MemeFlux

Hehe

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For those of us who still didn’t know that the Lord of the Rings director has changed a bit:

Then

Now

Wikipedia says: ‘According to the British Daily Telegraph he attributes his weight loss to his diet. He said, “I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli and it seems to work.”‘

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Global warming is all the rage nowadays. No trouble finding anything to scare the bejeebers out of you in both tabloid and news-with-context-sources. The polar bears are dying, disease ridden insects will flourish and the most important thing we can do is adhere to Kyoto.

Not really topics for an up-beat conversation, but if you read the book listed on the left of this blog (at the time of posting); Bjørn Lomborg’s excellent Cool It, you can be prepared for the next cocktail party to dis polar bears(1), ridicule the Kyoto Protocol(2) or make cunning remarks about why arguing that global warming causes malaria is about 1/60 000th of an argument(3) and should hence be replaced by a very small shell script of retorts. Now, just to make it clear: I have absolutely no doubt that our dear marble is heating up, and that humanity is to blame. But with the combination of ET-syndrome and shock-therapy with a holy grail to name-drop, chances are we’ll spend a lot of energy and money on doing the exactly wrong things, so again, read the book. (It’s good.)

However, we cannot always put our faith in quoting obscure facts about how hopeless it all is; if what we are doing is wrong and things only seem to get worse anyway, then where shall we direct our efforts (and rage)? Thankfully, MemeFlux has the answer.

Cows.

All this really started (as often does) with some wine-induced debate & Wikipedia here the other day, where our all favorite source of more-or-less-correct information could disclose two interesting facts:

• There are approximately 1.3 billion cows on the planet.
• Cattle contribute to around 18% of greenhouse gas emissions- due to their greedy 4 stomachs and methane-rich flatulence.

(also, the article continues to make the points that “Cattle are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.”)So, applying the “cowboy scientific method” (combining data dubious comparability to make a cheap point) and a favorite pedagogical method (small words and visual aids), we can show two charts:

A headcount of cows and humans to get a CowMan population of 8 billion:

We can draw conclusion #1 - cows represent about 16% of the total population of polluting bastards.

Visualising the second fact of environmental impact:

We can see that this 16% of the population actually harm the environment more than all the other stuff caused by by humans; your average cow pollutes more than the average human. So if you want to make a difference, going veggie is not enough; you know what to do… (average being a point here, if you live in the western world you should probably aim for - pardon the pun - more than one cow).

So, happy hunting, but beware Cows with Guns.

Hat tip to Kim

1) most populations are in fact increasing, the ones decreasing are in places where average temperature has gone down in the last years
2) postpones effects of global warming about 5 years
3) the money spent to save one life by preventing global warming and thus the spread of malaria mosquitoes would save 60 000 by regular prevention and disease control

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The Guardian reports on upcoming news about the first synthetic chromosome, which can be equated to creating a simple life form:

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The chromosome, however is not designed from scratch:

Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up.

M. genitalium (yes, it may be considered causing an STD) has a relatively short genome — only about 580000 base pairs (you know; A+T or G+C), compared to around 3 billion (10^9) pairs in the human genome, making it ideal for studies of this sort.

So, is this big news? The tabloids will surely pick this up with poorly-hidden references to Dr. Frankenstein and whatnots, everyone from the religious right to deepest socialist greens will go head over heels to condemn the work as meddling with God’s/Nature’s work, claiming that it is “unnatural” and immoral. So, for a moment, let’s consider what Mr. Venter’s team most likely have done:

They have taken the shortest genome known at the time they started the work, and have through a technique called gene knockout debugged all of it to find out which parts of it are actually needed to sustain life (in this context a self-replicating chromosome). Having also sequenced the genome, the team has painstakingly assembled all the parts needed from individual proteins. What is big news about this is that it 1) is an extraordinary engineering feat, and 2) proves what has long been assumed amongst biologists: there is nothing magic to life, it is only a matter of assembling the right components. Venter and his team are neither immoral nor is what they are doing unnatural, they are just pioneers on the very frontiers of science, and their discoveries and techniques will have profound impacts on genetic therapy and medical treatment of all of us in a few years’ time.

As a last point; take a moment to check out the database info for M. Genitalium; think about the amounts of information and knowledge that is hidden in data like these– one day you will have your own genome stored as a file, which can be used for diagnostics, getting tailor-made medicines that will actually work, make you know your deep historic genetic origins.

