Separating images

This looks interesting: using a kind of dual measurement to try to distinguish two very close sources. Rayleigh showed that two point sources couldn't be distinguished if their angular separation were less than a factor times the wavelength divided by the lens diameter. But their research suggests that if you are not doing direct imaging, it may be possible to do much better. Unfortunately I don't understand their paper well enough to say how practical this is likely to be, but I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe we'll be able to--well, "get a look" is direct imaging. How about "detect" binary star systems? OK, we detect them with doppler shifts and with occlusion effects if we're lucky. You know what I mean.

New particle?

Researchers using older LHC results from Atlas and CMS claim there is room for a new heavy boson that couple to dark matter. So said reports last week. The arXiv article is from last year, and garnered little attention until the authors made statements at ICHEP last week. Um.

As others (e.g. Motls and Dorigo have noted, there was room for a lot of low-significance guesses in the early data. Most of those bumps have gone away with more data. And though the article says the team showed their recent work at ICHEP, the linked papers had nothing to do with their arXiv article from last year--just stuff about what you could do with a new collider. (Since they don't have direct access to the latest LHC data, it's not terribly surprising that they don't have anything new to say yet.) It sounds like they are just touting a little "bump-hunting" from last year that nobody paid much attention to at the time.

I skimmed the paper, and didn't see much that jumped out at me--and I don't think I'll be going back to slog through it.

They're quite correct that there's a big problem with dark matter and normal matter--the latest results are squeezing the most popular models (WIMPs) out of the picture. Me? I suspect that dark matter interacts with neutrinos. That leaves room for them to interact with normal matter in the early universe when temperatures were high, and means that it will be next to impossible to detect their interactions now. Which isn't very encouraging to grad students looking for a thesis, or hoping for a Nobel for discovery.

I'm shocked, shocked!

Apparently policemen have a macabre sense of humor. A dry-erase board soliciting suggestions for dealing with problems caused by the homeless who congregate at the end of State Street wound up including "Burmese tiger trap," "swarms of bees," and similar ideas. The administration is apologizing, of course, and some outsiders said this doesn't reflect the attitude officers on the street show in real life. Well, no, of course it doesn't.

I'm told med students and ER workers have a wacky sense of humor too. I'd bet that most folks working in life-or-death occupations blow off steam with jokes that would freak out peaceful desk jockeys. I work in IT these days, and even on the worst days(*), as one of our guys says, "Babies ain't dyin'." But at lunch some of our jokes might make the system users shiver. We have a team of people who like to help, but when the same (otherwise brilliant) fellow keeps coming back with the same problem, he can expect there to be a little behind-the-scenes merriment. But we'll cheerfully keep fixing the problem.

Prediction: Among themselves park rangers will have wry jokes about bears and over-confident hikers, ambulance drivers will have coarse phrases for frequently visited locations, and firemen will have theirs about places and stupid people tricks.

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(*)E.g. When we lost an un-backed-up 3PB filesystem. We were saying to each other "Well, they needed more disk space, and now look--3PB of free space!" We got the system fixed, and only lost about 100,000 files, almost all of which were reconstruct-able--not too shabby.

Thief of time

Scanning the news stories about student demands at college, and the latest limit in the search for dark matter, reminded me of a fun book. "Contrary to the headmistress's instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone."

For something to exist, it has to be observed.
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space.
And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for.
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is paperwork

You have to be careful with your training sample

If you don't choose wisely, your Artificial Intelligence beauty contest judge will wind up famous for the wrong reasons.

"The idea that you could come up with a culturally neutral, racially neutral conception of beauty is simply mind-boggling."

The case is a reminder that "humans are really doing the thinking, even when it’s couched as algorithms and we think it’s neutral and scientific," he said.

In counting aspects of beauty, do you weight a symmetrical aquiline nose more heavily than steatopygy? There's a good chance some other culture disagrees.

