fojo
jon orwant's blog
Pediatric Anesthesia -- 7/28/2003
Begin forwarded message:
Dr. XXXXXX,
I am an Inventor, Academic Anesthesiologist, and an National Institute of Health Researcher who has been developing a new pediatric sedation system for 7 years with NIH support. If you do a google search under Pedisedate you will encounter several article and photos of the system. We are about to begin a second set of Clinical Trials at the Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto [snip]
| Free pediatric anesthesia? Sign us up!
Wow, I just checked out the product. It's awesome. It's a Nintendo Game Boy that dispenses nitrous oxide. Oh my god. Nobel prizes are not good enough for this Inventor, Academic Anesthesiologist, and National Institute of Health Researcher. A new award must be invented. Not since that Sony TV that injects viewers with smack has there been an Invention with such potential. I want to see the patent application. |
 |
"The following novel invention is claimed: a method and apparatus for allowing children to play video games while being inflated with a toxic gas that renders them unconscious. Figure 1 shows a child outfitted with a hermetically sealed snorkel that pumps her full of laughing gas while she plays Super Mario 64. In addition, we assert the following dependent claim: a method for identifying the extent to which a child's consciousness has been lost by her reaction time playing Legend of Zelda."
Tidbits -- 6/8/2003
Excerpt
from Philip Greenspun's blog
If one is not a professional
ecologist and one has grown up in North America it is tough to
appreciate at a gut level that humans are able to have any significant
effect on the Earth. Our planet seems like an infinitely huge and
forbidding wilderness punctuated by the occasional human
settlement. According to Understanding Earth (a very interesting book
but a new edition is coming out within a year or so), our planet's
mass is 5.976x10^27 grams, i.e., much heavier even than the biggest
S.U.V. Yet we humans have managed to speed up the Earth's rotation
enough to shorten each day by 10 microseconds by impounding water
behind dams in rich countries, which tend be at high latitudes. The
dams pull water away from the the equator, where it was spinning with
a high linear velocity. By conservation of angular momentum the Earth
is forced to spin a little bit faster when the mass of water is pulled
inwards, just as ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in.
86% ice + 14% wood pulp = building material [jhi]
Dropped between the legs of Winston Churchill in his bath, too
Percentage of men/women who wash hands in five major cities
Chicago 83%; NYC 49%
Florida inventor believes he can suck the power out of hurricanes [verp]
Pentagon frantically tries to subdue a dove, in world's best symbolism
In response, a snowboarding and Harley-riding John Kerry kills and eats doves xo
Two-headed turtle; heads have not yet squabbled
The kilogram is getting lighter [jhi]
Earth and moon as viewed from Mars
Paris bus line 38 has its own web site [sierra] xo
Tidbits -- 5/26/2003
Urban myth about Korean company soliciting dogs for food is an arty hoax
Animation of all flights over the U.S.
Varak: edible sheets of silver or gold
Workers lose pay because Bush used their factory to speak about jobs
The care and feeding of CEOs -- 5/26/2003
France Telecom, my employer, has as many employees -- 240,000 -- as Baton Rouge has residents. Like many old-guard technology megacorporations, it snatched up smaller companies during the dot-com boom. But because France Telecom is majority-owned by the French government, it had a disadvantage that most other telcos didn't -- when it acquired a company, it had to pay cash instead of stock. This is why the company I work for is $68 billion in the red, the most indebted company in the world.
Some of the acquired companies are big and independent enough to retain their own management structure: CEO, CFO, and so on. One of those subsidiary CEOs visited us last week. My group had an hour of his time, of which I was scheduled for 15 minutes.
I usually prepare a lot for important talks, but I never get nervous, because I've given so many of them by now. Emceeing the Internet Quiz Show calmed me down; entertaining a thousand nerds -- many of them as obsessive as I am -- is good practice.
So it was odd to see all the preparations in advance of a visit by two people (the CEO and his deputy). Washing, painting, pleas to clean our desks -- fair enough. But then our makeshift hardware lab was moved from an open area to behind closed doors, because the building looked cleaner that way. This baffled me. Exposed computer innards, the soldering iron, the microscope -- all evidence that we got actual work done and didn't just move email around all day. Why conceal it?
Then it got really weird. All of the Coke products in our fridge were replaced with Pepsi. Turns out that the CEO is on the board of Pepsi. Now, the CEO didn't ask for that. It was done for him. For all he knew, we preferred Pepsi.
