Embracing Chaos

I’ve had my own system for interpreting that "chance of rain" numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather.  Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing.  I wrote about it here a little while ago.  The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be "rain."

I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain.  Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it."  Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain.  It was a full on  storm.  Things broke.

In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph.  Roads were closed everywhere.  Power flickered all night.  Things banged loudly.  My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain!  By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes.  My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!!  It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS.  Oops.

A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out.  We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed.  Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing.  We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief.  Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two.  They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones.  I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a  giant short-circuit.  I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple.  Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds.  For some reason we were cheering.  After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.

It was amazing.

At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing.  When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside.  Show’s over.  Don’t wanna die tonight.

Some people complain that the holidays have become too commercial.  That the holiest of christian holidays has become an excuse to accumulate material things, and that the true meaning, whatever that was, is being lost.

I disagree.  I think now is the time to

Buy More Stuff!

I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word.  Someday soon I hope to have time to join them.

The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue with them.  My friends have gotten into prolonged arguments with shoppers and other passersby who don’t like the message they’re  spreading.  My friends retort with "How could you possibly tell your family and friends that you love them except by buying them more stuff?"  But even this doesn’t persuade those who are persistently disturbed by this message.

Maybe someday they’ll get it.  But I’m not holding out much hope.

Yesterday I got all excited about a journal article indicating the possibility of faster-than-light communication through quantum entanglement.  But I got excited before fully reading the article, and once I had I wrote a quick comment apologizing for the false alarm.  It’s not a peer-reviewed article, and it’s not very scientific.  I actually spent hours digging through their references trying to understand what they were saying, and wrote a longish post to a mailing list about it, so I figure I might as well share the analysis here.

First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number and atomic mass.  There is no element #184.  That’s tungsten’s atomic mass.  For tungsten, Z=74.

The most fundamental problem with the paper is that I can’t find any explanation of how the gamma rays they’re dealing with are even entangled in the first place.  All they say is "Since one electron produces several photons instantaneously, such photons are entangled according to Quantum Mechanics."  (p.3)  This is indicative of a basic problem with their treatment of entanglement throughout their writing — they write as if particles themselves get entangled, which isn’t really accurate.  Some measurable aspect of particles can get entangled — for example, a pair of electrons might have their spin-states entangled, but the electrons themselves aren’t entangled.  In this case we might guess that it’s the polarization of the gammas which is entangled, but they don’t call that out.  And that’s critical for understanding how it would get transferred to electrons in the crystals.  Polarization of the gamma effects the spin of the electron when it gets bumped into the valence band, maybe?  Definitely something they need to be explicit about.

They do cite a whole separate paper they wrote about entanglement with these gammas.  This paper has also not been peer-reviewed and is never cited by anybody else.  This article also doesn’t explain why the gammas given off in this radioactive decay process should be entangled except except by saying "It is well known that low energy photon pairs from atomic radiative cascade are entangled" and citing two other papers.  One of these papers has nothing to do with radioactive decay and the other one (I think it’s here but I’m not sure) has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.  Nice.  They really need to draw some connection about what aspect of these gamma particles is entangled and why.

Overall they seem to treat QE as if it’s some kind of magic pixie dust that happens whenever 2 particles get created simultaneously and that it offers these particles magical properties to defy the normal rules of science.  Moreover, in their analysis these magical properties can be easily conveyed to other particles, whereas in the real world entangled states are extremely fragile.  They explain this by citing research into quantum computing that explains how in very carefully controlled circumstances, entanglement can be transferred from one particle to another.  In reality, entangled states are very fragile — the wave functions collapse very easily, and it almost never gets transferred between particles.  In their world, it’s fairly automatic.

The pixie dust theme continues with their explanation for what’s going on within the oven which is the signaling mechanism in their FTL communicator.  "Entangled electrons, as the experiments show, do not appear to exit from the traps as the temperature increases except at very discrete and narrow characteristic trap emptying temperatures."  No citation or further explanation.  QE electrons just kinda do things differently from all other electrons in the world.  Because they’re special, I guess.

The data are pretty sketch too.  They never plot the temperature of their ovens — seems kinda important IMHO.  But at this point, there’s not much point in complaining.  There’s no explanation (beyond pixie dust) for why the random changes in luminescence would replay themselves while increasing and decreasing temperature.  As if the macroscopic object had a memory of what it did at a previous temperature because of its special QE electrons.  No attempt to explain this at an atomic level except to refer to the "particular behavior of the entangled electrons in the traps."

