Rob Pike designed another programming language!

It’s called Go.

I never liked the “New Jersey” school of software engineering too much, but there’s something very charming about the kind of thing they make. For example, in this document, Rob Pike says that one of the design principles of the Go language is “no stuttering”. Things like “foo.Foo *myFoo = new foo.Foo(foo.FOO_INIT)” are avoided.

I think he is spot on. Stuttering is exactly the right term for this type of Smalltalk-flavored syntax.

Zork fandom

This is from one of the Zork books, Conquest at Quendor.

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss

From this short piece published in ScienceNow:

Lévi-Strauss introduced “structuralism” to anthropology–the concept that all societies follow certain universal patterns of thought and behavior, as exemplified in their myths. Anthropologists say his way of looking at human culture did away with conceptions of indigenous groups as having “savage” or “primitive” minds–as well as the corollary view that Western civilization is uniquely advanced. Lévi-Strauss’s way of re-conceptualizing anthropology–informed by what he called the “three mistresses” of geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism–helped shape trends in social sciences and literary theory, and influenced intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Psychoanalysis and Marxism?? Are you kidding me? I was nodding along and I was all “ok ok…did away with primitive minds… that’s cool… western civilization not unique, sure I can see that” and then BANG! Psychoanalysis, and Marxism. You can record some humongous N400 brainwave from my scalp if you put electrodes on me. Totally unexpected from the context.

You can’t be a scientist if you pledge allegiance to a certain ideology, even if you call them your intellectual mistresses. I don’t think I am too interested in this dude.

Philosophers are annoying

What was I thinking when I recommended Massimo Pigliucci’s blog a few weeks ago? He immediately posted something stupid and annoying. In an entry titled “On the scope of skeptical inquiry“, Pigliucci said that

Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Yes, a philosopher can easily point out why last-thursdayism is unreasonable, but a scientist can’t? Scientific theories with no empirical evidence are proposed all the time and scientists seem to have no problem making decisions about which direction to pursue. Pigliucci insists that Richard Dawkins is “doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry” by making atheism a scientific position. Why? We rejected ether. We rejected phlogiston. We rejected ESP. We rejected soul. Why is it any different when it comes to god?

Furthermore, what really annoys me is the undertone of Pigliucci’s piece: scientists should restrict themselves playing with their test tubes and leave all the deep thinking to the philosophers, the professional thinkers. You see, philosophers are really good at thinking, because that’s all that they do. They think. Thinking is apparently the one thing that scientists can’t do properly.

The problem is that philosophers really don’t have a good track record. When was the last time a scientist said “look, I think we are stepping outside our epistemological boundary here. Why don’t we knock on the doors of our smarter colleagues in the philosophy department and see if they can sort this out for us?” Three hundred years ago? Scientists are faced with deep mysteries all the time. For example, cognitive scientists are faced with the “problem” with consciousness. We don’t know what it is. We don’t have a framework to work with when it comes to consciousness. Philosophers are supposed to be experts on this kind of thing. Maybe they can help? Nope. We checked and it turns out that they are clueless too. They have tons of arguments, thought experiments and endless streams of bickering and nitpicking. But nothing concrete. Nothing useful.

When theoretical physicists are faced with deep problems, they very often discover that mathematicians already developed all the tools for describing the problem, and sometimes for solving the problem. It is famously called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Philosophy, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. They miraculously managed to contribute nothing to science for a few hundred of years. I call this “the unreasonable useless of philosophy in natural sciences”. I have no idea why this is the case but it is.

Steely Dan III

Becker and Fagen got the name Steely Dan from this passage in Naked Lunch:

Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. “Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa….”

Random thoughts of the day

I recently found myself in a situation in which I had to write a program to determine if a 2D point is inside a simple polygon. The solution is fairly well-know. Wikipedia has a short article on it. See here. Essentially, you can choose from two popular algorithms: one based on crossing number and the other on winding number.

What is fascinating to me is that both are discrete cases of much more powerful theorems in topology. The former is related to the Jordan Curve Theorem, and the later to Gauss integral (in complex analysis). I learned these things in college but it never occurred to me that they are closely related.

Useless tidbit of the day

In “A short history of nearly everything”, Bill Bryson claimed that some members of the Glass family in J. D. Salinger’s short stories were inspired by James “Avoid Boring People” Watson. Is it true?

The problem with Bill Bryson is that I can never really trust him. Yes I know that he is amazingly good at researching his materials, but he seems to be very willing to exaggerate things.

This is one of my favorite stories in “A short history of nearly everything”:

In the late summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. ““Everyone is interested in pigeons,”” he observed helpfully.

Something from Nothing

Interesting story about the so-called orphan genes.

Grandma plays favorites

This result is really intriguing. Evolutionary psychology scores. Even I am starting to be convinced.

L’Archéologie du Savoir (7)

From wikipedia’s entry about the Apple // game Labyrinth:

[Douglas Adams] really liked the word “adumbrate”, a rather obscure verb meaning “To prefigure indistinctly; foreshadow”. So it ended up on the verb list. This obscure word was used in an even more obscure puzzle at one point in the game — you had to “adumbrate the elephant” when you were stuck in a prison, and an elephant would come and break a hole in the wall, freeing you.

Random thoughts

I recently started to learn to take advantage of the grid computing infrastructure on campus. It’s really interesting to see what computations are being done. The usual suspects are there: comparing genomic sequences, simulating colliding galaxies and that kind of things. But you also find things that don’t get much publicity. Mathematicians are using grid computing to enumerate latin squares, for example. Even the art department is using computation clusters now.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a sad life if you have nothing that you want to compute.

Somebody is wrong on the Internet!

I obviously can’t possibly point out every misinformation on the internet. But I can’t resist this one. Google “dijkstra’s algorithm” and you will find some of the top hits stating that “Dijkstra’s algorithm is a greedy algorithm”. No, it isn’t. It is a form of dynamic programming.

PS: I was searching for some graph algorithms implemented in c, and google returned this curious item:

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Bloch, William. Combinatorics, Topology, and Graph Theory in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Mathematical Association of America MathFest, TBA, Madison, Wisconsin, Jul 28, 2008

Abstract: According to Nobel-prize winning author Carlos Fuentes, the modern Spanish novel would not exist without the prose of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, an autodidact, was enamored with mathematics and read, for example, works of Bertrand Russell over and over to help him as he grappled with ideas and paradoxes surrounding the notion of infinity. Borges’ affinity for math works itself out in many of his remarkable short stories, but most especially in “The Aleph” and “The Library of Babel.” In a course ( \emph{The Edge of Reason} ) for humanists that I teach in conjunction with an English professor, we unpack a number of literary and mathematical ideas. In particular, “The Library of Babel” provides a natural springboard to discuss combinatorics (How many distinct books are there in the Library?), topology (What manifolds best model the Universe that is the Library?), and graph theory (How might we best understand the interior of the Library?). In this talk, I’ll describe the unique(?) structure of the course, provide a brief synopsis of the story, and discuss some of the mathematics we cover.

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Wow. That’s very impressive. An abstract about Jorge Luis Borges written in LaTeX!

Why sponges are animals?

Another great blog entry by Matthew Cobb. You have to read it immediately so that you can educate your kids the next time they watch Spongebob SquarePants. But more importantly, this topic is related to the evolution of the nervous system:

They may not have neurons, but they have the tiny ion channels that are required to make a neuron work. Express these genes in another organism, and they work.

They have a simple form of the genes required to make neurons. Express these genes in a toad or fly and they start to make neurons there.

Related: On the Origin of The Nervous System by Greg Miller. Interesting bit:

By looking down the tree of life, [scientists] are concluding that assembling these components into a cell a modern neuroscientist would recognize as a neuron probably happened very early in animal evolution, more than 600 million years ago.

Also:

…In the 1960s, researchers found that when the single-celled Paramecium caudatum bumps into an obstacle, a voltage change sweeps from one end to the other, much like the “action potentials” that convey a signal down the length of a neuron. In Paramecium, this electrical blip reverses the beat of its cilia, temporarily altering its course. Electrical excitability, it seems, evolved long before neurons made it their specialty.

The experiment described in Matthew Cobb’s post is by Bernard Degnan of the University of Queensland. Another terrific example of aussie scientific accomplishments:

Last year, the Amphimedon genome yielded another surprising find. A team led by Bernard Degnan of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, reported in Current Biology that cells in the sponge’s larvae express a handful of genes that spur neural precursor cells to develop into full-fledged neurons in more complex animals. Inserting the sponge version of one of these genes into frog embryos and fruit fly larvae led to the birth of extra neurons. Degnan suspects that the cells that express them might be a type of protoneuron. These cells sit on the outer surface of the sponge larvae, and Degnan speculates that they may somehow help the free-floating larvae sense their environment and find a suitable place to settle down and metamorphose into their adult form.

