Google Glass

What's it like to try Google Glass?I WALKED AWAY CONVINCED THIS WASN’T JUST ONE OF GOOGLE’S WEIRD FLIGHTS OF FANCYIs it ready for everyone right now? Not really. Does the Glass team still have huge distance to cover in making the experience work just the way it should every time you use it? Definitely.But I walked away convinced that this wasn’t just one of Google’s weird flights of fancy. The more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more...

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The nature of intuition

From an excellent blog post by Emanuel Derman. Derman contrasts Kahneman's use of "intuition" as quick insight with the physicist or mathematician's use of "intuition" to describe deep understanding operating at a subconscious level.Kahneman’s "intuition" = a quick guess; I mean by intuition the insight that can come only after long mental struggles.Kahneman is concerned with the biases of intuition. I am impressed with its occasional glimpses of absolute essence. Think Newton, Ampere, Maxwell, Einstein, Feynman, Spinoza or Freud or Schopenhauer...

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In search of principles: when biology met physics

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Bill Bialek's book on biophysics. Bialek was a professor at Berkeley when I was a graduate student, but has since moved to Princeton. See also For the historians and the ladies, As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods and Prometheus in the basement.... In one view of history, there is a direct path from Bohr, Delbruck and Schrodinger to the emergence of molecular biology. Certainly Delbruck did play a central role, not least because of his insistence that the community should focus (as...

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Weinberg on quantum foundations

I have been eagerly awaiting Steven Weinberg's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, both because Weinberg is a towering figure in theoretical physics, and because of his cryptic comments concerning the origin of probability in no collapse (many worlds) formulations:Einstein's Mistakes Steve Weinberg, Physics Today, November 2005 Bohr's version of quantum mechanics was deeply flawed, but not for the reason Einstein thought. The Copenhagen interpretation...

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A Genetic Code for Genius?

Another BGI Cognitive Genomics story, this time in the Wall Street Journal. I think coverage in the popular press is beneficial if it gets people to think through the implications of future genomic technology. It seems likely that the technology will arrive well before our political leadership and punditocracy have a firm understanding of the consequences. (In support of my point, see the comments on the article at the WSJ site; more at Marginal...

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The City and The Street

Michael Lewis writes in the NY Review of Books.Early 1990s, hanging out in Manhattan with some friends in the derivatives business, one of them an Oxbridge guy who had been at graduate school at Harvard: when I used the then new term "financial engineering" in conversation he burst out laughing. "Is that what they're going to call it?" he asked, incredulous. "It's just bollocks."See also The illusion of skill.NYBooks: ... If you had to pick a city on earth where the American investment banker did not belong, London would have been on any shortlist....

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The uses of gloom

Omri Tal writes on the history of The Gloomy Prospect. Apparently, the term originally referred to non-shared environmental effects (see Random microworlds), before Turkheimer applied it to genetic causation.Personally, I'm an optimist -- I believe in Pessimism of the Intellect but Optimism of the Will  :-)Hi Steve,Just to point out with regard to your recent interesting post.1. The Gloomy Prospect is a term originally by Plomin and...

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Eric, why so gloomy?

Eric Turkheimer wrote a blog post reacting to my comments (On the verge) about some recent intelligence GWAS results.I'm an admirer of Eric's work in behavior genetics, as you can tell from this 2008 post The joy of Turkheimer. Since then we've gotten to know each other via the internet and have even met at a conference.Eric is famous for (among other things) his Gloomy Prospect:The question is not whether there are correlations to be found between...

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Inside China’s Genome Factory

Another BGI profile, this time in MIT Technology Review.Technology Review: ... In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people’s ideas. That is the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000 people—mostly Americans—who have IQ scores...

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On the verge

This paper is based on a combined sample of 18k individuals, taken from several European longitudinal studies of child development. Note early childhood intelligence is not as heritable as adult intelligence, according to classical (twins, adoption) methods.Nature Molecular Psychiatry (29 January 2013) | doi:10.1038/mp.2012.184Childhood intelligence is heritable, highly polygenic and associated with FNBP1LIntelligence in childhood, as measured by...

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Quantum correspondence on black holes

Some Q&A from correspondence about my recent paper on quantum mechanics of black holes. See also Lubos Motl's blog post.Q: Put another way (loosely following Bousso), consider two observers, Alice and Bob. They steer their rocket toward the black hole and into "the zone" or "the atmosphere". Then, Bob takes a lifeboat and escapes to asymptotic infinity while Alice falls in. I hope you agree that Bob and Alice's observations should agree up to the point where their paths diverge. On the other hand, it seems that Bob, by escaping to asymptotic...

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"In the land of autistics, the aspie is king"

I've often thought this to myself, but was amused to hear it attributed to a famous theoretician at Princeton the other d...

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Meeting of minds

Ron Unz meets Amy Chua at Yale Law School. Wish I could have been there :-)The American Conservative: ... On Wednesday afternoon, I made an hour-long presentation at the Yale Law School, co-sponsored by the Asian-American Law Students Association and the Federalist Society, which drew a remarkable 100 students out of a total enrollment of around 600, filling one of the large lecture halls. In this instance, the research findings and proposals of...

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Quantum mechanics of black holes

A paper from last summer by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) has stimulated a lot of new work on the black hole information problem. At the time I was only able to follow it superficially as I was busy with my new position at MSU. But finally I've had time to think about it more carefully -- see this paper.http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0451Macroscopic superpositions and black hole unitarityWe discuss the black hole information problem, including...

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