Tag: SCIENCE!

On math and feminism and societies

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Politics3 Comments

Feeling a little grab-baggish today.  First things first, watch this.  Shut up and do it, dammit, it’s Saturday and you can spare eight bloody minutes:

You didn’t watch it, did you?  Jerk.  Fine, I’ll sum up:  the fella in the video is a British physicist, and he demonstrates a couple of interesting properties of infinite series: first, that the sum of 1 -1 +1 -1 +1… out into infinity is actually one half.  Then, to further screw with our brains, he demonstrates that the sum of the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5… is negative one twelfth.  Which is completely absurd, but the demonstration he works through is elegant and relatively simple even for non-mathematicians (which, for the record, is a category I’m including myself in) so long as they have some recollection of how algebra works.

I came across this here, at Phil Plait’s awesome Bad Astronomy blog.  The article touched off a bit of a shitstorm in the comments and elsewhere on the Interwubs for what is probably a perfectly obvious reason; it doesn’t make a speck of logical sense.  The math concepts being applied are apparently actually useful in string theory.  The problem, of course, is that most of the people involved in the argument don’t have the faintest goddamn idea what they’re talking about– which, surely, is the first time something like that has ever happened on the Internet.  This makes the argument not terribly enlightening.

Me, I’m inclined to trust the experts– while I agree that neither answer makes a drop of intuitive sense, I’m also sympathetic to the counter-argument that infinity itself doesn’t actually make a drop of sense to our non-infinite brains and that therefore “this doesn’t make sense” isn’t actually a valid knock against the math.  In fact, if I’m being honest, I find that argument fascinating.(*)  The guy in the video also points out that you’re right that if you stop at any point along the sequence, yes, you’re going to get a certain number, either 1 or 0 in the first instance and something really big in the second– but that if you extend the series to infinity, a concept that doesn’t rightly fit in our brains, you get these wonderfully unexpected results.  It’s cool.  And he’s kind of adorable.  So go do what I said and watch the video, because I know you didn’t watch it the first time.

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Complete change of subject: I need a feminist, or at least someone with a bigger vocabulary than me, to ‘splain me something, and to do it out of the goodness of her or his heart, because I’m perfectly aware I can research this myself but I’d rather ask the Internet for some reason:  is there a specific term for a society that is patriarchal in practice but not by law, other than “de facto patriarchy”?  Like, a single term?  The example I’m thinking of is America, obviously, where there are no longer any laws preventing women from, say, high office, or corporate boards, or other offices of high power that are currently occupied either nearly exclusively or literally exclusively by men, but that nonetheless all or nearly all of those offices are occupied by men.

To phrase it differently, I’m looking for a term or set of terms that distinguishes what I’ll call for the sake of argument a “hard” patriarchy– where women are literally not allowed access to positions of power via specific religious or legally enforceable and punishable prohibitions, from a “soft” patriarchy where the barrier is culture and not law.  Note that in a practical sense the effects can be exactly the same, which is why “de facto” and “de jure” would work if they weren’t phrases and not individual terms.

And maybe also you can see why I’m not trying to stuff this into a Google search, too.  🙂  Anybody got anything for me?

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(*) We’re gonna leave my inconsistency re: theology there aside, although now that I’ve noticed it I may think about it harder later.

In which math makes me angry

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy6 Comments

Y’know, I don’t expect perfection from weather forecasts– either forecasts by actual trained meteorologists or through a weather app.  I want a vague idea of what the temperature is going to be like and a radar; I can figure out the rest on my own.  I’ve discovered a new request over the last couple of days as the weather’s approached record-shitty levels:  I would like the projections being made to make some kind of fucking sense. To not be, oh, impossible.

To wit:

2014-01-06 10.49.48

This particular screenshot is taken from the weather channel’s app; I probably ought to have taken it from Yahoo’s, as Yahoo’s app is terrible, but it’ll do.  Take a look at the forecast for today, Monday, and tomorrow.

