Coding with Fountain Pens

A project has been set up which monitors the astrometry tag on flickr and hashes photos to determine what in the sky is being looked at. Not only does it add annotations for notable objects to the photo, it will allow compilation of a growing set of located images. Apparently a rotation invariant hashing algorithm was used. This essentially means that the image is converted into a hash code, that will be the same no matter what rotation the image was taken in.

Neat stuff. Via slashdot.

How do you know the relative weight of a scientific paper?  Is it well respected in the field?  Often Cited?  Maslov and Redner discuss the Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google’s PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks.  Interestingly, of the top 10 papers by pagerank, 9 are by Nobel Prize winners.

The recent genesis post reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and prompted me to check its Amazon listing.  I thought there must be many people who never read it, and would now be trying to sell it used.  Sure enough, there’s more than 100 copies available for $11 and up.

However I also have wondered how much that book was a marketing campaign versus an important work.  Based on some of the more rigorous reviews, I’m now pretty confident the work is going to fade into obscurity.  Or I guess it already did, until I brought it up again.

Interesting article on Wired from a few months ago that was brought to my attention by their end-of-year best-of post:  Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

It’s interesting that there are a variety of primitive bacteria and archaea that are still hanging around the planet, but the simple precursors of them seem not to be present.  Why could this be?

• They are extinct – enable to compete with more advanced forms of life, or were too delicious.
• They are here and we haven’t found them yet – The entire Archaea branch of the tree of life was only recently discovered, with it’s affinity for high-stress environments.  Perhaps the original buidling blocks are right under our nose, or came into being in hard-to-reach or unexpected places like deep in the earth’s crust.
• If you go with the spermogensis idea, the building blocks may have been synthesized on another planet, and their more complex decendants were delivered here by comet or what not.  This seems unlikely, given that these arrivals may have had trouble surviving if they evolved in a different kind of environment.
• FSM

If the family tree of life on Earth involves the genesis of simple machines in a different environment like Venus, followed by an meteoric transplant to the Earth environment, which was more conducive to more complex life but not its basic synthesis, it would seem to reduce the odds of life arising elsewhere.

ArbCamp08 was great, thanks to all the organizers, who had to scramble at the last minute to handle a huge turnout by changing the venue.  With more than 160 attendees, there was a wide variety of interesting breakout sessions and impromptu discussions.

I enjoyed the parallel programming session led by Jon Cohen – I hadn’t realized that graphics processors were up in the hundreds of cores, and that they can be utilized for scientific computing with the help of Nvidia’s Cuda compiler.  Users of this technology were first hand, including Eric Janikowski Jankowski, who agreed that this technology has revolutionized molecular simulation work.

Other sessions of note included a plan to set up a co-working space in the Arcadian Antiques location on Main Street, and a loose discussion of DIY photography.  Apparently the disposable digital cameras available at CVS are a good source of image sensors for DIY photography projects like kite photography.  Someone has even mounted one inside a volleyball to take pictures on each impact.

The event was, more than anything, a great opportunity to meet some of the interesting people in Ann Arbor, and for people in different disciplines to cross-polinate.

Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination.  While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection.

It’s a game about intelligent design.  You have godlike powers over your creature’s abilities and appearance, and you can modify this to achieve your desired ends.  There is no random variation, all of your creatures are identical.  There is no selection, as death of your creature never affects the rest of the species.  If you notice there is fruit hanging high in a tree, you can stretch your creature’s neck in a Lamarckian fashion.

Also, contrary to what I first thought, modifying attributes like your creature’s gait doesn’t appear to change their ground speed.  That seems to be entirely dependent on whether they have +1 or +2 leg parts.  Also, adding a second set of horns doesn’t increase their charging ability.  Thus, most of the creature editor is aesthetic, and doesn’t affect the creature’s abilities other than as an inventory of parts.

To be fair it may be impossible to create a realistic evolution by natural selection game, by definition.  If there is nothing for the god-like player to tweak, it’s not going to be a very engaging game-play experience.

I have a problem with this saying.  I think it’s good and healthy to have a posture of skepticism when encountering any argument, especially one that is not backed up by evidence.  You could say this evidence is essentially data.  Data itself can easily be very unwieldy, and statistics is a tool with which a complex set of data can be summarized.  For an example of this power, see Hans Rosling.

That said, often this old chestnut is whipped out when the data is not on the side of the debater.  When I hear someone use this saying, it makes me want to examine the foundation of their argument more closely, because it is typically riven with cracks.

Really, at face value, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is saying that you can’t trust statistics, and by extension data, and hence nothing is really knowable.

Galaxy Zoo is a project which is enlisting the eyes and minds of the public to help classify a large number of galaxies present in sky survey images. It’s fun for a few minutes, and would be great for kids, as they can learn about science while making a concrete contribution. Do galaxies prefer to rotate in one direction than another? Help gather the data to find out.