That's what chemicals can do

Hi!

Hey everybody, I know I haven't been posting for quite some time. It's been a hard couple of months for me, but things are settling down. I have been taking math classes at College Park, and I intend to go into graduate school in pure math rather than physics (as I last claimed on this blog) or applied math as I had suggested to others.

Why pure math? The basic answer is that I'm pretty decent at it and I think it's the least likely for me to become dissatisfied with the direction of the field. Nobody really knows what the math of social science will look like, but it seems likely to me that some of it still needs to be invented. The physicists working on social science research projects tend to use models commonly in use to study physical processes, and once we exhaust those it will be up to mathematicians to provide better models. I envision getting similarly frustrated in physics as I was in psychology, and pure math seems to invite the least stagnation.

I'm concerned, though, that I'll be only a mediocre mathematician. But I suppose I'd rather be that than a terrific psychologist. I suppose I'll figure out more about my abilities as time goes on.

Down at Fractal Rock

A friend of mine pointed me to this description on how to make fractal cookies. They're beautiful and no doubt amazingly delicious. They in turn link to a description of fractal pizza, which looks less delicious but is perhaps conceptually more interesting:

The idea was simple, as are most truly genius moments. When looking at a pizza I noticed that you had bread, sauce, cheese and toppings. The toppings struck me as interesting. No matter what you put on top of the bread, sauce, and cheese you still had pizza. Initially I had the same thoughts of the many pizza innovators that have gone before me, 'What is the craziest thing I could put on pizza!??'

It was my love of the term "meta" that turned me on to the idea. What is the craziest thing to put on pizza? Well, what about more pizza!??! I almost dismissed the idea initially, as I have eaten pizza with two crusts, and even stacked slices on top of each other... but I couldn't let go of the idea of a meta-pizza and then while wandering the frozen food aisle of my local grocery store it was like Newton's apple hit me on the head and said, "The pizza comes in a wide variety of sizes." Eureka!

The idea is called "self similarity". With pizzas of infinitely many sizes, any time you zoom in on a pizza you still see a full pizza topped with mini-pizzas! Deliciously brilliant I must say.

This inspired me to post an idea I had the other day: fractal symbioses. I know real ecosystems have fractal properties. That's not the point. In my fractal ecosystem, which I'll call fractal rock, you start with a medium-sized animal like a tiger. Then you take an animal that is about the size of that animal's prey but which (1) is a scaled down copy of the original animal (e.g. a housecat), and (2) is a symbiote. Maybe the housecat rids the area of mice and other vermon that the tiger doesn't want to bother with.

But that's only one layer of self-similarity. There needs to be a smaller cat, as small to the housecat as the housecat is to the tiger. And then there needs to be a bigger cat!. I think four generations is enough to get a really cool fractal symbioses going. We can potentially go smaller with cats the size of shrews. But any bigger and we'd be on dinosaur scales, and that's just scary.

Sage Math

I have been experimenting with the Sage mathematics software and so far I find it very good. The only mathematics software I am used to using is R, which I absolutely love. The advantage of Sage for me is that it does more than statistics (which is R's main reason for existing), it can solve equations symbolically, and it's easy to incorporate it into Python programs.

Basically, sage extends python to include several mathematical functions and also has an interface for a number of open source mathematical programs to fill in gaps. For example, there's an interface for maxima and octave, and they're working on one for R. The interface would be more cumbersome than using R directly, but it has the advantage of doing all one's math in the same place.

I have been using sage to do integrals that I don't feel like evaluating. For example you can do the following:

> F = x/(x^2 + 2) - log(x)
> F.integrate()
log(x^2 + 2)/2 - x*log(x) + x
> F.integrate().display2d()

The last line does the integration and displays the result in ascii art. It's a very nice feature to have when equations get more complicated. Sadly, it doesn't display correctly in verbatim tags.

I highly recommend checking out sage if you have a need for such things.

