Monthly Archive

It’s a morning of fun new words! First I hear greenwashing on the Today Show, which Donna likes to wash while she eats brekkie. Then, Language Log delights me with nanoblahblah, henchgoon, and celebufreak. Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, twitters words of the day so I also got a nice infusion when I examined her twitter feed for the past week or so. A few selections I particularly like that she found: paracosm, yostelumpet, and anthroponymy. And now for the definitions!

• anthroponymy - the study of the names of human beings [emckean@twitter]
• celebufreak - a freak with fame (e.g. Kim Kardashian) [Wordlustitude]
• greenwashing - marketing a product as green when it’s really not [Today show]
• henchgoon - alternate term for administrative assistant or “assistant of doom” [Wordlustitude]
• nanoblahblah - very, very tiny nonsense (nanotechnobabble) [Wordlustitude]
• paracosm - a private imaginary world, esp. made by children to escape harsh circumstances (think Pan’s Labyrinth) [emckean@twitter]
• yodelumpet - a singing style that combines yodeling and Louis-Armstrong-style trumpet-like sounds [emckean@twitter]

Please note that the twitter links are stable in terms of link permanence, but are unstable in twitter’s ability to serve up the page. So if at first you get a bizarre message with birds, try again. This has also led to the re-discovery of the most excellent Wordlustitude site. I had seen a while ago but for whatever reason didn’t subscribe to it. This has been remedied, and if you like neologisms, I recommend you do the same.

I felt like this was too important not to mention.  Four common ingredients in sunscreen are the cause of coral reef death according to a recent study.  The chemicals wash off of swimmers’ bodies and activate dormant viruses in symbiotic algae that live on the reefs.  This symbiotic algae provides reefs with food.  It also adds to their color, so when the algae dies due to the virus, the reefs become bleached.  About 10% of the world’s reefs are in danger.

Here are the chemicals you should avoid in sunscreen:

• paraben
• cinnamate
• benzophenone
• camphor derivative

So before you head to the beach, make sure that what you pick up doesn’t have those ingredients.  According to Roberto Danovaro, who headed the study, you should use sunscreens with physical filters that reflect UV rays and eco-friendly chemical sunscreens.

Well, Edwards is all set to announce he is dropping out of the democratic race and Ghouliani has withdrawn from the republican side. Of the mainstream democrat candidates, Edwards was the least likely to become corporate lapdog of the year. He had some unfortunate things against him, which made me less than meh about his bid, but I would have preferred him to Clinton or Obama. My prediction is Obama will take it. As for the Republicans, I was terribly wrong about McCain’s prospects. Which evil would be worse? McCain or Romney in the White House? I must say, though, I am so, so glad that Ghouliani was a miserable failure. If he had been made president, the world would have been a much darker place.

At this point, no one is heading to the White House that I support. I refuse to support the lesser of two evils and so will almost certainly be voting Green as a protest.

The current omnibus package for 2008 does not provide funding for many of the science programs that were promised in the America COMPETES Act passed last August. If something doesn’t happen, it will mean less funding for the NSF, NIST, and DOE Office of Science for this fiscal year. In turn, innovation in science in America will continue to slip compared to the rest of the world at a crucial time. So if you support science funding, please take 30 seconds to fill out this letter to your representatives in government (senate, house, president) urging them to increase funding for these agencies this year.

Please help keep me in a job! :) [hat tip]

Just what value is there in getting a degree in Computer Science (CS)? Are new graduates competent programmers? Is that the purpose of a CS degree? Should companies be spending money to train new hires out of college in the programming languages and practices that they use?

Robert Dewar is a professor emeritus at NYU in computer science, and he believes that the status of software engineers in America is in danger due to general incompetence of new graduates. The long and the short of it is that after the dot-com bubble burst, and computer science enrollment at universities plummeted, schools restructured their programs to be more fun. Essentially, they were dumbed down. Specifically, the focus has shifted away from math and the theory of computation. Students are not taught a wide range of programming practices, but instead are trained to rely on large software libraries in a sort of “cookbook” approach. That is, students can assemble a solution to a known problem (in Java), but they are woefully undertrained for solving actual problems in the wild with “more practical” programming skills.

