Are we Google’s cutomers or products?

Whimsley, while defending Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror:

Also, we have a different relationship to Google than to Microsoft. Most of us are Microsoft customers, but we are not Google’s customers, we are Google’s product. It sells us to advertisers.

There is more in the post; take a look!

Inspiring is putting it mildly

This very heartfelt and beautifully written post of Dr. Free-Ride remembering a teacher, scientist, and mentor who passed away recently. A must-read!

On why it is OK to be a Darwinist

John Hawks on what it means to be a scientist using Darwin as the case study:

People who say that Darwin didn’t have many ideas usually haven’t read any Darwin. Now, I might say this about many nineteenth-century thinkers. When you go through the works of Spencer, or Haeckel, or Wundt, you discover that these people were remarkably thoughtful. They went through reams of examples — the kind of writing you rarely see people do anymore. Darwin was one of this number, perhaps the foremost. So it should come as no surprise that his works were full of details that would precipitate or presage developments as much as 150 years later.

But there’s something more. Darwin threaded many needles in his writing, finding the right solution for many contradictions — not only in his naturalism but also in the way his theory provoked social resistance. Darwin had the first theory of human evolution. It wasn’t correct, as we now know, but it did the essential thing: it showed a way that human features could have emerged by natural pressures of the environment. Darwin found a plausible explanation for the diversity of races — one not rooted in the divine order, but in natural history. He championed the monogenetic theory against polygenists who held that human races had separate origins. And he integrated the best empirical data from animal and plant breeding into the understanding of the natural world. Possibly most important, he insisted on the testability of his hypotheses, and gave specific criteria that would falsify them.

Sure, many of Darwin’s ideas now seem obvious. When different varieties have different rates of intrinsic growth, one will inevitably supersede the others. Small changes add up to big changes over long times. Common descent explains common morphology.

But it is precisely the reams of details that remind us so forcefully that there is more to being a scientist than having good ideas. You also have to have the courage to tell the world exactly how your ideas could be rejected. We have rejected many of Darwin’s in the succeeding 150 years. Still the core remains.

A very well written piece. Take a look!

Materialia Indica: officially launched

Community spaces are important — they play a key role not only in the building of the community and fostering unity among its members, but also make the community strong and effective by allowing for free and fair sharing of information, tips and other such goodies!

The Indian materials science community now has a blog of its own — and, it is called Materialia Indica. Abi, in his post, explains the ideas and vision behind the portal rather nicely; as you can see, along with Phani, I am also a co-founder of the site. We hope, sooner, with inputs, participation and support from the Indian materials community, Materialia Indica will become the (one-stop) site for materials scientists, professionals and practitioners, particularly within India.

Do spread the word; if you are so inclined, let us know so that we can make you a contributor; above all, please drop by often and leave your comments so that the web page is a site of vigorous activity.

Books: Salsa dancing, Sandor Marai and Darwinia!

Over at Bookslut, Colleen Mondor, the bookslut in training, celebrates Darwin:

In this anniversary year for Charles Darwin (two hundred years for his birth and one hundred fifty for the publication of On the Origin of Species) it is entirely appropriate that he should be celebrated by readers and scientists of all ages. For the younger set One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky and Charles Darwin by Alan Gibbons (nicely illustrated in a realistic fashion by Leo Brown) are both fictionalized accounts of his life to be embraced. Lasky begins with Darwin’s childhood and the delight of growing up in a house where the words “Don’t Touch” were never used. Matthew Trueman’s rather whimsical illustrations show how much nature appealed to him even as a small boy and provide a great deal of humor.

Bookslut also carries Paul Morton’s review of Sandor Marai’s Esther’s inheritance:

Esther’s Inheritance is a frustrating little book. Márai purposefully allows terrible revelations to land without shock. And as Esther and Lajos regard themselves at a remove, inverting the archetypes of the good woman and the scoundrel, we are forced to regard them at one as well.

…

And that may be the source of the great flaw of the book. It explains, honestly and fairly, all the great inherent evils in Esther’s society. But it forgets that “the contract” Esther and her parents established created a world so many still find alluring, whatever its false promises.