Psychological Science

As many of you already know, I am taking a leave of absence from Yale to pursue the prospect of a department with a more rigorous approach. The impetus for this can be found in earlier posts. Basically, I think there are exciting things going on in the application of nonlinear science to social processes. I'm currently thinking of transferring to physics since many people who work in this area are in physics departments.

In this process, I have been thinking much about the status of psychology as a science. There's an organization called Psychological Science that considers itself to be "Building a science-first foundation for psychology." The silly thing about this organization is that they seem to engage more in apologetics for the current state of psychology than in advancing any scientific foundation. They have resisted the adoption of Bayesian statistics, and instead have been promoting this very silly cosmetic changes to statistics that nobody is really fooled by. In doing so they explicitly defined a replication in psychology as an experiment that reproduces generally the same result. For example, if study A finds a 90% decrease in depression due to some intervention then study B that finds only a 0.01% decrease is considered a replication. This would be clearly absurd to most sciences.

Their upcoming Psychological Science convention is tauting the idea that psychology is a "hub science", which means that if you draw a picture of how similar various disciplines are to each other, psychology is considerably different from physics and chemistry etc. They argue that this means psychology has an important position. What it really means, of course, is that psychology is measurably different from the hard sciences, which we already knew. It seems almost an act of desperation for them to take this interpretation.

Andrew Gelman has this nice post about social science, which explains that while social scientists know many things they have not done much that they can objectively claim to have solved or that has practical import.

MIT's Walter Lewin Drinks Your Milkshake

This video from MIT's introductory course in physics discusses atmospheric pressure. At the end (around time 00:45:03, or the last five minutes) he discusses the physics of stealing somebody's drink with a very long straw. The video is from 1999, and precedes the current pop-culture discussion of milkshake-stealing by nearly a decade.

The motivation for the problem is the fact that the human lungs can only take so much pressure. The most one can normally suck a liquid through a straw is about 1 meter, as he demonstrates directly before the drink-stealing discussion. He then proceeds to steal a drink from 5 meters away.

Walter Lewin drinks your milkshake.

Do Elections Behave Like Magnets?

I'm writing a paper in I argue that belief transmission can be modeled rather well by standard magnetism models from physics. Many people have actually made this point. What many people have not done is made animated gifs of election results and placed them next to an animated model of magnet dynamics in red and blue. I have now bridged that gap. I'm not sure they have any scientific value, but they are hypnotizing. I'll spare unintended eye strian by linking to the web page rather than placing the graphics here directly.

On the right are congressional election results by year, on the left is the so-called Ising model of magnetism.
Magnetism and Elections.

Help?

Anyone want to help me by giving me comments on my paper today?

Interesting Discussion on Multitasking

I have been looking for a while for good research on whether multitasking is good or bad. I have always been an extreme multitasker but I have long had the intuition that that's a bad thing.

Here is a piece from the Atlantic Monthly reviewing the literature and arguing that multitasking is bad. Here's a slashdot discussion on the issue. Alternately there are people who argue that multitasking makes people more cognitively flexible, but I'm not sure there's any scientific evidence for that claim. The rise of multitasking could, however, explain the rise of ADD in the last few generations.

KDE4 Released

KDE4, the fourth installment of the K Desktop Environment, has been released today. For those unfamiliar with them, a desktop environment is essentially the software that determines the look and feel of your graphical user interface. Windows and OS X differ from each other in many ways, but the primary way that non-technical userss notice is the difference in desktop environment. Elements such as OS X's dock, expose, the style of the menus, the prettiness of the icons, and so forth are all desktop elements.

KDE4 looks a bit like Vista, which is not my favorite look. But that is massively configurable as it is in all linux desktop environments. More interesting to me are speed improvements in the underlying architecture.

Everyone should check out Linux soon, as it's becoming much more friendly to the non-technical user. It has always been extremely friendly to the so-called "power user" who wants full control of the system. And in addition, the software is free and open source, which makes using and improving it an investment in the future of computing for everyone.

