Why America is losing its former advantage....

via videosift.com
via videosift.com

Belief

I believe in science.

All scientists and engineers do.

We take it on faith that electrons exist, and that the great results and theorems hold up to scrutiny. We trust our colleagues and historians when they report on important experimental results.

I don't pretend to understand evolution beyond what was explained in my high school textbook, but I believe in it. I believe that the scientists employed the scientific method, and that this theorem has stood up to scrutiny over the decades.

We take these things on faith because it is impractical for us to do otherwise. Yes, with time, resources, and effort, I would reproduce the experiments I read in journal and textbooks, but this is rather unlikely, isn't it. Repeatability is a good principle, but is for all intents and purposes a platitude. We rely on faith and trust.

How are we (science believers) any different than the religious zealot who has read his holy book and several commentaries on it; has read and heard about the observations of miracles and mystical experiences from others; and intellectually agrees with the tenets of his faith? Are adherents to science that far off from religious zealots?

Science works, you say? Bridges hold up the weight of vehicles, my plasma TV set works, etc. But how do we know these results were obtained from the scientific method. For all we know, these results could have been obtained by silent medication and prayer. We trust the folks who reported these results that lead to technological progress that they used the scientific method.

Psychohistory

Via Prometheus6, I have heard that one of my favorate scifi epics may be coming to the big screen. Foundation is an centuries spanning "future history" of a galactic empire, its fall, and the attempts of many groups to birth a new, better empire from the ashes.

These stories were written over the span of 50 years, and you can see in Isaac Asimov's style the perspectives and foci of a young versus an old man. 

I always enjoy clever protagonists and plot twists, and as a younger reader I enjoyed the way that in the stories cold calculations drafted decades previously could defeat brute force in the present. (in some ways, this is very similar to Obama's defeat of McCain: polished strategic planning against harsh, day-to-day snap politics.)

As an older man I have read his stories with an eye to his descriptions of psychohistory, the science used to shape historical forces decades before they happen. This discipline assumes that a galaxy full of people can provide enough statistical significance to treat society as a physical object with governing "physical" laws of behavior. 

I do not know how much I have been influenced by asimov, but I am actually working on ideas that bear some resemblance to psychohistory. I am using them not to save an empire but for more practical purposes, including marketing and valuation.

RIP ITO

Kyyoshi Ito may not mean much to many; but if you study stochastic and probability methods, his name rings loudly. He is one of the architects that developed and refined the math used today to describe systems with random characteristics, in fields as diverse as finance and physics.

Ito's Lemma is probably his most famous result: this is the stochastic (ie, random) equivalent of the chain rule in derivative calculus. Without his contribution, the Black-Scholes equations/results would not be possible. Though maybe, given recent events, that would be a good thing.

Anyway, he has recently passed. Stirling Newberry attempts to explain the significance of Ito's work. Here are  more organized explanations of his work and its significance.

Hmmm. Finance professor has almost identical thoughts.

Terrifying

 The government has figured out how to practically, quickly, and seamlessly use detailed personal information. A woman boards a plane without ID because the TSA knew the color of her house.Unbelieveable; I am used to thinking of the government as too incompetent to really pull something like this off. I guess change is a coming.

Reminds me of this must see scenario: Pizza Palace: