I love baseball a lot. I'm not generally a sports fan, my love of baseball derives, as L. would call it, from narrative--the stuff that's born from your dad taking you to games when you're small and telling you about seeing Bob Gibson and Stan Musial, how he and his brother used to go to Browns games when the Cardinals were sold out, and so on. Lots of guys love baseball this way, but L. is the first and so far only woman I've ever met who loves baseball for this reason (in her case it was her grandmother who supplied the narrative). The other class of reasons I love it, also fairly common, are the myriad and constantly evolving techniques used to model it.
If you don't follow baseball, or just follow it for the narrative, things like OPS, VORP, EqA, DIPS, and UZR have no meaning for you, but they're part of the family of new statistics that attempt to determine how valuable an individual is to a team, in context with other players at the same or different positions, how much of what appears to be good or bad pitching is actually due to the defense playing behind the pitcher, and so on. If you weren't in the business of actually putting together a baseball team, why would you care about these things? Because you're a dork (and by "you're a," I mean, "I'm a"). Anyway, your or my dorkiness, or lack thereof, is not my theme for today. The theme is a particular stat. Somewhere in the vicinity of two years ago they came up with my all time favorite statistic of...um...all time. It's called WPA, for "Win Probability Added," and it's pretty much "The Odds Are One" applied to baseball.
What WPA does is look at every baseball game that has ever been played (or as large a sample as you can find. You can do this now that you've got computers) and, given a particular situation that's occuring in the particular game you're watching (e.g. the home team batting in the bottom of the ninth inning, down by a run, with two outs and a runner on second), look for all the similar situations that have ever occurred in baseball. Then it looks at what percentage of those games were won by the home team and what percentage were won by the away team. So let's say in the above situation, with a runner on and two outs, 75% of the time the away team won and 25% of the time the home team won. Now you go back to the game you're watching and see what happens. The batter strikes out? The probability of the visiting team winning is 100% because, well, they won. The pitcher gets a +.25 WPA because he took his team's chances of winning from .75 to 1, and the batter gets a -.25 WPA because by striking out he took his team's chances of winning from .25 to 0. If the batter hits a home run, he takes his team's chance of winning from .25 to 1, and gets +.75 WPA, and the pitcher gets a -.75 WPA. If, on the other hand, the batter singles and the runner scores, the score is tied and the game is still going, so you have to go back to all games where the score was tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and see what percentage of the time the home team won and what percentage of the time the away team won in order to figure out the WPA of that play. Say it's roughly 50/50. Then, since it went from 25/75, the hitter gets +.25 WPA and the pitcher gets -.25 WPA.
If you think this statistic sounds completely insane, you are correct. This statistic is completely insane. There are people out there, however, who are doing this for every single Major League Baseball game that's played. Here, for instance, is the graph from last night's Mariners/Angels game. The Mariners were always ahead in this game, so the line tracks steadily upwards, with sharp dips where the Angels got hits that caught them up. What makes WPA cool is that it quantifies the individual contributions of players and when they occur in the game--e.g. if you're a pitcher in a 0-0 game and you give up a run in the bottom of the 4th inning, it doesn't matter that much because your team has time to catch up. If you're a pitcher in a 0-0 game and you give up a run in the bottom of the 9th, it matters a lot, because you just lost the game. At the end of the game you can add up everybody's WPA and see who contributed, and how much, to the win or loss.
What makes WPA completely insane is that, as you already know because you read OaO, it's completely meaningless (and I mean this in the usual Odds Are One way--it's meaningless in the statistical sense. It tells us quite a lot, in this case, about how we think about baseball games). As a statistic it has a number of rather inherent flaws, the most obvious of which is that there are often important plays where it's not clear which individual should get the credit, or how you should score it (if a player hits what's otherwise going to be a home run to win the game, but a fielder climbs the wall and catches the ball for an out, do you penalize the pitcher for losing the game, but then reward the fielder for un-losing it? Or do you treat it as an ordinary out? Do you penalize the hitter for making an out even though it took an extraordinary play to get him out?). It's also not in any way predictive. It looks at games that have already happened and then uses them to quantify plays in the particular game...that have already happened. The only thing it predicts is that when the game is over, one team will have won (Win Probability 1) and one will have lost (Win Probability 0).
Win Probability Added is all about...wait for it...narrative. It takes each event in the game and decides how much it contributed to the final story of that game. As with actual narratives, big events that happen at the end tend to be much more important to the final story that little events at the beginning, and the major characters in the story will have very high WPA or low negative WPA, and the minor characters will have a WPA near 0. All of us who are compiling or studying these metrics are, yes, big dorks. But we're also just making narrative.
Next: Still More Narrative!
Tags: Baseball, Sabermetrics, Narrative
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
It's a "Metaphor"
What is blogging like? I mean this question to be framed in the recurring theme of modern life about which I blog from time to time. The paraphrase of this idea is something like this: "The things that seem new and different about the modern human condition are repetitions of the same old things in new context. The things that seem like they never change are, in fact, new." My argument for this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps tautological, but it is more or less that the Nature of Things is for them to continuously change, so that a phenomenon that seems constant is actually having to resist the sort of natural order of things. I realize that this doesn't entirely make sense. But, for the purposes of reading this post, take it as an a priori. After that you can dismiss it.
If ones operating theory is that something that seemed like an utterly new phenomenon was in fact the natural evolution of an old one, that the new one had simply grown out of the old one, what was blogging before it was blogging? Blogging is nigh ubiquitous now, some people get paid to do it, and I was noticing yesterday that an alarming amount of my information about the outside world is coming from blogs. It is, at least right now, relatively democratic--anybody with internet access can write one for free, anybody with internet access can read anybody else's blog (offer not valid in China). (nearly) Everybody's writing. (nearly) Everybody's reading. So I don't know, what's that like?
Next: next!
Tags: Blogs, Blogging,
If ones operating theory is that something that seemed like an utterly new phenomenon was in fact the natural evolution of an old one, that the new one had simply grown out of the old one, what was blogging before it was blogging? Blogging is nigh ubiquitous now, some people get paid to do it, and I was noticing yesterday that an alarming amount of my information about the outside world is coming from blogs. It is, at least right now, relatively democratic--anybody with internet access can write one for free, anybody with internet access can read anybody else's blog (offer not valid in China). (nearly) Everybody's writing. (nearly) Everybody's reading. So I don't know, what's that like?
Next: next!
Tags: Blogs, Blogging,
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Dreaming Brain Redux
L. sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and says things to me. I am an extremely heavy sleeper, and otherwise don't wake up for almost anything, but when she starts talking, I'm immediately awake and (I think) relatively coherent, trying to figure out what she's saying. It usually tends, as a rule, to be kind of vaguely creepy. One night several months ago she woke up said, "Oh...oh my god, there are two cats in the bed with us." This, of course, was rather alarming, seeing as how we don't have any cats. Well, that, and her general sense of panic at suddenly waking up to find cats in our bed. Except, of course, there were no cats. I looked around to verify this fact and told her that in fact there were not any cats in the bed with us, and she said "Oh...okay," and went immediately back to sleep.
The other thing is, she doesn't remember that this happens. So, for instance, this blog entry will be the first she's heard of the incident from the other night that I'm about to relate. I woke up and she was saying this: "I understand now. The air from outside is coming in through the door of the basement." And then she immediately rolled over and went back to sleep.
I was lying there, now momentarily awake, and the weird thing was that I could pretty much piece together where her mind had been when it had decided to wake up and say that. I can't quite recall what it was now, but I remember thinking I ought to go downstairs and make sure the basement door was locked, but then realizing that this wasn't what she was telling me. She was telling me something else.
Next: More mysteries!
Tags: Dreams
The other thing is, she doesn't remember that this happens. So, for instance, this blog entry will be the first she's heard of the incident from the other night that I'm about to relate. I woke up and she was saying this: "I understand now. The air from outside is coming in through the door of the basement." And then she immediately rolled over and went back to sleep.
I was lying there, now momentarily awake, and the weird thing was that I could pretty much piece together where her mind had been when it had decided to wake up and say that. I can't quite recall what it was now, but I remember thinking I ought to go downstairs and make sure the basement door was locked, but then realizing that this wasn't what she was telling me. She was telling me something else.
Next: More mysteries!
Tags: Dreams
Thursday, March 30, 2006
But They Don't Lie
The subject of the damned lies of statistics is something I've been meaning to blog about forever, and this post would be, well, untimely, except that Liz has just posted a response to reading Freakonomics. Somewhere in this book, apparently (I haven't read it, just a variety of summaries of it), appears the old saw, "Numbers don't lie."
In the vast wide history of time, everyone who has ever uttered or written this phrase was, in fact, lying. Liz says this:
A quick quiz for you: name the statistical method (or methods) used to show cause (vis à vis effect). That is to say, given an observed phenomenon X (e.g. a drop in crime rates), how do you mathematically demonstrate that X was caused by other phenomenon Y (e.g. the availability of abortions to poor women during the late 70's and 80's, one of the arguments made in Freakonomics)? If you can't remember the exact method, you're probably at least aware that it's a difficult thing to calculate. Mull that over for a second.
Lying is a function of language. Numbers don't lie because they don't mean. Meaning (and lying, and misrepresenting, and misconstruing, and so on) occur when somebody tries to take the result of an equation and meld it to a result in the real world--that is, when somebody takes numbers and tries to model something with them. Some of these models work quite well (Calculus to the motion of accelerating bodies, e.g.) and some of them work for crap (attempts to model the weather or the stock market). But even in the models that are extremely good at making predictions there's nothing that inherently ties it to the phenomenon it models. The planets orbitted the sun before Calculus was invented, and they'll continue to do so if it's ever forgotten.
So how do you mathematically demonstrate that a drop in crime was due to the availability of abortions to poor women and not to, say, better policing methods? You can't. It was a trick question (ha ha on you). There is no way to demonstrate cause mathematically. Cause and effect is a narrative interpretation of phenomena that arise together (were I Buddhist I'd just come right out and say there's no such thing as cause and effect, but I'm not there yet). You can demonstrate correlation until the cows come home, but any more than that is subject to interpretation. What Freakonomics demonstrated (apparently--I haven't read it) is that a mathematical correlation exists between fall in crime rates and availability of abortions, and that this correlation is stronger than the one between falling crime rates and new policing methods. Correlation, though, is an extremely tricky thing to interpret. There is, for instance, a very high general correlation between shoe size and IQ scores, but nobody out there is claiming one causes the other (you would, for instance, find the same correlation between age and IQ scores and age and shoe size). There was also that rather infamous study a few years back that claimed that race and IQ score were linked. Now, this correlation demonstrably exists. African Americans do, on average, have lower IQ scores than white Americans. Here are some other correlations that also demonstrably exist: poverty and lower IQ. Lack of access to health care and lower IQ. Lower levels or quality of education and lower IQ. What is to be learned from this? Probably a lot more about the authors of The Bell Curve than about anything having to do with genetic factors and IQ. Of course, that's just my interpretation.
Next: Less ranting!
Tags: Statistics, Freakonomics
In the vast wide history of time, everyone who has ever uttered or written this phrase was, in fact, lying. Liz says this:
Not only do numbers lie, but they actual exist in a natural state of lying. It's not intentional. After all, numbers aren't actually sentient and making the choice to lie. I would also argue that the purveyors of numbers are (generally) not intending to lie, but are unable to gather all the information necessary to force the numbers to tell the truth.While I'm writing a critique of Liz's argument, I agree pretty much straight up with Liz's larger point about numbers, right up to the a priori of the last sentence I've excerpted here. Numbers don't lie. Numbers don't tell the truth, either.
A quick quiz for you: name the statistical method (or methods) used to show cause (vis à vis effect). That is to say, given an observed phenomenon X (e.g. a drop in crime rates), how do you mathematically demonstrate that X was caused by other phenomenon Y (e.g. the availability of abortions to poor women during the late 70's and 80's, one of the arguments made in Freakonomics)? If you can't remember the exact method, you're probably at least aware that it's a difficult thing to calculate. Mull that over for a second.
Lying is a function of language. Numbers don't lie because they don't mean. Meaning (and lying, and misrepresenting, and misconstruing, and so on) occur when somebody tries to take the result of an equation and meld it to a result in the real world--that is, when somebody takes numbers and tries to model something with them. Some of these models work quite well (Calculus to the motion of accelerating bodies, e.g.) and some of them work for crap (attempts to model the weather or the stock market). But even in the models that are extremely good at making predictions there's nothing that inherently ties it to the phenomenon it models. The planets orbitted the sun before Calculus was invented, and they'll continue to do so if it's ever forgotten.
So how do you mathematically demonstrate that a drop in crime was due to the availability of abortions to poor women and not to, say, better policing methods? You can't. It was a trick question (ha ha on you). There is no way to demonstrate cause mathematically. Cause and effect is a narrative interpretation of phenomena that arise together (were I Buddhist I'd just come right out and say there's no such thing as cause and effect, but I'm not there yet). You can demonstrate correlation until the cows come home, but any more than that is subject to interpretation. What Freakonomics demonstrated (apparently--I haven't read it) is that a mathematical correlation exists between fall in crime rates and availability of abortions, and that this correlation is stronger than the one between falling crime rates and new policing methods. Correlation, though, is an extremely tricky thing to interpret. There is, for instance, a very high general correlation between shoe size and IQ scores, but nobody out there is claiming one causes the other (you would, for instance, find the same correlation between age and IQ scores and age and shoe size). There was also that rather infamous study a few years back that claimed that race and IQ score were linked. Now, this correlation demonstrably exists. African Americans do, on average, have lower IQ scores than white Americans. Here are some other correlations that also demonstrably exist: poverty and lower IQ. Lack of access to health care and lower IQ. Lower levels or quality of education and lower IQ. What is to be learned from this? Probably a lot more about the authors of The Bell Curve than about anything having to do with genetic factors and IQ. Of course, that's just my interpretation.
Next: Less ranting!
Tags: Statistics, Freakonomics
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Amazon S3
Another event that went down while I was out in the field was the launch of Amazon S3, a web service for storing data. Amazon S3 was known internally as "Amazon Storage" until about a week before launch, at which point the folks running it sat down with Jeff Bezos, who opined that soon we'd be competing with Google Storage and Yahoo Storage, and how thus would we ever successfully brand or trademark our particular service? Hence Amazon S3 (S3 = "Simple Storage Service") was born. And thus have you learned an important lesson about being the CEO of a major corporation.
Being able to get generic storage space somewhere out in the ether is not a particularly spectacular innovation. When the first iMac came out (which was, what, ten years ago at this point? Good lord) and there was general uproar over the fact that it lacked a floppy drive, some wonk offered everybody with an email account a couple of megs of storage space on his server so that they wouldn't need one. L. backs up her data by attaching .doc files to emails and sending them to herself at her Yahoo mail account, being that they now provide a Gigabyte of storage for your mail. I suspect this practice is quite widespread. There are, though, two actual innovations with Amazon S3, one lesser and one greater: the lesser one is that this is an enterprise level service (which is code for it being reliable and available enough for Amazon's own use--we're drinking our own Kool-Aid, as it were). The greater innovation here is that we're now able to meter the usage and charge for it (Capitalism: it's what's for dinner).
S3 was slashdotted (here 'slashdot' appears in its past participle form, meaning "to post an item for comment on slashdot.org") a day or so after it launched, and 99% of the posts imagined it as an ethereal backup for ones personal data. You encrypt it (and here I'll make my little pitch again: any electronic data that you would mind if everyone in the world were to read, you should be encrypting. This, sadly, now includes stuff you think is only ever going to be sitting on your harddrive. Don't ask why. Just do it) and send it to S3, where it's reliably stored and available from anywhere. Even with a superfast internet connection, retrieval times aren't going to approach the speed of, e.g., a firewire drive, but if you're just storing and retrieving once in awhile, it works fine. At $0.15 a Gig per month, and $0.20 a Gig for bandwidth (to store or retrieve data), it's a pretty reasonable price for a highly reliable archive. But personal (or even business) archive storage like this isn't the point of S3.
If you're a regular OaO reader and pay very close attention to my postings on things Web 2.0 (hi Sam), you might notice that this is one more piece to the puzzle I laid out six months ago, just after I joined Amazon Web Services. S3 is a virtual harddrive. One use for such a virtual harddrive is to store your data. But in the brave new world of Web 2.0, it's also a data store and information server for this brave new virtual computer running brave new virtual software. The virtual computer is not a machine (hence the word 'virtual'), it's a distributed network of computers that are all somewhere out in the world, and the software isn't a piece of code that's loaded onto a machine, it's tens or hundreds or thousands of distributed functions that, again, run on arbitrary machines somewhere.
So, possibly you're not as excited about this as I. Maybe it really isn't that cool. It might just end up being a place to store your data, that's all, the end. Or it might not.
Next: Something you might conceiveably give a crap about!
Tags: Amazon S3, Web 2.0
Being able to get generic storage space somewhere out in the ether is not a particularly spectacular innovation. When the first iMac came out (which was, what, ten years ago at this point? Good lord) and there was general uproar over the fact that it lacked a floppy drive, some wonk offered everybody with an email account a couple of megs of storage space on his server so that they wouldn't need one. L. backs up her data by attaching .doc files to emails and sending them to herself at her Yahoo mail account, being that they now provide a Gigabyte of storage for your mail. I suspect this practice is quite widespread. There are, though, two actual innovations with Amazon S3, one lesser and one greater: the lesser one is that this is an enterprise level service (which is code for it being reliable and available enough for Amazon's own use--we're drinking our own Kool-Aid, as it were). The greater innovation here is that we're now able to meter the usage and charge for it (Capitalism: it's what's for dinner).
S3 was slashdotted (here 'slashdot' appears in its past participle form, meaning "to post an item for comment on slashdot.org") a day or so after it launched, and 99% of the posts imagined it as an ethereal backup for ones personal data. You encrypt it (and here I'll make my little pitch again: any electronic data that you would mind if everyone in the world were to read, you should be encrypting. This, sadly, now includes stuff you think is only ever going to be sitting on your harddrive. Don't ask why. Just do it) and send it to S3, where it's reliably stored and available from anywhere. Even with a superfast internet connection, retrieval times aren't going to approach the speed of, e.g., a firewire drive, but if you're just storing and retrieving once in awhile, it works fine. At $0.15 a Gig per month, and $0.20 a Gig for bandwidth (to store or retrieve data), it's a pretty reasonable price for a highly reliable archive. But personal (or even business) archive storage like this isn't the point of S3.
If you're a regular OaO reader and pay very close attention to my postings on things Web 2.0 (hi Sam), you might notice that this is one more piece to the puzzle I laid out six months ago, just after I joined Amazon Web Services. S3 is a virtual harddrive. One use for such a virtual harddrive is to store your data. But in the brave new world of Web 2.0, it's also a data store and information server for this brave new virtual computer running brave new virtual software. The virtual computer is not a machine (hence the word 'virtual'), it's a distributed network of computers that are all somewhere out in the world, and the software isn't a piece of code that's loaded onto a machine, it's tens or hundreds or thousands of distributed functions that, again, run on arbitrary machines somewhere.
So, possibly you're not as excited about this as I. Maybe it really isn't that cool. It might just end up being a place to store your data, that's all, the end. Or it might not.
Next: Something you might conceiveably give a crap about!
Tags: Amazon S3, Web 2.0
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
I've returned from vacation and I'm sitting here, on this Tuesday morning, with twenty-thousand things to post on, but a dirth of ideas on how to winnow them down and present them. There was, for instance, this interview with Edward Wilson on the topics surrounding evolution v. religion. Or this complete mind-fuck, a quantum computer program that can solve a problem without ever running. Perhaps the emerging (or, for those who are not upper-middle class and white, ever-present), battle for access to birth control that Rebecca's covering is more your cup of tea. And then there's the alternative medicine seminar I went to the weekend before last, about which I have long been meaning to post something.
Surely I can tie all those threads together here in one neat paragraph, then go fetch some lunch and get back to work...wait...thinking...nope, can't do it today. Instead what I've got is this overarching thing that's been on my mind lately--something about the massive distributed system that makes up the entirety of my being, or your being. I, you, they out there in the world, are the sum of differentiated cells that know nothing of the being of which they are part. They respond to changes in pressure or light or chemicals or electrical charge that occur in their immediate environment; when a change occurs, the cell alters in some way. You and I are one giant collection of stimulus and response--at this level there is no happy or sad, or pain or relief, or love or hate. There are merely chemicals and patterns of electricity.
But I don't feel like a machine that's the sum of these things. Maybe the human condition exists because we have chemical signals telling us to survive and reproduce and that really everything we do is part of the strategy to make sure that our genetic material is propagated--red in tooth and claw and all that. Maybe everything else is, for lack of a better word, narrative that we make up to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe religion is a narrative created to fill in that gap between the massive network of cells and the resulting experience that occurs when you are that massive network of cells. Maybe all of that. But then, and I don't know how it is for you, but I don't feel that way.
Next: What the hell was that?
Tags: Meaning Of Life
Surely I can tie all those threads together here in one neat paragraph, then go fetch some lunch and get back to work...wait...thinking...nope, can't do it today. Instead what I've got is this overarching thing that's been on my mind lately--something about the massive distributed system that makes up the entirety of my being, or your being. I, you, they out there in the world, are the sum of differentiated cells that know nothing of the being of which they are part. They respond to changes in pressure or light or chemicals or electrical charge that occur in their immediate environment; when a change occurs, the cell alters in some way. You and I are one giant collection of stimulus and response--at this level there is no happy or sad, or pain or relief, or love or hate. There are merely chemicals and patterns of electricity.
But I don't feel like a machine that's the sum of these things. Maybe the human condition exists because we have chemical signals telling us to survive and reproduce and that really everything we do is part of the strategy to make sure that our genetic material is propagated--red in tooth and claw and all that. Maybe everything else is, for lack of a better word, narrative that we make up to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe religion is a narrative created to fill in that gap between the massive network of cells and the resulting experience that occurs when you are that massive network of cells. Maybe all of that. But then, and I don't know how it is for you, but I don't feel that way.
Next: What the hell was that?
Tags: Meaning Of Life
Monday, March 06, 2006
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
...is a rocking band I have just discovered because of Pandora, a.k.a. "the music genome project." I am probably the last person on earth to try this idea of custom-tailored internet radio, but now I have, and I am here to tell you: Dude, it's fucking awesome. For the last two days I've been sitting at work meandering through a playlist that I started by telling it I liked Neil Finn and going from there. Subsequently hearing songs by 20 different bands that I a) had never in my life heard of, and b) freaking loved is only one of the the cool things about it. There's also the slow drift through genres that it has done based on whether I give particular songs the thumbs up or thumbs down--yesterday I was in kind of a wispy, folk-influenced kind of place and so after five songs of feedback it was playing this steady stream of Elliott Smith-y, Iron & Wine-y (and the aforementioned 20 folks of whom I'd never previously heard) kind of stuff, and today I'm in a little more of a emo rock kind of place, which led me to thumbs-down some of the folky stuff, so I've been hearing such things as "I Am Warm + Powerful" by these Yeltsin-loving fellows from Springfield, Missouri (which, oddly, is where my mom's family used to live).
The third cool thing is this melding of the unfamiliar with the familiar (stuff I already own) and the ubiquitous (stuff one would hear on the radio), which creates all manner of new contexts for music. The next song Pandora played after the Yeltsins was Stone Temple Pilots' "Big Empty," a song that had previous drifted right over my consciousness, and right now I'm listening to a song by some sort of Poor-Man's John Mayer teen rocker which I'd immediately dismiss in the real world. But the fact that this music algorithm (which affiliates songs by the type of singer, instrumentation, underlying musical influence, etc.--my favorite criterion so far which it's inferred that I like is "a good dose of acoustic guitar pickin'") plays mostly indie stuff overcomes my built-in coolness filter and I end up listening to the songs with a different ear. I mean, okay, that teen-rock song still sucks, but today it gets a pass.
I suppose there's some comparison to be made between the iPod playlist which isn't really reading your thoughts, and this, which is trying to do just that. Like last time, I'm leaving that up to you. It's time you all stop riding on my coat tails and learn to synthesize for yourselves.
Next: the collective musical consciousness!
Tags: Pandora, Music Genome Project, Music
The third cool thing is this melding of the unfamiliar with the familiar (stuff I already own) and the ubiquitous (stuff one would hear on the radio), which creates all manner of new contexts for music. The next song Pandora played after the Yeltsins was Stone Temple Pilots' "Big Empty," a song that had previous drifted right over my consciousness, and right now I'm listening to a song by some sort of Poor-Man's John Mayer teen rocker which I'd immediately dismiss in the real world. But the fact that this music algorithm (which affiliates songs by the type of singer, instrumentation, underlying musical influence, etc.--my favorite criterion so far which it's inferred that I like is "a good dose of acoustic guitar pickin'") plays mostly indie stuff overcomes my built-in coolness filter and I end up listening to the songs with a different ear. I mean, okay, that teen-rock song still sucks, but today it gets a pass.
I suppose there's some comparison to be made between the iPod playlist which isn't really reading your thoughts, and this, which is trying to do just that. Like last time, I'm leaving that up to you. It's time you all stop riding on my coat tails and learn to synthesize for yourselves.
Next: the collective musical consciousness!
Tags: Pandora, Music Genome Project, Music
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
iPod Moments
- 9, 3, 10, 1, 5, 8, 2, 6, 4, 7
- 1, 4, 5, 4, 5, 4, 8, 10, 6, 7
One of these two strings of numbers was generated by a computer using a random number function. The other one was generated by a human (me). Look, ponder, and then file that fact away for a moment.
This morning on my stroll to work I had a nice little iPod Moment. An iPod Moment is when the iPod does something droll whilst it is shuffling randomly through its playlist. A sort of mundane one would be playing two songs by the same artist or from the same album back to back. A more interesting one is when it plays a song and then a cover of that song back to back. This morning's glimpse from Serendip was the selection of Jason Falkner's "Before My Heart Attacks," immediately followed by Falkner's former band, Jellyfish, doing "I Wanna Stay Home."
I am not alone in noticing this phenomenon. I believe, e.g., that the father of one OaO reader has actually called him up on occasion when the iPod does something witty with its random playlist. And there's apparently a small band of fanatics out there who believe that the iPod is reading their minds, or at the very least that the random shuffle algorithm that the iPod uses is not truly random. I have wondered aloud at times whether there's a little humanness built into the algorithm, especially after we hear three songs in a row from the same artists but from different albums.
Generating true randomness is indeed a notoriously difficult task for a computer, and it's caused a lot of people a lot of problems when sets of numbers that were thought to be random turned out not to be. What makes this a somewhat more obtuse problem is that things that truly are random tend to be full of instantly noticeable patterns. Go back to those numbers at the top. There's an absolute dead giveaway that one of them is machine generated and one of them is human generated (actually, there are two). In the first string there are no discernable patterns--the numbers aren't in order, they don't repeat, there's basically no connection between one number and the next. The second sequence has that unusual string of repeating 4s and 5s.
You are clever OaO readers, so you already know that the second pattern is the machine generated one (I didn't manipulate that second pattern in any way--I generated ten random numbers between 1 and 10 and those are the ten numbers I got. I was expecting some sort of pattern to show up somewhere, and indeed one did). The other list was carefully manipulated to remove everything that a human might think wasn't random (the first dead giveaway that it wasn't truly random) and also to use each number exactly once (the second dead giveaway -- a truly random number generating routine will generate a string like this about .03% of the time).
At this point I'd usually offer you some sort of narrative tag that ties all this together neatly, but today I'm all about randomness. So screw you. Make your own narrative.
Next: More narrative made just for you!
Tags: iPods,Randomness,Probability
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Other Narratives
I've just spent 20 minutes reading this article, an interview of journalist Mark Danner by blogger Tom Englehardt, which was reprinted in Salon. It reaffirms that everything these days is exactly as terrible as you think it is. The quote from Danner that's getting me to blog about the article, though, is this:
My own thought on the subject, which I've mentioned before in this and different contexts is this: this is the way They get you (where "get you" = "get into power and stay there"). They get you because when It actually happens to You, It's Different. Presented with the statement, "the US today is like Kundera's Czech Republic under Communist Rule in the '50s," You (the titular 'You' for whom 'It' is 'Different') are going to dismiss the statement out of hand. That was a different time and a different circumstance. They were under the thumb of Totalitarians. We live in a democracy (which we don't, we live in a republic, which is an interesting distinction both technically and linguistically these days, but whatever). "Sure," 'You' will think, "we've got a few problems, but we are safe from the kind of blatant looting, lies, and naked power grabs that afflict Them. God help 'em, though, I'm glad I'm not their shoes."
Psychology is often described as the practice of trying to get someone to actually take the advice that any sane person would give them after five minutes of listening to that person's story. When it's put like that, it sure sounds easy. Yet there seem to be plenty of Psychologists working these days.
Next: The political is personal!