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I can stare at the moon on a clear night for quite a while. When I was very young, I felt like I could reach out and touch it. When I first got into model rockets (around 8 years old), I thought I could build one big enough one day to send it to the moon. My stepfather at the time (Greg) dispelled that notion, but not unkindly. Anyhow, I was looking at the moon tonight and thought it looked cool through the clouds. I took this picture with the flash on, so the shutter speed was fast. I tried taking several other shots with very slow shutter speeds, but the clouds blurred and the moon was overexposed. I used a tripod, but unfortunately when I snap the shot I cause a slight jitter. You can see there is a double-image effect going on here, which is the result of my movement after clicking the button.

It has been snowing here all day, so I’m in a wintry mood. I’ve taken a few pictures over the past couple weeks with my new camera. I particularly like this picture of Willow in the mirror with a snowy tree visible in the window.

A couple weeks ago at Frick Park, one of the trails iced over completely. Walking on it was pretty hazardous and I was slipping a lot, but there were joggers running by who didn’t seem to have a problem. Maybe I have bad snow shoes. Daedal didn’t seem to have a problem with it, either.

Willow loved the ice road more than Daedalus. You can probably see that she is a filthy mess in this picture. There was an area where the ground wasn’t frozen and it was insanely muddy. If she likes anything better than a hole in ice where she can lie in the water, it’s a hole in ice where she can lie in mud.

And here is Willow at Schenley Park last Wednesday. She looks kinda wolf-like to me. Like she is about to chase down a ball and hamstring it.

Become my friend on Netflix.  I think it helps that you are actually already on Netflix.  :P

In previous posts on cognate identification, I discussed the difference between strict and loose cognates. Loose cognates are words in two languages that have the same or similar written forms. I also described how approaches to cognate identification tend to differ based on whether the data being used is plain text or phonetic transcriptions. The type of data informs the methods. With plain text data, it is difficult to extract phonological information about the language so approaches in the past have largely been about string matching. I will discuss some of the approaches that have been taken below the jump.  In my next posting, when I get around to it, I will begin looking at some of the phonetic methods that have been applied to the task.

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I’m not at all a sports fan, but even I can appreciate this humor. Sorry if you’ve already seen it (I actually saw it last week and was just reminded of it). My favorite line: “It’s ok, he can afford one, don’t worry.”

There is nothing unusual about verbing nouns in English.  Despite the fact that your English teacher may have told you not to do this, it is common practice, especially on the intarwebs.  Verbing brand names to mean the primary action performed by the chief product of that brand is less common, but we all know about “googling.”  Just sitting here, trying to drink my morning coffee, I couldn’t come up with another example.

But what got me thinking about this is another example used in today’s User Friendly.  One character says,

“You’re gonna ebay it to goths, aren’t you.” [emphasis mine]

I had never heard the brand name ebay used in verb form, meaning to sell something on ebay (the primary function of their chief product).   It is not uncommon, though.  Searching the Google for +”to ebay it”, I found that at least 10% of the top few pages of results were just this construction (versus “to ebay.  It …”).  I estimate from that there are about 19,000 uses of ebay as a verb in this context, and no doubt many others in variations (e.g. “I ebayed my watch”).

Another example that just occurred to me, but which is pretty artificial, is to twitter, meaning to post something on Twitter.  I say this is artificial because Twitter openly encourages and suggests this terminology.  It was not an emergent construct, but an imposed one.  It has been adopted by the overwhelming majority of users, though.  [follow me on twitter]

So here is my question:  does this only work for Internet companies?  I’m probably forgetting some obvious brick-and-mortar company for which we have verbed their brand, so please tell me if I have.  Or is it that Internet companies are especially conducive to this construction because so many Internet companies start off with only one service and become known by that service.  Google is search, ebay is selling crap through auctions, twitter is … twittering.   If this only works for Internet companies, why did we start doing it in the first place?