Unless they are using definitions of what I consider simple words– “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “high,” and “low”– that I do not recognize, there is no goddamn way that these can be right, because temperature does not teleport.  If today’s temperature is not going to go above -8, it is impossible for tomorrow’s low to be 3, because at some point the temperature has to be in between those two temperatures.

Note that Wednesday’s low is Tuesday’s high, which would be expected and consistent given a gradual warming trend over those two days.  That one makes sense!

It gets worse: when I look at the hourly forecast, I find out that at 7:00 AM tomorrow, they’re expecting the temperature to be -11 and the wind chill to be in the neighborhood of -36.  This is from the same weather service that says the low is going to be three degrees. Their hourly forecast doesn’t project a positive temperature until 2 PM tomorrow, and even then expects the wind chill to be -17.

Again: it contradicts the high and low data that their own weather service is providing.  You can fit both of these inconsistent forecasts on the same screen.

Ordinarily, I’d blow this off– but it really doesn’t seem like it ought to be a terribly difficult programming challenge to get these numbers to pull from the same database, and there is a very real concern about whether my students are going to be expected to walk to fucking school, or wait for a bus, at 7:00 in the morning tomorrow.  There is a big damn difference between three degrees and 36 below fucking zero.

I fully expect school to be cancelled again tomorrow.  They haven’t done it yet, but we didn’t get the call until around 1:00 yesterday afternoon, so they’ve got a couple of hours.  But they’re going to be getting very different data depending on which forecasts they’re paying attention to (and, again, this isn’t just one app— I’m seeing nonsense like this all over the place about tomorrow’s forecasts) and I would hope they’ve got somebody who understands how goddamn numbers work doing the deciding.

I don’t expect perfect forecasts, and I have some understanding of how these things work.  I’m not the type of guy who sees a 20% chance of rain and then gets pissed off when he gets wet.  But a little bit of internal fucking consistency would be nice.

In which kids ruin everything

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting, Reviews10 Comments

TheLastofUsMankindParenthood changes you; everybody says that.  Prolly ‘cuz it’s true, and pretty self-evidently so at that.  What isn’t always obvious is the ways in which parenting messes with what was probably a perfectly good personality and lifestyle prior to having kids.  I was expecting having a kid to cut into my video game time, right?  I wasn’t expecting having a kid to change the way I related to playing video games, and that’s kinda fascinating to me.

Maybe not to you; I dunno.  Hey: my blog.  Shuddup.

You might remember I got myself a PS3 and The Last of Us around Thanksgiving.  I’ve owned an Xbox 360 (several, actually) since launch; it took until the launch of the PS3’s successor for a game to come out that finally flipped the switch and made me pull the trigger and mix some metaphors up and buy one.

A warning, the only warning you get:  hella spoilers.  If there is any chance at all that you’re ever going to play this thing, first, go do it now— it’s easily worth the price of the system all by itself– and second, don’t read this post until you’ve beaten the game.  I’ll see you in a month or so, if you’ve got my schedule.  Go forth.

A short plot synopsis:  The game starts in present day.  You’re a single dad with a fourteen-ish-year-old daughter.  The zombie apocalypse starts, except these are fungus zombies, which are neater and more frighteningly real than the regular kind.

Within fifteen minutes of the start of the game, your daughter is gunned down in your arms.

It’s… difficult.  As scenes go.  It really fucking sucks.  Badly.

Jump forward twenty years.  Joel (“you”) is still alive; society, not so much.  For various reasons you get tasked with escorting a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie, across the country.  Ellie, as it turns out, is immune.  Your job is to get her to some sciency folks alive.  

And we’re off to the races.