Think about what it's like to be this CEO. You stay at the Four Seasons when you travel. You fly on your jet (not a corporate jet, but your own). And everywhere you go, the only soft drinks you see are Pepsi. Your lunches are catered, your dinners are at fancy restaurants. You're ferried around from limousines, and you play golf in your spare time. When do you ever see a Coke? Is it any wonder that when some underling tells you how well Pepsi is doing compared to Coke, you believe him? Even though Coke obviously tastes much better?
Of course, Pepsi Co. isn't just sodas -- it also makes mediocre chips (Frito-Lay), mediocre pizza (Pizza Hut), good juice (Tropicana), good cereal (Quaker, makers of Cap'n Crunch and Quaker Oatmeal) Come to think of it, is anyone besides me picking up a Jekyll/Hyde vibe between the sensitive, thoughtful Quaker Oatmeal guy and the manic, sugar-soaked Cap'n? Their dubious choice of cartoonish spokesfreaks doesn't stop at doddering old white guys, either. This is also the company that gave us Aunt Jemima -- a role model for black girls everywhere -- and lit Michael Jackson's hair on fire.
But I digress. This CEO may be great at his job. I hope he is. And as for his Pepsi board duties, I hope he makes a point to visit a bowling alley every once in a while to see how the other 99.999% live.
I'm often surprised at how much private information people reveal in blogs. They'll talk about their relationships, or how things are going at work, all on the assumption that only their friends are reading. And I suppose I wouldn't want that CEO to read this entry either, which is why I haven't named him (although if you really care, a little Google elbow grease will reveal it). But I figure if this guy can get Coke transmuted into Pepsi without even asking, my blog will never make it to his peripheral vision. What a strange life he must lead.
Tidbits -- 5/11/2003
Bush/Blair nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Monkeys with typewriters don't write Shakespeare
(They apparently press the 'S' key and urinate.)
Bush asks for repeal of small nuke ban; Senate consents
Seattle to get a science-fiction shrine
CNN writes obits for the pre-dead
(Cheney, Reagan, Castro, Pope John Paul II, and Mandela.)
The obit mockups
Philosophy game (answer a few questions & try to stay alive)
Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La) endorsed a book on tax evasion
(Second paragraph from the end.)
Tidbits -- 4/30/2003
Outback Steakhouse invaded by cows
Iraqi Information Minister [carolyn]
...and his talking doll [robin]
Let the monkey choose a billionaire -- new show on WB [carolyn]
Iowa town adopts Sanskrit as official language [jhi]
Run your diesel engine on waste vegetable oil
Vatican might not be the smallest state in the world. Or even Rome. [jhi]
Spain has an enclave in France [jhi]
Better resolution through distorted images
Another good review of a bad movie [gnat]
Hollywood's elite message boards
Greenspun's history of Israel (long)
One-ton rubber band ball dropped from a mile high. Did it bounce?
"New girlfriend" not what she seems; thinks P = NP [gnat via boingboing]
The Rube Goldberg Honda ad making the rounds (video)
(The tires were able to roll uphill because they'd been weighted with bolts and screws. Only one moment of computer manipulation was necessary -- when the exhaust pipe rolls across the floor.)
Toward a molecular architecture of personality (paper abstract)
Tidbits -- 3/21/2003
Saddam's Thursday poem
"Unsheath your sword and let Saturn bear witness"?
Largest Iraqi banknote worth $0.0008
Winnie the Pooh movie review [gnat]
"In Which We Discover That a Very Big Company of Sometimes Very Little Brain Has Heffalumped a Beloved Franchise."
National Guardsman names himself after a Transformer
Life imitates the Sopranos as carp speaks in Hebrew, then sold for dinner
NYT real estate section on treehouses
Birds commit grand larceny, stealing $4000 in quarters
Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974 [sburke]
Derivative of the Gallery of Regrettable Food
Gibson directing Jesus movie in Latin, Aramaic, and without subtitles [sburke]
What's Going On In There? -- 3/25/03
"What's Going On In There?" is a book about children's pre- and post-natal development (Lise Eliot; Bantam, 1999). The book is stupendous, and I'm amazed it ever got published. It distills the current state of neuroscientists' knowledge about how baby brains develop: how the cortex matures, how taste/smell/sight/hearing/touch can accelerate that maturation, the genetic differences between girls and boys, and so on. There's no overarching theme, but plenty of little threads that return throughout the book, such as the notion that cognitive development is a series of compromises: certain skills can "steal" cortex from others. An excerpt:Prenatal Stress and Sexual Orientation
One of the more controversial proposals about prenatal stress is that it may contribute to male homosexuality. This theory has its origins in some early research on the neural basis of sexual behavior in rats. The hypothalamus, you may recall, plays a critical role in various instinctive behaviors, including sex drive and other reproductive functions. About twenty years ago, research discovered a small region near the fron of the rat hypothalamus that differs significantly in structure in males and females. This area, which they named the "sexually dimorphic nucleus of the pre-optic area" or SDN-POA, is about twice as large, and contains about twice as many neurons, in male as compared to female rats.
