Making Light pointed me to this site of collected Bill Watterson art. It includes cartoons drawn for his college paper, political cartoons, one offs to decorate interviews, some album art, and more. It must really suck for cartoonists, having to draw a cartoon for free to go with an interview.
Charles Stross has written the best new books I’ve read over the past few years.
Singularity Sky, Accelerando, Halting State, each excellent. And his books explore different ideas and are set in very different worlds. With the exception of the dismal Family Trade series, his writing has been excellent.
The Atrocity Archives and Concrete Jungle, two shorter works set in the same world are the first fantasy I’ve read by him, and they are crazy good. Halting State good, but these stories are modern fantasy integrated into the technological world, magic for hackers that participates in the modern world revolutionized by discoveries in mathematics, electronics, modern physics, and computers. A magical worldview that has confronted modern physics and considered the natural consequences of computers.
The book was a real page turner–errr, a virtual page turner that I read on computer. The Atrocity Archives is better than Concrete Jungle. Jungle seems constrained by its short length, the ending feels rushed. After Concrete Jungle I immediately sought a sequel and was glad to find The Jennifer Morgue.
I finally read the iconic dinosaur book by Michael Crichton. The book was very similar to the movie, closer than any other movie I’ve seen. In many ways the book reads as if it was written with the idea of turning it into a movie in mind. The plot is straightforward: rich old guy hires scientists to recreate dinosaurs from DNA preserved in fossils, then the dinosaurs get loose and eat people.
The science fiction idea than spawned the book is grand. Recreating dinosaurs! Real dinosaurs! That people can be see and watch and eventually run screaming from. The other part of the book, the horror movie bolt on plot, is naturally fit for a movie.
Surprisingly there isn’t much more to the book than what’s in the movie. And unfortunately the worst parts of the movie are the author’s invention. The ‘mathematician’ character, spouting ridiculous idea that chaos theory proves everything will go wrong and fall apart is all the author’s. Also, the annoying younger sister who alternates between fear, whining, and suicidal stupidity is all Crichton. She’s written worse in the book, the other characters mock whatever she has to say and keep telling her to shut up. The out of nowhere scene in the movie where she pops up as a computer system expert looks added in an attempt to give her character a positive side.
Still, dinosaurs!
When the book was written, it was plausible to speculate that fossils millions of years old would contain bits of DNA. As it turns out, DNA degrades over hundreds of thousands of years, and no DNA has been recovered from samples millions of years old. In fact, chemical studies predict that DNA will degrade at such a rate that no original DNA remains in samples millions of years old. Today, alas, it seems unlikely that dinosaur DNA sequences will ever be recovered.
I saw an article of the problems Univerity Presses are having these days, the problems of an industry facing a changing market combined with university budget cutting during the recession. I think University Presses should embrace change. To me, the Univerity Press looks like the easiest segment of the publishing industry to move completely online. Most of their books are published by academics and mailed to university libraries where they sit bulky and using expensive floor space, rarely read. And for an academic, the electronic book has plenty of advantages, easy searching, cut&paste for quotes and organizing digital research notes, etc.
The physical book is unnecessary, and the price could easily drop several fold. Libraries would save money both buying the books and on shelf space. Without physical books, the main cost is in Univeristy Press is acquisitions and editing staff. The only things holding the Press to physical books are old academics who can’t/won’t use computers (few), the norms of what counts as a book for academic advancement, and inertia.
From a thread discussing Kate Nepveu’s chapter by chapter review of LotR:
Though as Bilbo is the sort of house-guest who shows up out of the blue and stays for seventeen years, eating six meals a day throughout, perhaps the Rivendell Elves have given up expecting him to have finer feelings
Today Slashdot had an ‘Ask Slashdot’ post asking the question “Mathematics Reading List For High School Students?” Slashdot reader comments usually start are typically dismal and often worse. The only useful comments I’ve seen come to questions both technical and obscure. Looking for a Scheme compiler for the Commodore 64 or tools for hacking a router and Slashdot commenters can help.
But today a rare gem, an interesting question of general interest on /. worth reading. Here’s a summary of the suggestions:
(the obvious: Flatland, GEB)
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, 1954
Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell
How to Think Like a Mathematician: A Companion to Undergraduate Mathematics by Kevin Houston
All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School by Thomas A. Garrity
Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone
Schaum’s Outline of Linear Algebra by Seymour Lipschutz
The Feynmann Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich
The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio
Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive Story of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein
Knots : Mathematics with a Twist by A. B. Sossinsky
The Little Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen
The Pleasures of Counting by Thomas William Körner
Innumeracy and A Mathematician reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos
The Shape of Space by Jeff Weeks
‘e’: The Story of A Number by Eli Maor
What is mathematics? by Courant and Robbins
A Pathway Into Number Theory by R. P. Burn
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
A Long Way From Euclid by Constance Reid
and to add a few not mentioned:
Chaos by James Gleick
Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics by Michael Guillen
Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews by Donald J. Albers and Gerald L. Alexanderson
And last and best, any of the books of Martin Gardner’s Recreational Mathematics columns from Scientific American.