Folks, The Last of Us is probably the best game I’ve played in years; certainly the best game of 2013.  There’s no real doubt about that.  But what’s most amazing about it is the way it creates this relationship between Joel and Ellie, and pulls you along with it.  You’re tasked with protecting her for much of the game, although (thank God, because otherwise a game-long escort mission would have gone badly wrong) she does a good job of staying out of trouble and eventually is able to actually pitch in and fight alongside you.  But I really don’t think you can properly put yourself inside Joel’s head unless you’re a parent– and lemme tell you something, if you’ve got kids The Last of Us is gonna fuck you up.

There’s a point fairly late in the game where Joel abruptly gets quite badly injured.  The game throws a curveball at you by making you take over as Ellie for a while, trying to pull together enough food and medicine to get Joel through a Colorado winter alive.  There is, of course, one major zombie attack during this sequence, and to me at least it was one of the hardest points in the game– not just because it was, legitimately, a difficult gaming challenge to get through successfully, but because watching Ellie, this little kid who has been depending on you for, by this time, ten to twelve hours of gaming or so, get repeatedly killed was fucking gut-wrenching.  I had to turn the game off, not out of a frustration ragequit (although that was part of it, I’ll admit) but because I literally couldn’t watch Ellie get killed again.

(What did I do then?  Like an idiot, I tried to start the first chapter of the new Walking Dead game– which provided me with a refreshing tonal shift by making me play as 10-year-old Clementine from the first series.  That didn’t work very well either; I still haven’t finished the first section, for much the same reasons.  Plus there’s a thing with a dog and goddammit enough emotional bullshit from games tonight thank you.)

Anyway.  As I said, the main plot point driving the entire game is that Ellie was bitten by one of these things (off-camera, before you ever meet her) and she never succumbed.  She’s immune, and you’re trying to get her to this organization that Joel thinks can help to figure out why she’s so special and possibly find a cure for the Cordyceps fungus.  And then you get there.  And you’re separated from Ellie for a while.  And then you discover that the doctors do think that they can figure out what’s wrong with her– but that the fungus has invaded her brain structure and that it’s going to require risky brain surgery to be able to do anything about it.

It’s worth pointing out that at no point do they say “the surgery is going to kill her.”  They say “we have to do brain surgery” and Joel puts everything else together from there.

And Joel.  Goes.  Nuts.  Previously in the game you’ve either been fighting bandits (generally poorly armed and rarely protected by anything) or zombies (dangerous as hell, but generally lacking distance weapons.)  The last sequence throws you up against dozens of trained commandos with fucking body armor and machine guns.  Now, it’s become painfully apparent by this point in the game that Joel is a bit of a monster– the game isn’t really interested in letting you forget the fact that you’re killing people for part of it, even if those people can be broadly classed as Bad People a fair amount of the time.  It’s visceral.  It gets to you, after a while– and this was clearly a deliberate design decision on the part of the designers.  Joel gets more and more frantic about reaching Ellie before anything can happen to her– and, fascinatingly, so did I– I’m generally a hoarder in games like this, keeping everything in reserve In Case I Need It.  By the time you get to the last bit of the game where you know there’s not much more than a hallway between you and Ellie, I was playing with no quarter given for anyone— you’re behind a corner?  I’m not waiting for you to come out.  Molotov cocktail.  I shot at you once and missed?  Throwing a bomb.  Four of you back there?  Smoke grenade, followed by a Molotov, then breaking the neck of the guy who I missed.  Brutal shit.

And then you burst into the surgical suite.  Ellie’s on the table, unconscious.  There are three doctors in the room, unarmed.  They see the crazy man with the flamethrower (yup) and the machine gun burst into the room… and they cower.

I was expecting, at this point, to be presented with some sort of choice.  No.  Why not?  Because the game has gone to great pains to set up Joel’s character by this point, and isn’t terribly concerned with what you want to happen.  And there is no way in sweet shrieking Hell that Joel is letting anyone stick a knife in Ellie’s brain.  None.  Period.

