Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I am, perhaps, a bit odd. What I want from a social bookmarking site (or whatever the kinds are calling them these days) are articles which I did not know I wanted to read. For everything else, there’s RSS. I preferred Digg to its competitors (reddit and delicious) because I felt it had a wider base of sources it drew from, didn’t look like it was designed stylistically in 1997, and offered a feature that told me what other people who had liked the same articles as me had also liked. That last one really sealed the deal.

For me, social networking will probably never be social. There are so many ways I could stay connected with the people I care about, that the odds are slim to none that I will ever be connecting with all of them on the same service rendering the whole experience somewhat vacuous. Moreover, I already know what they like. If I wanted to read my friends favorite articles, there are much better ways for me to do that. I want an Amazon recommendation system for news. I want something that will tell me about something I never would have seen before based on my interest in the articles I already know how to find.

Digg gave me that. At least a close enough approximation that I used the service regularly. Now they’ve decided to re-invent RSS, a service I already use, and tack on some social features a la Google Reader. So it doesn’t let me do anything I couldn’t do before. The one feature that made it unique is missing. And in order to find parts of the web I’m statistically inclined to enjoy I’ve had to resort to stumbleupon. It gets close. But I want NEWS, not any random thing on the web that’s been sitting there for any period of time. And I can’t stand going through each website serially. I want a shotgun start. I want to not have to open articles that disinterest me based on their title and blurb.

So apparently the active business model in news aggregator services is to re-invent the already established wheel and offer nothing new. Which is sad. If there were one out there doing something unique, even if it wasn’t the specific unique thing I want them to do (keeping in mind that as far as I’m concerned social interaction on these services doesn’t exist… I just wanna read) I might use it just for that. So you folks with enough free time to spend reading a lot of news, enlighten me. Who really is doing something special and why should I be using their service?

I saw this one go around a bit on Facebook. Not sure how widespread it is.

Of all the humans who’ve ever lived, 6.4 percent are alive today. The sheer number of people is overwhelming natural systems, destroying biodiversity, and challenging efforts to control global warming. Earth’s population is rising at 80 million people per year – roughly the number of unwanted pregnancies. Solving the population problem means making every child a wanted child.

I’m alive. Just very negligent in my duties regards blogging about scientific topics. Also, I’m now engaged. Which is something I wish I had data collection set up for in advance, because from what I’ve observed the two most important items after a woman becomes engaged are “When is the date?” and “What does the ring look like?” I’d like to know if those are actually modal, or if it’s just my selective listening. I’ll probably talk a bit about having a feminist, atheist wedding as that time comes.

I have a guitar project that is making slow progress, but progress none the less. Really, if anyone wants to ask me physics questions about music, I really will do my best to answer them as long as they don’t require any actual non self-taught background in music. So seriously, fire away, it will give me a clear goal to work towards.

I’m thinking about jumping into do-it-yourself electronics. I’ve worked with single board computers at work that can interface with a GPS receiver for precise timing and trigger a laser. They can also steer the laser, but I didn’t work on that part of the code. So I’m eying an arduino microcontroller. Not sure what I want to do with it yet. Either a robot that can chase my fiancé’s cat, or a robotic coffee machine.

Biggest skeptical thing going on at the moment? The pope. A lot of vociferous atheist types like Rebeca Watson have come out supporting papal prosecution. Other vociferous atheists like PZ Myers have agreed with Rebeca. Honestly, what they said. If there’s anything I find irritating about the Internet it is the prevalence of vehement agreement with each other. I’m just trying it out to see how it feels.

I was in Ft. Collins, CO Wednesday evening through very early Sunday morning and I missed the entire “balloon boy” thing. Except for a joke made durring a presentation on weather baloon launches, no one seemed particularly concerned. This is probably as it should be. Skepchick’s Masala Skeptic has the best state-of-the-skepticism piece on it I’ve seen so far.

Thanks to travel and working on the weekend I now have a massive headache. I will attempt to cure this with coffee in the traditional graduate student way.

There’s a collection of interesting statistics collected from the Okcupid online dating site. They’ve tracked the response rate to messages containing certain words or combinations of words. To sum up the results, using correct English grammar and spelling as well as unusual words to set a message apart from others really help. Complementing a woman on her looks doesn’t. I actually met my girlfriend online, and she says that most people said something about her breasts. I asked her about her favorite place to get coffee. Guess I won on that one. If you must know, though, she’s fond of Dewy’s, while I prefer Phoenix.

Anyway, the other stat that was emphasized by Sean “The Guy Who Wrote My GR Textbook” Carroll, is that mentioning atheism improved response rate more than Christianity. Mentioning god without a proper name reduced the response rate from the average. So add that to your list of reasons why atheism is a good way to start conversations.

I thought this movie was tolerable. It really did have a lot of good things going for it, and chief among them to me was the premise of how the aliens came to be on Earth. They didn’t crash land and they didn’t invade, both of which seem to be unstoppable Hollywood tropes. I think these sell short any potential advanced aliens out there–you don’t build interstellar spaceships if you’re incompetent or irrationally violent. The District 9 aliens just kind of break down, spaceship still hovering.

Parts of the movie are shot like a mockumentary. Other parts are shot like a summer blockbuster action flick. The transition between these two styles is non-existent and kind of ruins the atmosphere created by the fauxcumentary at the beginning. On top of that, the acting was not so great. The main character is kind of a doofus, so a lot of Sharlto Copley’s awkwardness kind of blends in with that–but not all of it. To close out the movie, they have a cliffhanger ending. I find this smug, as if the writers and producers are so certain that there will be demand for a sequel that they don’t bother to include any kind of an ending with closure.

Final word from me, though, is that it’s worth seeing the movie if you’re into aliens. They’re not only well written aliens (not only in terms of plot, but there’s at least one clever play on the language barrier that I liked), but the special effects used to produce them are very unobtrusive to the point where it’s easy to forget it’s all CGI. So if you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll probably be unimpressed, but you probably won’t be disappointed.

And with that I retire again to the darkness, hopefully to re-emerge before week’s end to talk about actual science and not this made-up stuff. Amanda is in Europe at a conference. Maybe she’ll regale us with tales of adventure ant SCIENCE! sometime, as well.

Labor Day weekend is the Cleveland National Air Show. I’ve gone every year since I’ve moved here. And every year there have been protesters standing out front who just don’t seem to get it. It’s an attractive time to object to an apparent military spectacle with two unjust (in my opinion) wars going on and no clear plan to wrap them up. But to object to displays of technology, even if it was developed in black helicopter fashion for the purposes of being a weapon, edges in on the Luddite.

Technology comes from war (read: a non-negligible amount of technology comes from weapons development). As an observational astrophysicist, I use technology which is basically on loan from the military. If you’re prone to getting lost and have a GPS navigation computer on the dash of your car, you use it, too. It started out as a system using radio towers employed during WWII, and the first satellite system was deployed by the U.S. Navy as TRANSIT or NAVSAT. The current constellation of about 30 GPS satellites transmits different signals for civilian and military use.

So it may not be obvious watching aircraft designed to deliver bombs and munitions riding on one or two of the world’s most powerful jet engines that one day some part of that weapons system could be part of your daily life. Certainly, it’s unfortunate that it is frequently humanity’s desire to render other humans dead that leads to innovation. But I think it takes just as much brains and determination to re-purpose it for civilian and academic use. So hopefully here in a little bit I’ll actually get around to talking about how the GPS can be used to help make several simultaneous precision timing measurements against a clock several miles away (in space).

Besides, fast things can be just plain cool.

I’ve been seriously remiss in my duty to arrange words in moderately pleasing permutations for your entertainment and (hopefully) education. I promise I’ll actually get around to forcing myself to post about things I’m actually an “expert” in, but I’ve been thinking about this one for days: how long do people and events stay in our “cultural memory,” and how is this changing with new technology?

It’s hard to watch the news in America today without seeing someone Godwining out in fairly short order. Apparently Barack Obama is like Hitler, as was George W. Bush before him. Until someone uncovers evidence of 6 million deaths on either of their accounts, neither of those are appropriate comparisons. If there were people who had experienced the Third Reich first hand still active in political discourse, would this kind of inane politics be tolerated for very long?

This is probably a much more complicated issue, since I don’t know that most of the public anywhere knew what was going on behind the scenes until after the war. Which is one serious difference that’s developed over the past 50 years. Even on the television these days you can see the most recent footage on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. I won’t say that war is transparent, but the information is more readily available–and persistent. Once something is let loose on the internet, it’s nigh unto impossible to get it silenced.

So information these days is available more quickly, and for a longer period after it is first broadcast. How’s this going to affect the sort of collective behavior of the public when events happening right now are referenced in the future? Will there be any backlash for comparing future events to things happening right now? I’m curious. Is anyone doing research along these lines, and have they written a book about it?

What, you were expecting answers? I told you I wasn’t an expert…

It’s moon landing day, everyone! It’s also rest day on the Tour de France, so maybe I’ll stop hitting refresh waiting for updates and talk about bicycles for a bit. Now I have being a geek almost down to, pardon the phrase, a science. Everything down to hatred of watching sports on television. Other than golf, there is one sport I will go out of my way to watch: professional cycling.

The Tour de France came to prominence in the United States in 1999 when Lance Armstrong competed in and won his first of seven after a fight with testicular cancer. At least this is when I started watching. See, Lance went to the same oncologist that my Dad went to years before, so I think my Dad felt a little bit of a personal connection. He even has a poster signed by Armstrong, “TdF 1999″ and has ridden next to him at least once. They apparently talked about how my dad switched cable providers so he could watch the Tour.
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Forty years ago today, July 16th, 2009, two three humans landed on took of for the moon. This just strikes me dumb every time I think about it. We sent people… to the moon. It’s hard to imagine how that’s possible in a modern world, but it happened 40 years ago. Over 15 years before I was even born. When computers required entire rooms to contain them. I’m writing this on a four pound laptop and right next to me is a Beowulf cluster made of recent-model Dell desktops.

Of course it takes more than computation to take someone safely to the moon and return them to earth. It takes people and teamwork. I grew up on book about the space race. I think the first, and still one of the best was Moon Shot by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton, two of the original Mercury astronauts. I read A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin and This New Ocean by William E. Burrows, which after all this time I can no longer recall which is which.

Some of my first heroes were the people described in these books. And I’ve decided to hopefully relive a little bit of my childhood awe and respect by picking up yet more books about the people behind the race to the moon. Fortunately Borders (which seems to read my mind… or at least carry books that have recently been mentioned on NPR or are about something with an anniversary divisible by ten approaching) had a table set up right by the door. So I bought Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael Neufeld to read this summer.

Anyone else have any nerdy plans to celebrate 40 years? I might also have a party and watch The Right Stuff with some friends.