Esquire's - 79 Things We Can Agree On

Esquire's magazines 79 things we can agree on.:

No. 6 - Bono should sing more, talk less, and never write at all
No. 10 - The Obama presidency has been a disappointment for everyone involved
No. 23 - The US needs an active manned space program.  With its own spaceships.
No. 79 - Things are not so bad...

Scientific Method

In Jonah Lehrer's New Yorker Article (12/13/10 edition), he writes an interesting article on how "well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth..." Drugs losing their effectiveness, wonder if it could be related to IQ testing which suggests that people in 1920s would be considered stupid today (the Flynn Effect)? Frightening thought if the rigors of the scientific method suddenly can't be trusted!

In a 1990 (Johnathon Schooler) study it was found by writing down something it actually decreased ones ability to better remember...it was called verbal overshadowing. Following this study many other areas showed that by putting things into words led to a decrease (so by me writing this blog summary I am effectively going to forget I ever read this...) in the ability not remember things.. Then of course the author of the verbal overshadowing article started relooking at some of his results and as time went by the results to his big ideal started growing weaker.

One of the possible reasons for this decline is simple, "regression to the mean." As more studies are done the sample size increases and thus something that was significant gets averaged out. Another interesting note is that when new exciting research is published articles that tend to buy into this new research are published whereas the null results tend not to get published. This publication bias tends to make people believe the results (dead birds in Arkansas anyone?). Of course bottom line is that often researchers want to be right...their careers and money is often dependent so initial successes are held onto to continue to prove a theory...it is human nature to want to be right (autism and vaccines? amazing how a meme will just hang around). Finally an interesting test was done on trying to replicate an experiment in three different locations. The researcher tried to control every variable and yet the results were vastly different at each site. The implication of this is that often times results and data "are nothing but noise" And what gets published or notice? Yup dramatic results that are statistically significant and unexpected.

Magazine Tid-Bits

Nintendo is made up of three kanji characters, from nin, ten, and do, which means "leave luck to heaven"

Esquire 1-11 Issue - Collected Wisdom of Others - Things to Live By

"Never eat at a chain restaurant while on vacation"

"Always think fastball. You can adjust to an off speed pitch"

Magazine Stories

Wired - November 2009

Clive Thompson's Flight of Fancy column:

Clive's piece stresses the fact that a little day dreaming might actually be good for productivity. A 2007 study showed that minds drift away from our tasks one-third of the time. Daydreaming can be useful because when the mind drifts the temporal lobe, which processes long term memories become busy thus when you daydream your brain could be doing data storage work...writing to your hard drive! Also a wandering mind utilizes the prefrontal cortex which is involved in problem solving. Thus allowing your mind to wander from one problem to something else might help to highlight a solution to your original problem(?). In the end Clive stresses the possible importance of allowing this drift for increased productivity...heck considering how I work I do this anyway ;-)

Henri Poincaré once said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling."

Scientific America

Read some articles on the creation of the universe which made me wonder...

- Could we not be a universe created by someone's particle accelerator?

- If the universe expands and we are looking back into history with more powerful telescopes then why can we still look? doesn't it just disappear?

- And another thing why dinosaurs? In the evolutionary cycle why did we go towards these mammoth creatures?

New Yorker

Cocksure by Malcolm Gladwell

An interesting article about the fall of Bear Stearns (click here to see an even more over the top article in Rolling Stones). Malcolm restates the standard thoughts about the financial crisis that could have either been a structural failure meaning regulations didn't work or incompetence meaning investors had no clue in what they were doing with derivatives. Malcolm reviews his possible third reason which was more psychological.

"As novices, we don't trust our judgement. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally , we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there's nothing we can't master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgements, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we're involved with something of great personal importance."

Wall Streeet is a confidence game. Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. Malcolm rounds out his story with the tale of Bridge playing...indicating that although Bridge is similar to Wall Street is not quite the same because it is limited in scope with a definite winner and loser depending on how you play by the rules. Wall Street on the other hand is open ended and overconfidence can only take you so far before others see through the B.S.