Finally, Tyler Cowen recommends Kristin Luker’s Salsa dancing into the social sciences:

I enjoyed this book very much and I thought it was one of the best books on the philosophy of the social sciences I have read, ever. In part it is good because it ignores philosophy of science (and Continental philosophy gobbledy-gook) and focuses on the anthropology of how research is actually done.

…

Recommended.

Have fun!

Solving the crime or enjoy reading about it?

Via Literary Saloon, I learnt about the Q & A with P D James: of all the questions, I enjoyed only one:

Zeddo from Canada Dear Ms. James, I enjoyed The Private Patient as I have all of your previous novels. I do have a question regarding your comment that the reader expects “a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel…” Although I have heard many mystery novelists say this, I find very few contemporary mysteries in which this would be possible. This is an observation, not a complaint; I’d hate to have figured out the solution before the end of a mystery — what point would there be in continuing to read it?

Still, I can’t help wondering why mystery writers continue to say this, when it seems to me that what they’re actually doing is planting ambiguous actions which they will later knit together to form a plausible explanation for the identification of the criminal. Since ambiguous actions could be explained by many different resolutions, this seems quite different from providing clues which, if perceived by the reader and correctly assembled, would allow the reader to solve the mystery. I’d be interested in your view of the clues in The Private Patient with which the reader should be able to arrive at the solution before the conclusion of the novel.

The answer to that question that James gives is not too satisfactory to me; in my opinion, the clues should be in place so that I can read the novel second time around, knowing how the mystery is going to be unraveled, and see if the clues and descriptions are consistent!

Just for the sake of the phrases “rejuvenating glass” and “Jovian planets”, …

I am linking to these two papers in the latest PNAS:

[1] Spatiotemporal structures in aging and rejuvenating glasses

W G Peter

Complex spatiotemporal structures develop during the process of aging glasses after cooling and of rejuvenating glasses on heating. The key to understanding these structures is the interplay between the activated reconfiguration events that generate mobility and the transport of mobility. These effects are both accounted for by combining the random first-order transition theory of activated events with mode coupling theory in an inhomogeneous setting. The predicted modifications by mobility transport of the time course of the aging regime are modest. In contrast, the rejuvenation process is strongly affected through the propagation of fronts of enhanced mobility originating from the initial reconfiguration events. The structures in a rejuvenating glass resemble flames. An analysis along the lines of combustion theory provides an estimate of the front propagation speed. Heterogeneous rejuvenation naturally should occur for glasses with free surfaces. The analogy with combustion also provides a way of looking at the uptake of diluents by glasses described by case II and super case II diffusion.

[2] Phase separation in hydrogen–helium mixtures at Mbar pressures

M A Morales et al

The properties of hydrogen–helium mixtures at Mbar pressures and intermediate temperatures (4000 to 10000 K) are calculated with first-principles molecular dynamics simulations. We determine the equation of state as a function of density, temperature, and composition and, using thermodynamic integration, we estimate the Gibbs free energy of mixing, thereby determining the temperature, at a given pressure, when helium becomes insoluble in dense metallic hydrogen. These results are directly relevant to models of the interior structure and evolution of Jovian planets. We find that the temperatures for the demixing of helium and hydrogen are sufficiently high to cross the planetary adiabat of Saturn at pressures ≈5 Mbar; helium is partially miscible throughout a significant portion of the interior of Saturn, and to a lesser extent in Jupiter.

The MD study, by the way, is an Open Access article. Have fun!

I never knew

That Abi rooted for Steelers (but, I should have guessed!).

Ground rules for a massively collaborative mathematics project

Here is Tim Gower (link via Terence Tao at What’s new):

To finish, here is a set of ground rules that I hope it will be possible to abide by. At this stage I’m just guessing what will work, so these rules are subject to change. If you can see obvious flaws let me know.

1. The aim will be to produce a proof in a top-down manner. Thus, at least to start with, comments should be short and not too technical: they would be more like feasibility studies of various ideas.

