Reposted “My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! :)” by Sebastian Tomczak (Twitter)

Information Theory and signal processing FTW!

(Aside: This is a great example of how people really don’t understand our copyright system or science in general.)

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis by Alan Turing

Reposted a tweet by Michael Nielsen (Twitter)

Looks like Alan Turing, like Claude Shannon, was interested in microbiology too! I’ll have to dig into this. [pdf]

Your mom is killing your chances of going viral on Facebook | The Next Web

Reposted Your mom is killing your chances of going viral on Facebook by Anouk Vleugels (The Next Web)
Unconditional love means unconditional likes. At least, that’s how it works with Chris Aldrich’s mom, who “auto-likes” everything he posts to Facebook. Family pictures? Like! A blog post titled “A New Low in Quantum Mechanics?” Like!
The Next Web has a piece on my Facebook Mom Algorithm Problem article from a few weeks back.


Continue reading Your mom is killing your chances of going viral on Facebook | The Next Web

DreamHost is a proud sponsor of @indiewebcamp meetups!

Reposted a tweet by DreamHostVerified accountDreamHostVerified account (Twitter)
DreamHost is a proud sponsor of @indiewebcamp meetups! Right out of our #PDX office, no less! #webdesign #bloggingpic.twitter.com/bFsowoe4vK

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

Reposted a tweet by Open CultureOpen Culture (Twitter)
Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian http://bit.ly/2dF0SFZpic.twitter.com/sdgjcJX5ZK
Dave Harris is sure to appreciate this.

 

GitHub have published some guidance on persistence and archiving of repositories for academics #openscience

Reposted GitHub have published some guidance on persistence and archiving of repositories for academics #openscience by Arfon SmithArfon Smith (Twitter)
GitHub have published some guidance on persistence and archiving of repositories for academics https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and-data-on-github/ #openscience
The crowd from Dodging the Memory Hole are sure to find this interesting!

The fun was out there | First Person | Johns Hopkins Magazine | Hub

Reposted The fun was out there (Johns Hopkins Magazine, Summer 2016)
For the first couple of months of freshman year, I spent my evenings breaking into buildings on campus.

Having just passed our 20th college reunion, an old friend starts spilling the beans…

Apparently the statute of limitations on college shenanigans has run out and one of my best friends has written a nice little essay about some of “our” adventures. Fortunately he has kindly left out the names of his co-conspirators, so I’ll also remain silent about who was responsible for which particular crimes. Like him, I will leave the numerous other crimes he redacted unsung.


For the first couple of months of freshman year, I spent my evenings breaking into buildings on campus. This began, naturally, because a few of us who lived in and around the Vincent-Willard dorm had mail ordered lock-picking kits, and, well, we needed something to practice on besides our own dorm rooms.

So down into the midnight bowels of Krieger we crept, sneaking deep underground into disused classrooms, mute hallways, and one strange lab whose floor was tight-knit mesh wiring with a Silence of the Lambs–esque chamber below. We touched little, took nothing (except, once, a jar of desiccant—sorry!), and were never caught.

Such was the state of fun at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1992, an era when the administration seemed to have adopted a policy of benign neglect toward the extracurricular happiness of its undergraduate body. We had Spring Fair and the occasional bus trip to New York for the day. What more could we want?

For many—really, most—of my cutthroat classmates, this was reason to grumble. Why, they moaned from the depths of D-level, couldn’t school be more exciting? A student union, they pleaded. A bar. A café. Anything to make campus life more bearable.

But for my friends and me, the school’s DGAF attitude meant freedom: We could do whatever we wanted, on campus or off. When lock-picking grew old (quickly, I’m pleased to say), we began to roam, wandering among the half-abandoned industrial sites that lined the unreconstructed harbor, or driving (when someone happened to have a car) under the interstates that cut through and around the city. We were set loose upon Baltimore, and all we ever wanted was to go and see what there was.

Here’s what we found: A large yellow smiley face painted on the end of an oil-storage tank. The 16mm film collection at the Pratt Library. A man who claimed to have been hanging out with Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas the night she lost her virginity. The Baltimore Streetcar Museum. How to clear the dance floor at Club Midnite by playing the 1978 song “Fish Heads” (eat them up, yum!). The big slice at Angelo’s and the $4.95 crabcake subs at Sip & Bite. Smart drugs, Neal Stephenson, and 2600 magazine at Atomic Books. The indie movie screenings at Skizz Cyzyk’s funeral home “mansion.”

None of these alone was world-changing (okay, except maybe “Fish Heads”). Put together, though, they amounted to a constant stream of stimulation, novelty, and excitement, the discoveries that make new adulthood feel fresh and occasionally profound.