Tags: Politics, Current Affairs, Rants
When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and '60s -- in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.If we have a refrain these days it's that there is, quite literally, a new administration scandal every week; then there's no investigation and no one is held accountable. No one seems to care, there's no backlash, and nothing changes. It's not quite true--a lot of people care. But caring, along with writing about it, holding strategy meetings in your living room, standing in the streets protesting, and/or giving money to the opposition party doesn't seem to have much effect.
My own thought on the subject, which I've mentioned before in this and different contexts is this: this is the way They get you (where "get you" = "get into power and stay there"). They get you because when It actually happens to You, It's Different. Presented with the statement, "the US today is like Kundera's Czech Republic under Communist Rule in the '50s," You (the titular 'You' for whom 'It' is 'Different') are going to dismiss the statement out of hand. That was a different time and a different circumstance. They were under the thumb of Totalitarians. We live in a democracy (which we don't, we live in a republic, which is an interesting distinction both technically and linguistically these days, but whatever). "Sure," 'You' will think, "we've got a few problems, but we are safe from the kind of blatant looting, lies, and naked power grabs that afflict Them. God help 'em, though, I'm glad I'm not their shoes."
Psychology is often described as the practice of trying to get someone to actually take the advice that any sane person would give them after five minutes of listening to that person's story. When it's put like that, it sure sounds easy. Yet there seem to be plenty of Psychologists working these days.
Next: The political is personal!
Tags: Politics, Current Affairs, Rants
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Unexpected Turn Towards The Post-Modern
Canonical List of Bands of Which I Have Been a Member*
*Does not include collegiate a capella groups. To be considered an actual band, the band must have either made a recording or performed live in front of an audience. All bands eventually destroyed themselves due to clash of egos, arrogance, infighting, and/or disagreements about creative direction just as they were on the verge of their big break (except for Death Spleen, which disbanded after the lead singer tried to eat a microphone during a recording session).
Next: Not this!
Tags: This post not worthy of tags
- Death Spleen (1990-1991)
- The Egomaniacs (1991)
- Nothing Obscene (1991)
- Me, Him, and The Other Guy (1992)
- Common Men (1993)
- Juliet's Ankle (1994-1996)
- The Apostles of Pleasure (2002-2003)
- Bedevere (2003)
- The Unbeable Bareness of Lightning (name subject to change) (2005-present)
...a barren wasteland featuring several abortive attempts to go solo...
...barren wasteland redux...
*Does not include collegiate a capella groups. To be considered an actual band, the band must have either made a recording or performed live in front of an audience. All bands eventually destroyed themselves due to clash of egos, arrogance, infighting, and/or disagreements about creative direction just as they were on the verge of their big break (except for Death Spleen, which disbanded after the lead singer tried to eat a microphone during a recording session).
Next: Not this!
Tags: This post not worthy of tags
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
XML, Future Wave of the Future
It is my goal here at OaO to write about math/science/engineering in a way that is neither math-y, nor science-y, nor engineering-y. It is a task that I constantly keep in mind whilst writing. It is, concurrently, a task at which I am consistently failing. This, apparently, is because I never explain the (supposedly) non-technical narrative model I'm using to talk about things. I am bad writer. But is okay. I fix problem. I start with XML.
You can look up the wikipedia entry for XML as well as I can, so I won't repeat anything definitional; that definition also lacks any of the nuances I was trying to invoke in my last entry anyway. In the comments, Sam has asked the existential question, "So is XML like a grammar or something?" Yes, it is, sort of. But it's more of a language for making languages. It's a language about language. A meta-language if you will. Mmm...meta.
Here are some key points of the nuts and bolts: xml is made up of tags which form a tree of information about something. Here's a sample one:
This tells you there's a class of things called "people." One of the members of that set is a "person," which apparently come in different types, like "freak of nature." Then a person has a bunch of attributes, like his name and his job, and whether he owns an iPod. Then in this model a person has a sub-attribute called "blog" which tells you information about his blog. Note that the blog co-author has the refence type "person"--this gives us a clue that somewhere else in this document, there might be a "person" named "Rebecca" defined. Note also that this tag doesn't have a close tag the way the others do--if we define all of the tag's attributes within the tag, we can just end it by putting a "/" before the closing ">".
The real key here, though, is what this document doesn't say. It doesn't say anything about what you should do with this information. It doesn't say how you should read it, or display it, or feed it into some sort of computer program. The point of XML is that other than tags and attributes (which are themselves pretty flexible), the people who pass these documents around decide what they mean. You could, for instance, write a little plug-in for your browser that read this document and produced an image of a person. The image could have a name tag that read "Sam," it could put him in his graduate robes since he's a professor, and he could be carrying a little iPod icon. Next to him could be an image of a computer that would navigate to his blog when you clicked on it. So an XML document can be extremely meaningful, or totally meaningless. It's just like HTML--HTML is meaningful to a web browser and meaningless some simple text-editing program. The Browser gets it and displays things in fonts and nicely formatted with colors and images and such. A text editor opens it up and doesn't know any of the rules that go with HTML, so lacking anything better to do, just shows you the text.
This is what a newsreader does with an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a simple XML document that you get via a web service call, and contains the bare minimum of data about the news:
A newsreader or browser can take this and pretty much do whatever it wants with it, since nobody has really developed a standard for what RSS feeds should "look like." And, frankly, there's no real need to--the idea behind RSS feeds is that they're supposed to be simple, and that any style and formatting will be left up to the displayer. This is in marked contrast to HTML, where the formatting and styles are rigidly defined.
Calvino: I get it! HTML is a form of XML, except that HTML came first.
The Stoat: Yes. Ish. Technically, they are both offshoots of SGML, and HTML in its original form doesn't quite work as XML, but the W3 Consortium is working on a new standard for HTML called XHTML to fix that.
Calvino: Isn't "consortium" a great word?
The Stoat: It is.
Maybe you are, at this point, seeing the abstract beauty of XML and its derivations that exists outside of its rather abstract and technical nature. Or maybe not. Whatever. The examples I have given above are simple XML documents. You could also, as in HTML, rigidly define how those documents should be "understood." But it's a much more interesting metaphor if people just ignore the definitions, or if you just don't publish any. An XML document can have multiple translations, and all of them are meaningful, and they can all still be "true" translations of the original material. What I was trying to point out yesterday is that XML is all about Reader Response. You read the XML. You divine your own meaning. You build models and tools out of that meaning. You publish. The world is made new again. Repeat ad infinitum.
Next: Language doesn't work that way!
Tags: XML, Web 2.0, Language
You can look up the wikipedia entry for XML as well as I can, so I won't repeat anything definitional; that definition also lacks any of the nuances I was trying to invoke in my last entry anyway. In the comments, Sam has asked the existential question, "So is XML like a grammar or something?" Yes, it is, sort of. But it's more of a language for making languages. It's a language about language. A meta-language if you will. Mmm...meta.
Here are some key points of the nuts and bolts: xml is made up of tags which form a tree of information about something. Here's a sample one:
<people>
<person type="freak of nature">
<name>Sam</name>
<occupation>Professor</occupation>
<iPod>true</iPod>
<blog>
<url>http://secondamericano.blogspot.com</url>
<host>Blogger</host>
<subject>
How you can't really get down
to work until your second one.
</subject>
<coauthor ref="person" name="Rebecca"/>
</blog>
</person>
</people>
This tells you there's a class of things called "people." One of the members of that set is a "person," which apparently come in different types, like "freak of nature." Then a person has a bunch of attributes, like his name and his job, and whether he owns an iPod. Then in this model a person has a sub-attribute called "blog" which tells you information about his blog. Note that the blog co-author has the refence type "person"--this gives us a clue that somewhere else in this document, there might be a "person" named "Rebecca" defined. Note also that this tag doesn't have a close tag the way the others do--if we define all of the tag's attributes within the tag, we can just end it by putting a "/" before the closing ">".
The real key here, though, is what this document doesn't say. It doesn't say anything about what you should do with this information. It doesn't say how you should read it, or display it, or feed it into some sort of computer program. The point of XML is that other than tags and attributes (which are themselves pretty flexible), the people who pass these documents around decide what they mean. You could, for instance, write a little plug-in for your browser that read this document and produced an image of a person. The image could have a name tag that read "Sam," it could put him in his graduate robes since he's a professor, and he could be carrying a little iPod icon. Next to him could be an image of a computer that would navigate to his blog when you clicked on it. So an XML document can be extremely meaningful, or totally meaningless. It's just like HTML--HTML is meaningful to a web browser and meaningless some simple text-editing program. The Browser gets it and displays things in fonts and nicely formatted with colors and images and such. A text editor opens it up and doesn't know any of the rules that go with HTML, so lacking anything better to do, just shows you the text.
This is what a newsreader does with an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a simple XML document that you get via a web service call, and contains the bare minimum of data about the news:
<thenews>
<story>
<headline>
Cheney Shoots Bush in Hunting "Accident"
</headline>
<url>
http://www.nytimes.com/stories/accident.html
</url>
<summary>
Vice President Dick Cheney "accidentally" "shot"
President George Bush today whilst the two were
in the oval office. A spokesman said they were
"hunting" at the time.
</summary>
</story>
<story>
<headline>
Neoconservatives: Ethics Are Post-Hoc
Rationalizations To Justify What People Were
Already Going To Do Anyway
</headline>
<url>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/neocons.html
</url>
<summary>
The Project For The New American Century today
released a report revealing that the entire
foundation of Ethics is built upon a facade people
use to justify what they were already going to do
anyway. It is expected that this revelation will
have no effect on anything whatsoever.
</summary>
</story>
</thenews>
A newsreader or browser can take this and pretty much do whatever it wants with it, since nobody has really developed a standard for what RSS feeds should "look like." And, frankly, there's no real need to--the idea behind RSS feeds is that they're supposed to be simple, and that any style and formatting will be left up to the displayer. This is in marked contrast to HTML, where the formatting and styles are rigidly defined.
Calvino: I get it! HTML is a form of XML, except that HTML came first.
The Stoat: Yes. Ish. Technically, they are both offshoots of SGML, and HTML in its original form doesn't quite work as XML, but the W3 Consortium is working on a new standard for HTML called XHTML to fix that.
Calvino: Isn't "consortium" a great word?
The Stoat: It is.
Maybe you are, at this point, seeing the abstract beauty of XML and its derivations that exists outside of its rather abstract and technical nature. Or maybe not. Whatever. The examples I have given above are simple XML documents. You could also, as in HTML, rigidly define how those documents should be "understood." But it's a much more interesting metaphor if people just ignore the definitions, or if you just don't publish any. An XML document can have multiple translations, and all of them are meaningful, and they can all still be "true" translations of the original material. What I was trying to point out yesterday is that XML is all about Reader Response. You read the XML. You divine your own meaning. You build models and tools out of that meaning. You publish. The world is made new again. Repeat ad infinitum.
Next: Language doesn't work that way!
Tags: XML, Web 2.0, Language
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Maybe Ours is The Language of The Future
When I explain to people what a web service is and does I try and explain it as the difference between what a human can do with the internet and what a computer program can do with the internet. It goes like this: if you're a human, and you want information about a book, you go to Amazon.com and search for the title or the author in the little search bar at the top, and it leads you to the page with the book on it. You do this because Amazon is a great bibliographic reference, by virtue of the fact that they sell just about every book that exists. If, on the other hand, you're a computer program, and are trying to assemble a library database for somebody, you're a little hamstrung. Even with an internet connection, you don't know how to use a web browser, and programming you to understand how to use the search bar and enter search terms and then read the page that came up--things that come (relatively) naturally to a human being--would take forever. Enter the web service: it provides you with an interface across the internet to, e.g., all of the book information at Amazon, in a way that a computer program can easily access and translate.
Web services, as you might expect, had to come up with a common language that everybody spoke (they also should have come up with a common protocol, like http, but in fact there are at least four that I know of, a few essentially open-source ones, and SOAP, which was developed by...wait for it...Microsoft). What they (where "they" = "The W3 Consortium") came up with is the WSDL. A WSDL (we pronounce that 'WIZ-dul' because that's just how high is our level of dork) is an XML document, because XML is apparently the wave of the future. The WSDL for the web service I described above is here.
Here's a little chunk of it:
This is the data type of some information that would come back from a search request. You, as a human being, probably look at this and think a) it looks like HTML code (or XML code, if you're riding the wave of the future), and b) it's pretty much gibberish. Which is ironic, because a WSDL is primarily language for humans.
It's language for computers, too, obviously--there are parsers in most programming languages that can read in a WSDL document and produce code libraries to use so that you can call the web service. But that hasn't turned out to be the primary function of the WSDL; the primary function of the WSDL is for me, the human writing the computer program that uses the web service, to understand what the web service does and how it does it. If you speak Wiz-dul, you can look at tags and symbols in this document and understand amidst the gibberish that if you send a request to the webservice and name it, "ItemSearch," and include with it labeled information about the author, artist, composer, or conductor of the item you're searching for (e.g. "Artist='U2'" or "Author='Italo Calvino'") that the service on the other side will understand you and respond in kind with a labelled list of albums or books. You don't need any other documentation than that one page of nicely indented tags.
I'm sure it wasn't the original intent of the WSDL to enable computer programmers to talk to each other about the services they offer; it's become an accidental solution to the nearly intractable problem of creating understandable technical documents about computer code. You've probably never had to read a document from a technical writer that uses English to try and describe what computer code does. You have lived a happier life never having had to do this. You have lived a much, much happier life never having had to write such a document. I don't know if this is a sign of things to come, but XML might turn out to be a model that solves this problem of language quite nicely.
Next: Somewhat more frequent posts!
Tags: Web 2.0, XML, Language
Web services, as you might expect, had to come up with a common language that everybody spoke (they also should have come up with a common protocol, like http, but in fact there are at least four that I know of, a few essentially open-source ones, and SOAP, which was developed by...wait for it...Microsoft). What they (where "they" = "The W3 Consortium") came up with is the WSDL. A WSDL (we pronounce that 'WIZ-dul' because that's just how high is our level of dork) is an XML document, because XML is apparently the wave of the future. The WSDL for the web service I described above is here.
Here's a little chunk of it:
<xs:element name="Items">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element ref="tns:Request" minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="tns:CorrectedQuery" minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element name="TotalResults" type="xs:nonNegativeInteger"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element name="TotalPages" type="xs:nonNegativeInteger"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="tns:SearchResultsMap" minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="tns:Item" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
<xs:element ref="tns:SearchBinSets" minOccurs="0"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
This is the data type of some information that would come back from a search request. You, as a human being, probably look at this and think a) it looks like HTML code (or XML code, if you're riding the wave of the future), and b) it's pretty much gibberish. Which is ironic, because a WSDL is primarily language for humans.