Further research revealed that this sex difference depends on the presence of the male sex hormone, testosterone, during a very brief critical period in development. Beginning in late gestation and continuing for the first few days of postnatal life, male rats' testes release a surge of testosterone that reaches the brain and promotes the survival of neurons in the SDN-POA. Female rats do not experience this testosterone surge, so their brains follow the default developmental pathway, remaining "feminized." Not only does the brief testosterone surge permanently alter male rats' hypothalami, it also shapes their later sexual behavior. For instance, in experiments in which female rats are exposed to testosterone before birth (by injecting it into the pregnant mother), they later act more aggressively, tend to mount other females, and resist mounting attempts by males to a much greater extent than do normal females. Conversely, when male rats are castrated or given drugs that otherwise deprive them of testosterone during the critical period, they behave more like females, presenting themselves to other males in a sesxually receptive posture known as lordosis.
In humans, too, testosterone is responsible for sexual differentiation of the brain. But unlike rats, in which the testosterone surge straddles both pre- and postnatal periods. the testosterone surge in boys in largely prenatal, reaching its peak around the fourth month of gestation. Researchers have now identifiied several brains areas in males and females that differ consistently, though no one has yet proved that any of these dimoprhisms arise prenatally. Nonetheless, testosterone exposure in utero is known to have profound effects on later gender behaviors that must reflect sex differences in the brain itself.
End of excerpt. So what does any of this have to do with material stress during pregnancy? High doses of many of the major stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, interfere with testosterone production. Men, for instance, show a decreased level of circulating testosterone when they are significantly stressed. Because maternal stress hormones can cross the placenta, it has been proposed that pregnant females who are highly stressed may release sufficient quantities of adrenal hormones to interfere with the usual testosterone surge in male fetuses, thereby nudging their brains toward more feminine behavior, including a propensity for homosexuality.
The book mentions more evidence for this claim: First, studies with rats showing a link between stress and homosexuality. However, the link between rats and humans is weak. And even if there is a link between prenatal stress and the particular cortical structures, and a link between the cortical structures and homosexuality, there's no proof that the cortical structures cause homosexuality. It might be the other way around.
There were two relevant German studies on humans in the 1980s. Eliot mentions that there were methodological flaws with this studies, one being that the subjects were probably aware of the hypothesis being tested, so they could have shaped their answers accordingly.
There were two more recent American studies done with less chance of scientist bias. Neither confirmed the German studies, although one found a modest relationship between male homosexuality and maternal stress during the second trimester only, and the other found that women who are more stress-prone tend to have more effeminate boys than other mothers.
This is why I like "What's Going On In There?": after making a claim, it doesn't hesitate to show evidence against it. Sometimes Eliot takes a side, sometimes she leaves it open. Here, she leaves it open. "Although current evidence is very weak, it remains possible that prenatal stress is one factor that biases some boys toward a later homosexual orientation."
Tidbits -- 2/25/2003
Best erratum ever (New York Times, February 14, 2003):
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about diplomatic developments in the Iraq crisis misidentified the Bush administration official who said about the weapons inspectors in Iraq, "At some point it will become obvious that it's time for them to go." It was an administration official speaking on condition of anonymity, not Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser.
Hydrocephalic plane: the A300 Super Transporter [sengel]
It's an airplane used to ferry other parts of airplanes around.
Novel about Bush tax cut the worst ever published in English [gnat]
Isaac Newton says the world will end in 2060
PCsat, $50K "bargain basement" satellite made from off the shelf parts
HR has no sense of humor -- 2/25/2003
From: _________________
Date: Thu Feb 20, 2003
To: Jon Orwant
Subject: Re: 401K beneficiary
On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 2:14 PM, Jon Orwant wrote:
On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 11:00 AM, __________ wrote:
Jon, Principal notified me they have no record of a beneficiary form
on file for your 401K plan (I am not sure if there is a copy in your
file). You should complete a beneficiary form if it is not done
already (see _______) and forward to Principal. If one has been
completed and is in your file, please forward a copy to Principal.
Thanks, _______. In the event of my death I'd like my 401K to be
used for hunting down the bastard that killed me.
Sorry Jon, I can't help you with that.
Tidbits -- 2/23/2003
RAND suggests killer asteroids should be kept secret
EU declares Britain is not an island
Questions kids ask about the blind [sburke]
"How does a blind person identify money?"
"How does a blind person tell time?"
From: Geo
Do you know the "trick" about blowing a raspberry while watching, say, a video monitor? It vibrates your eyeballs, and you can see interference patterns on the monitor as the vibration beats against the monitor scan rate.
Anyway, a friend of mine a while ago was a musician with perfect pitch. Moreover, he had taught himself to push on his temples in just such a way so that, when he hummed, his eyeballs vibrated with the pitch he was humming. With a little practice, he became "the human tachometer"! : "How fast is that propeller over there going?" "I dunno, lemme see, ...mmmmmmmMmmmmmmmMMMMMMM... Oh, about 3400 or so..."
There are radiation detectors in our subways disguised as telephone cell relays
(New Scientist coverage)
Kasparov whiningly compares his tie against Deep Junior to his loss to Deep Blue
(Check out the byline -- Kasparov is a contributing editor to the WSJ?)
English dialect survey & results
The survey itself is huge, but you can save and return any time. But merely taking the survey will help you realize things you never knew about your accent. A sample question (IPA glyphs omitted):
1. How do you pronounce "aunt"?
- [a] as in "ah"
- [ae] as in "ant"
- [d] as in "caught"
- I have the same vowel in "ah", "caught", and "aunt"
- I pronounce it the same as "ain't"
- I use [a/d] when referring to the general concept of an aunt, but [ae] when referring to a specific person by name.
- I use [ae] when referring to the general concept of an aunt, but [a/d] when referring to a specific person by name.
- other:
LA, day 3 of 3 -- 2/23/03
| Sunday, the day after the wedding, I had all to myself. I went hiking in Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica mountains, and about ten seconds into my hike I saw six deer. An auspicious beginning; if there were six deer romping and frolicking fifty feet from the parking lot, then I fully expected to see, two miles into the wilderness, a Forest Jamboree with bears playing tubas and a li'l chipmunk on the tambourine for comic relief. Unfortunately, the only other animals I saw over the next few hours were 20 humans whining about money and their jobs, and one newt. |  |
After my hike, I went to both the Venice Beach and Santa Monica boardwalks, to see which won. Answer: Santa Monica, because they have the Gold Robot Man. This is a guy wearing a gold suit, gold hat, gold shoes, gold coat, gold sunglasses, a bunch of gold necklaces, and his exposed skin was painted gold in case we didn't get the point yet. There could be no purer manifestation of bling-bling. And he was a robot, meaning that he moved his limbs in staccato, as though he were powered by hydraulics. He was world's slowest and goldest breakdancer.
I got some nasty seafood on the boardwalk and drove back to LA through Beverly Hills hoping to see fancy homes. At first, I followed the luxury car gradient: whenever I came to an intersection, I took the road that had the more expensive cars parked on it. That didn't seem to work, so I switched rules. Whenever I came to an intersection, I chose the street that went higher, figuring that richer homes would have better views. (For you computer geeks, yes, I was using a hill-climbing algorithm to actually climb hills.) That did lead me to some big movie star houses. Or their front gates, anyway, since the really big houses can't be seen from the street.
Tidbits -- 2/17/2003
Monowheels (imagine riding a bicycle where you're inside the tire)
F1 engine
playing "When The Saints Go Marching In"
This is a 50-second audio
clip. The first 25 seconds are a 750 horsepower engine revving up.
Then the song begins. The magazine F1 Racing explains:
As we all know, a V10 engine produces five combustions per revolution at a frequency per second of 60/(5 x revs per minute), which equals 12/rpm. Therefore, to work out the revs you need to hit a particular musical note, you multiply the note's frequency by 12. To play a 440Hz 'A', for example, you need 5,280rpm. For 'C', use 3,139rpm, for 'F' 4,191rpm, and so on.
