#1 The periodic table

I would love to be able to memorize this song, but even I’m not that big of a geek.

#2 The Pi Song

This could have been horrible if it was not sung so well. This is another song I have little interest in actually learning but its always fun to know PI to at least 10 places…just incase.  

#3 The Universe Song – Monty Python

I really love this song and sing it all time to remember how big the universe really is. This version is sang by Clint Black (I am from Texas you know, plus the original lacks such quality visuals).

#4 The Universe…Again

A catchy tune and inspiring version, but since it lacks the numeric information of the Monty Python version it will always live in its shadow.

#5 The Nations of the World

This is one of my favorites. I have the first 2 sections memorized, but I loose it when he gets to Africa. Unfortunately, like most of these songs the information is increasingly out of date. 

#6 I am the very model of a modern major-general

While not necessarily conveying a lot of scientific or practical information (that’s kind of the point of the joke), this famous scene for the play the “Pirates of Penzance” does have a lot of historical perspective on what he nerds of the 19th century where talking about. From a time when things like “beings animalcules” (microscopic organisms) were first discovered. The late great science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this song where he identified the meaning behind every strange and forgotten word. If you’re into retro steam punk, you’ll enjoy this vocabulary lesson.

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein (or was it Leo Cherne?…read on)

I decided to see if I could find out starting, as expected, with a simple Google search. When you search the web using Google for confirmation, its easy to find:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid” – You get 21,800 results
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid” + Einstein – 12,100 results
“The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.” Cherne – 509 results

We might stop there and say “21,000 web pages is enough evidence for me”, but WHEN did Einstein say it? WHERE? No one seems to know. A large number of these quotes seem respectable enough – many are on university web sites, computer science portals, and in textbooks. The quote was even used as the motto for Super-computing 2006 and used in the key note speech. It seems in fact to be everywhere except in any book, paper, speech, or a citable source by Albert Einstein. By this point I’m 99.9% sure he never said it – but lets keep looking.

Wikiquote (a wikipedia project) tries to track down the actual original source of all quotes lists the “powerful beyond imagination” quote as on of its unverified on the talk page. No verified quote mentions computers at all.

So in this case the web is no help, so let’s try books.

So I switched from Google web search to Google Book search. Book authors normally spend a little more time researching before they publish…most of the time. I was able to find the quote in over 190 books that Google has scanned. Unfortunately the full text is rarely available. Interestingly, most of the newer books – after 2004 readily attribute the quote to Einstein.

But no book actually about Einstein mentions the quote…or anything else about computers.

According to the book – “The New Quotable Einstein” by Freeman Dyson (take a look at the index), Einstein never mentioned computers at all. Why would he, he died in 1955, the best computer of the time looked like this:

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), began construction in 1943 and was completed 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, and weighed almost 50 tons. When it was turned off in 1955, (the year Einstein died) its estimated to have done more arithmetic than the entire human race had done prior to 1945. That IS a lot of math, maybe its possible Einstein said it after all, but we still need evidence.
 

1955 in Computer history did seem to be a big year:

So if not Einstein, then who?

“Speaking of Science”, a book of science quotations by Jon Fripp includes the quote – but doesn’t attribute it to Einstein. The entry appears like this:

The Computer is incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and an opportunity beyond imagination.
– Walesh, 1989 (Summarizing the reasons for using computer modeling for hydrologic and water quality analysis.)

Walesh huh…who’s that? While this is a book of quotes… and the while the back of his book does state that “each quote is carefully referenced”, I know I have seen it earlier than 1989

Lets see if we can find any thing before 1989

Going back to Google book search I see the quote in a fiction book – Fort Momma (Page 37 by Al Gowan - Fiction - 2003) this time attributed to Leo Cherne. Cherne’s version is slightly different: 

Let’s just find the oldest damn reference to it!

Here it is (that I can find) – 1969. In a journal called “Advances in Instrumentation” v.24 pt.4, 1969, page 691, published by Instrument Society of America. Google book search found it on a shelf at the University of Michigan and digitized it on Nov 28, 2007. Here is a bit of context I was able to tease out of Google by searching over and over…

“The net result of the overall program was a group of well trained men that had been training in the same way and, as a result, now operate the machine more uniformly. If you get nothing else out of computer installation other than a well trained crew, it alone makes it worth the effort. Even with a computer there is no substitute for a good operator. Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. On the other hand, a well trained operator as compared with a computer is incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. We think of this feature as “intelligent override” in our control system. We feel you will always have to have this to make decisions about some phases of paper machine operation. Another fringe benefit is accurate production logs. Ours are set up on a 24-hour basis, but can be gotten on demand, to evaluate our progress on a given run. We also integrate stock, chemical, and steam consumption figures to give us a good reliable picture of grade manufacturing costs. In conclusion, we at Eastex feel that what we have done on our No. 4 Machine is merely the beginning. There is no question in our minds that in the future, DDC and the systems engineering method will become the industry standard for process design, installations and operation.”

But who is the author? – Alas, I do not know. Again, I can’t get to the article. If you have access to this book, please let me know. Something tells me there are earlier versions than this, and I doubt this is the reference that popularized it, but due to the copyright fear that grips the internet, I can not get to the top of the page…

Why does this bother me?