It's language for computers, too, obviously--there are parsers in most programming languages that can read in a WSDL document and produce code libraries to use so that you can call the web service. But that hasn't turned out to be the primary function of the WSDL; the primary function of the WSDL is for me, the human writing the computer program that uses the web service, to understand what the web service does and how it does it. If you speak Wiz-dul, you can look at tags and symbols in this document and understand amidst the gibberish that if you send a request to the webservice and name it, "ItemSearch," and include with it labeled information about the author, artist, composer, or conductor of the item you're searching for (e.g. "Artist='U2'" or "Author='Italo Calvino'") that the service on the other side will understand you and respond in kind with a labelled list of albums or books. You don't need any other documentation than that one page of nicely indented tags.
I'm sure it wasn't the original intent of the WSDL to enable computer programmers to talk to each other about the services they offer; it's become an accidental solution to the nearly intractable problem of creating understandable technical documents about computer code. You've probably never had to read a document from a technical writer that uses English to try and describe what computer code does. You have lived a happier life never having had to do this. You have lived a much, much happier life never having had to write such a document. I don't know if this is a sign of things to come, but XML might turn out to be a model that solves this problem of language quite nicely.
Next: Somewhat more frequent posts!
Tags: Web 2.0, XML, Language
Thursday, February 16, 2006
OaO: Now 47% Cooler
We've had a makeover. I decided it was time. After all, I've been blogging with the same old template for what, like six months? That's like two decades in internet time.
That's all. As you were.
That's all. As you were.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Song Narratives
On my walk to work yesterday, a particular song by Dada--See I'm tryin' to start this rock band, and my drummer really needed a kit. He's really into Bonham and Ozzy, you know he really likes to hit--came up in the shuffle. This song tells a little story about some guys meeting the titular Bob The Drummer after reading a classified ad about a set of drums he's selling. In the course of the song they discover that Bob is basically who they will become in 20 years, and at the end Bob decides he's not quite ready to sell his drums--You never know when there might be a gig.
This song is just, you know, cool in that way that songs are cool sometimes. I've heard this song on the order of magnitude of 100 times, and yesterday I made a new narrative out of the song that hadn't ever occurred to me before--Bob knew when he placed the drum ad that he wasn't selling the drums, he was just looking for the company. Moreover, I narratively surmised, maybe the whole thing was a ruse on Bob's part, knowing that since he's offerring a set of drums for an unusually low low price, he's going to draw folks who are on the path in life that he is, and that he's decided to serve as a subtle warning: you'll end up playing weddings and bar mitzvahs for half scale, staring into oblivion, and saying "Oh, how time flies."
Calvino: Is this the lamest post that has ever been composed on this blog?
The Stoat: Possibly. I have it on good authority that the author has an exam coming up this weekend and so hasn't had much time to post the last week and a half or so, and was feeling he needed some new content.
Calvino: Hmm...
L. and I are on a long quest for narrative in song. One of our favorite road trip activities is to put on Sting's The Soul Cages and discuss reader response to the unfolding story of a shipyard worker's son that happens in it. It's like talking about tv shows (which we, of course, also do all the time) except it's music, and it's much harder to find. Off the top of my head, I can only name...well, off the top of my head, Dark Side of the Moon is the only other album that comes to mind that's an extended narrative in LP form. I welcome your other submissions to this search, though. Must...have...more...narrative....
This song is just, you know, cool in that way that songs are cool sometimes. I've heard this song on the order of magnitude of 100 times, and yesterday I made a new narrative out of the song that hadn't ever occurred to me before--Bob knew when he placed the drum ad that he wasn't selling the drums, he was just looking for the company. Moreover, I narratively surmised, maybe the whole thing was a ruse on Bob's part, knowing that since he's offerring a set of drums for an unusually low low price, he's going to draw folks who are on the path in life that he is, and that he's decided to serve as a subtle warning: you'll end up playing weddings and bar mitzvahs for half scale, staring into oblivion, and saying "Oh, how time flies."
Calvino: Is this the lamest post that has ever been composed on this blog?
The Stoat: Possibly. I have it on good authority that the author has an exam coming up this weekend and so hasn't had much time to post the last week and a half or so, and was feeling he needed some new content.
Calvino: Hmm...
L. and I are on a long quest for narrative in song. One of our favorite road trip activities is to put on Sting's The Soul Cages and discuss reader response to the unfolding story of a shipyard worker's son that happens in it. It's like talking about tv shows (which we, of course, also do all the time) except it's music, and it's much harder to find. Off the top of my head, I can only name...well, off the top of my head, Dark Side of the Moon is the only other album that comes to mind that's an extended narrative in LP form. I welcome your other submissions to this search, though. Must...have...more...narrative....
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Who Are You?
It's a slow news day, so it's time to blog about one of the interesting (for some extremely abstract definition of the word "interesting") problems we're trying to solve here at work: identity. How does anybody know that you are who you say you are (where, for the purposes of the preceding sentence, the words "how", "anybody", "you", "are" and "know" have some level of arbitrary abstractness not yet defined by anyone)? If sheer opacity of language hasn't already convinced you that this is a problem people are struggling to solve, consider your Amazon.com account. It contains a bunch of information that Amazon knows about you that nobody else should have access to (and, in fact, you might argue that you don't want information such as what books you've bought, what music you like, or generally how best to market new products to you, known by Amazon either. Sadly, the time to register your complaints about the information age with The Powers That Be has come and gone. While you can still opt out at any time, you will literally have to go live in a cave in order to do so. Yes, I work here and I'm scared too. Have a nice day).
One of the upshots of the rather invisible Web 2.0 revolution is that your Amazon identity is no longer just a set of information about you, but rather a set of privileges--things like the ability to charge items to your credit card, or the ability to ship things second-day air for free because you're a member of Amazon Prime. The world coming soon to a theater near you that involves you buying virtual things has got the folks who care about things like intellectual property rights freaked right the hell out. You can buy perfect digital copies of books, songs, movies, or episodes of television shows and own them, carry them around, and, for all the copyright holders know, actually give them to your friends without paying for them again. So the enormous corporations that hold these copyrights are all in a tizzy, because their position as distributor middle-men is threatened. Or was it that the integrity of the original artist's work is threatened if the enormous multi-national doesn't control the distribution and release of that artist's ouevre? Well, in any case, some entity that controls an enormous amount of wealth is feeling threatened. I'm sure it's probably the artists of the world (don't mess with the Artist's Union, dude, they will fuck you up). So here's the problem--the powers that be want to figure out a way to sell these things to you without you actually owning them, such as having the movies, songs, books, or tv shows on a server, and giving you access to that server at any moment, such that you can stream the song or movie whenever you want. Here enters the third party: you buy an eBook from Amazon. Bob Livestockowski of Bob Livestockowski's Software Development Concern© writes a software program that will sync any eBooks you own to your PDA so that you can take them with you and read them wherever you go. But Bob Livestockowski isn't affiliated with Amazon.com, and so doesn't know which books you have "bought," nor does he have your Amazon account information, nor do you particularly want to give it to him, because Bob is kind of a shady character, what with his previous business forays into writing illicit spyware and Albanian Yak smuggling. Still, you want the program that syncs your PDA with your Amazon eBook stream, and you want to give Bob the ability to get it for you without giving him your Amazon user name and password outright. And there you are: a little problem for the Web, Version 2.0.
Possibly I became a little sardonic in that last paragraph whilst describing what we hip techno-folks call the "problem space" of 21st Century User Authentication. I do apologize for that. This morning, five of us uber-hip wonks were sitting in an office mulling over one of our latest proposals for solving this problem, and I noted to myself, "Hmm...here I am on the cutting edge of some obscure outpost of technology. How very...something." This evening I'm sitting here writing about it and I can't think of anything better to say about it.
Tags: Internet, Web 2.0
One of the upshots of the rather invisible Web 2.0 revolution is that your Amazon identity is no longer just a set of information about you, but rather a set of privileges--things like the ability to charge items to your credit card, or the ability to ship things second-day air for free because you're a member of Amazon Prime. The world coming soon to a theater near you that involves you buying virtual things has got the folks who care about things like intellectual property rights freaked right the hell out. You can buy perfect digital copies of books, songs, movies, or episodes of television shows and own them, carry them around, and, for all the copyright holders know, actually give them to your friends without paying for them again. So the enormous corporations that hold these copyrights are all in a tizzy, because their position as distributor middle-men is threatened. Or was it that the integrity of the original artist's work is threatened if the enormous multi-national doesn't control the distribution and release of that artist's ouevre? Well, in any case, some entity that controls an enormous amount of wealth is feeling threatened. I'm sure it's probably the artists of the world (don't mess with the Artist's Union, dude, they will fuck you up). So here's the problem--the powers that be want to figure out a way to sell these things to you without you actually owning them, such as having the movies, songs, books, or tv shows on a server, and giving you access to that server at any moment, such that you can stream the song or movie whenever you want. Here enters the third party: you buy an eBook from Amazon. Bob Livestockowski of Bob Livestockowski's Software Development Concern© writes a software program that will sync any eBooks you own to your PDA so that you can take them with you and read them wherever you go. But Bob Livestockowski isn't affiliated with Amazon.com, and so doesn't know which books you have "bought," nor does he have your Amazon account information, nor do you particularly want to give it to him, because Bob is kind of a shady character, what with his previous business forays into writing illicit spyware and Albanian Yak smuggling. Still, you want the program that syncs your PDA with your Amazon eBook stream, and you want to give Bob the ability to get it for you without giving him your Amazon user name and password outright. And there you are: a little problem for the Web, Version 2.0.
Possibly I became a little sardonic in that last paragraph whilst describing what we hip techno-folks call the "problem space" of 21st Century User Authentication. I do apologize for that. This morning, five of us uber-hip wonks were sitting in an office mulling over one of our latest proposals for solving this problem, and I noted to myself, "Hmm...here I am on the cutting edge of some obscure outpost of technology. How very...something." This evening I'm sitting here writing about it and I can't think of anything better to say about it.
Tags: Internet, Web 2.0
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
"Cowboy Up, Mulder"
I am developing this distinct fear that OaO is becoming the X-Files of blogs. That is, the writers of it think that people are reading it (in so far as anyone is reading this blog--please ignore the fact that I am comparing my blog to a tv show that was wildly popular, spawned a movie and video games, revitalized an entire sub-genre of science-fiction/mystery/conspiracy narrative, and rescued David Duchovny from a career appearing in soft porn and the occassional indie film. There is nothing to see here. Please move along) because of the ongoing, overarching, and unfolding mystery. In fact, the audience was reading it (blah blah television is Text blah) because of the things that happened in between the telling of this narrative. The writers thought the readers wanted to be let in on that unfolding mystery but the readers had become perplexed and bored by it--they wanted instead stories where Luke Wilson was a vampire, or Mulder and Scully were hallucinating their lives while slowly being digested by an enormous fungus.
I'm pretty sure, in any case, that nobody is reading these enormous posts I've racked up in the last week or so (well, Sam is, but Sam is an outlier, so to speak). In my mind, this is the whole point of OaO: the examination and redefinition of models and language and narrative and etc., but it occurred to me in the middle of writing the third enormously long, incredibly dense post in a row, that almost certainly nobody is reading this blog because of its length or density. If you wanted journal articles, you'd read a journal--instead, you're reading this blog. Or, at least, you were until I scared you away with my inability to write a blog entry shorter than 1000 words.
I have this operating theory that nobody who produces great art or great narrative actually knows why it's great. I take as evidence things like the incredibly clunky framing device used by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, or the inability of the Posies to ever repeat the simple unvarnished greatness of Failure, an album they recorded in their parents' basement when they were 20 year-olds. The 'why' of it is something I think you just don't get to know--it's my experience that things you produce that you think are clever or brilliant or whatever turn out to be trite or affected or overworked. I don't know what one can do about it or what it says about the world; I think you just have to keep writing the text and hope that what you mean to say will be there somewhere in between the words you use to say it.
Next: More opaque and intractable commentaries!
Tags: Narrative,Angst-Ridden Self Doubt
I'm pretty sure, in any case, that nobody is reading these enormous posts I've racked up in the last week or so (well, Sam is, but Sam is an outlier, so to speak). In my mind, this is the whole point of OaO: the examination and redefinition of models and language and narrative and etc., but it occurred to me in the middle of writing the third enormously long, incredibly dense post in a row, that almost certainly nobody is reading this blog because of its length or density. If you wanted journal articles, you'd read a journal--instead, you're reading this blog. Or, at least, you were until I scared you away with my inability to write a blog entry shorter than 1000 words.
I have this operating theory that nobody who produces great art or great narrative actually knows why it's great. I take as evidence things like the incredibly clunky framing device used by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, or the inability of the Posies to ever repeat the simple unvarnished greatness of Failure, an album they recorded in their parents' basement when they were 20 year-olds. The 'why' of it is something I think you just don't get to know--it's my experience that things you produce that you think are clever or brilliant or whatever turn out to be trite or affected or overworked. I don't know what one can do about it or what it says about the world; I think you just have to keep writing the text and hope that what you mean to say will be there somewhere in between the words you use to say it.
Next: More opaque and intractable commentaries!
Tags: Narrative,Angst-Ridden Self Doubt
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Particle/Wave II: Probabilistic Boogaloo
Moderator: Hello, and welcome back. Before you go any farther, you should probably read part one. No, really, do it. Also, everything you ever wanted to know about Quantum Physics can be found here. Okay, all good? Let's get back to the dialog.
Calvino: There's a moderator?
The Stoat: Apparently there was. Is. I feel strangely as if some chunk of my life has been removed, and yet here I am, arguing the same points as before, as if nothing had happened.
Calvino: Well, that could be because it's been a week since the end of the previous discussion, and you're not in fact real but a figment of the author's imagination, and therefore completely bound to the whim of an unseeable (unless he chooses to let you see him) and undefiable creator.
The Stoat: No, no, that's not it. It's some sort of metaphysical new state of being. A line has been crossed. We have been preternaturally altered, never to be the same again. I have flipped a coin and it has come up heads 100 times in a row, and it's entirely due to narrative.
Calvino: Ooookay. Whatever. We were talking about coin flips and quantum physics?
The Stoat: Well, right, I was saying that I'm skeptical of the idea of many universes being an explanation for a coin that is going to come up heads 50% of the time and tails 50% of the time.
Calvino: Can you, just for the sake of posterity, go over how you connect phenomenon of quantum physics to a coin flip, which is definitively a macro-level event?
