Jewel Cave

March 3rd, 2010 by jason No comments »

When I was little  we lived in Newcastle, WY.  My mother and father were public school teachers.  In the summers they did a number of things.  For a couple of summers my father worked as a park ranger at Jewel Cave National Monument.  I grew up listening to stories about my father’s time at Jewel Cave.

Jewel is a beautiful cave.  Jewel is an apt description.  There are many crystalline features that make it a must see if you are visiting The Black Hills.  I found this video online from National Public Radio about a spelunking adventure at Jewel:

What If You’re Wrong?

March 2nd, 2010 by jason No comments »

Non-Believers Giving Aid

March 1st, 2010 by jason No comments »

If you haven’t noticed I support Non-Believers Giving Aid, a great, new charitable organization that is designed to provide aid to the victims of the Haiti earthquake and beyond.  Please give if you can.  Currently the money donated is split 50/50 between Doctors Without Borders and The Red Cross.  And you can be sure that there aren’t any bibles being bought with the money, and those providing aid aren’t doing so with the caveat that the victims listen to a sermon first.

GivingAid.RichardDawkins.net

Staw Man

March 1st, 2010 by jason No comments »

Science isn’t about the person, its about the theory and the evidence.  Of course the people matter as they are the ones doing all the work, but at the end of the day our understanding of the universe and the natural world does not rely upon one person being right or wrong, but upon the evidence we find to support specific conclusions.  The theory itself might be changed, by the original author or by many in the scientific community, to more closely agree with the data.  This is a basic tenant of science.  We judge the resulting product based on the evidence, not whether it conveniently falls into a religious or political ideology.

Image if Einstein decided to retract general relativity in the late 1920s, with no reason or evidence justifying this action.  Imagine he simply decided that he no longer supported the idea.  Surely that would have caused a great stir in the scientific world and particularly in the world of theoretical physics.  However, the scientific community, in the end, would not have abandoned general relativity without proof it was wrong.  They would have stood by the theory, since in the 1920s there was already a lot of proof that it was very right.  We don’t need Einstein to agree that the theory is sound; we need evidence to agree that the idea is sound.

Similarly with evolution, Darwin doesn’t really matter other than the fact he first proposed it.  What matters is not what aspects of his original theory are right or wrong, though the vast majority of Darwin’s original theory has survived the test of time and more than one revolution in biology.  What Darwin said or did doesn’t change reality.  The theory, backed with evidence, changes our perceptions.  And that evidence is overwhelming in the cases of General Relativity and Evolution.  An attack on Darwin, or Einstein, is just an attack on a person, not on all the evidence supporting their theories.

A belief in evolution is not a faith.  Its based on the fact that evolution has been proven true by multiple, separate lines of evidence.  Evolution, for all intents and purposes, is a scientific fact.  It doesn’t matter what attacks might be made on the great man.  Those attacks, or anything Darwin said or did, does not change the physical reality that all organisms have evolved to their current states via natural selection.

Book Review: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

February 26th, 2010 by jason No comments »

I finished How to Teach Physics To Your Dog by Chad Orzel about a month ago, and have found myself thinking about it off and on during that time.  For the difficult subject of Quantum Physics, Orzel does a very good job conveying unintuitive concepts so that a non-physicist might understand them.  The book takes the format of Orzel teaching physics to his dog through many conversations that are often humorous and always lead to an in-depth discussion regarding Quantum Physics.  Having read a few other books on Physics and at least one other book on Quantum Physics, I was familiar with several of the concepts.  However, Orzel did a very good job diving into a level of detail that I had no previously seen, despite the accessibility of his writing style.

Quantum Physics flies in the face of common sense.  Our brains evolved with macro cause and effect, with objects that are solid and act in a fashion that we expect.  Particles at the quantum scale do not act solid, do not act in a fashion that our brain would expect, yet this science and been experimentally proven to a level that is only rivaled by the evidence for evolution or relativity.

One of my favorite sections of the book addresses quackery and popular misconceptions around quantum physics.  Orzel does a good job comparing and contrasting the science with the misconceptions perpetrated by these quacks, and by the media.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking to learn more about Quantum Physics.

Good Ol’ Days

February 26th, 2010 by jason No comments »

There were no “good ol’ days”.  We may be in an economic slump, but these times are better than any others mankind, or the US, has ever had.  More children grow up because of modern medicine.  More family and friends live longer and survive diseases and illnesses that may very well have killed them just 20 years ago.  Crime rates in the US are at all-time lows.  We are closer to true equality than ever.  We have more ways to stay in touch with family and friends.  And science will solve deafness, blindness, and paralyzation in my lifetime.  Yup, *these* are the good ol’ days.

Book Review: In Search of Memory

February 25th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Every once in a while I read a book that is truly amazing, a book that leaves keeps me thinking about it during those times of the day when my thoughts wander.  Godel, Escher and Bach is such a book, as is The Singularity is Near.  Last night I finished another such book, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind by Eric R. Kandel.  As you might expect from the title, the book is primarily concerned with the sciences related to the brain and in particular the science of memory.  However, Dr. Kandel’s book not only is a wonderfully vivid discussion of neural science over the past century and a half, but a touching autobiography.

Kandel, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was born a Jew, in Vienna, in 1929.  At age 10 the Nazis “invaded” Austria, and within the year he found himself in America.  Its is within the context of this start to life that he tells of his search for the biological basis of Freud’s theories, which ultimately leads him to the research of memory, many accolades, and an important place in medical and scientific history.

The science in the book is fascinating.  Kandel himself is a pioneer in neural science, but he spends many pages in each chapter discussing the brilliant women and men with which he has worked, many of whom have also won The Nobel Prize.  Kandel is a very talented writer, and exceptionally good at conveying complex scientific concepts to the lay reader.  The science of the mind is surely the most difficult of all of the medical sciences, and Kandel goes into detail while leaving the book accessible to the non-scientist.

When Kandel speaks of his past, his relationship to Europe and Vienna, his friends, and his family, he is particularly candid and touching.  The emotional depth of the book was surprising for me.  The man is clearly passionate about many things, and those passions ring through true and clear in the book.

At the end of reading the book I found my understanding of brain biology much greater, but I also found that I had learned a new aspect of the history World War II.  I also found that this man, who is obviously a talented scientist, is also Pulitzer-caliber author.  His writing is of such that I would wonder if this book might have won The Pulitzer if not for its scientific depth.

I cannot recommend this book enough.  It is one I am sure I will find myself revisiting in years to come.

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

February 12th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Spirituality

February 11th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Unit Testing and Code Change

January 29th, 2010 by jason No comments »

This morning I made a small but important change to a chunk of code that our entire Silverlight application uses.  This code, lets call it the Manager, facilitates every work flow through the application.  The code change to the Manager amounts to deleting some unused code, changing some types, and some small tweaks to how new screens are called.  On the surface the actual lines of code changed appeared to be very simple, but I was nervous I would break something since this is a fundamental piece of code.  Everything uses the Manager.

Code can have subtle and dangerous dependencies.  Even when one is the author (as I am in this case), one cannot be completely sure of the consequences of a code change in a sufficiently complex system.  This is where unit tests come to the rescue.

I was able to execute my suite of unit tests, and after a successful report I ran through a few regressions with live data.  Everything works.  And I commited the code to our repository with a high level of confidence.

If something had broken I would have fixed it, and then written a unit test to check for the condition in the future.

Unit tests are a pain to write, but they sure do have a big payoff.