In addition to the more well-known holiday, today is, according to the Book of Days, "nut-crack night" (also known as the "oracle of the nuts"):
A lad and lass each place a nut in the fire; the course of their courtship is predicted by the behavior of the nuts, whether they burn quiety together or jump apart.
This evening also apparently offers the opportunity for divination by cabbage-pulling.
I love holidays.
Japanese scientists have made a breakthrough in quantum computing:
A research team in Japan says it has successfully demonstrated for the first time in the world in a solid-state device one of the two basic building blocks that will be needed to construct a viable quantum computer.The team has built a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate, which is a fundamental building block for quantum computing in the same way that a NAND gate is for traditional computing.
Research into quantum computers is still in its early days, and experts predict it will be at least 10 years before a viable quantum computer is developed. But if they can be developed, quantum computers hold the potential to revolutionize some aspects of computing because of their ability to calculate in a few seconds what might take a traditional supercomputer millions of years to accomplish.
Remember scientist prediction math - when they tell you a problem can be solved in 1 year, it'll take 2. Two years really means five. Five means 10, and 10 means they have no earthly idea.
My sense of reality isn't what it used to be.Of course, reality isn't what it used to be.
If reality would be what it used to be, maybe I'd have a better sense of it.
But then I'd be out of touch with reality.
- Zippy, 10/29/03
I keep forgetting to blog my science writing here. There's such a lag (a whole 12 hours or more!) between when I write it and when it's published, I guess.
Anyway, here's one:
The ordinary matter with which we are familiar— the stuff of stars, planets, your couch and kitchen table— makes up just 5 percent of the universe's mass, the new results show.The rest?
Scientists call it "dark matter" and "dark energy."
And what is that?
"We haven't a clue what either one of them is," said Princeton University astrophysicist James Gunn.
Downloading some pictures, found this:
Mums in Lissa's garden.
Nora off to a play this afternoon with her pals, so Lissa and I threw dog in car and headed for the bosque. With the big clompy brace off of her formerly broken ankle, Lissa is fully mobile again, but the doc said she should avoid cycling for another couple of weeks. (Not the cycling itself, but the getting on and off bits, apparently.) Thing is, as I mentioned yesterday, the fall colors are peaking, so we did a walk instead.
We traipsed up the levee from where Central Ave. crosses the river near Albuquerque's downtown - that's old Route 66 for those interested in Americana. They've spent a lot of time and energy since June clearing out overgrown underbrush in the woods along the river to reduce fire danger, and it's now a lovely open forest of cottonwoods. You can see out to the river from the levee bank. I'd been on a tour with the city open space guy for a story for the paper, but Lissa hadn't been yet, so it made it a learning, informational sort of walk.
It's a beautiful stretch, with moments again and again where the Sandia Mountains (see the top right picture) pop out over the cottonwoods to the east.
Lissa picked up Chris Carmichael's latest book for me, How I Made Lance Such a Stud, Vol II. Luckily, it was just at the library - not a book I need to own. It's got some interesting information about exercise physiology, and I'd probably be a faster cyclist if I followed the CTS Pyramid for Success and all, but some days ya just wanna ride the bike, not do Carmichael's TempoHillRepeatIntervals or some such.
Today a case in point, in which I was just sorta rolling along when I decided on an unplanned right at the Montaño bridge. I just wanted to cross the river to get a look at the fall colors from the bridge. But then I saw a nice hill up ahead on the other side and decided to climb it. Before I knew it, I was climbing Boca Negra Canyon toward the volcanoes. Now if this was a carefully planned Carmichael Training Systems day, I would have been off program and jeopardizing my careful training schedule. There's pretty much no way to climb Boca Negra without going anaerobic. But hell, I just wanted to climb a hill. I need to be able to change my mind, frequently, to train on a whim. Guess I'll never be a Pyramid of Success True Champion. Whatever.
Of course, my whim ended up being a very bad decision, on account of the howling headwind that enveloped me most of the way home, but whatever. It was still a fun ride, and the fall dressing on the cottonwoods along the river are a delight.
OK, the part about where I said "Armstrong is finished after five Tours and Ullrich will spoil his attempt to win a sixth next summer"? OK, what I really meant was "Ullrich doesn't have a chance. Armstrong will win his sixth Tour in a row next summer". They announced the 2004 route today. Time Trial up Alpe d'Huez. 'Nuff said.
I have done this before, so I'll be brief.
