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Ophelia Benson takes offense at the claim by David Marliere that Charlie Hebdo’s exercise of free speech may have been counterproductive (presumably to whatever goals he thought they were seeking to achieve).She responds to Marliere’s “Of course people should be entitled to mock Islam and any other religion. However, in the current climate of racial and religious prejudice in Europe, how can these cartoons be helpful? Charlie Hebdo is waging a rearguard battle.” by saying “If you’re hoping to help defend the genuine right to mock Islam and any other religion, as opposed to a purely notional right mentioned in passing only to be negated in the next sentence, then these cartoons can be helpful by exercising the very right that Marlière pretends to affirm only to deny it in the next breath.” But to confound the suggestion that an act is unwise with a denial of the right to perform it is really pretty silly.

“Use it or lose it” may be a popular saying but it is certainly not a universally valid principle, and there is no inconsistency in suggesting that a right is more likely to be preserved if used sparingly. Marliere’s conclusion re Charlie Hebdo may (or may not) be wrong, but anyone who wants to attack it is more likely to change minds if they do so intelligently (even though they do have the right to do so foolishly).

When I see a report like this that some Iranian foundation ups price on Rushdie's head I wish that I had deep enough pockets to offer to pay double any such bounty to the killer of whoever offers it – and if anyone were to set up a foundation with that objective I would gladly offer to help support it.

A recent column in Nature by Daniel Sarewitz, which could have been a welcome meditation on the power of religion to stimulate art which “speaks to the soul”, is marred by overstatement and an inflammatory headline.

Nature’s on-line editor Ananayo Bhattacharya comes to the defense with an article on Discover magazine’s ‘The Crux’ website which is somewhat disturbingly entitled ‘The Limits of Science—and Scientists‘ , but after reading the Sarewitz article and looking over a number of the comments, I have to say that this self-serving defense of a poor editorial decision unfairly misrepresents the positions of most of those who criticized it. Indeed, I have to agree with Chris Chambers that it constitutes an insult to a large part of Nature’s readership.

Coincidentally, an almost simultaneous posting by TRIUMF’s Byron Jennings at ‘quantum Diaries’ continues the “two cultures” discussion that was taken up there a couple of months ago by Jordan Pitcher. Although I expressed some disagreement with the simple dichotomy identified by Jordan with regard to types of people I am inclined to accept the complementary of aesthetic and empirical ways of thinking (and don’t think I have ever seen Hume effectively refuted on that)

The events in Bangalore reveal new evidence that, in the parlance of social capital theory, electronic networking is more effective at producing “bonding” capital within groups than “bridging” capital between them.

n+1: Broad-Gauge.

Well if that hashtag isn’t already trending I’ll be very surprised!

Watching the RNC on Wednesday night Connie and I were impressed by Paul Ryan’s speech. He certainly sounded like a smart fellow with lots of “leadership” potential. And he had a lot of detailed “facts” at his fingertips. Although I am a Canadian with deep affection for a kind of socialized medicine which is faa..aar to the left of “Obama-Romney-Care” I have to admit that I was impressed. I hadn’t known that Obama’s right wing medical plan was going to steal $716 billion from the existing medicare plan for the elderly, since there are some elderly caregivers which also help with this, or that that Obama had ignored the recommendations of the Simpson Bowles deficit-cutting comission, or that he had promised to maintain that GM plant in Janesville but had not included it in his plan for saving the company (which actually DID happen!). But then I read that Fox news (of all places) had said that all these claims were FALSE and “Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” (I don’t actually follow Fox usually, so I only got that news via Salon).

I wasn’t surprised to hear that a slim and trim guy who can play so fast and loose with the facts is also a pretty fast runner and that his best marathon time was under three hours – but then it turns out that his own brother has exposed that as a lie also. In fact his ONLY marathon took over FOUR hours! (Not that I should diss that, as my own only effort was no better. But I can still remember the pain, and much as I would like to, it is hard to imagine remembering it as taking less than three hours.)

But now I am wondering if this guy has ever told the truth about anything. How many more lies are lying out there waiting to be revealed?

