I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
“One of the wonderful features of math is that, like with pastry, it can use quite simple ingredients to make very complicated situations. This can also make it rather offputting, like making puff pastry. Actually, I don’t think puff pastry is that difficult if you follow the instructions carefully. But even if you don’t want to try doing it yourself, perhaps you can still enjoy the fact that such simple ingredients can turn into delicious puff pastry. Math is about understanding processes and not just eating end results.”
ver the past couple of months leading up to to the launch of VH1’s new season of “Dating Naked: Playing for Keeps” , I’ve been entertained by friends who have seen little snippets and notices about the show and wondering why and how I got involved in front of the camera. Honestly, it’s mostly been the why question. Ego-bruisingly, only one so far has wanted to know if they could get the “unblurred” cut of the show.
Let’s get one thing straight: the Chris Aldrich on VH1’s Dating Naked is NOT me — first of all, I’m way better looking.
Fortunately as we’re getting closer, there’s now “artwork” to support the fact that it’s not me.
Once the show launches on the 22nd, I almost can’t wait to see what happens to the Google ranking for my searches on my name. I’m sure I’ll have some further entertainment in relation to my twitter account @chrisaldrich and other parts of my social media presence. I’m almost tempted to make a few changes in the bio sections to increase the ambiguity and cause some trouble.
I’m reminded of Wes Moore’s book “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates“, unfortunately I’m not quite sure that my writing a book about my experience with “The Other Chris Aldrich” would be so uplifting or inspiring to others. I’d also be more worried that I’d have to change the subtitle to “One name, One Fate.”
How a mathematical breakthrough from the 1960s now powers everything from spacecraft to cell phones.
Concurrent with the recent Pluto fly by, Alex Riley has a great popular science article on PBS that helps put the application of information theory and biology into perspective for the common person. Like a science version of “The Princess Bride”, this story has a little bit of everything that could be good and entertaining: information theory, biology, DNA, Reed-Solomon codes, fossils, interplanetary exploration, mathematics, music, genetics, computers, and even paleontology. Fans of Big History are sure to love the interconnections presented here.
Reed-Solomon codes correct for common transmission errors, including missing pixels (white), false signals (black), and paused transmissions (the white stripe).
Almost the same moment I saw my first Little Free Library, I decided that I wanted to host one of my very own, so I registered with the intent of building one in my free time. The registration arrived and I’d drafted some very serious custom plans, but just never gotten around to purchasing the supplies and building it.
Recently I saw something a bit more quirky and interesting than my original plans that I could up-cycle, so I made the purchase (happy belated birthday to me)! It’s got two spacious shelves with two doors including a glass fronted one, and it’s got the capacity for at least 6 linear feet of books. We’re nearly ready to go.
I’m hoping to get some mounting materials and have the library up and running soon. My plan is to specialize in literary fiction, though I’m sure we’ll also stock a fair amount of popular science and non-fiction as well as thriller, mystery, and suspense as well.
Invitations to the “launch” party should be coming shortly! If you’ve got some books you’d like to donate toward the cause, let me know in the comments below. Be sure to include a Book Crossing ID number on them if you’d like to track where your favorite objects head off to in the future.
The Golden Rule mandating that you treat others as you want them to treat you is simply a variation on tit-for-tat, one that emphasizes the benefit rather than the harm side. (The Christian principle of returning a favor for a harm in this respect is highly unusual and, one might note, more often than not unimplemented in Christian societies. No society I know of approves returning a harm for a favor as a general moral rule within the group.)
[recipe title=”Cream Scones” servings=”6-8″ time=”25-30mins” difficulty=”easy” image=”http://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/20150704_100549.jpg” description=”Light, flaky classic scones with full flavor”]
[recipe-ingredients]
– flour (all purpose generally yields better results than cake)
– sugar
– baking powder
– salt
– unsalted butter (cold)
– fruit: usually dried currants, raisins, chocolate chips, or other fruit
– egg
– heavy cream
– fruit zest (orange, lemon, grapefruit, other)
– cinnamon
[/recipe-ingredients]
[recipe-notes]
Other fats could be substituted for the butter, but butter generally tastes best here. For the small handful of health conscious non-professional home cooks, absolutely do not substitute milk for the cream, otherwise the fat ratio for the recipe will be thrown completely off and your results will be horrifying.
Ratio
5 parts flour : 1 part sugar : 1.5 parts butter : 1 parts egg : 2 parts cream : 1.5 parts fruit
Other ingredients (approximately per part)
1/2 teaspoon salt per part
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 oz zest
Professional kitchens scaling the recipe beyond 75 oz of flour, may wish to use 1.25 parts of sugar for more even results.
[/recipe-notes]
[recipe-directions]
1. Preheat oven to 425° F.
2. Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt until mixed thoroughly.
3. Cut the cold butter into the flour mixture with a pastry blender until the lumps of butter are just larger than the size of a pea. Any smaller and the scones will be tougher and less flaky.