People use quotes as a way to strengthen their own position. If I can quote someone you respect, it adds credibility to whatever argument I’m making. Over time, the truth gets further and further away. The biggest names have always attracted people who are more than willing to put words into their mouths for their own gain – Confucious, Jesus, Aristotle, Shakespere, Einstein, and the biggest, most misquoted, of them all – God. All of them have probably been quoted more for the things they never said, than things they actually did say. I imagine this is the most disappointing part of time travel, waiting around to witness words never spoken and deeds never done.

• First, there are actually 20 stars that make up the bear, and the “big dipper” is just his rump and tail – that’s right I said “tail”.
• Second, bears don’t have tails.

Why does this bear have a tail?
According the the Greeks, Zeus, the king of Greek gods, flung this bear into the heavens by its tail, stretching the tail into the shape it has now. Was this story compelling enough that Greeks, Roman’s, and all of Europe and generations of artists would see a bear? Apparently it was:

Artists have been drawing this “bear with a tail” for centuries.

Interestingly, many American Indian tribes who never heard the Greek story, also knew these seven stars as part of a large bear. They saw the three stars of the Dipper’s handle not as a tail, but as three boys chasing a bear. A much better story if you ask me.

To see how other cultures saw these stars, check out this nice site.

I think this image shows it best:

[The Big Picture; Wikipedia]

In order to survey the impact of massive solar power plants on the environment and wildlife, the federal government is freezing new solar projects on public land for two years! Buying private land is way more expensive for startups than leasing public land.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the Bush administration has demonstrated more than its share of incompetence. But they semm to have no problem dismissing environmental concerns when it comes to allowing the drilling of oil on public lands, but when it comes to letting the green competetion use that land for solar farms they impose a 2 year freeze to study the problem! Give me a break. This is more than incompetance, this smells like corruption. As a citizen and taxpayer, my vote counts for 1/300 millionth of the US public lands (which I think in this case is mostly desert right? where the sun is always shining.) I say, let them use the land. In fact, let them use it for free and get tax deductions. All of which will help to make this profitable and my energy bill lower and my air cleaner. (Read the story on the NYT)

Read More…

My first official reason to want to see this new Bolt movie.

via http://ziza.es/2008/05/15/7.html

The Odyssey, commonly dated to near 800 B.C., describes the 10-year voyage of the Greek general Odysseus to his home on the island of Ithaca after the fall of Troy in approximately 1200 B.C. Toward the end of the story, a seer named Theoclymenus prophecies the death of a group of suitors competing for the affection of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who is believed to be dead. Theoclymenus delivers his prophecy as the suitors are sitting down for their noontime meal. He foresees them entering Hades and ends his speech with the statement, “The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.” Odysseus dispatches the suitors not long thereafter.

[More]

Update: here is an animated older version. The link above goes to the version 2 story board which has not been animated.

This is something NASA has been able to demonstrate by putting atomic clocks in orbit and that the programmers of the GPS satellite system had to take into account to make the system work properly. Clocks (and all other matter) move faster when there is less gravity. Time, as we measure and understand it, passes slower on earth, than in orbit, and it is faster still once you get away from the sun, and even faster when you get out of the Milky Way. This leaves me with 2 questions:

1) If time is passing faster, the further away from a gravitation field you get, wouldn’t that explain why the universe is expanding faster? Eventually, as galaxies get further apart, there is less and less gravity in inner-galactic space, thus (I would assume) time is going faster between galaxies and the “normal” expansion process would be occurring at an accelerated pace. In other words, voids grow faster than matter rich areas of the universe because everything happens faster there. Think of a large balloon that is expanding on a wall of video monitors, some of the videos are playing faster and thus that part is expanding more rapidly. Not only that, be the expansion itself is causing gravity to be less and less on an influence because the galaxies are now further away (more space-time between them). Will time eventually become a run-away engine in the vast emptiness of space? Will the speed of time approach infinity?

Fact: The emptier space is (the less gravity) – the faster time passes.

One way I thought to test this would be to observe the speed of stars (if there are any) or any other matter in the “vast hole in the universe” that was discovered recently. If “emptiness” has the affect of accelerating time, that may be measurable by observing its affect on light traveling through those empty spaces. (objects opposite fast empty holes in the universe would appear closer than they really are)

2) About this time/gravity relationship. I imagine that as gravity approaches infinity as in a black-hole, time approaches zero. If time is slowed down – then what does that say about the spectacular speeds of stars orbiting black-holes? Have those calculations beed adjusted for this? Is there even a mathematical way to express time passing differently in different regions of the universe?

As I type this, it also occurs to me that this may also explain why there seem to be few stars between galaxies – maybe they age and die very quickly. I don’t understand the math well enough to try and calculate the relative difference in the rate of time in inner-galactic space versus on earth – much less in the middle of that billion-light year wide void, but imagine if there is a measurable between the surface of the earth, and 200 miles up in orbit, that a billion-light years of gravity free space might tack on the years pretty quickly.

If any one out there has a science background I would love to hear from you in the comments.

For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.