2. Comments should be as easy to understand as is humanly possible. For a truly collaborative project it is not enough to have a good idea: you have to express it in such a way that others can build on it.

3. When you do research, you are more likely to succeed if you try out lots of stupid ideas. Similarly, stupid comments are welcome here. (In the sense in which I am using “stupid”, it means something completely different from “unintelligent”. It just means not fully thought through.)

4. If you can see why somebody else’s comment is stupid, point it out in a polite way. And if someone points out that your comment is stupid, do not take offence: better to have had five stupid ideas than no ideas at all. And if somebody wrongly points out that your idea is stupid, it is even more important not to take offence: just explain gently why their dismissal of your idea is itself stupid.

5. Don’t actually use the word “stupid”, except perhaps of yourself.

6. The ideal outcome would be a solution of the problem with no single individual having to think all that hard. The hard thought would be done by a sort of super-mathematician whose brain is distributed amongst bits of the brains of lots of interlinked people. So try to resist the temptation to go away and think about something and come back with carefully polished thoughts: just give quick reactions to what you read and hope that the conversation will develop in good directions.

7. If you are convinced that you could answer a question, but it would just need a couple of weeks to go away and try a few things out, then still resist the temptation to do that. Instead, explain briefly, but as precisely as you can, why you think it is feasible to answer the question and see if the collective approach gets to the answer more quickly. (The hope is that every big idea can be broken down into a sequence of small ideas. The job of any individual collaborator is to have these small ideas until the big idea becomes obvious — and therefore just a small addition to what has gone before.) Only go off on your own if there is a general consensus that that is what you should do.

8. Similarly, suppose that somebody has an imprecise idea and you think that you can write out a fully precise version. This could be extremely valuable to the project, but don’t rush ahead and do it. First, announce in a comment what you think you can do. If the responses to your comment suggest that others would welcome a fully detailed proof of some substatement, then write a further comment with a fully motivated explanation of what it is you can prove, and give a link to a pdf file that contains the proof.

9. Actual technical work, as described in 8, will mainly be of use if it can be treated as a module. That is, one would ideally like the result to be a short statement that others can use without understanding its proof.

10. Keep the discussion focused. For instance, if the project concerns a particular approach to a particular problem (as it will do at first), and it causes you to think of a completely different approach to that problem, or of a possible way of solving a different problem, then by all means mention this, but don’t disappear down a different track.

11. However, if the different track seems to be particularly fruitful, then it would perhaps be OK to suggest it, and if there is widespread agreement that it would in fact be a good idea to abandon the original project (possibly temporarily) and pursue a new one — a kind of decision that individual mathematicians make all the time — then that is permissible.

12. Suppose the experiment actually results in something publishable. Even if only a very small number of people contribute the lion’s share of the ideas, the paper will still be submitted under a collective pseudonym with a link to the entire online discussion.

Don’t miss the comments either.

The Hindu’s relationship to his or her gods!

Amit Chaudhuri in The Telegraph:

It [the saying "Lakshmi and Saraswati never inhabit the same house."] bears the curious, forbearing mark of indulgence that distinguishes the Hindu’s relationship to his or her gods: a withdrawal of judgment, a suppression of condemnation. Why, after all, could Lakshmi and Saraswati not live in the same house, when it would have made things so much easier? We — the petitioners — won’t go there, however; any more than a retired Bengali grandfather would ask his son to come back from California to look after him. A strange protectiveness, traditionally, characterizes the Hindu’s love for his deities; it is, for instance, what makes the transference of the worshipper during the Durga Pujas from son and supplicant at the beginning of the festivities to notional, grieving father (as the visit to the paternal home comes to an end) both simple and logical. We don’t comprehend our deities’ behaviour any more than we do our childrens’; but we do know our emotions are implicated in their movements and disappearances, and so we’re willing to give them a fair amount of leeway. We are, in other words, as bound to them by maya, the law of illusory, indefatigable attraction and desire, as we are to anything else.

By the way, the same saying is used in our homes too; and, it was Gowri Puja instead of the Durga Puja in which the goddess is considered as a “girl of our home, leaving for her husband’s”.