Not even wrong: LHC edition

Posted on October 13th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

On committing to playing random card games to determine the future operation of the LHC as a mechanism for detecting reverse causality by a Higgs-abhoring Nature … generated by a Higgs-abhoring Nature, as seen by the failure of all potential Higgs-producing supercolliders.  Why would one play card games to determine whether or not to produce a Higgs boson?   So as to avoid the  “accidental” failure modes that we have apparently observed so far, which might result in loss of human life.

The article linked above describes a series of papers on reverse causality.  They postulate that some natural aversion by the Universe to the presence of Higgs bosons has led to the continued failure of the Large Hadron Collider, the bankruptcy of the Superconducting SuperCollider project, and any other projects that might conceivably have produced a Higgs.  They use a quirky choice of mathematics and grammar; but the authors are no cranks.   They are Holger-Bech Nielsen, one of the early creators of string theory, and Masao Ninomiya, one of the editors of International Journal of Modern Physics A — certainly respected in the right context, though given a certain distance today.

Fascinating, and an excellent candidate for Not Even Wrong.   Of course readers of this blog recall that after another couple of setbacks, the LHC will discover Higgs particles on December 21, 2012 .

3 comments.

TS^2 : Dual touch-screen trend-setting, and a prediction

Posted on September 24th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang.

Gizmodo features a mind-molding video of Microsoft’s dual-touchscreen Courier tablet laptop.

“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

0 comments.

Long-term challenges in education

Posted on September 2nd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, metrics.

Mitchell Charity recently quoted to me from Lant Pritchett’s essay, “Long-Term Global Challenges in education: Are There Feasible Steps Today?” – Ch.3 of RAND’s Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals.

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

0 comments.

ICT4Dev and three-legged stools

Posted on August 20th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, popular demand, wikipedia.

The ICT4Dev aggregators on technology and learning have been covering some excellent topics over the past few months, and doing a good job of bringing some new commenters into these discussion online.

Here is a series, part of the Educational Technology Debate, on ebooks and affordable access to [preexisting] content, featuring Dick Rowe (Olé!)and Angus Scrimgeour. People still avoid talking about building new materials from scratch – the sort of work that a skillful teacher engages in every week – which is when another leap forward will begin. But they are keen on finding ways to let interactivity and creativity improve and annotate books and class materials.

Do we need a three-legged stool? Will it balance?*  What else is missing?

* I can see a whole new series of YouTube videos based on this hook… including everything from architecture to ontologies.

1 comment.

San Francisco: long-term exposure

Posted on August 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

When you’ve been exposed to Bay area weather for too long, visiting New York can make you pull a face.  (But what is that metallic distortion in the background?)

Funny Faces SF

Sage Ross Photo Booth: Shining Happy People

3 comments.

Apprentices and Wikisourcerors

Posted on August 6th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

As with being a Wikipedian, being a Wikisourceror is a mindset, a view of the world: a compulsion to make source materials freely available for cleaning up, review, annotation and translation, a sense of how they would be used in other educational works.

I have this bug, for databases and for books.  But I haven’t indulged it much — I have contributed sporadically to Wikisource, mainly tiny works in English and Nahuatl, but nothing significant.  The largest work I’ve gotten copyright release for, the Whole Earth Catalog, I haven’t managed to digitize.  So I am still an apprentice, and can not speak definitively about what it means to be a wikisourceror.  But I want to share a story about someone I met who clearly has this spirit, and has gotten his students to work together on wiki-style projects to make their classroom work available to the rest of the world.

(more…)

0 comments.

Patrick Farley draws the blues

Posted on August 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Patrick Farley’s Electric Sheep Comix are back online, with the same combination of blues, joy, nostalgia and artistry that they have always had.   The new website was launched and announced on Twitter the day I posted about them… coincidence, surely.  Roughly ten of the original comix (including most of my favorites) are reproduced in their original form — thankfully, since the Internet Archive versions I linked to earlier this week were missing some images from every story.

I recommend you start with Apocamon or Dicebox, or even Delta  Thrives when it’s put up, for a quick immersion in color and art.  But my favorites are  the Jain’s Death and the full Spiders series (only the third episode of which is currently online).

1 comment.

Shards of beauty, Mk. 15

Posted on July 31st, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Friday linkfest — I ran across an old collection of beautiful things, published here for your delectation.

Update: thanks to Avi for pointing out that Farley is rebooting his site at electricsheepcomix.com .

    1 comment.

    a platform and a request

    Posted on July 30th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    I have written recently about my campaign for the Wikimedia Board.   I updated my platform, and am posting a few essays about what it means to me to be a Wikimedian – the sense of openness and collaboration towards a shared public goal that active contributors often hope to inspire in others.

    I am looking for other good descriptions of what it means to identify with similar global collaborative projects; not only in the world of free software and knowledge but also education, health, language, art, science, peace…  and would appreciate links to any gems.

    0 comments.

    wikiboarding

    Posted on July 20th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: SJ, Uncategorized, wikipedia.

    I am running for the Board again this year, with the hope of bringing a stronger community voice to the Board, and organizing good and frequent open discussions between the Board and community about priorities, core services, new initiatives, and the like.  Angela organized a few open meetings long ago when she first joined the Board which I really appreciated, and which encouraged some previously invisible community members to come forward with good ideas.

    Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

    Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations :)

    She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

    My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

    (more…)

    2 comments.

    Getting tweet

    Posted on July 19th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    Steve Gillmor puts it well with his hyperbolic streaming loquaciousness.

    And Tim and the new Web Ecology Project (’researching the Internet so you don’t have to’) has their first whitepaper up on the subject — I look forward to more.

    0 comments.