And I just came up with a brick-and-mortar example:  hoover.  You can hoover down a plate of food, meaning to suck something up like a champ.  But my classification still holds, that is the primary function of their chief product (or at least the main product that people know them by).  Marketing people have already taken this to heart, I’m sure.  You need an easy name that sounds like English.  Just like with scientific terminology, no one wants to Dinklefwat their dishes.

A short while ago, I wrote about the movie The Island starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. The studio was sued by the makers of Parts: the Clonus Horror for copyright infringement. A judge agreed that the case could proceed to court, at which point it was settled for a rumored 7-figure amount. Netflix, in a moment of recommender system success, presented me with none other than this movie! Fortunately for me, it was the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version. As usual, it was hilarious and far more enjoyable than if I had watched this atrocious bomb of a movie with no commentary.

Spoilers about Parts: the Clonus Horror and The Island are to follow.

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Fred Thompson has dropped out of the race for president. I liked him on Law and Order, not so much as a presidential candidate. Now he can go back to doing something he’s relatively good at. I’d feel more secure if Ghouliani dropped out (kudos for the name). His continued presence gives me shivers. He’s probably waiting for McCain to screw up and drive the electorate into his arms.

PhD Comics does it again. Seriously, that is so spookily accurate, I need to get a credit check to see if someone has stolen my identity. Minus the sports/celebrity gossip. Substitute tech/gadget/astronomy news for sports statistics/celebrity gossip and you have me pretty much to a T.

I just got back from watching Cloverfield. There are very few movies so interesting to me that I will actually go by myself to see them. I had tried to get a friend to come along, but he complained of “homework” and other such nonsense, and Donna can’t handle anything with monsters in it. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the movie was absolutely freaking awesome. It was definitely a brilliant new take on the classic monster movie.

Since this is my blog, let me just rant quickly: people who bring six-year-olds to movies like this are bad parents. You’re just not a good parent if you do this. You are bad. And stupid. You may think your kid can handle it, but you are wrong. And stupid. Ok, back to the movie.

Spoilers follow. I am putting a preview here to take up space on the page to prevent you from accidentally reading further if you don’t want to see the spoilers.

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There is a fine line between conspiracy theory and reasonable deduction. Most would agree it is insane to believe that a group of elite men have existed since before the founding of the United States with the purpose of ruling the world from secret. Most would agree that it is insane to believe that 9/11 was staged by people in the US government. But there are all these little coincidences out there that hint at something deeper going on. When we place them all side by side it seems almost reasonable to believe in the conspiracy theory, but the problem is that we have access to a limited set of the data. If we sampled from the distribution of coincidences again, we might come to a completely different conclusion. This is part of the difference between believing in a conspiracy theory and coming to a reasonable conclusion from the facts.

So consider these “coincidences” [source]:

• The owner of MSNBC and NBC is General Electric, who also owns Raytheon
• Raytheon is a defense contractor
• General Electric has a vested stake in Yucca Mountain
• GE and its affiliates have contributed to the main democratic contenders (Clinton, Obama, Edwards)
• GE and its affiliate employees have individually contributed nearly $70,000 to those candidates
• NBC has consistently excluded Kucinich from presidential debates
• Kucinich opposes the War in Iraq and opening Yucca Mountain

In the latest presidential debate, NBC stated its criteria for selecting candidates was being ranked in the top four. Since Bill Richardson exited the race, much to my pleasure, Kucinich was now in the top four. NBC extended him an invitation only to rescind it two days later. Kucinich sued on violation of contract and won. NBC appealed and Kucinich lost. NBC claimed their first amendment rights were infringed by being forced to include Kucinich. Corporations have first amendment rights?

So is it right to conclude from these series of “coincidences” that NBC and its corporate masters have conspired to affect the election by removing from consideration candidates who would not be financially beneficial to them? Or is it a reasonable deduction to conclude from the facts that GE has a vested interest in making sure candidates who will support their goals are given media attention, which translates directly into votes? If you will not agree with that, then surely you must agree that by excluding Kucinich, they materially affect the distribution of votes in the election.

FSMNLP 2008 (Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing) has issued their first Call for Papers (CFP). The deadline is May 11, 2008 and the conference will take place on September 11-12, 2008. Not the best time to be travelling perhaps, but this year it will be in Ispra, Lago Maggiore, Italy! That’s in the far north of Italy, right next to the Swiss border. From the pictures I’m finding on Google, it’s a gorgeous resort area.

