Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, November 02, 2002
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More things I don't understand.... ...but wish I did. I love this attitude though:
Everything sufficiently beautiful is connected to all other beautiful things! Follow the beauty and you will learn all the coolest stuff.
That comment comes from the website of John Baez, who is a mathematician and physicist. I wound up there following a link from boing boing about the Voynich manuscript, which is apparently one of Baez's many interests. He also looks at the ongoing Bogdanov uproar in the physics community. Those topics I can just about get the gist of. By the time I started looking at what he does for work, and hit "spin foam models," my eyes were rolling back in my head and I gave up in defeat. More Instant Humility. [both2and: beyond binary]
That Voynich manuscript sure looks intriguing.
 8:59:34 PM
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Alternative Logic. In a previous installment you've seen some of the alternatives to numbers that exist. But can we do something even more radical? How about going to the very foundations of mathematics itself and replacing logic itself? That might sound a little unusual, I mean logic's logic, you can't choose what you want to be true can you? Well actually there are plenty of alternatives to familiar classical logic, so many that I can't hope to do justice to them in one article. Nonetheless, I can still try to throw out a few teasers and hope you are motivated to check out the references and links to see what I'm really talking about. [kuro5hin.org]
8:55:49 PM
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Links and public discussion
Brian Micklethwait in a piece called "Ratmailing versus blogging" explains in different words a key reason why weblogs foster quality and enable the rebirth of public discussion. It's because the blogosphere is a wide open space - links can make anything one click away from what anyone wants to say.
Ratmail chat is not outreach. It's the converted idiotically trying to convert only each other, and regularly erupting in rage at their inevitable failure, rage for which they suffer no punishment because ratmailers know who's reading this. [...]
because of links, bloggers perform not only to their one little writer/readership of hard-core true-believers and obsessive anti-true-believers, but to the whole blog-readership out there, at least potentially. If we put on a civilised and friendly show, that whole readership will just keep growing and growing and we'll all do better.
8:33:46 AM
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Friday, November 01, 2002
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World view purification
Many interesting points in this essay by Flemming Funch.
Skeptics and Dogmatists. One of the types of deception that personally makes me the most angry is that carried out by socalled Skeptics. Not that there's anything at all wrong with being skeptical of outlandish claims. I'm skeptical too when I'm presented with new information that doesn't match my previous experience. And I'm skeptical about my own beliefs, and I'll often look for reasons to revise them towards something better. But there's are very influential Skeptics who aren't really skeptics at all, but rather people who use deceit to protect and perpetuate a certain worldview. [Ming the Mechanic]
A few quotes:
Take astrology, for example. It is a model that explains and predicts certain things about people. If it is a good one, we should be able to verify it, and the results through using astrology should be better than random results. That's not very hard to experiment with. Just gather lots of data for some thousands of people, including their birth data. Astrology will predict that certain people will be more accident prone than others, more likely to get married, more likely to have certain professions, etc. That can all be examined statistically.
But a [Dogmatic] Skeptic will usually not do any of those things. He'll be more likely to claim that astrology pre-supposes that mysterious rays are being emitted by the planets of the solar system, which are controlling people. And he will point out that science has found no such rays that control people. And thus astrology must be a fraud.
There's sort of a reverse evidence trick that is often being used to 'debunk' things that don't fit the allowed world view. [...]
The Dogmatic Skeptic approach is to reject anything that can't be proven in a repeatable manner and accepted by the established Authorities. [...]
That kind of Skepticism is very akin to a fundamentalist religion. I.e. it protects a certain belief system, a certain world view, and it uses circular arguments, rather than verification through experience. [...]
I very much suggest that everybody should gather their own baloney detection kit.
9:46:18 AM
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How to get a Ph.D. in theoretical physics - the bogus way
Let's pin those bogometers...
Stung by the Sokal Hoax, two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, have made a stab at righting the scales. They managed to obtain PhDs from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon and publish 4 papers filled with nonsense:
KMS Space-Time at the Planck Scale, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov , Nuovo Cim. 117B (2002) 417-424.
The KMS State of Space-Time at the Planck Scale, I. Bogdanov , Chin.J.Phys. 40 (2002) 149-158.
Space-Time Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov, Annals Phys.296 (2002) 90-97.
Topological Field Theory of the Initial Singularity of Space-Time, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov, Class.Quant.Grav. 18 (2001) 4341-4372.
What this says about the French PhD system or refereeing in the journals (and some journals they chose! Nuovo Cimento? The Chinese Journal of Physics? Gimme a break!) is anyone's guess. But the most curious aspect of the affair was that they never even bothered to submit their masterpieces to the eprint archives. Which is to say that no one (and I do mean not a single person) actually read this stuff before the story broke...
For those unfamiliar with the field, let me explain what that means. The abstracts of new papers submitted to hep-th are read daily by thousands of physicists. If the abstract sounds interesting, hundreds will download and read it. Feedback (positive or negative) comes swiftly and copiously. If (like 99.9% of all scientists), you want to get your work noticed and read, you send it to the archives.
If, on the other hand, you want your work to "fly under the radar" and make it into a journal, having been read only by one other person (the overworked referee, and, in this case, perhaps not even by him), then you studiously avoid sending your work to the archives. Since no one in our field reads the journals anymore (why bother, when the archives are so much more convenient?), no one will be the wiser.