Actually, the LAPD web site in general is pretty awesome, if you're nine
Stupid Tractor Trick (a photo essay)
Legal downloadable live music concerts (not many big-ticket bands here, natch)
A Layman's Guide to Evolutionary Economics [rre]
50 pages you should read if you ever want to use "Schumpeterian" in a sentence
Flies painted on urinals at Amsterdam airport encourage good aim
LA, day 2 of 3 -- 2/17/03
| Even the lush musical stylings of Dr. Bombay failed to adequately prepare me for an Indian wedding. Indian weddings last three days, have odd rituals and multiple clothing changes, feed an entire village, and are not in English. In other words, it's like a cricket match. |  |
This wedding was somewhat Americanized, however. It was a sprightly 7 hours, and the bride and groom didn't provide dinner for greater Los Angeles. And the 7 hours included dinner and cocktails; the actual ceremony was just three hours, shorter than the Gandhi movie. It began at 4:30pm, giving me most of the day to bum around LA. I bummed around my hotel reading (Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine", which is stupendous, and "The Odds On Virtually Everything", which is not).
I decided to lunch on lobster in Beverly Hills, so I got in my car and traveled west down Wilshire Boulevard. And my prayers were answered: I found a Red Lobster. But I didn't eat there. I haven't mentioned that every restaurant in Los Angeles displays a board of health certificate in their front window with a big block letter. Three Korean Glyphs Pyung Yang got an A, which is why I ate there. On my walk back, I looked at other restaurants. They all had A's. Hole-in-the-wall kim chi huts with mildewed awnings. IHOP. Denny's. A roach coach. A's for everyone. Los Angeles had worse grade inflation than phys ed courses at a PAC 10 school.
Red Lobster got a B.
So I kept driving. I turned onto Rodeo drive and and found some ritzy panini shop near Louis Vuitton and another store that didn't seem to sell anything tangible at all, but boy what decor. I ordered a $5 salmon panini and a $3 smoothie, paying with a $20 bill. This caused a stir, since they had no $1, $5, or $10 bills. This being Beverly Hills, there was a $50 slot in the cash register, and it was stuffed. Was I supposed to just say "Keep the change" because this was Rodeo drive? Screw that. They didn't even have a real rodeo.
An hour later, full of salmon, I drove to Newport Beach for the wedding. Luckily, Sunil, the groom, found me beforehand and explained that you weren't expected to actually sit through the entire wedding. It was entirely okay to get up, leave the room, get your drink on, get your snack on, and return at your leisure.
This was a good thing, because the three hour ceremony was entirely in Sanskrit and Telugu. Sanskrit script has always disturbed me, full of graceful swoops but with that unyielding and omnipresent horizontal line skewering all the letters:
Telugu is the opposite: flowing, curvy, vivacious. You just know it's the preferred tongue of mermaids and hippies:
Sburke, fojo reader and linguist, points out that Sanskrit doesn't have to be written in Devanagari, the default face with the horizontal line that you see above. You can typeset it in dozens of scripts, including the "palm leaf script" that you see in the Telugu sample.
Here's a (slightly edited) sample item from the 25 in the wedding program:
6. Kashi Yathra (Trip to Kashi)
[The groom] pauses and faces an internal struggle between the choice of married life and asceticism. Fearing the unknown challenges of married life and wanting to discard all worldly pleasures, he chooses to be an ascetic and plans a trip to Kashi (a place of Hindu pilgrimage). With an umbrella and chambu (vessel) of water in hand, he attempts to leave. [The bride's brother] intercepts him and, after some cajoling, convinces [the groom] that marrying [the bride] is the right choice. [The groom] now leaves the [wedding canopy] as it is time for [the bride] to arrive. Remember, the bride and groom are not permitted to see each other.
Many of the other items involved praying to various gods: Lord Ganesha (remover of all obstacles), Lord Agni (messenger to Gods), Gowri Devi (mother of the universe). My friend Dan, a computer scientist, leaned over to me and whispered "forall gods, do { worship god }"
Oh, and I learned that coconuts symbolize the purity of the universe.
Tidbits -- 2/16/2003
Insulting phrases for French, Spanish, and German [jhi]
Footage of AC-130 gunship picking off people in Afghanistan like a video game
Fractal magnetic fields (technical details)
Tukey's tally [gnat]:
Imagine you're at a blackboard, counting votes in a meeting. You
probably count in groups of five, making four vertical lines and then
"finishing" the group by drawing a diagonal line through them.
Instead. you should count in groups of ten, by first marking four dots
to make the corners of a box, and then connecting each pair of dots.
