Back of the Envelope

This is interesting. From a Wired article on autism:

The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?

But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn't speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.

And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.

Baggs lives in a public housing project for the elderly and handicapped near downtown Burlington, Vermont. She has short black hair, a pointy nose, and round glasses. She usually wears a T-shirt and baggy pants, and she spends a scary amount of time — day and night — on the Internet: blogging, hanging out in Second Life, and corresponding with her autie and aspie friends. (For the uninitiated, that's autistic and Asperger's.)
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Like many people with autism, Baggs doesn't like to look you in the eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British schoolteacher.
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I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally retarded range on standard intelligence tests — that's an IQ of 70 or less.

People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.

After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.

It's a long quote, but it's a long article: that's just the beginning.

There are, I think, two dangers here, and psychiatrists have been guilty of both in the past. The first is to define every eccentricity, every deviation from a mythical norm, as a mental illness. Psychiatrists have long since taken homosexuality off the books as a mental illness, but there are still plenty of them who want to put conservatism and religious belief on. The second is to define nothing as a mental illness--people are just different, that's all.

I think that if you no longer call autism a mental illness, then mental illness doesn't mean anything at all. Amanda Baggs clearly has a high level of functionality, but she is still incapable of the basic tasks needed to survive in today's society. This isn't an alternative lifestyle she has chosen to live--she's simply chosen to embrace the limitations she can't overcome. Perhaps it is the most healthy thing for her at this point, but it doesn't make the disability any less real.

On the other hand, I do think there's a lot of truth in this:

Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco, says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally retarded is "incredibly wrong and destructive." He has worked with a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would have been plunked into the low-functioning category. "We label them as retarded because they can't express what they know," and then, as they grow older, we accept that they "can't do much beyond sit in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in envelopes."

It quite possible that autistics are, by and large, no less intelligent than other people. A lot depends on how you define intelligence. Is it just what goes on in the brain? Or is how well you communicate with other people also a part of it?

There's a significant paradigm shift underway in the world of stem cell research. It started last week, with the announcement of Ian Wilmut, the scientist behind the cloning of Dolly, that he would no longer be pursuing therapeutic cloning:

The scientist who created Dolly the sheep, a breakthrough that provoked headlines around the world a decade ago, is to abandon the cloning technique he pioneered to create her.

Prof Ian Wilmut's decision to turn his back on "therapeutic cloning", just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.

He and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they unveiled Dolly, born July of the year before.

But now he has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago, as part of a drive to find new treatments for the devastating degenerative condition, Motor Neuron disease.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells which can be used to grow a patient's own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson's, and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as "nuclear transfer."

His announcement could mark the beginning of the end for therapeutic cloning, on which tens of millions of pounds have been spent worldwide over the past decade. "I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer," Prof Wilmut said.

It's been confirmed this week with new articles showing that the method that somatic reprogramming, the rival technique that Dr. Wilmut has decided to pursue, has been successful for human cells (from National Review):

Today’s papers bring news of an enormous advance in stem-cell research. Scientists in the United States and Japan have managed to turn regular human skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells — achieving what they’ve sought until now through the destruction of embryos, but without the need to use embryos, to use cloning, or to use eggs.

It is, to begin with, an extraordinary scientific achievement, with immense scientific potential. The new technique is much easier and cheaper than the use of embryos in research, and will likely bring about an explosion of new work on pluripotent stem cells and their applications.

But it is also, no less importantly, a powerful vindication of the premise behind much of the opposition to the destruction of embryos for research this past decade: the conviction that scientific advance need not require, and should not compel, the abandonment of ethical principles, and especially the principle of human equality that should cause us to cherish and guard every human life, from beginning to end.

In an effort to cause the country to abandon this conviction, some advocates of the research, including nearly every prominent Democrat in Congress, have made reckless and irresponsible promises, offered false hope to the suffering, depicted their opponents as heartless enemies of science, and exploited sick people for crass political gain.

For a long time now, pro-lifers, such as myself, have been saying that alternative methods of obtaining stem cells not only exist, but show more potential. Now that scientists who have long had a vested interest in therapeutic cloning have come to agree (not only Ian Wilmut, but also James Thompson, who originally isolated embryonic stem cells), it looks like the pendulum has finally swung in our direction. For purely practical reasons, scientists will begin moving away from embryo destructive research to this new method, and while embryonic stem cell research won't go away immediately, the demand for funding and more embryonic stem cell lines should fade quickly (although not immediately, as politicians such as Senator Harkin will continue to push for it). We shouldn't neglect the convictions of those who stood in the way of embryonic stem cell research. Columnists such as Charles Krauthamer and Kathryn Lopez, politicians such as former Massachusetts Governor Romney and President Bush, churches and pro-life organizations and voters everywhere all helped. Their opposition to embryo destructive research, pushing back hard on the media and political tsunami that promised miracles if and only if embryonic stem cell research was pursued and accused all opposition as being anti-science religious zealots, helped to stem the tide, and encouraged (and no doubt forced in some cases) scientists to pursue alternate means. Without that, this method, which by all accounts is not only less controversial, but also works better, might never have been discovered.

