Football Earth and the Degree Confluence Project

Now this may be the wildest web-based community project to date: The Degree Confluence project. The project goal is amazingly audacious - to "to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted ..."

A basic calculation shows that there are 64,442 confluences . ( To see this, forget the poles for a second - they are points of only one latitude 90 of - 90, and 360 longitude-values. The raining confluences then are 179 latitude lines * 360 longitude line = 64,440 confluences. Add the poles to get to 64,442)

The project was started in 1996 by Alex Jarrett because he "liked the idea of visiting a location represented by a round number such as 43°00'00"N 72°00'00"W. What would be there? Would other people have recognized this as a unique spot? "

He also writes that he had recently purchased a GPS and was looking to"come up with something to do with it."

After posting about the confluences he marked to his web site, apparently readers marked some of their own, and the project " just snowballed from there."

Boy, did it. Currently there have been over 5,000 successful markings!

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This Just In - Media Mistake Rate Doubles!

It's been 8 months since news broke of the US population reaching the 300 million mark, only 39 years after the population reached 200 million in 1967. At the time many news reports claimed that the US growth rate was accelerating.  The reason? It had taken 52 years for the US population to double from 100 to 200 million, but only 39 years to go from 200 to 300 million.  Hence the accelerated growth rate.

This is  totally incorrect reasoning!

Using the Rule of 70 (Growth Rate x Doubling Time ≈ 70),; a 52-year doubling time implies a growth rate of approximately 1.3%. However, the 39-year-span in going from 200 to 300 million is not a doubling time - this is only an increase of 50%. Therefore, the growth rate over the last 39 years (since 1967) is approximately 1.04%, i.e. the US growth rate has declined.

So a lot of media totally botched the message - not unusual given the rampant innumeracy (a wonderful word, and terribly debilitating problem for citizenry as described so well by John Allen Paulos in his book of the same title) in this country.

Is the growth rate still diminishing? This is probably a good bet. Population growth rates in the US dropped for most of the 20 century (see the Historical National Population Estimates for a listing of yearly grown rates form 1900-1999), starting at a value of approximately 2% in 1900. (Not surprisingly, there was a slight blip upwards post-World War II)

But there is every evidence to suggest that innumeracy, at least among the media, is staying level - and maybe growing.

College Programs in Science Writing

I am always interested in university programs that combine science and writing. The Stevens Institute of Technology has a very unique program titled the Center for Science Writings, which was created in 2005 to "emphasize the vital importance of writing and other forms of communication to science."

With award-winning author and journalist John Horgan as Director, the CSW sponsors a number of exciting and important activities. Two of particular interest to me are a blog that "explore(s) the boundaries between science and the media", and a list of the greatest science books of the 20th century. So far there are 50 books listed, and readers are encouraged to comment and suggest other books. The CSW criteria are that the books "stand out because of their subject matter, their rhetorical style and their impact on science and the rest of culture."

The blog contains a number of interesting posts that are motivated by press reports - something that I occasionally post about here. There are also a few posts written by students, although it is not clear whether these are class assignments. I will be teaching Chaos and Fractals again in Fall 2007, and all students will soon be posting here - most likely in a separate journal on this site. The CSW blog has already given me some a source of interesting readings for my upcoming class and a possible assignment - having my students respond to some of the CSW posts.

The book list is fascinating. Along with standards that all would expect - Einsteins' The Meaning of Relativity, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Dawkins' Selfish Gene,  Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, Watson/Crick's Double Helix, etc.. - I am really glad to see that Gleick's Chaos made the list as well as Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature. Then there other books that I probably would never have come up with, but am glad that someone did: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, Dianne Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses...even Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So be sure to check out the list, and make a suggestion or two. (Don't Panic - I see that someone has recommended Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe!)

If there are any readers out there who know of other interesting science & writing programs, please post a comment with a link.

Imagery in Art and Science - from da Vinci to the Desktop

da Vinci catheterized? See below for details.  Click to enlargeReaders interested in more of the science-art boundary should check out the review by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles in the May 2007 Scientific American. Titled The Interplay of Art and Science,the piece is an in-depth look at two books by Martin Kemp:

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design
and
Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope

(Note: Kemp is a frequent contributor to the Science in Culture column in Nature. A leading expert on da Vinci, he is professor of art history at Oxford.)

According to Kevles, a common theme in both books is how art affects imagery in science and science affects imagery in art, which leads to some very interesting and provocative ideas about digital imagery.

Two parts of the review are of particular interest. In one, Kevles describes how Kemp relates D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's analysis of the shape and size of living organisms spelled out in his famous work On Growth and Form to the "visual mathematics of fractals, chaos theory and machine-made images."

Continuing with the idea of the connection between visual imagery, art, science, and life, Kevles closes with some of Kemp's concerns about the imagery produced by science (e.g. in the form of medical imaging technology) and the reality behind it. The following is an excerpt: (See Kevles' full review for much more)

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Real Physics and Faked Farm Music

The ultimate in modeling occurs when a simulation of physical events is so real that reality pales in comparision.

Consider, for example, the case of the University of Iowa Farm Music Machine, as described in a recent e-mail making the rounds:

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa.

Amazingly, 97% of the machines Components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft Iowa, yes farm equipment! It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort.

It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

If you haven't seen/heard this device, check out the video. (Note - this is a wmv file. If your media player can't play it, try viewing the film at any one of hundreds of websites, e.g. digg)

While this is an amazing video, the Farm Music Machine is obviously not true - it is a brilliant computer animation produced by Animusic titled Pipe Dream. The e-mail describing the FMM may just be the most benign, and popular urban legend listed on Snopes.

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Ida Hoos - On The Perils of Mathematical Modeling and Public Policy

The need for careful analysis of all assumptions that go into a mathematical model, and a corresponding willingness to investigate the predicted output of a model vs. what is actually observed, is sine qua non for all mathematics modelers.

I mention this because I just heard of the death of Ida Hoos - someone whom I was unfamiliar with, but who published frequently on the potential problems with mathematical modeling in the social sciences.

From the 5/5/2007 NYTimes obit by Katie Hafner:

...Dr. Hoos, a sociologist, was widely recognized as an outspoken critic of systems analysis, which came to prominence after World War II. The approach used mathematical models to perform cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments on complex technologies like radar systems and military aircraft.

With the concept strengthening in the 1950s and ’60s, when the use of computers to assess technology grew more popular, she wrote widely on a need to balance it with other considerations like effects on the work force.

“A kind of quantomania prevails in the assessment of technologies,” Dr. Hoos wrote in 1979 in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. “What cannot be counted simply doesn't count, and so we systematically ignore large and important areas of concern.”

Dr. Hoos urged national decision makers to take such assessments “with a large measure of skepticism lest they lead us to regrettable, if not disastrous, conclusions.”

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Hot Baseball News - Say Hey to Global Warming?

Whether or not baseball is still America's Game has been debated for a long time.  For some, its often-glacial pace can't compete with the speed and physical intensity of the other major sports.

But for others the glacial pace is both comforting and a description of their rate of acceptance of the reality of climate change.

Recently, Sports Illustrated devoted a sizeable part of an issue to the effects of global warming on sports. From Golf courses to ski slopes, the article was a thorough summary of potential changes to sports because of the possible loss of outdoor venues. (See Going, Going Green by Alexander Wolff). A lot of doomsday scenarios to be sure - but some chilling images nonetheless. None more so than a sidebar on The Catch - Willie Mays' famous steal of Vic Wertz's shot to center field in the 1954 World Series between the NY Giants and Cleveland.

The story is that with global warming, average temperatures have risen just enough to make Mays' catch much harder, and quite possibly impossible, even for Willie. This is because the higher temperatures produce air that is less dense, allowing the ball to travel just a little bit farther then it would have otherwise. Compared to average temps of 76° in 1954, today's average temp of slightly more than 77° would give Wertz's fly ball an extra two inches of loft. Would Mays still get the ball, or would it hit the tip of the glove's webbing and bounce off? Would the Giants go on to sweep the Indians?

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Poker, Popper, and Wittgenstein - This Ain't No Love Story

It's hard to imagine a time when big-time philosophers roamed the earth as true public figures, in search of weighty issues, faculty positions, and total intellectual superiority over fellow philosophers who dared to argue with them.

Such was the time in the first half of the 20th Century, with one of the main battlegrounds the post-war scene at Cambridge University, home base of Bertrand Russel, GE Moore, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein - the iconoclastic bad boy of philosophy, cult figure, and master of cryptic utterances who had a devastating penchant for eviscerating the work of philosophers he disagreed with - which was most other philosophers without the initials LW.

The scene was the Moral Science Society, which was was holding their monthly meeting on October 25, 1946. Karl Popper - at that time just starting a position at the London School of Economics, was already causing a stir with his The Logic of Scientific Discovery - was in town presenting a talk titled Are There Philosophical Problems?

The head of the MSD was none other than Ludwig W. Wittgenstein, scion of one of the wealthiest families in pre-war Austria, who had renounced all his wealth to live an ascetic life of the mind, spirit, and body that is so improbably eccentric that he and his ideas are recurring figures and themes in many fictional stories that need a touch of the bizarre (e.g. The World As I Found It, by Bruce Duffy, A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr, Wittgensteins' Mistress by David Markson).

Apparently Popper was no no shrinking violet either : a truly fesity, take-no-philosophical-prisoner scold according to many contemporaries.

Back to the dom's room at Cambridge. You get the picture: smoky, with drab walls, scuffed, darkened oak chairs and table, leaded glass separators on the casement windows, bottles of port, an old fireplace with soot-covered bricks inside, and... a fireplace poker soon to be infamous for the briefest of philosophical battles. What happened in that room is the stuff of philosophical lore - 10-minute argument that flashed between Wittgenstein and Popper that is still recounted and debated today.

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Thomas Kuhn in High Def - Paradigm Shifts, Blu-Rays, and the NFL

Until I read James Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science in 1987, I had only a passing knowledge of  paradigm shifts, one of the defining features of science described by Thomas Kuhn in his Structures of Scientific Revolution. Gleick used the paradigm shift idea to describe the break with the overly linear science brought on by the new discoveries of Chaos Theory - a usage of the paradigm shift concept that seems to adhere to Kuhn's definition.

A concise summary of  Kuhn's ideas can be found in Lawrence van Gelder's June 19, 1996 NYTimes obit:

His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could overthrow theories of a world governed by design.

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No Prediction, No Soup For You...

There has been an intermittent dialogue taking place in response to my previous post on The Economic Modeling of Religion, in which Bob Ekelund, one of the authors of The Marketplace of Christianity and a professor of Economics of Auburn U responded to misgivings about the applicability of the economic model. Recently David George - a colleague at La Salle known for his work in meta-preferences (see his Preference Pollution: How Markets Create the Desires we Dislike) has added a provocative comment to the mix.

So I am starting a new thread here with a top-level post for two reasons: to make sure that newer viewers are award of the dialogue, and particularly Bob Ekelund's responses and defense of the economic model of religion, and to answer David George's point concerning understanding and prediction, which will give me more of chance to discuss this continuum.

An excerpt from D. George's response:

Second, I must disagree with both of you that, to quote Bob Ekelund, "any model must have predictive power." As you, Rich, appear to point out in an earlier entry, "understanding" is also of great importance. Work that I have done tends to focus on exactly such understand[sic] without claiming to be able to predict. The late Milton Friedman brought economics to its present sorry methodological state by asserting in an early 1950s article that "assumptions don't matter." I have seen first-hand the mischief that this can cause. Beginning, I believe, with Thaler and Sheffrin around 1980, attempts to explain internal conflict have begun with the assumption of "two-selves" (or "multiple-selves") residing within each individual. If pressed, advocates of these models will probably stress that person isn’t really “two-selves” but simply behaves "as if" he is. As I have argued extensively, this does little to further our understanding of internal conflict. To tell someone trying to understand her internal conflict that she has more than one self begs the question, to put it mildly. To explain that the

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