The article goes on to complain about algorithm-based law enforcement tactics, but that's a bit different--most people fear violent crime more than white-collar theft, and the unhappiness arises from the fact that the loci of violent crimes tend to cluster, and so do the side effects from policing.

But an algorithm for most beautiful? I remember one day waiting for a ride at Union South, and looking at the people around. One young lady seemed more attractive than the rest, and for want of more noble things to think about I tried to figure out why. I finally realized that she resembled my wife.

Cell phone gun

You all probably heard about the gun that folds up to look like a cell phone. I saw reactions from "cool, I should get one" to "what evil-minded people those gun weirdos are." One thing I did not see was a use case.

• Home Defense? Why bother with a fold-up?
• Concealed carry to prevent a mugging? By the time you unfold the thing, the mugger will have shot you three times and be halfway down the block with anything valuable.
• Parthian shot at a mugger? Do you think a mugger is going to leave you your "cell phones"? Anyway, judges frown on shooting people running away from you.
• Assassination? You're going to get this past metal detectors, and then unfold it undetected, and then get close enough so you can hit the broadside of a barn. Yep, sure. A derringer would be smaller; or use a ceramic knife if you expect metal detectors.
• Because it's a cool novelty? OK, impressing people is a valid use case. Still.

It finally struck me: You conceal it from your boss in a "No firearms" establishment where you have reason to expect random shooters. Chances are you won't be targeted first, so you have time to duck and unfold and fire.

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I made notes but never actually posted about this one.

Malaria

Malaria Capers is a very interesting history of the disease and its attempted cures, and its use (to cure syphilis). There've been many attempts at a vaccine, and plenty of treatments. BBC reports on a new attempt that shows promise in animals, attacking the parasite in a couple of stages of its development and, the article says, suppressing it for about a month. Pretty good--chloroquine we had to take every week. Over the years so many drugs have shown promise and failed, or begun to fail as the organism adapted, that it is hard to get excited. But who knows? Maybe this will be able to replace artemisinin, or maybe even be a long-term cure.

Race around the Pole

I've never been to the South Pole, but I work with others who have--and some even wintered-over. When IceCube was drilling its 2.5km deep holes in the ice, we had a lot of people in the drilling crew. They stood 8 hours shifts--the system kept running 24/7 (OK, there were a lot more than 24 hours in the day). If you work for 8 and sleep for 7 or 8 hours--what do you do with the rest of the time? Remember that these are clever, adventurous (or they'd not have taken a job at the Pole), creative, and very good at making and fixing things--and repurposing things.

Once upon a time, the Race Around The Pole was a bigger deal than it is now--a recreation for people sitting in the middle of nowhere.(*) It is still an important event--people devise some costumes and run/walk/whatever on this year's track around the South Pole. But a few years ago things had gotten a little competitive.

How about a dragon racing around? And yes, that's a hot tub in the back. I presume the ladies represent captive princesses. Hot water is gold there, btw.

Or perhaps a chariot?

It looks to me like the chariot wheels were made from the leftover spools that held the cable we shipped down.

Unfortunately, although we all cheer for the creativity, funding agencies tend not to have a sense of humor, and I gather word came down to scale it back. Since the drilling's done we don't have as many engineers down there anymore, so it's probably moot. But it would be cool to spend time working alongside a group like that.

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I got the images from icestories.explorium.edu, but I couldn't link them directly--see them for more.

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(*) I'm tolerably sure the airlines try to time various in-flight activities to keep the passengers from going stir-crazy. Food, ads, movies, whatever -- to break up the noisy monotony of an 8-hour flight.

Squirrel tastes

This morning while we were getting breakfast together I noticed a squirrel out by the bird feeders eating a mushroom. I'd not realized they did that. Apparently they do. He was picky, though--the relic looked a little ratty and notched when I photographed it later. (Lots of glare, but you can learn something from the fact that the original mushroom was round.)

