Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I sometimes find, when talking to my contemporaries, that some of what has become my personal vernacular over the years refers to things that aren’t really part of the common & general knowledge, for one reason or another.

One such term is the “Rube Goldberg machine“–I’d say that less than 10% of the people who I drop that term around in Real World conversation¹ have any idea what I’m talking about.

This was recently brought to mind in some discussions of one of the OK Go videos–I found myself explaining the Rube Goldberg reference a lot.

If it comes up again, instead of pointing people at the Wikipedia entry, I shall instead point them to the recent Golden Age Comic Book Stories entry which has lots of examples of Goldberg comics–including some from the Stupid Questions series, and some of the classic machines.

Like this one:

1. As opposed to my online associates, who tend to have a more eclectic pool of general knowledge.(back)

I was just having a conversation on Friday with someone about a bunch of Google employees who had ordered up a ridiculous amount of silly putty so they could do an experiment with dropping it from a great height. As someone educated in a faculty of engineering, this made tremendous sense to me: I’ve done my own experiments with various brands of superballs to determine the height at which they cease to bounce back and instead more-or-less turn to dust on impact¹, and perhaps the less said about the “end of the week cafeteria jello drop” experiments the better.

But, those Googlers have nothing on the groups of mostly-German-but-hey-England-and-France-also-get-a-look-in researchers who recently performed the mother of all “drop it from a great height” experiments.

First of all, it turns out that ZARM has a 150m tower built expressly for researching dropping things. Right there we’re into awesome.

Second of all, though, is what they dropped. Their drop capsule was a Bose-Einstein condensate produced by cooling a gas of rubidium atoms to nine billionths of a degree above absolute zero. (Don’t worry, they aren’t going to splat it, at the bottom of the drop is an eight-meter-deep pile of polystyrene balls breaks the capsule’s fall.)

Now, they will tell you that there are very important and serious reasons for doing this, like these:

The experiment could lay the groundwork for BEC experiments in the weightless environment of space, where the quantum wave nature of the condensates might be used to create ultrasensitive matter interferometers, in much the same way that atoms are already used in such devices to probe minute physical effects. In the optical realm, interferometry usually relies on lasers; BECs are often compared to lasers in the way that they each represent a coherent collection of quantum objects—photons for lasers, atoms for BECs. Interferometers based on BECs could one day reach orbit to probe the intricacies of spacetime curvature predicted by general relativity and perhaps shed some light on the interface between quantum mechanics and gravity.

(That’s from the Scientific American quick writeup. Those with journal access can read the paper itself wherein reasons include “During the expansion over 1 second, the atoms form a giant coherent matter wave that is delocalized on a millimeter scale, which represents a promising source for matter-wave interferometry to test the universality of free fall with quantum matter.” Admit it, you wish you had a job that allowed you to say “a giant coherent matter waye” as part of your working routine.)

Those are all good and valid reasons for researching Bose-Einstein condensates in microgravity, but let’s admit it–the biggest reason to drop a ball of super-cooled rubidium down a forty story shaft is because you can.

1. Hotels build on the “rooms around the perimeter of a large open atrium” plan are excellent for this–a quality superball dropped from the 8th floor can easily make it back up as high as the 5th floor.(back)

And a tip of the hat to my pal Ms. Kira for putting me onto this artist and this tune–I am unsure how I’ve managed to not hear of this guy before, but some money will be changing hands very shortly, I assure you.

Yeah, I can add that to my “drinking songs”¹ playlist along with Dave van Ronk’s Last Call, Moxy Fruvous’ Drinking Song, Rob Lute’s Alcohol, Rob Szabo’s We’re All Alcoholics, and… well, lots of others.

This tune puts me in mind of my old pal Chef Paul, and many nights out late with the OEP gang, back in the day.

1. The quotes are part of the title: my “‘drinking songs’ playlist” is very different from my “drinking songs playlist”.(back)

When we are surprised by a particular outcome or event, we should consciously acknowledge that there must be a gap between our perception and reality. A surprise should be a signal inviting us to realign our intuition and our thinking so that they conform to actuality. One of the life lessons that mathematical thinking offers us is that we should always reexamine a surprising situation from various angles and points of view until that surprising feeling is replaced by a rock-solid intuitive understanding of the truth.

—from Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird.

As a picky and pedantic point I’d argue that “the truth” there in the last line is a problematic phrasing–I know what they’re getting at, obviously, but the point here is that the surprise is an invitation to move to a more useful paradigm, which is not necessarily the same thing as moving to, or even toward, The Truth.

Still, that’s a lovely paragraph, and I was quite pleased to hit in the middle of a work of popularization.

If I’m translating this French news story correctly, then the BQ thinks they can get Harper charged with obstruction of justice, an offence that could carry a 10 year jail sentence.

I’m not holding my breath, but I am crossing my fingers.

Le Bloc québécois estime que le premier ministre Stephen Harper pourrait être passible de 10 ans de prison. Selon la députée Carole Freeman, en donnant ordre à son directeur des communications, Dimitri Soudas, de ne pas comparaître en comité parlementaire, le premier ministre s’est peut-être rendu coupable d’entrave à la justice.

Yes, we’re all supposed to be much more interested in the oil spill at the moment, but we still remember that whole huge financial crisis right?

If so, then you will want to read Jeff Madrick’s review of Michael Lewis‘ new book The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine.

It’s the best kind of review–it not only gives you a sense of why you would want to read the book, it also places the book in a context, and it functions as one of the better articles on the entire mess I’ve read.

I’ll be getting Lewis’ book, and I’ll comment on it when I read it. In the mean time I suggest you read the article. (And right after I finish posting this, I’m going to go read the online excerpt from Lewis’ book.)

Here’s one bit I quite liked:

But Goldman actually transferred its obligations to naive traders at AIG, the insurance giant, by buying insurance far more cheaply from them to cover Goldman’s liability on the insurance it sold to Burry. As noted, it charged Burry 2.5 percent a year for insurance on the triple-B bonds, but it packaged most of those triple-B bonds into CDOs, turning them into triple-A securities. It then bought, according to Lewis, insurance from AIG on the supposedly less risky tranches for only 0.12 percent, or 12 cents per $100 of bond.

Yeah, there’s a way to make money–sell at $2.50/$100 what you’re buying at $0.12/$100. That’s a bit of a profit margin, for sure.

And here’s a slightly longer quotation to show you what I mean about the review putting the book in a critical context:

Had CDOs been better understood and regulated, the extent of financial collapse would have been mitigated. Had credit default swaps been traded in plain sight and the counterparties like AIG been forced to put up capital, the crisis would have been far less costly. Had the conflicts of interest of credit ratings agencies been dealt with, the tranche system would not have been so abused.

In their new book, Crisis Economics, Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm would require that all derivatives, such as credit default swaps, be traded openly. They would consider prohibiting CDOs altogether on grounds that these derivatives are far too risky and complex. They would demand that investors pool funds to finance credit-rating agencies, removing the major conflicts of interest that derive from issuers paying for their ratings. They would also break up Goldman Sachs and the other big banks into relatively small pieces.

By comparison, the current finance reform legislation before Congress may well turn out to be tame. The provisions of the bill that is passed will probably provide for only a minor breakup of the banks and they may, for example, allow some derivatives not to be listed publicly. Moreover, the bill doesn’t adequately address the conflicts of interest and market-rigging that have discredited the ratings agencies.

A few years back, I posted some comments about a “great books in genre” list. One of the comments had to do with the lack of female writers on the list, and I tossed out 20 examples of great genre books by women.

Sandra MacDonald has taken that kind of effort to a whole new level, creating a periodic table of fabulous women writers in genre over the last 75 years. It’s kind of a cross-promotion for her new book, but it’s a pretty impressive thing in its own right. (And nice that she left three spaces for adding more, since my list of 20 includes three authors that aren’t on her list).

And, I see on my pal Gwenda’s blog (among others), that it’s become one of those “what have you read” memes. Since I was bugging Gwenda about her picks, I guess it’s only fair that I put mine out there too.

Following the rules, I’ve bolded the ones I own books by, italicized the women I’ve read something by, and starred those I’m unfamiliar with. For the editors, I’m assuming this means owning books they’ve edited, reading work they’ve edited, etc. I guess that means plain text is people I’ve heard of, but not read. As usual, I’ve also added some comments of my own. Results after the jump, in the interest of attention conservation.

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And now, for your amusement, bogglement, edification, and education, a selection of wildly disparate YouTube videos that caught my attention over the last few days.

First, from the category of absolutely appropriate pairings and the unlikely beauty where it’s not expected, we’ve got Tom Waits doing a reading of a Bukowski poem:

Secondly, from the world of cool ideas that are really pretty damn depressing if you think about them, I’ve got this clip of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about why we might not be as smart as we think we are, and the possibility that we might just be too dumb as a species to understand the universe:

I’d love to see Dr. Tyson sit down over a beer with (Dr.) Peter Watts and talk about some of the intelligence/consciousness stuff from Watts’ book Blindsight.

(That clip, by the way, is from the end of Cosmic Quandries, and the whole program is on YouTube–it’s a fun 90 minutes, if you have them to kill.)

