One day I will write all those posts that I’ve been intending on writing. One day… until then:
Nabokov’s butterfly theory is found to be correct.
Why you should encrypt your smartphone.
You should now call him Doctor Grover. No, not him, silly. Him.
MIT’s 150th year anniversary PR blitz has an article on Wiener.
From the tail end of The Human Use of Human Beings:
Our papers have been making a great deal of American “know-how” ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know-what” by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. I can distinguish between the two by an example. Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player-piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not correspond to any particular interest in the music played by the piano but rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism. For this gentleman, the player-piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving some inventor the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music. This is an estimable attitude in a second-year high-school student. How estimable it is in one of those on whom the whole cultural future of the country depends, I leave to the reader.
Oh, snap!
More seriously though, this definitely feels like a criticism of the era in which Wiener was writing. Game theory was very fashionable, and the pseudo-mathematization of Cold War geopolitics definitely gave him pause. I don’t think Wiener would agree current railing against “wasteful” government spending on “useless” research projects, despite his obvious dislike of vanity research and his disappointment with this science of his day. It was important to him that scientists remained free from political pressures and constraints to conform to a government agenda (as described in A Fragile Power).
From Paul Ellis‘s The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes:
THe post hoc analysis of nonsignificant results is sometime painted as controversial (e.g. Nakagawa and Foster 2004), but it really isn’t. It is just wrong. There are two small technical reasons and one gigantic reason why the post hoc analysis of observed power is an exercise in futility…
… and then some more stuff on p-values and the like. Somehow, reading applied statistics books make my brain glaze over, but at least you get a giggle now and then.
Last week I saw this in the library at UCSD:
One of these things does not belong in QA279
Perhaps the IEEE read my earlier complaints:
Although it does have that “winner of contest holding a giant check” look to it…
He was hitting the haterade pretty hard:
The vacuum tube was first used to replace previously existing components of long-distance telephone circuits and wireless telegraphy. It was not long, however, before it became clear that the radio-telephone had achieved the stature of the radio-telegraph, and that broadcasting was possible. Let not the fact that this great triumph of invention has largely been given over to the soap-opera and the hillbilly singer blind one to the excellent work that was done in developing it, and to the great civilizing possibilities which have been perverted into a national medicine-show.
A friend posted an article from the New York Times on Kura, a sushi chain that uses sushi-making robots. This of course got me thinking about how I like to sit at the sushi bar and have a conversation with the sushi chef. How might that go with a robot? I fired up ELIZA (M-x doctor) and…
I am the sushi chef. Please, describe your problems.
Hello
Can you elaborate on that?
Good evening
Why do you say good evening?
I would like to have some sushi for dinner.
What makes you believe i might want to have this sushi dinner?
I was hoping you would make me a sushi dinner.
Earlier you said
i would like to have this sushi dinner?
Yes.
I would appreciate it if you would continue.
What would you recommend?
Maybe your life has something to do with this.
It’s true, I am often indecisive. I really love sushi!
Perhaps you could tell me about your relationship with sushi.
Well, it started when I was in high school.
Talk about your school.
I took four years of Japanese. Koukou de yon nen kurai benkyou
shimashita. Demo zen zen wasuremashita.
Is it because of your plans that you say demo zen zen wasuremashita?
Well, I have always wanted to learn again.
You mentioned that
i would like to have this sushi dinner?
Yes, I am very hungry. What fish is fresh today?
Perhaps the people you hang around with have something to do with this.
Maybe a mackerel temaki?
Are you sure that
maybe a mackerel temaki?
Is the mackerel good?
Do you really think you love sushi?
Yes…
Go on, don’t be afraid.
I really do.
Is it because of problems at school that you are going through all this?
I’m done with school, thank goodness.
Does it bother you that your grades could improve?
Too late for that now.
I need a little more detail please.
How about salmon skin?
Is it because of any hobbies you have that you say
how about salmon skin?
What, like Silence of the Lambs?
Earlier you said
i would like to have this sushi dinner?
Yes, I’ll have the omakase.
How do you reconcile hangups you have?
Graunt’s 1662 book on the London Bills of Mortality claims to be written in “succinct paragraphs, without any long series of multiloquious deductions.”
“Multiloquious” is my new favorite word.
The Bell Systems Technical Journal is online now. Unfortunately, when I tried to download a paper I got this:
Some interesting stuff has passed my way while being in India (and one or two things from before). Might as well post them before I forget, no?
Slavoj Žižek may be a curmudgeonly Marxist, but the animation helps soften it, I think. I don’t think I fully agree with him, but there’s stuff in there to chew on.
The Purdue anonymization project won a big NSF award.
Tips for tasks related to graduating (h/t Bobak).
Some interesting news about the future of the textbook market. It’s doubly interesting since I am in Pune, a treasure-trove of cheaper editions of technical books.
Apparently I sometimes wear a lab coat.
An Ergodic Walk 