Tidbits -- 2/15/2003
Crab gets sucked into 2700psi 3mm pipe
Lama's corpse fails to decompose -- genetics to blame?
Blackest black created by etching a nickel-phosphorus alloy in nitric acid
Chimp "talks", uttering distinctive sounds for "banana", "grapes", "juice", and "yes"
LA, day 1 of 3 -- 2/14/2003
Last Friday I flew to Los Angeles for a friend's wedding. Aside from stopovers, I've been to LA only once as an adult, an emergency can-you-leave-tomorrow flight to rendezvous with someone on his way to an MPEG meeting. On that trip, I managed to squeeze in visits to the Nixon Museum & Birthplace, the Huntington Library & Gardens, and the La Brea Tar Pits. I wanted this trip to be more sedate. I especially didn't want to take the "jogging tours" that my guidebook mentioned, where you pay $35 to run twelve miles past celebrity mansions.
I got my rental car (standing in line for a half hour while CNN announced the increase in the terror level to "Orange") and drove to my hotel (listening to a talk radio station where they revealed that the new terror level made them, one, plan which highways to use for fleeing the city and two, hungry for Orange Chicken).
For a hotel, I chose the Radisson Wilshire because it advertised Internet access, but upon arriving I learned that only some rooms did, all of which were filled because of a dentist convention. I now hate dentists even more than before. They always were my least favorite medical practitioners, since every object in their offices looks dangerous. At least if you go to a doctor's office, you see all sorts of non-threatening objects: the scale, the vinyl-cushioned bench, the stethoscope, the blood pressure taker whose official name -- sphygnomanometer -- I will continue to remember in case a spontaneous spelling bee breaks out. But everything in a dentist's office looks painful.
| The hotel was in Koreatown. After I arrived I walked down Wilshire past a lot of Korean restaurants, eventually settling on "(three Korean glyphs) Pyung Yang". Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea! I wondered if North Korean cuisine was any different than South Korean cuisine. After all, they're pretty different countries, with South Korea rapidly becoming a technological power, and North Korea being a religious cult led by a dwarf in a leisure suit, elevator shoes, and those glasses they give granny after cataract surgery. Weaponry by Tom Clancy, casting by David Lynch. Seriously, look at the Korean peninsula on this satellite map of the nighttime sky. The boundary between North and South Korea is sharply delineated. (full version here.) |  |
But I digress. Back to food. The menu at Three Korean Glyphs Pyung Yang was entirely in Korean, but I was able to order a bibim bap hot pot. They served a hot brown drink that was neither tea nor miso. It was weak, sour, and salty. I spent the entire meal trying to figure out whether it was actually intended for consumption, or was meant for rinsing chopsticks. I looked at the other Koreans in the restaurant to see whether they were drinking it, but they all positioned their cups so that I couldn't see them. Very clever.
The bibim bap was fine. The assortment of side dishes included still-frozen vegetables (carrots, corn, peas, and lima beans), and the bibim bap itself had flakes of odd sweet seaweed. The white of the egg had been removed, leaving just the yolk, and there were two oval bright yellow beans above it, leaving an eerie impression of two yellow eyes atop a large yellow mouth.
Next up: the wedding.
Tidbits -- 1/1/2003
Relative wealth of fictional characters (Gatsby, Monty Burns, Thurston Howell III...)
Actors spoofing the film industry (quicktime movie; profanity)
Paul McCartney granted coat of arms (The coat of arms has a guitar. Ugh. Hey, one of the Viagra inventors was British. What's on his coat of arms?)
Magnetic poles may be about to flip (But maybe not, since this hasn't generated much concern...)
Redheads need 20% more anesthesia
Lab-grown steak (How should vegetarians feel about it?)
E != mc^2. E = mc^2 / (1 + mc^2/E_p)
The Sport of Cup Stacking (video)
Create your own online Lego figure (choose hair color, clothing, etc.)
Law school in a nutshell (Legalese from a computer scientist's point of view)
Strange quark matter ripping through planet every once in a while?
Paul Krugman, Cronies in Arms, The New York Times, Sept. 17, 2002.In February 2001 Enron presented an imposing facade, but insiders knew better: they were desperately struggling to keep their Ponzi scheme going. When one top executive learned of millions in further losses, his e-mailed response summed up the whole strategy: "Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q."
