Proxy effort

Posters from WW-II urge civilians to save oil and buy bonds, but draw distinction between "Go across" and "come across". The fighters are still the fighters; the civilians are supporting them. More recent campaigns urge us to "fight" by giving to this effort or that. We "fight a war on poverty" with taxes. The language makes us front line fighters now.

For those of us old enough to remember, when our proxies landed on the Moon it felt as though a little bit of us was there with them. And I not infrequently hear people talk of some scientific discovery as something "we" have learned. I don't object at all--they pay us to explore on their behalf and I'm glad for the opportunity. But what here is a harmless expression of solidarity seems more like an excuse for not committing elsewhere.

OK, Louis XIV said that "it is the last piece of gold that wins" a war, but there's still no equivalence in effort between giving up new shoes to provide that last piece of gold and marching out to get shot at.

Rachel Jones said about caring people:

"A significant challenge for nonprofits and ministries remains recruiting people who will commit to serve long-term outside the United States."

"I know there are a plethora of good reasons that concerned American Christians can't just uproot and leave the States, from family to health to finances. I know I simplify. But I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others."

"They think they already are."

Minor financial adjustments such as buying fair trade coffee, and writing letters about safe working conditions at supplier factories are considered "being part of the fight": Words, and relatively painless giving will do the job. Maybe changes in fashion and minor financial pressures will translate into big social changes somewhere across the world. Maybe. We should do what good we can. But I think Jones may be right that we delude ourselves into thinking we're doing something important for the poor when most of us aren't. I'm not doing anything important. We give to a few charities and the church, and now and then I split half a sandwich with one of the beggars at the capitol square, but that doesn't make me one of the "poverty fighters." It isn't much help at all.

I'm starting to converge on a theory that helping the homeless is more a matter of relationships: community to individual, with expectations and a completely new environment. Change in the hat is symbolic at best, but if we think we're "fighting poverty" we may be satisfied with that. More thought and research needed... First approximation model for caring for the homeless looked like "spending a couple of months in a monastery", which isn't very practical.

We're pretty good at befuddling ourselves with words. Back in the early 70's a member of a Dutch squatter group proudly announced that he was a productive member of society: he kept tabs on police malfeasance (as defined by him). Maybe the role is necessary (though given the benign reputation of the Dutch police I suspect he was deluding himself), but it isn't productive. We probably all saw the full-page ad in which Cindy Crawford told us she was fighting some disease or another just by posing there. (I can't find the image.) Who knew disease research was that easy?

Not all of us, or perhaps even many of us, are called to dramatic work. If we tell ourselves that we're heroes for buying more expensive coffee it can't make it easier to hear the call to do something serious.

"Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good"

Mystery

The Dalai Lama was in town again today. People paid up to $75 for tickets to hear him speak (I gather receipts over expenses go to charity). He's a regular to the area, since the Deer Park center is just down the road in Oregon, and he's quite popular. By all reports he's a good man, with wide curiosity. Less commonly known is that he's ... (surprise!) ... Buddhist, and holds to some unpopular doctrines about sexual morals, and unless I misunderstand has some uncomfortable ideas about greed. These aren't the same as the Christian doctrines, because of radically different understandings of the nature of man, but the practical applications of those doctrines look pretty much the same. Not so with others; the religions are not equivalent.

I'm rehashing the old complaint that he's admired as a symbol of something most people never bother to understand. They're satisfied with a pop Buddhism that makes no difficult demands and requires no self-discipline. Meditate for an hour a week and sign petitions against the death penalty and order the hummus plate in front of your friends. No need to understand the pantheon or the rules or the calendar.

I commented on the previous post that an American Indian could probably satisfy the hunger of the Newtown parents to have the Newtown school purified, by chanting and waving eagle wings and blowing tobacco and sage smoke against the walls. But they wouldn't really understand either with heart or mind. Tony Hillerman's best efforts can't give the full meaning of what the Navaho life is like, and the bystanders at Eagle Days (myself included) only understood a simple cartoon of what the blessing of the eagles was supposed to be doing. It was exotic and mysterious. A Newtown purifier like that would likewise be exotic and mysterious, and that would probably be good enough.

