The Sagacious Iconoclast: Some Stuff You Might Like

Some Stuff You Might Like is a vehicle I've created for publishing links to various stuff I happen to stumble across in my wanderings about the virtual places I happen to wander about, which I think you might like, using less overhead than our Distinguished Symposia series. Each link is thus simply presented with a short note about why I'm recommending it; batches of links are in reverse order chronologically.

2012-12-27

Welcome to Some Stuff You Might Like, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's opening music selection, for your delectation, features the electro swing band Caravan Palace performing Rock It For Me live at Le Trianon in 2012.
Here's David Deutsch's 2012 Edge talk on Constructor Theory, in which he notes that "Information [...] has been instantiated in radically different physical objects that obey different laws of physics. Yet in order to describe this process you have to refer to the thing that has remained unchanged throughout the process, which is only the information rather than any obviously physical thing like energy or momentum. [...] The way to get this sub- strate independence of information is to refer it to a level of physics that is below and more fundamental than things like laws of motion, that we have been used to thinking of as near the lowest, most fundamental level of physics. Constructor theory is that deeper level of physics, physical laws and physical systems, more fundamental than the existing prevailing conception of what physics is". David goes on to discuss how that relates to some of the principles of rational thinking & optimism which are further developed in his book "The Beginning of Infinity".
Scott Aaronson is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studies theoretical computer science. Here is his Quantum Computing & the Limits of the Efficiently Computable Buhl Lecture, which he presented at Carnegie Mellon University, in which he considers (starting at 4:25) a number of possible limitations to the theories of quantum computation. It's good to keep these sorts of considerations in mind when thinking about the forms that David's constructor theory may have to come in.
Here's Gregory Chaitin's Leibniz, Complexity and Incompleteness lecture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which Gregory notes that "Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason asserts that if anything is true it is true for a reason. But the bits of the numerical value of the halting probability are mathematical truths that are true for no reason. More precisely, as I will explain, they are irreducible mathematical truths, that is, true for no reason simpler than themselves". This lecture also contains one of my favourite new apothegms for 2012, when Gregory says, "absolute truth you can only approach asymptotically". Call for Dr. Deutsch, white courtesy telephone ☺
Here is Matt Ridley, the right honourable 5th Viscount Ridley, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, discussing some thoughts from his 2010 book, "The Rational Optimist", on the "Uncommon Knowledge" program from the Hoover Institution. You may recall that Matt once famously noted, "For the past century the world has got steadily better for most people. You do not believe that? I am not surprised. You are fed such a strong diet of news about how bad things are that it must be hard to believe they were once worse. But choose any statistic you like and it will show that the lot of even the poorest is better today than it was in 1903. [...] All this has been achieved primarily by that most hated of tricks, the technical fix. By invention, not legislation."
I'd like to close tonight with my favourite episode to date from Jerry Sienfeld's new series called "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee". In this episode Jerry and his guests Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks have dinner at Reiner's place. It's called I Want Sandwiches, I Want Chicken.