4. Mix together the cream, egg, (optional currants, raisins, fruit), and the zest, then mix into the flour/butter just until the dough comes together.
5. Do not overwork the scone dough or the resultant scones will not be light and flaky. You should preferably be able to still see small chunks of butter in the dough.
6. Roll the dough out into a disk about 1.5″ thick.
7. Brush a light layer of cream (or milk) onto the top of the disk and sprinkle on a nice layer of cinnamon and sugar.
8. Using a dough scraper cut the dough into eight equal wedges and place onto cooking sheet.
9. Put the sheet of scone dough into the oven at 450 for 12-15 minutes until golden brown, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
10. Cool for a few minutes and then enjoy fresh with clotted cream and fresh fruit.
[/recipe-directions]
[/recipe]
Step-by-step photos
Follow the instructions in the captions below: Ingredients for making scones
Mise on place for scone ingredientsClose up of scone ingredientsWhisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and saltPut the cold butter into the flour mixture.Cut in the butter with a pastry blender until the lumps of butter are just larger than the size of a pea. Any smaller and the scones will be tougher and less flaky.Mix together the cream, egg, (optional currants, raisins, fruit), and the zest, then mix into the flour/butter JUST until the dough comes together.Do not overwork the scone dough or the resultant scones will not be light and flaky.Roll the dough out into a disk about 1.5″ thick.Brush a light layer of cream (or milk) onto the top of the disk.Close up of the dough disk with cream. You should preferably be able to still see small chunks of butter in the dough.Sprinkle on a nice layer of cinnamon and sugar.Close up of the texture of the dough.
Using a dough scraper cut the dough into eight equal wedges and place onto cooking sheet.Put the sheet of scone dough into the oven at 450 for 12-15 minutes until golden brown, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
Cool for a few minutes and then enjoy fresh with clotted cream and fresh fruit.
I have to imagine that once the conceptualization of language and some basic grammar existed, word generation was a much more common thing than it is now. It’s only been since the time of Noah Webster that humans have been actively standardizing things like spelling. If we can use Papua New Guinea as a model of pre-agrarian society and consider that almost 12% of extant languages on the Earth are spoken in an area about the size of Texas (and with about 1/5th the population of Texas too), then modern societies are actually severely limiting language (creation, growth, diversity, creativity, etc.) [cross reference: A World of Languages – and How Many Speak Them (Infographic)]
Consider that the current extinction of languages is about one every 14 weeks, which puts us on a course to loose about half of the 7,100 languages on the planet right now before the end of the century. Collective learning has potentially been growing at the expense of a shrinking body of diverse language! In the paper “Global distribution and drivers of language extinction risk” the authors indicate that of all the variables tested, economic growth was most strongly linked to language loss.
To help put this exercise into perspective, we can look at the corpus of extant written Latin (a technically dead language):
“It is a truly impressive fact that, simply by knowing that if one can memorize and master about 250 words in Latin, it will allow them to read and understand 50% of most written Latin. Further, knowledge of 1,500 Latin words will put one at the 80% level of vocabulary mastery for most texts. Mastering even a very small list of vocabulary allows one to read a large variety of texts very comfortably.”
These numbers become even smaller when considering ancient Greek texts.
Another interesting measurement is the vocabulary of a modern 2 year old who typically has a 50-75 word vocabulary while a 4 year old has 250-500 words, which is about the level of the exercise.
As a contrast, consider the message in this TED Youth Talk from last year by Erin McKean, which students should be able to relate to:
[ted id=2158]
And of course, there’s the dog Chaser, which 60 minutes recently reported has a vocabulary of over 1,000 words. (Are we now destroying variants of “dog language” for English too?!)
Hopefully the evolutionary value of the loss of the multiple languages will be more than balanced out by the power of collective learning in the long run.
“The Molecular Programming Project aims to develop computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity. Our long-term vision is to establish molecular programming as a subdiscipline of computer science — one that will enable a yet-to-be imagined array of applications from chemical circuitry for interacting with biological molecules to nanoscale computing and molecular robotics.”
An infographic from the South China Morning Post has some interesting statistics about which many modern people don’t know (or remember). It’s very interesting to see the distribution of languages and where they’re spoken. Of particular note that most will miss, even from this infographic, is that 839 languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea (11.8% of all known languages on Earth). Given the effects of history and modernity, imagine how many languages there might have been without them.
I just ordered a copy of Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo. Although it seems more focused on economics, the base theory seems to fit right into some similar thoughts I’ve long held about biology.
Why Information Grows: The Evolutiion of Order from Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo
From the book description:
“What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT’s antidisciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.
At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order–or information–will disappear. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Our cities are pockets where information grows, but they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish little more than pulling rocks off the ground. So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil’s, and Brazil’s that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston’s Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information.
Seen from Hidalgo’s vantage, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows lays bear the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do, not just more, but more interesting things.”
Alex Riley
