It pays to go to college

So this guy Peter Thiel is starting a fellowship program that will give students $100,000 to start a new business. He thinks it will encourage more rapid innovation. The catch is that they can only do this fellowship instead of going to college for two years [NPR story]. Apparently Thiel has some contrarian tendencies, and perhaps a grudge against higher education. He's done pretty well for himself as a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook; he's worth around $1,5000,000,000 [wikipedia]. Oh, and by the way, he graduated from Stanford in philosophy in 1989, and then got his JD from Stanford in 1992. All that time at Stanford would probably make anyone hate higher education (Go Bears!). So education worked for him, but this fellowship is about stimulating and accelerating innovation, and from my reading of his Wikipedia page, it sounds like Thiel is an investor, not an innovator. He struck gold with PayPal, which has given him a chance to take risks on lots of start-ups, some of which might do well and others completely fail. He's a hedge fund manager and a venture capitalist, so his job is focused on taking risks and hoping that some of them pay off big (and implicitly this assumes that those few successes will more than make up for the many failures).

All this is fine and good, but now that Thiel is talking about education, I think he may have confused his own risk-taking lifestyle as an appropriate one for society at large. He's presenting the undergraduate degree as being overvalued, and thinks of this like a bubble (as in the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble). There is maybe a point in there somewhere, and maybe in the USA we need to think about whether everyone needs to go to college. I'll throw in the thought that "trade schools" are extremely undervalued, and that promoting real trade schools would be much more valuable to a vast number of people than getting an associates degree from a community college. That's a digression, though, and to get back on track, let me say that Andrew Kelly wrote a nice critique of the fellowship program on (unfortunately) the HuffPo [LINK].  He points out that the fellowship program is taking some of the best students from the best universities in the country, and putting them into a 2-year intensive mentoring program. This is a far cry from devaluing higher education.

For the overwhelming number of American students, going to college is a good idea. Whether it is because of an overvaluation of degrees or not, the numbers simply show that the more education one gets, the higher the salary [SEE FIGURE, SOURCE].  In the present social-economic conditions, trying to argue that fewer people need to graduate from college is damning most of those people to a lower salary tier. While Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college to become extraordinarily wealthy, the graphic and the data show that they are extreme outliers, and that most people who quit college are giving up almost a third of their potential salary.

Okay, my final comment for this rant... I hope the Thiel Fellowship program is wildly successful. No, really! You should go look at the list of young "innovators" [LINK]; they are extremely impressive, and if this 2-year program can get them and their ideas to the next level, that could have a tremendous impact in several emerging fields (I was especially interested in the Energy category). These are clearly very smart, highly motivated people, and allowing them to focus intensely on these ideas for two years is actually a good plan. It isn't for the average American 20-year-old, but for a few it could be really advantageous. My guess is that most of these Thiel Fellows will go back to school, and then on to graduate school, because they won't be satisfied picking things up along the way. When it comes to extremely technical fields, it actually is more efficient to work through all that fundamental material before just jumping in and cobbling together the pieces as you go along. But we will see.

Keeping perspective

MySpace is firing about half its employees, about 500 people, as it struggles to stay relevant [LINK]. Contrast with Wikipedia, which has about 50 employees total and has existed successfully for 10 years and is now one of the "most relevant" sites on the internet [LINK].

The Simpson's & Banksy collaborate

In the absence of actual content, I submit entertainment:



Banksy storyboarded the sequence. Via Laughing Squid via Daring Fireball.

Streamlining your workflow

Just watched this video showing how one guy keeps his references organized. It's included below, and worth watching. My own citation organization isn't as clean, but uses basically these same tools. (Read that as: this is how I should do it!)

I'll also note that I'm a bit conflicted about whether to use BibDesk to organize my files. The definite pros are that I'm already using it to organize my references and that it is free. I've been using Yep! to organize my documents, which don't always need to be in my bibtex library, and it is a pretty nice application. The downside is that it isn't free (I got it in one of those bundles). I think Yep! is very similar to another application called Papers that I know some people like a lot.

Impact in North America?

