Google Chrome Is Really Fast.

Google Chrome has been released for the Linux and Mac operating systems.
There's lot of things I could highlight in comparison with other web browsers but let's just say this:  Google Chrome is fast, very fast.

I've heard this from other sources, but seeing it in person was impressive enough to still amaze me.

Taking a Month Off

Due to general craziness, I've been pretty bad about blog posts for the past month. But to make myself look less lazy, I've decided to post this video of a Florida State offensive lineman who really decided to take some time off. Enjoy:

More frequent posting will resume December 9th, assuming I pass the second part of my comprehensive exam and advanced to doctoral candidate status. Wish me luck (I'm going to need it).

Quote Of The Day

Max Tegmark is a prominent cosmologist at MIT. (It turns out he is a really nice person as well.)

He has the ultimate Occam's Razor quote for defense of a multiverse.   Occam's Razor being the idea that, given two theories that seem to be equivalent up to experiment, choose the simpler theory:

A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds. But an entire ensemble is often much simpler than one of its members. This principle can be stated more formally using the notion of algorithmic information content. The algorithmic information content in a number is, roughly speaking, the length of the shortest computer program that will produce that number as output.

For example, consider the set of all integers. Which is simpler, the whole set or just one number? Naively, you might think that a single number is simpler, but the entire set can be generated by quite a trivial computer program, whereas a single number can be hugely long. Therefore, the whole set is actually simpler.

Similarly, the set of all solutions to Einstein's field equations is simpler than a specific solution. The former is described by a few equations, whereas the latter requires the specification of vast amounts of initial data on some hypersurface. The lesson is that complexity increases when we restrict our attention to one particular element in an ensemble, thereby losing the symmetry and simplicity that were inherent in the totality of all the elements taken together.

In this sense, the higher-level multiverses are simpler. Going from our universe to the Level I multiverse eliminates the need to specify initial conditions, upgrading to Level II eliminates the need to specify physical constants, and the Level IV multiverse eliminates the need to specify anything at all... A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default.

To deny the existence of those universes, one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates: finite space, wave function collapse and ontological asymmetry. Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get used to the weird ways of our cosmos and find its strangeness to be part of its charm.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is a very speculative quote.  I am not trying to sell this as mainstream at all.

However, it is one of the more interesting applications of Occam's Razor I have seen. :)

An Email I Never Got From BYU

One thing about changing schools during our education is that we get to see how different departments, schools and states handle basic stuff. Having only ever attended BYU before starting graduate school it was a slight adjustment starting school at UNC. Looking back I realize that the BYU physics department, and BYU as a whole is very "official" for lack of a better word (some would call it "up tight" or "autocratic"). At BYU any email sent out to faculty, staff and students had to first be submitted to committee, reviewed, "queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." OK maybe not that bad but it was a process.

At UNC we have a department list-serv (actually we have several, I think I am on 5 or 6) where anyone in the department can send an email everyone else in the department, without prior approval. I won't share any of the more interesting (or in need of censoring) emails that I have gotten, but I did recently get an email that I would never get at BYU, for many different reasons.

Subject: flooding

"people in the basement should be on the lookout for water
during this heavy rain. the chance will get worse over time
it is going to rain hard until Friday. let me know if you see water
in the floor."

First, it doesn't rain in Utah, and if it does it is nowhere close to the rain we get in North Carolina. Second, at BYU the custodians are the ones that typically keep track of things like this, not the grad students. It would seem that at UNC this would fall under "building maintenance" which is separate from "housekeeping", thus the custodians could not do anything about it even if they noticed because of union, accounting, and organizational rules (gotta love socialism!). Third, no capitalization, and at least one grammatically incorrect sentence.

This little email was a simple reminder of some of the basic differences between BYU and UNC (and I would venture most other places).

The Go Programing Language?

It appears Google has created a very interesting programming language. Here are the highlights I care about:

1. Has array slicing. (This is the only advantage Fortran has to C in my opinion.  Slicing makes some mathematical routines soooo much easier to code as well as vectorize.)
2. Google claims it runs essentially as fast as C/C++ code.
3. It compiles much faster than C/C++.
4. Has garbage collection.
5. It was built from the ground up to be a parallel language.  The "Go routines" run concurrently.
6. In addition to slicing, it has a lot of Python features like dictionary type objects. (You all know, other than speed, Python is the greatest language on earth.)
7. In addition to 6, it was designed to feel like a dynamic language like Python but again have the speed of C.
8. It claims it is very memory safe and has built in features to prevent stack overflows.
9. It's open source.
10. It's Google!