So that's it, we've won, right? Therapeutic cloning is going the way of the dodo. Not so fast! We're missing something if we engage in triumphalism. This has been won not on principle, but on a technicality. Not because we've convinced people that our cause was just, but because science saved the day. We were lucky. We knew there were alternatives, we knew they looked promising, and thus we had an ace in the hole that played out not a moment too soon. Despite what some conservatives are saying right now, we cannot know and should not expect there to always be a more ethical alternative that delivers on all the promises of the unethical method and then some. It's not even a sure thing now. Yes, it looks good, but there's always a possibility that five years from now, somatic reprogramming will not pan out and therapeutic cloning will look like the only way to get the promised benefits. That's what Harkin's arguing, and he has a point. The general population has already demonstrated that they're willing to sacrifice embryos for cures. The fact that there's another, better way to get those cures may have stopped them for now, but our job is not done. We have some time now, and we need to use it to convince people that sacrificing embryos for their own health is not only inefficient, it's wrong. Unless we can convince people on the moral argument, we will lose the next time the question arises.

The first step will be the hardest, as it's something pro-lifers have been very reluctant to do before now. We need to take a stand on in vitro fertilization. Society's acceptance of this, and the pro-life movement's unwillingness to confront it, is the reason that embryonic stem cell research took us off-guard. While there's no reason to oppose IVF in principle, the current methods used are appallingly wasteful. The idea behind this fertility method is that redundancy is the key to successful pregnancy. This is why many eggs are fertilized but never used (resulting in the embryos "destined for destruction" which pro-embryonic stem cell activists like to point out). It also results in women being implanted with multiple embryos, often resulting in an overcrowded womb and a choice "between selective reduction" or children with debilitating birth defects. This commoditization of human life has to be opposed. While we shouldn't expect to stop it overnight, we can educate the public on it, push for less wasteful procedures, and encourage infertile couples to avoid the worst ones.

So the house has passed a law which bans cloning, except that what it really bans is reproductive cloning, not cloning for destruction. This is, of course, the opposite of what we should want.

While I consider cloning for destruction (also called therapeutic cloning) to be abhorrent, I don't have the same moral objection to cloning for reproduction: creating a living human being who is a clone of another. I would argue that it is not inherently wrong to produce a human being who is the genetic duplicate of another. An identical twin, for example, is genetically the same as another person. However, I'm hard pressed to think of a reason to do so which is not immoral. It may be that I am nitpicking here. Let's say that the technology has progressed to the point where it is relatively easy to produce a human clone, without any of the nasty health issues that clones usually suffer these days. Why would you want to do so? Cloning, by definition, produces a person who is nearly the same as another person, so barring extraordinary circumstances, that's the reason why you would use it. There are many reasons for doing so, most of them obviously wrong. For example, you may want to produce a clone so that you can harvest his organs to save the original. You may want to reproduce a loved one, so you have, in some sense, his companionship again. You may want to reproduce one of the great scientists or political leaders of the previous generation. You may want to test that nature vs. nurture hypothesis. In none of these reasons are you valuing the clone as a person in and of himself: in every case, you assign value to the original, and the clone's status is second class.

So my objection for cloning for reproduction is not opposition to creating a clone, but rather that the motivation for doing so devalues the life and dignity of the clone. That said, plenty of children throughout history have been produced for the wrong reasons. We do not try to regulate how or why children are produced. So do objections to every imaginable motivation for human cloning constitute sufficient reason to ban an action which in itself is not objectionable? Perhaps it is worthwhile to ban an act which can only conceivably come from bad motives, but I readily admit that I cannot imagine every possible motive. Does banning the act of cloning further devalue those clones who may be produced illegally?

I don't really know the answers to these questions, I'll admit.

Ah, the sounds of Weird Al Yankovich. This is beautiful (Hat tip to View from a Pew).

If you want to know what the equation is in the background, it's actually Schrödinger's equation, the equation governing all of quantum mechanics. In this case, though, it's a specific form of Schrödinger's, referring to an electron in the potential of a proton--the Hydrogen atom. It'll give you the orbitals of an electron. I have in fact solved this equation before. It's a bear, but the results are pretty cool.

Hah, how's that for nerdy!

This may seem like a simple, self-focused Wired opinion piece, but it's important:

The e-mail generated by that essay [on whether it's e-mail or email] was overwhelming. It split about 50-50 for and against, and the tone swung dramatically, too, from adulatory to just plain snarky. I remember one in particular: "Why is it," wondered the writer, "that copy editors are always the most long-winded sons of bitches in any organization?" My reply to him (and I replied to as many as I could) was direct: "Because we're paid to be. That's why."

The following morning there was an apologetic response from him waiting in my mail queue. He was chastened, not because I wasn't a long-winded SOB on this occasion, but because I had answered him, one human being to another. He hadn't expected that. He thought he was writing into the ether. By answering him, I was no longer a faceless wall of sound. For him, at least, I now lived and breathed.

We enjoyed some clever banter until each of us gradually wearied of it and drifted off to other things, but it hammered home a lesson I've never forgotten: In a world where technology theoretically binds us closer together, it's more important than ever to really talk with the other person.

Although technically, e-mail (with or without a hyphen) and its even faster cousins, IM and text messaging, make communicating across time and distance a breeze, it's still the quality of the communication that counts. In the case of my irritable reader, our e-mail hookup worked because both of us were willing to make it work.

This I agree with whole-heartedly. It's way too easy to take the person on the other end of an e-mail or online conversation as an anonymous nobody, and that's unhealthy. The author goes on from there, and I haven't had a chance to digest the rest and decide whether I agree or not, but remember in the next flamewar that the person on the other end is a real human person.

Update: I changed the title to more accurately reflect the content.

I have the same skepticism about evolution as Doc Rampage, but this is interesting:

An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests.

The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand.
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Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions — traits that are important for detecting threats at close range.

Humans are descended from those same primates.

It puts me in mind of Genesis 3.