2011-11-21

Welcome to Some Stuff You Might Like, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's opening music selection, for your delectation, features Peter Lund, Jacob Venndt, Lasse Høj Jakobsen, and Jens Christian Kwella as the Dixieland Gipsy Band, performing Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli's Minor Swing, in 2008.
Here's our old friend Walter Lewin, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presenting his The Beauty and Wonder of Teaching Physics lecture, in which he explores the beauty and the physics of colour, rainbows, and sunsets, and how they work.
In his Biased Biases: Do Cognitive Biases Give an Advantage to Hawks over Doves? talk, in the History and Rationality Lecture Series at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 2006, our old friend and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman considers some of the implications of cognitive biases in conflict situations. Note that only the first 2½ minutes and a couple of the questions are in Hebrew, the other 1½ hours are in English.
Cognitive biases are the systematic errors which we all have a tendency to make and yet which only some people are generally aware of, such as the Fundamental Attribution Error and the Illusion of Transparency, which often set up positive feedback loops of the sort we would rather avoid.
The Limits of Understanding, II, III, IV, V, VI & VII, is a panel discussion featuring our old friend Gregory Chaitin, along with Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky, which considers some of the implications of Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and their relevance to our modern sense of understanding.
The 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate from the American Museum of Natural History, featuring physicists Lee Smolin, Janna Levin, Marcelo Gleiser, Jim Gates, Katherine Freese, Brian Greene, with moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, considers the state of the discussion on The Theory of Everything, in 2011.
In his The Line Between Life and Not-Life TED Talk, Martin Hanczyc presents his lab's results on various proto-cell phenomenon that behave like life (including replication) and yet remain just blobs of chemicals, pursuant to the question of artificially creating life from scratch, should that be to our benefit, and to the question of what possible life there may be out there in the universe, because we're curious.
In his Taking Sex Differences Seriously lecture, Steven Rhoads, professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia, considers the sex distinctions which remain deeply rooted in human nature and which are in fact a direct result of our biology, and why these differences should be respected each in its own right.
In closing tonight, ladies and gentlemen, here's Mitch Hedberg's delightful performance from the 1998 Just for Laughs gala.

2011-11-02

Welcome to Some Stuff You Might Like, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's opening music selection, for your delectation, is in my opinion a very good production of Living in the Past, by Jethro Tull, featuring Ian Anderson, in 1969.
Paul Bloom is professor of psychology and cognitive sciences at Yale University. I found his TED Talk on The Origins of Pleasure pleasurable, so I looked him up and found the 20 lectures from his Introduction to Psychology course, Psyc 110, which I highly recommend. It's nice to see so many of the topics we have looked at here at The Sagacious Iconoclast brought together into a cogent 25-hour summary of many of the changes in psychology that have happened over the last 30 years.
In his 2011 Edge Master Class talk on A History of Violence, Harvard College Professor Steven Pinker shows that "What may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history is that violence has gone down, by dramatic degrees, and in many dimensions, all over the world and in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals". I know, I know, more bad news for apocaholics.
In his short Building a Museum of Museums on the Web TED Talk, Amit Sood presents Google's new Google Art Project technology for navigating around museums (think street view) and for viewing images at giga-pixel resolution therein. Fascinating.
In their 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia talk, Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth, and Derek Hoiem present their amazing results on Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs, in which their program parses 3D scenes from 2D photographs and then inserts synthetic objects into the scenes, with animation. You'll have to watch this video to believe it.
In his Toiling in Feynman's Shadow TED talk, MIT professor of computing science Scott Aaronson presents a perspective on modern computing & physics, and predicts that "The effort to build quantum computers, and to understand their capabilities and limitations, will lead to a major conceptual advance in our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, which hasn't happened yet". I like Scott's shtick.
In this University of Washington program on the National Science Foundation's Research Channel, Bernard Chazelle, Eugene Higgins professor of computing science at Princeton University, presents his talk on Why The Algorithm Might Soon Be The Only Game in Town, following in the footsteps of previous works we have seen by the likes of Stephen Wolfram and Gregory Chaitin, in which he notes the delightful result that the fastest sort algorithm is O( n_d + H(d) ), where n_d is the number of elements in the data set d, and H(d) is proportional to the entropy of the data set. Yes! Call for Claude Shannon, white courtesy telephone please ☺
From Google's lightening talks presentation at the National Academy of Engineering's 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, here are Language Translation by Franz Och, Speech by Vincent Vanhoucke, Optical Character Recognition by Remco Teunen, Machine Perception by Jay Yagnik, and Machine Hearing by Doug Eck. You may be surprised by the scope of these recent results, by their mechanisms, and by the conclusion that simple models with lots of data often do very well.
In his Google Tech Talk Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet, Jim Gettys explains how overly generous buffering in the proliferation of TCP/IP stacks in the software & hardware nodes between our clients and their servers has broken the protocol's end-to-end servo- mechanism's throttling control algorithm (with an excellent introduction by none other than Vinton Cerf, co-founder of the Internet).
Here is an episode from the Moon Machines documentary, this one on the Apollo Guidance Computer ¶, which starting at 07:50 in part three details the drama of the 1201 ("Executive overflow - no vacant areas") and 1202 ("Executive overflow - no core sets") program alarms that were generated tens of seconds before the Eagle landed on the moon, in 1969, almost out of fuel, under Armstrong's skilled manual flying. This is a classic computing story that should not be lost. (Note that YouTube will recommend the other episodes of this documentary in its related links.)
In his National Science Foundation talk Are Mathematical Models the Cause of Financial Crisis in the Global Economy?, MIT professor of finance Andrew Lo correctly, I think, concludes that it's not the models that are the problem, it's that "The Psychology of Greed Makes these Crises Unavoidable".
Nathan Myhrvold and chef Chris Young, in their Cooking in Silico: Heat Transfer in the Modern Kitchen National Science Foundation talk at the University of Washington, take a look at the results from algorithmic modeling of food cooking processes, with an eye toward understanding how to improve our kitchen success, consistency, and value. And yes, I do know about Myhrvold's legacy, lab, and his Modernist Cuisine cookbook(s), but, look, we're talkin' kitchen thermodynamics here, folks ☺
Looking toward the future as tonight's show comes toward a close: David Deutsch (FRS) is a professor of physics at Oxford University and is a favourite of ours here at The Sagacious Iconoclast from his On The Fabric of Reality and his awesome A New Way to Explain Explanation lectures at our Distinguished Symposia. Here is his How to Think About the Future lecture, in which he considers Rationality, Optimism, &c.
In closing tonight, ladies and gentlemen, here's our old friend Mr. Jackie Mason, who we previously visited when he was awarded his Fellowship in the Oxford Union Society, here describing his perspective On Psychiatrists.