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Who needs Nostradamus when one has prescient columnists:

” . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

—H. L. Mencken (July 1920 article in the Baltimore Evening Sun).

Hat tip to Kristian.

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How would you pronounce the year number in this link?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_of_2007

“Two thousand and seven”, I guess would be most people’s choice. But all through the last decades we have used to divide years into two numbers, so when will we start using “twenty” to designate the current century? In “Twenty-ten”? And what then, when we sit down to think about the early decades of this century, how will we then refer to the first years?” I remember back in the early tens” might work, “Two thousand and one” will probably stand out due to events and other memes — but what about the years we are currently living? “The late oh-ohs” just sound silly — Wikipedia expands:

Names of the decade
In contrast to the decades from 1920 to 1999, which are called “the Twenties”, “the Sixties”, and the like, the 2000s have no universally-accepted name. Some people refer to the decade simply as the “two thousands” while others may refer to it as the “twenty hundreds”; this can be written as “the 2000s” or “the ’00s”. But simply saying “the 2000s” can cause confusion, since this could refer to the entire 21st century, or even the entire millennium. The most common format (in the English language) in referring to the individual years is to read out the full name; i.e. 2008 as “two thousand (and) eight”. Less commonly, but occasionally in the media, a shorter version such as “twenty-oh-seven” is used.

Determining a name for the decade has been problematic, especially in the United States. The term “Noughties” has been suggested by the BBC,^[1][2] but this term has not gained general currency, especially outside the United Kingdom although it is popular in Australia.

Other proposed names include:

• aughts, aughties, the Twenty-O’s, and double-aughts, from ‘aught’,^[3] which, like “naught” means “zero” (aughts was one of the more popular terms in the early 20th century)
• nils and nillies, from “nil”, meaning “nothing”
• 2Ks, from the Greek term khilioi, meaning “thousand”
• ōzies, from the practice of calling the number zero ‘O’
• zeroes, double zeroes, ohs, double ohs, and oh-ohs

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<preface>

This may be a bit on the heavy theoretical side, but bear with me. There will not be a quiz at the end.

<gnu>

In 1957, Hugh Everett III launched his interpretation of the consequences of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. According to the uncertainty principle, the fundamental particles of our world are impossible to pinpoint in time and space. Space, though fundamentally digital – more on that later – is at a certain scale fuzzy. There is a random demon loose in our world, and at every tick of our Planck time clock, there are untold numbers of reactions amongst these particles. Every outcome is random, albeit to varying degrees of several orders of magnitude.

Take the very simple situation of two particles on a collision course in deep space. Let us further assume that mentioned particles are electrically neutral; no opposites attracting. Deep in space we have barely no gravitational pull, and any nuclear or other electromagnetic distortions are reduced to the ever haunting background radiation from the Big Bang herself. Hence we have a very simple and predictable situation, much like a very basic exercise in classical mechanics.

In classical mechanics, this is indeed a very simple exercise. If you know the velocities – their speed and direction, that is – of the particles, you can easily calculate what will happen when they hit each other. If you know their initial positions, you can also easily calculate where they will collide. Assuming you know their individual masses, you can also use their momentum – mass times velocity – to show how fast the particles will travel after the collision. You can even throw in differently charged and sized particles traveling in arcs guided by gravity at speeds close to the speed of light, using relativistic mechanics, and the outcome will still be predictable (given that you got your Lorentz transformations correct, naturally).

Enter the demon.

Let us remove one of our particles, leaving the last particle travel through space alone, at a velocity yet undisclosed. In fact, we don’t even know the exact position of our quantum Quaoar of particle space.

The uncertainty principle states that you cannot know exactly where a particle is at the same time as you know its velocity. To observe the location of our particle, we have to measure its position, yet however we choose to measure the particle, we will change its velocity by bombarding it with photons to make it visible. Every particle has to be expressed as a wave function. In this formulation, the instantaneous state of a quantum system is described by a quantum state, which encodes the probabilities associated with all measurable properties, or “observables”. Examples of observables include energy, position, momentum, and angular momentum. Observables can be either continuous (e.g. the position of a particle) or discrete (e.g. the energy of an electron bound to a hydrogen atom.)

Generally, quantum mechanics does not assign definite values to observables. Instead, it makes predictions about probability distributions; that is, the probability of obtaining each of the possible outcomes from measuring an observable. Naturally, these probabilities will depend on the quantum state at the instant of the measurement. (There are, however, certain states that are associated with a definite value of a particular observable. These are known as the eigenstates of the observable.)

There are several classes of phenomena that appear under quantum mechanics which have no analogue in classical physics.

The demon of it all is the uncertainty principle, which is the phenomenon that consecutive measurements of two or more observables may possess a fundamental limitation on accuracy. In our free particle example, it turns out that it is impossible to find a wavefunction that is an eigenstate of both position and momentum. This implies that position and momentum can never be simultaneously measured with arbitrary precision, even in principle: as the precision of the position measurement improves, the maximum precision of the momentum measurement decreases, and vice versa. Those variables for which it holds (e.g. momentum and position, or energy and time) are canonically conjugate variables in classical physics.

Another quantum effect is the wave-particle duality. Under certain conditions, microscopic objects like atoms or electrons exhibit wave-like behavior, such as interference. Let photons stream through two very narrow slits, so that you will get an interference pattern on the wall beyond, like waves from two rocks dropped in a pond generate a mix of enforced and canceled waves as they propagate.

It has been shown that, under certain experimental conditions, the same type of objects exhibit particle-like behavior. Constrain the stream of photons to a trickle – it can be done in your highshool lab! – and put a piece of film in front of it. You will see the points of individual atoms building up on the screen, one by one, given that you have a good microscope. In the beginning, the scattering will seem random, the uncertainty principle kicking in and decides which slit the individual photon has passed through, something we observe when the particle hits the film. What is disturbing is when you leave the stream on, letting many photons through, one by one. The result will not be random at all, rather it will be – you guessed right – the very same interference pattern we observe with a constant stream of wave-light. The uncertainty demon makes sure the photons know their place, based on the randomness of the past. Or rather, the statistical inevitability of the future.

Yet it is our conscious choice to set up the experiment which forces the particles to collapse from wave state to observed reality. In quantum physics, the particle cannot exist until it has been observed. This is the essence of the story of Schroedinger’s ill-fated cat-in-a-box. If the cat’s demise is triggered by something determined by quantum uncertainty, for example the decay of one particular atom into another element, we cannot determine whether the cat is alive or dead until we open the box and take a look (or otherwise measure its state). Until we choose to look, it is both alive and dead, or none of them if you prefer. By observing, we change the universe.

The most disturbing phenomena are however the consequences of this uncertainty. states that, since there exists a contiunous range of possibilities for any interaction based on the quantum effects of all particles involved, there exists an unlimited number of possibilities. For every quantum interaction, the world splits into the range of possibilities of outcomes from the quantum wave functions. For everything that happens, an unlimited number of different futures are created. An unlimited number of pasts lead up to this very instant, and you affect your universe by merely observing it. For every planck time unit of existence, reality spawns new realities, each one slightly different from the rest. The many-worlds theory means there is a world where you are the supreme ruler of Earth, another where you died at age three in a tragic accident, yet another where no Earth exists at all.

What does it matter whether God plays dice, if he has an infinite number of them?

Take an example. I, the narrator of this piece of text, is a construct in the writer’s mind, yet somewhere, sometime I do exist – in a world which is real to me in the very same sense as the one you currently live in. Hence, everything in this blog is true, somewhere, somewhen, now, never, always. For a consciousness occupying a single reality stream in a tiny fraction of spacetime, words do not exist to describe the relations between these worlds. This also means that any references to persons in this blog are neither fictional, real, dead nor alive. They are very much real in my world, though not necessarily in the same way as you may know them.

Everything is not possible, it is inevitable, it has already happened, and always will happen.

(science stuff lifted from Wikipedia and mercilessly mixed with pure pipe dreams)

</gnu>

</preface>

In the world we share, however, New Scientist reports (and others pick up) that an Oxford team of scientists led by Dr. David Deutsch (author of The Fabric of Reality) has shown that the multiverse theory of endless branches of universes can explain some of the key equations of quantum mechanics:

“This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science,” says Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis.

If your head is not full yet, you can have an after-article brain snack reading up on Quantum Darwinism.

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So about time we did something like this …

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