If Google has actually created a language that is as fast as C but has a feel similar to Python with array slicing I am about ready to convert today.  Especially if doing parallel programming is straight forward.

Slashdot article here.

Here is a video showing how fast it compiles code. (This is scary fast. I wonder how they engineered this given how much time and effort is to making good C compilers.)

Doing Math In Your Head

Some of us have impressed others which the kind of math we can carry out in our head.  However, this guy takes the cake.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Some people consider the death penalty cruel and unusual, and others think things like Joe Araipo's Tent City, an outside jail in the Arizona desert that gets up to 120° where inmates have to wear pink underwear, us unusually harsh.

However, in the Philippines inmates are being forced to do choreography for songs by Micheal Jackson and Queen as seen below!  

Just when are people from the Philippines going to rise up and say enough is enough?!?!  Criminals are people too!!! (They even made a few of them wear tutus for the queen video.)

BYU Students May Not Be As Nice As You Think

In almost all sports there is some level of technically illegal contact that regularly occurs. In football defensive backs and receivers commonly bump, grab, and push each other. In basketball the line between a charge and a blocking foul is razor thin. In soccer there are some hard tackles and even the occasional hand to the face or gut. All of this, however, is put to shame by this clip from a women's soccer game between BYU and New Mexico.

So as it turns out BYU athletics might not be as saintly as originally thought. Next time you play soccer at BYU (or New Mexico for that matter), wear a helmet and wrap yourself in bubble wrap.

Statistics on Grad School and Getting a Job

When I (someday) graduate from CU and receive my doctorate, I will be the first person in my family to do so. We have had a small army of Nelsons with Masters degrees and one law degree that I know of, but as far as I know no one before me has gone for a PhD. Since this career path is something I have never seen in my family, I am always very curious to know more about it. I would like to know things like what kind of job I'm likely to have after I graduate and what the job market is like. I imagine that anybody reading this blog as a grad student or undergrad wants to know the same thing.

To answer these questions, I recommend talking to people who have done it. Their experiences cannot be reduced to data, so get them in verbal form. However, as a physicist, I much prefer looking at data over trying to average people's life-stories. Luckily, the American Institute of Physics has a wealth of statistical information on their website. So here's what I have found by running my own little analysis of their data. All of these conclusions will be drawn from data from 1998 to 2008 (or 2006 in some cases). I used a decade worth of data because I felt it was a good compromise between getting trends that are valid today and giving enough averaging time to make this valid for the next 4-6 years (when I hope to be in the graduating/job finding phase). Here's what I've found (in no particular order):

1. For physics PhD programs in the US, on average, per year, there have been 2,519 incoming students, 12,358 enrolled students, and 1,222 PhDs awarded. If you assume a constant dropout rate per year, that means that it takes on average 7.6 years to graduate, 10.01% of students dropout per year, and on average only half of those who start a PhD program will finish it. Those numbers vary by about plus or minus 10% on any given year, except the graduation time, which varies by plus or minus 2 years.
2. The number of incoming graduate students in American programs is growing by an average of 3.3% per year, while the number graduating is growing by 1.0% per year. By comparison, the percent growth in full-time equivalent (FTE) physics faculty has done the following:In on average, the number of FTE faculty is growing by 0.67% per year for PhD-granting departments, and roughly twice that (1.36% and 1.38%, respectively) for Masters and Bachelors departments. The general trends look like this:

I was thinking about drawing some conclusions, but instead I think I'll let you draw your own. Comment away on what you think this all means.

A Republic of No-Confidence

I am personally a fan of a republic as a form of government. I don't understand governmental economic policy and its implications or the ins and outs of international diplomacy anywhere near well enough to make educated judgments about these important issues and frankly I don't want to. I find a lot of the details boring, frustrating, and tedious. Instead, I try to understand the broad issues and then vote for men and women who have the intelligence to understand those issues and whose broad opinions agree with mine. In essence, I don't want a pure democracy, I want a republic.

Couple that with the fact that something like 75% of people in the US will rate themselves as having above average intelligence or decision-making ability and the fact that Congress has an approval rating hovering around 25%, and you get this fun little fact: a Rassmuson survey showed that 51% of Americans rate their understanding of healthcare reform as excellent or good, while only 31% rate their Congressman's understanding as excellent or good.

That means that at least 20% of Americans believe that they understand a major piece of legislation better than the man or woman they elected specifically to understand and evaluate these sorts of issues. Note that this question wasn't asking if people agreed with their Congressman's opinion of the bill - only whether or not they understood it.

How do you have a republic where the citizen have little to no confidence that their elected officials are qualified to do their jobs?