Your only option is to gun down the (unarmed, hiding) doctors and pick up Ellie and run– which brings you right back to the beginning of the game, where you’ve got a defenseless kid in your arms, and because you’re carrying her you can’t get to your guns and shoot back, and your only option is to run like hell or you’re both going to die.  Because as it turns out the guards do not suddenly get less pissed at you once you’ve killed the doctors and taken Ellie back.

And you know how the game handled this the first time it happened, too.  She died.  And Joel didn’t.

And just to make sure this is clear: I had an Atari, people.  I’ve been a gamer for a very long time; I’m part of the first generation of people who can say honestly that they’ve been gamers for their entire lives.  And I have never once played a game where the main character was given the chance to save the world and chose not to.  Because if the choices are save the world, or save your kid?  Fuck the world.

Like I said:  if you’re a parent, this shit’s gonna fuck with your head.  Because, as contrived as it sounds, that’s not a choice that I could make and expect to keep my sanity.

Amazing, amazing stuff; everyone involved with the game should be proud of themselves.  And you should have played it by now.  Go forth and game.

In which I learn a thing

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

The official word for the process that causes your stomach to growl is boborygmy. 

Guess what’s been going on in my life for the last hour or so.

On iceballs (again)

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Europa Report was awesome, dudes.  Go check it out.

In which iceballs are awesome

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

europa-galileo

This is Europa.  Europa is the most interesting of Jupiter’s 67 moons.  Io is the second coolest, if you happen to be wondering, and S/2003 J 2, which has a dumb name and is only two kilometers wide, is the least interesting.

Europa has at some point (and that point may be now) harbored life.  Yes, I’m phrasing it that definitively.  I don’t care.  I’m a rebel, dammit!  Plus I’m right.  Do I mean, like, little green dudes who might eat us?  No; probably bacteria of some sort, although something more complicated is certainly possible.  But Europa is basically a giant ball of ice with a water ocean underneath it.  The surface features, you see, change on a fairly regular basis, and Europa is the flattest object in the solar system– it doesn’t really appear to have a lot of craters.

That no craters thing is a huge key to the existence of the ocean, see; the idea is that that frozen surface is continually cracking (being as close to Jupiter as it is means that the planet’s gravity is wreaking havoc with Europa’s surface) and the liquid water underneath is coming up and re-freezing the surface.  Which, as you know if you’ve ever seen ice, tends to create a pretty flat surface.

Our experiences on Earth have taught us just how hardy life is.  Basically, anywhere there’s water, there’s life.  Hell, even in places where there’s barely any water, there’s still life.  I have a lot of trouble imagining that this moon has literally a planetary-sized ocean (the estimate, if you didn’t read the Wikipedia article, is twice the volume of Earth’s oceans) with absolutely nothing living in it.  Granted that “I have trouble imagining” isn’t the greatest example of scientific reasoning in the history of time, but whatever, my nonexistent reputation as a scientist will survive.

(Also: one of the greatest things about being an amateur astronomer is just how fast the field changes.  When I was a kid, the thought of extraterrestrial planets was considered vaguely ludicrous, as we hadn’t found any yet.  Now that I’m old we’re finding twenty Goldilocks planets a month and there are at least half-a-dozen moons in our solar system alone that we think could potentially harbor or have harbored some sort of life.  The possibility of life outside Earth has gone from a massive improbability to something that seems virtually certain.  All these planets, all these moons, and life nowhere but here?  Bullshit.)

Anyway, here’s the reason I’m even talking about this:  A movie that I’ve been excited about for a while, Europa Report, comes out today, and it’s doing so in an interesting way: it’s in theaters in limited release but you can also stream it through iTunes.  The film’s creators appear to have put a lot of effort into making the film scientifically plausible, at least up to a point, and I’m super excited about watching it– probably not tonight, as I’ve got plans to eat massive amounts of sushi after work and will want to come home and die– but this weekend.

I like living in the future.

