Monthly Archives: May 2012

Waldseemuller Map: The Mona Lisa of the Cartography Nerds

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First, a side note: With the title, I don’t mean to be poking fun at the scholars that dedicate their life to the study of maps, but I love how clearly obsessed they are with the subject to the point where basic grooming and social skills take a distant second place in the priority list. In all honesty, I deeply respect people that are that passionate about any subject.

Alright, onward to the Waldseemuller map:

The U.S. Library of Congress bought the only surviving copy (of originally 1,000 copies) for $10,000,000 in 2001.

This map is a window into how the world was seen by the Europeans of 500 years ago. It’s thought to be the first time that America was put on a map as not being just the east coast of Asia or India. This is such a brilliant discovery if you put yourself in a mindset where everyone around you believes that what was discovered by Columbus and Vespucci was India or Asia. To understand from their accounts that this was a different continent all together is a brilliant discovery that defines the Age of Exploration.

In some ways, in the 21st century we face the same degree of uncertainty about space as people of the 15th and 16th century did about geography. Are there inhabitable planets out there? Is there life out there? Is there intelligent life?

By the way, there’s a nice program on a book about this map from C-SPAN. Check it out: The Fourth Part of the World.

Also, for the especially curious, here’s a 100 mb version of the map where you can study the tiniest details. For the record, saving the map in Ubuntu Linux and opening it in the default image viewer crashed my computer.

Two Ideas From Jesse Ventura on Improving Our Political System

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I knew Jesse Ventura vaguely as a “pro” wrestler and less vaguely as an actor who played alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. So when he ran for governor of Minnesota, without bother to learn anything more about him, I just assumed him to be no more than a gimmick candidate who didn’t really stand for anything, but was damn good at riding talking points and the power of his name.

A couple of days ago, I saw this talk of his at Google and was pleasantly surprised:

The man is principled and reasonable. It’s not easy to put a label on him. He seems to basically be a libertarian, but he is a big supporter of investing in infrastructure. The big thing he wants to cut is defense spending. Like most good libertarians, he is a bit quirky, borderline mad, and totally out of fashion with the way mainstream politics works. But he is full of good ideas, and seems to be incapable of lying which in the very least makes him an interesting speaker and writer.

In the talk he briefly proposed two simple (arguably small) ideas for reforming elections:

  1. Don’t show party affiliation on the ballot.
  2. Add “none of the above” as an option.

The first idea he feels will encourage people to learn about the actually candidates and the details of their positions instead of just voting all Democrat or all Republican. It’s an interesting idea but my cynical side assumes that voters will not do any more research and will either not vote or vote based on something meaningless like the sound of the candidate’s name.

The second idea is interesting as well. It gives the voter a way to voice a disapproval of the system in general, and makes the reason of “I don’t like any of them” a less valid excuse for not voting.

Software Piracy and the Adobe CS6 Model

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Online piracy is widespread in the United States and even more so in the rest of the world. 70% of people find piracy acceptable. It’s digital theft, but something about it makes people overlook the theft aspect of it.

I grew up in Russia where now 73% of installed software is stolen. United States on the other hand is at 20%. To me, these numbers always seemed insane. Lets look at the reality of the situation. Adobe Photoshop costs $700. Can a 15 year old recreational web/graphic designer afford that? In fact, can any recreational designer afford that? What should the price be such that they would?

I’m pondering this question as I’m enjoying my 30 day trial of the software, and for the first time, I see a reasonable answer from Adobe. They are now selling a $50 monthly subscription that gives access to all their products on a month-to-month basis. I think that will draw a lot of pirates out of the dark caves and actually pay for the awesome products they use.

Of course, I would love it if piracy was made much more difficult and then the price could  go down to $20 a month or less. But if we learned anything from the Internet, the thing that makes it powerful is also the thing that makes it very difficult to police.

I don’t like writing about piracy, but I wanted to write a quick note complimenting Adobe for thinking outside the box, literally and figuratively.

By the way, the suite of products in Adobe CS6 Master Collection is awesome. There are a lot of improvement in the interface, workflow, and feature set.

The Kilogram Diet: Lose An Average of 15 Pounds With The Power of Your Mind

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I have been a lifelong student of nutrition, dieting, and trying to be healthy. And if I learned anything, it’s the cynical fact that the diet that works is:

  1. Pick any diet that makes sense to you.
  2. Deceive yourself into thinking it’s the right way to go.
  3. Follow the diet with strict discipline.

