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I was reading a rant about sci-fi physics (or the lack thereof), and it mentioned ...

jerf@jerf.org (jerf) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:20:43 -0000

I was reading a rant about sci-fi physics (or the lack thereof), and it mentioned how Star Trek had a problem with the transporter being too powerful, requiring a series of increasingly-implausible reasons why it couldn't save the day today. I say "increasingly-implausible" not because it didn't make sense that the transporter would be disrupted by, well, everything, since in some sense that's exactly why they are totally impossible, but because by the end of the run of Star Trek, it is completely implausible that anybody would ever trust their lives to one of these disasters!

It occurred to me that a slight reformulation of them would have solved the majority of problems. Say that the transporters are rock-solid reliable, as long as they can get a lock, but that they absolutely, positively, written-into-the-laws-of-physics require a long setup time, at least fifteen minutes. Maybe if there's a compatible transporter at the other end, we permit them to instantly link up, but blind transportation requires a set up time. I wouldn't even require the transportee to stand in the transporter for that period of time, they can just show up after fifteen minutes, but there should be no way around the setup time.

This makes most of the ways in which the transporter can suck the drama out of the story go away without making it useless. It's still clearly valuable. It's still clearly faster to use the transporter than take a shuttle. In fact it may well be more valuable since my version doesn't break down in a strong wind. But you don't get to use it to beam people out of trouble, or beam a bomb onto a moving ship (can't set up something that isn't stationary or fully predictable), or in fact use it in a conflict situation very often. I believe I would permit the transporter to be set up in advance, as long as the requisite setup time is passed, so if you make it back to the rendezvous point maybe the transporter is waiting for you, but if you don't make it back it's not immediately available.

This seems so much better, from a dramatic point of view.

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HR 1: Spreadsheet Breakdown of Division A

jerf@jerf.org (jerf) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:34:39 -0000

I got tired of politically-loaded summaries of what is in HR 1, the stimulus bill as it passed in the House. Everyone knows they "ought" to read it, but few seem willing to actually do it. (The best version unfortunately resists permalinking: Go here, select "House Bills 1-100", then the first house bill.)

Let me help you out. I still have not read the whole thing, and at 800+KB of text I don't feel too bad. But I did spend four hours last night on the bill.

I will stay non-political in this post, until ofter the end. I ask that you bear with me through some political observation, because after spending four hours with legalese I feel I'm entitled to a bit of commentary.

The bill is organized into two Divisions. Division A seems to primarily be about appropriations, and consists of approximately one third of the bill by textual volume, and by my unskilled calculation, about one third of the reported cost. Division B appears to be a massive rewrite of the tax code. Both sections of the bill contain significant modifications to other law, and I have not had the time to follow the (numerous) references through, but it is clear just looking at some of them that they are major changes. Nobody is understating how big this bill is; I daresay everybody is understating it, because a straight description sounds hyperbolic.

I have broken the appropriations into a spreadsheet, which is available as an HTML table in the main body of this post, or as an Open Office Calc file or a Comma Separated Values file. (In both cases you may have to right-click and "Save Link As..." to save it.) The table below is in the same order it appears in the bill; with a spreadsheet you can reorder it, of course.

I haven't even begun to analyze the tax code because I am not competent to analyze tax implications. Also, unlike the appropriations which are mostly either new law, or simply increases in funding for old law (though not entirely), the tax section primarily consists of significant rewrites of older law, making the exact implications difficult to tease apart even if you were intimately familiar with existing tax code and who pays what taxes. I've considered trying to write a summary, but I don't think I can even do that, whereas I might be able to pull it off with reasonable accuracy for Division A.

Read the rest...

Non-atomic things are not illusions

jerf@jerf.org (jerf) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 02:51:11 -0000

It's unusual for me to repost something I left as a comment on another site, but I thought this was worth sharing here, even stripped of its context. Tweaked for posting here.

One of the great dangers of brain research today is that as we find the "explanation" for things, we will conclude they are just illusions and not real.

Well, the thing is, we're pretty sure at this point then that everything is "an illusion" by this standard. Religious experience, love, red, pain, it's all just an illusion brought on by neurons firing in certain patterns, right? Moving into the computer realm, the text box I am typing this into is an illusion brought on by clever programming, as is the browser. It's not an isolated series of claims of illusoriness, you need to consider the whole of them at once, including not just the politically popular ones (religion), but everything that argument makes sense for (red, mathematics, scary).

I submit to you that this view, while popular, is silly.

Read the rest...

It's worth remembering, as we enter the culmination of a very loud Internet election season, ...

jerf@jerf.org (jerf) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:59:16 -0000

It's worth remembering, as we enter the culmination of a very loud Internet election season, that out there in the real world, only 8% of voters claim to be voting for one because they "dislike" the other (10% say that while voting for McCain, 6% for Obama).

(Check that methodology so you know what that means. It's a free form answer question. If the question were asked as "Which of the following statements do you agree with?" it would be a different result. But I think that this is revealing in its own way.)

I'm sure "hate" would be an even smaller response.

The media... and I include the internet media here too... the media as a whole delights in bringing you the story of extremes. But the extremes are... extremes.

Happy voting.

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The assumption that industry-funded studies are intrinsically inferior to a non-industry-funded study is an article ...

jerf@jerf.org (jerf) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:58:53 -0000

The assumption that industry-funded studies are intrinsically inferior to a non-industry-funded study is an article of faith to many people; in the most extreme cases, the mere fact that a study was funded by industry is sufficient evidence to consider it total garbage. This is challenged by an interesting paper in the International Journal of Obesity, where it is shown that industry studies consistently have a higher quality of reporting than non-industry studies in the field of obesity studies.

It's worth carefully reading the sketch of a definition of "quality of reporting" they give in the second paragraph of the introduction to see exactly what they are saying. While still possible that these studies are reporting faked data in high definition, the definition of "quality" does encompass some things that make that more difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

This paper isn't sufficient to prove that industry studies are always better, or any other absolutist claim on the other end of the spectrum. But I do think this is sufficient to say that the presumption of non-industry superiority is quasi-religious, not based in fact. Studies must be judged on their own merits, and personal attacks remain a logical fallacy, even, perhaps especially, when dealing with science.

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