VIDEO: Star Wars Retold by a Star Wars Virgin

If you don't know, I'm a bit of a Star Wars fan. This rolled across my reader this morning and I couldn't stop laughing. Enjoy!


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Solutions From Our New Administration

All quoted statements taken from President Obama's January 24th Address via YouTube. Statements preceded by a dash ( - ) are my own.

"To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We’ll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes."

- No doubt this is a good idea. We've needed to commit more funding to alternative energy initiatives for years.

"To lower health care cost, cut medical errors, and improve care, we’ll computerize the nation’s health record in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we’ll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn."

- There have been a number of attempts by the private sector to digitize our health records (Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, etc.) but none have stuck. Government-backed and standardized formats should facilitate adoption.

To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools, building state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries, and labs to improve learning for over five million students. We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students, and triple the number of fellowships in science to help spur the next generation of innovation.

- This is absolutely one of the best things you could possibly do. Our education standards and performance have been slipping for quite some time. Providing better curriculum and learning environments for students is what creates an intelligent and creative workforce, one who is better able to propose innovative solutions.

"Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located."

- A bevy of new jobs! And it's tough to hate on better broadband access, come on!

"...and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov."

- A tool to help make government more transparent and hopefully keep politicians honest (I'll pray if you do).

Final Thoughts: My first reaction was 'how the hell are we going to afford all this?' That thought quickly subsided because I started think about the big picture. Necessity breeds innovation, which is exactly why we stagnated or in some cases declined (note: increasing GDP does not equal progress) over the past 15 years -- poor school performance, unjustified war, research funding cuts, etc. When you're getting your way (multiple cars, houses, iphones, etc.), why would you rock the boat? Now that things aren't so peachy, it follows quite rationally that we'd invest some time and energy into fixing the areas we knew needed attention but in the past ignored because we were happy and content. Will a 2 trillion dollar deficit for our children be any worse than only a single trillion? I don't think so. Do you? Am I too optimistic?

Narcissism in Web 2.0

On a drive with good friends recently a remarkable nugget of wisdom was stumbled upon while discussing the relevance of web 2.0 services like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Blogging. Basically nugget was uncovered with the simple statement “I don’t use them because I don’t think I’m that important.” To me, a person that currently could be describes as dabbling in web services, the statement struck a chord in which I personally have and had identified.

I stopped using Myspace frequently because I began to feel like the platform offered an “I’m so awesome” soapbox that supported the now classic tool shed self-held camera phone pictures that accentuate the naughty bits while artistically avoiding the stuff we’re not proud of, hence the straight cleavage doe-eyed pics for the chix and the straight belly button flexer for the dudes. And to date, that’s literally all I think of when I think of Myspace brand (the marketing aspects of this imagery is an entirely different conversation). But to say the least I’m not interested in that community and have no abs so I stopped going there which cost me the tertiary dialog I had with the individuals I did communicate with on Myspace. The same distaste has also made me avoid Facebook.

So the nugget of wisdom came in the fact that “Social” sites are not at their best when they allow you to be a narcissist, but instead are only worthwhile when they allow you to form and support a community that is genuinely interested in what you are/have been/ and are going to be doing.

The tools that we have at our disposal allow interested social groups to be passively and actively involved in almost everything their peers do on a daily basis. Now for the interested parties some things are interesting… for example my friends might be interested in what experiments actually look like, or do we actually wear lab coats and look like scientists. Now as far as my personal taste, I would be far more interested in seeing the chair that a good friend sits in daily than I would to just see a picture of them flexing awkwardly while holding the camera on the good side of their body. The point being that being a member of a web 2.0 service that includes friends is best used by showing people what THEY THINK is cool, not what you think is cool. The point is to let people in to our lives so they understand us as people a bit better than they would have otherwise if we didn’t have the cool technology we do.

Granted I don't think I've ever been the self-portrait type toolshed, but still... can't say I've never posted something to make myself cooler. But I can say it puts a new slant onto the motivation when you think about what friends would actually enjoy seeing, and I hope it does for you too.

Have a good one, thanks for reading.

VIDEO: Science and the Pursuit of Truth

Below is a great video that articulates a few ideas from my previous post on science.

Close to the Machine

i ran across this on errtheblog:

The project begins in the programmer's mind with the beauty of a crystal. I
remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the
knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a
time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. Human and machine seem attuned to
a cut-diamond-like state of grace. Once in my life I tried methamphetamine: That
speed high is the only state that approximates the feel of a project at its
inception. Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how straightforward. Oh
yes. I see.

Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of
human thinking start to emerge. You write some code, and suddenly there are
dark, unspecified areas. All the pages of careful design documents, and still,
between the sentences, something is missing. Human thinking can skip over a
great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in
untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the
attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or
background. It can be programmed to behave as if it were working with
uncertainty, but -- underneath, at the code, at the circuits -- it cannot
simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains
unknown. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line,
the programmer confronts an awful, inevitable truth: the ways of human and
machine understanding are disjunct.