All the while, I heard the no-fun grumbling from around campus and failed to understand it. We had freedom—what more could we need? The world was all around us, begging to be explored. We didn’t even have to leave campus: One spring, my girlfriend and I simply stepped off the sidewalk next to Mudd Hall into a little dell—and discovered a stand of wild scallions. We picked a ton, brought them home, and feasted on our foraged bounty. All we’d had to do was to leave the asphalt path—no red brick in those days—behind.

Matt Gross, Johns Hopkins A&S ’96, ’98 (MA), is a food and travel writer/editor who’s worked for everyone from The New York Times and Bon Appétit to The Guardian, The Village Voice, and Saveur. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jean Liu, A&S ’96, and their two daughters.

Incidentally he also had two other meaty pieces that came out yesterday as well:

Mathematics in Popular Science Books | The Economist

Reposted Big bang (The Economist)
Popular physics has enjoyed a new-found regard. Now comes a brave attempt to inject mathematics into an otherwise fashionable subject
This review of Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s forthcoming book The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen sounds intriguing. I’m highly impressed that so much of the review focuses on the author’s decision to include a more mathematical treatment of their subject for what is supposed to be a popular science book. I always wish books like these at least had the temerity to include much more in the way of the mathematical underpinnings of their subjects; I’m glad that the popular press (or at least The Economist in this case) is willing to be asking for the mathematics as well. Hopefully it will mark a broader trend in popular books on scientific topics!

Fundamental physics

Big bang

Popular physics has enjoyed a new-found regard. Now comes a brave attempt to inject mathematics into an otherwise fashionable subject

Nov 5th 2011 | from the print edition

The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen. By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Allen Lane; 255 pages; £20. To be published in America in January by Da Capo Press; $25.

PREVIOUSLY the preserve of dusty, tweed-jacketed academics, physics has enjoyed a surprising popular renaissance over the past few years. In America Michio Kaku, a string theorist, has penned several successful books and wowed television and radio audiences with his presentations on esoteric subjects such as the existence of wormholes and the possibility of alien life. In Britain Brian Cox, a former pop star whose music helped propel Tony Blair to power, has become the front man for physics, which recently regained its status as a popular subject in British classrooms, an effect many attribute to Mr Cox’s astonishing appeal.

Mr Cox, a particle physicist, is well-known as the presenter of two BBC television series that have attracted millions of viewers (a third series will be aired next year) and as a bestselling author and public speaker. His latest book, “The Quantum Universe”, which he co-wrote with Jeff Forshaw of the University of Manchester, breaks the rules of popular science-writing that were established over two decades ago by Stephen Hawking, who launched the modern genre with his famous book, “A Brief History of Time”.

Mr Hawking’s literary success was ascribed to his eschewing equations. One of his editors warned him that sales of the book would be halved by every equation he included; Mr Hawking inserted just one, E=mc2, and, even then, the volume acquired a sorry reputation for being bought but not read. By contrast, Mr Cox, whose previous book with Mr Forshaw investigated “Why does E=mc2?” (2009), has bravely sloshed a generous slug of mathematics throughout his texts.

The difficulties in explaining physics without using maths are longstanding. Einstein mused, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” and “the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” Yet the language in which the world is described is that of maths, a relatively sound grasp of which is needed to comprehend the difficulties that physicists are trying to resolve as well as the possible solutions. Mr Cox has secured a large fan base with his boyish good looks, his happy turns of phrase and his knack for presenting complex ideas using simple analogies. He also admirably shies away from dumbing down. “The Quantum Universe” is not a dry undergraduate text book, but nor is it a particularly easy read.

The subject matter is hard. Quantum mechanics, which describes in subatomic detail a shadowy world in which cats can be simultaneously alive and dead, is notoriously difficult to grasp. Its experiments yield bizarre results that can be explained only by embracing the maths that describe them, and its theories make outrageous predictions (such as the existence of antimatter) that have nevertheless later been verified. Messrs Cox and Forshaw say they have included the maths “mainly because it allows us to really explain why things are the way they are. Without it, we should have to resort to the physicist-guru mentality whereby we pluck profundities out of thin air, and neither author would be comfortable with guru status.”

That stance might comfort the authors, but to many readers they will nonetheless seem to pluck equations out of thin air. Yet their decision to include some of the hard stuff leaves open the possibility that some readers might actually engage in the slog that leads to higher pleasures. For non-sloggers alternative routes are offered: Messrs Cox and Forshaw use clockfaces to illustrate how particles interact with one another, a drawing of how guitar strings twang and a photograph of a vibrating drum. A diagram, rather than an equation, is used to explain one promising theory of how matter acquires mass, a question that experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will hopefully soon answer.