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve paid attention to this blog over the years, you’ll have clued in to the fact that I quite like the occasional malted beverage, and that I strongly prefer the black, opaque ones to the ones I tend to disdainfully dismiss as “see-through beer”.

I may also have mentioned over the years that I tend to prefer stouts in the 4-7% a.b.v range, although for certain particularly well-crafted imperial stouts and strong porters (and, of course, Unibroue products) I have enjoyed things up to around the 9% range.

Anything above that, I tend to think of as a stunt beer–you might drink some once, just to say you did, but they tend not to be delightful taste experiences, at least to my palette.

Frankly, once you qualify as “malt liquor”, the odds are quite good I’m going to think you taste like a particularly poor hooch, not a particularly bold beer.

However, the lure of the occasional stunt beer still remains, and there’s always the possibility that a particularly talented brewmeister might craft something worth drinking at the higher alcohol levels…

But, when we jump into ranges higher than 40%, and are racing to 50%, then I’m fair certain this is a “because it’s there” project, and not a “for the beauty of the view from the peak” one.

The story, though, of the way this “extreme beer” race developed, and continues to develop, is pretty interesting though–especially the UK-vs-Germany aspect of it.

The Gizmag folks have a pretty lengthy writeup on the whole thing that you might find interesting, even if–like me–you think that freezing is a kind of distillation, and hence the product is not-really-beer, and like me you have no intention of trying to drink a bottle of the stuff.

The strongest beer in history had a 27% alcohol content in January 2009. By December, the record had risen to nearly 40% alcohol by volume – a 50% rise in potency in 12 months, despite 10,000 years of history.

“I don’t think 45% is the limit for alcohol content, though I suspect that once we get to 50% we may begin to find issues with the drinkability and taste – it’s uncharted territory. I am confident we can get to 50% with all the right qualities. After that, we’ll see. Also if we go much higher, we might be getting only 40 to 60 bottles from an entire batch. It’s not about the money – like people chasing any record, I just want to see what the limit can be.”

On a different axis of extreme–this time age, not strength–I should also note that the writeup referenced above lead me to information about Sumerian poetry and the history of recorded beer recipes.

I was quite cheered to read the nearly 4000 year old Sumerian beer recipe embedded in a poem, and to read that the Anchor guys actually brewed some of this. There’s an extreme beer I would try–hell, I tried the ‘Phrygian cocktail‘, and this is somewhat in the same line.

Today I ran into (over at PSFK) another extremely well-designed¹ infographic that puts the current oil spill into context in a different way…

Of course, this doesn’t really make me feel any better. Criminal charges might, though. Or I could find some way to help.

1. The designer’s site is worth a peek as well.(back)

There is little I could say to add anything to the ongoing discussion around the horrible mess in the Gulf of Mexico–other than, perhaps, to point out that if BP had been required to have relief wells in place more-or-less immediately (as Canada requires) this problem would be resolved already. Those kinds of comments, though, don’t help resolve the current problem; they just suggest things we can do to prevent this happening again.

I can, though, point out a few things that might help people really understand the magnitude of the spill–when you start talking about millions of gallons, in the context of an entire ocean, it’s hard to picture it. And when it’s all very far away, it’s easy to ignore it.

For most people, looking at something like this doesn’t really help you understand the magnitude of the problem:

So let’s try to first put the size of the problem in context: the people at IfItWasMyHome.com¹ have whipped up a little Google Maps application to allow you to overlay the current size of the spill on a map of anywhere, which can help make the size of it more real.

So, if the spill were happening at my house, it would cover an area that would encompass all of the most populous parts of southern Ontario, and would also stretch into the US, essentially covering Buffalo and a good chunk of the U.P.

More disturbing is looking at what this spill would look like if it were happening in my former home of Halifax–the spill covers an area on the same scale as the entire province of Nova Scotia…

I’ll put a couple more examples after the jump, for places where I know some people who will read this are.

Maybe that’s helped with understanding the size of the spill, but what about the “if I’m not in Louisiana why should I care?” problem. We could discuss the ecological impacts, and the interconnectedness of ecology, etc. Or we could look at more direct personal reasons for people to care.

While the major media is just starting to really get interested in questions like “how will this effect Florida“, I think that’s actually a bit near-sighted, and I’ll show you a single image which I think explains why quite concisely–visualization to the rescue again:

There’s another way visualization can help people understand the problem, of course, and it’s both simple and effective, and speaks perfectly well for itself.

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1. Yes, I am exactly enough of a language pedant to be disappointed that it isn’t IfItWereMyHome.com. I can live with myself.(back)

It’s not often a YouTube video grabs my attention for the better part of an hour, but this did. I did want them to be a little less polite at a couple of points, but still utterly compelling for me.