For more discussion of the unfolding "scandal", see this Usenet thread.
The plot thickens: The Bogdanov brothers are not listed among the current or recent PhD students of the Lab. Have their names been pulled from the website, or is this all a put-up job?
Apparently, the Bogdanov brothers have been at this game for a while.
I've been pulling up reviews on the web of their 1991 book, "Dieu et la Science" (God and Science), written with Jean Guitton of the Académie Française. From the excerpts, it appears to be written as an extended "interview", with Guitton as the interviewer, and the Bogdanov brothers responding (with what sounds to me to be mostly bullshit). But . . . and here's the interesting bit . . . all the reviews I pulled up from Google credit the Bogdanov brothers as having PhDs in theoretical physics and astrophysics (when they wrote the book, in 1991!).
[Musings]
Follow-up: the Bogdanov brothers deny that this is a hoax.
Here are more reports on bogus science collected by yours truly.
9:14:27 AM
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An Internet way of self-knowledge
Here's a concise but thought-provoking essay by Jorn Barger on using the net to undermine the self-knowledge taboo. Jorn stresses the usefulness of weblogs as a means of self-discovery, echoing Rebecca Blood's "side effects of blogging".
Keeping a weblog of your reading on the Web forces you to commit to some opinion on each link, and publishing that opinion forces you to take full responsibility for it. [...]
Learning to write well also involves seeing-thru these self-deceptions, and hearing that tone in your written voice when you're running-away from truth... and writing on the Net, where every class of critic is potentially just a click away, helps focus this. [...]
Academia and the law often reward obfuscation as a way of making trivialities more impressive, and lies more credible.
But web-hypertext is useful to the degree that it resists obfuscation, instead laying out its insights as clearly as possible. [...]
Paradoxically, the 'Semantic Web' movement is forcing computer scientists to confront their own lack of self-knowledge. (By analogy with the 'event horizon' of black holes, this lack can be called the self-knowledge horizon.)
[via Psybertron]
8:23:18 AM
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Thursday, October 31, 2002
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Migrating a mailing list community
I have just sent a message with the title "Goup-forming's next incarnation" to our mailing list, thinking out loud about how the next system we'll use ought to encourage and facilitate knowledge organization. The trick is of course to develop healthy hyperlinking and synthesis habits. Here's how it starts:
Hi there,
This week I've begun feeling that the mailing list has already run its course.
It has served us well, helping us in gathering people easily, finding out who we are and what we know and sketching out where our respective interests lie. However, as Eric has just pointed out, a big cause of dissatisfaction is the fact that the content we're pooling is poorly organized, which is likely to make us less effective in actually getting somewhere. So I think we might be due for a first bootstrapping effort here.
In his last post Eric has thought about ways to complement the mailing list; here I think about what we should replace it with.
I see two aspects with the situation, one that relates with the tool itself that we're using (mailing list software), and one that relates to the way we use it. The two are interrelated.
Just as mailing lists, weblog networks enable conversation. I've been thinking about the dynamics of personal weblogging for a while (for details see this article) and I want to stress the important differences that exist between the way weblog posts and mailing list posts are typically written.
When you write something you need to somehow relate it to a surrounding context. In a mailing list the context is usually indicated by the post you're replying to, and by quoted segments of that post; the rest of the context is implicit in the (possibly long) chain of messages leading up to your post. By contrast, when you write in a weblog, your post needs to stand on its own; it is a little more like a news story. The result is that you need a little more footwork to set up the context. Typically you'll write a meaningful title, a couple introductory sentences,
summarizing and linking to related posts by you or others.
What I find is that this extra context-elicitation work is excellent practice, both for the group and the individuals. It lets newcomers or revisitors much more easily get into the groove when they need to. The context-setting effort is also good for the author because it forces him to think synthetically, and because the hyperlink patterns reduce the chances that his contributions will fall into obscurity.
To summarize, I'm advocating more blog-style posts as a way of amplifying our collective memory (and, hopefully, intelligence). More elaborate ways have already been proposed and will undoubtedly come further down the line
(or in parallel), but I think we'd already be better off if we directly made our conversations more approachable.
Now it is true that we could discipline ourselves to use mailing lists in that way, citing URLs as I have done in a few of my posts. But it's not an elegant hack, and I'm sure we'll get lazy and won't do it most of the
time.
I've taken a quick look at the Drupal engine, and a few features struck me as being appropriate for the need I've outlined above. [read more...]
10:37:05 AM
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002
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Monday, October 28, 2002
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Journalism and countries
Here are interesting so-called country media summaries by PR Passport for people who need to start public relations operations in foreign countries but don't know where to start. Filled with fun facts. I learned for example that almost 9.1 million adult Canadians read a paper daily. The summary didn't cover blogging though.
In the same vein, Joi Ito points to Reporters without Borders' worldwide press freedom index (Canada ranks #5). Is it me, or does freedom of press seem generally better in countries with a high density of webloggers?
11:55:28 PM
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George Bernard Shaw. "The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity." [Quotes of the Day]
12:17:18 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:07:10 PM.
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