I've often heard Madeleine Albright brought up as an shining example of the American Dream fulfilled. The daughter of Czech immigrant parents that fled Europe to escape the Nazis, I've always counted it as a rare story that keeps the illusion of American social mobility alive. A Google search for "Madeleine Albright" "American Dream" will turn up plenty of heartwarming takes on the tale.

Crock of shit. If you read the Wikipedia article I linked above, you'll see that one of those "immigrant parents" were Josef Korbel, a Czech ambassador and presidential advisor, as well as future Professor and academic parent to Condoleezza Rice. Immigration? More like arranged political asylum. Humble beginnings my ass.

Yet this is the kind of tale that keeps working class Americans voting Republican and buying into tax cuts for the rich, because, hey, one day they might themselves be those millionaires, and if you were in that position, would you want the government taking your hard earned money?

American Dream. As usual, I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

Besides being terrible about updating this site the past few months, I've also been terrible about reading (unless you count math textbooks and wikipedia, which I do). As a result, I've got a terrible backlog of chickenscratch to take in, and near the top of that list is Stephen Wolframs cellular automata-inspired book, A New Kind of Science. I got linked to a 2003 review in Science News today from 3 quarks daily, and it got me salivating all over again. It's definately on my summer to do list, for sure.

Britannica gets its skivvies in a bunch, and Nature responds.

During the past few months, my continued admiration for Richard "master of my universe" Feynman has led me to browse many writings about the man, including a copy of The Beat of a Different Drum that I happened to stumble across, which is a very scientific treatment of his life and work. I was hiding in the tucked away library of the theoretical physics department, where they have very quiet workspace, when I felt the book staring at me from the "returned" rack. I went over and "happened" to read chapter about his life as an undergraduate. The biographies discusses Feynmans senior thesis work, and near the end of the chapter, it is made clear that a substantial part of the heavy lifting in his research was a well known way to manipulate the problem (something about Hamiltonian operators). Essentially, much of the thesis was a reinvention of the wheel. Fortunately, Feynman had come to some other exceptional conclusions that were far from unoriginal, and he was allowed to graduate.

The reason I bring this little tale up is because lately I've found that it's a very healthy exercise to reinvent a few wheels now and then. All the problems of the world that haven't been solved yet are unsolved for a reason: because they're hard. And if you don't practice by inventing a few wheels every now and then, taking on unsolved problems is a fools errand.

Yesterday I was working on a Statistics problem set, and was crossed by the peculiar fact. I was trying to type (8.2)^2, when I mistyped on my calculator, 8.0^2, which gave 64. Of course. Retyping the correct number, I got 67.24. I thought about this for a second, and wondered, hmm, I wonder I could have used my result of 64 and just add whatever accounts for the difference of 3.24...what is it? It can't be 0.2^2. Hmm. 324. That's a square, I'm sure of it. Ha! 1.8^2 = 3.24. Quaint. Why is 8.2^2 = 8.0^2 + 1.8^2? I thought and thought and thought...

Why is 41^2 = 40^2 + 9^2? What an odd triplet. Are there any other adjacent integers where the difference of their squares is the square of an integer? I started brute forcing around a bit, and realized that they were all odd integers, as well. And then....OF COURSE! How could I be so stupid? Pythagorean triplets! 3, 4, 5! Wow, they sure are beautiful. I sat and admired them for a few moments, maybe drawing a triangle of five. And then got back to work.

OK, so my discovery was 15 orders of magnitude less significant than Feynmans, but it (along with a slightly more complicated wheel I reinvented last weekend that I won't go into here, involving graph connectedness and Dijkstras algorithm) was nonetheless an instance where I felt I had discovered something, reduced a data set of events to a underlying theory describing it, and that was one of the best feelings (OK, the feeling was much stronger with the graph problem last weekend, but that's a much longer and more technical story) I've had in a long time, and it's why I bother to study what I do.

It was practice at explaining the universe with a really great reward, and the fact that it was already done was completely irrelevant. So next time you've spotted something strange, don't ask google, work it out! It might turn out to be the trivial result of a basic theorem and obvious to anyone more learned then you and I, but that's not the point. If you can't deduce that, then how are you ever going to be able to explain the universe? And hey, you don't know it's trivial until you've checked!