The Stoat: Sure. Actually, you did it yourself when last we spoke, when you pointed out that the results of a regular coin flip were subject to the whims of tiny changes in atmospheric pressure. I'm actually going to argue, in fact, that any macro outcome that you would model as probabilistic is made up of (many) such quantum events.
Calvino: I'll save you the trouble. I'm perfectly prepared to accept this proposition. Clearly the coin flip is this way, not only in that it's subject to the environment, but the conditions that exist in your body--the muscles, the cells, the chemical signals between your brain and your extremities--at the moment you strike your thumb against the side of the coin in order to send it flipping end over end into the air. I might even be willing to make a case for the contrapositive being true--that is, things that seem to us absolute, like tides or seasons or the orbits of the planets, are non-probabilistic precisely because they aren't as affected by such things as the decay of carbon atoms or the existence of an electron in one place or another.
The Stoat: Good then. Someday we'll talk about chaos, and the fact that a quantum event could theoretically affect which side of the sun the earth will be on several million years from now. But for now, the model you describe is perfect.
Calvino: Last time you argued against the idea of multiple universes being an explanation for quantum events, or events in general that have multiple outcomes. That is, in the case of the coin flip that we interrupted so that we could talk about it, you tried to refute the idea that there's a universe in which it lands tails and a universe in which it lands heads.
The Stoat: That's right.
Calvino: It's not clear to me that you made this argument convincingly. I admit, on the surface the idea of many universes--and I acknoweldge that here "many" means "an ungodly large and incomprehensible number"--seems hopelessly complex, but that doesn't seem like enough to conclude that it's not a valid model of reality, or at the very least a useful one.
The Stoat: I grant that. Frankly, by the time I'm done this will be the least of your objections. My larger point is that I'm not to the point of making a rigorous argument yet. I'm not going to try and symbolically prove anything or write any equations. I'm only at the stage of making a proposition, or set of propositions.
Calvino: Okay. Then propose away.
The Stoat: All right. We were in the middle of that coin flip. Right now you would say that 50% of the time it's going to land heads and 50% of the time it's going to land tails. But if I won't let you have at least two universes, one in which the coin lands heads and one it which lands tails, what does that mean?
Calvino: I suppose it means that of the next ten flips, odds are that it'll come up heads about five times and tails five times.
The Stoat: No, no, we're not talking about multiple coin flips. We're talking about just this one, discrete flip. What does it mean to say that the result will be heads half the time and tails half the time?
Calvino: I don't understand what you're asking. This seems to be a pretty straightforward statement.
The Stoat: And I'm arguing that it's not. We've established and agreed that pre-flip, mid-flip, late-flip, and pretty much until it lands and we observe the results (when it does get kind of gray and have to do with things regarding cats and boxes) that the outcome of the flip isn't determined. But if you reject the idea that the universe somehow "splits" and there are multiple outcomes, there is no such thing as the coin coming out 50% heads and 50% tails.
Calvino: Look, this is stupid, and the only reason it seems like there's anything worth debating here is because this is a 50-50 proposition. If, for instance...well, okay, I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. If I ask you to guess what it is, I can say with as close as anything can be to actual, true, knowledge that you'll never....
The Stoat: It's 47.
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: ...
Moderator: Several moments of increasingly hilarious silence now ensue, followed at last by...
Calvino: Crap.
The Stoat: ...
Calvino: Okay, that was a bad example. I've got a hundred-sided die, and I'm going to roll it. I can say something about it: I can say that there's almost no way that it's going to come up 47.
The Stoat: Yeah, but you could say that about any number, including the number that's actually going to come up when you do roll it. I understand your frustration, but you're moving in a somewhat oblique direction to my argument. Here is what I am saying: when you say that the coin is going to come up heads half the time and tails half the time (or any way you want to phrase a statement on the probabilistic outcome of a discrete event), you are making a statement not about the event you're about to record, but about the nature of the results of an infinite number of those events--something I am, in fact, going to call the 'wave' of the flipped coin.
Calvino: Sure. I see that. But I'm still making an inference, based on that 'wave.' It sounds an awful lot like you're just saying I can't make a meaningful inference. This just doesn't sound right to me.
The Stoat: You aren't making an inference. You're making a statement about a wave. It's a wave, in fact, that is extremely well defined. The flip, on the other hand, is not defined at all.
Calvino: I just don't accept that. When the coin's in mid-air, isn't it 50% heads and 50% tails? That seems also extremely well defined.
The Stoat: Sure, sure. As long as it's a coin that's in mid-flip, or going to be flipped, or whatever (and you may make all manner of arguments about when that happens) it's in a superposition of states--50% heads and 50% tails if you like. But that's not information about what the outcome will be, that's a list of possible outcomes.
Calvino: Possible outcomes and their likelihood to occur!
The Stoat: It seems like that's true, but if there's no determinism--it wasn't predestined at any point to have a particular outcome, and there are no multiple outcomes--the universe doesn't split in two separate but equal universes in which each outcome occurs, what does that mean?
Calvino: It means that if I flip 100 coins...wait...crap....
The Stoat: Crap, exactly.
Calvino: I'm still hung up on the case of the hundred-sided die. I'd be stupid to bet on the next roll coming up 47. But that's a discrete event just like the coin flip. And there doesn't seem to be any getting around the simple fact that "not 47" is more likely than "47."
The Stoat: Well, for one, you've just lumped 99 outcomes together and are comparing them with one outcome. So 99 is indeed greater than 1, and I'm fine with that definition of "more likely." If, however, you want to say, "not 47 happens more of the time than 47," that's true, but again it's not a statement about one die-roll, it's a statement about many die-rolls--about the probability wave of a rolled 100-sided die.
Calvino: Hmm. Whether or not you've convinced me of anything at all here, I can't help but feel as if I've been robbed. I used to be perfectly happy having knowledge about individual outcomes, and whether or not you've proven that this was false belief on my part, you haven't given me anything new. It seems like the onus is on you to offer a better model. You've sort of hinted at some sort of particle/wave thing, but I haven't seen it yet.
The Stoat: I realize that. And I haven't even broached the subject of the coin flip having no outcome until somebody observes it. Frankly, I'm in a little bit of a quandary as to how to accomplish this and still...blog. These dialogs are just too long. I should be writing a paragraph a day, rather than a treatise a week.
Calvino: So this dialog is just going to end, right here, with so much unresolved?
The Stoat: Yes. For today.
Next: More stuff! More things!
Tags: Probability,Statistics,Philosophy,Quantum Physics,Humor
Calvino: There's a moderator?
The Stoat: Apparently there was. Is. I feel strangely as if some chunk of my life has been removed, and yet here I am, arguing the same points as before, as if nothing had happened.
Calvino: Well, that could be because it's been a week since the end of the previous discussion, and you're not in fact real but a figment of the author's imagination, and therefore completely bound to the whim of an unseeable (unless he chooses to let you see him) and undefiable creator.
The Stoat: No, no, that's not it. It's some sort of metaphysical new state of being. A line has been crossed. We have been preternaturally altered, never to be the same again. I have flipped a coin and it has come up heads 100 times in a row, and it's entirely due to narrative.
Calvino: Ooookay. Whatever. We were talking about coin flips and quantum physics?
The Stoat: Well, right, I was saying that I'm skeptical of the idea of many universes being an explanation for a coin that is going to come up heads 50% of the time and tails 50% of the time.
Calvino: Can you, just for the sake of posterity, go over how you connect phenomenon of quantum physics to a coin flip, which is definitively a macro-level event?
The Stoat: Sure. Actually, you did it yourself when last we spoke, when you pointed out that the results of a regular coin flip were subject to the whims of tiny changes in atmospheric pressure. I'm actually going to argue, in fact, that any macro outcome that you would model as probabilistic is made up of (many) such quantum events.
Calvino: I'll save you the trouble. I'm perfectly prepared to accept this proposition. Clearly the coin flip is this way, not only in that it's subject to the environment, but the conditions that exist in your body--the muscles, the cells, the chemical signals between your brain and your extremities--at the moment you strike your thumb against the side of the coin in order to send it flipping end over end into the air. I might even be willing to make a case for the contrapositive being true--that is, things that seem to us absolute, like tides or seasons or the orbits of the planets, are non-probabilistic precisely because they aren't as affected by such things as the decay of carbon atoms or the existence of an electron in one place or another.
The Stoat: Good then. Someday we'll talk about chaos, and the fact that a quantum event could theoretically affect which side of the sun the earth will be on several million years from now. But for now, the model you describe is perfect.
Calvino: Last time you argued against the idea of multiple universes being an explanation for quantum events, or events in general that have multiple outcomes. That is, in the case of the coin flip that we interrupted so that we could talk about it, you tried to refute the idea that there's a universe in which it lands tails and a universe in which it lands heads.
The Stoat: That's right.
Calvino: It's not clear to me that you made this argument convincingly. I admit, on the surface the idea of many universes--and I acknoweldge that here "many" means "an ungodly large and incomprehensible number"--seems hopelessly complex, but that doesn't seem like enough to conclude that it's not a valid model of reality, or at the very least a useful one.
The Stoat: I grant that. Frankly, by the time I'm done this will be the least of your objections. My larger point is that I'm not to the point of making a rigorous argument yet. I'm not going to try and symbolically prove anything or write any equations. I'm only at the stage of making a proposition, or set of propositions.
Calvino: Okay. Then propose away.
The Stoat: All right. We were in the middle of that coin flip. Right now you would say that 50% of the time it's going to land heads and 50% of the time it's going to land tails. But if I won't let you have at least two universes, one in which the coin lands heads and one it which lands tails, what does that mean?
Calvino: I suppose it means that of the next ten flips, odds are that it'll come up heads about five times and tails five times.
The Stoat: No, no, we're not talking about multiple coin flips. We're talking about just this one, discrete flip. What does it mean to say that the result will be heads half the time and tails half the time?
Calvino: I don't understand what you're asking. This seems to be a pretty straightforward statement.
The Stoat: And I'm arguing that it's not. We've established and agreed that pre-flip, mid-flip, late-flip, and pretty much until it lands and we observe the results (when it does get kind of gray and have to do with things regarding cats and boxes) that the outcome of the flip isn't determined. But if you reject the idea that the universe somehow "splits" and there are multiple outcomes, there is no such thing as the coin coming out 50% heads and 50% tails.
Calvino: Look, this is stupid, and the only reason it seems like there's anything worth debating here is because this is a 50-50 proposition. If, for instance...well, okay, I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. If I ask you to guess what it is, I can say with as close as anything can be to actual, true, knowledge that you'll never....
The Stoat: It's 47.
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: ...
Moderator: Several moments of increasingly hilarious silence now ensue, followed at last by...
Calvino: Crap.
The Stoat: ...
Calvino: Okay, that was a bad example. I've got a hundred-sided die, and I'm going to roll it. I can say something about it: I can say that there's almost no way that it's going to come up 47.
The Stoat: Yeah, but you could say that about any number, including the number that's actually going to come up when you do roll it. I understand your frustration, but you're moving in a somewhat oblique direction to my argument. Here is what I am saying: when you say that the coin is going to come up heads half the time and tails half the time (or any way you want to phrase a statement on the probabilistic outcome of a discrete event), you are making a statement not about the event you're about to record, but about the nature of the results of an infinite number of those events--something I am, in fact, going to call the 'wave' of the flipped coin.
Calvino: Sure. I see that. But I'm still making an inference, based on that 'wave.' It sounds an awful lot like you're just saying I can't make a meaningful inference. This just doesn't sound right to me.
The Stoat: You aren't making an inference. You're making a statement about a wave. It's a wave, in fact, that is extremely well defined. The flip, on the other hand, is not defined at all.
Calvino: I just don't accept that. When the coin's in mid-air, isn't it 50% heads and 50% tails? That seems also extremely well defined.
The Stoat: Sure, sure. As long as it's a coin that's in mid-flip, or going to be flipped, or whatever (and you may make all manner of arguments about when that happens) it's in a superposition of states--50% heads and 50% tails if you like. But that's not information about what the outcome will be, that's a list of possible outcomes.
Calvino: Possible outcomes and their likelihood to occur!
The Stoat: It seems like that's true, but if there's no determinism--it wasn't predestined at any point to have a particular outcome, and there are no multiple outcomes--the universe doesn't split in two separate but equal universes in which each outcome occurs, what does that mean?
Calvino: It means that if I flip 100 coins...wait...crap....
The Stoat: Crap, exactly.
Calvino: I'm still hung up on the case of the hundred-sided die. I'd be stupid to bet on the next roll coming up 47. But that's a discrete event just like the coin flip. And there doesn't seem to be any getting around the simple fact that "not 47" is more likely than "47."
The Stoat: Well, for one, you've just lumped 99 outcomes together and are comparing them with one outcome. So 99 is indeed greater than 1, and I'm fine with that definition of "more likely." If, however, you want to say, "not 47 happens more of the time than 47," that's true, but again it's not a statement about one die-roll, it's a statement about many die-rolls--about the probability wave of a rolled 100-sided die.
Calvino: Hmm. Whether or not you've convinced me of anything at all here, I can't help but feel as if I've been robbed. I used to be perfectly happy having knowledge about individual outcomes, and whether or not you've proven that this was false belief on my part, you haven't given me anything new. It seems like the onus is on you to offer a better model. You've sort of hinted at some sort of particle/wave thing, but I haven't seen it yet.
The Stoat: I realize that. And I haven't even broached the subject of the coin flip having no outcome until somebody observes it. Frankly, I'm in a little bit of a quandary as to how to accomplish this and still...blog. These dialogs are just too long. I should be writing a paragraph a day, rather than a treatise a week.
Calvino: So this dialog is just going to end, right here, with so much unresolved?
The Stoat: Yes. For today.
Next: More stuff! More things!
Tags: Probability,Statistics,Philosophy,Quantum Physics,Humor
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Ceci N'est Pas Une Second Wave/Particle Post
I started writing the follow up to my last post, and found the following to be true:
So...the cat in the box that's both dead and alive: I have not yet explicitly mentioned Schrödinger's Cat, but it's come up in the comments, and the concepts involved are relevant. It is, for instance, the particular result that Physicists feel compelled to explain by introducing the concept of many universes. Here it is: experiments with very small particles, like electrons and photons, in the early part of the 20th century, revealed that these particles had a wave nature. This was relatively soon after physicists had discovered that light and energy had a particle nature, whereas classical physics had said that light and energy came in waves. Physicists in the first part of the last century had a lot of problems making up their minds.