It was in a darkened car, listening to the radio, that I saw Roger Clemens strike out Luis Castillo last night, and that ultimately seems like the right way. I grew up with the sound of baseball in my ear, and called correctly you can see the game. I could see the fastball, the swing, the crowd rising. Scully used to do the thing after a home run, shutting up to let us listen to the roar of the crowd. There was 38 seconds his silence, only cheering, after Sandy Koufax struck out Harvey Kuenn for the final out of his 1965 perfect game.
I watched most of the game on TV, and it was pretty memorable, Clemens screwing up that first inning and then rising above it to pitch the right way, the tough and memorable way, for the next six brilliant innings. Storybook baseball, screw the ending. And then I had to go pick up the girls from school, so I flipped on the radio and listened in the darkness of a cool Albuquerque evening to what we assume will be Roger Clemens' last inning on the mound.
I became a Yankee fan by listening to them on the radio, so that seems the right spot for this.
In the middle of game 7 of the American League championship series (that memorable extra-innings battle the Yankees won on Aaron Boone's walkoff home run), when it looked like the Yankees were done, Derek Jeter leaned over to Boone and said, "The ghosts will show up eventually." That's not exactly cocky, but is an odd way of looking at things. Before Game 7 of the 2001 Arizona-Yankee World Series, Diamondback starter Curt Schilling guaranteed his fans a win. Jeter, one of enigmatic baseball minds of the 21st century, was more circumspect that year - no ghosts, just a smile: "I guarantee it'll be a lot of fun."
So it's a three-game series now, and it is a lot of fun. Perhaps I'll listen on the radio.
Today is the day that, by tradition, the swallows leave Mission San Juan Capistrano, a day not much celebrated. The swallows' sprint return is a huge deal, but for some reason people don't much like to talk about their departure. Sad omen of coming winter or something, though frankly winter is no particular reason to fret on the coast of what we now call Southern California. Capistrano was a Franciscan who saw the light enough to leave the order and marry, then saw a second light of some sort and left the marriage to go back to the order. His Christian duties included raising an army against the Turks, who no doubt had not seen any of the appropriate light and were therefore worth killing. It's apparently what was done to non-Christians back in the day, though we're thankfully beyond that now - aren't we?
Daniel Veillard has released the latest libxml2. This guy is the model of a great maintainer. Can we clone him?
From the Herald Sun:
Offering a new and much more literal measuring stick for the corporate glass ceiling, a University of Florida study says tall people earn better pay than short people. Each inch, the report said, adds $783 a year to someone's income.The study, released this week, concluded height matters more in determining income than gender. Tall people beat short people on job evaluations and even fare better on seemingly objective measures, like sales performance.
Researchers say the advantages probably come from an inclination to respect tall people and to view them as successful.
Apparently, people look up to people they have to look up to.
What was it Randy Newman said? "Short people got no reason to live."
When I wandered into the kitchen this morning to make breakfast, there was a large bowl of split peas sitting on the stove, soaking in water, ready for soup. I am reasonably certain they were not there last night when I went to bed. I think we had a visit overnight from the Split Pea Fairy.
"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised."
- Bart Giamatti, from The Green Fields of the Mind (thanks to Michael J. Madison and many others who saw fit to quote this)
Or my buddy Jim Belshaw:
Baseball is finished for the year, but the World Series is just starting. It is the Bambino's Paradox, the Goat's Conundrum. Very strange.No Cubs. No Red Sox. No curses. No gauzy sentimental TV moments. No identification with futility, because like the Cubs and Red Sox, most of us know futility too well. Tragedy sticks to our ribs long after comedy has come and gone.
Jim is a fan of the Chicago White Sox, and loves to repeat this quote, from Jean Shepherd:
If I was ever ordered to storm a pillbox, going to shear, sudden, and utterly certain death, and told to pick my platoon, I would pick White Sox fans. I would pick Sox Fans because they have known death every day of their lives--and it holds no terror for them anymore.
The Sox haven't won since 1917. Jim is a Sox fan.
The folks at eBay pulled the auction of an "modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts". Methinks Saskboy's new technology is hitting a little too close to home, eh? The auction seems to be back up, but I'm suspicious.
"Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
Today we celebrate the memory of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky - scholar, typist and unofficial patron saint of the Internet. It is said that the Episcopalian bishop of Shanghai spent twenty years translating the Bible into the Wenli dialect, disabled by Parkinsons (or was it stroke?) and typing all the while with one finger.
Something far greater than Jonah is there.