Oh, and I got posted to 3 Quarks Daily today...!

I often set my away message on AIM to something absurd and nerdy, and so today I settled for "counting to infinity", which set off a neural A-bomb. Why? It reminded me of a practice I had when I was a kid of counting...to infinity. It's all surging back to me...I had this large note card where I kept track of how far I had gotten. I would often count in the shower, before going to bed, etc., and kept the card in the top drawer of my desk. I can't remember if I was trying to reach a set goal or just outdo myself, but I had a tendency to try and take on ridiculous challenges with the hope of making it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what I was hoping for, to be recognized as the person who had single handedly counted the farthest. Other projects included pogo-stick jumping, where I had the Dorchester Elementary school record for consecutive hops, but gave up when I realized the winner had stayed on for several days, I believe. The counting project was going on for quite some time, but I have no memory whatsoever of how far I got. I wonder where that note card is today? What happens to a dream deferred? It's probably recycled into that pizza box sitting in the corner of your kitchen. Yeah, you, I'm talking to you. Murderer.

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination." - A. Einstein

Crooked Timber is spot on with this piece breaking down a recent NY Times article on ivy league women and family planning.

But as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all...The focus on women at elite schools makes this tendency even worse. Cynthia and Shannon seem oblivious to the idea that a rather large number of women do have to go out to work, in order to make ends meet for their families. It’s immediately clear—though I think never plainly stated by any of the women themselves—that it’s the comfortable prospect of a very wealthy husband that allows them to plan their lives as they do, without any worrying about how they’ll support themselves and their darling kids when they reach their 30s.

That kind of complacency drives second-wave feminists nuts, because these students are like free-riders. They plan to take the upside of the revolution in women’s participation in elite education, but they are tacitly aware that they don’t have to expose themselves to any of the risk if they don’t want to.

Zing.

The IEEE Spectrum has a very informative article about the less and less unlikely idea of Hoisting to the Heavens. I clearly remember that during my high school physics eduation (which was otherwise stellar), the teacher repeatly mentioned the impossibility of a rope into space as an example of how far it was into space, and how the rope would snap under it's own weight. The idea was pure fantasy. Well, pretty soon is looks like fantasy may arrive. I guess the lesson to be learned here is that carbon nanotube rope is just as unfathomly small as the distance to space is large.

My study of Francis Fukuyama is limited, though I find his thoughts very interesting. I'm not sure I buy the post-history arguement, but I almost fell in love with him when he proclaimed post-humanism as the single greatest threat to the future of society. He represents conservative thinking without the bagage of suck that bogs down so many other fooligans. If somebody has a well-formed opinion on his general politics, please let me know.

Anyway, the reason I'm saying all this is that arts and letters daily linked to a very interesting article/interview about the man that is some highly recommended reading.

This is nearly as clever as the Time Travel Convention last spring. Theoretically interesting and logically convincing, save for one very unlikely assumption, namely the possibility of time travel. The failure of the convention could be argued as proof of the impossibility of backwards time travel, and I don't see how a person could be "retrieved" without such technology, but, damn, I'm almost ready to give the guys a dollar just for the idea. Clever clever.

An American journalist visiting Finland seems to have to seen the Northern Light, and wants America to follow in Finlands Footsteps. The article makes a perfectly valid presentation, though I am tempted to (as always) request a more refined take on it all. Sweden, like Finland, is privy to all the wonders of social democracy, and there is nothing a Swede could complain about in life, everything is taken care of. But, in my opinion, that is not exactly a good thing. Let's try a metaphor. Because they are so well fed, they don't know hunger, and because they don't know hunger, they lack the imagination to dream up new recipes. Essentially, the problem I've been observing up here is that mediocrity stifles creativity. Why am I supposed to excel, if I'm just going to get taxed to tell anyway? Money isn't everything, it isn't, but when there is literally no benefit to pursuing an ambitious career, people are just as well working part time, and that's terrible for innovation and regional development.