One of the things these indecisive scientists discovered about particles was that one couldn't accurately measure the particle's velocity and position at the same time. That is, one could know where it was, but not exactly where it was going. Or know where it was going, but not exactly where it was. This is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is a very powerful result, and it shattered the classical idea of Determinism--in this case, the belief that if you knew the velocity and position of every particle in the universe, you could know what was going to happen in the future--the weather tomorrow, whether that coin flip that I left right in the middle of my last post was going to end up heads or tails, etc. It turned out that you simply could never know the velocity and position of even one particle in the universe, let alone all of them. Even God was subject to Heisenberg.
This has all manner of repercussions in discussions of free will and fate and Philosophy in general which will be ignored by me right now. The upshot is that electrons are tricky bastards. You can track them for days, and still not know exactly where they are. Say you spot an electron somewhere (they are very small, so it's not like you can just put a tracking device on the thing; you have to put a detector some place and hope one passes by). The fact that you can't quite know where it was going (since you knew where it was) means that you're going to have to take a guess. So all you can do is narrow it down to a general area, based on what it was doing the last time you saw it. Think of this like watching a person entering a dark room: you know his path walking up to the doorway, but then he walks through the door and disappears. You know for sure he's now inside the room, and you could maybe make a pretty good guess where he is based on where he was headed, but that's about all you know. He could have stopped or changed direction after he's run into a chair because nobody bothered to turn on the goddamn light. Erwin Schrödinger more or less quantified this phenomenon with what is known as the Wave Function. It basically shows you the probability that a particle will be in a particular place given where you last saw it (actual Quantum Physicists are now having a freak out from this definition of the Wave Function. Fuck them. They are not important right now). Basically, it will be highly likely to be in some places and extremely unlikely to be in others.
Okay, put that aside for a moment and consider the Double Slit Experiment. For this you'll need a visual aid. Here's a really cool one. Here's a lower tech version, if that doesn't work for you (you have to scroll down a little to get to the pictures). The reason Classical Physicists thought light was a wave was because it acted like one. If you turned on a light, and shined it through a barrier with two slits in it, it created an interference pattern on the wall behind it. This is what waves do--think of waves in the ocean. If two waves that are at their peak combine, they make a wave with a peak twice as high. If both waves meet when they're both at their lowest point, they'll make a trough twice as deep. And if two waves meet when one is at a peak and one is at a trough, they'll cancel each other out and the result will be smooth. So everyone was going along all happy with light being a wave until the late 19th century, when Max Planck realized that light had to come in small packets which he called 'quanta', because all the experiments with light and heat only made sense if energy came in discrete quantities. I won't expound on this, but it's kind of mind-blowing. I mean, hell, I've installed dimmer switches in my house, it sure looks to me like light is a relatively continuous quantity--I turn the switch, the light gets brighter. But this isn't quite what's going on. Light seems like it's analog, but it's digital--it comes in steps. They're very, very small steps, but they are steps nonetheless.
This threw the Physicists into a tizzy--I mean, what the fuck, right? (This was nothing compared to what was about to hit them.) Light acts like a wave. If light were a particle it would act like a particle when you shined it through a barrier with two slits in it--there would be no interference pattern, there'd just be two bright spots where the light shined through. "Well," they reasoned, "if light is a particle, we should be able to see which slits the particles are going through." So they set up the experiment again (I am being fast and loose with the time frame here), except this time they put some detectors by the slits to see which slit the particles were going through. As soon as they did that, light started acting like a particle. The interference pattern on the wall behind the double-slit barrier went away and was replaced by two bright splotches of light. As soon as the detectors were removed, the interference pattern returned. This was just too much. The Physicists, after having their entire foundation of what reality was crumble underneath them, all went out for a collective three-day crack-and-whore bender (or whatever it was they smoked in those days). When they came back from their lost weekends, they were left with only one reasonable conclusion: particles simply have no reality until you observe them. It's not just that a particle of light (or an electron--the double slit experiment has been verified with a particle as large as a bucky ball) can be in many places with varying probabilities, it's that it is in all of these places until an observation is made.
I should add here that many Physicists thought that this interpretation of the phenomenon was crap. Einstein was among them, saying famously that "God does not play dice with the universe" (to which I say, no duh: God is clearly playing Settlers of Catan with the universe). He spent much of the rest of his life trying to prove it. One of the results of this pursuit is what is known as the ERP Paradox, which postulates instantaneous exchange of information across unlimited distances. According to Einstein's own theory of Special Relativity, this is impossible, and all tests of the ERP Paradox have shown that this phenomenon is real. Quantum Physics is full of ironies like this. Another of these little ironies is Schrödinger's Cat (you were wondering when I was going to get back to that). Schrödinger also thought that this interpretation of his wave function, that it showed where a given particle could be with given probability, was complete bollocks. He created the thought experiment of the cat in a box to prove it. He imagined that there was an opaque, sound-proof box containing a cat, a canister of cyanide gas, and a hammer connected to a Geiger Counter. There was also a piece of radioactive material in the box, and it was such that the probability that a piece of the particle would decay in the span of an hour was exactly 50%. If this happened, the Geiger Counter would detect the radioactive decay, and trigger the hammer, which would smash the glass, letting out the gas and killing the cat. After an hour, you would look in and see how the cat was doing. But wait! Particle decay is a quantum event, which means that, according to the favored interpretation, the particle has neither decayed nor not decayed until an observation is made. But since you've created a system in which the life of the cat is connected to the decay of the particle, the cat is in the exact same condition--neither alive nor dead--until an observation is made. That is, until you lift the lid of the box and see if the cat is still alive.
"Clearly," said Schrödinger, "no reasonable person would ever believe in a cat that was both alive and dead at the same time. I mean, come on, have you ever seen one?" "No dude...wait...that's totally awesome!" replied the Physicists, who somehow had become stoner surfers from Long Beach between the last paragraph and this one, "The cat is totally alive and dead at the same time! It exists in some never-before-observed state of being. That totally rocks!" Then they all went out to score dime bags from their dealers, hitting the grocery store for some Fritos before going back to their labs to finish watching The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's Dark Size of the Moon as the soundtrack. For his part, Schrödinger returned home, having had enough irony for one day.
Here I'd like to defer to L., in her wifely guise of "Mrs. Transient Gadfly," in which she states the whole paradox of this quite nicely:
Before I finish, I want to make a little nod to Dan, who started this whole thing off. He made a couple of arguments for the possibility of many universes actually being a simpler model of reality than one fuzzy universe, a topic which I would like to address, but my posts are just getting way too damn long. Hopefully some day I'll get there. I've never met Dan, and I wouldn't know him if he fell on me (unless, of course, I were warned in advance that the person who would be, in just a moment, falling on me were to be Dan), but he's joined the dialog here at OaO, so I've added his blog, Until Today, to the blogroll at the left. Welcome, Dan.
Finally, L. also made reference in her comments on Sam's post as to how Quantum Physicists get steamed every time somebody in another field uses their models as metaphor for something else. Here is what I have to say to them: shut the hell up. Physics is metaphor. It is not reality. It is map, not territory, the same way Math is, the same way Anthropology is, the same way Art is, the same way Philosophy is. In 50 years, somebody will, within the established framework of Physics, prove this, and the Physicists will be shocked and amazed, and that person will win the Nobel Prize. Then everybody will go back to their labs where, quite surprisingly, they'll still be watching Judy Garland and listening to Floyd. So tomorrow or the next day, whenever I get back to Part II of the post, when I'll be making a bunch of metaphors that would make any real scientist cringe, I'll point back to this paragraph. Physicists have been, over the last century, galloping headlong towards the idea that everything everyone else already understood about everything macro, in every other intellectual discipline--that there is no truth, only good metaphor; that nothing is but that observing makes it so--holds for any level of reality you care to look at. Sooner or later, we'll all run into each other.
Next: brazenly pseudo-scientific quasi-intellectual babble!
Tags: Science,Philosophy,Quantum Physics,Humor
- My post was becoming incredibly cluttered with sidetracks about physics and reality and such.
- I was writing it as if everyone reading either knew about these things, or clicked on the links to find out about them, in either case ending up with the same understanding of them that I have.
- Given the degree to which some have loudly complained that my discussions of such things are rudely opaque, this seemed to be a bad assumption, therefore...
- ...being as how I generally have great affection for my audience and do not wish them to feel alienated, I thought I would provide a little bonus post to talk about some things which seem like they are scary and math-y/technical, but which are in fact cool and full of narrative.
- If you already know about such things, and/or don't care, and/or you are not feeling alienated, you may skip this post.
So...the cat in the box that's both dead and alive: I have not yet explicitly mentioned Schrödinger's Cat, but it's come up in the comments, and the concepts involved are relevant. It is, for instance, the particular result that Physicists feel compelled to explain by introducing the concept of many universes. Here it is: experiments with very small particles, like electrons and photons, in the early part of the 20th century, revealed that these particles had a wave nature. This was relatively soon after physicists had discovered that light and energy had a particle nature, whereas classical physics had said that light and energy came in waves. Physicists in the first part of the last century had a lot of problems making up their minds.
One of the things these indecisive scientists discovered about particles was that one couldn't accurately measure the particle's velocity and position at the same time. That is, one could know where it was, but not exactly where it was going. Or know where it was going, but not exactly where it was. This is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is a very powerful result, and it shattered the classical idea of Determinism--in this case, the belief that if you knew the velocity and position of every particle in the universe, you could know what was going to happen in the future--the weather tomorrow, whether that coin flip that I left right in the middle of my last post was going to end up heads or tails, etc. It turned out that you simply could never know the velocity and position of even one particle in the universe, let alone all of them. Even God was subject to Heisenberg.
This has all manner of repercussions in discussions of free will and fate and Philosophy in general which will be ignored by me right now. The upshot is that electrons are tricky bastards. You can track them for days, and still not know exactly where they are. Say you spot an electron somewhere (they are very small, so it's not like you can just put a tracking device on the thing; you have to put a detector some place and hope one passes by). The fact that you can't quite know where it was going (since you knew where it was) means that you're going to have to take a guess. So all you can do is narrow it down to a general area, based on what it was doing the last time you saw it. Think of this like watching a person entering a dark room: you know his path walking up to the doorway, but then he walks through the door and disappears. You know for sure he's now inside the room, and you could maybe make a pretty good guess where he is based on where he was headed, but that's about all you know. He could have stopped or changed direction after he's run into a chair because nobody bothered to turn on the goddamn light. Erwin Schrödinger more or less quantified this phenomenon with what is known as the Wave Function. It basically shows you the probability that a particle will be in a particular place given where you last saw it (actual Quantum Physicists are now having a freak out from this definition of the Wave Function. Fuck them. They are not important right now). Basically, it will be highly likely to be in some places and extremely unlikely to be in others.
Okay, put that aside for a moment and consider the Double Slit Experiment. For this you'll need a visual aid. Here's a really cool one. Here's a lower tech version, if that doesn't work for you (you have to scroll down a little to get to the pictures). The reason Classical Physicists thought light was a wave was because it acted like one. If you turned on a light, and shined it through a barrier with two slits in it, it created an interference pattern on the wall behind it. This is what waves do--think of waves in the ocean. If two waves that are at their peak combine, they make a wave with a peak twice as high. If both waves meet when they're both at their lowest point, they'll make a trough twice as deep. And if two waves meet when one is at a peak and one is at a trough, they'll cancel each other out and the result will be smooth. So everyone was going along all happy with light being a wave until the late 19th century, when Max Planck realized that light had to come in small packets which he called 'quanta', because all the experiments with light and heat only made sense if energy came in discrete quantities. I won't expound on this, but it's kind of mind-blowing. I mean, hell, I've installed dimmer switches in my house, it sure looks to me like light is a relatively continuous quantity--I turn the switch, the light gets brighter. But this isn't quite what's going on. Light seems like it's analog, but it's digital--it comes in steps. They're very, very small steps, but they are steps nonetheless.
This threw the Physicists into a tizzy--I mean, what the fuck, right? (This was nothing compared to what was about to hit them.) Light acts like a wave. If light were a particle it would act like a particle when you shined it through a barrier with two slits in it--there would be no interference pattern, there'd just be two bright spots where the light shined through. "Well," they reasoned, "if light is a particle, we should be able to see which slits the particles are going through." So they set up the experiment again (I am being fast and loose with the time frame here), except this time they put some detectors by the slits to see which slit the particles were going through. As soon as they did that, light started acting like a particle. The interference pattern on the wall behind the double-slit barrier went away and was replaced by two bright splotches of light. As soon as the detectors were removed, the interference pattern returned. This was just too much. The Physicists, after having their entire foundation of what reality was crumble underneath them, all went out for a collective three-day crack-and-whore bender (or whatever it was they smoked in those days). When they came back from their lost weekends, they were left with only one reasonable conclusion: particles simply have no reality until you observe them. It's not just that a particle of light (or an electron--the double slit experiment has been verified with a particle as large as a bucky ball) can be in many places with varying probabilities, it's that it is in all of these places until an observation is made.
I should add here that many Physicists thought that this interpretation of the phenomenon was crap. Einstein was among them, saying famously that "God does not play dice with the universe" (to which I say, no duh: God is clearly playing Settlers of Catan with the universe). He spent much of the rest of his life trying to prove it. One of the results of this pursuit is what is known as the ERP Paradox, which postulates instantaneous exchange of information across unlimited distances. According to Einstein's own theory of Special Relativity, this is impossible, and all tests of the ERP Paradox have shown that this phenomenon is real. Quantum Physics is full of ironies like this. Another of these little ironies is Schrödinger's Cat (you were wondering when I was going to get back to that). Schrödinger also thought that this interpretation of his wave function, that it showed where a given particle could be with given probability, was complete bollocks. He created the thought experiment of the cat in a box to prove it. He imagined that there was an opaque, sound-proof box containing a cat, a canister of cyanide gas, and a hammer connected to a Geiger Counter. There was also a piece of radioactive material in the box, and it was such that the probability that a piece of the particle would decay in the span of an hour was exactly 50%. If this happened, the Geiger Counter would detect the radioactive decay, and trigger the hammer, which would smash the glass, letting out the gas and killing the cat. After an hour, you would look in and see how the cat was doing. But wait! Particle decay is a quantum event, which means that, according to the favored interpretation, the particle has neither decayed nor not decayed until an observation is made. But since you've created a system in which the life of the cat is connected to the decay of the particle, the cat is in the exact same condition--neither alive nor dead--until an observation is made. That is, until you lift the lid of the box and see if the cat is still alive.