I'm as much into cybernetics as the next sci-fi geek, but this is just plain creepy:

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch.

It's been described as a buzzing sensation, a tingling, an oscillation, movement, pure stimulation and, in the case of body-modification expert Shannon Larrett's encounter with a too-powerful antitheft gateway at a retail store, "Like sticking your hand in an ultrasonic cleaner."

Body-mod artists Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth's original idea was to implant a magnet to carry metal gadgets. It turns out that doesn't work: If you try to carry something magnetic on your implant regularly, the pinched skin between the magnets dies and your body rejects the implant. But they came up with a new application when a mutual friend suffered an accident that left a shard of iron in his finger. He worked with audio equipment, and found that he could tell which speakers were magnetized from the sensation that passed through his finger at close range.

That gave Jarrell and Haworth a new direction: Could they obtain that effect deliberately, extending the sense of touch into a sense of magnetism?

I don't think I shall be implanting magnets in my fingers in order to "feel" when electronics are acting up. First, I generally don't need to. I've been playing with electronics long enough that I have a fairly good instinctive feel for those sorts of things without any tingling in my fingers. Plus, my computers are not only really loud so that I can hear it when the drives spin up, they also have these convenient LED lights that tell me when the hard drive is chugging. Second, when I'm dealing with those sorts of problems, I tend to wind up with all sorts of scrapes and cuts on my hands from dealing with sharp wires and components. The last thing I want is an additional tingling in my hands. Plus the pictures accompanying the story aren't pretty.

Doc Rampage has a post on the proper physiology of winged humans. He argues that in order to get the proper flying position, the wings need to be lower than the shoulderblades and closer to the center of gravity. Although the hips work, he has a better proposal:

However, there is a middle ground (that was another pun, see if you can figure it out); the center of gravity is at the hips, but only when the arms are at the sides. I don't know if we want any humanoids flying around with their arms at their sides; it smacks of hotdogging. No, the proper position for a flying humanoid is the Superman prone flying position with the arms out front to improve streamlining and to keep you from smacking into a mountain head-first in the dark. This position moves the center of gravity forward several inches into a position just below the rib cage.

Standard-issue humanoids don't have a strong bone in that area to attach the wings to; we would have to manufacture one. I propose that the lowest rib become much more massive and curve downward to meet the hip bone which is sending a massive protrusion upward. The two bones would fuse together into a socket during fetal development, providing a stable platform for the wings. Of course, this takes up a lot of room in the torso, but that's OK, because flying humanoids don't need a large stomach and the many feet of intestines; they only drink nectar or suck blood or have some other dietary limitations that require much less digestion machinery.

The biggest problem I see with the new bone structure that Doc proposes is that it will greatly reduce the winged human's flexibility. Belly dancing would definitely be out.

I've been bouncing around an idea in my head of starting up a second blog, a group blog devoted entirely to Quantum Computation. The idea would be to despin the quantum news in order to help the layman understand the true state of progress without trying to convince people that every incremental step is the next revolution in computing. It would also help readers keep up withthe real news in quantum computation, looking at important advances which appear in the scientific journals but which lack the proper PR department to impress the MSM.

The problem is, aside from my lack of time to take on yet another project, the fact that I lack the expertise to effectively do this. I am, as I have said in the past, not a physicist, theoretical or otherwise, but an engineer who has done experimental physics, and I'm not even in the field of quantum computation anymore. Thus the need for this to be a group blog, where my role would primarily be Token Engineer and Substitute Layman, trying to get the real experts to explain it in terms the rest of us can understand. Of course, to really do this, I would need to recruit real Quantum Computation experts, of whom I know a couple. I'm not sure they'd be interested--some of them are bloggers, but they may rather write their own blogs than participate in a group one. If one of them were doing the job, I could just link to them and not worry about it, but some prefer to use their blogs for non-technical things, while others are way too technical, and most of them are not very regular bloggers. We'll see.

There's a great post on well-tempered numbers at Zeroth Order Approximation:

In doing quick approximate calculations, you certainly do not want to do actual multiplication or long division. Heavens! So you take short-cuts and round things off pretty severely. But you want to round things off in a uniform and consistent way, to keep your errors under control. To do this, I find that I naturally begin using a well-tempered set of numbers.

The idea is to choose a set of numbers that are separated by equal ratios -- like the notes in the well-tempered scale. Instead of filling the space between 1 and 2 (one octave), though, you fill up the space between 1 and 10 (one decade). Basically, the numbers you pick are evenly spaced on the slide rule scale. How many "notes" should you have in your scale? Not too many, or the system will be cumbersome; not too few, or your calculations will be too approximate to be useful. The exact number of notes in a decade will be chosen so that the individual steps have very convenient, easy-to-remember values -- even if you have to cheat a little to get the right "harmonies".

This is why engineers, at least those working across many orders of magnitude, such as radar engineers, often use units of decibels. Of course, thinking this way tends to skew your thinking, especially when you look at a circuit and think, "Okay, it's only a 3 dB loss in power, so I'm okay." The problem is, 3 dB of loss means you've lost half the power.

Richard Doerflinger has a long and fact-filled article up at National Review where he discusses the hype surrounding therapeutic cloning:

In fact there is, as yet, no published evidence of “therapeutic” benefit even in animals from stem cells derived from cloned embryos. But when Congressman Dave Weldon (R., Fla.), prime sponsor of the federal cloning ban, noted this during the House’s 2003 debate on the bill, his comment was publicly attacked as “embarrassing,” “asinine” and “Luddite” by Lanza himself and Nobel laureate Paul Berg. On further examination, it turned out these pro-cloning researchers were using the now-well-established “bait and switch” technique: Every study they cited to rebut Dr. Weldon either didn’t involve cloning, or didn’t involve embryonic stem cells at all.

