Curious Ellie's Annex

Pi Day 2xxx

 

I once had an econometrics professor who noted that the repetition of mathematical constants like pi and Euler's number across different disciplines was the best argument for the world being created by intelligent design. Just as pi has a place in Einstein's equation, so too it has a place in the normal probability density function: f(x) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}}\; e^{-x^2/2}. Is it more impressive to find a fully operational watch in a field or pi in equations describing seemingly unrelated phenomena?

—via Pi Day 2014 at Right Reason blog

I think Harrison Searles is a (perhaps nascent?) foreign trade economist. I noticed an atypical blog entry in which he quotes a nice passage from Sean Carroll's Bad Astronomy. He then makes a few observations of his own, which I re-blogged above.

I don't find it especially surprising that pi or e or any transcendental numbers or physical constants pop up all over the place... not to dismiss Harrison's professor's thoughts about intelligent design. Instead, I was reassured that physics hadn't gone widely post-modern as of 2014, when Harrison wrote his post.

POMO Physics: Derrida fhtagn Iä Iä

By widely or maybe wildly, I mean post-modern physics as an accepted or even likely possibility, as described by academic physicists in a YouTube video now, in 2023. Sentiments were echoed by the comments.

Nihilism?

The video in question didn't merely suggest, but strongly argued in favor of the idea that the universe only exists in the minds of humans. Yes, all that physics and math (not to mention every other human accomplishment, but they don't even mention THAT!) exist only because we observe them to exist. This reminds me, uncomfortably, of William Gibson's definition of cyberspace, "a mutually consensual hallucination." And if it were true, and all humans were to die tomorrow, then would all of physics cease to exist? If so, it is too much relativism for me!

See what you think. I continue to be cynical of most things pertaining to woo physics, following the IN-famous creation of a black hole of the wormhole variety in a lab travesty a few months ago.

The title of the talk is "There are no physical laws in the world". It is recent, taped in April 2023, not on Pi Day 2014!  Harrison hasn't updated his blog since 2017 but, happily, pi hasn't changed. Here's the video's introduction:

The Nobel Prize in physics in 2022 went to the scientists who, for over 40 years, have carried out experiments indicating that physical entities do not have standalone existence [only observational]. This result is extraordinarily relevant to our understanding of reality... In collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences [home to one of the 2022 Nobel prize winners], organized a conference discussing the implications of this result.

In this video, Dr. Daniele Oriti, from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, defends the view that physical laws are epistemic in nature, having no independent ontological status.

 

It is 42 minutes in length. I couldn't take anymore after the 10 minute mark.

I voiced my opinion in the comments: Physical laws DO have independent ontological status! If they didn't, we wouldn't be watching this video. This is upsetting and I can't watch any more of it. I don't like post-modernist physics! It is like saying,

Map Projection Ontology

What term would be appropriate for someone with a secret fondness for naming and classification?

Closet Taxonomist

I confess, I am a closet taxonomist at heart, though not of the biological variety per se.

• Axioms have uber status. They are the nearest thing to certainty in a world of subjective reality. Axioms are a great comfort to me in times of uncertainty.
• Definitions follow quickly on the heels of axioms. They are trusted friends.
• Hypotheses, theorems and proofs contribute to the construction of a splendid edifice going forward.
• Corollaries and lemmas might or might not follow in due time.

Name ALL the Things!

Given my way of seeing the world, I continue to have high hopes for the semantic web. It remains to be seen how well that will work. It might though, given sufficient time and patience.

Map types and usage

During the course of my recent internet travels, I happened upon a near-comprehensive summary of every sort of map projection.

There are many varieties of maps, and a certain challenge in even figuring out how to classify them! This is further exacerbated by the enduring aspect of map-making and finding one's way, albeit with varying degrees of success, over the course of human history. The metaphorical aspect of maps are a further complication. I will avoid mention of tertiary connotations, such as "guides for clean living" (or even not-so-clean living) or "maps for finding hidden treasure".

Orthogonal classification 

Any given projection may belong to more than one category

Cordiform projections:

The shape of maps is not constrained to rectangles, discs or ellipses. Some are not even convex, like the beautiful projections devised by Johann Stabius of Vienna, ca. 1500.

 

Stabius map: polar aspect

Branching taxonomy 

Maps resembling the tree and branch style of biological classification

Pseudo-conical projections

In the normal aspect for the artificial group of projections known as pseudo-conic, all parallels are circular arcs with a common central point; however, meridians are not constrained to be straight lines, in contrast to true conic projections. The concept is quite old and was used by Ptolemy.

