Coding with Fountain Pens

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.

Mr. Fusion coming closer to reality everyday.  An Instructables on converting your Accord to run on trash.  I have to say, the resulting plastic flextube and boiler look is not nearly as slick as the original Mr. Fusion styling.  Maybe the key innovation between now and 2015 is not the actual technology, but the aesthetics.

[via Boing Boing]

Hallelujah, Picasa for Mac has been released. I never could get used to iPhoto and it’s foibles, always wishing there was a Picasa release for the Mac. This also allows you to standardize on one photo organizer for all platforms. Fantastic!

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.

I have noticed for many years, that when I come into contact with a new concept, word, or fact, that I have seemingly never come across before, it will reappear again one or two times in the following fortnight.  I’ve never had a name for it, but let’s call it the Serendipity Effect.

I used to also observe that when you see a television program the first few times, I would often see the same episode repeated in that small set.  I realized last week this is really a special case of the serendipity effect.

I’m writing this post because it’s happened again.  I was just reading this Slashfood post about brains and eggs a few days ago.  It was memorable, as being none too appetizing, and I was quite sure I’d never come across it before.  Then today, I’m watching Iron Chef, and what does the challenger whip out?  Brains and eggs.  (They were doing a suckling pig battle and they weren’t content with pork chops).

So what is going on with this effect?  Do you hear all kinds of things through your life that go right over your head, and then once you have some understanding you then recognize them?  Or is this just a Poisson Burst, the idea that unlikely events are unlikely to be evenly spaced, and hence tend to cluster?