The emperor's last clothes?It is clearly a popular text but yes, indeed, it is way more technical than some books that are considered by their authors to be more-than-popular. ;-)
Funny stuff from McSweeney's:
General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.
Can we come up with a similar list for the brain sciences? I think you could replace quantum mechanics with brain imaging and perhaps substitute electrophysiology for general relativity.
Via kottke
We can't joke around too much about this Hurricane Dolly, I'm afraid. The weather is not terrible here in Corpus, but conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Brownsville. We now have reports of tornado warnings in nearby counties, and confirmed power outages for more than 9000 people.
News reports are forecasting an incredible amount of rain (up to 15 inches). If i remember right, that would be the equivalent of a 5 foot snowstorm in the Northeast.
From the Associated Press:
Dolly, upgraded from a tropical storm Tuesday, had sustained winds of 95 mph, just short of becoming a Category 2 storm. At 9 a.m. EDT Wednesday, the storm's center was about 40 miles east of Brownsville, moving northwest at about 8 mph.Read the comments on this post...A hurricane warning was in effect for the coast of Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and in Mexico from Rio San Fernando northward.
Utility company AEP Texas reported power outages to more than 9,200 customers in Cameron County.
Physicists love spontaneous symmetry breaking. It’s a great way to reconcile the messiness of reality with our belief in simple and beautiful underlying mechanisms. We posit that the true fundamental dynamics of the world has some symmetry — X can be exchanged with Y, and all relevant processes are unchanged — but the actual state of the world does not respect that symmetry, which leaves it hidden (or “nonlinearly realized,” if you want to sound all sciencey). Deep down, a (left-handed) electron is completely interchangeable with an electron neutrino; but in the world as we find it, this symmetry is broken, and we end up with an electron that is charged and massive, a neutrino that is neutral and nearly massless. The Higgs boson that the Large Hadron Collider is looking for would be the telltale sign of the mechanism behind this symmetry breaking.
For reasons which escape me, this concept has not been borrowed (as far as I can tell) by social scientists and pundits more generally.* Which is too bad, as it explains a great deal. For example, appealing to the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking would have been really helpful to Whoopi Goldberg on The View recently, as she patiently tried to explain to a distraught Elisabeth Hasselbeck why it’s just not the same when black people use the word “nigger” as when white people do. (From Sociological Images, via The Edge of the American West.)
Which is not to say that it’s always okay, or that there is no thoughtful critique of the re-appropriation of derogatory language by targeted groups, etc. Just that “If it’s wrong when white people say it, it should be wrong when black people say it too! It’s just not fair!” is far too simple-minded to carry any water.
Let’s imagine that, in our view of a happy future utopia, all races find themselves in situations of perfect equality of opportunity and dignity. Everyone enters society with equal status, and people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (The “symmetric vacuum.”) In such a world, arguments like “If you can do it, why shouldn’t I be able to?” would carry some weight. But even if we want that to be the world — even if we believe that the grand unified theory of social ethics involves a symmetry of rights and obligations under the interchange of various racial categories — it’s not the world in which we live. In the real world, different races don’t go through life with the same masses and charges (if you will). There really is such a thing as discrimination, legacies of poverty and exclusion, and so on. We can argue about the best way to deal with those features of reality, but pretending that they don’t exist isn’t a very useful strategy.
As Whoopi explains, many blacks have chosen to re-appropriate the n-word as part of a conscious strategy of fighting back against a power dynamic that uses language to keep them at the bottom. Again, one can argue about the effectiveness of that strategy, and the circumstances under which it is appropriate, and whether Jesse Jackson should really have used that term in referring to Barack Obama. But it doesn’t follow that “if it’s fair for you, it should be fair for me.” Here is a guy who sadly doesn’t get it; a white high-school teacher who is genuinely puzzled about why he got in trouble for calling one of his black students “nigga.”
