Some excerpts from a talk by Richard Hamming (inventor of, among other things, hamming codes) on how to do great research. I recommend reading the whole thing! You and Your Research: ... At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up...
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Dan Henderson knocked out Fedor last night. Both are MMA legends, but it appears that Fedor should probably retire (he's now lost 3 straight after remaining undefeated for many years). I think Fedor's style relies more on raw ability than Dan's technical greco style. Dan is actually the older fighter -- he's 40 to Fedor's 34. But IIRC Dan is on hormone replacement therapy (he's allowed to take steroids for medical reasons, although he has to keep...
Saturday, 30 July 2011
Current best estimates of the heritability of g come from twin and adoption studies. The table below, from the recent paper: Molecular Psychiatry (2010) 15, 1112, gives you an idea of the general consistency of results from a number of twins studies with large statistics.But now that we have inexpensive genotyping, we can study heritability of a quantitative trait by looking at unrelated (or only distantly related) individuals, and asking to what...
Thursday, 28 July 2011
A private wealth manager reflects on the top 1 percent and top .1 percent in net worth. His data would be a bit more informative if he broke it out by age group (note the numbers at the link are not entirely consistent with those given below, probably because of the use of means vs medians or threshold values). A 30 year old with a million dollars and someone about to retire with the same net worth are in two very different situations. See also working class millionaires.... Until recently, most studies just broke out the top 1% as a group. Data...
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Below are some of the follow up questions I answered for viewers of Through the Wormhole. I was very impressed with the quality of the show after watching the episode I had taped.We know that time and space are relative, is 'information'? Information can be defined in relative terms, as in what is known to a particular observer. There are also notions of absolute information, as in what is the total amount of information (bits or qubits) required...
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
USA AAA?While we're waiting to see whether treasuries lose their AAA rating, here's something more real time: CME now imposing several percent haircut on US securities used as collateral. Previously the haircut was zero. How does this compare to other AAA rated securities?Politicians, you have been warn...
Monday, 25 July 2011
This American Life makes the case that Intellectual Ventures are patent trolls cum extortionists. Thanks to a reader for sending me the link. See also this earlier post which examines Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article on Nathan Myhrvold and IV. (Gladwell, as usual, gets it all wrong.)Transcript: ... Alex: We told Intellectual Ventures that Chris Sacca compared their business to a mafia shakedown and in an e-mail, Peter Detkin called that ridiculous and offensive. He then reiterated some of the arguments you’ve heard about how IV protects inventors...
A colleague (Ben Grinstein of UCSD) asked me to help advertise this new dissertation prize. Please encourage your students to apply!Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle PhysicsStarting this year, the Division of Particles and Fields hasestablished a Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics.The Award recognizes exceptional young scientists who haveperformed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientificquality and achievement in the area of theoretical particle physics.The annual Award consists of $1,500, a certificate citing...
Friday, 22 July 2011
The man identified by police in Norway as today's mass killer is Anders Behring Breivik. A collection of his political thought can be found at the link below. (Excerpt translated by Google.) I doubt Breivik's horrific actions today will promote his desired political outcomes, in fact quite the opposite.document.no2010-10-29 14:08:40 ... I have worked with the project for 14 years with several projects related to web solutions, have the financial...
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
A collaborator pointed out this nice figure (from the paper below), which is pretty self-explanatory, but let me emphasize the fairly wide SES (socioeconomic status) range of families under consideration. If SES were determined solely by household income the four categories in the graph would range from below $20k to above $100k per annum (2003 US income data). See related posts SES and IQ and Random microworlds.Note to Tiger Moms and Sociologists:...
The NYT reports that Ivy teams will limit themselves to only 2 full-contact practices per week. I was wondering when something like this would happen, given recent research on brain injuries in football.According to the new rules, teams will be able to hold only two full-contact practices per week during the season, compared with a maximum of five under N.C.A.A. guidelines. On the other days of the week, practices cannot include contact or live tackles, and no player may be “taken to the ground.”This means the overall skill development of Ivy players...
I came across these creatures via a G+ post by Carl Zimmer.I've always thought the world on sub-millimeter length scales must be a terrifying place. Insects and even smaller organisms have, through many more generations of evolution than animals our size, developed frightening specialized capabilities.Just imagine creatures like these emerging from your pillow each night to clean dead skin cells from your face 8-)Bonus!: Here's a dust mite :-) ...
Sunday, 17 July 2011
I'm in the Science Channel show Through the Wormhole later this week (first air date is Weds. 7/20/2011), talking about faster than light travel via wormhole.I blogged about shooting the episode here. I haven't seen the show, other than the excerpt below. It's kind of cool to hear Morgan Freeman say my name ...
