A 29th twofer.

First, an interesting little article on a very strange research project that, strangely, seems to have produced some results. Strange ones. Basically, they are trying to map personality traits according to geography in the US.

Second, an article about the mistakes made by Einstein. This, in my opinion, is an important thing to write and read about, because it defuses the idea that science is ideology. If a physicist whose name and countenance are symbols of intelligence itself can be shown to have been wrong - well, that's only to be expected really.

All the other great scientists of the past were wrong about things, because advancing the state of the art in knowledge is like that - better theories, better data, better models - but never The Truth. Just a useful approximation. This is the power and glory of science: to recognize and correct its errors.

This is why I dislike terms such as "Darwinism" and "evolutionism" so intensely. They attempt to crystallize the ever changing ideas of how species originate into an ideology that, if somehow shown to be false, can then be defeated. It surely must be comforting for opponents of science and knowledge to think that this could possibly work. However, they are just as wrong about this as they are about so many other things.

Beauty's Truth

Find here an old but very interesting essay about what makes a scientific theory beautiful. Essentially, the author argues that the beauty of a theory comes from its truth, and not the other way around. That is, having preconceived notions of what a beautiful theory is can prevent scientists from accepting one that may describe reality better.

Especially interesting given the recent news about the Large Hadron Supercollider. Let's see what happens - maybe we will live to see new theories emerge. This is a historic time.

The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

Magnolia Sitter has linked to this very interesting article. The double standard of engineering students who don't like humanities versus humanities students who don't like math or science is especially interesting.

Also interesting to me is that in medieval education, the trivium and quadrivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, respectively. Of the seven courses in the original liberal arts curriculum, two were explicitly mathematical and three were closely related to mathematics.

To paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson, "Some people at the university specialized in manipulating mathematical symbols, others in verbal ones. Because the people who manipulated verbal symbols were better with language, they got to define themselves as the intellectuals."

The Most Important Image Ever Taken

According to this video, it is the Hubble Deep Field, and I'm inclined to agree. Whenever I look at it, I feel chills. This image, and the even higher resolution Ultra Deep Field, contain hundreds and hundreds of points, blobs, and smears of light. Each one is not a star, but an entire galaxy.

On the less inspired side of things, if you want to see something that manifests such intense stupidity and willful, possibly malevolent ignorance that it is capable of causing physical pain in those who watch it, go here.

The basic "idea", for those unwilling or unable to subject themselves to such gibbering imbecility, is staggeringly nonsensical, and incandescently moronic; a train wreck of epic cognitive ineptitude: Rainbows are a government conspiracy.

Or as the video says: "Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum, is rainbows. This cannot be natural." This is why we need math and science education with tough, rigorous, and reality-based curricula.

The Quest to Solve the Hardest Math Problem

A recent article (which appears not to be available online) in Mental Floss talked some about the quest to prove the Poincaré conjecture. It's the sort of thing that, at some level, seems to be true intuitively but is a nightmare to prove. One of the people who attempted to do so eventually quit math and took up poetry, another swore he would not marry until he proved it - and died a bachelor.

Between 2002 and 2003, a reclusive mathematician named Perelman posted online an outline of a proof, which was then filled out and verified by others. He refused the Fields Medal which the ICM offered him for this feat. Given that the conjecture was proposed in 1904, and this only after Poincaré himself found a flaw in his own proof, the problem went unsolved for over a hundred years.

As for Mental Floss, it is awesome. And they have a couple of articles in the "More" section that are math related: 5 Rap Songs That don't Make the Grade and a proof that Vampires are Mathematically Impossible. Which is flawed because the quoted author assumes that vampires turn everyone they feed on instead of killing most of them. To use Anne Rice's terminology, not everyone deserves the Dark Gift.

“I don’t imitate nature. I try and understand her operating principles.”

As John Todd quotes Bucky Fuller in this interview. This is a vision of ecology, industry, and design that uses natural processes as inspiration. It will take me a while to absorb so much exciting thought. There is an example of this sort of design at the NC Estuarium, which is next to a wetlands that was built to clean the runoff from the town of Washington before releasing it into the Pamlico Sound. It is home to muskrats, dragonflies, turtles, birds, fish, lily pads, and algae.

univers revolved

Check out this font based on taking letter forms and revolving them though the third dimension. The infinitely symmetrical forms allow the letters to be placed into three dimensional and nonlinear arrangements. Very cool, mind bending stuff.