I was contemplating writing this post for a long time, with the relevant symmetry being men/women and the social milieu being the scientific community. Too many physicists reason along the following lines: “Men and women should be treated equally. Therefore, any time we privilege one over the other, as in making a special effort to encourage women in science, we are making a mistake.” That would be a reasonable argument, if the symmetry weren’t dramatically broken by the state in which we find ourselves. Which happily is not a stable vacuum! (Note that the underlying assumption is not that different genders or races are necessarily equivalent when it comes to innate abilities; that is largely beside the point, and obsession about those questions gets to be a little creepy. But they should certainly have equal opportunities — and right now, they don’t.) Treating one group differently than the other isn’t what we ultimately want to be doing — it’s not part of the happy utopia — but it might be the best response to the current state of unequal treatment overall.
But Whoopi’s little teaching moment was too good to pass up. If the discussion of race and gender in the rest of the MSM rose to that level of sophistication, we’d all be better off.
———-
*I’ve been searching for an excuse to mention Kieran Healy’s Standard Model of Sociophysics. I’m not sure if this is it, but I’ll take it.

Gina Trapani, having found herself marinated in studies about productivity and the internet, muses (in Lifehacker) on what it all means:
Every time a new research study around personal productivity and office culture appears, we dutifully post the “proof” that information overload, email distractions, and multitasking are keeping you from getting work done—but are they? Sure, many of these findings seem very feasible, but it’s hard not to think they’re published only as a crutch for a larger commercial or media message—either “the internet is destroying your life!” or “you need to buy this product.” …
Even though we’re very much a cog in this giant machine, I have my doubts.
The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the “information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand. I get more done via email and surfing the web than my parents ever did using phones and libraries, even when I’m having a bad day and switch to my email application the moment I see a new message notification.
There's a classic paper on the Quantum Zeno Effect that I discuss in Chapter 5 of the book. The paper does two tests of the effect, and presents the results in two bar graphs. They also provide the data in tabular form.
My question is this:
If I copy the data from the table, and make my own version of the graph, am I obliged to contact them and ask permission to duplicate their results in my book?
If I were copying their graphs directly, I would definitely contact them and ask permission, but I'm not as certain about using their data to make my own version of their graphs.
Complicating matters, when I asked Kate about this, she replied "Why would you need to ask permission to reproduce figures? Isn't that fair use?" I have no idea why it is, I just know that it's What Is Done in these cases (having been contacted a few times for permission to reproduce stuff from papers I wrote).
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Followup to: Should We Ban Physics?
It may come as a surprise to some readers of this blog, that I do not always advocate using probabilities.
Or rather, I don't always advocate that human beings, trying to solve their problems, should try to make up probabilities, and then apply the laws of probability theory or decision theory to whatever they just made up, and then use the result as their final belief or decision.
The laws of probability are laws, not suggestions, but often the true Law is too difficult for us humans to compute. If P != NP and the universe has no source of exponential computing power, then there are evidential updates too difficult for even a superintelligence to compute - even though the probabilities would be quite well-defined, if we could afford to calculate them.
So sometimes you don't apply probability theory. Especially if you're human, and your brain has evolved with all sorts of useful algorithms for uncertain reasoning, that don't involve verbal probability assignments.
Not sure where a flying ball will land? I don't advise trying to formulate a probability distribution over its landing spots, performing deliberate Bayesian updates on your glances at the ball, and calculating the expected utility of all possible strings of motor instructions to your muscles.
Trying to catch a flying ball, you're probably better off with your brain's built-in mechanisms, then using deliberative verbal reasoning to invent or manipulate probabilities.
But this doesn't mean you're going beyond probability theory or above probability theory.
The Dutch Book arguments still apply. If I offer you a choice of gambles ($10,000 if the ball lands in this square, versus $10,000 if I roll a die and it comes up 6), and you answer in a way that does not allow consistent probabilities to be assigned, then you will accept combinations of gambles that are certain losses, or reject gambles that are certain gains...
Which still doesn't mean that you should try to use deliberative verbal reasoning. I would expect that for professional baseball players, at least, it's more important to catch the ball than to assign consistent probabilities. Indeed, if you tried to make up probabilities, the verbal probabilities might not even be very good ones, compared to some gut-level feeling - some wordless representation of uncertainty in the back of your mind.
There is nothing privileged about uncertainty that is expressed in words, unless the verbal parts of your brain do, in fact, happen to work better on the problem.
And while accurate maps of the same territory will necessarily be consistent among themselves, not all consistent maps are accurate. It is more important to be accurate than to be consistent, and more important to catch the ball than to be consistent.
In fact, I generally advise against making up probabilities, unless it seems like you have some decent basis for them. This only fools you into believing that you are more Bayesian than you actually are.
To be specific, I would advise, in most cases, against using non-numerical procedures to create what appear to be numerical probabilities. Numbers should come from numbers.
Now there are benefits from trying to translate your gut feelings of uncertainty into verbal probabilities. It may help you spot problems like the conjunction fallacy. It may help you spot internal inconsistencies - though it may not show you any way to remedy them.
But you shouldn't go around thinking that, if you translate your gut feeling into "one in a thousand", then, on occasions when you emit these verbal words, the corresponding event will happen around one in a thousand times. Your brain is not so well-calibrated. If instead you do something nonverbal with your gut feeling of uncertainty, you may be better off, because at least you'll be using the gut feeling the way it was meant to be used.
This specific topic came up recently in the context of the Large Hadron Collider, and an argument given at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference:
That we couldn't be sure that there was no error in the papers which showed from multiple angles that the LHC couldn't possibly destroy the world. And moreover, the theory used in the papers might be wrong. And in either case, there was still a chance the LHC could destroy the world. And therefore, it ought not to be turned on.
Now if the argument had been given in just this way, I would not have objected to its epistemology.
But the speaker actually purported to assign a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that the theory, model, or calculations in the LHC paper were wrong; and a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that, if the theory or model or calculations were wrong, the LHC would destroy the world.
After all, it's surely not so improbable that future generations will reject the theory used in the LHC paper, or reject the model, or maybe just find an error. And if the LHC paper is wrong, then who knows what might happen as a result?
So that is an argument - but to assign numbers to it?
I object to the air of authority given these numbers pulled out of thin air. I generally feel that if you can't use probabilistic tools to shape your feelings of uncertainty, you ought not to dignify them by calling them probabilities.
The alternative I would propose, in this particular case, is to debate the general rule of banning physics experiments because you cannot be absolutely certain of the arguments that say they are safe.
I hold that if you phrase it this way, then your mind, by considering frequencies of events, is likely to bring in more consequences of the decision, and remember more relevant historical cases.
If you debate just the one case of the LHC, and assign specific probabilities, it (1) gives very shaky reasoning an undue air of authority, (2) obscures the general consequences of applying similar rules, and even (3) creates the illusion that we might come to a different decision if someone else published a new physics paper that decreased the probabilities.
The authors at the Global Catastrophic Risk conference seemed to be suggesting that we could just do a bit more analysis of the LHC and then switch it on. This struck me as the most disingenuous part of the argument. Once you admit the argument "Maybe the analysis could be wrong, and who knows what happens then," there is no possible physics paper that can ever get rid of it.
No matter what other physics papers had been published previously, the authors would have used the same argument and made up the same numerical probabilities at the Global Catastrophic Risk conference. I cannot be sure of this statement, of course, but it has a probability of 75%.
In general a rationalist tries to make their minds function at the best achievable power output; sometimes this involves talking about verbal probabilities, and sometimes it does not, but always the laws of probability theory govern.
If all you have is a gut feeling of uncertainty, then you should probably stick with those algorithms that make use of gut feelings of uncertainty, because your built-in algorithms may do better than your clumsy attempts to put things into words.
Now it may be that by reasoning thusly, I may find myself inconsistent. For example, I would be substantially more alarmed about a lottery device with a well-defined chance of 1 in 1,000,000 of destroying the world, than I am about the Large Hadron Collider switched on. If I could prevent only one of these events, I would prevent the lottery.
On the other hand, if you asked me whether I could make one million statements of authority equal to "The Large Hadron Collider will not destroy the world", and be wrong, on average, around once, then I would have to say no.
What should I do about this inconsistency? I'm not sure, but I'm certainly not going to wave a magic wand to make it go away. That's like finding an inconsistency in a pair of maps you own, and quickly scribbling some alterations to make sure they're consistent.
I would also, by the way, be substantially more worried about a lottery device with a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of destroying the world, than a device which destroyed the world if the Judeo-Christian God existed. But I would not suppose that I could make one billion statements, one after the other, fully independent and equally fraught as "There is no God", and be wrong on average around once.
I can't say I'm happy with this state of epistemic affairs, but I'm not going to modify it until I can see myself moving in the direction of greater accuracy and real-world effectiveness, not just moving in the direction of greater self-consistency. The goal is to win, after all. If I make up a probability that is not shaped by probabilistic tools, if I make up a number that is not created by numerical methods, then maybe I am just defeating my built-in algorithms that would do better by reasoning in their native modes of uncertainty.
Of course this is not a license to ignore probabilities that are well-founded. Any numerical founding at all is likely to be better than a vague feeling of uncertainty; humans are terrible statisticians. But pulling a number entirely out of your butt, that is, using a non-numerical procedure to produce a number, is nearly no foundation at all; and in that case you probably are better off sticking with the vague feelings of uncertainty.
Which is why my Overcoming Bias posts generally use words like "maybe" and "probably" and "surely" instead of assigning made-up numerical probabilities like "40%" and "70%" and "95%". Think of how silly that would look. I think it actually would be silly; I think I would do worse thereby.
I am not the kind of straw Bayesian who says that you should make up probabilities to avoid being subject to Dutch Books. I am the sort of Bayesian who says that in practice, humans end up subject to Dutch Books because they aren't powerful enough to avoid them; and moreover it's more important to catch the ball than to avoid Dutch Books. The math is like underlying physics, inescapably governing, but too expensive to calculate. Nor is there any point in a ritual of cognition which mimics the surface forms of the math, but fails to produce systematically better decision-making. That would be a lost purpose; this is not the true art of living under the law.
Bad news often has self-fulfilling prophesy effects. Tell a student his work is bad and he might give up. Telling friends someone is unpopular makes her even less popular. Tell a sport team they will lose and they might not try as hard. Tell customers a product is bad and they might look at it more carefully for flaws or switch products, and with fewer customers the producer has fewer resources to improve the product. Tell people a bank is in trouble and they withdraw their deposits, stressing the bank further.
But most of us think it crazy to therefore ban bad news. Sure some might maliciously spread negative rumors to hurt a rival, but this hardly means we should forbid anyone from ever talking negatively about anything! We should instead rely on listeners treating rumors skeptically and listening less to those they find to be unreliable sources.
Alas, all this common sense goes out the window when bad news comes via financial markets. When we buy stock observers reasonably interpret that as our saying we have good news about that stock, while selling is reasonably interpreted as bad news. And so the US SEC is doing more to ban bad news:
An order from the Securities and Exchange Commission aimed at protecting some of the country's largest financial companies against a form of short selling took effect yesterday. .... In the current financial environment, short selling can be especially harmful to banks and brokerage firms because customers and investors may view sinking stock prices as a sign of trouble and react by withdrawing deposits.
The result of these sort of policies is sad and obvious: it will take longer for us to find out about bad news, and so we will interpret silence and apparent good news more skeptically. That is, we will just know less. Note also that speculative markets actually do better at punishing malicious rival rumors -- those who spread false rumors via gossip are less reliably punished than those who sell short a stock they know to be valuable.
Coming soon after speculators were blamed for rising commodity prices, I fear this is bad news for hopes for legal prediction markets anytime soon.
I am liveblogging Hurricane Dolly from Corpus Christi, Texas. It's raining here in the Coastal Bend. Not too much wind. Thanks to the storm we have a "snow day" at school. Plus, I don't have to water the lawn for a week. Things are looking up, but flooding is forecast for the region, so there could still be trouble.
My wife brought a camera to the supermarket last night to document the supermarket's reaction to the storm here in South Texas. We expected large pallets of drinking water, but there's no evidence of profiteering. Rather, it seems there was a run on sliced bread and tuna fish. Other people must have come to the same conclusion we did. Tuna fish sandwiches are good hurricane food.


So, now I'm wondering "what happens if global warming leads to more hurricanes, and therefore more tuna fish consumption". That could be troubling.
The idea worries me partly because Chris Mooney is worried. Storm pundits are under the impression that global warming stokes hurricanes. Where hurricanes make landfall, tuna disappears off the shelves. Here lies the problem, and its hypothesis.