Good article although in the big scheme of things it is amazing how confident we all need to be to keep this country's engine churning...how a very few egotistical maniacs control our well being...

Magazine Spew

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17douthat.html?ref=opinion

With all the debate about health care I thought this editorial was good. I have nothing against old people...they certainly deserve what they have earned but has the greatest generation become the Selfish Generation. Medicare is great but at what expense are we losing the future generation. Everyone deserves health care or at least the opportunity to have it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16FOB-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine

Again why has our country gotten so fat? Think if we fix the fat problem we could fix the cost of healthcare? Only going to get worse...maybe $8 gas isn't too bad make people walk more...you know healthcare, fat problems, and recession...has America become too entitled...have we forgotten what it means to work hard? Do we care? Or does what Britney latest clothing trend mean more to us then trying to fix anything. I we wonder why Empires crumble...they get complacent (and fat!).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16beatles-t.html?ref=magazine

Fascinating article...

Magazine Updates

Teller from Penn and Teller actually was a co-author on a published paper. How are brains want to be tricked...

Interesting tale of a professor who dabbles in a bit of everything. Craziest patients he deals with our those who don't like a limb and want to have it chopped off!

Time Magazine - List Issue

Time Magazine - 12/22/08 Issue

Top 10 Discoveries

8.  Red Sox jersey in Yankee Stadium concrete

10 Most Memorable Olympic Moments

1. Phelps ' Photo Finish (2 cm  |--------------| )

My Personal Top 10 of 2008 (not in any order)

10.  Yuengling and Harpoon

9.  Guitar Hero

8.  X-men:  Messiah Complex

7.  Lego Force Unleashed Rogue Shadow

6.  Iron Man

5.  Book of the Year:  Laika - Nick Abadzis and Hilary Sycamore

4.  Music Group I Liked This Year - Placebo

3.  Baseball Research - Number of Hits to Score Run

2.  iTouch

1.  Fresh Maine Lobster

Magazine Wrap Up

Just some quotes that were MAKE magazine attributed to Picasso(?)

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Action is the foundational key to all success. (or as Mike Shanahan says "Preparation is the foundation of Success)

All creative endeavor begins with just fooling around, not doing much of anything, just noodling and letting the different parts of your mind talk to each other. Did you follow your weird -- Cory Doctorow

Magazine Updates

Wired

Want to define a word then go www.thebigwordproject.com

What happened to ribofunk

What is Twine?

Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely because of the nickel in the hybrid's battery.

AC is inherently more efficient than heating (it takes less energy to cool a given space by 1 degree than to heat it by the same amount).

Wizard

How the hell is Cyclops rated the number 106th superhero of all time.  He is the heart and soul of the X-Team.

New Yorker

Did you know that Mark Twain visited Israel (actually Palestine) back in 1867?

Our old friend, Malcolm Gladwell, has an interesting article on big ideas.  Overall a decent article but nothing really show stopping.  Did enjoy the section on the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery.  It would seem that lots of things were discovered by two separate groups or individuals right around the same time (Newton and Leibnitz and calculus).  Because of the multiples it would seem that scientific discoveries must in some sense be inevitable(?)

Article goes on to recount a physicist who reads medical journals for fun and came across an article on cancer cells and how at one time are so plentiful in the body.  In addition to being plentiful it would appear they travel through the blood stream quite a many time before ever settling in and actually causing cancer!  As the physicist said, Doctors are terrible at math!  Anyway interesting article.

Magazine Wrap Up

New Yorker - April 14, 2008

Royall Tyler's 1797 novel "The Algerine Captive" The underlying article was to discuss religion and the founding fathers but it had an interesting lead in concerning this novel. The novel basically has a christian and muslim squaring off with the Christian trying to win his freedom. One of the muslim thoughts was you (the Christian) had inherited your beliefs but had never
examined them. Wonder if this is on gutenberg?