Russian Jew American Christian Chinaman
Yoked twenty years and more to your chair.
Who can bear to hear that this is God's plan?
Robert M. Cooper
As Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up."
Pepys' description of church today was a picture:
To White Hall chappell, where one Dr. Crofts made an indifferent sermon, and after it an anthem, ill sung, which made the King laugh.
Gotta love the New York Post: Fenway Punk was their cover headline, above a picture of a young and trim Pedro Martinez standing over - well, let's let the Post describe the scene for you as Zimmer lumbered out of the Yankee dugout headed in poor helpless Pedro's direction:
The lovable, roly-poly Zimmer headed directly for Martinez, awkwardly lunging for the hurler. Martinez sidestepped Zimmer,
grabbed him by the head with both hands and tossed him to the ground like a rag doll."I was just trying to dodge him and push him away, and too bad his body fell," Martinez insisted afterwards.
Too bad indeed, Pedro.
Daughter Nora sends along this:
This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you - your government!But we both know that the government's 'pet mind reading threat' pales in comparison to the unknown dangers of aliens reading your pet's mind. The PFHT Special Edition [PFHTSE, pronounced Pfootsie], has a hydrocarbon-chain lining specially designed to filter the hydrogen band alien brain scans. This space age material may appear to the untrained eye to be just plain plastic shopping bag, but your pet will know the difference.
(I think I must have done raised her up good.)
Seth: Your Factories, Refineries and Tools is brilliant, but it may be built on a fallacy. Aren't you asking for the development of a piece of computer software to solve a problem that is best solved outside the computer? You say it yourself:
So in the real world we have some great brainstorming tools. Whiteboards are my favorite, but cheap tablets of paper, giant sheets of poster paper, and groups of gathered people are all fantastic for different purposes (and different people). The basic limitation of the computer interface (relative to these other tools) is a deficiency in physical interface.
So why not stick with those real world brainstorming tools? Our brains have evolved over some 3 million years or so to interact with information in a three-dimensional world, with physical and spatial clues playing an important role in the cognitive process. That's why the pad and pencil, and the whiteboard, work. An attempt to replace this may be doomed to failure.
See, for example, Gladwell's argument in The Social Life of Paper (I think we've talked about this before, Seth?). "Paper," Gladwell writes, "enables a certain kind of thinking."
The case for paper is made most eloquently in "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (M.I.T.; $24.95), by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writing reports -- at least at the I.M.F -- is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer -- moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.Without paper, this kind of collaborative, iterative work process would be much more difficult. According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of "affordances" -- that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text. Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:
Computers are terrific tools for the actual typing of words, and for searching through vast quantities of text. But let's be cautious in assuming that makes them useful for actual deep cognitive interaction with the resulting information.
Both Lissa and Malcolm Tredinnick pointed me to this, a delightful PBS piece about the economics of decision-making in baseball. Its authors use baseball as a set piece to illustrate the fundamentals of behavioral economics - the notion that the whole idea of perfect markets and rational actors trying to maximize their self-interest is, in reality, a bunch of bunk.
JIM SHERMAN, Psychologist: The idea that if the outcome is good, the decision must have been the right decision. Well that's not true. Sometimes good outcomes are based on bad decisions and sometimes good decisions lead to bad outcomes.PAUL SOLMAN: These and other all-too-human tendencies, say Sherman and Thaler, lead to a game replete with irrationality. Such as only using your star relief pitcher in the last inning, and only if your team is ahead.
JIM SHERMAN: The guy who ends the game is called "the closer." And the guy who pitches before him is called "the setup man." Now it's clear which you'd rather be-- you'd much rather be the closer than the setup man.
LITTLE LEAGUE COACH: You did a great job, all right? I'm very proud of you.
PAUL SOLMAN: Closers get more fame, more money. But statistically, getting outs in the last inning is no more important than in, say, the inning before.
RICHARD THALER: Every out is important. And it's no harder to get the last three outs than the previous three outs, and in fact, it can often be the other way.
PAUL SOLMAN: Then there's another strategy that has become the way to do things: The sacrifice bunt.
RICHARD THALER: The book says in a close game, the first guy gets on, the next guy should try and do a sacrifice bunt to get him over to second base. And the analysis of that shows that you actually score somewhat fewer runs with a man on second and one out, than a man on first and no outs.
PAUL SOLMAN: So even when it advances the runner, the aptly- named "sacrifice" results in a too-costly out. This, in short, is not rational maximizing behavior, any more than an intentional walk is. Even if issued to baseball's scariest hitter, Barry Bonds.
