the 27th letter of the alphabet

Geoff Pullum of Language Log writes that "one of the very worst things about the English writing system ... is that it very clearly employs 27 letters in the spelling of words but there is a huge and long-standing conspiracy to market it as having only 26." He explains:

One of the worst things about the forgotten letter is that it never stands for a sound in native English words. Indeed, it could be argued that it never appears as a letter within the plain form of any lexeme, and never occurs initially in any word in modern English. But it does appear as the first letter of the two-letter genitive singular suffix of regular nouns; as the second letter of the two-letter genitive plural suffix; as the middle of the three letters that spell the suffix identifying the negative form of auxiliary verbs; as the first letter in the written clitic forms of am, are, had, has, have, is, will, and would; and it has miscellaneous other uses. But though obligatory where it occurs, it never corresponds to any sound in native words.

If you're still confused, read the whole thing!

fermi paradox

SMBC gets it right again:
:

Science journalism how-to

Last month, I wrote about misusing quantum mechanics.

Martin Robbins has taken it to the next level:

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won't provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can't be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.

"Basically, this is a brief soundbite," the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. "The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on," she or he will continue.

Hat tip to loyal reader ZM.

Talk about a single-payer system

From Marginal Revolution:

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

More here.

That's... efficient.

Links for 22 September

How panhandlers use their money.
A brief history of publication.
Essays via the iTunes model.
Snark.
A lit review on serifs and readability.
A store for time travellers. (h/t SA)
Deleting one gene makes mice smart. (h/t GL)

why things are broken

TED is famous for its great talks. But sometimes, people give great talks at other venues. Fortunately, TED grabs up these talks too, and calls them "Best of the Web" talks.

Here's a great one by Seth Godin on why so many things in the modern world seem broken.

Seth Godin: This is broken

Links for 9 September

Your philosophic beliefs matter for your real world performance. (Via.)
Soon, helium will cost 10,000 times what it does today.
Small schools stand out because they are more variable. Lesson: look for the outliers at both ends.
Casino "carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor."
Here's what white people really like -- according to their own OKcupid profiles. (h/t CH)
Worried about all those snakes you have on your plane? Try tylenol addled mice.
Reverse psychology.
A review of Merchants of Doubt. See also this.


(Apologies for seeming like a "best of Marginal Revolution" roundup this week.)

How to raise an athlete

1. Give birth between January and March.
2. Raise your future superstar in a small city.
3. Make them practice for 10,000 hours.

Markets in everything, personal services edition

(Straight from Marginal Revolution) Markets in everything, personal services edition:

A number of people have been hiring “virtual” assistants in lower-wage countries to do all the tasks in their life that don’t require a personal presence. ...

[One man] has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date.

"Gee you're nothing like I imagined you from your emails!"

How do you feel?

Suppose a small red noise surrounds a concept that is faster than granite and bends like the distance. You want to wear its talents and drink its red. But you can't bend the view that your rushing is a pleasure and your texture sounds like the feel of aroma. Suddenly a noise drips into a clear blur and the wind feels tight. You see a three-pointed scent out of the corner of your head and your spine goes fresh. This must be the smoothness that everyone is so loudly ignoring. The secret rubs its way through your hair and is lost in a thin, green odor. 

From here. Comments indicate three major clusters of reaction:

1. Awesome.

2. Angry.

3. Confused.

Which are you?

How to misuse quantum mechanics

(I should probably not engage in making fun of quackery -- especially quantum mechanical quackery -- but every once in a while I like to indulge. Feel free to keep on walking.)

Look here for a great example.

Step 1. Be an expert in something other than quantum mechanics.

Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has several hundred publications and inventions, and over two dozen scientific books: among them, Principles of Tissue Engineering, which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/#blogger_bio

Perfect!

Step 2. Read about one or two experiments in quantum mechanics. (N.B. It is easier if you read only press releases, but see also Step 7 for ways to misuse the words of QM experts.)

Step 3. Re-describe the experiment, preferably without referencing the paper itself. (That would just be confusing!)

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler.

Step 4. Go off the rails. The easiest way to do this is to take metaphorical language literally.

It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.

Step 5. Generalize liberally from your literalized metaphor.

But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.

Congratulations! You've succeeded in founding a new pseudoscience!

Step 6. Be sure to give it a catchy name.

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.

Step 7. Use the Lie of Juxtaposition. Quote real experts and then restate your position. Pretend the quote has relevance to your claims.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Extra points for the errant Biblical reference. Nice job.

(Thanks to Greg for the original pointer.)

Links for 24 August

Greeks were tacky.
Lazy 20-somethings are now "emerging adults."
"Council hires ban bid taxi firm" -- one of the all-time great crash blossoms?
Jazz up your game of hangman.
Need some perspective?
Intelligent parking.  (Plus, a roundup of parking policy from MR)

Going Galt

Why have libertarians never built a utopia? Here.

... Libertopia would yield its residents a greatly reduced standard of living, compared to what they could get from a government. Of course, the ideal would be a nearby government jurisdiction that would provide the large-scale industry needed for a ready source of consumer goods, a home for contracted-in service providers, support for losers and so on, but would not be able to tax the Libertopians.