New Yorker - March 31, 2008

The Toven Specimen - an aluminum penny from 1974.

Another book review on David Hajdu's book "The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America" Obviously being a comic book reader it is of interest how comic books have declined based on a 1954 congressional hearing. The hearing was investigating the causes of juvenile delinquency. According to a Gallup poll taken in November 1954, 70% of
Americans believed comic books were a cause of juvenile crime! Throw in TV and that was the death kneel for comics.

Wired

On moments of inspiration, Quantum Electrodynamics 1946 Richard Feynman, " I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. I went to work out equations of wobbles...Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in
relativity.." Inspiration can come from anywhere!

New Yorker Article - Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life

Magic - In its simplest form it is simply slight of hand tricks using playing cards and at its apex is making the Statue of Liberty disappear. Why does it fascinate? From Houdini, Henning, Copperfield, and the latest Blaine, it seems that a mantle of a generation magician is passed along. David Copperfield's warehouse, Genii and antimony (both magic magazines), S.W. Erdnase (mystery book of magic), and million seconds (5.7 days) all is found within the article. An interesting article nothing real revelatory but a good basic article on being a magician. Blaine's latest trick is to stay awake for a million seconds. That should be interesting. Anyway fascinating!

Magazine Update

New Yorker

With the incessant talk about the downing economy is it any wonder it doesn't become a self fulling prophecy. Anyway in the intro to the magazine it discusses an economist Hyman Minsky who held that Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take too much risk which generated ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. His "financial-instability hypothesis" states that there are 5 stages of the credit cycle: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking,and panic. Displacement is simply a new invention that causes excitement (internet, low interest rates), which leads to a boom (money flows), then euphoria which causes conservative businesses to lend credit to anything hoping to make a killing, then these same businesses start to sell-off knowing the good times won't last, and finally panic hits when (tipping point anyone?) it hits the little people (and usually too late).

Wired

What's Inside: Featuring PowerBar Protein Plus - High Fructose Corn Syrup (American's consumed 58 pounds of this sweetener) eeks!

Boring article on stuff that seems to suck...but I prefer the little sidebar on 34 things that don't suck (things I agree to): farmer's markets, tap water, pocketknives, DVRs, thumb drives, kites, netflix, guitar hero, bicycles, velcro, and flip-flops. And I include M&Ms, iPods, lava lamps, books, comic books, and running shoes.

Interesting aside in the iPhone article. Buried in the middle of the article was a reference of Apple's interest in putting forth a tablet computer. Lots of references that this would be the new thing...I wonder.

Magazine Wrap Up

Wired

Michel Gondry, frankly I had never heard of him...but then Jack Black's new movie about video store clerks remaking famous movies came about and...guess who the director is? Up to this point his best known movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I thought was good but kind of in that David Lynch style of moviemaking (i.e. more impressed the movie actually got made because frankly it would have taken a leap of faith for anyone to actually green light...wouldn't you'd think someone would have to understand it before letting it go forward...all in the name art!)

42 Entertainment? Again anyone? Well if you remember the internet search for interesting clues for the movie AI then you've got the organization. The latest has been Nine Inch Nails internet advertising. Mysterious flashdrives lying in bathrooms reviewing a new song which ends with crickets which when analyzed by a spectrograph reveals a phone number in Cleveland which leads to a phone message which led to a website and etc etc... Also the whole perplex city cards indicated the potential for world wide games. Exciting but unfortunately most of us have lives...

Where does $15.99 go when purchasing a CD?

0.16 Musician's Unions

0.80 Packaging/Manufacturing

0.80 Publishing Royalties

0.80 Retail Profit

0.96 Distribution

1.60 Artist's Royalties

1.76 Label Profit

2.40 Marketing/Promotion

2.88 Label Overhead

3.84 Retail Overhead

And iTunes - $9.99

1.40 Artist

3.00 iTunes

5.59 Label

Interesting infoporn article on nutritional values

Sky and Telescope

The prime meridian was established in 1850 by George Airy and then in October 1884 at conference in Washington DC declared that this would "the " meridian.  Didn't realize it took so long to make it official.  At one time, Paris tried to become this meridian and years before India had established a 0 degrees longitude.