There's been a lot of talk about an extraterrestrial impact in North America about 11,000 years ago. The idea is that such an event could have contributed to the extinction of North America's megafauna, like giant ground sloths and wooly mammoths. A new paper in PNAS by Haynes et al [LINK] examine the evidence from several "Clovis" sites. These are sites where remains of the Clovis people [wikipedia] have been found. Their analysis finds no strong evidence of an extraterrestrial impactor, and especially damning to me is that they find no enhancement of Iridium, which is a fingerprint for impacts.

While they are careful to say that they haven't ruled out an impact, I think this is strong evidence that the other hypotheses (e.g., human hunting) are more likely to have led to the megafaunal extinction.

"This is not your father's quark-gluon plasma."

It's awesome when you actually do get to break the laws of physics: [NYTimes][via Kottke]

A stupid article in LATimes

I don't have anything else to really say than the title would suggest. Here's an article in the LATimes that basically says nothing at all about global warming, but does almost report on the results of a recent gallup survey [LINK]. It's an opinion piece, so I suppose that lowers expectations, but the journalism involved is piss poor to use a colloquialism. The author is Meghan Daum, who I've never heard of, but is apparently on staff at LAT. I hope I never have to read a word written by her again, it wasted several minutes of my life.

You can take the monkey out of the jungle, ...

brilliant:

Disappearing physicist?

I have never until today heard about Ettore Majorana, an Italian physicist who was a contemporary of Fermi. A new book about Majorana's life and mysterious disappearance is outright panned in Nature (last week, LINK) by Frank Close. While I certainly won't read the book under review, I can't help but be fascinated by this bizarre story, and may have to follow up with some additional reading.

The Dolphin Situation

It seems that dolphins may be "non-human persons," and deserves special rights above other animals [LINK]. Maybe we can just have the dolphins figure out a way to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere and avoid making their own underwater world an acid bath. Go Dolphins!

Those Damned Tree Huggers

A thought just crossed my mind that I thought I'd share. I think that anytime you read/hear the term "tree hugger," you can immediately parse the statements of the source as biased and probably wrong. This is probably true even in those rare instances when the term is used endearingly or positively. Has this always been true? Maybe this is totally obvious. I'm going to keep my eye out for exceptions.

Coolest thing I've seen all day

If you can, watch in full screen with HD for full effect:



A related comic version: http://xkcd.com/482/

Democracy? In California?

For those in or interested in California, there's an interesting bit of news happening. Linguist George Lakoff is trying to amend the California state constitution. There's a NYTimes story about the effort [LINK]. The beauty of the potential proposition is that it is 14 words, a single sentence. It will insert into the constitution:

All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be

determined by a majority vote.

That's it. The goal is to allow the majority party to actually make decisions to govern the state, which if you've been following hasn't happened in quite some time.

I'm not sure this would be enough, but at least it would be a start, so I wish Lakoff good luck. A signature gathering campaign is ongoing, as is fundraising. For more information, please visit http://ca.restoremajorityrule.com/ and/or http://www.californiansfordemocracy.com/

A terrible video you have to watch

Everything that this woman says is completely wrong. I'm amazed that someone can be so wrong in such a short span of time.



Did you watch it?

In case you were thinking, well, maybe some of that makes some sense, let me point out a potential "flaw" in her "argument."

She is making a claim that homeopathy is all about energy. As a refresher, remember that homeopathic treatments use some kind of natural agent to cure symptoms, but the application is a very dilute solution. So if onion is the agent, and I think it sometimes is in homeopathy, the homeopath will take an onion, grind it up and add it to water. But then they take that water, divide it into two, and add it to more water, and so on and so on. Eventually the solution is so dilute that there is no meaningful amount of onion in the water, so the homeopathic treatment is just water. I'm not exaggerating, either, go look it up. Anyway, the woman in the video tries to make sense of this because mass is energy, so in some sense she is saying that they are putting the energy of the onion into the water, so it doesn't matter if there is mass in there. She justifies this because the mass term in E = m*c^2 is very small. In fact, she says you can ignore the m because it is infinitesimal. Wah? Yes, she says this several times, including in her introduction, saying that all the matter in the universe could fit into a bowling ball. I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I do know how to multiply.

Let's take the speed of light, c. Roughly, c is 300-million meters per second, c = 3*10^8 m/s. That's a big number. Now square it, c*c = 9*10^16 m^s/s2, and that is a really big number. No wonder that homeopath thinks we can just neglect the tiny little amount of matter in an onion, since this number is so big. Let's say we have a really large onion of 1 kg. Now how much energy does that mass turn into, well, 1kg*9*10^16 m^2/s^2 = 9*10^16 kgm^2/s^2, which is just 9*10^16 Joules, the SI unit of energy. Now, that sounds like a lot of energy, so it is fine to divide it into a lot of water, right, and spread that energetic wealth. So the homepath puts the pulverized onion into the water, then splits the water into two and adds water, and so on and so on. Eventually you find that the mass of onion in each drop of water is negligible, or infinitesimal, just like the homeopath said. So let's take a very tiny number for the mass, say 1 millionth of the original mass of the onion, so that much energy is actually E = 1kg/10000009*10^16 m^2/s^2 = 90 billion Joules. Still looks like a big number, but remember 1kg divided into a million pieces is still far more than infinitesimal, what about 1 billionth of a kilogram, well that'd be 90 million Joules, and 1 thousandth of a billionth of a kilogram would be 90,000 Joules, and a kilogram divided by the number of atoms in a mole (= 6.02*10^23) produces about 1.5*10^-7 Joules. Ah, there seems to be a trend. If you keep reducing the mass, the energy drops. Even way before you have a single atom per drop of water, you have a negligible amount of energy, despite the constancy of the speed of light.

Just to belabor the point, the homeopath is missing a fact of basic arithmetic. Multiplying a large number by a small number doesn't mean you get the large number. Spreading the onion's energy over a very large amount of water doesn't imbue the water with magical curative properties. You end up with water, plain and simple.

And I haven't even mentioned an essential physical error in her interpretation, namely that squishing an onion does not release the energy of the onion. You apply energy to the onion to break the bonds that hold it together. This does not convert mass to energy; for all practical purposes mass is conserved. Only when we deal with relativity does the Einstein's mass-energy equivalence come into play.

Homeopathy is bunk. At best it is a placebo, and at worst it convinces people to forego actual treatment, fork over their money to some snake-oil salesperson and not get better.

Watching Wave

I've been passively listening to some of the reaction to Google Wave lately. Yesterday (via Daring Fireball), I found a blog post by Daniel Tenner that explains how Google Wave will "replace" email for corporate environments [LINK]. I think Tenner is presenting a good case that the people currently testing Wave aren't really the audience that will most benefit from such a product. Where I think he's going slightly wrong is by using the "corporate" environment (which is what DF says too) as the model. Wave is collaboration software, and the way it is presented by Tenner, it really does sound like it could replace email to a large extent for projects and collaboration. It doesn't replace email for correspondence, and it doesn't replace Facebook or Twitter for "status updates" or "microblogging," and it doesn't replace your favorite IM software. But for people who use any of these tools to actually do work, and especially for people who switch between them (or want to be able to switch between them) for a project, Wave sounds like it will be amazing. The essential idea seems to be that you can start a "wave" as a virtual conversation, including having documents and files and thing, and you can add or drop people from the wave at any time (and they get to see everything, not just what is "happening" now), and Wave makes sense for seamless transitions from email to IM type communication. That is, you upload a document, and everyone has it and can read it and edit it, and everyone can see all versions of it. No more attachments. You can walk away from your computer and come back and get caught up with what is going on, or you can be sitting at your computer going back and forth with others in the wave.

Maybe my vision of Wave makes it better than it can possibly be. But I got excited by Tenner's post. I think this would be an amazing way to do collaborative science. Tenner presents things as problems with email and why Wave fixes it, and for every one I though, yes, that is a problem with email! In science there are many collaborations that could benefit by replacing the normal email with a more efficient communication stream. Examples are reports of all kinds, like when people have to report on the status of a project to the funding agency, or when a dispersed team is writing a paper about a project and different people are writing different sections. Another example might just be a grad student working on her/his thesis, their advisor could observe progress and give feedback using Wave, and postdocs, researchers, or committee members could be brought into the wave as needed for further advice and feedback. It could also work for planning projects, working on code, or even doing homework. Wave seems to be a way to clean up your communication stream, bringing different pieces all into one "wave" seems like a better way to get things done. But we'll see.

