Vocabulary Trivia Quiz

The "new SAT" made its debut earlier this month. Part of the redesign included a de-emphasis on obscure vocabulary words, since it is well-known that college students no longer need to read multisyllabic words.

I am sure that this loss was deeply felt by many of us, so to make up for it, I am offering a one-question vocabulary quiz for today.  Here's the question:

Which of these words is not like the other?  One of these words just doesn't belong. Which one is it? (Extra credit if you can define all of the words).

A.  Jacobite
B.  Jacobin
C.  Jacobian
D.  Jacobean

Answer after the break...

Quantum Mechanics and Board Games

While I am a fan of nearly all board games, I've just never gotten excited about Go, the subject of the most recent human-computer smackdown.  But a couple of days ago, Andre Ranchin proposed an amusing variant of Go -- one that incorporates quantum mechanics!

Will Computers ever be Self-Aware?

Will computers ever achieve a form of consciousness?  This is such a huge topic in science fiction that I cannot begin to do it justice.  The roots of the idea go all of the way back to Frankenstein.  And it bubbles up again every time there is some new milestone in artificial intelligence, such as the recent victory by AlphaGo in its match with Go champion Lee Seedol.

Personally, I think it's impossible for a computer to achieve self-awareness. Consider the Turing test, in which a computer is challenged to imitate a human in conversation. I actually wrote a computer program to mimic human interaction back when I was in high school, modeling it on the famous ELIZA program, which was supposed to imitate a psychotherapist. The remarkable thing is not that I did this back in the 1970s, writing in BASIC, but that I actually saved the output for 40 years. So here's an excerpt from my conversation with my own computer program. You'll see that the computer displays a bit of an adolescent male perspective.. The computer responses are in italics:

Computer:  Welcome to my office. What is bothering you?

Me:  I have these weird dreams.

Would you like to discuss dreams?

Yes.

Why?

Because I have weird dreams.

Why do you keep talking about dreams?

Because they bother me.

I'd like to talk about dreams.

Good.  Say something intelligent for a change.

Why?

I'm tired of talking to you.

Why to you want to talk about me?

I don't.

People like you should be locked up.

You are a mere computer and have bad judgment.

Would you like to discuss computers?

Yes.  Do computers have feelings?

That's an interesting question.  What made you think of it?

Since you are a computer, you should know the answer.

I'd rather talk about computers than my answer.

What's that supposed to mean?

Why do you ask such a question?

You are so stupid.

I am not!!

Yes, you are stupid.

Yes, you are stupid, too.

I'm tired of talking.

I really don't think that you are.

How would you know?

I'm asking the questions around here, not you.

Pi Day

In honor of Pi Day, I direct your attention to this "scientific" paper, which I posted to the physics preprint arXiv on April 1, 2009:
"Time Variation of a Fundamental Dimensionless Constant".
For those of you outside the world of physics, the "arXiv" website is where most physicists post their papers while they are waiting for them to appear in a scientific journal.  It's a little-known fact that the managers of this site have tacitly allowed April Fools' Day papers to appear over the years.  You can search them out, but they are hard to find.

Leap Years and How Scientists Tell Time

I couldn't let Feb. 29th go by without commenting on leap years, especially since I have no expectation that this blog will still be around four years from now. Leap years originate in astronomy -- the length of the year (the time it takes the Earth to go around the sun), is not an even number of days (the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis). The length of the year is roughly 365.2422 days. Lucky for us, the fractional part of the year (0.2422) is almost equal to 0.25 (or 1/4), so we can fix things by adding 1/4 of a day every year, or one day every four years. This "fix" was introduced by the ancient Romans, and it works pretty well, but it's still not perfect. The Gregorian calendar fixes the fix by taking away leap days every 100 years (so, for instance 1800 and 1900 were not leap years) and then adding them back in every 400 years, so 2000 was a leap year. Our leap year in 2000 is something we won't see again until 2400! This gives us a length of the year equal to 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425 days, which means the calendar will be off by one day every 3333 years -- not too shabby!