The authors have wisely chosen to leaven their tome with amusing tales of dysfunctional characters among scholars who developed quantum mechanics in the 1920s and beyond, as well as with accounts of the philosophical struggles with which they grappled and the occasional earthy aside. Where the subject matter is a trifle dull, Messrs Cox and Forshaw acknowledge it: of Heinrich Kayser, who a century ago completed a six-volume reference book documenting the spectral lines generated by every known element, they observe, “He must have been great fun at dinner parties.” And they make some sweeping generalisations about their colleagues who pore over equations, “Physicists are very lazy, and they would not go to all this trouble unless it saved time in the long run.”

Whether or not readers of “The Quantum Universe” will follow all the maths, the authors’ love for their subject shines through the book. “There is no better demonstration of the power of the scientific method than quantum theory,” they write. That may be so, but physicists all over the world, Messrs Cox and Forshaw included, are longing for the next breakthrough that will supersede the claim. Hopes are pinned on experiments currently under way at CERN that may force physicists to rethink their understanding of the universe, and inspire Messrs Cox and Forshaw to write their next book—equations and all.

from the print edition | Books and arts

‘The Information’ by James Gleick – Book Review by Janet Maslin | New York Times

Reposted ‘The Information’ by James Gleick - Review (nytimes.com)
“The Information,” by James Gleick, is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is to sand.
This book is assuredly going to have to skip up to the top of my current reading list.

“The Information” is so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it. Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly. Imagine luxuriating on a Wi-Fi-equipped desert island with Mr. Gleick’s book, a search engine and no distractions. “The Information” is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is to sand.

In this relaxed setting, take the time to differentiate among the Brownian (motion), Bodleian (library) and Boolean (logic) while following Mr. Gleick’s version of what Einstein called “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” or “spooky action at a distance.” Einstein wasn’t precise about what this meant, and Mr. Gleick isn’t always precise either. His ambitions for this book are diffuse and far flung, to the point where providing a thumbnail description of “The Information” is impossible.

So this book’s prologue is its most slippery section. It does not exactly outline a unifying thesis. Instead it hints at the amalgam of logic, philosophy, linguistics, research, appraisal and anecdotal wisdom that will follow. If Mr. Gleick has one overriding goal it is to provide an animated history of scientific progress, specifically the progress of the technology that allows information to be recorded, transmitted and analyzed. This study’s range extends from communication by drumbeat to cognitive assault by e-mail.

As an illustration of Mr. Gleick’s versatility, consider what he has to say about the telegraph. He describes the mechanical key that made telegraphic transmission possible; the compression of language that this new medium encouraged; that it literally was a medium, a midway point between fully verbal messages and coded ones; the damaging effect its forced brevity had on civility; the confusion it created as to what a message actually was (could a mother send her son a dish of sauerkraut?) and the new conceptual thinking that it helped implement. The weather, which had been understood on a place-by-place basis, was suddenly much more than a collection of local events.

Beyond all this Mr. Gleick’s telegraph chapter, titled “A Nervous System for the Earth,” finds time to consider the kind of binary code that began to make sense in the telegraph era. It examines the way letters came to treated like numbers, the way systems of ciphers emerged. It cites the various uses to which ciphers might be put by businessmen, governments or fiction writers (Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe). Most of all it shows how this phase of communication anticipated the immense complexities of our own information age.

Although “The Information” unfolds in a roughly chronological way, Mr. Gleick is no slave to linearity. He freely embarks on colorful digressions. Some are included just for the sake of introducing the great eccentrics whose seemingly marginal inventions would prove to be prophetic. Like Richard Holmes’s “Age of Wonder” this book invests scientists with big, eccentric personalities. Augusta Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, may have been spectacularly arrogant about what she called “my immense reasoning faculties,” claiming that her brain was “something more than merely mortal.” But her contribution to the writing of algorithms can, in the right geeky circles, be mentioned in the same breath as her father’s contribution to poetry.

The segments of “The Information” vary in levels of difficulty. Grappling with entropy, randomness and quantum teleportation is the price of enjoying Mr. Gleick’s simple, entertaining riffs on the Oxford English Dictionary’s methodology, which has yielded 30-odd spellings of “mackerel” and an enchantingly tongue-tied definition of “bada-bing” and on the cyber-battles waged via Wikipedia. (As he notes, there are people who have bothered to fight over Wikipedia’s use of the word “cute” to accompany a picture of a young polar bear.) That Amazon boasts of being able to download a book called “Data Smog” in less than a minute does not escape his keen sense of the absurd.