However, if you lack discipline, but need to lose weight fast, I have a revolutionary new diet for Americans:

  1. Change the setting on you bathroom scale from pounds to kilograms.
  2. Convince yourself that there are approximately 2 lbs in 1 kilogram.
  3. Boom! You just shredded 9% of your body weight! That’s 16 lbs lost if you weigh 180 lbs, and it’s 36 lbs lost if you weight 400 lbs.

The idea of this diet came from a talk I heard from the Nutrition Studies Research Center at Stanford, where the speaker converted from kilograms to pounds by multiplying by two. It wasn’t important to be accurate in the point he was making, so he just did what I find a lot of people do: round off the 0.2 in the interest of time.

So that’s where this new diet comes in. We first switch to the metric system and then rely on our general inability to multiply numbers by 2.2 and instead multiplying by 2.

While this “diet” is tongue-in-cheek, I think two things are true… First, so much of our relationship with food and weight loss is a sink for emotional issues from other aspects of our life. Second, Americans are getting fatter. While we’ve grown by 1 inch in the last 40 years, we’ve gained 25 lbs. But don’t worry that’s only 10 kilograms.

The Diablo 3 Existential Crisis: A New Age of Evil is Upon Us

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Diablo 3 will be released tomorrow, or as the following opening cinematic explains: “The powers of hell are on the way… It has begun…”

I have a long history with Diablo and Diablo 2, and so the pull of it is strong. I have very little time to play it, nor frankly does anyone have time to play it, because it’s not a game that you can play in moderation, unless you have some kind of superhuman self-restraint. Let’s be honest here.

That said… I told myself that I will play it but only if by the end of May I finish the journal paper I’m working on now, and also if I win a gold medal at the jiu jitsu World championship on May 31st. Both of these are difficult but achievable goals if I continue working hard. So I’m using the extremely addictive drug that is Diablo 3 as a reward to push myself.

Much like a drug addict who has beaten the habit, I have a certain approach to games like Diablo 3 that basically can be summed up with “will it really be worth it in the end?” In a way, the answer of course is no, but then again perhaps the same could be asked of life in general. Like many things we take on outside of work (and sometimes work itself), it’s an escape. It’s a chance to get away from the difficulties of the real world, whatever form they take, and immerse yourself in a universe where hacking away at demons with a giant sword somehow has meaning, and even more, can make you truly happy.

So, for at least another 2 weeks, I will let the fires of hell burn outside, and continue my peaceful life in academia, focused on publishing not slashing, occasionally running into a co-worker with dark circles under his eyes who has clearly given into the dark mystical attraction of another Blizzard title.

Time Scale and Spatial Scale Is Important in Defining Life and Intelligence

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Main point: Defining “life” and “intelligence” becomes that much more difficult when you consider the possibility of an organism operating on a different scale of time and space than those “living” on Earth.

In 1995, the first planet (51 Pegasi b) orbiting another sun was discovered. Ever since then, the idea of life (even intelligent life) being a widespread phenomena in the universe became real in the minds of many astrophysicists and scientists in general. The 1961 Drake equation got a little empirical boost, and the imagination of the public was off and running.

Once you open your mind to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, the next question is: what does it look like? How do we identify an object as “living” when we see it? And once we say it’s a living thing, how do we know if it’s “intelligent”?

As I was walking home yesterday, it occurred to me (as it must’ve occured to a lot of people seeking a definition of life) that when we intuitively think of what is a living thing we think of objects operating on a time scale similar to our own life. So, in defining whether that thing is intelligent, we consider whether it can “reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience” (Gottfredson 1994) on the time scale of a human life.

So here is a question… are plants intelligent? At first the intuitive answer is no. But what if we normalize the changes that “happen” to plants to be on the same time scale as our own, then the gradual adaptations of plants would seem no different than our own physical movements in response to the external environment.

Even more radically, here’s another questions… is a planet a living organism? Let’s again normalize a planet such as Earth in size and time to be similar to the size of human beings and the time scale of our daily life. Could we then classify a planet as a living thing? Under the common biological definition, one of the things missing is the ability to reproduce. But is it really missing? In a certain kind of way, human beings are the cells of this organism. These cells are the carriers of information in the same way that DNA is.   So perhaps a planet can indeed reproduce, luckily without the commitment-laden intimacy of sexual intercourse, by the colonization of other planets.

