MSU photos 5

Autumn in East Lansing (near Lyman Briggs residential college on the MSU campus).Senator Levin visits an MSU lab. The device they are discussing detects DNA from invasive species using a microfluidic chip.Visit to UW Madison as part of the UW-MSU Great Lakes BioEnergy Research Center collaboration. The first building is microbiology, the second one under construction is for the Wisconsin Energy Institute which will be home to the GLBRC.At the UW-MSU...

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Asian hordes in the NYT and WSJ

Stuyvesant High School (traditionally the top high school in NYC; admission is by exam) is now over 70% Asian-American. Meanwhile, at elite universities that do not practice race-blind admissions (from earlier post Demography and destiny; IIRC, currently the Asian-American fraction at all Ivies is lower than at Harvard in the early 1990s):OCR = Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, which conducted an investigation of anti-Asian bias in...

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But is it art?

A. Zee refers me to this art exhibition of theoretical physics blackboard scribblings. The one below is from Berkeley:Here's a shot of my whiteboard from the post Last days in Oreg...

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De novo deleterious variants identified via sequencing

Genome sequencing is poised to become a routine clinical tool.Forbes: In two papers in major scientific journals, researchers today suggested pushing DNA sequencing into more routine use in the clinic, and not just as a research tool.Dutch researchers are proposing that DNA sequencing replace older forms of genetic tests for diagnosing the cause of severe intellectual disability, the second time in a day that researchers have pushed the emerging technology as a first-choice diagnostic test for severe illness. Those results were published this evening...

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Deleterious variants affecting traits that have been under selection are rare and of small effect

This NYTimes article discusses ideas similar to the ones in my BGA 2012 talk (slides): because of previous selection (e.g., over the last millions of years of hominid development), most rare alleles affecting intelligence will have slightly negative effect. That is, the alleles of large, positive effect (to be precise: on fitness) will be found in every "normal" person, whereas alleles of small negative effect will still linger at low frequency....

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Obama's way

A glimpse into the inner Obama. NYTimes: ... On rare occasions, Mr. Obama allows others a glimpse of the history, expectations and hope he carries with him. At the funeral of the civil rights leader Dorothy Height in 2010, he wept openly. Again and again, those close to him say, Mr. Obama is moved by the grace with which other blacks who broke the color barrier behaved under pressure.When Ruby Bridges Hall went to see the famous Norman Rockwell portrait...

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Akerloff on Efficient Markets Hypothesis

I particularly like his comments (@13 min or so) on Snake Oil and financial assets. When market participants are exuberant (overly confident) it is natural for firms to create and market new assets that are overpriced relative to actual value, or have dangerous risk-return tradeoffs. For the latest example, in natural gas drilling rights during the recent boom (now a bust), see here.See also Venn diagram for economics.The cover illustration of Akerloff...

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Dyson on philosophy and the gravitational free lunch

Freeman Dyson in The NY Review of Books: When and why did philosophy lose its bite? How did it become a toothless relic of past glories? These are the ugly questions that Jim Holt’s book compels us to ask. Philosophers became insignificant when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines. Until the nineteenth century, science was called natural philosophy and officially recognized as a branch of philosophy. The word...

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Sakharov's third idea

We know that the decisive ideas for the first thermonuclear device came from Ulam and Teller. Did the great theorists Sakharov and Zeldovich (both names will be familiar to students of cosmology and particle physics) who created the Soviet H-bomb have the same ideas independently, or did they obtain them via espionage? The answer is still in dispute ...Scientific American: ... There are no documents shedding light on this crucial period....

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Prometheus: meeting your maker

I finally got to see it over the weekend. Re: plot, there is a way to interpret the story that actually hangs together (suspension of disbelief regarding workings of Darwinian evolution that produced mankind still required, however).This is one of my favorite scenes. Michael Fassbender is fantastic as the android David.Some interesting stuff here:"Please fund my startup!"See also this old post: Prometheus in the baseme...

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Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

Highly recommended. There were also German tapes of Allied prisoners, but those have not yet been found!Sönke Neitzel, Professor of International History, London School of Economics, discusses his investigations into the mind-set of the German fighting man during World War II. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, written with social psychologist Harald Welzer, is based on declassified transcripts of covert recordings taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the German POWs, providing a view of the mentality...

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The normaliens

In an earlier post I mentioned that Serge Harouche (2012 Nobel Prize in physics) is a normalien: a graduate of France's Ecole Normale Superieure. Admission to ENS is strictly meritocratic, based on a competitive exam. The result: 12 Nobel Prize laureates and 10 Fields Medalists from a school with fewer than a thousand undergraduates. (The school is similar in size to Caltech; smaller than most high schools.)See Defining Merit for the story of Harvard's...

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Schrodinger cat Nobels

Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland share the 2012 Nobel Prize for their work in quantum optics / atomic physics. Wineland traps atoms whereas Haroche traps photons. Haroche is a normalien and Wineland was educated at Berkeley and Harvard.My favorite Haroche experiments are the ones in which he creates macroscopic Schrodinger cat states and watches them decohere. For example, see here and here. I also like Haroche's book Exploring the Quantum.See also...

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George Church on Colbert

George Church on the Colbert report.The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Arch...

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My "controversial views"

This Lansing State Journal article covers my recent appointment as VP of Research and Graduate studies at MSU. It's journalism, so as you can expect they emphasized potentially controversial topics like my work in genomics. (I expend about 10% of my research effort on this work, but it's much more titillating than the quantum mechanics of black holes!)In order to set the record straight I have excerpted from the article and added my own comments.... He is working with BGI-Shenzhen, a Chinese company that runs one of the world’s largest gene-sequencing...

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Adventures of a Mathematician

I found my copy of Ulam's book Adventures of a Mathematician recently while preparing to move (it was in a box with other books and notes from Caltech). I had not looked at it since I was an undergraduate! Below are some interesting excerpts to go with the ones I posted here.[p.60] ... the vacancy in the Society of Fellows at Harvard which I was invited to fill resulted from Chandrasekhar's acceptance of an assistant professorship at Chicago. [p.81] When we talked about Einstein, Johnny [von Neumann] would express the usual admiration for...

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MSU photos 4

Ford CEO Alan Mulally visits MSU. Coach Dantonio addresses boosters shortly before the OSU game.New Plant Biology buildi...

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Naipaul, Tejpal and India

Tarun Tejpal interviews V.S. Naipaul. Unfortunately, at this point Tejpal is a more interesting thinker than Naipaul.I highly recommend Naipaul's non-fiction such as his India trilogy (discussed @25:30): An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.For a complex portrait of Naipaul, see Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shad...

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The Christy Gadget

Christy was one of the last Manhattan Project survivors. NYTimes: Robert F. Christy, who as a young Canadian-born physicist working on the Manhattan Project came up with a critical insight that led to the creation of the world’s first atom bomb, died on Wednesday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 96.... The first bomb, developed in secrecy during World War II at Los Alamos, N.M., relied on implosion. The plan was to detonate a sphere of conventional explosives, the blast from which would compress a central ball of nuclear fuel into an incredibly...

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Andrew Ng and Coursera

Great profile of Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng. I first met Andrew a few years ago at Foo Camp. He attended a talk I gave on psychometrics, and we had several discussions afterwards. The formulation of g as a means of compressing cognitive data was not lost on him.Little did I know at the time he was interested in technology applied to teaching.Here are his popular lectures on machine learning. See also Whither higher education?Chronicle of Higher Education: ... Today Mr. Ng is an innovator in an entirely different setting: online education....

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