As it traces our route to information overload, “The Information” pays tribute to the places that made it possible. He cites and honors the great cogitation hives of yore. In addition to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Mount Rushmore of theoretical science, he acknowledges the achievements of corporate facilities like Bell Labs and I.B.M.’s Watson Research Center in the halcyon days when many innovations had not found practical applications and progress was its own reward.

“The Information” also lauds the heroics of mathematicians, physicists and computer pioneers like Claude Shannon, who is revered in the computer-science realm for his information theory but not yet treated as a subject for full-length, mainstream biography. Mr. Shannon’s interest in circuitry using “if … then” choices conducting arithmetic in a binary system had novelty when he began formulating his thoughts in 1937. “Here in a master’s thesis by a research assistant,” Mr. Gleick writes, “was the essence of the computer revolution yet to come.”

Among its many other virtues “The Information” has the rare capacity to work as a time machine. It goes back much further than Shannon’s breakthroughs. And with each step backward Mr. Gleick must erase what his readers already know. He casts new light on the verbal flourishes of the Greek poetry that preceded the written word: these turns of phrase could be as useful for their mnemonic power as for their art. He explains why the Greeks arranged things in terms of events, not categories; how one Babylonian text that ends with “this is the procedure” is essentially an algorithm; and why the telephone and the skyscraper go hand in hand. Once the telephone eliminated the need for hand-delivered messages, the sky was the limit.

In the opinion of “The Information” the world of information still has room for expansion. We may be drowning in spam, but the sky’s still the limit today.

Repost: ‘Loca’ event raises over $6 mil | Variety

Reposted ‘Loca’ event raises over $6 mil by Army ArcherdArmy Archerd (Variety)

GOOD MORNING: Sunday morning, hours after they departed the SRO BevHilton ballroom where their Carousel of Hope Ball raised more than $6 million ($1.5 million from Marvin) benefiting the Children’s Diabetes Foundation, Marvin and Barbara Davis were hosting a lavish lunch for the out-of-town guests plus participants in the fundraiser. Marvin still couldn’t get over the ball’s finale when he saw wife Barbara on stage shaking it with Ricky Martin — who had the entire ballroom on its feet dancing. Barbara had also told Michael Jackson, “Ricky wants to meet you.” So Jackson and his date Elizabeth Taylor made their way backstage with Barbara, who shoved Michael onstage for a brief moment in the spotlight with the new king, Ricky Martin. Martin had flown in from Australia with his entire troupe to perform gratis, as did the other artists. I had been annoyed by Jackson and Taylor, who were sitting directly in front of our table. I thought them rude as they engaged in conversation during Ricky’s first two numbers. Jackson’s doctor, dermatologist Arnold Klein; had sidled up to talk with them during Martin’s performance. (Klein’s nurse Debbie Rowe, you recall, married/divorced Michael and bore him two children: son Prince, 3-1/2, and daughter Paris, 2-1/2). Jackson and his children have been regular (biweekly) visitors at the Davis’ home and the offspring get high marks from Marvin. John Davis had birthday-gifted dad Marvin with two tiny donkeys which graze on the lush lawn; the celeb lunch bunch had a full view of the tiny critters who have free rein (and you know what that includes) of the garden … At the BevHilton, Elizabeth and Michael were seated at one end of the head table on the first riser and in full view of the crowd below. As you might imagine, their presence created a major crush of visitors; some like Shirley MacLaine and Carrie Fisher (who just toiled with Taylor in “Those Old Broads”) carried on their conversation on the carpeting alongside Elizabeth. Another of the “Broads,” Joan Collins, was seated elsewhere with Evie and Leslie Bricusse. Collins is off to England to be at daughter Tara Newley’s side during her divorce battle. Joan is no stranger to that stage.