Pedro and the Rocket, this afternoon at 2 p.m.
I've had a short fuse all week, and I've been feeling like shit. All I've wanted to do is sit on the couch and watch baseball. I had one of those "Doh" moments this morning on my bike ride that forced me to realize last Saturday's dog attack had traumatized me far more than I had realized.
I'd been riding for an hour, and was noodling through the neighborhood near home, not particularly fast, when I spotted a big grey dog in a front yard to my right. The dog's owner was out with him, but he had no collar on, and he bounded into the street to check me out. He seemed totally friendly, but my heart was nevertheless in my throat. I hit the brakes, unclipped from my pedal and stopped dead in the street to face off the dog. The guy called the dog back into his yard, but I told him I wouldn't start riding again until he had ahold of the dog so it wouldn't chase me.
So I'm traumatized far more than I realized by the sudden violence of the attack, and by the continuing reminder of Sadie moping around the house (she's better, but she's still kind of a bloody mess). We take her to the vet today to get the drain out. Lissa said she could take care of it, but I really wanna go.
I was doing some arithmetic the other day and realized that, despite not being a sports fan, sports on telly takes a significant chunk out of my life. But there is a gentle pleasure on settling down on our big new couch and blocking out responsibility for the leisure of a ballgame.
In the spring, it's the Giro d'Italia, the Grand Boucle in the summer, then the fall is crammed with the Vuelta and championship baseball. To fully enjoy, one must have a team, which makes the Giro less important (U.S. Postal doesn't race it), the triumphs of Cancer Boy an obvious choice for Le Tour, and the U.S. Postal armada a sentimental favorite in the Vuelta.
For fall baseball, things get more complex. To first order, I have a weak Yankees bond built when their games were the only thing I could get here in Albuquerque on the radio. I grew up a Dodger fan, a fact that makes my mother cringe when I now say anything suggesting I might approve of anything the Yankees do. But it is what it is, and being a Yankee fan makes things easy every fall. This year, however, there is the sentimental Cubbie thing, and I feel a certain envy for those diehards. A few years back, I made a personal pilgrimage to Wrigley to see Baseball, and it was in all fairness a religious experience. And my sister, now living down the road from Fenway, has been speaking of the Red Sox in ways that give me pause. So perhaps....
Given the pressures of my busy life, I was feeling a little bad about the time lost to the couch for sport, but Lissa looked at me sitting there the other night all relaxed and happy watching a ballgame and pronounced it a good sight to see. So I guess I'll be parked for a few more hours over the next couple of weeks.
In which my two lives collide in a meeting with Richard Stallman.
When last we met, our intrepid hero John was paying a Friday night visit to the emergency room with his father, seeking assurance that Dad's heart pains were not cause for alarm. They were not, paving the way for fresh adventure!
Feeling as though the snapshot of humanity he saw Friday night at the ER was insufficient, John spent Saturday evening at the emergency animal hospital while doctors there tended to his beloved pooch Sadie after her cruel and untimely victimization by an untethered hound.
OK, I'm making fun here, but the weekend pretty much completely sucked from about 4:45 p.m. Friday through 8 a.m. Sunday. It has had moments of improvement since them, but it still sucks.
Sadie and I out running Saturday evening at dusk, past a thrift store parking lot about a mile from the house, assholes there hanging out in the parking lot with two dogs. The whole thing was over in an instant - big bad dogs jumped Sadie, Sadie went down, big bad dog sank its teeth into Sadie's right shoulder (going for the throat but thankfully missing), I kicked big bad dog off cowering Sadie while the second dog orbited thinking this was some sort of game. Someone tried to apologize, John yelled very bad word in describing bad dog and suggesting that perhaps tethering it might be wise in future.
It wasn't until we got home that I realized how badly Sadie was hurt. The big wounds were beneath her fur, and they were punctures so they weren't bleeding a lot. But they needed to anesthetize her at the doggie emergency room in order to shave, clean and stitch her and put in a drain, so she had to spend the night.
When we picked her up this morning, she was still woozy from the anesthetic, but she wouldn't lay down, she just sort of wandered around the house like a stumbling drunk. She's finally sleeping, hard and sound. She's an ugly bloody mess.