"Clearly," said Schrödinger, "no reasonable person would ever believe in a cat that was both alive and dead at the same time. I mean, come on, have you ever seen one?" "No dude...wait...that's totally awesome!" replied the Physicists, who somehow had become stoner surfers from Long Beach between the last paragraph and this one, "The cat is totally alive and dead at the same time! It exists in some never-before-observed state of being. That totally rocks!" Then they all went out to score dime bags from their dealers, hitting the grocery store for some Fritos before going back to their labs to finish watching The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's Dark Size of the Moon as the soundtrack. For his part, Schrödinger returned home, having had enough irony for one day.
Here I'd like to defer to L., in her wifely guise of "Mrs. Transient Gadfly," in which she states the whole paradox of this quite nicely:
That there is no reality outside of our representation/observation/interpretation of it is, well, our approach to media, politics, art, philosophy, narrative, reading, writing, the world in general, and everything else there is in the universe -- absolutely...except that freaking cat...who though i believe in every every important, representational, constructed, intent, and purpose way is neither/both alive/dead in my heart of hearts, i secretly can't convince myself that really REALLY he isn't actually one or the other.
Before I finish, I want to make a little nod to Dan, who started this whole thing off. He made a couple of arguments for the possibility of many universes actually being a simpler model of reality than one fuzzy universe, a topic which I would like to address, but my posts are just getting way too damn long. Hopefully some day I'll get there. I've never met Dan, and I wouldn't know him if he fell on me (unless, of course, I were warned in advance that the person who would be, in just a moment, falling on me were to be Dan), but he's joined the dialog here at OaO, so I've added his blog, Until Today, to the blogroll at the left. Welcome, Dan.
Finally, L. also made reference in her comments on Sam's post as to how Quantum Physicists get steamed every time somebody in another field uses their models as metaphor for something else. Here is what I have to say to them: shut the hell up. Physics is metaphor. It is not reality. It is map, not territory, the same way Math is, the same way Anthropology is, the same way Art is, the same way Philosophy is. In 50 years, somebody will, within the established framework of Physics, prove this, and the Physicists will be shocked and amazed, and that person will win the Nobel Prize. Then everybody will go back to their labs where, quite surprisingly, they'll still be watching Judy Garland and listening to Floyd. So tomorrow or the next day, whenever I get back to Part II of the post, when I'll be making a bunch of metaphors that would make any real scientist cringe, I'll point back to this paragraph. Physicists have been, over the last century, galloping headlong towards the idea that everything everyone else already understood about everything macro, in every other intellectual discipline--that there is no truth, only good metaphor; that nothing is but that observing makes it so--holds for any level of reality you care to look at. Sooner or later, we'll all run into each other.
Next: brazenly pseudo-scientific quasi-intellectual babble!
Tags: Science,Philosophy,Quantum Physics,Humor
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Particle/Wave
At the end of my previous post, I made a claim that was simply outrageous:
Calvino: My god, do I still exist? I hadn't heard from me in months. I thought I had been replaced.
The Stoat: Yet here you are. And I too. I suspect this happens every time the author is about to propose something radical, and it's just been that long since he's done so.
Calvino: Interesting theory. And indeed, suggesting that one knows nothing about the result of the next flip of a fair coin seems pretty radical. And also demonstrably false. You know 50% of the time it will come up heads, and 50% of the time it will come up tails. That's not nothing.
The Stoat: Well, he could merely have been talking about the fact that a million coin flips don't give you any new information about what the next flip is going to be. That is, he could be talking about the well-discussed fallacy that if you flip heads a hundred times in a row, the odds of flipping heads again are....
Calvino: 50/50. And not 1 in 2101. Yes, I know. I believe that the author might point out that this is a problem of language, not probability. Anyway, he didn't say that. He said you know nothing about the next flip.
The Stoat: Yes, and I'm going to propose that it's entirely possible that he indeed believes one knows nothing, that the appearance that one can make a discrete inference about this next flip being heads or landing tails is entirely illusory, and that there exists a more illuminating model. I'm also going to propose that he hasn't entirely formalized this theory, and that perhaps someone has goaded him into presenting this theory now, before it's been formalized, in the name of radicalism.
Calvino: I am bored by your propositions. I want to know why I can't say the next coin flip is going to be heads half the time and tails the other half.
The Stoat: Yes, I suspected that you might.
Coin flips are just about the perfect probabilistic event. A flip could result in the coin falling off the table and getting lost and thus you'll never know what the result was, or it could land perfectly on its side because it's 1961 and you work in a bank and suddenly can hear everybody thinking because you're the guy in that one episode of The Twilight Zone. But you can pretty much just throw those results out--any sane person would aver that if you flip a coin, 50% of the time it'll land heads and 50% of the time it'll land tails.
Go through this thought experiment with me: you've flipped the coin--it's turning over and over in the air, and now it's at it's peak before it starts coming down. Let's stop time and ask a few questions.
The Stoat: Is the outcome of the flip now pre-determined? That is, if time continues from this point on, would the outcome always be tails?
Calvino: My first impulse is to say yes, and in fact to claim that the outcome was fixed as soon as you gave the coin an initial upward velocity and spin with your thumb. But on second thought, we know thanks to 20th century physics that we don't live in a deterministic universe--the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and all that. More concretely, I guess that you could reasonably predict that in some universes the atmospheric pressure where the coin is falling will change slightly just before the coin hits the table, such that it bounces funny and lands on a different side than it otherwise would have.
The Stoat: Yes, I agree. By the way, don't you think "Heisenberg Certainty Principle" is a totally awesome name for a rock band?
Calvino: Yes?
The Stoat: I'm just saying, if you go and start, like, a math rock band and name it that, you have to give me credit for having thought up the name.
Calvino: Yeah...sure, whatever. We were talking about probability?
The Stoat: Yes, sorry. Look, before we go any farther--well, you just mentioned above the idea that "in some universes things change and the coin flip comes out differently." It's a nice way to talk about the possibility that the coin can end up heads or end up tails, and I'm now going to take it away from you. The idea of many universes, splitting off from this one is crap, and I will now debunk it.
Calvino: Just like that? A model favored by many famous Physicists who are incredibly much smarter than you? I suppose also you are also going to explain away wave-particle duality at the same time?
The Stoat: Well, yes, I will. But not yet. One coin flip vis a vis many coin flips is in fact an excellent metaphor for particle and wave. But I'll get to that. Firstly, the many worlds interpretation of events states that where you have a quantum event (an atom of carbon, e.g., which will either decay or not decay in a particular time period), that two deterministic universes are created--one in which the particle decayed and one in which the particle did not decay. We also know, in fact, that you don't know in which of these universes you live unless you actually go and measure that particular carbon atom and see if it decayed.
Calvino: You are talking about the collapse of the Schrödinger Wave Function--that a particle actually doesn't have one state or the other until it is observed.
The Stoat: Yes--the many universes theory explains this by saying, no, it did have one state or the other, the universe split into two realities at the moment of the quantum event and you-the-observer landed in one or the other. My objection is this: can you imagine how much memory it would take to run the universe if near-infinite numbers of splits of reality are happening at every instant? Even if most of those universes eventually peter out into non-existence, you're still splitt ing off unimaginable numbers of copies.
Calvino: What, we're in the Matrix? The universe is a computer simulation?
The Stoat: I'm not claiming that, what I'm making is an argument using Ockham's Razor. Which is more likely: a universe that has a nearly infinite number of states, with more states splitting off every instant (many universes), or a universe that is kind of "fuzzy", where there's no fixed reality unless you force there to be one by making an observation (that is, via the collapse of a wave functions)? From a strictly design point of view, the second is utterly less complex to manage. Not only do you not have to keep track of the states of all possible universes, you don't even have to have to keep track of the state of the one--only when somebody's looking do you have to decide whether, e.g., the carbon atom decayed or not, or the coin flip came up heads or tails.
Calvino: Either you're insane or I'm totally lost.
Moderator: ...
Calvino: There's a moderator?
Moderator: Yes, and I'm going to end the discussion here for today, as the author is violating all reasonable laws of blogging by going on endlessly. We'll pick it up here tomorrow.
Tags: Probability,Statistics,Humor
I invented the question mark.No, wait...that wasn't me. This was me:
The longer you flip a fair coin, the closer it runs to 50% heads, 50% tails. And you still don't know a goddamn thing about what the next flip is going to be.
Calvino: My god, do I still exist? I hadn't heard from me in months. I thought I had been replaced.
The Stoat: Yet here you are. And I too. I suspect this happens every time the author is about to propose something radical, and it's just been that long since he's done so.
Calvino: Interesting theory. And indeed, suggesting that one knows nothing about the result of the next flip of a fair coin seems pretty radical. And also demonstrably false. You know 50% of the time it will come up heads, and 50% of the time it will come up tails. That's not nothing.
The Stoat: Well, he could merely have been talking about the fact that a million coin flips don't give you any new information about what the next flip is going to be. That is, he could be talking about the well-discussed fallacy that if you flip heads a hundred times in a row, the odds of flipping heads again are....
Calvino: 50/50. And not 1 in 2101. Yes, I know. I believe that the author might point out that this is a problem of language, not probability. Anyway, he didn't say that. He said you know nothing about the next flip.
The Stoat: Yes, and I'm going to propose that it's entirely possible that he indeed believes one knows nothing, that the appearance that one can make a discrete inference about this next flip being heads or landing tails is entirely illusory, and that there exists a more illuminating model. I'm also going to propose that he hasn't entirely formalized this theory, and that perhaps someone has goaded him into presenting this theory now, before it's been formalized, in the name of radicalism.
Calvino: I am bored by your propositions. I want to know why I can't say the next coin flip is going to be heads half the time and tails the other half.
The Stoat: Yes, I suspected that you might.
Coin flips are just about the perfect probabilistic event. A flip could result in the coin falling off the table and getting lost and thus you'll never know what the result was, or it could land perfectly on its side because it's 1961 and you work in a bank and suddenly can hear everybody thinking because you're the guy in that one episode of The Twilight Zone. But you can pretty much just throw those results out--any sane person would aver that if you flip a coin, 50% of the time it'll land heads and 50% of the time it'll land tails.
Go through this thought experiment with me: you've flipped the coin--it's turning over and over in the air, and now it's at it's peak before it starts coming down. Let's stop time and ask a few questions.
The Stoat: Is the outcome of the flip now pre-determined? That is, if time continues from this point on, would the outcome always be tails?
Calvino: My first impulse is to say yes, and in fact to claim that the outcome was fixed as soon as you gave the coin an initial upward velocity and spin with your thumb. But on second thought, we know thanks to 20th century physics that we don't live in a deterministic universe--the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and all that. More concretely, I guess that you could reasonably predict that in some universes the atmospheric pressure where the coin is falling will change slightly just before the coin hits the table, such that it bounces funny and lands on a different side than it otherwise would have.
The Stoat: Yes, I agree. By the way, don't you think "Heisenberg Certainty Principle" is a totally awesome name for a rock band?
Calvino: Yes?
The Stoat: I'm just saying, if you go and start, like, a math rock band and name it that, you have to give me credit for having thought up the name.
Calvino: Yeah...sure, whatever. We were talking about probability?
The Stoat: Yes, sorry. Look, before we go any farther--well, you just mentioned above the idea that "in some universes things change and the coin flip comes out differently." It's a nice way to talk about the possibility that the coin can end up heads or end up tails, and I'm now going to take it away from you. The idea of many universes, splitting off from this one is crap, and I will now debunk it.
Calvino: Just like that? A model favored by many famous Physicists who are incredibly much smarter than you? I suppose also you are also going to explain away wave-particle duality at the same time?
The Stoat: Well, yes, I will. But not yet. One coin flip vis a vis many coin flips is in fact an excellent metaphor for particle and wave. But I'll get to that. Firstly, the many worlds interpretation of events states that where you have a quantum event (an atom of carbon, e.g., which will either decay or not decay in a particular time period), that two deterministic universes are created--one in which the particle decayed and one in which the particle did not decay. We also know, in fact, that you don't know in which of these universes you live unless you actually go and measure that particular carbon atom and see if it decayed.
Calvino: You are talking about the collapse of the Schrödinger Wave Function--that a particle actually doesn't have one state or the other until it is observed.
The Stoat: Yes--the many universes theory explains this by saying, no, it did have one state or the other, the universe split into two realities at the moment of the quantum event and you-the-observer landed in one or the other. My objection is this: can you imagine how much memory it would take to run the universe if near-infinite numbers of splits of reality are happening at every instant? Even if most of those universes eventually peter out into non-existence, you're still splitt ing off unimaginable numbers of copies.
Calvino: What, we're in the Matrix? The universe is a computer simulation?
The Stoat: I'm not claiming that, what I'm making is an argument using Ockham's Razor. Which is more likely: a universe that has a nearly infinite number of states, with more states splitting off every instant (many universes), or a universe that is kind of "fuzzy", where there's no fixed reality unless you force there to be one by making an observation (that is, via the collapse of a wave functions)? From a strictly design point of view, the second is utterly less complex to manage. Not only do you not have to keep track of the states of all possible universes, you don't even have to have to keep track of the state of the one--only when somebody's looking do you have to decide whether, e.g., the carbon atom decayed or not, or the coin flip came up heads or tails.
Calvino: Either you're insane or I'm totally lost.
Moderator: ...
Calvino: There's a moderator?
Moderator: Yes, and I'm going to end the discussion here for today, as the author is violating all reasonable laws of blogging by going on endlessly. We'll pick it up here tomorrow.
Tags: Probability,Statistics,Humor
Monday, January 16, 2006
Odds 'R
The second in the series of posts that stem from comments that weren't there the last time I looked comes courtesy of Dan, who pointed me towards Odds'R, which is a book of trivia presented in probabilistic form. e.g.:
Dan asks:
What can we actually infer from the above question about witchcraft (b is the answer they give as being correct--I know, I can't believe it wasn't c, that pinacle of well-timed comedy, either. Oh my god...witches, brooms...stop. I'm gonna pee)? Only that there were some number of people arrested for practicing witchcraft in Salem in 1692, say 24, and that 3 of them were executed. To infer what the question actually states as being true ("if YOU, the person now reading this sentence, were a person living in Salem in 1692 and you were arrested for practicing witchcraft, 12.5% of the time you would be executed") would be completely fallacious, meaningless, and frankly kind of a weird thing to infer. I can say with certainty that this did not happen to you. The odds of it are zero.
The phenomenon of Odds-Are-Oneness tries to make some sort of statement about what we tend to think of as fate--weird things happen to us, things that seem like they were spectacularly unlikely to happen, but did. But we also notice the "weird" things, and ignore the incidents of similar phenomenon that aren't "weird" to us. To review my very first example, nobody took note of the thousands of times that the New York City Pick Three Lottery came up, e.g., 1-6-5 on May 13th, 1995. Except, of course, to the people who won the lottery that day, at which point it suddenly seemed a lot like fate to them, and they, if they're like the majority of people in the world, probably went back and created some narrative about what those numbers "meant" and "why" they won.