On how to quickly and efficiently make me a crazy person

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy1 Comment

photo

I like Instagram more than I ever imagined I would.  I’m far from a good photographer and half of my pictures are bullshit that no one would ever have any reason to want to look at, so maybe I’m a terrible Instagrammer– but I like the hell out of this app for some reason.  I’ve got a couple of friends who appear to take pictures of every single object they look at and post them to Instagram; I’m not at that level yet (and, for the record, I’m not griping about those who are) but I may be headed that way.  I don’t know why this is so much fun but it is.

Anyway.

That’s the moon.  It was taken yesterday, at OtherJob.  It’s not blurry as hell out of any particular desire to be arty or anything like that; that’s just how the picture came out and I decided I liked it enough to go ahead and use it.

Note a couple of things:

  • That the moon is full, or is at least nearly enough so as to not matter for this picture.
  • That the moon is bright.  Full moons are bright!  That’s kind of the idea!
  • That the moon is, while large, not larger than you’d expect it to be.

You can cover the moon with a dime held at arm’s length, people.  When it’s at the horizon your brain tricks you with the Moon Illusion, which– while really, really cool– does not actually represent a change in the moon’s size.  The moon looks small from the Earth’s surface.  It should; it’s not very big to begin with (by celestial-object standards, I mean) and it’s, on average, 380,000 kilometers or so away.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

It is not a secret: people are wrong on the Internetduty_calls.   There are always people who are wildly catastrophically stupidly wrong on the Internet and they will always be out there, on the Internet, being all wrong and shit, and furthermore some of them are wrong on purpose and those people enjoy making you crazy.

For a certain kind of person, how capable they are of ignoring Internet idiocy is a useful measure of their overall mental health.  I say “for a certain kind of person” because some people don’t notice Internet idiocy; those are generally the kinds of people making the rest of us insane.  The quality I’m talking about is the ability to read something, recognize that you have lost IQ points to its soul-destroying stupidity, and then ignore it and move on with your life.

Anyway.  Here’s a guide to how to make me nuts:

1) Be wrong on the Internet.  This ain’t hard.  And, to make this clear, I’m wrong on the Internet all the time.  If I wasn’t in the habit of deleting all my Facebook posts a day or two after they go up I could point to many examples.  Some of the people most likely to set me straight when I’m wrong on the Internet may well comment on this.

2) Be someone who should know better than whatever nonsense it is than you just posted.  This is critical; I’m actually pretty good at ignoring stupid from people who I already think are stupid.  If I think of you as an intelligent person, or you occupy a job that should by rights be held by someone with a brain in their head, and I see you posting stupid shit, I’m much more likely to intervene and point out why you’re being stupid.  (2A is “or catch me in the mood to fuck with someone,” which I’ll admit does happen sometimes, but is less common than those who know me well might actually think.)

3) After I correct your stupid, use the phrase “that’s your opinion” or “we’ll agree to disagree.”

No.  No we fucking won’t.  You’re wrong, or I wouldn’t have wasted the breath on correcting your dumb fucking ass.  (Can I tell the difference between fact and my opinion?  Yes!  I’m about to illustrate the difference.)

Here is the difference: if me correcting you uses math, you’re wrong.

For example, if you’ve used the phrase “supermoon” in the last couple of days.  And if you’re posting on something you’re calling an “astronomy blog.”  And if you seem to think that the moon is not only going to be several times larger than it usually looks but is going to cause earthquakes and volcanoes due to its incredible proximity to the Earth, and you post this on your astronomy blog, it is entirely possible that I’m going to speak with you about it.  And when I use the numbers in your own post to point out that the difference between “average” moon and “super” moon is less than seven percent, and you tell me “that’s your opinion,” I’m going to get a little closer to losing my mind on you.  Because that’s not what “opinion” means.  And when I further point out that your stupid ass has suggested that something that happens a little bit less than once a year causes earthquakes and floods, and you tell me that “you’re just saying that the idea is out there,” I’m probably going to savage your soul.  Because, guess what, jackass?  There’s this thing, called observation, that we can use to determine whether the moon causes earthquakes and floods and volcanoes and swarms of locusts every 13.5 months.  And someone who calls himself a “scientist” probably ought to acknowledge the fact that there’s a way to determine with objectivity whether this “idea” that’s “out there” is true or not.