The Korean “egg scandal” has made international headlines. Largely unreported is the fact that the entire propaganda campaign for research cloning has been filled with misrepresentations, hype, and outright lies.

In their op-ed, Caplan and McGee worry that the Hwang scandal may lead people to ask “whether or not [embryonic] stem cell researchers are a rogue lot, not to be trusted.” It would be about time.

A certain amount of hype is expected from scientific researchers, but the amount that is coming from this field is scandalous.

I'm thinking of getting some business cards. Not for work, but for blogging. Of course, by "get," I mean design them with Microsoft Publisher and buy some business card stock and print them out on my color inkjet at home. That's really all that's needed to get business cards these days. In any case, here are a couple of designs I came up with.

First design:


Second design:

What do you think? You notice that they're both based on the new Back of the Envelope logo I now have on my page (if it looks like the old one to you, hit reload to make sure the new image is used rather than the old one you have in your cache). I decided to update it to a better looking envelope with a more quantum computation-specific equation. <0|+>=1/2^½ is actually a dot product of two vectors (one-dimensional arrays). If |0> and |1> are the two qubit states zero and one in vector form, then <0| and <1| are their conjugate transposes. (That's just what it sounds like--take the conjugate of the complex numbers and transpose the vector.) Using the usual 0 and 1 basis, we define the vector |0>=[1;0] and |1>=[0;1]. (The semicolons indicate that the elements are in separate rows--it's hard to show here.) Thus, <0|=[1 0] and <1|=[0 1]. <0|0>=1 and <1|1>=1, but <0|1>=0 and <1|0>=0. It's an orthonormal basis set, where each vector has a unit length and is orthogonal to the other vectors in that set, and by multiplying them by scalars you can create any vector in that space. Meanwhile, |+>=1/2^½(|0>+|1>) and |->=1/2^½(|0>-|1>), forming a separate orthonormal basis set. I've discussed different bases before. The key idea is that while |0> and |1> are orthonormal to one another, as are |+> and |->, |0> and |1> are not orthonormal to |+> amd |->, giving <0|+>=1/2^½.

Want to live forever? Not Tony Long. He offers some reasons in his article, most of them humorous, but this one seems pretty likely to happen:

Science fiction deals extensively with the whole eternal-life thing. In his Robot series, Isaac Asimov posits a world divided into two groups: those with the economic means of living thousands of years and those who, not having those means, are doomed to live a normal life span. It's the ultimate power trip, with the eternals exploiting their advantage over the mortals to make the gulf between haves and have-nots even worse. Cautionary? Yeah. Plausible? Assuming that thousand-year life spans are plausible at all, you bet.

Count on it. If it happens, eternal life will be limited to those who 1.) can afford it, or 2.) make their Faustian bargain with someone who can. Living forever is a concept you'll buy at the Sharper Image, not from the Sears catalog.

I'm not sure whether the fact that only a priveleged class can afford it is a really good reason not to do it. It's certainly not capitalistic to oppose it for that reason. That's hardly the reason I don't intend to eke eteranl life out of modern technology. I fully intend to live forever, I just think it's masochistic to just indefinitely extend life on earth for no other reason than to avoid death. Eternal life is about more than not getting old.

That said, I'm not sure I'd outright refuse the chance to extend life for fifty or a hundred years, assuming a corresponding vitality and not just a really long old age. But if people start living 200 years, they're really going to have to raise the retirement age.

Don't tell Derbyshire, but there's some Darwin-skepticism going on at National Review:

In my book, I quote Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, telling a professional audience at the American Museum in New York that there was "not one thing" he knew about evolution. He had asked the evolutionary-morphology seminar at the University of Chicago if there was anything they knew about it, and, he said: "The only answer I got was silence."

Patterson, who died a few years ago, was an atheist and once told me that he regarded the Bible as "a pack of lies." There was no way he could be accused of Biblical primitivism. People would ask him, with a note of alarm, "Well, you do believe in evolution, don't you?" He would respond that science wasn't supposed to be a system of belief.

So let's look at the evidence adduced for evolution. The fossil record is sparse. Bats, for example — the only mammals capable of powered flight — appear suddenly in the fossil record, with their sonar systems already fully developed. "There are no half bats," as a world expert on bats once said. The experts have no idea what animal gave rise to the first bat.

The creatures that evolution purports to explain are fantastically complex. The cell, thought at the time of Darwin to be a "simple little lump of protoplasm," is as complicated as a high-tech factory. We have no actual evidence that it evolved — and yet we are asked, indeed obliged, to believe that it did.
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This is the science before which all knees must bend? These explanations are no better than "Just-So stories" (as one or two Harvard professors have rightly said). No actual digging in the dirt is needed: The theorist merely contemplates the trait in question and makes up a plausible story as to how it might have been advantageous.

We fear questioning the evolutionist dogma. Someone might call us fanatical. "Intemperate" was the word George Will used. So we go along with the dogmas of materialism, lest we be considered ignorant or uneducated or driven by a religious agenda.
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George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: "The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis." This is true; but he should have added that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin's claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted "survival of the fittest" as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the "fittest" that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this." Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.

There's more, by Tom Bethell, and it's worth reading. I don't usually get involved in the intelligent design debate, but I'm a big fan of the free marketplace of ideas. These days, the marketplace is less free than it should be.