IT WAS NO SECRET that Ricky Martin, while the toast of the (young) world, was nervous about appearing before this mature, star-studded audience of performers and execs. He needn’t have been! Sure, he’s had movie offers but can’t accept because of the time they’d take away from his concerts and recordings. He winged out (in his plane) immediately after the BevHilton benefit to Miami … Performers at future BevHilton events will be pleased to know that Merv Griffin, the Carousel Ball’s host, has built a new backstage facility for talent. It was appreciated by the magnificent performers Toni Braxton (who said her mother has diabetes), young Charlotte Church (whatta voice!), David Foster and the musicians. Jay Leno’s takeoff tape on candidates Gore and Bush was classic, but his remarks about President Clinton are getting to be overdone by now. Touching moments were the remarks by Barbara Davis, daughter Dana (and the presentation of a hand receiving the brass ring sculpture) and Sidney Poitier. George Schlatter did a terrif job again producing the show … Clive Davis, one of the music chairmen, just signed Luther Vandross and O-Town to his new J Records and has now added a young duo from Brazil: Medeiros, brothers Julian and Rodalgo M. who sing in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Attending with Davis was his cousin Jo Schuman Silver, owner of SanFran’s fantastic “Beach Blanket Babylon” show, which continues SRO for every performance … Among those who stopped by to hug Michael Jackson was Berry Gordy, his discoverer. Also Suzanne De Passe. Also there Keely Shaye Smith and Pierce Brosnan, who told me he doesn’t expect to be away at work when their baby arrives in February. And they probably will not have the wedding until summer, in Ireland … As always, the Carousel Ball featured a silent auction which preceded in the BevHilton’s rooms surrounding the lobby and ballroom. Dana Davis and sister Nancy Davis-Rickel again chaired and the auction brought in $623,389 — to date. They are still selling items. Celebrity-designed plates brought in $56,700. Guests included Line Renaud, just in from Paris. She arrived with Veronique and Gregory Peck (he contributed one of the designed plates). Neil Diamond even bought a painting by LeRoy Neiman, which he had contributed … Marvin Davis, whose properties over the years have included 20th Century Fox and the Beverly Hills Hotel, has a new affiliation with Lend Lease with plans to build everything “all over the world.” Meanwhile the Davises continue to build to one day find a cure for childhood diabetes.

AND NOW, AS THEY SAY on the 11 o’clock news, “some late-breaking news”: Charlton Heston, who starred in the first two “Planet of the Apes” pix for 20th, will cameo in the next. Yes, he was killed off in the second pic — but now he returns as an ape. No, he’s not a foot soldier, so he won’t have to carry a gun — as I did, as an ape (member of the National Rhesus Assn., ya know) in the first “Planet” pic, opposite Heston. Producer Richard Zanuck and director Tim Burton launch next week in Paige, Ariz., site of the first.

It’s all about the donkeys:

John Davis had birthday-gifted dad Marvin with two tiny donkeys which graze on the lush lawn; the celeb lunch bunch had a full view of the tiny critters who have free rein (and you know what that includes) of the garden …

Alumni Notes–November 1999 | Johns Hopkins Magazine

Reposted Alumni Notes--November 1999 by Julie Snyder (Johns Hopkins Magazine)
Class of 1996: JEFFREY P. DOSHNA and SARAH (WATSON) DOSHNA write: "We are pleased to announce the birth of our son, Noah Alexander Doshna on April 29. Sarah continues to work as a process engineer for Merck & Co., in their sterile pilot plants. Although Jeff is continuing his doctoral studies in the department of urban planning at Rutgers University, he has assumed the role of 'stay-at-home' dad for the time being. Fellow Vincent-Willard alumna IVY WONG '96, paid a visit in June and brought a card for Noah signed by ROGER OEN '96, JAMES ARMSTRONG '94, CHRIS ALDRICH '96, MAX BARTEAU '96, TAMMY WU '96, JANET LEE '96, PETER SYLVES '96, and TONY TSAI '96. We also regularly see JOHN PAXTON '96."
8/8/2018: I’m collecting some snippet mentions of me from the early days of the web. Notes like this online (and also in print at the time) were the original social networking.

Johns Hopkins Goes West | Alumni News–June 1997 | JHU Magazine

Reposted Johns Hopkins Goes West | Alumni News--June 1997 by Billie Walker (editor) (Johns Hopkins Magazine)
More than 400 guests attended Johns Hopkins convocations in San Francisco and Burbank in March, hearing from President William R. Brody and other outstanding faculty speakers about developments at Johns Hopkins. The Southern California convocation, held at the Walt Disney Studios, was hosted by University trustee John F. Cooke, Disney's executive vice president-corporate affairs.
During the convocation luncheon at the Disney Commissary in Burbank, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, A&S ’66, at left, talks with Chris Aldrich, A&S ’96. At right is James Neal, the Sheridan Director of Homewood’s Eisenhower Library and one of the event speakers.

After his computer music performance at the Southern California convocation, Peabody’s Forrest Tobey is surrounded by admirers as he explains his use of arm gestures to trigger sounds stored in the synthesizer.

In Pasadena on the evening before the Southern California convocation, President Brody meets Los Angeles area alumni and friends at a dinner hosted by University trustee Charles D. Miller. Here he talks with Dr. and Mrs. J. Michael Criley, at left, and Dr. and Mrs. Richard Call.