The Fabric of the Cosmos

During my recent trip to Boston / MIT, I picked up a copy of "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, and I read about half of it by now. It is a great reading; I think I am starting to get a vague idea about both how relativity and quantum physics work, subjects that I was utterly ignorant of not long ago. Sometimes the references to the Simpsons and Springfield and agent Mulder and Scully and baseball can be annoying, but overall I am really enjoying this book.

And I am realizing how 'narrow-minded' we humans are. Evolution shaped our minds so that we easily understand what is important for our survival, but there was no selective pressure to evolve an understanding of how things work on much larger or much smaller spatial and temporal scales: having some intuitive ideas about what trajectory a thrown piece of rock describes probably had some survival value, but our ancestors did not need to know about the probabilistic nature of the subatomic world in order to get through the hard times.

My talk on bed thicknesses and power laws

At the end of April I am going to give a talk on power-law and lognormal distributions and how they apply to turbidite bed thickness data. Here is the abstract. And here are some previous thoughts and links on the subject of log-log plots, power-laws and bed-thickness distributions.

On digital SLRs and compact cameras

When last summer I bought a Nikon D70, I only knew that I wanted a very good digital camera. Since all the reviews about the Nikon D70 were extremely positive, this was my final choice. But even after I bought it, I had some afterthoughts that maybe it would have been better to get an expensive (but similarly priced to a 'cheap' DSLR) point-and-shoot camera that has a fixed lens, like the Nikon 8700 or the Sony DSC-F828. With these, you get a lens with a wider range of zoom, without having to buy another expensive lens and then having ot change them all the time.

But since then I have been using the Nikon D70 quite often (not as often as I'd like to, but that's another story), and I am perfectly happy with it. Ken Rockwell explains very well here why it is a no-brainer whether to buy an expensive point-and-shoot camera or a 'cheap' DSLR for the same price. Even the latest and greatest point-and-shoot cameras do not have the speed necessary to capture moving subjects. Here is how Ken Rockwell sums it up:

"For a small snapshot camera get a $300 point-and-shoot. I have one, love it, and take it everywhere.If you want to spend a grand for serious digital photography forget the expensive p/s cameras and go straight to any DSLR. Since you can get a far superior DSLR for what you used to have to pay for just a p/s as of 2004 I see no need for the expensive p/s digital cameras. The reason we still have expensive p/s cameras today is because camera companies still have two sets of development and marketing teams, one for each class of camera, so there are still people at these companies pushing the expensive p/s cameras even though the DSLRs made by the same company are better for the same price. Other companies, like Sony, don't make any real DSLRs and of course they will promote their p/s cameras. Don't waste $1,000 on a point and shoot unless you really want to trade off ease of use, speed and image quality for a little size and weight."

Ian Anderson on Christmas

The best thing about Christmas is that you get a few free days -- and I manage to spend them without worrying too much about not working. If I want to be more sympathetic, I think I can pretty much agree with Ian Anderson's (from the good old Jethro Tull) views on the subject:

"My views on Christmas? Well, I’m not exactly a practising paid-up Christian but I have grown up and lived with a so-called Christian society for 55 years and still feel great warmth for the nostalgia, festive occasion and family togetherness, so much a part of that time of year. Maybe without Christmas we would have that much less to celebrate and enjoy in this troubled old world. But it’s really all the Winter Solstice and the re-birth of nature overlaid with the common sense and righteous teachings of Mr. C.

A Christmas in this modern world should, in my view, accommodate the leisure needs and affections of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and agnostics, as well as Fido the family dog and Felix the cat. Throw in a few lost cousins and that dreadful man from next door and you have it! Sip the sloe gin, pull a cracker (so long as she’s not the daughter of that dreadful man from next door), kiss and cuddle under the mistletoe, toss Vegan disciplines aside, gobble the turkey (steady on, now) and have a therapeutic respite from the rigours of daily life."

Introverts and extroverts

An article on introverts by Jonathan Rauch -- it also has been published in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" 2004 volume (edited by Steven Pinker):

"With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. "People person" is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private"--narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours."