Haibane.info

Category: Stranger than fiction

  • election math

    I just finished extolling the virtues of keeping politics out of the Otakusphere, but this isn’t really a post about politics, it’s about math. Besides, only a geetaku audience can appreciate this.

    Good Math Bad Math points out the innumeracy of many election-beat reporters who seem to be unaware of how percentages work:

    as results were coming in from Ohio, one reporter was saying “Black turnout in Cleveland was only around 18%, which is only up 2% from four years ago”. That’s a rather classic bad-math error. A two percent increase over 16% is 16.32% – which is a trivial change. A change from 16% to 18% is actually a 12.5% increase – which is very significant.

    At the opposite side of the scale, I think it’s astounding just how eerily accurate Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com was regarding his predictions. The cool thing about his methodology is that he actually simulates the election results in Monte Carlo fashion, running each one 10,000 times:

    The basic process for computing our Presidential projections consists of six steps:

    1. Polling Average: Aggregate polling data, and weight it according to our reliability scores.

    2. Trend Adjustment: Adjust the polling data for current trends.

    3. Regression: Analyze demographic data in each state by means of regression analysis.

    4. Snapshot: Combine the polling data with the regression analysis to produce an electoral snapshot. This is our estimate of what would happen if the election were held today.

    5. Projection: Translate the snapshot into a projection of what will happen in November, by allocating out undecided voters and applying a discount to current polling leads based on historical trends.

    6. Simulation: Simulate our results 10,000 times based on the results of the projection to account for the uncertainty in our estimates. The end result is a robust probabilistic assessment of what will happen in each state as well as in the nation as a whole.

    This is a more stochastic approach to election prediction which I think matches reality very well.

    I also found this collection of links, which are dangerously interesting. Among them, “The Mathematics of Voting“:

    Mathematical economist Kenneth Arrow proved (in 1952) that there is no consistent method of making a fair choice among three or more candidates. Topics cover Fairness Criteria, Voting Methods, Fairness Criteria applied to Voting Methods, and Ranking Procedures.

    Then there’s the old favorite topics, like should we ditch the Electoral College? (no). Should we use an Instant Runoff Voting system instead? (no).

    Election math is cool.

  • that which must not be spoken

    I deliberately keep my politics off this blog, because I’ve found that politics is a topic that necessarily inflames passions of the sort that are antithetical to people sitting around and talking about things they enjoy. I’ve been a traveler of the middle path, with a leftwards drift, since 2000, and Ive seen a lot of victories and losses on both sides of the aisle. My experience shows me that people are the same – they have the same fears, the same biases, and the same need to paint their opponents in dark colors of the Other to validate their passion, because they wrongly feel that there’s some shame in that passion. There isn’t – the passion is good, and it’s necessary, and it’s worth it to look in the mirror after a bitter fight and reflect that what divides us is so much smaller than what brings up together.

    There are those who will not be able to let go, and there are those who will, but just not yet. I don’t think anyone I know or read regularly sincerely wants the President-elect to fail, or wants the country to be punished for making the “wrong” choice, or takes any pleasure in pronouncements of doom forthcoming. But much of what those people I respect are saying right now, does sound like they do desire those outcomes, in the absence of benefit of the doubt, or the simple knowledge of their characters born of personal contact and friendship. Emotions are cathartic and also nothing to be ashamed of.

    At any rate, I am glad the election is over, because there’s a lot of blogging to do in the otakusphere. I’ll be back on a regular-ish schedule again now. If you have any interest in what I’ve to say in the political realm, I do invite you to stop by my blog at Beliefnet, City of Brass – but let’s leave that, there.

  • LHC webcams and doomsday voyeurism

    There are two live webcams setup for the Large Hadron Collider. I can’t help but be fascinated. It’s tempting to sit in front of them and wait for a giant black hole to swallow the Earth or something. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s impossible… or is it?

  • strangest attractor

    Behold, empirical evidence of Something Out There Beyond Our Ken:

    Dark Flow in the Universe
    Dark Flow in the Universe

    Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.”

    The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

    There’s a more detailed discussion of this new study at Ars Technica, where they note,

    A quartet of researchers measured fluctuations in the CMB that result from the scattering of microwave photons by energetic X-ray emissions from galactic clusters, and discovered a coherent flow of matter across the universe. Dubbed “dark flow” by the team, it cannot easily be explained by the distribution of matter in the visible universe. The team postulates that this motion may be the effect of matter residing outside the CMB—something beyond our ability to directly detect.
    […]
    The data used in the paper came from the three year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) dataset. Using the WMAP data, the researchers extracted the wavelength of scattered photons from individual galactic clusters. Since the clusters’ motion does not exactly follow the expansion of space-time, these scattering measurements allow researchers to compute the individual motions of each cluster. This is apparent in a very small change in the CMB temperature in the direction the clusters are flowing, a phenomena known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. This technique has a drawback, in that the measurements of this effect for a single cluster have a large statistical errors; to overcome this, the researchers took measurements from over 700 distinct clusters.

    The velocity of these clusters was computed to be around 2 million miles per hour. Once the part of the movement that is caused by the expansion of the universe was removed, the researchers found a coherent direction to the remaining flow—matter seems to stream towards a region of space between the constellations Centaurus and Vela.

    The image above shows the 700 clusters as white dots and the purple spot the general area towards which they are all headed. The autors are repeating the experiment with even more clusters using the 5-year WMAP dataset which should reduce some of the statistical uncertainty involved, but it looks like these results are robust. There really is something out there. And by out “there”, I mean not “here” but an elsewhere that is beyond anywhere that we could ever conceivably call “here”. Woah.