Calendar reform had a symbiotic relationship with the infant science of astronomy. It's really just a weird coincidence that a simple leap year works so well, but not well enough that it didn't need to be fixed later on. Would science have developed any differently if the year were more exactly a simple fraction of the number of days, so that the Gregorian reform had not been necessary? And what if the opposite had been true? What if the year weren't anywhere close to a simple fraction of the number of days? Would that have led to much greater calendrical confusion over the centuries?

Given all of this confusion, what unit of time do scientists use in their own work?  Days? Years? Hours? Minutes? The answer is none of the above.

The Flat Universe Society

In my peregrinations around the Internet, I have discovered not one, but two websites devoted to the Flat Earth Society:

www.theflatearthsociety.org
and
www.tfes.org

I think one is a splinter group from the other. I bet they hate each other.

But why limit ourselves to a binary choice? Why does the alternative to a round Earth have to be a flat Earth? Let's be creative and think of other possibilities.

Maybe the Earth is actually shaped like a torus (a gigantic donut):

This is even better than a sphere -- now there are two different ways to go around the world! You can sail around the outside of the donut, or you can circle the world through the donut hole.

Or maybe the surface of the Earth has negative curvature, like a saddle or a Pringles potato chip:

Of course, this isn't what the Earth looks like. But it's what the entire universe might look like.

Gravitational Radiation and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

With the first direct detection of gravitational radiation by LIGO, we've entered a new era in science. Gravitational wave astronomy promises to be the most exciting field in the physical sciences for the next decade. So should we start looking for signals from ET in this data?

First Detection of Gravitational Radiation?

It's totally irresponsible for scientists to spread rumors on the Internet, so I will wait until after the break to do so.

Dell Award for Undergraduate Science Fiction Writing

This past fall marked the third time that Professor Jay Clayton and I taught our Vanderbilt seminar on science and science fiction. As a final exercise, the students usually choose to write their own short stories. (They also have the option of writing a "popular science" article or a critical essay, but only one student has chosen this in the entire history of the class!) We've always entered the best of the students' stories in the competition for the Dell Award for undergraduate science fiction writing. This year, our students took first place and third place in the competition!

Thought for the Day: Snow Edition

Nashville received a backhand blow from the storm that knocked out the East Coast: we got 8 inches of snow (the heaviest snowfall since I've lived here), which completely paralyzed the city. Nashville's method of snow removal is called "solar power." We lost electricity for several hours on Saturday morning and watched helplessly as the temperature inside the house dropped about a degree every hour. Power was restored before it got too uncomfortable, but this led me to the following thought experiment. Suppose that all of our technological infrastructure (electricity, gas, cable TV) collapsed for a month in the middle of the winter. Which one of these people would you want at your side to help you survive?

The Kardashev Scale for Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Back in the 1960s, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a scale to measure the technological level of extraterrestrial civilizations. I was reminded of his work by this paper, which appeared today. Here is an explanation of the Kardashev scale, with some minor additions of my own:

The Historical Memory of Children

I'm too young to remember the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but I remember the assassination of Martin Luther King with crystal clarity. I was 9 years old at the time, attending a small Catholic school in St. Louis. The morning after King was assassinated, all of the nuns at my school were deeply upset, which puzzled me, because I was under the impression that Martin Luther had been assassinated. A little historical knowledge is a dangerous thing, and we forget what it was like to be young and have such a distorted understanding of history.

Happy 50th Anniversary, Batman!

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the premier of Batman, the television show. It's difficult today, within our fractured popular culture, to appreciate what an overwhelming phenomenon this show was at the time, but I can give one example from personal experience.

When Young People Watch Old Movies

In preparation for taking my children to the latest Star Wars movie, we pulled our copies of the original Star Wars trilogy out of storage for the kids to watch. And what did my kids think of them? One main comment: the special effects weren't very good.

Now when I was a kid, special effects were downright awful, and yet I somehow managed to look past them to enjoy all of the classic SF movies of the 50s and 60s. I know this sounds like the typical complaints of a grumpy middle-aged man about how when I was a kid ... a line of argument that goes back, I believe, to the ancient Sumerians.

How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age

I had another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, entitled "How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age."  You can't read it unless you are a subscriber -- the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall that makes the Berlin Wall look like a speed bump -- but the article basically details my experiences growing up as proto-scientist in the 1960s and 70s.