Physicist Amok

In backwater Virginia where I grew up, there was one ISP which pretty much everyone used, a little local operation called LSNet. It was founded and run by one of the great curmudgeons of my acquaintance, Jim Tarvid. Tarvid got around the lack of trained personnel in the area by hiring bright kids, and providing them with a really good technical education while they worked for him. I was one of those kids.

Tarvid was an old hand in computers. He was programming Burroughs machines before there were monitors. In the course of my time at LSNet he formulated what we referred to as Tarvid’s three laws. I present them here for the edification of the reader.

1. ALGOL 68 was an improvement on all its successors.
2. Appropriate force is the secret of the universe.
3. Don’t do that.

When Tarvid uttered rule 1, at the time I thought he was just being curmudgeonly. After a few years of growing bitter in my programming, I think ALGOL 68 was probably an improvement on all imperative programming languages that followed it. I think Haskell is a better language, but it’s just about the only thing that is.

Tarvid usually uttered the second law when trying to seat warped video cards in ISA slots. It also saw use when talking about designing software.

The third law was generally in response to users saying, “If I do X, it breaks!”

Here I have to insert an amusing quote from Alan Kay about the Burroughs B5000: “Neither Intel nor Motorola nor any other chip company understands the first thing about why that architecture was a good idea.” (from this interview).

madhadron :: Jun.12.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Stranger Fruit points out a poll on belief in evolution/creation at USA Today. The numbers are disturbing, but what we really learn from this is that the folks at USA Today don’t set very good polls. There’s a common problem in software engineering: what users tell you they want bears no resemblence to what they actually want. However, a person’s beliefs should influence their actions and decisions, so to measure belief, it’s better to measure actions and decisions than to ask about beliefs. A better approach would have been:

1. Humans and bacteria share a common ancestor (True/False)
2. Homo sapiens first appeared on Earth more than 10,000 years ago. (True/False)
3. Would a presidential candidate declaring that they DO NOT believe that bacteria and humans have a common ancestor make you more or less likely to vote for him? (more/no difference/less)

The first two questions immediately establish whether a person believes in evolution. The second question adds another tidbit of information: if you answered yes to 1 and no to 2, then we can conclude that you don’t understand numbers.

I took out the questions about how familiar the respondant is with evolution and creation, since I can think of only one interesting measurement I could make off of them with any confidence, namely the distribution of these quantities conditioned on their answer to question one, and it’s not particularly informative. If I were to ask them, I’d phrase them as:

• How would you rate your knowledge of evolution? (Nonexistent/Weak/Strong)
• How would you rate your knowledge of creationism? (Nonexistent/Weak/Strong)

I would also want to add some additional questions to establish a baseline for the respondant on this scale. The formulation of such a set of baseline questions is a research project in its own right, though perhaps someone has already done it.

You’ll notice that I took all the fine gradations out. If anyone has some research on how well such gradations work, I’d like to know about it. My unsubtantiated impression is that humans are extremely bad at fine discrimination, while they’re fairly accurate in big, robust blocks.

madhadron :: Jun.08.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

In the first issue of my undergraduate physics department’s newsletter, I saw a notice of Julian Noble’s death.

My first thought was, “Now I can’t buy him lunch.” Late in my first year at the University of Virginia, when I was digesting quantum mechanics and relativity, I appeared on his doorstep with a general relativity question. He was about to leave for lunch, invited me along, gave me a wonderfully clear explanation, and bought me lunch over my protests, which he dismissed with, “Just buy me lunch when you get your PhD.”

I first met Noble when I was a prospective undergraduate visiting the department. I had been doing a lot of programming in Forth at the time, a language in which he was a well known expert, so I naturally sought him out. At his urging, I took his graduate computational physics course when I arrived in the fall. I have never met someone with such disregard for the background knowledge a student might lack. He demanded mathematical ability, but did it so casually that I did crazy things, such as constructing an operational knowledge of linear algebra in forty-eight hours. He taught me how fast I could drive myself, which has served me well ever since.

Noble’s humor was of a sadistic and irreverent variety. He could tell rabbi, minister, and priest jokes by the hour, and sought groans and cringes from his audience rather than laughter. He reveled in off-color jokes and bad puns, and insisted that I should take up the saxophone (I was already a serious violinist) so that I would have “sax and violins.”

Everyone who knew him late in his life would agree he was scatter-brained. His attention hopped like a flea among subjects as disparate as integral equations, public policy, and the Swiss. I suspect he wasn’t always like this. One day, in the middle of a discussion of random processes, he said to me, “No one should have to watch his own child die.” The way he said it told me a lot–watching his own son die of cancer had broken him.

Julian Noble was the strongest influence on my first years in physics. I really wish I could have bought him lunch.

madhadron :: Jun.08.2007 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off