Imagine a Catholic priest sprinkling holy water in the building. The devout Catholic would have the sense of the church brought to heal the place--he's used holy water himself. The Protestant wouldn't see that--it would be a ritual disconnected from the rest of his life and faith.

We need the holy to transform and purify, but in lieu of that we'll take the mysterious.

Solutions for the rich

The Newtown school board wants to tear down the building and replace it. There is precedent:

The panel did have something of a road map. Columbine High School in Colorado, where 12 students and one teacher were killed by gunmen 1999, removed the library where most of the victims died and replaced it with an atrium. Virginia Tech "converted a classroom building where a student gunman killed 32 people in 2007 into a peace studies and violence prevention center," the AP said. At West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, officials built a new school several hundred yards away after a gunman killed five girls there in 2006.

And at California's Oikos University, where seven people were killed in 2012, the classroom where they were slain is now "used only for theology classes," NBC News noted.

The reason why is obvious:

Brian Engel, whose 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, died in the shootings, told the task force he didn't want Olivia's younger brother to have to walk into the building where the massacre took place: "We do want him to go to Sandy Hook School, but at an alternate location—not where his sister died."

The building has been contaminated, and they know of no way to purify it, no rite to exorcise it.

But this is a rich man's solution to the problem of "psychic pollution." And we aren't very consistent about it. If a child is stabbed to death waiting for the subway, we don't pour concrete in the station and call it a monument.

I don't recall many of these sorts of solutions in the histories of eras when death wasn't so isolated from normal life. I have no desire to go back to those days of deadly medicine and high infant mortality. (I suspect we will, but that's another issue.) But the effort we spent on hiding death seems disproportionate. We are all going to die, and what place can you go that has not seen death, even early and tragic death?

It seems cruel to bring a 6-year old boy into the class where his sister was murdered. But you can't hide the murder from him, and to put the facade of a new building over it won't conceal the crime. Maybe it is kinder to have him face the place, and let him promise that he is going to live.

Is there any sort of purification people can recognize outside of razing and starting over?

Jargon and the long road to a paper

I should maybe explain what the "burn sample" is.

There's a world of difference between the meaning of looking at a histogram, seeing a medium sized bump at point A, and saying "I wonder what's there?" and the meaning of puzzling through the theory to figure that there might be a bump at point B, and then looking at the histogram and finding a small bump there.

Why?

In a few hundred random histograms, there will typically be a 3-σ bump--that is to say a bump that will only occur 1/300 times. Random stuff will sometimes look like a real signal of some kind; that's life. So if you have a sky map of where neutrinos came from, and one 5 degree wide spot looks like it has extra neutrinos coming from it, that doesn't mean much of anything. Looking through the sky catalogs for some sort of match is likely to be a fool's errand. You'll probably find something: there'll be dozens of possible candidates. The chances that you have a coincidence are high.

If you look along a tide-washed beach for charred wood, and find a few extra sticks together, it might be the site of a fire or it might merely be where an eddy deposited some debris washed from a mile away.

But if you know you saw a light on the left side of the bay last night and this morning you find the charred wood there--but not much anywhere else--you can surmise with some confidence that the light was from the campfire. If theory says there should be a bump at point B and you see a smallish sort of bump there, you start to feel confident that you are seeing something real.

To keep from "bump hunting" and losing the significance of other analyses to trial factors when you reveal that there's something signal-like in region X, the experiments try to coordinate analyses. (This also makes sure there are enough thesis topics to go around.)

The first step is to figure out a question and then "back of the envelope" it to see if your experiment's data has a snowball's chance in hell of answering it. Usually it doesn't.

If it does, the next step is to create as accurate a model as you can and use the data simulation system to create signal and background data, and try to refine an analysis that can tell the difference between them. You then have to estimate two things: the "discovery potential" and the "limit potential" of your analysis. BTW, you have to give reports on this in your working group, and learn from the comments and suggestions. "Discovery potential" is usually described by a set of curves. If the signal exceeds the 5-σ curve you can announce a discovery, if 3-σ you have "evidence", if below 1-σ you grump, and see if you can publish a limit. "Limit potential" is similar, but in the opposite direction--how strongly can you rule out a signal.