Engadget points to an article on a cybernetic hand:

Bionic body parts are becoming a reality, thanks to a highly dexterous, bio-inspired artificial hand, and sensory system, currently in development.

The artificial hand, which could provide patients with active feeling, is being developed under a European project.

The project, aptly named “Cyberhand,” aims to hard- wire the artificially created hand into the nervous system, allowing sensory feedback from the hand to reach the brain, and instructions to come from the brain to control the hand, at least in part.
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So far, the project is racking up an impressive list of achievements. It has a complete, fully sensitised five-fingered hand. The CYBERHAND prototype has 16 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) made possible by the work of six tiny motors.

Each of the five fingers is articulated and has one motor dedicated to its joint flexing for autonomous control. It features an opposable thumb, so the device can perform different grasping actions.

Sounds neat. I honestly think prosthetics will come a long way within our lifetimes, such that they'll no longer be noticeable by observers. I doubt they'll actually reach the point where they'll be completely equal to the original, at least from the amputee's point of view, but they'll come close. There are movies available at the projects website. Engadget points out that the current design uses a wireless link between the mechanical hand and the implanted link to the patient's neural system, suggesting the possibility of swapping modular hands with other possible components. I want the chainsaw!

Dean Esmay is excited about an article in quantum computation. To quote from the article:

Delsing and colleagues at Chalmers University began by embedding their Cooper-pair transistor in a resonant circuit. Next, they cooled the device down to millikelvin temperatures and measured how the phase of a radio-frequency signal changed when it was reflected from the circuit. Based on these measurements, the team was able to show that the device behaved like a quantum capacitor. Hakonen and co-workers in Helsinki and Moscow group employed a similar technique. Both teams found that the devices behaved as predicted by theory.

The effect could be used to read out quantum bits (qubits) in a reliable way because the quantum capacitance of the excited state of the qubit has the opposite sign to the ground state. These states could be used as the "1s" and "0s" in a quantum computer. Indeed Hakonen and colleagues have already used this approach to read the value of a qubit without changing its value — which is almost always a problem when measuring the quantum state of any system.

As I explained in Dean's comments, this isn't anywhere near as exciting as the article makes it sound. Generally, reading the papers (or at least the abstracts) makes the actual results of the experiments clearer. The two papers mentioned in this article can be found here and here. Reading a qubit without collapsing its wavefunction is, to the best of our knowledge, physically impossible. It's not something you want in a quantum computer either, as the quantum algorithms won't work unless you collapse the wavefunction. This is best understood in the context of entanglement. Suppose that you have a three qubit register which is in an equal superposition of two values, 100 and 010. Both of these values are possible solutions to the problem you are solving, but 110 is not. Because these three qubits are entangled, once you read the first qubit, the others collapse into the appropriate state. So if your highest order qubit is read as 1, the second qubit collapses to 0, and the third is 0 as well. If your highest order qubit is read as 0, the second qubit is 1, and the third is 0. You read either 100 or 010. Now suppose you could read each qubit individually without collapsing the wavefunction. You could tell that the highest order qubit is half one and half zero, the next is half one and half zero, and the third is 0. Knowing only this, you might conclude that the solutions to the problem are 000, 100, 010, and 110. There is no way of telling, with just the above information, that 000 and 110 are not solutions, and that collapsing the superposition will only give you 100 or 010.

Of course, this experiment is impossible, as reading out a value of a qubit does collapse the wavefunction. There is a theory of doing non-destructive measurements, but these reduce down to ways of transferring information from a qubit to another quantum system, which is ultimately just two qubit operations. What is wanted for a non-demolition qubit measurement is something that collapses the wavefunction from a superposition, but does not disturb the probabilistic distribution of the states which results. Schemes using the resonant frequency of weakly coupled systems are one way of doing this, and Hakonen claims to have achieved it in the paper mentioned above. A friend (and former labmate) of mine has done something similar, as her paper shows. Personally, I've always favored very fast, strongly coupled measurements, using RSFQ superconducting electronics for example, instead. This gives you a very quick readout, on a picosecond timescale, collapsing the wavefunction quickly but measuring the result before it has time to change. The speed with which this can be done is part of the advantage.

Ben Schumacher of Zeroth Order Approximation is back and blogging again. I also noticed a post of his from a while back which, while long, is really good. It's called A Physicist Talks to Theologians. It's from a talk Ben gave, and it begins thus:

The subject for my talk to you is "What I wish my pastor knew about Physics" -- a title and topic, I should add, that has been helpfully supplied by my brother. (Thanks.) It seems to me that there are two presuppositions in this title. First, there is something that my pastor may not know. Second, there is something that I wish that my pastor did know.

It's a great post, and I highly recommend reading it if you have any interest in faith and science.

Every once in a while, the legends are true (from FOXNews):

When a nearly 20-foot long tentacle was hauled aboard his research ship, Tsunemi Kubodera knew he had something big. Then it began sucking on his hands. But what came next excited him most — hundreds of photos of a purplish-red sea monster doing battle 3,000 feet deep.

It was a rare giant squid, a creature that until then had eluded observation in the wild.

Read the article, but more importantly, have a look at the pictures. That's one big squid!

Believe it or not, it's what you get when a bird hits an airplane:

"It's bird ick," said Smithsonian snarge expert Carla Dove, who heads the lab. Technicians identify the snarge DNA using sequencing technology, then enter the sequences into a national database. Scientists can then tell what kinds of birds are commonly smashing into America's airplanes, something of intense interest to both the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. military.
...
And its not just birds. Sometimes jet-stream encounters can take a page from the X-Files. "We've had frogs, turtles, snakes. We had a cat once that was struck at some high altitude," said the Smithsonian's Dove. She says birds like hawks and herons will occasionally drop their quarries into oncoming planes. "The other day we had a bird strike. We sent the sample to the DNA lab and it came back as rabbit. How do you explain to the FAA that we had a rabbit strike at 1,800 feet?"