The sorts of things they are interested in include:

• NLP applications and linguistic aspects of finite state methods
• Finite state models of language
• Practices for building lexical transducers for the world’s languages
• Specification and implementation of sets, relations, and multiplicities in NLP using finite state devices
• Machine learning of finite state models of natural language
• Finite state manipulation software

The special theme this year will be on high performance finite state systems in large scale NLP applications.

I am going to try really hard to get something together for it this year. I had a project last year that was potentially worth submitting, but I wasn’t able to get it done in time. Unfortunately, it has languished since then as other, more pressing matters have superceded it. Going to Northern Italy ought to be motivation enough, though, don’t you think?

The entire CFP is below the jump and is also available on their website:

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The article I mentioned the other day concerning a computer program that confirms dogs communicate has drawn attention from Language Log [first here, more here]. The first was more of a rant from Geoff Pullum that left me feeling like he’s just not much of a dog person (or at the very least, has a healthy skepticism of animal communication claims).  Actually I think he is more angry with the way the media covers this sort of research, but I should stop now before putting too many uninformed words in his mouth.  Mark Liberman goes much more in depth and actually picks apart the paper by Molnar, Kaplan, Roy, Pachet, Pongracz, Doka and Miklosi (the Hungarian scientists mentioned in my previous post).

For anyone interested in machine learning and/or animal communication, I think the Liberman post is worth reading. A few highlights are as follows:

• no tests were done to see if the computer was significantly more accurate than humans
• computer accuracy overall was 43% while human accuracy was 40%
• the article is less about communication than it is about the physiological state used to produce the barks: that is, if a dog is emotionally stimulated, body in a lunging position, his bark will naturally differ from a resting dog

The first two points are important in that the pop science articles reporting the study misrepresented the impact of the research — not very surprising. The third point is more interesting to me, though I have never done anything with animal communication aside from learn about it briefly in a introductory linguistics class.  I had heard about gorillas who could communicate with sign language, and assumed the results were provocative but not controversial. It was fascinating to learn that whether gorillas are doing anything more than memorizing a set of signs that lead to rewards is still debated.

I saw a video via StumbleUpon the other day where a chimp and a human are shown a screen with numbers that are flashed quickly then converted to blank squares. The task is to touch the squares in descending order. The chimps can do it amazingly fast and humans screw it up big time. I attribute this to the idea that animals are “present” or “in the moment,” while humans tend to have a lot going on in their heads that distracts them from the real world. The chimp reacts to the present world, and the humans get bungled up by trying to sort the spatial configuration of the screen as they see it.  They are slowed down by converting the scene into a mental representation, rather than just seeing what is in front of them.  But I’m just theorizing…  I hope someone with more experience with cognitive science can enlighten this off-the-cuff opinion.

Returning to Mark Liberman’s comments about the physiological condition of the dog, I have to partially disagree.  First of all, I definitely agree that the dog’s physical position allows the proper bark to be made.  For Daedalus to produce his beagle howl, his body must be rigid and his head extended upwards.  I have tried to move his body to prevent this bark (because it’s loud as hell on a quiet street at 12am) and have managed to distort it.  However, it is still clearly recognizable as this particular type of bark.  I don’t really see, though, why the territorial instinct of warning other animals away from his territory (wolf heritage) would demand the body rigid, head-back position.  I think the bark demands that position in order to be made, much as our mouth must be in different configurations to make different sounds (ignoring trained exceptions like ventriloquism).  That’s not to say the “fight” body position and the “fight” bark are not interrelated.  After all, a human must be holding a sword and facing massive opposition to yell:

This is SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Just came across this very amusing video via the Bad Astronomer.  The Large Hadron Collider is one of those things that could produce some amazing science, but has also caused a number of scientists to express worries that it might destroy the planet.  Cool, huh?  Most scientists consider that to be doomsaying, and that the LHC will be benign while yielding amazing results.  The video ignores any mention of dangers at the LHC (it is, after all, a propaganda piece), but I found it very fun to listen to it for what is not said.