So far so good, but simulated data is never quite the same as real. There are several things one can do at this stage. You can scramble the data, mixing bits from this event and that one together, and use that as a new simulation. Or you can run your analysis on a small part of the dataset and tune your analysis to address the problems you find from the real noise rates. This is the "burn sample". Typically you are allowed to only look at certain quantities that measure the quality, and not on those that display a signal.

Then you present your results again, and the collaborators argue, and give you the go-ahead to run on the whole dataset.

Then you present your results from that, and they argue a while about what you should do instead. At some point they agree to the "unblinding" and the results you really wanted to see are finally produced and presented.

Usually by this time there's some general idea of whether this is going to be discovery or limit, but there are sometimes surprises. Bert and Ernie were surprises--two neutrinos at such high energy in only 1 year's running isn't easy to explain with existing models (in fact a talk this morning ruled out the top 5 models, with nothing left).

Now comes a lot of argument over what you really should have done to make the analysis better. And over the interpretation, and how it should be presented to the world. Sometimes personalities clash. (Funny, that.)

In a big group there is usually a team to help shepherd the paper and guide the analysis, especially if the researcher is a grad student. Anybody can make a typo in their code; it is good to have extra eyes.

If the working group approves it, and the physics coordinator approves it, and the collaboration approves it, off it goes to arXiv and the journals. Usually it gets past the reviewers with only minor changes, and several months later it is printed. And nobody reads it, because if they were really interested they already read it on arXiv. Or it was leaked at a conference. Scientists are generally lousy at keeping secrets.

Education and Outreach

This morning was the education and outreach plenary, with descriptions of how the group is engaging undergrads and even high school students. I emailed along a proposal of my own (grad students create a web-based "poster session" describing their thesis, aimed at a high-school physics level) which met with initial enthusiasm (the coordinator is not a grad student :-) ).

The last talk of the morning session was "ArtScience in the Development of Quasar (an interactive sound and light sculpture)". Quasar is some kind of art installation next door made of optical strands and ... well, they said "The main body of a Quasar installation is designed as an immersive landscape that forms a visually striking array of crystalline elements and fibre optic strands, which are supported by an intricate metallic substructure inspired by quantum loops." Hosale and Crettaz began by "explaining" how they integrated the universes of art, science, and philosophy. I thought science was natural philosophy using the art of mathematics, but maybe I'm naive. Crettaz (?) told us of how one of his heroes worked with Le Corbusier, which I suppose is a recommendation in some circles. He said the curves of Quasar were inspired by gravity bending light. They showed photos of it, but I suppose you have to be there. At night.

An "Imax"-type movie should be out in September, and the representative from the Milwaukee Public Museum showed some raw footage. We all sincerely hope that the name will not be "Ghost Catchers".

The science parallel sessions mixed the dull and the interesting, often in the same talk. There was a lot going on I hadn't heard about.

Encouragement

After the IT meeting I stared at the listings for the Online and the rest of the WIMP breakout sessions. I'd been to part of the WIMP talks, and learned quite a bit--but the afternoon sessions seemed to be "limit" sessions, and I was getting a little weary of new limit papers. That's a bad character trait for a scientist, who is supposed to be happy to learn anything, but some of these are exercises; excluding models I don't believe while waiting for the statistics to address more reasonable models.

And Powerpoint is hypnotic. Zzzz. (Here's a conspiracy theory for you: Powerpoint is for sales presentations, designed to hypnotize the audience so the salesman can press his pitch on a helpless group.)

So I went with the Online processing group, with talks about software trigger upgrades and plans. And a talk I didn't expect to be encouraging, but was. IceCube was designed as a neutrino telescope, and one obvious thing to try to do is coordinate with optical or radio or gamma-ray telescopes to look for neutrinos associated with their spectacular events, or for them to scan for where we say there was something exciting happening in the sky. Universität Bonn should have an interesting result released soon. Nice to see we can do it. Now if something lets loose in our galaxy...