Now begins a process of frustration. The programmer goes back to the analysts
with questions, the analysts to the users, the users to their managers, the
managers back to the analysts, the analysts to the programmers. It turns out
that some things are just not understood. No one knows the answers to some
questions. Or worse, there are too many answers. A long list of exceptional
situations is revealed, things that occur very rarely but that occur all the
same. Should these be programmed? Yes, of course. How else will the system do
the work human beings need to accomplish? Details and exceptions accumulate.
Soon the beautiful crystal must be recut. This lovely edge and that are lost.
What began in a state of grace soon reveals itself to be a jumble. The human
mind, as it turns out, is messy.

Gone is the calm, mathematical world. The clear, clean methedrine high is over.
The whole endeavor has become a struggle against disorder. A battle of wills. A
testing of endurance. Requirements muddle up; changes are needed immediately.
Meanwhile, no one has changed the system deadline. The programmer, who needs
clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers
down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the
programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its
origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow post-it notes
everywhere; the white boards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward
manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into
the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Soon the programmer has no choice but to retreat into some private interior
space, closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished. The machine
begins to seem friendlier than the analysts, the users, the managers. The
real-world reflection of the program -- who cares anymore? Guide an X-ray
machine or target a missile; print a budget or a dossier; run a city subway or a
disk-drive read/write arm: it all begins to blur. The system has crossed the
membrane -- the great filter of logic, instruction by instruction -- where it
has been cleansed of its linkages to actual human life.

The goal now is not whatever all the analysts first set out to do; the goal
becomes the creation of the system itself. Any ethics or morals or second
thoughts, any questions or muddles or exceptions, all dissolve into a junky
Nike-mind: Just do it. If I just sit here and code, you think, I can make
something run. When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the
program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs.
Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and
what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system. Talk all
you want, but this thing here: it works.

From "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman.

Science and the Pursuit of Truth

Truth...is truth. It is factual, absolute, and always consistent with itself. Some people like it, others hate it. Thankfully truth doesn't care if you like it, because it is what it is. It just is.

But how does one determine what is true and not true, and how would you do it in a repeatable fashion? In an objective and unbiased fashion, I hope. Being the smart human beings we are, we developed a framework for ascertaining the truth -- a system by which the entire goal of the process is to remove human bias as much as possible. If you're not familiar, allow me to offer a quick overview:

1. observe the behavior, effect, or problem.
e.g. water seems to boil at a high temperature. i wonder what temperature.

2. develop a preliminary hypothesis or educated guess, if you will.
e.g. purely guessing it feels (ouch) like about 90 C.

3. design an experiment to test your hypothesis.
e.g. i will place a thermometer in water, boil it, and observe the temperature.

4. carry out your experiment in the most controlled setting possible.
e.g. boil water on hot plate, use digital thermometer for accurate measurement. repeat 5x for statistical power.

5. use statistics to measure the size of and legitimacy of the results.
e.g. i enter my data into excel obtain an average of 100 C.

6. write a formal report detailing my findings.
e.g. i write a paper that states that the boiling point of water is 100 C

While the boiling point of water was once a very real research question, after repeated experiments most people consider the boiling point of water to be common knowledge. It is true that the process by which researchers conduct their experiments follows this pattern very closely, but know that the road to discovery is often filled with dead ends, discoveries of complex interactions/correlations and failed experiments. Thankfully researchers are very determined in their pursuit of truth. After a paper is published, other scientists in the field attempt to reproduce those findings by carrying out the same experiment or a slight derivative. Slowly, but surely, the body of knowledge around a particular unknown grows until it some arbitrary point the consistent result simply becomes common knowledge. If there is any debate about a particular result experimenters go back to their labs, redesign their experiments, and retest the problem.

There is no other system in the world that consistently uncovers more truth than research. Period. I think people understand this, at least to some degree, but for whatever reason they forget about the clout science has over everything else. Science literally constructed the world around you. Reach out and touch something, I guarantee you science had a hand in it.

So why do people push away scientific claims? I can think of two reasons:

1. it disrupts their view of the world

people like consistency -- it keeps them grounded. if things are consistent, they are predictable. and people like to know what's coming. as said before, science can sometimes yield contradictory results. the non-instantaneous nature of discovering truth means that sometimes researchers won't have all the answers.

this is further compounded by next reason...

2. popular science

nothing contributes more to the shattering of dreams and exaggeration of scientific claims like popular science. popular science exists in the form of magazines, news paper articles, etc. these are articles meant to convey research results to the layman, typically in terms of a real-world effect.

Example:
research paper title - experimentation on nerve reconstruction using SRC-7 stem cells
popular science article title - we can rebuild him! paralyzed will walk again!

And so there is a consistent theme of false promises to the public, but certainly not on the part of the researchers. My advice is this: take every scientific claim you hear that didn't come from a research paper with a grain of salt. And by all means, if something is unclear or unknown, do some basic research. I might take some flack for this recommendation but I would absolutely recommend Wikipedia as a source to get a basic understanding of a topic. These days Wikipedia articles often contain cited sources that allow you to fact-check or use to find even more sources. Just as one has to sample a large portion of reviews when reading product views online, one also has to sample many research papers to truly understand scientific consensus on a topic.

Video: History of the Internet

This a very informative rundown of how the internet was created and a few explanations of how it works.


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Site Recommendation: Tip'd

If you're at all interested in finance, the economy, and tips and tricks related to, I highly recommend Tip'd. I subscribed to their blog using Google Reader last week and have seen some very good posts. My last post on outrageous earmarks came from them. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Happy New Year everyone!!