2011-07-21

Welcome to Some Stuff You Might Like, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's opening music selection, for your delectation, is a fine Sophisticated Lady performance by Duke Ellington & his orchestra, with particularly good work by Harry Carney on saxophone, in 1965.
For those who may be interested, there are 16 new Charlie Chan film links, and 6 new Two Fat Ladies episodes now available at The Sagacious Iconoclast.
Jeff Koplow and the folks at Sandia National Laboratories have put together an excellent prototype of a new form of air-cooled heat exchanger that could bring important improvements in applications ranging from higher-speed computing for all of us, to cooling of large-scale industrial processes. Not only that, this paper is an excellent example of the classic style of engineering design, study, and report: The Air Bearing Heat Exchanger (PDF).
There's more bad news out today for people who aren't happy unless they can convince themselves that things are bad and getting worse; Statistics Canada's 2010 Police Reported Crime Statistics and 2010 Homicide in Canada reports show continued declining crime rates almost across the board and almost everywhere in the country.
I've recently completed reading The Great Equations, by Robert Chase, and I highly recommend it. I found the anecdote on page 184 insightful, so I have here excerpted from it for your delectation:

In September, 1946, in New York City, at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society, the presentation by the Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behaviour of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, and elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of "subelectrons", charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and [he] approached the podium attempting to be heard.
A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein ~ who told me the story ~ was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert. "Pais's theory is far crazier then Ehrenhaft's", Goldstein asked Siegert, "Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?"
Siegert through a moment. "Because", he said firmly, "Ehrenhaft believes his theory".
The strength of Ehrenhaft's convictions, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfactions. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effect of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science.
And it's not just science and scientists, I think. More generally, I think that what exhausts the patience of reasonable men is people who believe their theories, because their conviction tends to wipe out their playfulness, without which they become uninteresting or even annoying to reasonable men. Of course, that's only my opinion, I could be wrong.