Correction

Earlier I said Bert and Ernie were the highest energy IceCube events. It seems that the analysis had a few surprises. The "burn sample" (a set of data you try to tune your analysis on and develop the selection criteria) turns out to have contained Big Bird, with maybe as much energy as Bert and Ernie together. If this was the only high energy case we'd be worried--you don't want to "draw the target around the bullet hole"--but since there are others outside the burn sample it is probably OK. There'll be arguments, though. (In fact a recent evaluation complained that the collaboration was too slow to release results, due to what insiders think of as interminable arguments(*).)

The results are preliminary, and unreleased, so I'm protected from making the obvious (and probably foolish, given the poor statistics) comments about the energy distribution.

(*)Reporters want the story this minute, never mind how accurate. Scientists want it accurate, and if there's no competitor they can take a long time refining the analysis--to the despair of grad students who want to graduate.

UPDATE: Actually Bert and Ernie were from the 2011 season, and Big Bird from the burn sample for the 2012 season.

The joys of going with the low bid

I don't know if the
situation is as dire as they make out, but giving China the ability to turn off some of our military communications seems strangely trusting. We've never been entirely self-sufficient, but how do we build avionics if parts can't arrive through an embattled South China Sea?

One obvious side effect of outsourcing so much of our supply is that our critical interests spread more widely than otherwise, demanding greater hegemony and involving us in more disputes. Which requires a bigger and more expensive army, which seems to militate against any cost savings.

Making sure of anti-matter

Einstein's theory of General Relativity (aka gravitation) has been so successful that you'd think there's not much left that needs demonstrating. Everything pulls everything else; even light takes a curved path around a star. Not very curved, but measurably so.

What about anti-matter? Does that have "anti-gravity?"

We've made plenty of anti-matter, surely we'd have noticed by now.

It turns out to be a little less than obvious. We load anti-protons in an accelerator and store them in orbit for hours. They don't behave differently (except for the sign of their charge) than the protons do. But they're confined in orbit by strong magnetic fields, and if they start to fall down (or fall up) the field bends their paths back to where they belong. Protons don't fall out. Neither do anti-protons.

We get anti-electrons from nuclear decay all the time. They come out of the nucleus with energies high enough to give them speeds that are an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and then they start playing pachinko with other electrons along the way. The effects of gravity get lost in the noise.

Trying to hold onto anti-matter is a bit fraught. It won't sit politely in your test tube.

So the ALPHA collaboration has tried to make a little magnetic bottle to hold atoms of anti-hydrogen. When they turn off the magnetic field, the atoms fly around, hit the sides of the detector, and start annihilating with ordinary matter. If more of them hit the top than the bottom, does that mean they feel anti-gravity?

The devil is in the details. The anti-atoms aren't perfectly cold, so they have a distribution of velocities that sends them in all directions. The effect might be small. Also, the field doesn't turn off instantly, as Nature explains. That might bias the directions they fly in. The fast atoms escape quickly, and the slow ones--the ones you might expect 9.8m/sec^2 to matter for--trail out later.

The collaboration is building a better detector, so they can cool the anti-atoms further, and make better estimates. Right now their limits are not very good--but it says something about the difficulty of studying antimatter when you learn that their limits are the best direct limits so far. "If an antihydrogen atom falls downward, its gravitational mass is no more than 110 times greater than its inertial mass. If it falls upward, its gravitational mass is at most 65 times greater." That's the problem when you've only got 23 events to play with.

Reloading memory

Time to review the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. We believe a newspaper when it writes of things we don't know about, even though when it touches on stories we are familiar with it generally makes a botch of them. Why?

Perhaps we recognize and respect the confidence of the writers. They even put in background information sometimes, to make sure we understand the context. Good teachers make the explanations as simple as possible, bad ones rely on $50 jargon. Perhaps they are the only designated authorities left, so we overlook their occasional failings.