Do I actually think the LHC poses a threat to human life?  I have no idea, since I’m not a particle physicist, but my suspicion is that we’ll still be here after it fires up.  Imagining the end of the world is one of my favorite mental hobbies, though, so one can always hope.

Being in close proximity to two dogs for many hours per day over the past two years, I have come to recognize different barks that my dogs make as meaning different things.

Willow, my Australian Shepherd, has a bark that is very strained, urgent, fast, and loud that she uses to say she is in kill mode.  She uses this bark on things like cats and people or dogs that come onto our property at night.  She has another bark that says, “Pick up the damn ball I just dropped at your feet and play!”  This particular bark makes me want to smack her, but of course, I don’t.  Its insolence is simultaneously annoying and endearing.

My beagle Daedalus has a wider array of barks.  The best is the beagle howl.  This isn’t like a howling wolf, but more of a trumpeting ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  It is crazy loud and at first it was annoying, but now it just cracks me up.  He has a much more annoying bark he uses to say “Willow has a treat and I want it!”  This bark is loud, quick, and incessant.  He also uses this bark to alert us to the presence of animals.  When we visited my mother over Christmas, he would bark at her ferrets this way.  He wouldn’t attack them outright, since that isn’t really his nature, but he would get very close and bark and bark and bark and bark.  This is beagle breeding kicking in, since they are bred to track game and alert the hunters to its location.

So a new study reveals what most dog owners probably already took for granted.  There really is a dog language that other dogs understand and use to communicate with each other.  Using a neural network, Hungarian researchers were able to detect key features in barks that indicated the situation that caused them.  Accuracy of the software was different based on the situation.  But that the system was able to abstract similarities between the barks was pretty good evidence that there are common barking patterns for different activities.  My hope is that this research will encourage further studies that may be more accurate.  Perhaps being more accurate just isn’t possible, but that would also be interesting to know.

I see a valuable commercial interest here:  create a collar attachment that monitors the dog and whenever it barks, it speaks aloud — in English — the sentiment the dog is expressing.

WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!
“Aggression… Aggression… Aggression…”

I took the dogs to a different dog park than usual today. Schenley Park is within walking distance of our apartment, and then it was relatively easy to find a stretch of grass far enough away from the road that I could feel safe letting Willow off leash to play ball. Daedalus and her both explored the woods a little bit, Daedalus still on his leash. I just can’t trust him to come when called if he gets on a scent. Their coloring was perfect for the partially snow-covered leaves.

As usual in recent years, the actual intention of the second amendment is being called into question. This is one particular debate I am not strongly emotionally attached to. I have owned a single gun (a .22) for a few years, firing it a total of two times. It was a Christmas gift from my second stepfather, but as with all of his rules, the restrictions placed on it were too draconian and therefore constricted my interest in it to nil. I enjoy firing weapons at a firing range, but I’ve only done that once. Also, I don’t hunt and find the actual act of taking a life repulsive. I say this to state the fact that I stand to lose nothing in terms of my personal life if guns were banned.

The second amendment of the Constitution of the United States:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

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I have been wanting to see The Island ever since it came out in 2005. Not because it looked like it was going to be a great movie, but because it bore a striking resemblance to a book I had listened to on tape called The Experiment. I will go into further details of their similarity below, but I want to warn the reader/viewer that I will be giving spoilers to both the book (The Experiment) and the film (The Island). If you do not wish to read the spoilers, proceed no further.

Warning: spoilers to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Donald Knuth’s 70th birthday. If you haven’t at least heard of him, then you probably are not a programmer. I’ve heard several bloggers refer to him as a modern-day Alan Turing (who is widely considered the father of computer science). Knuth is sometimes referred to as the father of algorithmic analysis, so at the very least, his contributions to the field should definitely earn him a place of high regard.