Too many stories in the doggie ER - the woman with a Jack Russell trying to give birth, but a puppy was stuck (and the woman's too-cliched cowboy husband making macho jokes that were embarassingly insensitive, and the woman's baby in a car seat, almost an afterthought), the quiet mother with her son and a listless cat in a sort of big Tupperware bin ("Mom, where's my book," the boy says, finally walking over and grabbing it out of her purse), the guy with a big black lab that had been hit by a car, but he had no money, couldn't pay, and the sad conversation that followed. And then the elderly couple this morning, when we came to pick Sadie up, the women red-eyed like she had been crying, or hadn't slept, or both, paying the final bill and making arrangements for the cremation. That was the saddest moment of all, yet there was warmth in the exchange: The clerk explained at the body would be sent to the company that does the cremations, the woman wanted some some reassurance that the company was, I don't know exactly, "good" or "reputable." "They're great," the clerk told her. "They've dealt with a couple of animals of mine." It was a little moment of extraordinary humanity.
The bike ride seems almost like an afterthought, but it was as fine as a bicyle ride can be. Jaime and Steve are coming up on their respective Ironman races, so they both needed to spend six hours on the bike today. I had no such intentions, so they started at Jaime's house, rode the hour to my house and picked me up. We headed east into the canyon and up through the mountains over Tijeras pass. It's a weird sort of pass, without an obvious top, but rolling up along old Route 66 we finally hit the point where you can look east and see beyond the mountains. It is where the mountains end, and the great flat middle of the central United State begins. It was a perfect fall day - warm enough for shorts and short sleeves, but cool enough to be perfectly pleasant. The wind was from the west - a tailwind up the canyon as we climbed, a brisk headwind coming back down. Those canyon winds are notorious among local cyclists, and this was the perfect sort of day for that particular ride, the sort of day for which bicycles were invented.
Coming back down into the wind, we flew. I took one turn at the front, but basically Jaime, who is the strongest, did all the work, bulling into the wind as Steve and I tucked in behind. You can see in Jaime's body language when the noodling is over and the serious riding begins, and at that moment you have no choice but to latch onto his back wheel or say goodbye.
That descent was a moment, however long it lasted (a half hour to get down through the canyon? I've no idea, no earthly idea), of perfect concentration, meditative, nothing left in my mind but the flood of immediacy that the ride itself presented. This is why I ride.
Oh, and did I mention our DSL has been down all weekend? Did I mention this weekend sucks?
Across the hall, the woman laying in hospital gown is holding an ice pack on the right side of her face. She's talking to someone just out of sight in the room with her, and now she's gesturing with both hands, trying to explain what happened. Each hand is one of the cars, and in the midst of the gesture, they hit, T-bone style. Looks like she'll be OK. She seems stoically calm.
Next room things aren't so sanguine. Another car accident. The woman who was driving, maybe the mom, maybe not quite old enough, is also holding ice to her face. She's standing. She's not the patient. She tries to explain to the other people there how the accident happened, and she breaks down. She thought he'd stopped in front of her, but then he didn't stop....
People come and go, until the nurse has to come in and tell them there's a limit of two people plus the patient in the room. "They're just too small," she says. We look around our room, do a quick count, figure out who should leave when she comes in to tell us the same thing, but she never does.
After a while, they say they want to take her (we still haven't seen "her", the patient across the hall) to x-ray to see if any of the bones around her eye are broken. They wheel her out, sitting in a tipped up wheeled hospital bed, and it's a teenage girl. Her face is all bloody, and she's scared. "Daddy, come with me," she says, and her Dad tries to find a way to walk alongside the rolling bed, but there's no room, he's got to be either in front or in back, and the struggle to figure out how to stay close to his daughter seems too much for me to bear.
As for us, Dad's OK. The chest pains that brought him (and us) to the ER on a Friday night were not a heart attack, and they couldn't find anything else wrong. He's gotta go back in first of the week for more tests, but our little drama seems so manageable in comparison. He's home taking it easy, I took Lissa and Nora out for ice cream, and the people across the hall are probably all still there.
If free and open source software is a powerful engine of intellectual growth in computer technology, then free and open access to things like biomedical and scientific endeavors can only be a good thing.
Academicians have long been about the free and open thing, but in sometimes ambiguous and/or contradictory ways. Found a fabulous blog about this today, the Open Access News.
It is now October, and the lofty windes make bare the trees of their leaues, while the hogs in the Woods grow fat with the falne Acorns; the forward Deere begin to boe to rut, and the barren Doe groweth good meat: the Basket-makers now gather their rods, and the fisheres lay their leapes in the deepe.
- Breton, 1626