There is something both appealing and repellent in the idea that our “modern” attitudes are prefigured in the work of ancient philosophers. It is exciting to find a voice from the past that feels like “one of us” but at the same time a bit discouraging to think that there is nothing new in our ideas after all. Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘The Swerve’ delights in telling the story of how a modern voice was discovered through the work of the Roman poet Lucretius but Morgan Meis prefers the earlier analysis by Hans Blumberg whose ‘The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966)’ emphasizes the difference between classical epicureans and the modern outlook. The world view may be very similar in physical terms but the attitude is perhaps quite different with the classical emphasis on an accepting and arguably incurious “ataraxia” being replaced by a more curious engagement and eagerness to manipulate the world around us. But I am not convinced. Those of us actually engaged in the sciences do not need to claim a philosophical difference in order to see that we have “gone further”, and the idea that any age can be characterized by a universal attitude denies our individuality. Some ancients were deeply engaged in enquiry and engineering, and a goal of emotional equilibrium is not in fact incompatible with deep curiosity and passionate engagement in the modern world. In fact one can fight a desperate battle perhaps even more effectively by keeping a corner of one’s mind detached from the consequences and accepting of whatever comes to pass.

This, and especially this, reminds me of something I did long ago which, it turned out, had already been done by Hepp expanding on von Neumann’s treatment of the measurement problem.

The idea was to explain “collapse” of the superposition into a mixed state on the basis of having the measurement process consist of interaction with a macroscopic apparatus which would typically of course always be prepared in a mixed state itself.

I haven’t really thought how the “many worlds” approach relates to the “mixed state of apparatus” idea, but the latter seems to me more natural and does not seem to require the extra philosophical overhead.

This article by Melanie Fahlman Reid came out while my brother Tony and I were up in Haida Gwaii and by coincidence the guesthouse where we were staying had a book about the various kinds of (mis)representation by photographers “documenting” native culture.

Among the many fond recollections that followed the recent death of William Thurston, I came across a reference to this article on proof and progress in mathematics.

Thurston, a geometer of great insight and also I think a great contributor to the popularization of mathematics, argues for a view of mathematical progress which does not restrict itself to just the production of completed proofs.

Thurston’s view of mathematics and how mathematicians think is in contrast to that expressed by Feynman in his lecture on the relationship between Physics and Mathematics where he repeatedly identifies the mathematical approach as starting with fixed axioms as opposed to looking at the overall network of logical relationships. To some extent that is true but only as one of the exercises of mathematical thinking and the question of alternative axiomatizations is always in the air – with a view of the whole network being not just essential to this but also always being at the heart of truly “complete” understanding.

One point of interest to me is that Thurston’s article was written in response to a suggestion by Arthur Jaffe and Frank Quinn that credit for the kind of work Thurston describes be more explicitly separated from that for actually completing rigorous proofs. I certainly share Thurston’s discomfort with their use of the word “theoretical mathematics” for the more speculative and less fully locked-down types of discussion. (The fact that theoretical physicists do a lot of speculative math seems to be a very poor justification for that choice of wording.) But I find it ironic that there is a tone of conflict when both papers seem to be arguing for the same thing in one sense – namely more attention to the role of intuitive and speculative thinking in mathematics. I suspect that Jaffe and Quinn were being a bit tongue-in-cheek with their suggestion of a separate discipline, but of course Thurston had some reason to take it personally as he was cited as an example of someone whose incompletely documented speculative advances may have discouraged others from pursuing the same goals. Thurston, who was working hard to bring others up to speed with his ideas, seems to feel unfairly criticized, but it may well be that those outside his circle had good reason to suspect that whatever progress they made would gain little recognition because it would always appear that their ideas were already known in Thurston’s group.

A further irony, especially considering Jaffe’s frustration with the premature announcement of Dobrushin and Minlos, is that his own close colleague Thaddeus Balaban announced an impending proof of existence of the YM4 Quantum Field Theory which undoubtedly deterred a number of others from proceeding to investigate that topic in the late ’80s.

Of course the issue of credit has always been fraught. And ever since well before Newton and Leibnitz, or even Cardano, Ferraro and Tartaglia, the question of fair attribution when one party appears to be ahead but holds cards close to the chest has been problematic. In one sense it would be much better if priority counted for less, but perhaps the overall rate of progress would be slower if it was dependent on dullards like me and those who take us ahead would fail to do so without the thrill of victory as a potential reward.

Perhaps (in fact almost certainly).
But I think I could live with that!

This recent discussion on LinkedIn asks for applications of complex numbers which can be explained to High-School students.

The case of AC electric circuits is one familiar application which was mentioned by several respondents and one of them pointed to http://www.picomonster.com/ where an attempt is made to motivate their use for describing relationships between other cyclical phenomena.

Another commenter mentioned the use of complex numbers in Quantum Mechanics but I find this hard to explain in elementary terms. Continue reading →

This is just a prompt for me to consider the issue. It’s very far from “right” for me but does contain some points I agree with.