While I’ve never read any of his books, I have used one of the tools he created quite extensively in the past two years: TeX. For those who’ve never had the pleasure of using TeX and seeing documents come out beautifully and professionally formatted with relatively little effort, you’re missing out. Some might argue that you’re missing out on hours of headaches for something you could do in Microsoft Word in 1 minute. I would argue back that while getting TeX to do exactly what you want can sometimes be hard, there are things you can do in TeX very easily that you will never, ever be able to do in Word. Try producing a lower case delta with a hat in Word. Unless you are lucky enough to have a font on your computer with it (and please send me a copy of that font if you do), you will be searching a long time.

There are many Knuth tributes out there from people with far more interesting stories than me. There was an even a call to post, issued by Jeff Shallit. Here are a few:

• Recursivity - biographical notes and discussion of Knuth’s impact on his life (Jeffrey Shallit)
• Computational Complexity - some observations about his achievements, his books, and TeX
• Good Math, Bad Math - a lot about TeX if you’re interested
• Geomblog - a discussion of something from the second volume of his book The Art of Computer Programming
• Shtetl-Optimized - more in-depth observations of Knuth’s many contributions
• in theory - more biographical info and background
• 0xDE - a pretty remarkable Knuth tribute with some very interesting CS stuff, complete with exercises!

Taking me completely by surprise, “Running the World” by Jarvis Cocker is one of the coolest songs I’ve heard in a very long time.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out exactly what he’s saying (it’s NSFW).  The lyrics are just plain awesome.  This kind of song grabs a hold of the part of me that appreciates the beauty of sadness.  I’m not sure which I appreciate more:  the beauty of sadness or the beauty of majesty.  The beauty I appreciate most of all is self-sacrifice.  I can’t see it without struggling really hard to not cry.  Another song that uses the beauty of sadness is “Mad World” (the remake by Gary Jules from Donnie Darko).

I happened upon the song because I was searching for a clip of a scene near the end of Children of Men.  So as not to spoil anything for the random reader who hasn’t seen the movie, it’s a moment of peace in the chaos, the characters are filled with a profound awe, and it is broken by intense violence (it also appears briefly in the clip below).  This video appears to be promotional material used to influence the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) people to nominate it for Best Picture.  It didn’t win anything, since the Academy is full of crap.

Enjoy.  Oh and the video contains spoilers (and is NSFW).

I wonder if a campaign like this, executed a few years ago, would have helped endear him more to the public?  He actually comes across as somewhat human.

This T-shirt just cracked me up:

Of course, it actually could have been this way. I think the US even had a defacto assumption that the moon was ours. This is very much not the case. With the recent Japanese and Chinese probes to the moon, the upcoming German probe, and rumors of more probes and missions to the moon, there are many claimants. There was a Moon Treaty that was supposed to hand control of all heavenly bodies over to the international community (that is, the UN). However, this useless piece of paper was only ratified by the likes of Mexico, France, India, Chile, Australia, and the Phillipines (and several other small countries), none of which have a manned space program.

The moon is potentially a gold mine (or rather, a helium-3 mine). What it is not, is a waste of time. If we ever do manned exploration of other worlds, a lunar base would be a great base of operations. For one, it’s good practice. For another, the lower lunar gravity could allow people to reside there longer with slightly reduced health effects while still providing an easy base to launch from. Of course, the moon has its dangers. NASA is planning a new lunar base on the lunar pole, where danger from solar radiation is diminished while still allowing for energy gathering from solar arrays.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out on the moon. Will there be borders and bases manned by robots and people from many different countries? Or will we see international cooperation as we have seen with the space station? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.

While at my mom’s house in Greenville, South Carolina, I played a little frisbee with Willow (my australian shepherd) in the back yard.  I took some video where I was throwing the frisbee, then switched over to my mom throwing it.  However, insanely, when my mom started throwing I put the cap on and failed to notice for like 10 minutes!!  Thereby losing all the good footage and left with only my crappy warmup footage.  I was so pissed at myself.  Bad noob cameraman!

The soundtrack is Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 by Edvard Grieg and is in the public domain.