Cool, but disgusting. And is it wrong of me to be insanely curious about how that cat got there? That must have been a big hawk.

This is, quite simply, the coolest thing ever (hat tip Jonah at The Corner):

You can't make out much on this scale (you have to follow the link), but it shows the relative sizes of dozens of Sci-Fi spacecraft from across the genre. There's Star Wars and Star Trek, of course, but also Lexx, Farscape, the old Battlestar Galactica, and Babylon 5. What surprised me is that I knew at least something about all those shows. There was only one which I hadn't seen, but I'd heard about it. Other than that, what can I say? Besides that the Super Star Destroyer is freaking huge! It dwarfs whole space stations from the other sci-fi universes.

Sadly, the Death Star isn't on the chart, but Star Wars just does things on a much grander scale. If you were to include that small moon of a space station, the other ships would be vanishingly small in comparison, and they're hard enough to see as it is.

Okay, you've got to love this headline: "Robotic space penguin to hop across the Moon". From New Scientist:

The first lunar colonists may not be a humans but compact robots capable of jumping more than a kilometre in a single bound.

Engineers at US defence contractor Raytheon, in Massachusetts, have developed a robot, dubbed the Lunar Penguin, that could one day bounce across perilous craters and imposing mountains on the Moon's craggy surface using a set of compact rocket boosters.

US president George W Bush has made returning to the Moon, and later reaching Mars, a crucial part of his vision for future US space exploration. But, in order for humans to make the Moon a second home, robotic scouts will need to search for safe landing spots and useful minerals for colonists to mine.

"Since we could set it down in such a precise location, the Penguin could be the delivery vehicle for the science community," Raytheon engineer Karleen Seybold, who is leading the Penguin project, told Reuters.

New Scientist also has an article titled "Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive", which is almost as good. Why should tabloids have all the fun?

No, it's not the subject of a sci-fi story, or the result of the search for drunken intelligent life, which is what I thought of when I saw the headline: "Study Details Bar at Center of Milky Way." Rather, it turns out that the Milky Way has a more unique shape than we thought. Maybe you ought to just read the article. As you can see, there is a 27,000 light-year long bar of stars across the center of the Milky Way, as shown in this artist rendition from the University of Wisconsin website:

Freaky, huh? At this point I haven't seen any ideas as to why it's there, but I wonder where it's pointing, don't you?

You can tell an electrical engineering paper is really old when a picofarad capacitor is referred to as a "micromicrofarad condenser."

Doc is singing the praises of peer review, citing something Dean said earlier:

It's important that you understand the significance of that: a paper in a peeer-reviewed journal is not Gospel, but it is written by a respected researcher and, before it's published, it undergoes a lengthy process where other qualified researchers in the field review it carefully, point out possible flaws or objections, challenge his references, and give the author a chance to meet their objections and/or clarify his reasoning before publication.

In other words, while a peer-reviewed paper may be wrong about something, it is extraordinarily arrogant to think you can just skim it and toss off a casual dismissal. You need to respect the material, and that means that before you spout about it you read it carefully and think about it, under the assumption that someone who's quite smart and quite well-informed wrote it, and that other people who are quite smart and well-informed reviewed it before it got published.

To which Doc follows up: "Experts aren't always right, but they are always experts."

Now I've defended the peer-review process on this blog before, but I think Doc and Dean are overstating the case somewhat. I can't speak for political science, but in my Ph.D. field, you don't have to be "respected" to get a peer-reviewed paper published (although it helps), nor is the peer-review process necessarily lengthy. Generally only two or three reviewers will read the paper before it's published, and whether the reviewers really thoroughly examine the paper (or even read it themselves rather than have one of their Grad students do it) depends a lot on the reviewer. Now, the quality of the reviewer, and the attention he pays to the paper, largely depends on the quality of the journal it's submitted to and the perceived importance of the paper's results, so generally the more important papers are better reviewed. Also of note is that unless there's an obvious problem with the data, most reviewers will take your word on experimental results. I've never heard of a reviewer insist on an independent reproduction of experimental results before accepting a paper, but that's not surprising, as it would be impractical to do in most cases. This has led to problems in the past of "respected" researchers falsifying results for years before they were caught.

So am I saying that the peer-review process is useless? No, just that it's not only imperfect, but far less perfect than most laymen give it credit. At least in the field of experimental physics. Maybe it's different in computer science: that might explain why Doc accepted Dean's defense of peer-review so completely.

Every once in a while I'm forcibly reminded that although I have a Ph.D., I am not a theorist, such as when I attempted to make sense out of this article at NewScientist.com:

ATTEMPTS to build quantum computers could run up against a fundamental limit on how long useful information can persist inside them. Exceed the limit and information could just leak away, making computation impossible.

...The entire [Quantum Computer] system is delicate: during a computation the qubits have to be isolated from their environment, because any outside disturbance can cause "decoherence" and spoil the calculations.

Coherence is harder to maintain in larger qubits containing more particles, because there is more potential for interaction with the surroundings. To try and limit this effect, researchers are pursuing ways of making microscopic qubits...

