Miscellany II

Well it looks like I haven’t posted since the last day of April. There’s a good reason for that, namely that I’ve been busy. I had finals the first week of May, then the lead-up to Whitney’s graduation on the 18th, then we left the 19th to go to Idaho and didn’t return until June 31st. We stayed home for a few days but went to Ft. Worth last weekend. I really haven’t had the time nor the inclination to do much in the way of writing. However, during the last month or so I’ve collected some bookmarks that I’ve planned on writing about so I present another miscellany post.

1. Sean Carroll wrote an interesting article in one of his favorite areas of research (and mine), the direction of time, for Scientific American:

   The basic laws of physics work equally well forward or backward in time, yet we perceive time to move in one direction only—toward the future. Why?
   To account for it, we have to delve into the prehistory of the universe, to a time before the big bang. Our universe may be part of a much larger multiverse, which as a whole is time-symmetric. Time may run backward in other universes.

2. As someone who is involved in academia the growing distaste that the general public has with all endeavors intellectual pains me greatly. I thought I was just turning into a grumpy old man, even though I’m only 25, but evidently this problem has been around for a while. Many articles and even books have been written on the subject of anti-intellectualism, and the one I happened to stumble across was in the Washington Post:

   It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

   Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance also blogged about the topic.

3. The Center for American Progress (who saw it in Texas Monthly) noted some terrible information about the sex education program in Texas schools.

   Under current federal standards, any sex education program receiving federal funds must conform to “abstinence only” guidelines, which means mentioning contraception only to discuss its failures and teaching, among other things, that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

   The puritanical handling of sex in this country isn’t doing anybody any good. I’m wondering where these people are who ignore reality to such an extent that they think teaching pro-abstinence sex-ed will be successful. Loons, every one of them.

4. I looked around at the websites for SciPy and SAGE but haven’t tried them out yet. I guess I’m going to be learning some more Python.

   While talking about SciPy at vetta project they made a statement that’s probably very familiar to those of us with a strong computation background.

   Now this is great in a sense. You end up throwing away most of your code now that all the real computation work is being done by sophisticated mathematical functions which are using optimised matrix computation libraries. The bottleneck in writing code isn’t in the writing of the code, it’s in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done. Once you’ve done that, i.e. come up with mathematical objects and equations that describe your algorithm, you simply express these in a few lines of scipy and hit go.

5. There is new 60 MPG Volkswagen Jetta with a diesel engine that will be available here again. I’m really glad to see the increasing popularity of diesel engines in the US. They’re more efficient and better for the environment. What more could you reasonably ask for?

   Before people mention that diesel costs more, consider that the increased efficiency (30% on average) exceeds the increased cost. If you pay the average gas price of $4.039/gal then a break-even price for diesel is (.3)(4.039) + 4.039 = $5.25/gal. The average price for diesel is only $4.69. That means that if you have a diesel engine you’re really saving about 56 cents per gallon, assuming 30% increased efficiency. I’d love to save 56 cents per gallon.

   I was hoping that the smart fourtwo would be available in the US with a diesel (which got around 60mpg) but they are only offering a gasoline version which gets 41mpg on the highway. My Honda Civic gets 39-40mpg on the highway and it has 4 doors, a full back seat, and a sizable trunk. Buying a smart is not in the cards. Bad move on smart’s part.

That’s all for now. I have more time these days since I don’t have any classes during the first summer semester so I may be posting more often. We’ll see.