Sigh.  I’m glad the professori emeriti are having fun in their near-retirement.  It’s not the first time I’ve been duped by a research paper.  I remember in college taking a class on scientific ethics and wanting to cite a fascinating paper (I think it’s this one) about research into a longevity gene that was conferred truly amazing properties onto mice and fish, until I noticed the paper was published on April 1st.  But it had lots of references to other articles, so I started checking them.  This was in 1993 or so, so I had to go to the library.  I couldn’t find most of the journals they cited — maybe they didn’t exist or maybe our library just didn’t carry them.  But one was in a reputable journal I recognized, and it was about a critical piece of science that led to this research.  Excitedly I pulled out the thick bound volume from the shelf and started leafing towards the page.  I expected a full page ad or a table-of-contents page or something, but no there was a real article describing the first discovery of this gene.  And then I noticed that this article too was published on April 1st.  Sigh.  The paper was due the next day, and this article was a big part of my argument.  And it was a class on ethics.  What a quandary.  I was up late that night.

Ever wonder what Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were saying to each other before it all fell apart?  Now you can read it for yourself.  Check out the Enron Explorer.  It lets you browse over 200,000 internal Enron e-mails.  It’s got a nifty java applet for exploring connections and even has shortcuts for interesting topics like the FBI and shredding.  Let’s hear it for information democracy!

Thanks to Charles Armstrong for putting this together.

I have a hat in my office.  It’s a magic hat.  You can ask it any question about software engineering, coding, or object-oriented design, and it will give you the answer.  Just reach in and pull out a slip of paper and be amazed at the wisdom of the hat.  Follow its advice and you’ll never go wrong.

Every slip of paper says the same thing: "Encapsulate it."

Back in the 1980’s we all knew that global variables (or common blocks in Fortran) were evil.  They led to subtle, hard-to-find bugs.  We all know the kind — you call a function and don’t realize that it has some subtle side-effect outside of what you want it to do, and that breaks something else.  The irony is that you don’t need global variables to get this kind of bug.  (But they sure do make it easy.)  This is a totally common description for a hard to find bug.  A great way to avoid this is to encapsulate your code so it doesn’t do anything outside of the playground it’s supposed to be working in.  The only access is through well-defined interfaces.

My first glimpse at this came with Borland’s Turbo Pascal which
offered to make sets of variables only visible to certain blocks of
code.  Object Oriented Programming (OOP) takes this the next step with polymorphism and the still-unrealized promise of code re-use.  But I’d argue the true value of OOP is the ability to organize your code into chunks that have nothing to do with each other execpt through well-defined interfaces.

Some languages like .net provide mechanisms to enforce encapsulation
of entire libraries from each other — this assembly cannot call
anything in this assembly.  DLLs can only call certain DLLs.  Good java programmers take careful note of which packages include which other packages, but AFAIK the language doesn’t offer much in the way of tools for enforcing this.  A friend of mine spends his entire job
trying to enforce this kind of library-level encapsulation on the Windows codebase.
(Keep up the good work, Mark, please.)  The trend towards service-oriented
architectures (SOA) can be seed as a way to formalize this kind of higher-level encapsulation.  If the procedure you’re calling is on a different machine, you’ve got a high degree of confidence in its encapsulation.

Another key benefit of encapsulation is that when it comes time to change something — say swap something out for a replacement that does it better.  If the new code follows the same interface, all the other code that works around it should keep working unchanged.  Herein lies the true wisdom of the magic hat: if you’re ever not sure how to write a piece of code, take whatever it is you’re not sure about, and encapsulate it so that you can change that aspect of it later.  It might seem like a pain in the ass to decouple these things, but the fact that you’re not sure about which way to do it probably means it’s a good place to put an interface layer.  Now it’s up to you to decide if this interface is just a class-boundary, or something higher-level like a package/DLL/assembly boundary or even has to go through an RPC/SOAP/service layer.  But you’ll rarely go wrong with extra encapsulation.

I recently noticed that Red Elvises got added to the Rhapsody catalog.  Yay!  Last time I checked, which was a while ago, they weren’t there, which effectively means I’ll never listen to them.  (Like I’m gonna dig up a plastic disc to listen to music!  Okay, I might dig through my fileserver for some mp3s, but it’s such a mess, I rarely bother.)  If you don’t know them, take a listen to their first album: http://play.rhapsody.com/redelvises/groovingtothemoscowbeat  (how about that URL, eh?) 