Saturday, 16 July 2011
The guy in the video is Chris Spealler, a little 150 pounder (former collegiate wrestler) who is one of the top Crossfitters in the world.This year's Crossfit Games are going to be very interesting, as their open qualifying process and the increasing popularity of the sport have attracted a much larger pool of athletes. It reminds me a bit of MMA 10 years ago, and even of what happened in physics in the 20th century. The Crossfit champions of today will soon be surpassed by the supermen of tomorrow, due simply to the increasing size of the gene...
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Somehow I missed the paragraph below when the (preliminary) 1000 Genomes paper came out last fall. Nothing shocking but it is interesting that almost all the variants that have reached fixation in different groups are (or will soon be) known. I don't really understand why there are so many more differences in fixed variants (72) between E. Asians (CHB+JPT) and Yorubans (YRI) than between any other pair of groups: only 2 between E. Asians and Europeans...
G+ got me to use Picasa, so I was sorting through photos and thought I would share these.When I look at these pictures I am simply amazed -- the kids change so fast that each stage is but a fleeting moment. If you are a parent of young kids my advice is to take as many photos and as much video as you can! Sure, you might look like a dork with your camera or cellphone pointed at your kid, but you'll be happy you did it. Photos and long term memo...
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
New paper! Probably of interest only to experts ...Quantum fluctuations in planar domain wall spacetimes: A possible origin of primordial preferred direction1107.1762We study the gravitational effects of a planar domain wall on quantum fluctuations of a massless scalar field during inflation. By obtaining an exact solution of the scalar field equation in de Sitter space, we show that the gravitational effects of the domain wall break the rotational...
Monday, 11 July 2011
I much prefer G+ to Facebook. I wish I could push my blog RSS feed into my stream -- anyone know when that will be possible? WSJ: Mark Zuckerberg might want to fast-track Facebook's initial public offering.In what appeared to be a hasty response to the launch of Google's rival social-networking product, called Google+, Mr. Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled Facebook's new video-chatting feature. He called it "super awesome." Too bad Google made the same feature available in 2008. Indeed, Facebook suddenly looks vulnerable. This could be bad news...
Friday, 8 July 2011
The other day at the bookstore I skimmed Jane Smiley's book The Man Who Invented the Computer, about physicist Vincent Atanasoff and the early history of electronic computing. (A replica of Atanasoff's machine, the ABC, is shown above.) Atanasoff was named the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer as a result of the 1973 patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand. In that decision, the judge found that "Eckert and Mauchly [creators...
Thursday, 7 July 2011
Personally, I'm not a big Facebook user. Someone recently described it to me as the new AOL ;-) Facebook Employees are selling X shares at a price of $35 per share in advance of the pending IPO. The price of $35 per share implies a valuation of $80 billion for the company (2,300,000,000 shares outstanding * $35). These shares will be subject to a 180 lock up period post the IPO (subject to extension). The timing of the IPO is unknown at this time and a syndicate has not yet been selected. The book is currently 2.0 – 2.5x oversubscribed. Expected...
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
This is the sequel to an earlier paper on physical effects associated with the QED theta angle. Unfortunately, field configurations which would yield theta-dependent effects are not realizable in the lab, based on general considerations discussed in the new paper. There could, however, be small non-perturbative effects sensitive to theta despite the lack of topology in QED (maps from S^3 to U(1) are all topologically trivial).http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0756Theta terms and asymptotic behavior of gauge potentials in (3+1) dimensions We describe paths...
Is the letter below for real, or just a clever parody? ("Shoes!") This old joke says it all:A man meets a woman in a bar and asks her if he will have sex with him for a million dollars. The woman thinks about it for a moment and says yes.The man then asks the woman if she will have sex with him for $20. The woman becomes incensed and says, “What do you take me for, a whore?”The man replies, “Ma’am we’ve already established what you are, now we’re just negotiating price.”Related posts. Via Maoxian.Why I Love My Sugar Daddy: ... The dating pool in...
Monday, 4 July 2011
This discussion is from 2009. I enjoy Gopnik's New Yorker writing, which is usually on cultural topics (he was trained as an art historian). But here he comes across as a high V, low M type -- more fluff than substance. Like other HVLM types, he seems to lack a good intuitive feel for the dynamics of how evolution works (i.e., for how a complex system might evolve in time). His goal seems to be to "rehabilitate" Darwin (as if that were really necessary), to make Darwin's beliefs consistent with modern political correctness. Listen carefully to...
Saturday, 2 July 2011
The Atlantic profiles Andreas Schleicher, the German scientist behind PISA -- the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Not surprisingly, he was trained in physics before becoming interested in educational assessment.For previous PISA-related posts, see here, here and here.Rindermann, in The g‐factor of international cognitive ability comparisons: the homogeneity of results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ‐tests across nations, showed...
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