But physicists Jasper van Wezel, Jeroen van den Brink and Jan Zaanen of Leiden University in the Netherlands have shown that efforts to engineer quantum computers around ever-smaller qubits may face significant obstacles. "We have proven that there is a universal decoherence rate for qubits," says van den Brink. This means that quantum information will inevitably be lost after a certain time, even without any external disturbance. Rather than remaining in a superposition of two states, a qubit will spontaneously collapse into one state or another (Physical Review Letters, vol 94, p 230401). "When we discovered this we were stunned," says van den Brink.

Worryingly, the time limit for decoherence seems to grow shorter as systems get smaller. Zaanen says that for some of the most promising qubit technologies the limit would be about 1 second. It's not a problem at the moment, he says, because researchers are fighting to get coherence times up to around a microsecond. "But this fundamental limit is getting within reach."

Not being satisfied with the news report, I read the paper. Upon doing that, I realized that it is very much a theoretical paper, and I'm not sure I feel qualified to comment on it. I did notice a couple of things in the paper that don't really fit with the article, however, which means that either I am misreading the paper (quite possible), the article got it wrong, or the authors of the paper are missing something. Anyway, rather than attempt to Fisk the paper (again, I'm not qualified to do that), I'll just pose the questions I have about it. The paper can be found here, but only if you or your organization has an account with APS. However, there is an older version of it available to everyone here.

1. The calculations in the paper begin with the assumption that the qubit is entangled to the measurement device, and calculates the decoherence time (the time it takes for the qubit to lose its information) from there. However, the measurement schemes which I'm most familiar with do their best not to entangle the measurement device to the qubit until it's time to perform the measurement. As the measurement is performed at the end, after all the calculations are done, I don't see why this would limit the coherence time of the qubit while it's performing the calculations, which is where the coherence time is most critical. If that's the case, then the article is highly misleading. However, it may be that the measurement device represented in the paper is not literally the device performing measurements, but is rather representative of the environment, which is effectively measuring the qubit.


2. The New Scientist article says, "the time limit for decoherence seems to grow shorter as systems get smaller." In the paper, this is because the coherence time is inversely proportional to the N variable, which is the number of atoms. However, this brings me to my second problem, as N is not the number of atoms in the qubit, but in the measurement device. The measurement device can be much, much bigger than the qubit storing the data, so it's not obvious to me that a smaller qubit (an ion in a trap, for instance) should have worse decoherence than a larger one (a superconducting ring), should they use the same measurement device (a SQUID magnetometer, for instance). Of course, this may go back to my first question, and whether the measurement device is really the measurement device or rather the environment seen by the qubit, this being itself. (Yes, the qubit is its own environment, in the sense that the physical system has a lot more quantum states than those purposely used to store data, and losing data into these states is just as bad as losing data to the world at large.)


3. Nowhere in the decoherence equation does a coupling parameter appear. The coupling between the measurement device and the qubit is controllable in most quantum computation schemes, and if they're really talking about a measurement device, it seems to me that this should be taken into account. I think, reading the paper, that the coupling parameter is supposed to cancel out, but I find that hard to believe, and I'm not sure if I'm reading the paper correctly.


4. The paper doesn't address the question of quantum error correction. A fundamental time limit on quantum coherence time doesn't matter if quantum error correction can still be performed (which requires the coherence time to be 10⁴ times as long as the operation time), which can extend the coherence time of the device indefinitely. One second should be plenty of time for most quantum computation schemes to implement error correction. Is there something in this fundamental limit which prevents this?


5. Finally, I want to know whether this fundamental coherence time limit can be applied to NMR. NMR quantum computers, though limited in size, have demonstrated quantum coherence greater than the one second limit at room temperature. Admittedly, there is some question of whether NMR is real quantum computing, but I'd like to see the authors address this and how their analysis applies, or why it does not, in this case.

So there're five questions I don't know the answer to.Maybe I should ask a real theorist, such as Ben Schumacher, what he thinks.

As you've probably heard, the solar sail satellite has been lost:

The world's first solar sail-powered spacecraft failed to reach its planned orbit after the Russian rocket carrying it shut down seconds after launch, Russia's state space agency said on Wednesday.

But it was unclear if the privately-funded Cosmos 1 was in space or had crashed to Earth, with the U.S. backers of the project saying the craft was sending faint signals, possibly from a lower orbit.

"The unique solar sail spacecraft was not delivered to its planned orbit because the engine of the first stage of the "Volna" rocket shut itself down 83 seconds into the flight," Russia's Federal Space Agency said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, this is the second unsuccessful attempt to launch a solar sail craft on a journey through space," it said.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm not. As I reported two months ago, the track record of the group trying to get the sail into space has not been the greatest. The problem with trying to do space missions on a shoestring budget is that rocket science is indeed a very hard science. You need to overengineer the problem. Cutting corners greatly decreases the likelihood of success, but it does so more rapidly for space missions. The expense of lifting an item into orbit and the near impossibility of correcting a mistake once it's there means that it has to be done right the first time. Using a converted ballistic missile as your launch vehicle would be the first cut corner I'd worry about, and indeed the main cause of this mission's problems.

Looking for the latest gadgets? The blog Engadget keeps you up to date on all the toys. It's more quick blurbs than long articles, but there's everything from hard drives to MP3 players there.

I should acknowledge Gmail's web clips for pointing this blog out to me. I thought the web clips (little one line blurbs appearing at the top of my Gmail page) were annoying at first, but I've decided that they're fairly unobtrusive and they occasionally point to interesting articles.

Well, I explained this once before, in my first week of blogging, but if you want to know what a back of the envelope calculation is, with an explanation of why it's useful and plenty of examples, have a look at this presentation (in PDF format).