Ingratitude

Some people seem to naturally feel entitled to the sun, moon, and seven stars. Some of us just act like it because we don't know any better.

Psalm 59:11 Do not slay them, or my people will forget; Scatter them by Your power, and bring them down, O Lord, our shield. I remember wondering about that verse. He's not asking for Divine mercy for his foes (he explicitly asks that they be punished!), but he's asking that they be kept around--presumably as foes still, just not powerful.

History books aren't very powerful reminders. Movies can be, but over time the hunger for new stuff changes the focus. Mad studied this a while back:

WWII then and now, and future.

And after a while you get a generation that does not know Joseph, or in our case doesn't know much about war or freedom or have much idea how hard it was to produce their inheritance.

Asking forgiveness

"Is my gluttony a sin? I'm sorry, and I'll show it by ... giving up broccoli!"

Left to ourselves I don't think we're very good at repentance.

We don't get to prescribe how we "make the first move" in repentance. Voltaire said "God will forgive; it is His job." On the contrary, Jesus mentioned one rather large restriction in a prayer everybody probably knows. The law of Moses specified certain rules for showing repentance and for thanking or preparing yourself for God. There were more convenient things to do than going to the tabernacle/temple, and more dramatic things, and I gather the ancient Jews did both--baking cakes at home for the Queen of Heaven, or burning the odd child for Moloch.

"It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins," but it was the prescribed work to show penitence and faith that God would find a way to forgive. He did.

Slow quakes

It makes sense that the faults slip slowly as well as quickly, but this is something I hadn't heard of before--an intermediate speed slipping, where a change can happen over "days, months, sometimes even years." We can detect some of these now. The really deep ones are, as usual, harder.

Internet of things

At the IT lunch Friday during a conversation about connectedness our "PoleMaster"(*) mentioned bluetooth connected toothbrushes. We laughed, but he said it was real, and so it was. He said his smart-TV was immune from hacking, being on the far side of a firewall that blocked all packets, and we laughed at that too.

We're not black-hat guys, and I don't know how to hack into your home router. I could probably find out how to crack simple system w/o too much trouble, and I know there's a network of folks who share more sophisticated info (but I'm not known to them, or they to me, so I can't get in). I assume the big agencies know most of the tricks.

So don't worry, I won't be trying to figure out if you brush your teeth thoroughly. Or perusing your song playlist. Or listening to your baby monitor. I'm a nice guy.

Feel better?

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(*) He's responsible for our South Pole computer systems, and for training winter-overs.

Placebo

Go read the article on the placebo effect. I have trouble remembering names, but even I'd heard of Beecher's study

Beecher concluded that, overall, in 35 percent of cases the condition was "satisfactorily relieved by a placebo," which he took to be evidence of therapeutic effectiveness.

It wasn't my field, but I figured the folks in the field had vetted it and it could be relied on--though I wondered about placebo in animals.

There turn out to be some issues with the study, and with others following it. One obvious problem is that there's no control to study placebos. You can treat a patient, fake-treat a patient, or not treat a patient. The author calls for such studies. One of these things is not like the other things--and a lack of treatment is not exactly comforting. (Comforting can be a big deal in helping. Feeling like you've been rejected may cause problems.)

Plus, a lot of people just get better with or without treatment. The body is designed to try to repair itself, and often it succeeds.

There are fluctuations in severity of a disease or of pain. If you have a threshold (the patient has to be worse than X to start my study), there's a chance that there'll be a fluctuation below the threshold later--briefly feeling better. Or briefly feeling worse--some studies didn't take "getting worse" into account properly.

I'll not say there's no such thing as a placebo effect (and the author is careful not to say that either), but the situation is certainly much fuzzier than popularly believed.

A word to the wise

When the label of a can of foaming insulation says wear gloves, do. It also splatters surprisingly far, so goggles are a wise choice also. I was foresighted enough to wear clothes I didn't care about, but I thought I had the adapter secured on the nozzle well enough. It surprised me with a handful of foam. Even acetone (suggested on the label) doesn't get all the stuff off, so I have an extra layer of skin for a while. With glued-in grime.