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Stephen Downes has commented on a discussion of free speech issues at the University of California but I think his focus on intended harm as the only excuse for restricting freedom of speech is too limited.

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Algebra, as remembered by many,  seems to be  nothing more than a set of meaningless formal tasks, and if that memory is accurate, then indeed it has no right to be included as a requirement of everyone’s basic education. [ Some who see it that way try to justify the subject  as an exercise in mental discipline, but that argument is as vacuous as it was when applied to teaching Latin grammar (without the literature) in centuries recently past. So if algebra is really as people claim to remember it then it certainly is not “necessary”.] But such memories are either false, or are evidence of incompetent teaching.  And they are not by any means a justification for abandoning the subject as a universal requirement.

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Michael Geist’s analysis of recent  Supreme Court decisions is encouraging and provides a nice counterpoint to the nasty business our Harper gov’t did to us on the digital lock rules.

William M. Briggs  misses the main point when he claims that the recent sequence of high temperature months is no cause for alarm (on the grounds that a sequence of thirteen high months is no less improbable than any other particular sequence).

SteveBrooklineMA’s sarcastic comment (about refusing to adjust one’s aim in the face of consistently hitting too high) is actually right on target.  Given a sequence of consistently high results it would make sense to consider the possibility that there *might* be a systematic effect happening (and especially so when there is a good theoretical reason to expect that there really is such an effect!).

The difference from Briggs’  blade of grass story is in the fact that, although all blades are equally unlikely, if his golf ball hit the one blade that *I* had picked out *in advance* then I would be very surprised and suspect a trick in a way that I would not  if everyone in the world had chosen their own favourite and some other person’s favourite got hit.

Similarly, while I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that someone somewhere in the world threw 13 Heads in a row with a fair coin yesterday, I would have good reason to be very suspicious of a coin which gave *me* that result in the first time I tried it.

In the same way, the particular unlikely sequence of thirteen high temperature months in a row is different from other equally unlikely but less interesting sequences because none of the others correspond to a simple hypothesis that could have been (and was!) made in advance, and it is as foolish to ignore this as to deny the possibility that a sequence of thirteen high shots at a target is consistent with the simple plausible hypothesis that I am pulling the barrel up as I shoot. Continue reading →

Apparently he no longer believes that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” But who with more than half a brain ever did believe the second half of that? (The first half of course is obviously true unless some medical miracle gives us all 100+ year lifespans.)

It infuriates me that the media always anoint those with the most extreme and outlandish views as the “leading” proponents of any movement. The point seems to be just so that when they eventually are seen to be ridiculous or back off from their position then others can chime in with “I told you so” and “see! The whole thing was ridiculous”.

Murray Bourne at ‘squareCircleZ’ has a great post on modeling fish stocks as an interesting applied example for a math class.

In addition to helping students find interest in understanding the mathematics, this can also help people to really see why when fisheries scientists say that a particular harvesting practice is probably unsustainable.
My only caution would be to note that while it makes sense to avoid what the model says is unsustainable it doesn’t necessarily go the other way, and in fact sometimes what looks like a plausible model can give undue confidence in a belief that a certain harvesting rate is sustainable when in fact it is not.
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I have been trying to read some of John Baez’s[1] series on “Information Geometry” (here at Part 11), part of which has now also been summarized by Sean Carroll.[2]

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Jim Holt, in the NYTimes (via 3Qdaily) says “Physicists, Stop the Churlishness“.

Oh come on! This ‘churlishness’ is all just part of the ‘game’ that has been going on *between* philosophers ever since the beginning.

And philosophers themselves have never been slouches when it comes to applying that ‘churlishness’ to philosophy in general – especially in comparison with real science.

Russell: “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”

Nietzsche:”Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
…(but)…
among scholars who are really scientific men things may well be different – ‘better’, if you like – there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge…”

But I would give Democritus a bit more credit than some other commenters have done. Coming up with a plausible hypothesis is a worthwhile contribution, even if the necessary step of testing it is left for someone else to do later (and even if “later” in this case means two millennia). His atoms actually do serve quite well to explain the proportions of reagents in chemical reactions. And after what early chemists thought to be the “atoms” turned out not to be? – well, we still have not quite completely abandoned the idea of truly elementary particles, so the idea of indivisible “atoms” still has legs to some extent.

I was surprised to see media claims that Bill Clinton was advocating an extension of the Bush tax cuts, but Robert Reich (who was there) explains that the comment was not about what should happen but what might happen as a result of legislative deadlock .

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