And while I'm at it, I'll give you an example of an actual back of the envelope calculation I've done before. While designing a superconducting circuit in Grad school, I had to know whether I needed a distributed element model, or whether lumped element was good enough. Lumped element assumes that each component--capacitor, inductor, resistor, Josephson junction--is discrete, its size does not matter, and you can assume that the voltage and current are uniform across it. In a distributed circuit model, the frequency of the circuit is so high that we need to consider waves propagating through your elements. You can measure a wire at one point and find that it has a voltage of V₀sin(wt) while at another point it has a voltage of V₀sin(wt+a), such that there is a noticeable phase difference at different points along the wire, and you need to treat it as a transmission line. You can tell whether the circuit can be modeled as lumped element or distributed element by comparing the wavelength of its signals to its dimensions. If the dimensions are much smaller than the wavelength, then it can be treated as lumped element, otherwise you need a distributed element model. I was designing this circuit on a microchip which was 5 mm on a side, with the 1 mm at the edges reserved for the contact pads, so the space for the circuit was 3 mm x 3 mm. The actual circuit was much smaller than that. The circuit was supposed to run at f = 10 GHz. The maximum speed of the signal is the speed of light, c = 3 x 10⁸, so the wavelength of the signal is c/f or 3 cm. Since the length of the circuit is less than 3 mm, it's an order of magnitude smaller than the wavelength, so the lumped element model is okay.

So far, so good. I've decided that the phone works pretty well as an MP3 player. I was worried at first, since it put all the music files, including all the phone's ringtones, on the same playlist. After playing with it a little, I discovered that I could make subdirectories, and it would treat each subdirectory as it's own playlist. It's not a very sophisticated solution, but it does work well for what I want to do. Namely, I like to put audio books on the MP3 player, generally putting as many CDs onto it as I can manage. This sometimes poses a problem, as when I rip the books from the CDs, it usually names the individual tracks as Track 1, Track 2, etc, so I can't put them all in the same directory. But with this set-up, I can put each CD in a separate directory, and listen to them one at a time by navigating the directory structure. As an MP3 player, it works at least as well as the dedicated MP3 player I have. In addition, the phone came with a stereo headset, where all I have to do is tap the button on the headset's microphone and it will pause the MP3 player and let me make a phone call. It also pauses the player if I receive a call, and I can hit any button on the phone to start it up again.

Which brings me to one of my favorite features, the voice activation. How I have it set up, while the headset's plugged in, all I have to do is say a "magic word" (which I choose beforehand), and it will beep and prompt me to say the name of who I want to call. I can associate a total of 25-30 phone numbers with voice commands, and for each of these I don't have to press a single button in order to call them. Unfortunately, it doesn't listen for this "magic word" while the MP3 player's going, in which case I do have to press the button on the headset's microphone.

Anyway, I finally got the e-mail working for one of the e-mail services I use. It still doesn't work with Gmail, but I figure that if I'm going to be out-of-touch with Internet for a while, I can set up Gmail to auto-forward to this other address, and access it through my cell phone. And no, I'm not going to tell you which service it is, as I'm reserving it for this particular use.

In addition, I bought a USB bluetooth adapter for my laptop. Plug it in, and I can access files on the phone from my laptop. It works well, although it's a bit slow for file transfer (~20 kbps), but that's fast enough for uploading and downloading the occasional photo, which lets me use the phone's remaining 32 MB of internal memory for pictures and reserve the Memory Stick Duo for MP3s. The picture below shows the gadgets I'm working with:

At the top is a jump drive (~$50 when I bought it six months ago), which stores 256 MB, and is useful for moving files between my laptop and a desktop when they're not sharing a network. On the left is the 32 MB Memory Stick Duo card which came with the phone (I'm using a 128 MB card now (~$50), so this is a spare), on the right is the Bluetooth adapter (~$50), and below, for size reference, is a quarter (~$0.25).

All in all I'm pretty happy. I can even upload JPEGs and MP3s to the phone to use as backgrounds and ringtones. I'm using the Imperial March from Star Wars for my ringtone right now, with a cut-out from this image for the wallpaper.

Well, I finally did it, I bought a new cell phone. The particular phone is a Sony Ericsson S710a. I've drooled over it on this blog before, and it's a really nice phone, and a decent MP3 player and digital camera. I've already upgraded the memory card (it uses the Memory Stick Duo, but alas, not the Duo Pro) from 32 MB to 128 MB. In truth, 32 MB was plenty for pictures, as it maxes out at 1280x960 pixels, but I wanted enough memory so I could take advantage of the MP3 player to carry some significant portion of an audio book with me (128 MB will hold roughly four hours, more if I were willing to sacrifice some quality). I've also gotten a look at the web browser, and being EDGE enabled, it's a real web browser, capable of displaying HTML webpages rather than just the WAP format ones. Of course, the screen's a little bit small for that, and unless you get the $25 unlimited Internet access plan, it will cost you a small fortune paying per kilobyte. What I really want to do is check my e-mail using it, but while it has POP3 capability, it doesn't play nice with Gmail. It can access the Gmail website directly, but again, the additional data overhead could get expensive. If I hadn't gotten comfortable with Gmail, I'd consider getting an account with one of the other services which the phone does work well with. I still might, just to see whether I like how it handles e-mail and whether I want it badly enough to move my MIT alum e-mail forwarding to yet another account.

Anyway, the real reason I got this phone was the camera. I was tired of coming upon something and thinking "I really ought to get a picture of this for my blog" and not having a camera with me. Now, even with this phone, the camera's not great as digital cameras go, but it's good enough for the small pixel size images you usually put on blogs.