The strategy worked. Enron collapsed, but not before insiders made off with nearly $1 billion. The sender of that blunt e-mail sold $12 million in stocks just before they became worthless. And now he's secretary of the Army.
Tidbits -- 11/5/2002
Ship that can flip from a horizontal to vertical position at will
Gyroscopic cheese vaudeville act
Windows virus uses your modem to call 911
(finally, a computer virus that can actually kill people)
D&D compendium: find out how much those old modules are worth
Tampa cops pull over motorists for marketing survey
NBC gets its own ice cream flavors [rre]
(Fear Factor Sundae, Will & Grace's Rocky Road of Romance)
Motorola Makes Your TiVo Fail -- 11/5/2002
If you have a new Motorola set-top box, you may have noticed that sometimes you're unable to properly set the channel. This is because their set-top boxes intentionally occasionally ignore the incoming infrared.
Why would Motorola make a buggy set-top box? Because the box can't tell whether the infrared is coming from a human holding a remote, or a TiVo. And since they're going to be coming out with their own TiVo competitor someday, it's to their advantage to frustrate TiVo owners.
Pay Your Parking Tickets Before Voting -- 11/4/2002
Here's how to scare the undereducated and the poor into not voting. And just to be sure, the voting date is wrong too.
Is Life Analog or Digital? -- 10/19/2002
Last week I received this talk announcement:
Is Life Analog or Digital?
Freeman Dyson
I started thinking about the abstract definition of life twenty years ago, when I published a paper in the Reviews of Modern Physics about the possible survival of life in a cold expanding universe. I found that survival is possible for a community of living creatures using only a finite store of matter and energy. Then, three years ago, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, friends of mine at Case Western Reserve University, told me that everything I claimed in my paper is wrong. It is much more fun to be contradicted than to be ignored. Now, after three years of friendly argument, it appears that they are right and I am right, too. They are right, and life cannot survive forever, if life is digital; but I am right, and life might survive forever, if life is analog. The question, whether life is digital or analog, is more interesting and perhaps more important than the question of survival from which it arose.
Upon reading this, one question jumped out at me. Freeman Dyson is still alive? I went to see the talk just to be sure.
His lecture was perfect: lucid and fascinating, comprehensible to the layman, and full of chewy bits for experts in the MIT crowd. I recognized Philip Morrison and Ed Fredkin, and I'm sure I would have recognized some Nobel laureates if only People Magazine would run that issue on scientists that I keep writing them about. Anyway, you could smell the brains.
Dyson was introduced by Frank Wilczek, who studied with him at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is to geniuses what the Betty Ford clinic is to movie stars. Wilczek said that Dyson was the one theoretical physicist at IAS able to answer the question: What has Quantum Field Theory contributed to our understanding of the universe? Wilczek wouldn't tell us what the answer was, but during the Q&A at the end of Dyson's talk, we found out:
The universe consists of indistinguishable particles; for instance, one electron looks just like another.
A nice little nugget, to be sure, and no surprise that Dyson got the answer right, since among physicists he's best known for his work on quantum field theory. (Among computer geeks, he's best known for being Esther Dyson's daddy, and among everyone else he's probably best known for conjecturing the Dyson sphere, which involves us smooshing Jupiter into bits and using the orbiting sphere of detritus to capture the Sun's energy so we can live happily ever after.)
| Replace his suit and tie with a cape and tunic, and Freeman Dyson could be peeping out through a hedge in Hobbiton. He has a slight build, and gives the impression of an energetic woodland creature, delighted by life, and probably a blast to have around so long as you don't have to clean up after him or do his taxes. |  |
Anyway, on to his big question, which wasn't really whether life is analog or digital, but whether life can survive forever in a unvierse that inevitably grows colder. He began right out by saying that we can't hope to know for sure. All we can do is prove that survival is not forbidden by the laws of nature as we know them today. Fair enough.
The first bugaboo is that all matter might eventually decay. We used to think that this wouldn't happen, because protons seemed stable; if protons decayed, that would violate baryon conservation. But then we found out that there was more matter than antimatter in the universe. That violates baryon conservation by itself, so our current thinking is that protons decay just often enough to counter the matter/antimatter imbalance. If this is correct, protons have a half-life of about 1031 years.
To test that, we've been waiting to catch a proton in the act of decaying, using huge underground tanks of water 2000 feet below Lake Erie. Hasn't happened yet; Dyson says that protons appear to either be stable, or take more than 1033 years to decay. Rock on. If they do decay, so will we, and we'd have to content ourselves living as electron-positron plasmas.