It brings up fond memories of repeatedly running into them playing on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.  Aside from a bunch of fun groovy surf music, their lyrics crack me up.

"I got so drunk I sank my boat.  It couldn’t spoil my happy smile.  I swam from Moscow to New York: five hundred thousand square miles."  (in Tango)

Harriet is another of my favorites — a sweet ballad that turns painfully sideways about halfway through.  Reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s Weiner Shnitzel Waltz.  Maybe I’ve just got a thing for campy Elvis impersonator bands.  But as the Elvises always say during their shows, "if you don’t like our music, we have T-shirts and bumper stickers too."  If you want a smile, lend your ear to Red Elvises — quality entertainment from Siberia!

Pike or Pine?  For those of us who live in Seattle, this is an eternal question.  Often rhetorical.  The two streets run parallel from downtown through Capitol Hill and nobody can keep them straight.  This fact was institutionalized by the local sketch comedy show Almost Live in a game show called "Pike or Pine?" where contestants were asked which of the two streets various landmarks are on. 

"Where is the Paramount Theater?"

"Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work.  It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off.  It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!" 

"Oh, I’m sorry.  It’s actually on Pine."

Personally, I’ve given up trying to keep them straight.  I just call them both Pinke.  (Pronounced with a long I sound.)  It’s much easier this way.  I don’t need to think about it.  When I get there I can generally figure it out.  Many people I talk to don’t even catch that I wasn’t specific and understand the general idea which is perfect.  Some people hear it and understand my intent instantly.  Some ask.

I think this generalization stresses out the people I’m talking with less.  I think that if I were to specify one of the two streets specifically, people would sit there and rack their brains trying to remember which one I had named.  Since they’d have probably a 30% chance of misidentifying the street in their heads, and I’d have about a 40% chance of having said the wrong one in the first place, the odds of successful communication would be just 54%.  That sounds no better than a coin-flip to me, especially considering that 12% of the time communication would have worked because we both got it wrong!  I think information is actually being conveyed more effectively by not specifying Pike or Pine, but instead just saying Pinke.

I was thinking about getting all serious-like and talking about how cultural relativism makes it hard for me to judge the immorality of gangsta rap that glorifies crime.  And I’ll still rant just a bit.  But really my main motivation is to shout out props to  Weird Al for his new song "White & Nerdy".  (For extra entertainment, watch the questionably-legal video at youtube, at least until they take it down.)

It’s parodying a song by Chamillionaire that glorifies smuggling drugs.  Nice work dude — way to be a positive influence on other people’s lives.  This is one of the reasons I really love Eminem.  He sings about how crappy life in the hood is.  You can call me white and nerdy for liking white rappers, and you wouldn’t be far off — I got a soldering gun and I edit wikipedia.  But I don’t encourage strangers to pick up my bad habits.  Like Eminem says, keep off the addictive drugs.

The forecast today calls for an 80% chance of rain.   Traditionally this means that 80% of the time it will rain, but that there’s a 20% chance it won’t rain at all.  Here in Seattle we interpret those numbers a little differently.

In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.”  For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in the Winter, it’s never quite dry here.  And it rarely actually rains either — real rain with lots of big heavy drops.  We tend to have this persistent heavy fog that moves downward and gets things wet.  Sometimes it’s lighter and sometimes it’s heavier — it’s pretty arbitrary when you’d call it rain and when you wouldn’t.  Thus the consensus model.

Right now I’d actually say we’ve got about a 60% chance of rain.  80% is pretty darned heavy IMHO.  I don’t think it’s possible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some transplanted diehards from monsoon territory will always hold out and say “this ain’t real rain” as their goretex hats turn into buckets.  Likewise, in Winter I suspect the minimum chance of rain is about 5%, owing to the bitter so-cal transplants who whine that it’s always raining here, regardless of what’s happening in the sky.

So grab a double-tall skinny hazelnut latte and hunker down by the fireplace for a few months.  Here’s looking forward to snowboarding!

The first time you have to ask a friend to wipe your ass for you, that’s when you know you’re getting old.  I’m only 32, but a few weeks ago that’s where I was: lying on the floor moaning, almost passed out from pain, needing my roommate to help me wipe my ass before we went to the hospital.  Good thing we’re so close.

You can also be pretty sure that surgery’s a good option in your future when you can dislocate your shoulder just by trying to wipe your own ass.  Yay for modern surgery!

It’s also a good thing I managed to get my arm back in its socket before we had to do all that.