Twenty-five percent of the Swedish work force is continually on sick leave. That's freaking disgusting. Now I don't want to sound harsh, but I disapprove of situations such as the following: someone takes two years of sick leave because they need time to get over the death of their brother. Removing yourself from your day to day and crying into a pillow for two years is not doing anything productive. People need to get on with their lives.
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Seeing as I was in Copenhagen only yesterday, I found this essay on the importance of public spaces very on the mark.

They are the starting point for all community, commerce and democracy. Indeed, the future of the human race depends on public spaces - they are, after all, where young men and women meet and court.

The piece examines the role of these spaces in modern sprawled urbanism.
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And then there's always a good read on energy policy, now isn't there. The UK government and Nuclear lethargy, which discuses how nuclear power has come to embody many of today's fears about the use of technology.
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To round out the roundup, here's a accesible read on the science of intelligent design.
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Oh, and I've added a site feed..!

The restricted three-body problem and efficient interplanetary space transit. As the article states, it costs a cool million to send a pound of fuel to the moon. This is a very hip and unintuitive way of zipping things around space with minimum fuel consumption. I clearly remember the first time I heard how Galileo used gravity assist (pdf) slingshoting around Venus, Earth, and Earth again before heaving out to Jupiter. Who would have thought that the most fuel efficient way to the outer solar system would be to head towards the sun? These "highways" are the next level of the same phenom. Pretty neat.

...posting here takes up a lot of my time, time I've been recently trying to redirect away from the keyboard. This summer I had six marvelously keyboard free weeks (except for the occasional cafe email), and I'd like to integrate more of that into the coming year. That said, I do enjoy maintaining this site, but as Stephanie properly criticized me last month, it's been widdled down to a string of links without any substantial commentary, which I guess was the only think distinguishing this site from Arts and Letters Daily, SciTech Daily, or 3 Quarks Daily, the three main sources for these articles during the past year.

I've also felt guilty that I'm simply contributing to the noise side of the signal/noise blogosphere, and I don't have the commitment to cross over, nor do I think I'd like to be that addicted to information. The internet has a lot of information. If you follow Boing Boing or Pandagon, you know what I'm talking about. Things such as this collection of amazing artwork by Banksy at the West Bank wall, or a remarkable letter to the Arizona Republic with dumbfounding commentary on the intelligent design debacle. (Anna: There is so much.) When I pulled those last two links from pandagon, I hadn't even visited it in a good four months. And those were just off of the front page, which contained only posts from the last two days.

So I'm feverishly debating whether or not I'm going to put this site to rest for a while. It's all too much, and I think i was better off without the internet. People got along fine without it for a very long time, from what I've heard. And people still get along, throughout the analog real world suspended between the digital metropoli of the world. (A thin streak of which I crossed this summer.) What I'd ideally like this site to be is a place where I can post links to interesting articles, and I can then discuss them with people I know in the response section. I want it to work like a mass-emailed article with a consolidated debate forum for all the people I've come to know through the years, (guests are naturally welcome).

The other things that this site is good for is that it (1) serves a journal of my thoughts on various topics, when I do get the chance to scribble together some commentary, and it (2) keeps me writing in english with some frequency (though the construction that introduces this paragraph is admittedly pretty damn horrendous). It also (3) gives me incentive to crawl the internet in search for all things interesting regarding alternative energy, energy policy, archeological sciences, assistive technology, neuroprosthetics, educational policy and philosophy, EU/International relations, ethical development, sustainable conservation, responsible technology, and such things that truly interest me. I'm undoubtedly going to go into work in one of those fields, so it could only be a good thing that I stay on top of developments, no?

I guess the only question is if there's a defendable point to maintaining this site, and that hinges upon wether or not my audience (or lack there of, though that's understandable, I've been slow in posting) will give me some feedback, some debate, some bite. And in return I'll try and be more substantial.

Consider this a call for vote of confidence. Can this site be more than just internet noise, and perhaps serve as a community of informative keeping-ups? Maybe I should get some more people to post? Though I shamelessly doubt that there are people I know who crawl the internet as much as I do, and I wouldn't want to infect anyone with my unhealthy bug. Crack is wack.

I´m hiking through Northern Spain for the next four weeks. Peace out.