Homicides in Baltimore 2007 Map

In honor of the upcoming wire season (I can't wait!), I thought I'd share this Google map application that locates Baltimore murders fitting criteria specified by the user. Here it is..

Personal Update (Sociophysics, Guitar Hero)

Sorry for the sporadic/slow updating. I have been working on school stuff in such a way that I'm not wanting to write about it in a public forum. When my article gets published I'll return to my usual rants about psychology not being a real science and how to improve it.

On the plus side, I've found that there are numerous physicists working on similar problems to the one I am. The general field is called sociophysics, and it's become a hot topic in physics journals. A former editor of the journal Nature has called it a revolution in the social sciences, and clearly the most important problem of our era. That makes me feel better for having argued that something like sociophysics needs to happen. I had made the argument for a sociophysics approach to psychology in order to justify learning the math behind statistical physics. People thought I was kind of crazy I think.

Whenever I find myself in the minority (as I often do, and as I currently do with my belief that psychology needs a makeover), I usually have people much smarter than I am back me up. I've been missing this sort of backup lately, but it looks like the physicists are to the rescue. If they think that applying statistical mechanics to psychology is a good idea, then I can't be entirely crazy in thinking the same thing...right? I hope so. At least my advisor no longer has to worry that nobody will publish a physics-ized psychology study.

In non-school news (which is sparse lately because I've been schooling non-stop) I've been hanging out with my family and playing a lot of Guitar Hero. I find guitar hero appreciably harder than playing the actual guitar. Many of the songs are heavy metal songs that I don't really like, but beyond that it's incredible fun.

Sun Niagara 2 Open Source!

Have you ever thought to yourself, "I wish Sun would opensource its Niagra 2 CPU architecture?" I know I have. Really, I have.

Well they've done it. Why is this cool? Well, it means more people can chip in on chip design. The Niagara 2 can be used for supercomputing. If people are able to produce low-cost spinoffs, then CPU prices might come down for supercomputers or for computers overall.

This latter part is good because lower CPU costs are needed for projects like One Laptop Per Child.

Here's the slashdot link

DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR'S PERMISSION

Does anyone know what happens if you violate the plea not to cite or circulate a draft of a paper? I'm inclined to think that the openness of science favors citing anything and everything that might be relevant.

I know in other disciplines it's common to cite technical reports or things posted online if they advance the discipline. In social science and the humanities embargoing such things seems to be more common.

EDIT: Jordan pointed out that this has been discussed in philosophy. Particularly here and here.

To quote,

I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal.

The paper certainly doesn't go in the public domain in the sense that I can copy it without citing. But it does enter the world of public knowledge and can be cited as such. Maybe it's all the time I spend in the free software crowd, but I think information should be free as in free speech and that placing restrictions like these are against the spirit of academic discourse.

Truman Atom Bomb Documents

I came across these documents while trying to remember Truman's official position on dropping the atom bomb. Many of them are formerly classified documents that I find quite interesting to read.

There's the official memo to drop the bombs, as well as a diary entry the same day indicating Truman's belief that the target was "purely military."

More documents are at this random page, and at the Truman Library page.

I can't wait until Kennedy's documents are unclassified.

Personal Update

I've been working hard on my Theme Statement, which is a big essay due at the end of our third year. It's eventually going to become a paper on how people learn second-hand information, which I hope to submit to a journal that takes longer theoretical papers with data.

I started a statistics reading group and we met for the first time yesterday. It was nice to have people interested in statistics, and I've been talking more to students in other areas like personality and clinical psychology that have in my opinion much stronger methods. The irony is that in developmental psychology the stereotype is that clinical and personality psychologists have weaker methods. At any rate, I envision some collaboration on issues that I think are especially challenging.

Thanksgiving break is coming up soon. I'm looking forward to seeing my family and friends.