But I also think the answer to Dan's question is unequivocally yes. These odds don't have anything to do with probability. They can't possibly apply to you imagining yourself into the shoes of an accused witch in Salem in 1692. Or in the case of another question found in Odds'R on a favorite topic of mine, "What are the odds that a US state has a law on the books challenging the validity of evolution?" (given answer, 17 in 50)--I'm not saying there's no meaning in that statement, but it sure isn't about probability. It's for sure not telling us that when the next territory or protectorate votes for statehood that there's a 34% chance someone will toss in an amendment saying, "We vote for statehood, and P.S., Puerto Rico also declares that Darwin did crack."
So the open question is, is there actually any such thing as logical discrete statistical inference? Can we logically infer from the fact that one out of every million plane flights ends up crashing whether or not we should get on the next plane? Does knowing that one out of every fifty persons who takes Vioxx experiences heart failure within two years tell us anything about whether we should take it? Don't get me wrong, probability and statistics are not meaningless. Casinos make money. Carbon 14 decays. A relatively predictable number of people will buy things from Amazon in the next year. Over a large sample size, statistics and probability are inexorable. The longer you flip a fair coin, the closer it runs to 50% heads, 50% tails. And you still don't know a goddamn thing about what the next flip is going to be.
If you had been arrested for witchcraft during the infamous Salem witch hunt and trials of 1692, what would have been your odds of being executed?Also there's a board game, and I'm sure any moment now, you're going to be able to buy the Official Odds'R Bow Tie and Mustache Set™ in a store near you (dude, that tie totally rocks).
a) 1 in 4
b) 1 in 8
c) Zero--they all got away on their brooms.
Dan asks:
Is asking the odds on such specific questions as above still a problem within your argument that the "odds" are statistically meaningless because the question was asked within a framework where "meaning" does not correspond to numbers, thus the "odds don’t have the meaning that they appear to have?"I, being a crass opportunist, will use this question to launch a larger discussion of what probability actually "means."
What can we actually infer from the above question about witchcraft (b is the answer they give as being correct--I know, I can't believe it wasn't c, that pinacle of well-timed comedy, either. Oh my god...witches, brooms...stop. I'm gonna pee)? Only that there were some number of people arrested for practicing witchcraft in Salem in 1692, say 24, and that 3 of them were executed. To infer what the question actually states as being true ("if YOU, the person now reading this sentence, were a person living in Salem in 1692 and you were arrested for practicing witchcraft, 12.5% of the time you would be executed") would be completely fallacious, meaningless, and frankly kind of a weird thing to infer. I can say with certainty that this did not happen to you. The odds of it are zero.
The phenomenon of Odds-Are-Oneness tries to make some sort of statement about what we tend to think of as fate--weird things happen to us, things that seem like they were spectacularly unlikely to happen, but did. But we also notice the "weird" things, and ignore the incidents of similar phenomenon that aren't "weird" to us. To review my very first example, nobody took note of the thousands of times that the New York City Pick Three Lottery came up, e.g., 1-6-5 on May 13th, 1995. Except, of course, to the people who won the lottery that day, at which point it suddenly seemed a lot like fate to them, and they, if they're like the majority of people in the world, probably went back and created some narrative about what those numbers "meant" and "why" they won.
But I also think the answer to Dan's question is unequivocally yes. These odds don't have anything to do with probability. They can't possibly apply to you imagining yourself into the shoes of an accused witch in Salem in 1692. Or in the case of another question found in Odds'R on a favorite topic of mine, "What are the odds that a US state has a law on the books challenging the validity of evolution?" (given answer, 17 in 50)--I'm not saying there's no meaning in that statement, but it sure isn't about probability. It's for sure not telling us that when the next territory or protectorate votes for statehood that there's a 34% chance someone will toss in an amendment saying, "We vote for statehood, and P.S., Puerto Rico also declares that Darwin did crack."
So the open question is, is there actually any such thing as logical discrete statistical inference? Can we logically infer from the fact that one out of every million plane flights ends up crashing whether or not we should get on the next plane? Does knowing that one out of every fifty persons who takes Vioxx experiences heart failure within two years tell us anything about whether we should take it? Don't get me wrong, probability and statistics are not meaningless. Casinos make money. Carbon 14 decays. A relatively predictable number of people will buy things from Amazon in the next year. Over a large sample size, statistics and probability are inexorable. The longer you flip a fair coin, the closer it runs to 50% heads, 50% tails. And you still don't know a goddamn thing about what the next flip is going to be.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Almost Famous
I was going back through my site and came across a couple of comments that weren't there the last time I looked. One, from Tarn, was on my first entry about Mechanical Turk, and pointed out that some among the burgeoning community of "Turkers" had stumbled across OaO. The post is this little narrative--first I'm super cool because I'm an insider. Then they realize that I don't actually work on Mechanical Turk (I don't know John Bravenec's name, or, in fact, what he actually does for Turk). In the end they conclude that I must be a "custodian." Ouch.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Quick-Hitter Thursday, Cont'd
Top 7 Previously Unknown Risks of Having Sam Stay At Your House*
*based on a sample size of one (1) visit. Also possibly not previously unknown. Many of these things are not actual risks. Some of them are not specific to Sam. And okay, fine, I wanted to complain that Sam ate all my peanut butter, but needed some sort of excuse to do so. Please bite me.
- Like a whore, will eat all of your peanut butter (where "whore"="someone who eats all of your peanut butter")
- Literally forces you to stay up all night watching Sports Night.
- May, of his own volition, install a new stereo in your car, replacing the perfectly serviceable empty hole that was already there.
- Will cook bacon in your kitchen in the morning, which, while it smells yummy, is secretly yucky bacon.
- Two words: way too much coffee
- subrisk: will lose the ability to count the number of words in standard English phrases.
- Nope, never mind, that's all I've got.
*based on a sample size of one (1) visit. Also possibly not previously unknown. Many of these things are not actual risks. Some of them are not specific to Sam. And okay, fine, I wanted to complain that Sam ate all my peanut butter, but needed some sort of excuse to do so. Please bite me.
Quick-Hitter Thursday
Mark and I get together semi-regularly and play music in a sort of surreal jam-like fashion which we think is cool but is probably dreary and obnoxious to anyone else (which is sad, because we're planning on coming out with an album one of these days). Mark plays bass, but lately he's started taking to the guitar again, and it occurred to me on Saturday, when last we convened, that he plays the guitar in a manner totally unlike anybody else I know. Most musicians, if they are playing along to a tune they don't know, will watch the other players or play a couple of tentative notes until they figure out what key everyone's in and/or what the chord progression is. Mark never does this, he just plays. If you asked him what key he's in, he'd have no idea, and he wouldn't know what chords are being played either. As far as I can tell by watching him play, he does it entirely by feel (and, I guess, by sound), as if he has entirely skipped the translation step anyone else would normally go through to accompany an unfamiliar tune. I find this pretty cool; I suspect it also has a lot to do with the fact that we're pretty used to each others' styles at this point.
Friday, January 06, 2006
The Future of the Future
This is another little shout-out to someone whom I recently learned occassionally tunes in to OaO. This is a fellow I used to work for in one of my prior lives (one which, frankly, was not all that different from this one). Anyway, we'll call him 'gtp.' What makes gtp cooler than either you or me, as I just learned yesterday, is that he has his own entry in the IMDB, by virtue of once having narrated a computer game.
What I'm cribbing today comes from a dinner conversation I had with gtp shortly after I quit working for him and just before I moved off to find my way in the world (which, as noted before, turned out to be pretty similar to my way in the world beforehand, except that I'm now married, studying acupuncture, and I blog). We were talking about visions of the future and gtp pointed out the following: the popular and widespread vision of the future has us expanding, off the earth and out to the stars, exploring the vast new frontiers. But not only does our current model of laws of physics make this a difficult enterprise, it isn't what's actually happening. Instead of expanding out, we're withdrawing further and further into ourselves.
If I remember gtp's premise, the main symptom of this is the slow replacement of the actual physical self with the virtual one in reacting and responding to the world. e.g. I have a physical identity in which my name is Paul, am 5'11", have black hair, and closely resemble the love child of Hugh Grant and Brad Pitt (just kidding. My hair is brown). I also have a blogger identity wherein my name is "Transient Gadfly," and I share a community with a bunch of people who only know me by what I write on this blog. If you follow that down the rabbit hole, you have that whole "on the internet you can be anyone you want to be," phenomenon, except as we move forward, we end up in some sort of Matrix-y, William Gibson-like world (that is to say, some science fiction narrative makers have fully embraced this kind of vision) wherein the outside world (where by contrast, you apparently can't be anyone you want) matters less and less and your online, virtual identity matters more and more.
I thought of this again lately when I noticed how much of popular computer gaming has become about not just getting through the game, but getting your character in the game better/richer/more power/more mojo/whatever. It's not just in the Warquest-like world where you're going up levels in some sort of role-playing-game-like way, it's in things like Grand Theft Auto, where you start out as a petty thief, and attempt to make your way up to crime lord--it's not about solving puzzles anymore, it's about solving puzzles so you become (virtually) rich and powerful and successful. It's especially these online worlds where this seems most evident, where actual outside world money is being exchanged for powers and advantages in the game. This phenomenon, this "who you are or can be online," is growing itself a real-world market, which seems like a big red neon arrow pointing to something dramatic going on.
This is another phenomenon I'd argue is not necessarily new (e.g. you could establish an identity through any kind of writing for the last several thousand years or so and it's likely to have been quite different from the actual person doing the writing), but the online platform on which it's happening now is making it a lot more prevolent and, apparently, a lot more attractive.
What I'm cribbing today comes from a dinner conversation I had with gtp shortly after I quit working for him and just before I moved off to find my way in the world (which, as noted before, turned out to be pretty similar to my way in the world beforehand, except that I'm now married, studying acupuncture, and I blog). We were talking about visions of the future and gtp pointed out the following: the popular and widespread vision of the future has us expanding, off the earth and out to the stars, exploring the vast new frontiers. But not only does our current model of laws of physics make this a difficult enterprise, it isn't what's actually happening. Instead of expanding out, we're withdrawing further and further into ourselves.
If I remember gtp's premise, the main symptom of this is the slow replacement of the actual physical self with the virtual one in reacting and responding to the world. e.g. I have a physical identity in which my name is Paul, am 5'11", have black hair, and closely resemble the love child of Hugh Grant and Brad Pitt (just kidding. My hair is brown). I also have a blogger identity wherein my name is "Transient Gadfly," and I share a community with a bunch of people who only know me by what I write on this blog. If you follow that down the rabbit hole, you have that whole "on the internet you can be anyone you want to be," phenomenon, except as we move forward, we end up in some sort of Matrix-y, William Gibson-like world (that is to say, some science fiction narrative makers have fully embraced this kind of vision) wherein the outside world (where by contrast, you apparently can't be anyone you want) matters less and less and your online, virtual identity matters more and more.
I thought of this again lately when I noticed how much of popular computer gaming has become about not just getting through the game, but getting your character in the game better/richer/more power/more mojo/whatever. It's not just in the Warquest-like world where you're going up levels in some sort of role-playing-game-like way, it's in things like Grand Theft Auto, where you start out as a petty thief, and attempt to make your way up to crime lord--it's not about solving puzzles anymore, it's about solving puzzles so you become (virtually) rich and powerful and successful. It's especially these online worlds where this seems most evident, where actual outside world money is being exchanged for powers and advantages in the game. This phenomenon, this "who you are or can be online," is growing itself a real-world market, which seems like a big red neon arrow pointing to something dramatic going on.
This is another phenomenon I'd argue is not necessarily new (e.g. you could establish an identity through any kind of writing for the last several thousand years or so and it's likely to have been quite different from the actual person doing the writing), but the online platform on which it's happening now is making it a lot more prevolent and, apparently, a lot more attractive.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
"Jack, I swear..."
This is sort of a post about Brokeback Mountain, because everybody else was doing it. Plus, blogging about a gay cowboy movie set in Wyoming (but which was secretly filmed in Alberta, which is, in a somewhat odd definition of the term, where L. and I went on our first date) is kind of like writing about nature, which is what I am supposed to be doing in the first place.
I have seen this movie twice, and I left the second viewing with a very different sense of the movie than the first time. The first time I saw the gay cowboy movie (or the queer cowboy movie, as Sam has argued) and the second time I saw a movie which I found to be just incredibly, profoundly sad; so much so that I wasn't sure how I'd missed it the first time. As Dan has also mentioned, this movie sticks with you.
The reason it's staying with me, in a kind of molasses-of-sadness way that I can't remember another narrative doing in a long time, seems to me to be a thing apart from the movie itself--the writing, the acting, the directing, the cinematography--as L. said, forbidden love is a story you've seen a hundred times before; here they just changed one tiny little detail, and look what happened. I don't mean to imply that this film transcends its gayness, because regardless of what else you want to argue, THIS FILM IS TOTALLY GAY (or else it's totally queer, but I'll leave that argument to the people who have degrees in this stuff). It is gayer-than-a-tree-full-of-parrots gay. But this film did transcend some sort of narrative something for me, in a way which the other longing-and-loss texts that I've read/seen/whatever didn't, but which seems inextractable from its gay/queerness, but also beyond it.
Also, the two guys making out is totally hot.
I have seen this movie twice, and I left the second viewing with a very different sense of the movie than the first time. The first time I saw the gay cowboy movie (or the queer cowboy movie, as Sam has argued) and the second time I saw a movie which I found to be just incredibly, profoundly sad; so much so that I wasn't sure how I'd missed it the first time. As Dan has also mentioned, this movie sticks with you.
The reason it's staying with me, in a kind of molasses-of-sadness way that I can't remember another narrative doing in a long time, seems to me to be a thing apart from the movie itself--the writing, the acting, the directing, the cinematography--as L. said, forbidden love is a story you've seen a hundred times before; here they just changed one tiny little detail, and look what happened. I don't mean to imply that this film transcends its gayness, because regardless of what else you want to argue, THIS FILM IS TOTALLY GAY (or else it's totally queer, but I'll leave that argument to the people who have degrees in this stuff). It is gayer-than-a-tree-full-of-parrots gay. But this film did transcend some sort of narrative something for me, in a way which the other longing-and-loss texts that I've read/seen/whatever didn't, but which seems inextractable from its gay/queerness, but also beyond it.
Also, the two guys making out is totally hot.
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