Lab Monkey

Eric Suh. Graduate Student. Simian with opposable thumbs.

Drop him a line.

A new blog format

It’s 2012, and that means it’s time for another blog format change!

I’ve decided in more recent times to start eschewing cloud services in favor of remote solutions more directly under my control. Moving this blog to a new format and off of Tumblr, is one small step. (The occasional server problems at Tumblr and my need to tinker with things served to catalyze this particular project).

Will I be able to keep this up? We’ll see. For now, though, I have a custom Hakyll/Haskell script translating my Markdown files into static HTML, which I can then upload and serve from basically anywhere. My blog posts are therefore portable, future-proof, implementation-independent (sort of), and easily version-controlled using git. Hopefully, this will be a robust and ultimately long-lived solution; maybe I’ll finally stop migrating blog services every two years or so.

Anyway, this address will soon redirect to http://www.ericsuh.com/blog, where my new blog will be. All of the posts heretoforth on this blog will be present there, newly reformatted. Please update your RSS feeds!

Carolyn Maloney parroting Elsevier lines

Michael Eisen shows that Rep. Carolyn Maloney has entire sentences and phrases identical to blog comments written by an Elsevier VP for Global Corporate Relations:

The comments on my blog were clearly Reller – his writing was natural and engaged directly with what other people were saying, so I’m sure he wasn’t just spouting prepared text. There are only two viable explanations for how essentially the same text ended up in Maloney’s letter. Either she copied it from my blog without citing its source (a clear violation of the Creative Commons Attribution license that governs all content on the site), or, Reller wrote the letter, either directly, or indirectly by preparing text that Maloney’s office could use to defend the bill. So Rep. Maloney [is] a plagiarist or an Elsevier puppet.

….

So, given the history of their campaign contributions to Rep Maloney, I’m not really surprised to find that Elsevier’s fingers would be all over this bill and Rep Maloney’s defense of it.

Go to the link for the relevant passages.

Pre-rigor to Rigor to Post-Rigor

I just read this blog post by Terrence Tao, in which he talks about the three stages of mathematical education — pre-rigor, rigor, and post-rigor:

It is of course vitally important that you know how to think rigorously, as this gives you the discipline to avoid many common errors and purge many misconceptions. Unfortunately, this has the unintended consequence that “fuzzier” or “intuitive” thinking (such as heuristic reasoning, judicious extrapolation from examples, or analogies with other contexts such as physics) gets deprecated as “non-rigorous”. All too often, one ends up discarding one’s initial intuition and is only able to process mathematics at a formal level, thus getting stalled at the second stage of one’s mathematical education.

The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition.

I do think this applies in other fields as well, even experimental sciences. My own personal examples include statistics and thermodynamics. For the former, I feel as though for certain aspects I’ve reached the stage where I’m fairly comfortable with the theory and I no longer need the absolute rigor of going through systematic symbolic manipulation to get where I’m going. On the other hand, for thermodynamics, I definitely plateaued at the stage where I was lost in a sea of symbols with no intuitive way out. I could calculate a lot of rigorous conclusions, but it felt like I’d lost my inner sense of direction. Terrence Tao’s post definitely inspires hope that this is a natural progression in my march to actually understanding any subject.

How we think

My mother-in-law was driving our family back from a day trip to Joshua Tree National Park (awesome, by the way, and the night sky view there is spec-tac-ular), when suddenly we heard a “thup-thup-thupping” sound coming from beneath the car. My mother-in-law had blown two tires in the past few months, so her first thought was “oh no, is the tire flat again?”

But wait, there was another possibility. The road was kind of rough; maybe the sound was just the road surface? My mother-in-law switched lanes, and voila, the sound went away. So, not the tire, just the rough road surface.

Ok, so this story was kind of boring, but it struck me that switching lanes to see if the problem was the road or the tire was a very natural way to find the truth. It sure sounds natural enough that the story is really boring.

But it’s also a scientific way of going about the problem. Science isn’t some sort of hard, unnaturally convoluted way of looking at the world. It actually comes to us instinctively in a lot of situations. Just think about some possible scenarios about what might be happening, and then test them in a way that lets you tell the difference. The only extra steps for ‘science’ are these two: get others to try the same test to make sure it works, and try other tests just to make sure this one test wasn’t a fluke. In my opinion, that’s the scientific method, not that horribly nitpicky garbage they feed school kids about “hypothesis-test-conclusion.” That’s not how science is done; that’s how science is written about in retrospect, because it’s nice and organized.

Science isn’t hard, and it comes naturally to all of us as the best way to figure out the real, hard truth. If we all recognized that a little bit more, maybe there would be more trust in scientists and more kids who get excited about the parts of science that matter: blowing sh*t up.