 Heart-shaped maps are referred to as cardioform projections.

Leonardo da Vinci is credited with this four leaf clover shaped map, also known as an octant map as two clovers were required for each hemisphere, presumably north and south.

Triangle-based octant map projection

a Reuleaux triangle-based octant world map, ca. 1514 with gores, slice-like cuts that allowed the map to be laid flat [when not enclosing a three-dimensional object], arranged in separate, shamrock-like hemispheres, but omitting the graticule; the projection method can only be speculated.

Browse through the many map projections classified by geometry or common properties. Don't forget to bookmark the complete listing, with accompanying images and notations!

Confusion Rug

A 2002 design by Sofia, Bulgaria-based Pravdoliub Ivanov.

[via Jay Mug]

via www.bookofjoe.com

via jeffreine.typepad.com

I'm not certain that I understand the point of this, but I like the nice clean white rooms, the radiator and the older style telephone wiring. And I really like the pattern on the red rug!

I wonder how it is done...? Where is the rest of the red rug? Is it on the other side of the wall, like the small blue rug?

Of Course Google Is Biased

Okay, yes we know about this already! But Google search engine bias is inconsistent, based on some (admittedly) entirely anecdotal observations noted, Of Course Google Is Biased. 

 

The big problem with Google, however, is likely not political bias but financial bias. We don't pay Google for our results. We aren't really the customer. In Google's world -- and this is the same for social media as well -- we are the product. The customer is the vendor paying to find out about us, so they can sell to us more effectively.

Tires

No surprises here. If Google were unbiased, it would rank the auto enthusiast forums and Consumer Reports at the top of the first page of results. Those search results would be less biased than companies selling whatever tires that are overstocked.  Instead, the tire retailers are on top with only a few unbiased sources mid-page. 

 

Weight loss

Google search does seem to put independent sources first if querying "best ways to lose weight", Biased vendor links or miracle diets don't show up until the second page and on and on.

 

Politics!

If you search on just the names "Trump Clinton" you are overwhelmingly negative Trump stories except for those from Fox, which don't show up at all on the first page. 

However, we also know that Fox is one of the most powerful news organizations in America, so its stories should have shown up on the first page. If they don't appear, then what else from the conservative side are we missing?

Power versus profit

It appears that Google's bias is stronger politically than it is financially, because people don't like to look at information that disagrees with their world view. Were Google exclusively, or mostly, revenue-driven, it likely would just give me Fox results (still bias, but driven by the need for profit rather than a political agenda).

 

In the case of political power, profit seems to be secondary. This is especially bad because political news reporting is almost entirely delivered via the Internet. Other than for diminishing numbers of news publication subscribers, that news is accessed with Google search or ideologically similar Facebook.

 

Citizen's United for me not thee

 

Here's an example that I find amusing. Remember Citizen's United and how much Democrats hated it? They said they wanted to get the money out of politics. A curious thing happened shortly after the January 6 protest riot at the US capital. Many large corporate donors temporarily suspended their PACs (Political Action Committees) for ALL purposes, to both political parties. Democrats activists should have been ebullient, right? Nooo, not exactly. This caught me totally by surprise. Pauses in corporate PAC donations draws ire of Democrats! Emphasis mine:

...a spokesman for End Citizens United, a campaign finance overhaul group that urges candidates to reject donations from all corporate PACs, blasted companies that are suspending all their donations, regardless of political affiliation... End Citizens United on Thursday called on corporate donors to cut off funding specifically to the GOP House and Senate campaign arms as well as super PACs that support Republican congressional candidates.

They complained bitterly, saying that corporate contributions were necessary for good Democrats, but for bad Republicans!

 

Search and media bias redux

 

Google search bias is the same or worse now. What can be done about it? I don't know. When Democrats were not in charge, they clamored for regulation of Google. Now that they are back in power, they seem to have lost interest in anti-trust and other regulatory actions. Would Republicans be any better than Democrats,  at imposing a doctrine of fairness? I doubt it.

 

In many ways, we only have ourselves to blame. News media always had some degree of bias, but there were both professional journalism standards AND FCC imposed rules about equal time for diverse coverage. But the FCC decided that the Fairness and Zapple doctrines were unenforceable by 2010.  The New York Times became laughable as the paper of record a few years later.  No one, neither the leftists ("information wants to be free") nor the right-leaning libertarians ("copyright is theft") wanted paywalled online news websites. No one wanted to pay for music. Or movies. Or video games. Think of websites like Torrent Freak and Pirate Bay. Or Mike Masnick's TechDirt. 

 

Maybe... copying is theft after all

Recall that Google and Silicon Valley in general were very opposed to copyright protections. Software copyright was wildly abused by bad actors, which didn't help. Then there's open source software (OSS) and Richard Stallman's FOSS (free and open source software), both of which have much to recommend them. I am a statistician not a software developer, so I prefer (close sourced) licensed and well-documented SAS. I'm not a programmer though.

 

I scoffed at those who said, "I get my news for free on the Internet". I knew that nothing of value is free to produce other than copies of software. I have no suggestions about remedying the situation though, not now and not in 2010, when if first became clear where we were going.

Providence names intersection after HP Lovecraft

Couldn't they have found an intersection with non-Euclidean geometry?

via adamtbradley.typepad.com

Fine art and commercial design - then and now

Railroad company logos through time

The first North American railroads were built 50 years before the first railroad logo was trademarked. Today, as the result of mergers and bankruptcies there are only eleven Class I railroads operating in the United States and Canada.

via Railroad company logo design evolution by Christian Annyas

Amtrak

Amtrak's 1971 logo looks too chunky to me. It is dated, not modern, unlike when it was introduced.

 

1971

 The current Amtrak logo is sleek. It doesn't look out-of-date now.

Even after another 10 or 20 years go by, it might not be past its prime.

 

2000

 

 

 

Bangor and Aroostook

Newer designs are not necessarily better than their predecessors. Classic vintage logos can be more enduring than trendy looks that are strongly associated with styles from a particular time and place. This 1936 B&A logo (maybe signage?) was elegant.

 

1936

 

B&A transitioned to symbolic logos in 1973. Language-agnostic representation was considered cosmopolitan and more inclusive. This particular design, see below, attempts to capture the heightened environmental awareness and earth-friendly green messaging of the 1970s. Unfortunately, it is so minimalist that it is a better match for a water treatment facility than a railroad!

 

1973

CSX

Some things DO improve over time!

 

1986

 

CSX's 1986 logo only had the three letters C S X in black font on a white background. Around 2005, it was changed to a more lively version, while preserving the original typeface. The newer logo is bold and contemporary. I especially like that it is a compromise between realism and representation. The four rail car wheels are symbolic but clearly identifiable, with just enough lettering to reinforce CSX brand name recognition.

Evolution of pointillism

I am fond of pointillism. Pointillism was completely novel when it debuted in the final years of the 19th century in France. It was considered modern and scientific because of the precision that could be achieved. My favorite pointillist painting is the most well-known, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (1884 - 1886).

For anyone interested in pointillism, particularly in the evolution of Seurat's famous painting, the Art Institute of Chicago has a chronology and explanation page about La Grande Jatte. Seurat painted an Impressionist "first draft" of La Grande Jatte, two years prior to his famous pointillist version.

Pointillism without the paint

La Grande Jatte is amenable to further transformation. Nearly 100 years after Seurat completed his "final draft", La Grande Jatte accommodated the vision of another artist. Milton Glaser used a different technique, but preserved La Grande Jatte as representational rather than abstract art.

Milton Glaser after Seurat (1977) captured the essence of Seurat's pointillism, without using any paint at all!

Glaser replaces the original’s dots with Push Pin-style thin black lines and broad swaths of bright, flat color ...

Dots were removed, and lines took over. I like it, but I prefer Seurat's original.

Top 7 hedge fund edges that aren't

via blog.clarityspring.com

WE'RE DOCTORS. WE KNOW BIOTECH

“We’re geologists. We know mining”, “We’re engineers. We know technology”, etc.

This was prescient for May 2012. I've since read about an appalling fiduciary failure. A physician lost millions in public employee pension assets. He had just started as a portfolio manager for a biotech fund which was selected to manage a big chunk of that state employee retirement money.

The physician had no prior experience as an institutional money manager.

I wouldn't want a biotech portfolio manager as a medical care-giver either.

Will the Pentagon use a contractor to merge information networks?