Fields of study

BS King has a nice post up. Before settling on a major/career, sometimes you look through many fields: she likens this to dating.

I wanted to be a fireman, then I wanted to be an archaeologist. (Or maybe a paleontologist--dinosaurs were cool. But no, ruins and bones and mysterious people were cooler.) Then a nuclear physicist. Then a particle physicist--that was in high school; Feynman sounded cool. I didn't look back. (Funding ran low, and I'm in IT now.)

My dating career was similarly circumscribed.

I think of fields of study as more like places you go.

In some places you are just a tourist--you go look because it's beautiful. Others are familiar vacation spots--you have some emotional investment too, and you put in the work of camping. Others are places you live for a while and actually help out with something--they require a lot more investment of time and understanding what to do.

I'm a tourist in a lot of different fields--I try to learn enough to get the beauty of them. (I get pushback from some members of the family when I assert that mathematics is an art form too.) Others I know well enough to be able to ask useful questions--generally questions that were posed and solved a century ago--but that’s a camper for you, discovering a "new" trail. In a couple of fields I spent the time to actually find new things--but it does take time. (Oh look, a squirrel!)

A toast?

Ars Technica has a light article about alcohol and astronauts. They include Aldrin's communion wine, though that doesn't seem in the same category as Christmas bottles of Coronet for Apollo 8.

In particular, carbonated options like champagne, beer, or a Tom Collins likely wouldn't be viable.

"Aesthetically, bubbles don't work the same," Stephenson said. "When prepared on Earth, bubbles are more buoyant, and they travel up. In space, there is no up, and they clump in the middle until disturbed. It kind of looks like a congealed mess.”

Beyond looks, the bigger issue would be how those bubbles work within astronauts. On Earth, as Stephenson pointed out, gravity helps keep what we ingest down. Gases then separate and rise, leading to burps. But in space, gases, solids, and liquids can intertwine without gravity to separate them. "You can't burp in space," he said. "Well, you can, but you'd probably throw up at the same time."

A cola would be equally unappetizing.

Fake official letters?

A letter allegedly written by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the 'Majority Members' (also known as Anti-Tyler lawmakers) of the House of Representatives read in the Thursday, August 18 session, is said to be fake because it lacks the conventional reference code/index (Document Code) and is riddled with spelling mistakes and ink-pen corrections, as well as an unusual signature of the President. It had the right letterhead, but some standard official letter codings were missing, and '"That’s outrageous and un-presidential," the staffer said. "I have seen letters with spelling mistakes and run-on sentences but they are not corrected with ink-pen."'

Science, Part 1

Science is dissection. And reassembly.

The world is obviously quite complicated, often almost hopelessly so.

If you want to understand how things work, you look for patterns. You find many classes of such patterns—some involving complex interactions behind the scenes.

Ask where ice cream comes from. One child will explain the pattern he has found: put 3 quarters in a vending machine and an ice cream cup falls into a tray at the bottom.

That answer may not entirely satisfy you. If you dissect the vending machine you find a finite stack of ice cream cups, and will discover that these need to be replenished.

The origin of the ice cream turns out to be a delivery truck. Or maybe not—on dissecting the truck and tracking its operation you find that the real origin is in a factory.

Dissect the factory and you find you have to start making some distinctions. What you choose to call ice cream has its origin in a vat—and it is made of other ingredients that are not ice cream themselves, and which come from elsewhere.

Looking closely into that vat you learn what mix of air and cream and sugar and flavorings and cold makes the ice cream.

Now you have an explanation that should satisfy you, and answer your initial question.

You can dissect further, but at the price of no longer talking exactly about ice cream. For example you can ask why fats congeal this way, and study that aspect of chemistry, or how the flavors effect the tongue, or how the textures effect the tongue, or how the cold effects the mouth. You could even try to learn if people have genetic predispositions to prefer one flavor over another.