Or maybe we've gotten so used to getting our external information from the paper or the TV that we reload our memory every day from them. The stuff we live with day in and out--work, hobby, whatever--that stuff we remember from month to month. But if it isn't sports or celebrity gossip or other hobby we can just listen to the TV explain how Senator Q supports this policy; and not recall that he opposed it last year.

Impish

I remembered the code word wrong: I thought it was "impishness;" must have merged the warning keyword and the retraction word. Remember when the Emergency Broadcast System warned of the end of the world? conelrad.blogspot has the 1971 war scare story.

A lot of radio stations ignored the warning, because even though it had the right codeword it was at the time scheduled for a test. And there was nothing (they knew of) on the international scene to merit worry of nuclear war. One of the commenters claims only 20 stations did what they were supposed to during the 40-minute mixup.

I'm not sure which is scarier: the far-reaching consequences of a small government screwup or the station managers who assumed that who assumed (correctly, this time) that the world would go on as usual because the news they had didn't include anything scary. We've started to learn about the close calls that officials kept secret. If something had slipped that EBS signal would have been the station managers' first warning that something was wrong. But the echo-chamber news business blanks out more and more, to the point where I wonder how many TV newsdesks really know what dangers there are.

Don Giovanni

Although I'd heard arias from the opera, and even listened to a broadcast of it, I'd never seen it until yesterday. Being able to understand what's going on makes a big difference in appreciation. I hate to admit this, but the music doesn't always give me a good clue as to whether the soprano is out for vengeance, falling in love, or about to kill herself. She's emotional about something, but I don't speak Italian. Perhaps I have to work backwards: cued that she is angry I can learn to look for musical clues.

The show was well done, btw; and the cast managed minor technical glitches with perfect aplomb. The fights suffered the usual problem of having to match the action to the music: if Ottavio really wanted vengeance he'd have done a slash and lunge and the opera would have been over an act too early.

The first time I was introduced to any of the characters was in Shaw's Man and Superman, in the Don Juan in Hell section. Not an endorsement. I reread it last night after 40 years. I was buoyed by remembering that the section was short. The references to a statue confused me then, but I didn't get around to looking it up because there were more plays in the collection and then something else to read, and... The characters, aged by 70 years of heaven, hell and motherhood, debated Shaw's pet notions about Life Force. I prefer Mozart.

At the opera's end the survivors sing of what they will do now, and the twice-gulled Donna Elvira says she will spend her life in a convent. The audience laughed. The segment was supposed to be somewhat comic, but the punch line was the next one, as Zerlina sings that she and her new husband will go home to supper.

Were the characters real I'd not advise Elvira to try for a convent, but within the story her situation is painful enough to demand a little respect for her cry. She has discovered that she can't trust herself to stay away from a man she knows will betray her, and has even tried to, in effect, betray her new friends by asking mercy for a man she knows will try to prey on them. And we laughed at her shame and penitence.

Narcotics detectors

Perhaps you heard of James McCormick and his amazing bomb detectors:

McCormick had claimed the devices could bypass "all forms of concealment", detecting drugs and people along with explosives, the court heard.

He claimed they would work under water and from the air, and would track an object up to 1km (3280ft) below the ground.

The bomb detectors came with cards which were "programmed" to detect a wide array of substances, from ivory to $100 banknotes.

Kenya police announced that the bomb detectors they have work fine.

They carried out a public demonstration in the capital, Nairobi, in which the detector seemingly located narcotics.

Draw your own conclusions.

IceCube events

The New Scientist has a good description of what IceCube found that looks like it might be extra-solarsystem neutrinos. And... (drum roll) they included the caveat about uncertainty in atmospheric production! I don't have to correct anything.

I should clarify one point, though. We expect that charm particles will be created when cosmic ray protons or nuclei smash into the upper atmosphere. There's no good way to tell when it happens, because there are so many particles in the resulting shower. So what we do is extrapolate the curves we find from fixed target and collider experiments (where we can usually tell) out to the cosmic ray primary energies.