I read an article the other day, Pentagon to merge information networks. The following section caught my eye in particular,

Defense Department leaders have decided that the best way to protect sensitive information from cybercriminals and internal leaks is to consolidate its 15,000 networks into a single “joint information environment.” JIE is a set of security protocols — which the Pentagon calls a single security architecture...Although the JIE is not a “program of record” with its own funding line, it will be financed under the Pentagon’s $23 billion cybersecurity budget. Leading the massive network integration effort is the Joint Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA].

                                                — via National Defense Magazine, 13 September 2013

It is good that DISA will serve as the Joint Information Environment (JIE) development hub, with associated accountability. However, I noticed that the head of DISA, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie D. Hawkins Jr., mentioned this:

To foil insider leaks, the JIE will track network activity using 'identity access management' technology.

I am familiar with a cloud services vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS), who uses the same terminology, "identity access management" or IAM. AWS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, the e-commerce retailer. 

FedRAMP

I do not know whether IAM is an Amazon.com trademark, i.e. if it is unique to AWS. I do know that Amazon was granted FedRAMP, a special government contracting credential, in May 2013.

FedRAMP is a is a cost-cutting initiative intended to do away with checking the safety of cloud services, if the products already have cleared the program’s boilerplate style security audit. It guarantees that a cloud service complies with U.S. laws for guarding federal information, but is not applicable to classified or high-security systems.

Outsourcing

In my opinion, something as vitally important as our national defense deserves to be handled internally, watched over by government employees and military servicemen whose loyalties and steadfastness is unwavering. Congress should put aside sufficient funds. I can't think of many other government initiatives more worthy of being done right! I truly hope that the new Joint Information Environment will be implemented by U.S. Department of Defense staff or civilian employees of the federal government, rather than being outsourced to Amazon Web Service's cloud.

 

Yes, it may be more costly, in the short term, but we can't have everything. We need to decrease dependency on contractors.

Update

On 6 June 2014, FedRAMP updated security controls to align with the updated security and privacy controls for Federal information systems and organizations, per NIST Special Publication 800-53.

Computing Reviews offers reviewer revue

Computing Reviews is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) publication review website. It isn't scholarly journal peer review, but rather, book reviews and critique of trends and new developments in computer science and computing applications.

Reviewer revue!

Computing Reviews runs a monthly series, Featured in Five. No, there's no singing or dancing, like a musical revue. The same five questions are asked of each month's featured reviewer, a "reviewer revue", so to speak. I recommend the series in general. Reviewers are computer science academicians or information technology professionals at various stages of their careers. The variation in answers to the same five questions* is fascinating.

My interest is in applied math, statistics and probability. One post dwelt on data analysis more than the rest, and caught my attention.

Big data and uncertainty

The following is an excerpt from the January 2013 post, for which Vladik Kreinovich was the featured reviewer.

Modern technology allows us to generate, store, and process huge amounts of data... big data can (and will) lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in science, engineering, medicine, and so on. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that all this data comes with uncertainty...

It is essential to gauge data accuracy. Until that is well understood and accounted for, big data will be of limited usefulness.

Bounded accuracy

Why is the accuracy associated with big data different, or more difficult, to study than "medium" or "small" data uncertainty?

ZeroCompute for solutionists

via blog.cyclecomputing.com

This was an April fool's day blog post!

Disclaimers aside, it is amusing yet informative. Cycle Computing succeeds in being light-hearted, whereas I must turn everything into a ponderous, weighty object lesson :o)

ZeroCompute™ : Eco-conscious, Instantaneous Utility Supercomputing

...by simply not running the science on any cores, we remove the computational challenges and data transfer bottlenecks of today’s BigCompute and BigData workloads. Because ZeroCompute "completes" the floating point in the nanosecond it takes the software to decide not to run anything... peak floating-point performance exceeds one billion petaflops, at a cost of $0.00 per flop.

The only way to avoid all negative consequences is to avoid any action, any innovation at all. That is associated with negative consequences as well. The numerous, vocal opponents of nuclear energy and modern agricultural methods would be wiser and more compassionate if they were to take such ideas to heart.

Vaccination to prevent the childhood diseases of diptheria, whooping cough, mumps and measles, as well as adult diseases such as tetanus, typhoid, rubella, polio and smallpox are a different matter. They are an unmitigated public good. There are no concomitant hazards such as ionizing radiation exposure nor GMO innuendo. Our brave, heroic, brilliant though now-deceased Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would have been able to get through to the anti-vaccination evil-do'er groups, if anyone could.