Some random trivia here. In the Masterpiece Theatre version of Jane Eyre, St. John hands Jane a couple books and tells her to begin learning a new language. This was his typically controlling way of telling her she was going to become a missionary with him as well as his wife. Curious about which language she was to be learning, I paused the DVD and found the title was A Dictionary of English to Shosa. Shosa is spelt Xhosa in modern times, and is one of the official languages of South Africa (and spoken by 7.9 million people). In the movie, it is indeed “the Cape” that they would be travelling to and I think South Africa is mentioned elsewhere. I was unable to find any mention of this book on Google.

If anyone knows of any good resources for searching for books from the 19th Century, I’d love for you to leave me a comment with your suggestions. Even more so if you actually find the book.

User Friendly, another beloved comic strip I subscribe to, poses the interesting question (generalized):  what if someone else discovered X?  Ernst Mach deduced and experimentally verified the idea that an object moving faster than the speed of sound would produce a shockwave in the shape of a cone with the object at the apex.  The famous Mach number (used for jets travelling faster than the speed of sound) is named after him.  User Friendly brings up the point that if someone with a far more complicated name had discovered this phenomenon, perhaps we’d have a much harder word to remember.   But I wonder, if the name was more complicated, wouldn’t we have just come up with something else?  I suspect there would have been an acronym invented for it.

Ernst Mach also was a heavyweight in the philosophy of science.  He recognized early on that scientific laws and theories are approximations of the real world for the purpose of making phenomena comprehensible to the human mind.  Mathematics is a human construct (and wouldn’t it be interesting if it weren’t?) and so when you build physical laws like Newton’s F = ma, you are superimposing the activity of the real world onto this construct.  Mach saw that the complexity of the world, reduced as it was by science, was an artificial process useful to the human mind.  Science then is not so much explaining the world as it actually is, but explaining the world to ourselves in a way we can understand and make use of.  This philosophy seems to still influence science, but has been superceded.  I’m not very well versed in the philosophy of science, though, and I’m regurgitating this from Wikipedia anyway, so I’ll leave it at that.  I just thought it was interesting.

The Roman occupation of Judea (Israel) during the first century AD was disrupted in 70 AD when the Jewish people revolted. Rome, being a kick-ass military power, put down this rebellion. However, they couldn’t let the Jews get away with this attempt at self-rule, which might encourage other provinces to do the same. The new, crushing occupation and settlement of Judea led to the beginning of another diaspora of the Jewish people (the Jews had been scattered before, read your Old Testament).

I’ve talked about my idea of the new information diaspora a couple times before. We fill up all these different social networking sites and online services with personal information about our hobbies, preferences, friends, etc. This information is separated by incompatibility between platforms. OpenSocial is a move towards removing these boundaries, but so far it hasn’t caught fire.

In Facebook’s terms of service, you are not allowed to scrape Facebook for content. They don’t want you to gather information about your social graph, since that would potentially undermine their service. Ergo, you can import information into Facebook, but can’t export it out. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (though whether it was really his idea or software is disputed), seems to be shaping up to be quite a tyrant in this realm. It’s almost daily that some news about his bungling comes over the blagoblag.

The latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that attempts to solve a small part of the information diaspora problem by consolidating your friends’ activities on different sites. Facebook, however, put down this rebellion by disabling Scoble’s account. Robert’s crime? Trying to get the names, email addresses, and birthdays of the 1800 friends he has on both Facebook and Plaxo.

The Empire never ended.

Perhaps it’s a little late to do a recap of my blogging from last year, but I was just thinking about which posts I made that were the most popular and which flopped. It was very interesting to me that the most popular ones tended to be those I invested myself in the least. The ones where I felt like the writing and/or content was the best saw relatively few hits. There are exceptions, of course. My favorite post almost made the top 5 most popular list and the 4th most popular would be in my top 10 or 15 favorite. So here are the top 5 most popular posts and my top 5 favorite posts from 2007, my first year in the blagoblag.