New Yorker

In depth article on the head of the US intelligence service.  Seems a decent type of guy but can you really honestly feel safe about someone running this organization who grew up in the Cold War era and probably still can't figure out how to turn off the ringer on his cell phone?  Problem with government jobs and seniority...by the time these guys get into the position to run an organization they don't know beans about what is going on in the world around them.  I mean this article discusses a Disney Imagineer coming in and designing the Natonal Counter Terrorism Center.  They talk about Intellipedia (a la wikipedia) , A-Space (social network), and looking into virtual worlds???  Good golly have they forgotten the underlying basis of intelligence...i.e. local gossip, learning foreign languages, integreting into societies.  Ughhhh

The one thing interesting that I didn't know about was a Women's school in DC during WWII that operated the machinery that deciphered German naval code...for the story here

/div>

Magazine Wrap-Up

The New Yorker

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an article entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." The basis of the article is that US really has no strategic interest in supporting Israel. Obviously it is more in depth than that but the purpose of the paper was to stimulate discussion about the lobbying power of Israel and the foreign policy that the US follows in the Middle East (and whether there is a link). The authors, both respected political scientist, have been labeled anti-Semite in some corners which then usually leads to an end of the discussion which is too bad. It is always easy to fall into the trap that there is this big Israeli conspiracy and that the world is secretly being manipulated. Unfortunately too many people assume that this is partially true which is plain ignorant. My opinion is too much of our foreign policy (and for that matter, most of the current policy, is driven too much by lobbying and money. Is it too much to ask for our elected officials to be honorable and do what's right? Am I just naive to think that this is how it as always been and that the dollars changing hands today is just bigger? The sad part of it all is that foreign policy decisions, if they are being swayed by lobbying, are causing deaths to American soldiers and disgrace to our country. I would appreciate a healthy dialogue regardless of labels and I applaud Mearsheimer and Walt for at least trying. Our Middle East policy is in tatters as it is, it would be nice to know that policy is being laid out to benefit our country and ultimately the world.

David Owen puts together a nice article on light pollution. Being a fan of the night sky and seeing the sky from atop Mt Kilimanjaro, I can attest that there is a lot that we don't see! There is a group, International Dark-Sky Association, whose goal is to reduce the night, light signature. I have always thought that the incessant need to put up street lights and light everything up is silly and expensive. Image how much towns could save by making it dark again? The article moved beyond the night sky and launched into a discussion on circadian rhythms. Pervasive artificial illumination has begun to possibly interfere with our biological machinery. One such link is cancer, specifically breast cancer in women in the industrialized world. A researcher on a whim studied the link of nighttime employment and found a strong association between working at night and an increased risk of cancer. In addition migrating birds can be fooled by artificial lights. Finally the need for lighting is supposedly to deter thieves but because of the common place night time light criminals really don't stand out and basically fade into the background. Know imagine if it was dark a flashlight was needed? Interesting article.

Wired

On to a later topic: Standards as in what makes a kilogram, a meter, or a second? Well Wired is telling us:

Kilogram: 215 x 10^23 silicon atoms
Meter: Distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds
Second: The time it takes for cesium-133 atom to cycle 9,192,631,770 times between to specific quantum states

Make Magazine Volume 9

The "Fringe" Issue...decent nothing spectacular.

Interesting contraption called a vortex tube...by putting compressed air in the middle you get hot air out one end and cold air out the other...click here

Interesting thought on patents...instead of worrying about patents and secrecy...become known or what you do. Do it well and tell people about it, even telling them how to do it. The reality is that the invention or the idea is a tiny fraction of the work to be done. The real tradeable value is your capacity to implement the ideal.

Can random numbers converge during world wide changing events? see here OK I admit kind of wacky but what the heck, stranger things are looked into!

Pinhold Camera - love this picture -