Dyson doesn't believe that's possible. Eternal life requires protons, and he's further assuming that we'll transform our bodies into something very different from the bags of watery meat we are today. If you take a narrow view of life -- that it means flesh and blood, or cells in water, then certainly life can't persist forever, since the universe is growing ever colder, and life as we know it needs an environment of about 300 Kelvin. In a cold expanding unvierse, life must ultimately run out of free energy if it keeps its temperature fixed.
So that's the trick: dump your brain into a body that cools itself. You might do this by treating your brain as a big transactional persistent database and downloading it into a computer. This will cost a lot, but Larry Ellison will gladly provide humanity with a six-billion-seat license for Oracle 9i in exchange for asset-backed bonds on the world's gross global product. Then you can do all the Xtreme sports you like without fear that your mental images of third-grade wedgies will be lost to posterity.
The computer can then adjust its temperature to fit its surroundings. This reminds me of a chip designed by a friend of mine, John Redford: it had a temperature-dependent variable clock speed. The cooler the temperature, the faster it ran. If you were nice to your computer by putting it in a cool room, it would reward you by speeding up.
But Dyson cautions that digital storage isn't the way to go. Instead, we need analog vessels for our bodies because of the energy loss involved in digital transitions. (At the end of the talk, Ed Fredkin asked whether reversible computing couldn't make digital life feasible; Dyson admitted that he'd have to think about it.)
One hypothetical form of analog life is the black cloud, described by Fred Hoyle. Instead of cells, we'd be little grains of matter dispersed over a volume of space. We'd get energy from gravity and starlight. We wouldn't have a nervous system -- just electromagnetic signals transmitting information back and forth among our grains. Such a black cloud could, he contends, adapt to arbitrarily low temperatures.
The black cloud that is you will need to hibernate for long periods of time, or as I put it: "Party when you can, and sleep the rest of the time. The older you get, the more you'll have to sleep."
Of course, not even a black cloud can survive the universe imploding. Luckily for you optimists, we don't know how the universe is going to end. There are four possible outcomes:
Theory 1: The universe is closed.
The density of the universe is high enough that the expansion of the universe will stop and reverse. The universe ends in a big crunch, and we die.
Theory 2: The universe is accelerating.
The universe will expand forever, and the rate of expansion is increasing. This is the theory that a preponderance of cosmologists now believe, although Dyson cautions us that they all change their minds every so often. Under this scenario, we're screwed, because it will be impossible to cool yourself enough to live forever.
Theory 3: The universe is decelerating.
The universe will expand forever, and the rate of expansion is decreasing. Dyson says living forever is possible in this case, for both digital and analog forms of life.
Theory 4: The universe is open.
Dyson says living forever is possible here but only for analog life, because of the extra energy needed to process information in a quantized system.
All clear? To live forever, you need to either turn yourself into a cloud of communicating particles and then hope that the universe is decelerating or open; or you can choose between a particle cloud and Oracle 9i and hope that the universe is decelerating.
One back of the envelope calculation by Dyson: current human society consumes 1014 watts. The free energy required for permanent survival of society is then 1024 watt-years, which is just 3 days of the sun's energy output.
Oh, I didn't mention the alarm clocks. You need a black cloud alarm clock to wake you up once you begin hibernating. He described how to build one.
Anyway, his talk was more rigorous that I've let on here -- he led us through a few equations (nothing beyond simple calculus) and rebutted some counterarguments to his theory (such as the contention that the alarm clocks would themselves need to hibernate).
One questioner asked whether Dyson was himself making plans for immortality. He replied that a cryonics society had approached him about popsiclehood, but he demurred.
Another questioner asked, What about Wolfram, whose modestly-titled A New Kind of Science posits that three hundred years of mathematics based on the equal sign hasn't led anywhere, and we should be studying cellular automata instead? Dyson tried to show restraint: "If you're asking me whether I should reject modern physics in my calculations, well, no, I don't want to do that. As for the speculation that everything in the universe results from just a couple of lines of computer code, I'm sorry to say I don't take that seriously."
Intro -- 10/18/2002
To all Fojo subscribers -- sorry I haven't written in so long. I left O'Reilly in August, to join France Telecom R&D (at a new lab here in Boston) and to teach game design at MIT. And I got new computers and a new house. With all the changes, I decided to change Fojo as well. It'll now be more of a typical blog, although you'll still be able to get all the tidbits via the email list.