    Brilliant Apollo moonshot anniversary reenactment website

    Posted on July 18th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    This is a weekend of writing for me. I’m holed up in a quiet breezy room with two laptops and a stack of statements, letters, and essays to work through (currently: 2 of 12).

    I just ran across a fabulous moonshot website via SJv’s photostream, however, that deserves immediate blogging.  In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it is a multimedia site broadcasting a real-time reenactment of the launch, flight and landing.  Even the name of the site is a pleasure : we choose the moon.  They are currently in Stage 6, with almost 2 days to go before moon-landing.

    Take a look!  It’s a fantastic site to share with teachers and children as well, since links to the primary sources are all neatly integrated with artist’s renderings of the elements involved.

    0 comments.

    sjmail : email that anyone can respond to

    Posted on July 7th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    I’m working on the gmail-to-wiki idea, since I’m trying to minimize my use of private channels and want to be able to truthfully say “for fastest response time, please use my [public|wiki|shared] email address”.  (Note to linguists : we lack the right word to fit in those brackets.)

    How it might work:

    • you write to wikisj@gmail .  It posts to the sjmail wiki : subject becomes title [or dab], metadata gets put in a wiki-template (or sem wiki form) .
    • a mwiki extension adds a “reply” button at the top of main article namespace pages.  this appends the reply in its own section on the article page, and emails the result to the original sender and cc list [you get normal options of reply, reply-all, &c].
    • the response email that senders receive looks like a normal email, with a footer saying “sent by user:hill  at <site url> via sjmail”
    • senders who care can log into the sjmail site to set their preferences — they can opt to get aggregate updates rather than every email response, or just abbreviations of the response with a link to the full page.
    • repliers can use the system to send a private email as well : it would note a reply was sent with timestamp somehow in the thread flow of the page but not show or store the contents.  Of course if you know the email address of the original correspondent (which wouldn’t be directly visible on the site, only stored internally), you can write them out of band.  But that’s true too if you see an email printed out or read it over my shoulder.
    • wikilinks [between messages, to wp, &c] used in the reply gets converted to URLs when sent via email.

    Thoughts?  Naturally this idea came from the success and scalability of user talk: pages, which are nothing but a simplified public messaging system where anyone can come and modify, wikify, or reply to my message to you.

    If you’ve done gmail-to-site hacking and are interested in the project, let me know.

    I’d like to see this expand to be a useful service, with individual namespaces for any number of people.  I can see the resulting body of correspondence being an interesting store of public knowledge; perhaps individual user namespaces matched to target email address ‘recipients’, RC by user, and a shared common namespace not unlike everything2 in feel — everything one might want to say about “getting around Boston” might be linked from [[getting around Boston]] in someone’s reply.

    What do you think?  I’m also looking for better ideas for a name!

    1 comment.

    Relying on non-specific reputation can be deadly

    Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    Openly peer-reviewed journals would never be able to mislead the way Elsevier can.  And there would be no slipspace for them to be tempted to misbehave.

    Publicly authored works, with public drafts showing the stages of development (appropriate for anything but creative art, where the illusion is part of the package, don’t you think?), would never be able to imply original research and fact-checking the way Chris Anderson can.

    0 comments.

    Zeal is zeal is zeal

    Posted on July 1st, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    Jeremy and I were discussing climate dynamics and related brinks claimed in countless debates around the globe – from academic journals to political and economic forecasts to doomsday prophecies.

    We disagreed about whether the truth of the importance of the matter was obvious.  As someone who still has no idea what the real fundamentals are, I don’t find this obvious.  Some clever scientists doubt the brinks.  Some dedicate their lives to explaining that this is the defining crisis of our times.  It offends me deeply as a scientist that the opinions of scientists fall strongly along political lines.  What the hell is wrong with our scientific community?

    Jeremy and I noted that some very smart people are convinced that human contributions to climate change will change and effectively destroy life on Earth within short order.  They put their careers on the line with projections of environmental and economic catastrophe with low error bars within 30 years, and work to convince everyone, in science, art, media, policy, business, and planning, that this is the essential crisis of our time.  Others put their careers on the line insisting that there is no such crisis and everyone should stop wasting effort even investigating it.

    Or do these zealots put their careers on the line?  It’s acceptable as a scientist to tilt at windmills, even drawing many others along with you, and then to end up having been wrong.  There are certainly scientists who are make a good living holding forth a minority theory, and I can’t think of any active mechanism to censure someone for mere ‘innocent’ deception and misguided analysis if they don’t stoop to plagiarism or data forgery.

    I reckon our society hasn’t moved passed the stage where playground challenges and antics are acceptable discourse, and where shouting “Fire!” on the global stage evokes more than a raised eyebrow.  Scientific disciplines should be the first to change this.

    (more…)

    0 comments.

    Government transparency gets real

    Posted on June 30th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Uncategorized.

    Our fair government, global champion of the public domain, returns to its roots of maverick transparency : with public ‘dashboards’ showing exactly where our $70B of annual IT spending is going, what projects are on or behind schedule, which officials are in charge of each division and which contractors are responsible for each project.

    I love it — and I want it for every organization I care about.  Mad props to Vivek Kundra – whose quote about “having up to 30 days” to get used to the new system is priceless.

    0 comments.

    on disambiguation and The Atomization of Meaning

    Posted on June 25th, 2009 by metasj.
    Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, metrics, wikipedia.

    Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ’specify’ for ages.  And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly.  At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics.   And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century.  All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia.  In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.

    A bit of background.  The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s.  It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham.  But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics?  And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

    bentham-ontology-exposition

    The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.  Details after the jump.

    (more…)

    2 comments.

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