Vindication is a wonderful thing. The only thing I want to know is, shouldn’t environmental groups have wondered why they were being so ineffectual if the 1% number had been true? Or are they now on board when it comes to cleaning forests?
From the department of the bleeding obvious comes news that eating too much makes you fat, according to this gem of a report. However, the shocking conclusion is that “Americans are being manipulated by the food industry into eating far more than they need, or even want to.”
You know what’s next, of course. A 550-pound man will sue McDonalds for being asked by employees over a period of 15 years if he wanted to supersize his meals, when they should have known supersizing was dangerous to his health. Expect McDonalds to deny that their products kill, however: “The food and restaurant industries have started to strike back at such campaigns, saying it is a lack of exercise and not eating more that is to blame.”
I personally plan to sue my local movie theater for offering a bucket of popcorn for only 50c more than the $4 dixie-cup size. I thought it was a bargain, but now I realize “People think they are getting bargains but they are just getting calories”. Yep, value marketing is manipulation, and I look forward to having my day in court.
And Starbucks is not going to be let off lightly either. For years, they’ve been asking me if I wanted something to eat with that coffee. And I daresay that on occasion, I’ve succumbed to the serpent-headed lure of a pretty barista and asked for that chocolate croissant just to impress her.
But even if I haven’t ordered the supersized portions at restaurants, merely sitting near friends who do can have devastating consequences; inevitably, fries get stolen, food gets shared around, and deserts are ordered collectively. Passive eating may well be the next great public health epidemic.
New York Times article on Wolfram’s new book.
Look! A new improved rule 30. Press play when you’re ready. The red line is a continuous thread that emanates from the first square. Go ahead and try different widths (14 is one of my favorites).
What’s Stephen Wolfram been up to over the past 20 years? Dealing with the implications of his discovery of rule 30.
In this Flash application, every successive row of squares is generated by applying a simple rule to the preceding row. For each square in the new row, the rule looks at the three closest squares in the preceding row. In our case, if all 3 are black, for example, then the new square will be white–and if the one immediately above is black but the other 2 are white, then the new square will be black, etc… There are 256 such possible rules (because a set of 3 squares with 2 states has eight possible permutations, and for each permutation the new square has 2 possible states). Rule 30, displayed here on he right, is special: Wolfram discovered that it is capable of generating completely random behavior from a row containing just a single square.
My implementation of rule 30 does not lead to perfectly random behavior, because–for space reasons–the leftmost square and the rightmost square have been turned into neighbors. Because the amount of squares in a row is fixed (at 30) there is a finite set of possible permutations, and so eventually the combinations must repeat. In our particular case, this happens every 250,000 iterations or so, or about every 2 days at the current pace. Still, not bad for a few lines of code.
Steven Jay Gould has died of cancer. You’d think evolution has finally managed to kill him off. But it looks more like he’s cheated on his planned obsolescence once before. And he made it to a guest spot on the Simpsons.
I’ve just received my copy of A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram‘s just-published bid at becoming the next Einstein. It’s a 1200-page hardcover brick of a book, and it contains the fruits of 20 years’ worth of jealously guarded scientific investigation by Wolfram. Wolfram’s scientific career so far has been as grand as his ego, and his decision not to subject his discoveries to academic peer review has raised eyebrows.
His main contention as I understand it (before having read the book)–that many fundamental natural processes are irreducible to equations but instead can only be described by what amounts to simple algorithms–is bound to leave few scientists without an opinion. Are we on the verge of a Kuhnian paradigm shift?
The book, by the way, is aimed at a non-scientific audience.
On this page, I’ve tried to focus on quality over quantity when it comes to posts, but it seems that if I don’t write something on a regular basis some so-called friends take this task inexpertly upon themselves (see the comments on the previous post), a turn of events that others have lamented.
To help quell all this turmoil in your lives I’d now like to declaim that the best thing to come out of the UK since the Mini is not Margaret Thatcher, the Millenium Dome or Anthony Kenny, but the gorgeous new iMac. Yes, it was improbably designed by a Brit, interviewed here in the Independent. Read carefully and you’ll find out how the iMac grew out of letting every part be true to itself. It almost makes the iMac a metaphor for Britain, where every eccentric is allowed to be true to him/herself. Clever and quirky, meritocritous and often the underdog, brilliant but perhaps too caring for detail–Britain and the iMac are one and the same. Go ahead and switch from der Vindows XP, ja. Oops, I mentioned the war.
This well-written article on the handicap principle adds a personal touch to the latest advances in the theory of evolution, and also goes a long way to explaining some of the more outrageous pursuits perpetrated by some of my friends over the years.
It’s 3:45 AM and clear in New York City and I’ve just come down from my roof, where I was checking up on the Leonid meteor shower, which once every generation turns into a stunning storm. It’s past due this year, but so far the count has been no more than about one per minute, instead of the much-hoped for hundreds. It’s supposed to peak after 5 AM, though, so I will take another look later.
The New York night is far less dark than before September 11; the Empire State Building does double duty now, its lights pressed into service until dawn instead of midnight–a red white and blue beacon shooting a column of light into the sky. And a white glow from Ground Zero floodlights bathes the buildings in the financial district as workers dig through the night. But the building where I used to work, 3 World Financial Center, is still dark. My desk there is exactly as I left it on September 10, and will remain that way for some time to come, a time capsule for memos and pursuits that now seem wholly trivial.
My roof is a fabulous perch. It sits suspended between earth and sky, giving both equal prominence. In Manhattan, the sky’s subtle pleasures are easily drowned out–Jupiter in Gemini, Orion prominent in the South, a meteor shower–these staples of the rural night are hard to notice down in the street. But I will always associate the place with what I saw from there on September 11.
5:20 AM: I counted 60 meteorites in a 15 minute period. Quite a few leave trails that last for a second or so.