In the cities where canned tuna is tested, mercury levels are above the recommended dose for daily consumption. Daily intake of canned tuna may result in what's been referred to as a "fish fog". Through inference I will hazard that most canned tuna is above recommended levels of mercury. Therefore, an upward trend in sea surface temperatures could elevate local mercury intake and subsequently "stupidize" our population.
Consider a positive feedback loop wherein the global warming comedy "Sizzle" comes to play in a theater in Corpus Christi and "people just don't get it" because folks have been eating too much tuna. The policy ramifications are enormous, like more seawalls in the face of rising seas. I should be worried. I know.
Read the comments on this post...A lot of reactions with nucleophiles' rates are determined by how good a leaving group you have. For leaving group reasons and others, DMAP is a great organocatalyst:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
Stephen Gisselbrecht has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:
I am happy to have found a scientific society that will cater to more than one of my interests.
Stephen S. Gisselbrecht, MA, LFHCfS
Senior Technical Research Assistant
Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Newsflash! This just in from the Weather Channel:
Dolly has strengthened to become the second hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season. It has maximum sustained winds of 75 mph; a category one hurricane.Hurricane Dolly may continue to strengthen tonight and tomorrow morning before landfall. It is expected to make landfall along the northern Mexico or southern Texas Gulf Coast by Wednesday morning or during the midday hours.
Join me for a warm cup of coffee as I evaluate local conditions, and decide whether or not its safe for my family to leave the house tomorrow morning. To go puddle jumping, ... for example.
Read the comments on this post...

Clouds can be a sailor's best friend. Given, you'd have to be an awfully lonely sailor, and probably have to scratch a half dozen unmentionables off the list before you ever got to "clouds", but, ... hey, some modern sailors keep a nice cloud book with them in the navigation room. OK? It helps to whiddle away the hours on a quiet sea spent waiting for the research submersible team to break the surface. Really. Ask anybody.
Anyways, in anticipation of the approaching Tropical Storm Dolly, I trekked down to Corpus Christi Bay around 2pm to see how the cloud cover had changed with the impending storm. When I moved here to Corpus Christi one of the things that impressed me most was the beautiful cloudy skies. That and a two bedroom home for less than 200k. I moved here from LA, where these prices are no longer possible.
The images above show a view of the Bay from a few blocks down my street, and another one downtown. White puffy cumulus clouds lie off to the east over Mustang Island in photos 1 and 2, above. The vertical development indicates warm (darn hot, actually) air rising towards cooler air, where it condenses. Cumulus clouds are associated with good weather. The clouds often associated with the bad weather are below the fold.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
BrianR at Clastic Detritus brought my attention to a new wonderful bathymetric map of the globe. Despite his questionable loyalty to volcanoes, Brian knows a good map when he sees one and I agree that this one is indeed beautiful. GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) is an initiative joining the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and International Hydrographic Organization. You can get the high res version of the above here. Read the comments on this post...
This storm, heading for the Mexico-Texas border, is now a hurricane. Our second of the 2008 season, and it's not even August yet....
Eric Berger has some interesting discussion of just how busy this year is starting out. Only three years in recorded history have been busier so early, and two of them are the busiest two years in history: 2005 and 1933.
Did I mention I was worried?
Read the comments on this post...
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
[Hat tip: Bunny]
Read the comments on this post...
Maria over at Green Gabbro feels that I have printed a false and malicious post for the purpose of defaming volcanoes. I cannot be held liable if the accusations are true. Maria thinks that printing a list of "all the good things volcanoes do" will be more than sufficient to make up for their previous indiscretions. But perhaps we need a bit of perspective on the role of volcanoes in the history of life.
According toWignall's excellent review in 2001 on why and how volcanoes are evil, 6 of the 15 major extinctions in the history of life coincide with major episodes of volcanicity. In the last 300 Ma, all extinctions coincide with large igneous deposits.
How did volcanoes do it? Wignall provides this wonderful diagram (click for larger) based on the chain of events occurring in conjunction with the Siberian Traps (a large eruption event ~250Mya).

Of course some of Maria's list is also suspect.