Where Is Joel?

Here’s a little problem for y’all, how do I decide if the following equation has a solution?

y1 < a1×1 + a2×2 + … + anxn < y2

or rather more generally Ax < y where A is a mxn matrix, x is a vector of size n and y is a vector of size m.  x is constrained to be all integers.

where all unknowns x are constrained to being integers but all y and a may be any real number.

Been pondering this on and off for a bit now and I finally found a solution and am in the middle of implementing it.  Answer to come.  ;-)

The "Eye of God" as photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

I was recently an innocent bystander to a rather impassioned argument by a certain U of A microbiology undergrad as to why god does not exist.  Actually, to be more clear her argument was that as scientists the only sensible position to have on the existence of a deity is atheism.  I personally am not an extremely religious person and have not set foot into a church in over 6 years not, but the more I thought about this viewpoint the more it irritated me.  The premise of the argument was that as the existence of god was the most challenging of “the existence of god” vs. “the non-existence of god” to accept, the burden of proof falls upon the theist camp.

This notion is nonsense. The burden of proof falls on everyone. As scientists we have no right to call anyone wrong without being able to prove ourselves correct, and calling someone wrong without proof limits the possibilities of human imagination and as such the scientific process.  We now commonly accept many things that within the frame of reference of people at some point would have seemed ludicrous.  For example as one point the concept that the earth was not flat was nonsense. It contradicted everything our sense told us. The concept that time goes slower as we get faster??? Nonsense!!  That energy can only exist in multiples of distinct quanta??  Yeah….  That doesn’t make sense. How about the fact that the entire universe originated from a volume margins of magnitude smaller than the tip of my pinky finger? Laughable really. By calling views that don’t seem to correspond to our frame of reference wrong we inhibit ourselves from discovering truths.

So to all scientists out there, including the arguer in question, I urge you all to choose your own path when choosing whether or not to be religious. If the thought that in this universe, of which we have possibly barely scratched the surface of understanding, the thought of a being greater than ourselves having guided the evolution of this world and taking part in our day to day lives seems too ludicrous to accept to you than feel free to be atheists. If the thought that there is no way that having pre-marital sex will not send you to burn forever in the fires of hell seems silly than by all mean beat your bible fervently. Just do not force upon others the views that you espouse.  …  Unless of course you can prove god exists/does not exist.  In that case feel free to write me, I’m dying to hear from you.

I have in the past complained about transparency in science in light of the whole Scott Reuben disaster which I seemed to be the only person in the entire world who got really mad about. This is about something different, the accessibility of science to the public.

It seems to me that over the last 50 years scientists have done an excellent job of alienating themselves. Just over half of a century ago people like Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr were celebrities. Thomas Edison was reshaping the face of the world. Galileo was so controversial and interesting in his time that we *still* talk about his life. People put fish on their cars with Darwin’s name in them. What scientists alive now so stir the imaginations of the public?

Stephen Hawking perhaps. David Suzuki?? People aren’t as captivated by science as they once were. In my opinion there are two primary reasons for this.

1) In an age of access to access to information, access to scientific information is still lacking. Status in academia is entirely based on publishing in reputable journals and reputable journals always charge to read the papers that are published.

2) Works that are published are often incredibly boring. I’m not sure when someone mandated that scientific writing needs to be dry. Obviously some disciplines like control theory are not very interesting and not much can be done but, seriously, if you did something worthwhile then you should at *least* be able to write an interesting abstract.

Given that I believe these are the problems what can be done? First we need to open up science. With many disciplines opening up via social media and sharing information more openly science needs to follow suit. PLOSone is a good start. Lets keep it up. I’m not sue what else needs to be done. Imma ponder this for a while.

Suggestions??

As much as I love Edmonton, for a few months in the winter it does become a very unpleasant place. It’s cold every day for months and the sun is up after I leave for school in the morning and down before I go home at night. I usually kind of spend these few months as a grumpy hermit with the only upside being grumpy hermits seem to get a ton of work done and I need to get said ton of work done! I was thinking yesterday as the sun ended it’s daily trek across the sky at shortly before 5 o’clock and the days were showing signs of not returning to warm for another 4 months, “This is really a very marginal climate”.

In economics there is a concept that when some sort of business is operating in a “marginal” environment, the profit it is able to make is what determines the profit of businesses in more prime environments. Let me do a simple quick glossy explanation. Say there are two Starbucks stores, one at the exit to a busy LRT stop where people are getting off for work wanting coffee and one on a quiet street corner where the occasional patron stops in on their way to whatever they might be doing. If the quiet street corner is the worst location a Starbucks can operate and make a reasonable profit then this is the marginal location. Now if the costs of operating the Starbucks in the train station are low enough that it makes more money than the Starbucks on the quiet corner it would make sense for the owner of the Starbucks on the corner to try and acquire the more profitable location hence driving up property/rent/other costs at the more profitable location until it is once again on par with the less profitable. Obviously not all Starbucks are equally as profitable, but the concept is still valid, economies just aren’t perfectly fluid.

This made me think about whether there was some such similar concept with regards to where we live and the happiness we derive from that location. If people in Los Angeles, where they don’t have as ludicrously short days or cold winters as Edmonton, were happier in general than Edmontonians then it would make sense for Edmontonians to leave Edmonton for Los Angeles. Is there some mechanism whereby the influx of people to the happier locations causes more pollution/crime etc. so that on a generational level the happiness of humans in all locations is determined by the happiness of the humans on the margin? Is there perhaps on the other hand some restrictive force causing human relocation and happiness to not be a fluid enough economic system for the balancing to occur? I can see that the latter might be the case if you were a starving farmer living day to day in a third world country, but on a generational level I can’t imagine a similar mechanism preventing relocation between countries of at least medium wealth? Immigration laws?? Hard to say. Interesting to think about though.

Like most other people in North America who are both a) interested in interesting things and b) read at a grade 6 level, I read and enjoyed the book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and some other dude. Lemon Jello and Orange Jello. Classic. The sequel has been released, it is called Superfreaonomics, and it has caused an enormous stir in the world of climate change scientists. I’ve been following the action and I think both sides are being ridiculous so I thought I’d weight in on the debate.

For starters I’d like to clarify my position on global warming.
a) There is very strong evidence that the world is getting rapidly warmer and is doing so because of human influence primarily in the form of Carbon Dioxide release. (See my earlier post on why people who don’t agree with this are *likely* wrong.)
b) Unlike many alarmists I firmly believe that even if we do nothing right now science will eventually fix this problem for us. I’m not convinced that will happen before a lot of human suffering occurs however.

Now on to the argument made by Mr. Levitt and his friend. They believe that we can solve this problem by “geo-engineering” the planet. The premise is if we release huge amounts of pollutants to the upper atmosphere they will act as a sort of umbrella and cool us down. Soon after this was released climatologists and bloggers everywhere demonized the authors. The main issue people seem to invariably point out is *one* botched quote and some questionable arguments about solar panels. I don’t really take issue with either of these things too much, and the fact is that geo-engineering would be a very rapid way to cool the planet down. This doesn’t mean that I think they are on the right track or have done the right thing by publishing this however.

The problems with their argument are:
- We solve global warming without reducing atmospheric carbon. This leaves 50% of the problem with atmospheric carbon which is that it is acidifying the ocean which will eventually destroy much of our planets photosynthetic ability (ability to create energy for animals from the sun) as well as the coral reefs. That’s a pretty big oversight!!
- We have NO idea what the repercussions of this plan are. At least global warming is a devil we know. Imagine living under a planet wide cover of smog. It would reduce the amount of useable energy from the sun that reaches our planet. It would totally change weather patterns by changing the temperature gradient in the atmosphere. Who knows what else it would do!!! It could be a disaster much worse than just the warming of the planet.

Of course Levitt and _______ are within their rights to publish this. It’s a valid argument for how to cool the planet. It is however irresponsible for people in a position of trust with such a widespread audience to insinuate that we can solve this problem without making changes to our carbon emissions. As far as we know we can’t and in the current atmosphere of declining public belief in global warming it is more important than ever that people are told this. All Levitt and John Doe’s chapter does is increase the tendency toward apathy.

That having been said, what was in my opinion completely out of line was the reaction of the carbon reduction proponents particularly Joseph Romm. They reacted with extremely strongly worded angry replies that were so steeped in science most normal people would never spend the time trying to figure them out. All this accomplishes is alienating the public by visibly yelling all sorts of things we don’t understand and acting like lunatics. Secondly instead of opening dialog with Levitt and his little buddy which would be very visible on the widely read freakonomics blog it puts them on the defensive criticizing the carbon reduction movement. Lastly all the hype will just help with Superfreakonomics sales, further spreading the word they wanted stomped out. it mystifies me how environmentalists can’t behave like normal humans and are always tying themselves to trees and blowing up pipes. THAT IS NOT HOW YOU MAKE FRIENDS!!! If we hope to solve the global warming problem before it becomes too severe what is needed is open dialog and public education and less histrionics. That goes for you Joseph Romm, who as far as I can tell just printed that post to get more attention. What chance do we have when those campaigning for change do all the wrong things all the time??

Joel out.

So there has been a ton of hub bub lately over this article in “Trends in Ecology and Evolution”. The premise being that women make different mate choices while on their pill and while off of their pill. I read over it, and while quite interesting it seemed to ultimately be much ado about nothing. It just so happens to be an article easy to sensationalize by the media. I did learn something very interesting however that I had been up until this point unaware of with regards to women’s menstrual cycles and their sexual behaviour.

It has for a long time been understood that women are more attracted to men with high levels of testosterone during their most fertile periods and more likely to have a one night stand with these men, whereas during periods of low fertility women are attracted to men with low levels of testosterone and are more likely to establish a relationship with these men. Testosterone levels are evident when looking at men judging by their jaw line etc. and often their level of competitiveness. The assumption is of course is that during periods of extreme fertility women are attracted to high testosterone men because these men are most likely to confer upon their child the ability to survive while in low fertility periods women want low testosterone men as these men are more likely to stick around and care for said child. (The unfortunate implication here is that we possibly have an evolved tendency to cheat as cheating men and women both find ways of increasing the chance of perpetuating their genetic material… This is off topic however so I won’t delve into it any further.)

I had always assumed that high testosterone men were good genetic fathers as the male children would also inherit the high testosterone characteristic and be stronger and more capable of providing for himself. He would also of course be more likely to be selected to be the genetic father of the next generation, although there is no reason this behaviour would initially have been selected for before this trait existed. This paper presents the postulate that as testosterone is actually an immunosuppressant, being able to survive high testosterone levels are a good indication of genetic quality as the subject survives even with a weakened immune system. I’ve never heard this before and am going to have to think about it. It seems counterintuitive that women would want to pass a weakness like immunosuppression on to their male offspring even if that male offspring had a higher chance of genetic quality.

Thoughts??

There has been a ton of chattering lately about how “Global Warming” is not in fact real. The chatter has been inspired by the fact that recent data has shown that the world has actually not been warming itself up over the last ten years but rather cooling itself down. Pretty much all the real scientists and people who understand statistics have said two things.

1) The data is not necessarily in fact representative of that actual situation as it ignored the polar regions, the regions that are warming the fastest.

2) The slight cooling effect is well within the tolerable variance of the chosen trend line and only people who don’t understand Statistics (aka 99.99% of people, including generally myself. See this article to prove you don’t understand statistics, then also reference the fact that you believe that teams and players go on hot/cold streaks in sports often.) would ever attribute any importance to it.

The media has of course sensationalized the whole affair and the people who aren’t scientists but style themselves have such are asking for for the scientists heads on a stake. What this come down to is the entire affair is ridiculous and no matter who you believe it shouldn’t change anything. We should be motivated to reduce carbon emissions even on the off chance that global warming is real. If it is real and we fail to do so we may be condemning generations to a painful process of rehabilitating our planet. Even if global warming does not exist there is very little chance that tons of extra carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is actually a good thing so we probably aren’t destined to hurt much by trying to solve the “problem”.

What this demonstrates to me is the extreme danger in sensationalizing real problems. When Al Gore (Aka Dr. Hypocrite) and company went out and proclaimed the sinking of cities etc. it became the face of global warming. When things Al Gore said turned out to be true, but not as sensational as he made them out to be it opened a door for people to criticize the existence of Global Warming. It’s important we understand the problem is very likely real. It’s important to understand that if we do nothing it’s still very likely fixable in the future, but not without most likely a large hardship. Then it is important that we set about to do something and stop flagellating. This was a bit of a rant, sorry all. I’m a little bit irritated by the whole affair right now.

ps. We should also note that the sun has been oddly cool for the last little while and the planet is still warming up… Just sayin’.

Alzheimer’s. Apparently caused in part by the hyperphosphorylation of the human tau protein.

Well, every other single person in the world seems to be writing about this today, and why not, it’s pretty dang cool. As I don’t want to miss out on the action I might as well write a few things I think.

Ok, what the heck am I talking about? Ardi (Ardipithecus Ramidus) is the earliest pseudo complete skeleton of a homonid clearly related to humans. Yay!!! Why do we care??

For starters it’s not the missing link. Every time someone says missing link I feel like slapping them. I hate the term and think the whole concept of missing link is retarded. Evolution is a fluid process, of which there are huge chunks of gaps in the fossil record simply because there just aren’t *that* many fossils. There are always going to be holes in the evolutionary record of any species. The term was popularized in the 19th century and for some reason it’s like we just can’t let go. Even national geographic mentioned it in the title of it’s article on the publications.

Secondly, despite media already seeming to mangle this, it’s not entirely clear that this fossil is a direct ancestor to Homo Sapiens. It’s obviously not too far off of the evolutionary shoot so to speak and was at the very least likely very much like our early ancestors, but whether it was in fact my Great^200000 grandmother is a contentious issue that is likely to be debated for a very long time.

Now, on to what is dang cool about this guy (chika in fact.) Humans closest relative in the animal world is the chimpanzee. It has long been assumed that when we diverged from the chimp our ancestor was some sort of chimpanzee looking thing. The reason for this is that we feel like a superior species to the chimp, so evolution must have swept us forward while leaving them behind. (This is of course ludicrous, and no credible scientist would ever mention it, but you know you thought it!) We can tell when chimpanzees and humans diverged evolutionarily based on genetic evidence, we understand facts like how fast things mutate and we can determine the amount of genetic difference between the two species. Based on this genetic evidence it appears that humans and chimps likely diverged less than 5 and a half million years ago. (I’m sure I should add a reference here, but I don’t remember where I read that. Google scholar it, it was in Nature or Science I think.) Given that Ardi is 4.4 million years old our common ancestor probably looked like ardi.

The crazy thing is Ardi was a bipedal!! The crazy, slouchy, on their hand walk of chimpanzees likely evolved after we diverged!! The bipedal walk we treasure as being so distinctly human existed in a primitive form prior to divergence and then was evolved away in other species. Now *that* is surprising!! I’m sure there are about a billion other interesting other things about this discovery in the papers, but I’m lazy and this is the main thing that stood out to me. If it sounds interesting though go pick up a copy of science. It’s all very cool.

Lastly I’d like to point out that once again reasonable non-crazy people have fired another shot across the bow of creationism. Ardi is indeed a transitional form which creationists claim vehemently we have never found. Of course there have been other transitional forms found, but this one happens to be very high profile, so maybe when people here from a creationist that no transitional forms have ever been found they will realize that this is complete garbage. Of course the people listening to creationists probably don’t read all this whacko sciency crap that gets published in Science anyway. So maybe not.

Later!!

I spend a ton of time skim reading journals to see what is coming out in my field. I thought from now on I would share the things I find that are particularly interesting.

1) Science publishes an article on Ardipithecus. This is the earliest known ancestor to man that we have ever found a skeleton of and possibly the biggest news in human evolution since Lucy. The first remains were found 15 years ago and the results of the excavation published finally today. It’s been a 15 year wait for curious scientists who must feel like christmas has come early. I think it’s pretty dang cool if this kinda stuff interests you at all. Check it out in Science this month!!

2) From SciAm. People who sleep more lose more weight faster. … Yeah, I mighta suspected as much. Apparently not sleeping creates enzymes that make you hungry. Speaking of which I better go to bed soon!

3) In PNAS this month Smith and his buddies showed off how it may be possible to reverse the effects of synapse deterioration in Alzhymers. Before anyone gets too excited they didn’t actually do it, they just showed that a known mechanism of synapse deterioration can be counteracted. Cool stuff none the less.

4) Also in PNAS, a neurological explanation for why imposing sanctions upon negative behaviours can in fact lower cooperation levels of the sanctionee with the sanctioner. Here’s betting the UN doesn’t even look at this when dealing with Iran, but maybe it’s time we start dealing with problems like this a little bit differently.

Ok, I’m positive I read some other cool things lately, but I’m tired and don’t want to get fat via not sleeping!

Good night all.