  • 149 Terajoules

    Hurricane Ike as seen from the International Space Station
    Hurricane Ike as seen from the International Space Station

    Lots of detail here at Weather Underground about the storm surges and the expected damage. 149 Terajoules was the Integrated Kinetic Energy of the storm -it has actually fallen to 124 TJ now, but that is still more than Hurricane Katrina at landfall.

  • Ike approacheth

    Hurricane Ike track as of 9-12-08
    Hurricane Ike track as of 9-12-08

    Shout out to Ubu Roi – stay safe man. Dunno where you live, but Highway 6 is a better route than the interstates, or Braeswood all the way out past the beltway/route 59 conjunction on the southwest side. UPDATE: Ubu has been hurricane-blogging extensively at Houblog. He’s way better prepared for this than 99% of the rest of the Houston metro.

    I have to confess enormous relief at having moved away from the Gulf Coast over a year ago. Still, many many of my friends and family reside in Houston, including some in Galveston county, and for all of them I pray that this storm has as little effect as Hurricane Rita did. I still vividly remember the nightmare of our Hurricane Rita experience, and that was just the evacuation and city-wide shortages of gasoline, milk, eggs, etc for weeks afterwards. There wasn’t even any monster rainfall with Rita, though she was a Category 5. A few years earlier, though, Tropical Storm Allison turned Houston into a gigantic bayou, causing billions of dollars to infrastructure and buildings, and irreplaceable loss of research and data at the Medical Center. Hurricane Ike is more analogous to Allison than to Rita – the primary concern is a storm surge of 20 feet in the Galveston lowlands, and then area-wide severe flooding throughout Harris county. Unlike Rita, Ike hasn’t been deflected at the last minute, and given Ike’s far greater extent (500 miles wide!) even if Ike were to be deflected by the hand of God now, Houston would still get hit. East Texas is going to get wet – seriously.

    I had chronicled our Rita experiences on my blog – it was a nightmare that I’d never want to live through again.

  • gravitational induction

    Faraday’s Law is that a changing electric flux induces a magnetic flux. Now, physicists working under an EA contract think they’ve empirically observed the gravitometric analogue:

    Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the effect is virtually negligible. However, Martin Tajmar, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria, and colleagues believe they have measured the effect in a laboratory.
    […]
    Their experiment involves a ring of superconducting material rotating up to 6 500 times a minute. Superconductors are special materials that lose all electrical resistance at a certain temperature. Spinning superconductors produce a weak magnetic field, the so-called London moment. The new experiment tests a conjecture that explains the difference between high-precision mass measurements of Cooper-pairs (the current carriers in superconductors) and their prediction via quantum theory. They have discovered that this anomaly could be explained by the appearance of a gravitomagnetic field in the spinning superconductor (This effect has been named the Gravitomagnetic London Moment by analogy with its magnetic counterpart).

    Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. “This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831.

    The accompanying graphic really explains it much better:

    gravitometric induction
    gravitometric induction

  • surfing FTL

    In scifi, FTL is achieved by jumping around spacetime, because accelerating to light speed would require infinite energy (as per Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Gamma is not your friend). However, now some physicists have theorized a way to accelerate to c and beyond, by “surfing” on a wave of space-time:

    In theory, the universe grew faster than the speed of light for a very short time after the Big Bang, driven by the dark energy that represents about 74 percent of the total mass-energy budget in the universe. Dark matter constitutes 22 percent of the budget, and normal matter (stars, planets and everything you see) makes up the remaining 4 percent or so.

    Strange as it sounds, current evidence supports the notion that the fabric of space-time can expand faster than the speed of light, because the reality in which light travels is itself expanding.

    Cleaver and Richard Obousy, a Baylor graduate student, tapped the latest idea in string theory to devise how to manipulate dark energy and accelerate a spaceship. Their notion is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding space-time behind the spaceship while also shrinking space-time in front.
    […]
    Cleaver told Space.com, “The dark energy is simultaneously decreased just in front of the ship to decrease (and bring to a stop) the expansion rate of the universe in front of the ship. If the dark energy can be made negative directly in front of the ship, then space in front of the ship would locally contract.”

    All you need to do is manipulate the 11th dimension. And it doesn’t even require infinite energy. Just a Jupiter mass or so. Simple!

  • um.

    I think this is a stunt, but considering it’s Scarlett Johannsen, maybe it isn’t. Regardless, I don’t think I’m gonna get permission to enter the contest.

    Of course, the disclaimer at the bottom could be interpreted several ways…

  • LHC – It’s the end of the world as we know it

    These pictures of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are awe-inspiring, but also make me a bit sad. It’s depressing to think that Big Science like this can’t be done in the US anymore. Or rather, won’t be done.

    these are just a few of the amazing photos available. For captions, and many more, check out the original link.

    I visited Fermilab as a kid and then actually worked on some hardware for an experiment there as a summer student in college at UW. I don’t know much about particle physics but I do know that every square foot of those massive, intricate assemblies is the product of some grad student’s or researcher’s life work. It’s humbling to think of the intellectual capital invested in this machine, built to answer what amount to such fundamental, even basic questions.

    I had a similar reaction when I visited the Saturn V on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, TX. That was once functioning hardware; had there been the money, it could have flown to the moon. Instead it rusts in a placid Texas field.

    It occurs to me that I’ve never seen the equal of these pictures of the LHC in any science fiction, on TV or film. Nothing in the imagination of our storytellers has equaled the sheer complexity and power of the simple photos here.