Backing up a bit: the cosmic ray primary is the one that comes from where-ever and hits the upper atmosphere: usually a proton, sometimes another nucleus. The primary has the highest energy, of course. The secondary particles share that energy, and then they interact with other atmospheric nuclei to produce more (lower energy) secondaries and on and on until they range out, are absorbed in nuclei, or decay. The stuff that hits the ground is almost all muons from the decay of particles produced in the showers.

If the extrapolation is wrong, our estimate for how many high-energy muons we should get from that initial primary-cosmic-nucleus hitting a nitrogen nucleus will be wrong, because we won't have the rate of charm quarks in the first generation of secondary particles and subsequent decay into relatively high energy muons right. And the decay of one of those very high energy muons would generally produce a high energy neutrino.

But, as Halzen points out, if we discover that we have the wrong rate, that tells us something interesting about charm physics.

I am not leaking anything by saying that Bert and Ernie are not the only interesting events, but they are (so far) the highest energy, and the first ones discovered.

---

You might wonder why the group gave the events names. It is in the culture, in a manner of speaking. There are 86 "strings" with detectors (DOM) strung on them: a total of 5160. OK, quick: does DOM number 54-02 need to be rebooted, or was it 54-20? Early on (before I arrived) someone (Krasberg?) figured out that people remembered names better than strings of numbers, so each DOM has a location (string and position on the string), a serial number, and a name (Cayenne_pepper, Porter, Chardonnay, Demophobia, Thalassophobia, Claestorp, Apache_tribe, and so on). The extension of this idea to rare and interesting events I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Probability and the news

Suppose that the news producers guess that stories A, B, and C are going to be the most interesting stories of the day.

Now suppose that their "customers" only pay attention to the news in short bursts: maybe 2 minutes here and there. In that random 2 minute interval the producers want to update the viewer on the top stories.

In particular, if story A (e.g. the Boston massacre) is really big they'll worry that if the viewer doesn't hear about story A first, he'll flip channels. So if they want to maximize the probability that the viewer will hear information about story A, they saturate programming with virtually nothing else.

Suppose the situation isn't so dire, and they expect the viewer to be interested in any of A, B, or C. Now in the same way, to maximize the probability that the viewer will hear information about the stories A, B, and C, they can loop stories A, B, and C and virtually nothing else.

It goes without saying that there are plenty of important news stories that don't make the short list. And the Big Events don't always look like reportable news. Even so, if the viewers aren't expected to be systematic in collecting information, the producers are going to provide shallow and repetitious content.

The result is hard to distinguish from deliberate distortion.

I'm not a typical news "consumer", nor would I expect any who read blogs to be. But in the homes of acquaintances I've seen TVs on as background with nobody paying much attention.

Senate and NRA

I’ve heard (even from some near and dear) the claim that the Senate was bought by NRA money. That’s vanishingly unlikely. What the NRA can wield is a large and loyal block of voters, many times their own membership. Trying to figure out how unpopular the bill was is hard because the media were staunchly in favor and only reluctantly report contrary opinions. Gun and ammo sales make for an interesting proxy, though.

So why would there be such opposition to simple measures like extending mental health background checks to private sales? It seems innocuous enough, though it does add lots of extra paperwork and annoyance to someone who wants to sell his shotgun to his neighbor. It added extra tracking. Potentially the information would accumulate in a federal database of owners.

Such tools can be misused. New York or Chicago have rules that nominally allow people to buy handguns, but in practice you don’t get permission. But who trusts New York or Chicago anyway?

I think the answer to my question about opposition is simply that a large fraction of us don’t trust the federal government to do the right thing; that we expect it to abuse any power we give it.

At one level that’s quite reasonable. The nation was designed with the principle that you can’t trust any group very much.

But on another level it could mean that a large fraction of us don’t think the federal government is working for the common good anymore. That’s edging pretty close to losing the consent of the governed. That’s not a good direction.

We’ve a little ways to go before we get that far. Most people still trust and respect the police and the firemen. But the more we go down the "Chicago Way" the less even that will be true. Although I wonder how bad things have to get before Illinois gets rid of their government. Maybe it now reflects what they want. That would be even worse.