Top 5 Most Popular

1. You have no soul — 9 Nov 2007 — 29,326 hits
2. Ambigrams — 16 Oct 2007 — 353 hits
3. Hanukkah Dog — 24 Nov 2007 — 245 hits
4. Old English Translator — 8 Nov 2007 — 193 hits
5. Salad Fingers 8 — 30 Sep 2007 — 176 hits

Top 5 Favorite

1. Netflix Prize: Good science or not? — 14 Dec 2007 — 161 hits
2. Mrs. McGrath — 6 October 2007 — 26 hits
3. The Noob’s Guide to Parsing — 25 Oct 2007 — 27 hits
4. The case for nuking Greenland — 6 Dec 2007 — 79 hits
5. Inbred Mice and Appalachia — 14 Aug 2007 — 20 hits

Good ole Rudy Giuliani is up to no good. His recent television spot is nothing short of evil. I’m sorry, but when you blatantly use FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) for political gain, you might as well announce your intention to become a tyrant. He’s apparently using the political playbook of Goebbels. By simultaneously portraying muslims as vicious animals and Iran as a warmongering nation led by a madman, this ad is a masterpiece clumsy bit of propaganda. I hate to think that people are stupid enough to believe him.

Scientists have used a nasal spray containing the brain hormone orexin A to wake up sleepy monkeys. Three groups of monkeys were given a cognitive test: alert monkeys, sleep-deprived monkeys given orexin A, and sleep deprived monkeys given a saline solution placebo. The sleep-deprived monkeys given orexin A performed as well as the alert monkeys, while the placebo monkeys (control group) performed poorly. They were deprived of sleep for about 36 hours. Also, the monkeys given orexin A had PET scans that looked like the brains of alert monkeys. Orexin A is non-addictive so doesn’t run into some of the problems with other stimulants.

I have mixed feelings about this. If it works in humans with no side effects (a pretty huge if), will the world of sleep be at an end? Will we start working 80-hour work weeks? Productivity certainly will increase, but so will consumption. If we need energy for another 8 hours of activity, we’ll probably have to add another meal. Food production would have to increase proportionally, which will be felt all the way down the chain. Oil consumption will increase, carbon emissions will increase from people driving at all hours, power usage will increase from additional lights/televisions/etc. On the other hand, I have often felt that sleep is a waste of time and have resented the fact that my brain’s performance degrades on lack of sleep. I am not someone who naps peacefully, but begrudgingly and rarely.

That said, I seriously doubt this will work in humans and if it does, there will probably be dangerous side effects.

Daedalus (my lemon beagle) does this thing where he will extend his neck and begin doing some sort of weird coughing, where it sounds like he is either choking or trying to hack up mucus. Usually the episode ends with him opening his mouth wide while not breathing and then producing a loud hack or snort. We have taken him to the vet for this and the vet said he looked healthy but put Daedal on a round of antibiotics since he thought maybe it was kennel cough. Unfortunately, it appears our vet doesn’t know much about hunting dogs.

While at the dog park yesterday, Donna and I ran across a guy with two beagles. One of them began doing the exact same thing Daedalus does, which used to cause us much alarm. He said it was normal for beagles and that his vet called it reverse coughing. I researched it online for a bit and found that it’s actually called reverse sneezing and that many dogs experience it. The cause of the condition is unknown, but various theories state it is the result of an allergy to some scent picked up in puppyhood, an attempt to remove mucus, or some other nasal/pharyngeal problem. It is also called inspiratory paroxysmal respiration.

I think I fall on the side of the mucus cause. Daedalus does seem to hack up something which he then swallows (sorry if this grosses you out). This isn’t any different than humans who as children are usually taught to spit that out when they are sick. Also, we began giving Daedalus Benadryl after the visit to the vet in case it was an allergy thing. He reverse sneezes very irregularly, so it was hard to tell if it was working. Then, while on Benadryl, he did it twice in a 24-hour stretch. At that point, I pretty much gave up on it being an allergy-related thing, though he does seem to have some allergies (eye-discharge is reduced on Benadryl). I’m not ready to make a decision either way, though, since there are many free variables. The extra mucus could be produced by allergies anyway, it would seem.

In any case, the good news is that if your dog does this, it is perfectly normal — especially for beagles and other hunting dogs, but it’s not limited to hunting dogs or any particular breed. Small dogs seem to do it more often, but not by much. Even better news is that there does not appear to be any lasting harm to the dog — the dog is normal before and after the episode. Just some bizarre dog thing.