But once you think that you realise that a partial approach to this outcome already exists, and has millions of inhabitants across the US. They’re called suburban Republicans. The suburbs benefit from urban centers, but resist paying for them, mostly successfully. It’s not exactly Libertopia, but it’s obviously close enough to be more appealing than going Galt.

Another entrant in the "Werner Hertzog reads..." meme

Madeline

alice and bob

I wish I had thought of this first.

Alice: You are late. How was your day?
Bob: Sorry honey, I had to wait for t = infinity, it took forever.

(As I said once before, if you get the joke, you have no right to complain.)

why you should throw books out

Most people, if they aren't going to keep a book, pass it along to someone else. But that's irrational if the book isn't good, says Tyler Cowen. You should throw it out.

If you donate the otherwise-trashed book somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that person reading some other book instead.

The question is whether the book is worth it. You've read it and can make an informed judgment. It is your duty to do so--else you will be encouraging the propagation of bad books to the detriment of the good. Particularly if, like me, you are more likely to keep good books and dispose of the bad. "But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book can be useful because it might appeal to 'bad' readers and lure them away from even worse books." Another confounder is that some of the books I know are bad are just the only book I know on a subject--can I really recommend against such a one?

This is not an idle question: my small graduate department once maintained a room-sized private library of books in the field. Private libraries are discouraged by the university library system (for good reason), and so when we ran out of office space, the library had to go. Now we have boxes and boxes of books--some good, some bad. The university library wants them. But would it be responsible to give them?

on knowing math

A straight cut from 3quarksdaily:

During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader. Asked what he did for a living he said that he was a mathematician.

The sceptical gang-leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung around his neck. "All right", he said, "calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free; fail and you will be shot". Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

What's the lesson here? To remember your Taylor series? To never exaggerate your mathematical prowess to anti-communist vigilantes? That in Ukraine, even vigilantes know more math than I remember? Or that in Ukraine, even knowing math won't keep you out of a life of vigilantism?

every grad student should get one of these

This Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi - Charenjaa Kitto (Wake up! First Sun Warrior of the Morning - challenger kit) alarm clock wakes kids up "by turning them into Ultraman."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the day"...

Awesome. (Hat tip Marginal Revolution)

on being left-handed

10% of the general population are left-handed. Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, Gore, and now Obama and McCain are all left-handed [via MR].

Does my being left-handed increase my chances of becoming President of the United States?

prognostication

Social Technologies predicts 12 Areas for Technology Innovation through 2025.

1. Personalized medicine
2. Distributed energy
3. Pervasive computing
4. Nanomaterials
5. Biomarkers for health
6. Biofuels
7. Advanced manufacturing
8. Universal water
9. Carbon management
10. Engineered agriculture
11. Security and tracking
12. Advanced transportation

The rules of prognostication are simple. Be specific, outlandish, and keep quiet about the ones that fall through. Social Technologies doesn't meet the bill. It's a terrible list. They aren't prognosticating so much as advertising. Here's my take on their 12 areas of innovation:

1. Nearly all cancers will be treated with retroviruses.
2. In China and India, energy will be generated locally, leapfrogging those nations past the United States and other Western nations beleaguered by increasingly desperate corporations and the inertia of distribution infrastructure.
   
3. In 2025, pervasive computing and the semantic web will be on the list of predicted tech innovations for 2050. The next computing revolution is that thousands of African children who have received One Laptop Per Child will earn One Dollar Per Day acting as the back-end to your Roomba.
4. Nanomaterials will be ubiquitous and cheap, but will turn out to be useful mostly for advertising.
   
5. Socialist countries will have to face the troubling fascist aspect of genetic determinism in their free healthcare plans.
   
6. After trillions of dollars have been wasted in developing biofuels, we will decide that trains were a good idea after all.
7. While some corporations spend billions trying to develop a homogenous system to allow customers arbitrary degrees of customization on their products, smarter corporations spend billions developing the enabling technologies they can sell to artisans for use in creating such products. The de-industrial revolution begins in your mom's craft room.
8. A salt shortage makes desalinization affordable.
9. Carbon management becomes a big business. On this one, the panel is right on. Of course, managing carbon doesn't actually do anything except redistribute wealth.
10. Kitchen counter genetic engineering to produce crop diversity becomes commonplace. Corporations that attempt to patent genes are laughed out of court. Intellectual property law follows an attribution model, and end-profits trickle up to the originator.
11. Everyone, everywhere, has cameras. They're always on and always recording, and no one cares anymore. Criminals subvert the nanomaterials so useful for advertising to disguise themselves as their own Second Life avatar.
    
12. The Netherlands outlaws cars. Most large cities outlaw cars in the downtown core (excepting electric cabs and emergency vehicles). Everyone in the city rides a bike, and fashion follows suit: flared legs and skirts are out, and to my general annoyance, capri pants become popular for both genders.

Yogi Berra has it right: prediction is very hard, especially about the future.