I don’t like writing long blog posts, because the main point can too easily be drowned in the rambling chaos of poorly formed ideas. In fact, often, a long blog post is an indication that there is no main point. Well, let me just end it by saying that our understanding of life and intelligence is limited by the way our brain has evolved to effectively deal with the environment around it.

President Obama Speaks in Support of Gay Marriage

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Obama publicly declared his personal belief that gay marriage should be legal. It was truly refreshing to hear the president speak out for gay rights on an issue where he is potentially far enough ahead of public opinion to lose votes over it.

There are a lot of opinions about the political impact of this. While I will engage in such discussion given a few beers, I certainly don’t see value or validity in any opinion on the matter. I have only one general sense, and that is: when people will look back 50 years from now at the fact that gay people could not marry, they will see it the same way as we now see the fact that women could not vote in the United States in a relatively recent past.

In other words, we are making some kind of progress. None of it is trivial (though it might appear to be in retrospect) but it’s comforting to know that I live in a time when we as a society are actively struggling with big moral questions. And all of it adds up to real implications for ourselves and our neighbors.

Of course, I’m confident that in 50 years, there will be newly “identified” groups of people whom the majority will discriminate against, either through the law or just through the way we talk, think, and live. I believe that one such group is robots. It may seem like a joke now, but I do believe that the growth of the personal robotics industry (or perhaps cloning) will bring some damn tough moral questions to the forefront.

Theory Evolution is Not Obvious

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Main point: Learn first. Make up your mind later.

I personally think that the theory of evolution is one of the most beautiful and world-changing ideas ever discovered and formulated by man. But I don’t agree with a commonly stated claim that it is an “obvious fact”. It’s beautiful, powerful, exceptionally well-supported by evidence, but it is not obvious. We do not observe evolution in every day life, because evolution operates on a time scale that is orders of magnitude larger than the time scale of our day-to-day existence.

If you don’t understand the basic mechanisms of evolutionary biology that make it all possible, then frankly, it’s much more natural to think of it as some mysterious miracle of the universe or orchestrated by some intelligent designer (e.g. God).

It’s sad that “science” is viewed with suspicion by many people in the United States. Too often, ignorance and poor education is not viewed as something to be ashamed of, but a kind of staple of the cowboy character… “I like beer, and I don’t like math”. That’s truly unfortunate. Put evolution, global warming, and whatever other politicized field of science aside. If you are bad at math… if you don’t know the basics of the scientific method… pick up a book, let yourself be amazed by the world out there.

Science isn’t something for “elitist” professors at “liberal” universities. It’s simply a method of answering the universal question of “how the heck does this work?” and “why the heck does this happen?” If you allow yourself that little bit of curiosity, and follow it up with some reading, I think the beauty of the universe will open up to you, with or without God.

Back to the main point… evolution is only beautiful if you learn a little bit about it. It is not obvious. It requires study. I find that most people that deny the theory of evolution, don’t know much at all about it. Wikipedia, my friends, is a good place to start.

U.S. Prison Population

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Main point: U.S. Prison populations are growing, and there is no smoking gun or a clearly-identified simple solution.

Each Friday, C-SPAN’s “America By the Numbers” segment features information from the federal statistical system. This week they did a program on the U.S. Prison Population.

Mostly, they confirmed what I already knew…

The American prison system is growing rapidly due to the fact that there is money to be made in it on many levels. The plot on the right shows the % of US population jailed at 0.22% in 1980 and at 0.76% in 2007. In other words, it more than tripled.

Many libertarians will tell you that the war on drugs is at the core of the problem. It seems that it is part of the problem but not at the core of it. Only 20% of prison inmates are there for drug offenses. However, there is a more powerful but indirect effect of the war on drugs seen in longer sentences for more violent or property crimes if the criminal has a prior record (often due to a minor drug offense).

Of course, the C-SPAN program also highlighted the well-known race imbalance. Black males are imprisoned at 6.5 times the rate of white males. One new interesting statistic I learned is that there is a bit more racial equality among women in that black women are imprisoned at 3 times the rate of white women.

By the way, for people that are unclear about the distinction between jails and prisons… A jail is for short sentences or just for holding people that are awaiting trial. A prison is the long-term cage that most of these financial discussions are center around.