Woo-hoo for me

Well, I took the Pew Research Center's science knowledge quiz, and as you can see, I did quite well. Go take the quiz yourself: LINK.

Blobfish

Okay, nothing really to do with climate change.... yet. But I just learned what a blobfish is. Perhaps one of natures least lovable animals [via Kottke].

Is peak oil a myth?

An op-ed piece by Michael Lynch in the New York Times suggests that "peak oil theory" is just a myth [LINK]. Really what he's saying is that it is a crazy left-wing conspiracy theory. I wanted to just post some reaction to his op-ed, calling some of his arguments into question. I'm not going to claim he's wrong, just that his arguments are far from persuasive. First, let's also have some disclosure, Michael Lynch is President and Director of Global Petroleum Service, part of Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc [LINK]. This is a consulting firm, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of their clients are oil companies. He's also been associated with other energy policy organizations as well as MIT. I'm not saying he is not credible, I'm sure he's an expert, I'm just saying Lynch is probably as biased as the people he is criticizing.

Lynch dismisses the statement that the "easy oil is gone." This is a common point made by people concerned with peak oil, as Lynch points out. The idea is that 100 years ago, there were oil fields that literally had oil coming out of the surface. Remember the Beverly Hillbillies? Now there aren't such high-pressure fields. Instead of accepting that as true, Lynch says the argument is "vague and irrelevant." He then says that Persian oil drillers 100 years ago wouldn't think that oil was "easy." This is a false analogy. Nobody is saying that the labor of extracting oil was ever easy. The point is about how much energy has to be spent to extract a given amount of oil, which then produces a given amount of energy. It's not easy to quantify, but as I understand the state of oil today, more energy is used to extract oil per unit energy now than it was, say, in the 1950s.

A point made just after the one above revisits the oil crises in 1973 and 1979. Lynch points to predictions from "experts" saying prices would just keep going up. Then they didn't go up. This is supposed to be part of Lynch's op-ed about arguments of political instability playing a part in oil production; he's saying that political instability is nothing new. In my reading of his article, I find that this whole section is really a straw-man argument. He brings it up because, "When their shaky claims on geology are exposed, the peak-oil advocates tend to argue that today’s geopolitical instability needs to be taken into consideration." So he sets up an argument that is not about peak oil just to shoot it down. The question of peak oil is essentially one of geology and technology; geopolitics certainly plays a role in oil production (well, maybe not according to Lynch), but it isn't part of the peak oil theory except that if production ceases in a region, then the peak would be pushed back in time.

Finally, Lynch ends with this:

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Well, there's a bit of an appeal to authority here, but I'm not going to claim that there's a real logical fallacy. This might just be a case of presenting (without evidence) a number that differs from the estimates I've seen before. Because there are no sources or evidence presented, it is impossible for the reader to know if this point is true or not. My guess is that there are some large error-bars on that 10 trillion barrel number, and this value is probably at the high end of them. I would hazard to guess that the 2 trillion barrel number is too low (and I have heard that number before), but that 10 trillion barrels is a pretty high estimate. The recoverable part of whatever the true number is the real question. The truth is, though, that at some point the extraction of oil becomes cost ineffective compared to other energy sources. It might be when the oil has to be mined from 5000 feet below the ocean surface or when they have to drill miles into continental bedrock or when tar sands have to be utilized, but there must be a point where the amount of energy going into the extraction of oil is nearly the same as the amount of oil extracted. At that point, there's no need to extract any oil since becomes a zero sum gain. I've always heard the argument that alternative energy sources will become much more cost effective in the run up to the zero sum gain on oil, so we'll probably never reach that extreme.

The bottom line seems to be that there are still disagreements about whether peak oil theory will pan out or not. The oil consultants say no, and a bunch of academics say yes. Hmm, interesting. Like other, strangely similar, "debates," the answer will likely be learned in the next couple of decades. And also like those other issues, by the time we find out the answer, it might already be too late to change course without drastically impacting all of our lives.

Audience participation

This is fun:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

The funny guy makes a good point

Here is Dara O'Brian saying things more convincingly than most more serious folks:



This video was drawn to my attention by Phil Plait's blog.