Wonderful life – Amazon molly

I just learned about the reproductive strategy of the Amazon molly (Poecilla formosa). The Amazon molly isn’t found in the Amazon. Rather, it is a reference to the greek mythology because this species of fish is female only! How is that possible? From the wikipedia:

The Amazon molly, Poecilia formosa, is a freshwater fish which reproduces through gynogenesis. This means that although females must mate with a male, genetic material from the male is not incorporated into the already diploid egg cells that the mother is carrying (except in extraordinary circumstances), resulting in clones of the mother being produced en mass. This characteristic has led to the Amazon molly becoming an all female species

Salvador Dali vs. higher mathematics

The last paining by Salvador Dali is titled “The swallow’s tail”. It was inspired by Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory – a branch of mathematics that deals with singularity. For some reason Dali was fascinated by it and planned to produce a series of paintings about this esoteric subject.

L’Archéologie du Savoir (6)

I have no idea if this new “finding” of mine is well-known or not. But here it goes anyway: I think the big library described in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a direct reference to the Vatican Secret Archive. Recently listverse.com published an interesting list about conspiracies, which includes this little tidbit:

Absolutely no one is allowed into the Archives, not even Cardinals. It is not well explained, on the Archives’ website, whether the Pope is allowed to go in or not. Anyone who wants to see a document from the Archives must ask in advance, and thus, must know in advance if such a document even exists. The only four people on earth known to have access to the Archives are Cardinals Raffaele Farina (the Archivist, or Librarian), Jorge Maria Mejia and Luigi Poggi (Archivists Emeriti), and Prefect of the Secret Archives Sergio Pagano. There is only one entrance into the Archives: from the main library, go by way of Porta Angelica, through Porta di Santa Anna.

The resemblance is uncanny. Most likely, the Vatican Secret Archive served as a blue print for the big library in The Name of the Rose. But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe The Name of the Rose managed to creep into the public imagination about the Vatican. The operation of the secret archive is secret. Nobody really knows how it works. It’s a fertile ground for conceptual blending.

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Isn’t my pretentiously titled L’Archéologie du Savoir series about the weird things in the wikipedia? Where does the wikipedia comes in? Well, I clicked on the wikipedia entry about the pope, and found this:

The official list of titles of the Pope, in the order in which they are given in the Annuario Pontificio, is: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God.

The pope is the Primate of Italy??? Who’s the prosimian of Italy? The president?

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I used “The resemblance is uncanny” as a stock phrase. I didn’t know that the meaning of the word “uncanny” is quite specific. Again, wikipedia to the rescue:

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche — literally, “un-home-ly”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.

What? This innocent little word is a Freudian concept? I didn’t know that. I thought the word had something to do with a can. Uncanny, I thought, means “does not look like a can” or something like that (ok I am joking. Of course, can is the latin root for knowledge). But the word was first coined in 1906 by psychologist Ernst Jentsch. The wikipedia entry managed to make references to Sigmund Freud, George Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. It’s a great read. It’s like reading about the dark ages, when psychologists spoke like babbling idiots.

The diagram (“uncanny valley”) at the bottom of the wikipedia page is very interesting. It seems to convey a somewhat legitimate scientific intuition, but it’s expressed in a overly pretentious manner, and yet at the same time there’s something whimsical about it. The effect is uncanny.

The Nobel Prize is a joke

I mean, WTF? The literature prize winner is not Thomas Pynchon? All members of the “Award Thomas Pynchon the Nobel Prize for Literature, already!” facebook group (yes, all 137 of them) are pissed. I swear this Herta Müller lady is an agent of Thurn und Taxis.

Pure poetry

[via Jerry Coyne's blog, by Matthew Cobb] Those are thousands of bats flying, captured with an infrared camera.

This is pure poetry. I never read any poem or work fiction that touches me more deeply. But I guess I’m a scientist first. Maybe with two independent cameras, you’ll be able to reconstruct the full 3D scene. Maybe you can then estimate the direction and velocity of individual animals. Lots of cools things can be done with this.

PS: A related note the vocal mimicry of baby bats [link].

Headline

Headline: The Cigarette Smoking Man debated Richard Dawkins about X-Files in an atheist meeting. Never had I constructed a sentence with so many incongruent words. [link]

The Cancer Man is not a big fan of democracy? No kidding. He assassinated JFK for crying out loud!

The owl visual wulst

I want to quickly mention this paper:

Pinto, L. & Baron, J. (2009) Spatiotemporal frequency and speed tuning in the owl visual wulst. European Journal of Neuroscience. pp1-18

The behavior of neurons in the visual wulst of the owl is amazingly similar to the mammalian primary cortex (V1). 300 million years of independent evolution has produced very similar visual systems, both in anatomical circuits (despite the fact that birds don’t have a proper neocortex) and in physiological properties. The differences among vertebrate brains are surprisingly small.

Note to engineers: if you have to design a image processing system, it is probably a good idea to copy the mammalian V1. Two branches of evolutionary history that diverged 300 million years ago arrived at the same solution. Something must be very good about it.