duh!

Quote of the day:

"Today, no one--or at least no one sensible--thinks that general relativity is anything but a low energy approximation to a fundamental theory, in other words another effective field theory."

--Steven Weinberg, lecture at 2004 KITP Future of Physics Symposium, (16:30)

processing speed

My cousin Drausin has a post on his fantastic blog (which you should add to your Google Reader right now) about a neuroscience study that finds the human brain processing rate for lexical tasks of 60 bits per second.

But I think the really key point comes from the arXiv blog: "Of course, this is not the information-processing capacity of the entire brain but one measure of the input/output capacity during a specific task."

The brain isn't optimized for lexical tasks like sorting out letters into words or doing mathematical computations. How about something the brain is really good at, like facial recognition? I bet in one second you could look at a photograph of a bunch of colleagues and memorize the names of 5-10 of them who are in the picture. How much processing power does that take? Hard to estimate, but certainly many orders of magnitude greater than 60 bps.

As an aside, the bandwidth from the retina, according to a study cited on wikipedia's retina page, is 8.75 megabits per second. Actually, that's pretty low given that a lot of digital cameras take photos of over 8.75 megabits. The trick of the brain is to make us think our entire field of vision has high resolution when really we're only getting good resolution in the focus of the eye.

fair and balanced

To get an op-ed in the Times, you'd better not pick one side or the other in the science-v-religion debate.

Robert Wright argues that not only Creationists, but also atheists are guilty of "underestimation of natural selection’s creative power":

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html?pagewanted=print

It makes for a nice column, to say that both sides are at fault here. But that's intellectually dishonest. Pick a side, then make your case. Don't try to get along with everyone.

only 3 generations

Cottingham and Greenwood give a good presentation of the argument for why there are only 3 generations of neutrinos. The argument comes from the predicted rate of decays of Z to invisible (i.e., neutrinos), compared with the experimentally measured rate. The plot on p. 128 is pretty striking. It makes you think that there really shouldn't be another neutrino beyond the 3 we know of.

health care

The only political news item these days seems to be the health care debate. Pundits like to focus on sensational things, like gun-wielding protesters at town hall meetings or death panels. But it seems to me that in the end some reform bill will ultimately pass, probably not exactly as Obama would have wanted it (the public option is likely to go), but with some substantial changes that increase coverage and lower costs. Obama gets criticized a lot for not sticking his neck out more and delivering a detailed bill to the Congress, but it seems to me wise on an issue of this importance to allow a vigorous national debate so that ideas can get hashed out. That's democracy at its best. Maybe ugly sometimes, but at least out in the open for scrutiny.

why it sucked to be royalty

Your bathroom smelled like shit (no running water). If you got cold, you might up and die (James V). You barely ever took baths because water was thought to be unhealthy. King Charles took one every 6 months; James V reportedly never had one. You hardly ever went swimming; certainly not if you were a lady. You got imprisoned and executed if you had the wrong religion (Mary, Queen of Scots, to name just one). You couldn't drink plain water (too unhealthy), so you had to drink beer. Okay, maybe that's a bonus.

why science rocks

I'm halfway through Isaacson's biography of Einstein. He just described Arthur Eddington's observation of the 1919 solar eclipse, from Brazil and the island of Principe off the coast of Africa. The results confirmed Einstein's prediction based on the general theory of relativity. And it really launched Einstein's fame to a global level.

I think it's a great example of why science is so great. Isaacson points out that it was quite "an audacious idea that a team of English scientists should prove the theory of a German, even as the two nations were at war." Scientists tend to look beyond provincial boundaries and see the value of international collaboration, regardless of whatever short-term (even militaristic) political conflicts. Those are the kind of people you want to surround yourself with.

conferences

First day of the Scottish summer school here (SUSSP 65) in rainy-sunny-rainy-sunny-rainy St. Andrews, Kingdom of Fife.

The structure of the workshop is really good: everyone stays in the same dorm, eats meals together, goes to lectures together. It's very conducive for lots of interaction. Much better than say APS, where there are thousands of people and you have to fend for yourself in a big city.

My one complaint is that the ratio of working problems to listening to lectures is to low (in fact, it's 0 so far). Too often smart people spend all their time talking instead of allowing their audience do some of the work. But with 80 students, I recognize it's a hard format for group work.