Updated on 28th December 2014 to fix errors caused by a change in the CodeSkulptor library.
The latest Coursera class I’ve been taking is Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, a long and unwieldy title. It was conducted by professors Joe Warren, Scott Rixner, John Greiner and Stephen Wong of Rice University and ended yesterday so, as usual, I thought I’d write a few words about it.
To tell the truth, I was misled by the title of the course. I thought it really was an introduction to writing interactive programs. Since all of the programs we worked on in the Algorithms class were non-interactive, I thought this would be a good new experience. It turns out that this course should really be labelled something like Introduction to Programming via Interactive Games in Python, which is even more of a mouthful but more aptly describes the content of the course.
The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. In some markets, it is also sold as The Moat around Murcheson’s Eye, which is a mouthful for a title but perhaps makes more sense. It was released in 1993, a full eighteen years after the first book was published. (George R.R. Martin fans might want to take note.) That’s almost as long as the time that has passed in-universe between the events of the two books.
The sequel centers around two characters from the first book. Kevin Renner who was navigator on board the INSS MacArthur during the mission to Mote Prime and Horace Bury, the trading magnate who initially saw the Moties as a tremendous money-making opportunity but later became terrified of them. The two are now agents of Navy Intelligence, with the responsibility of ferreting out rebel threats to the Empire while the Imperial Navy concentrates its resources on the Motie blockade.
Majorly late with this one, I know. I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for extended period lately. But better late than never and I’m determined to keep this blog alive if updates now are less frequent. So let’s get on with it.
This first one is a bit trite and still a truth worth keeping in mind. It’s from the BPS Research Digest and talks about how people tend to think of their own names as being rarer, and therefore more special, than they really are. Also connected is the finding that people with genuinely rare names tend to be happier with their names, further confirming the observation like to be special. But I think people should be careful about going too far and end up choosing names that are just plain ridiculous.
The next article from the website MNT and covers the subject of how people might be able to solve mathematical problems unconsciously. The study in questioned distracted the participants with another stimuli while an arithmetic equation or a verbal expression was displayed. The result, to no one’s surprise, is that the so-called unconscious stimuli primed participants to be more likely to respond with the correct answer. Personally I find this particular piece of research to be fairly dubious. The mathematically problem given as an example seems to simple that it should be solvable by reflex so it’s not clear to me what the news here is.
Next up is a feature from The New Yorker which talks about the world’s grandest computer simulation of a brain. The initial target is to simulate the brain of a macaque monkey on a collection of ninety-six of the world’s fastest computers. It’s more of an overview of this area of research than this particular project since we have only the announcement and not much else to go on. Count me in as one of the skeptics on this one. I have a feeling that brain computation involves more than just neurons and ignoring the rest of the complex biochemistry going on is a mistake.
So I’m finally done with the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It’s a monster of a novel at well over 1,000 pages and has been nearly six years in the making. It’s impossible to talk about it without tramping into spoilers so here are a few short spoiler-free comments about it before going into full-on analysis mode. Does stuff actually happen in this book, as opposed to say, A Feast for Crows? Well, yes, but less than you might expect from a novel of this length. Is it good? It’s decent but falls markedly short of the first three books due to lack of focus and poor prose. Does it finally tie things up? Not really.
The last couple of months have been great for anyone who enjoys a good dose of schadenfreude. First, in Malaysia we’ve had the implosion of the Genneva gold ponzi scheme. The LYN forums have had active threads on them for years. And for years we’ve seen dedicated Gennevarians pop up in the forum to defend the company and claim that it isn’t a ponzi scheme. But then after the raid on October 1st, all of them disappeared from LYN and instead regrouped to their Facebook page which actively censors dissenting opinions.
The amazing thing about the Genneva affair is how many of their so-called customers continue to insist that it is a legitimate business even after the raid. As the LYN crew is fond of pointing out, in Singapore Genneva customers sue the company to get back their money (and the company has repeatedly failed to mount a defense in court cases in Singapore). But in Malaysia, the customers seem likelier to sue the Malaysian Central Bank for killing their golden goose.
A mixed bag of articles for this month, ranging from the funny to the weird. Let’s get to it.
Regenerative medicine, or growing replacement body parts from one’s own cells, will be the next frontier of medicine. This article from the admittedly skanky Global Post site demonstrates that it has the potential to covers external organs as well as the more commonly considered example of internal organs. In this instance, a woman had a replacement ear grown on her arm as a substitute for the original one which was removed due to cancer. The new ear was fashioned using cartilage from her rib.
The next article from the Wall Street Journal covers a paper that is cleverly titled “The Power of Kawaii”. The claim is that human test subjects perform assigned with greater care and precision after being exposed to pictures of cute things, such as puppies and kittens. The tasks ranged from the delicate, such as picking up small objects from a hole without brushing the sides, to the purely logical, such as finding a target from a sequence of random numbers. As a control, participants were also exposed to pictures of adult dogs and cats and food items, which did not result in the same improved performance.
As this next article from The Economist states, we’ve found so many extrasolar planets now that they’re no longer exciting. The difference with this one is that it’s orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three gravitationally bound stars that form the trinary Alpha Centauri system. This is the nearest system from our own Sol system at a mere four light-years, close enough that we could conceivably launch an expeditionary probe to it. The bad news is that it is located far too close to its parent star to have any chance of harboring life with one of its “years” lasting 3.2 Earth days. But where we’ve found one planet, we’re more likely to find more. You can bet that astronomers all around the world are feverishly working on it.
Ever wonder if animals are capable of recognizing their own dead and responding to it? This post at the The Scorpion and the Frog blog talks about a research paper on just this topic. The animals in question are western scrub-jays and the researchers tested their responses towards both an actual scrub-jay carcass, complete with feathers, and a collection of painted wood pieces arranged vaguely to look like a dead scrub-jay. The live birds reacted furiously to the real carcass, hopping about and calling loudly, while taking far fewer peanuts strewn on the ground as usual. Testing further with a realistic mounted great horned owl, a predator of scrub-jays, led to similar reactions, leading the scientists to conclude that the reaction wasn’t about grief but about alarm and physical danger.
Finally, here’s a longer article about the evolution of lactose intolerance in humans from Slate. It’s not about a specific new discovery, more of an overview of the subject. Apparently the ability to digest lactose in adult humans spread very quickly once the mutation occurred, unreasonably quickly according to most scientists, and the reason why is still something of a mystery.
Oops, almost forgot to do this feature. Every year I try to highlight the results of the Nobel Prizes that actually matter and aren’t completely spurious. I mean I guarantee that everyone in the Chinese-speaking world knows who won the literature prize and plenty of people who read the news are aware that the Peace Prize committee are keeping up their reputation for bizarre choices by picking the European Union. But how many people know who won the prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics or what the discoveries were for? So that’s what this blog post is all about.
First up, the physics prize was won by Serge Haroche of the Collège de France, in Paris, and David Wineland of America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. The two independently invented methods of directly observing quantum systems without destroying their superposition of states. Interestingly, they used opposite strategies. Dr. Wineland trapped ions and used photons to control and measure them. Dr. Haroche trapped photons and sent atoms through the trap to measure them. Both are real-life examples of the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, though on a far smaller macroscopic scale.