I read a review of Michael Brooks’s 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense on the Uncertain Principles blog. I haven’t read the book, but the review tickled me enough that I looked around for more info and found Jennifer Ouellette’s review in The New Scientist where Brooks is a contributor.
Both Chad Orzel and Jennifer Ouellette give Brooks weak “this book has some weak parts but also some good parts” reviews. Just from the reviews and blurbs I can tell Brooks book is destructive, part worthless speculation on the meaning of anomalous results that are almost certainly erroneous and part flattering discussion of pseudoscience.
Why are people giving Brooks such gentle reviews? The physics results are typical of the lot. John Webb’s fine-structure result is of the same sort as the Viking experiment result. Interesting if true, but not reproduced and instead contradicted by other experiments and thus uninteresting.
Brooks doesn’t understand that for something to not ‘Make Sense’ it has to be true. Anomalous *verified* results, results that can’t be explained theoretically or seem to contradict existing results are the kinds of things that ‘Don’t Make Sense’ but could be cool. These are the kinds of things that Brooks should be writing about.
One of Brooks’s topics is the mimivirus, a virus with the largest genome known so far (1.2 Mb). I can’t imagine anything particularly Earth shaking about it–it’s really big for a virus, but that’s it. Biology is littered with oddities and weird exceptions. No one tell Brooks about ttn-1, a titin protein 57X larger than the average worm protein. Or about the ostrich.
The placebo effect has two components, self-delusion and a poorly understood mechanism whereby the state of mind can affect the body. The mind->body connection is true and poorly understood, the proper subject of Brook’s book.
In Jennifer Ouellette’s review she says that Brooks includes homeopathy because of its relation to the placebo effect. This is ridiculous–any of the thousands of worthless ‘medical’ treatments known from blood letting to magic spells have this property.
Brooks’s inclusion of homeopathy and death is complete nonsense. Homeopathy is pseudoscience, bunkum. And there well understood evolutionary reasons why organisms die, death (and aging) are not even anomalous.
Twee.
I had an idea for a game. It’s a memory game, the idea is to flash a molecule on the screen for a few seconds in the left hand window, then in the window to right the player builds the molecule. That’s basically the game. The player learns to recognize interesting chemicals, learns to break down larger molecules into functional groups as a way of remembering them, and perhaps learns what they are.
As the molecule fades it would be replaced with a picture that goes with the molecule–oranges for citric acid, as a memory aid or a clue for the chemically astute player.
The game could be made easier by having the molecule fade out slowly, or flashing on periodically, or visible through a port.
I don’t really want to write a molecule editor myself, that would take a lot of time and also it turns out to have been done by chemist/programmers many times. Yeah! Some very good molecular editors are out there. I was particularly impressed with Molinspiration WebME editor. Two problems though, it’s 2D and not open source.
Looking further, I found BKchem and molsKetch both of which look good and are GPL licensed but are 2D. Jamberoo is Java based but the molecule editing worked too slowly for a game.
Avogadro is 3D, is GPL licensed so the source code is available, and works on Linux/OSX/Win. It looks good and works well, so I think it would make a good starting point for a game.
Vitamin C in Avogadro:
Pepper spray has been around for years now, but there is not commonly available antidote. And we know how the active ingredient, capsaicin acts to active, or hold open, the ion channels that transduce pain signals. In fact, a quick Google shows that capsaicin binds and activates a receptor called the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1), a member of a group of related receptors called TRP ion channels that are activated by temperature changes.
Capsaicin chemical structure (from Wikipedia)
So an antidote would be an inhibitor of the VR1 receptor, and such a thing should be easy to find, or create, and in fact another Google shows that several have been created. Capsazepine was the first inhibitor discovered, way back in 1994. Activators and inhibitors of this receptor have many potential uses as analgesics and anti-inflammation compounds so there is a lot of research interest.
Capsaicin inhibitor capsazepine (from Wikipedia)
A spray containing one of these inhibitors should be an effective antidote for pepper spray. But surprisingly no such inhibitor is available! The small quantities of purified inhibitors are available in small quantities for research purposes (i.e. capsazepine, 50mg for $455 but I can’t find anyone who has made an antidote preparation. This should be safe and fairly easy. Safe, because it would be applied mainly externally, and because pepper spray is itself fairly safe–aside from the pain and shock it is used to cause. It doesn’t have other, non-specific side effects. And relatively easy to make because the literature describes the synthesis of inhibitors from capsaicin itself. So the starting product used to make an inhibitor can be capsaicin, and capsaicin is readily available in large quantities!