All these represent aspects of ice cream, but no longer represent the totality of it. That doesn’t make them valueless--quite the contrary--but they are no longer big picture studies. Maybe they’ll help improve ice cream, but there’s work to be done putting the pieces together first.

Suppose we take a more traditional example from elementary physics class—the famous soporific inclined plane that trips up so many with its force decomposition diagrams.

Before you place the block on the slope you have to make sure of Rule 0:

"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider."

Rule 0: Make sure nobody is doing something else with your apparatus. If you put a toy car on an inclined plane you don’t expect it to roll uphill—but it might. Think “wind-up car.” If somebody else has plans for your apparatus, you won’t be able to measure what you want to.

This means that you cannot directly study intentions with science. You have to exclude them as a complicating factor—you can’t do experiments unless the materials involved operate through their own motions with no human, angelic, or divine intervention. Or … “There's a story about a psychologist who was studying the intelligence of a chimpanzee. He led the chimp into a room full of toys, went out, closed the door and put his eye to the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing. He found himself gazing into a glittering interested brown eye only inches from his own. The chimp was looking through the keyhole to see what the psychologist was doing."

Interventions, motives, and goals are not part of the field of view of science by construction. Some careless folk claim that since science doesn’t study them, they don’t exist. Chess doesn’t include the concept of a full house, but poker exists anyway.

When you let the block slide down the slope to try to study gravity and force balancing, you try to keep friction to a minimum, air resistance to a minimum, and don’t use wheels. Once you understand sliding you can study friction; once you know both you can study rolling; once you understand those you can study friction in the axles; then go on to air resistance, and so on.

Study the properties of springs in isolation, of gears in isolation, and ratchets, and so on.

Once you understand these in isolation you can model their combinations, and try to understand the operation of a wind-up toy car. That’s the “integration” part of science and technology. The final system is very complex, but each of the dissected forces is easy enough to understand in isolation. The science lies in the dissection and modeling of the simple aspects. The engineering art lies in assembling these into a design.

Technologies take models—usually fairly high level models—and design ways to use these. Typically an engineer does not care about the crystal structure of a steel beam when he is designing a bridge—unless he cares about the limits of his model and what the effects of metal fatigue and creep are likely to be. Then he does need a deeper, more fundamental, model of matter.

A structural engineer won’t need to worry about quantum effects, but an electronics engineer probably will, if only to understand the limits of his tools.

Remember—you don’t understand your measurement until you understand the limits of your measurement.

Can Kant?

Did Kant like people at all? If his analysis of marriage and sex

In this relation the human individual makes himself into a thing, which is contrary to the right of humanity in his own person. This, however, is only possible under the one condition, that as the one person is acquired by the other as a thing, that same person also equally acquires the other reciprocally, and thus regains and reestablishes the rational personality.

is what he actually thought, then perhaps it is good that he never married. Wikipedia says he did have friends, though. Schiller wrote "Problem: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubts that I am not a virtuous person. Reply: Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely. And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you."

From what I read his "Pure Reason" seems to treat man as a kind of abstract geometry; a formless point with no shape.

Using that kind of model of people as the foundation for morality and duty is an absolute minimum. A morality that deals with real people cannot help but include other rules suitable to the details of the nature of real people.

For starters: "It is not good for man to be alone." Experience with solitary confinement in prison shows that being alone can have horrible effects on people. You can think of others.

Even for the point-like rational beings, when he wrote that one should act according to rules that one would be willing to see as universal rules, he required what is not completely possible. Said "point-like rational beings" have finite intelligence. By Godel, when they devise a set of guidelines for determining the value of rules they cannot prove the correctness of every possible rule governing all the permutations of PLRB interactions. There will always be some interaction that the PLRB's rules won't cover. His prescription is incomplete: both on the face of it and because it doesn't address details of the nature of humans.