And it isn’t.

That’s not my opinion.  That’s fucking reality.  It is objective fact that the moon is not going to look five times larger in the sky on Sunday than it does today.  It will, to the naked eye, look exactly the fucking same.  Will it be bright and prominent and light up the night sky?  Yes!  That’s what the full moon does.  

So, yeah.  If you want to make me crazy, pose as a scientist, post blatantly nonscientific shit where I can see it, then try and blame me when I call you out on it.  The end.

(Seriously, though?  Look up on Sunday.  The moon is cool, “super” or not.)

In which I throw money away

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

Well that didn’t last very long.

I’m supposed to be at a training– roughly seven hours a day or so, six and a half if you don’t count lunch– every day for the next two weeks. For attending this training I was supposed to receive a thousand dollar stipend. I’ve already taken off day shifts at OtherJob so that I can do this; I was going to behave similarly next week.

After one day of the training, I’m ready to bag the whole thing and say to hell with the thousand dollars. (Okay, $800 or whatever after taxes, since the school corporation is paying us through payroll rather than the university we’re doing the training at.)

My problem: I have a perilously low tolerance for bullshit, and a perilously low tolerance for idiots, and a perilously low tolerance for having my time wasted. This manages to be all three.  It turns out that the prospect of receiving a thousand dollars basically for sitting in a room and being annoyed but making nice for two weeks is not sufficient motivation to allow my time to be wasted. Without getting too far into the details, I was told specifically more than once that this training would not cover material that I have not only taught twice but been trained on twice in two different contexts. Today, I found out that fully one-half of the training is going to be material that is entirely redundant to me. Annoyingly, it’s half of every day, not half of the days, meaning I can’t just go one week, skip the other, and insist on being given $500. I’d have to cut out every day, which seems unnecessarily rude.

The other portion of the day is going to be math stuff, which I have not done in the past, except insofar that I’m, y’know, already pretty good at math. There might be some new tips and tricks in there, I dunno. But I signed up for the training with the promise of new science stuff. Science is where I’m weak; science is where I need to improve my instruction. I’m not saying I’m incapable of becoming a better math teacher; that’s certainly not true. But it’s not the focus of my self-improvement efforts at the moment.

The person doing the math training spent virtually all of her time mumbling to herself and standing in front of what she was doing at the whiteboard. The time when she wasn’t mumbling or blocking our view of what she was doing, she was struggling with the (not terribly complicated) projection technology that the classroom already had in place. I had maybe an hour with her today and it was unbearable; a good part of the morning was taken up with housekeeping stuff for the entire training and, in what proved to be a poor omen, the exact same math and science pre-tests we’d taken when I did what was supposed to be a different training entirely two years ago. Tomorrow she’ll have her full time. I can’t deal with it.

Combine that with someone sitting with me all day who has proven to be an utter moron and, for reasons I won’t go into, doesn’t seem likely to be choosing anyone else to sit with for the next two weeks, and… God, I’ve already got two jobs. Fuck your thousand dollars. I’ll just spend less money this summer.

This is probably stupid, I dunno. But I can’t deal with getting up every day for two weeks during my summer break and putting up with soul-destroying bullshit. Soul-destroying bullshit is what third quarter is for.

(Sidenote: As I said, I’d taken that precise test two years ago. I whiffed on the exact same question I whiffed on two years ago, involving logarithms. It’s about the third time I’ve whiffed on logarithms in the past several years, and I’m tired of forgetting what they are. Maybe the phrase “reverse exponents” will finally stick in my head this time. We’ll see.)