• PRO: Towels are self-drying.
• CON: Dust accumulates on surfaces regardless of the moral culpability of the surface’s owner. This is typically the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the phrase “cosmic injustice”.
• PRO: The tendency of energy to seek less-ordered states allows physical work to exist in the universe, which can can be harnessed by order-increasing processes, including those that form the basis of life.
• CON: Videogame controller cords frequently become tangled.
• PRO/CON: Bags of candy (e.g. Skittles) are self-mixing. However, this is somewhat offset by the resulting necessity of M&M sorting, which significantly drives up the per-unit cost of rock & roll.
• PRO: Ice makes drinks colder.
• CON: The inevitable heat death of the universe. This sounds like it will be a drag.

VERDICT: Mixed. Entropy allows life to exist, but also means that life will consist largely of tidying up. It’s unclear whether this is a net positive or negative.

I am pleased to announce that I’ve recently upgraded my shaving technology. Before this I was using a red Mach3 Turbo that my mother gave to me, which worked well enough. Prior to that I was using a Mach3, which was indistinguishable from its successor except for a lack of redness and failure to incorporate the word “turbo” into its name. Also, it seemed slower.

But I’m now the proud owner of a Gillette Fusion PHANTOM, the most advanced piece of face-grooming technology yet wrought by man. It contains a motor, a microchip, and, at last count, SIX blades. From the name I infer that it also possesses some sort of Active Stealth technology.

As astounding as this all is, it’s true that the PHANTOM is an evolutionary product as much as a revolutionary one. The motor, for instance, is not new: the Gillette M3 POWER was the first razor to leverage the key “let’s make the user’s hand shake” insight. But that was the rare technology for which I was not keen to become an early adopter.

And yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to send me a link to this Onion article. Ha-ha. Very funny, you goddamn Luddite. If it was up to people like you we’d still be scraping our faces with oyster shells, squatting in the mud and waiting for the day when hyperintelligent bees conquer the earth. No thank you.

If you want to escape the prison of your anti-scientific prejudices, I highly recommend that you visit the educational website that Gillette has established. There you can explore the futuristic lab where Gillette razorologists continue to probe the furthest reaches of beard physics. Your virtual guide will be the brilliant and surprisingly slutty Dr. Cassandra. Her come-ons become more intense with each click of the mouse, as Gillette’s computers note your continued attention and furiously recalculate the likelihood that you can be fooled into buying a razor on the off chance that doing so will lead to sexual intercourse with a Flash animation.

Things really get crazy once you enter the Holosphere. I won’t say anything more, except to encourage you to exercise caution: as with any holo-technology, there is always a small but real chance of cowboys, Nazis and/or literary villains escaping from the simulation and running amok.

I’ll leave you with this sample of the high-quality educational resource that awaits you. Who are you to resist?

It’s perpetually surprising to me that articles like this one can find their way into the Science section of what is by most accounts a Newspaper For Smart People. Even more astounding is that they got David Chalmers to contribute some quotes to it.

You should read the piece for yourself, but the gist of what John Tierney excitedly reports is that Dr. Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosophy professor, has decided that we may all be living in a computer simulation. He reasons that future civilizations will become advanced enough to run simulations of brains, and that they’ll make widespread use of this technology for entertainment or to research their past. If they use it enough, the odds of a given mind from any point in history occurring outside of the system become quite low. If you consider the possibility of nested simulations the odds diminish even further.

The whole “ancestor simulation” premise sounds like it suffers from some confusion about the reversibility of deterministic processes. There’s also a bit of an issue with thinking that a lack of information can be remedied with probabilistic hand-waving (this Crooked Timber post rails against the technique nicely). Bostrom’s ideas, or at least Tierney’s writeup, seem to ignore the considerably better-developed and more interesting speculation about the possibility of an Omega Point. And I have some anti-reductionist complaints that I doubt anyone reading this blog will be very receptive to.

But mostly this is bad because it’s all so banal. Put a group of freshmen in a room with a copy of Principles of Philosophy, the first Matrix movie and a dime bag and you’ll get pretty much the same thing (including the overly-cute World of Warcraft reference).

Amazingly, this is actually only the second-worst science article I’ve recently read. Check out the BBC’s coverage of an amazing new “paper battery” — a carbon-nanotube-based technology from Rensselaer that made Slashdot’s frontpage yesterday. The writeup is bold enough to include a “How a paper battery works” graphic without actually demonstrating any evidence that the admittedly paper-based technology could be used as a battery. The article mentions voltage, but nothing about capacity. Neither does the original press release upon which it’s based, which ought to be a red flag to anyone who took AP Physics and/or has wondered why we use batteries despite the existence of capacitors.

This looks like an awful lot like a novel capacitor and nothing more. I seriously doubt it can store a fraction as much charge as even the cheapest chemical cell on sale at the nearest drugstore. Carbon nanotube ultracapacitors may become a useful technology someday, but we’re nowhere near replacing the lithium batteries in your mobile electronics with them. But you’d never know from the article that this technology’s energy-storage applications will likely be limited to digital watches… maybe.

I can only think of two reasons why science coverage is so awful, neither of which is particularly original, but both of which I can’t resist repeating. First, there’s obviously the question of expertise — journalists need to be generalists. Even when they consult an informed party for a quote, they may not trust that source’s judgment about what makes (or fails to make) the story newsworthy — they just see “possible applications include curing cancer and humanity’s lack of heat-vision” on the press release and decide to run with it.

Second, and more evident in the Tierney article, I suspect, is the industry’s willingness to let science fans like Gregg Easterbrook pursue their hobby on their employer’s dime (and newsprint) after proving themselves in some other journalistic area. I can’t blame these writers for trying this — I’d do the same thing if I were in their position, and probably embarrass myself just as often. But the expertise problem must frequently stop their editors from exerting enough influence on the result.

UPDATE: Tim Lee also thinks Tierney’s article is pretty lame.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has posted a letter in which the writer implies that Dr. Bostrom is ripping off a 90s sci-fi author who used a similar premise in one of his stories. That seems extremely unlikely to me, but I do think it’s good further evidence of how obvious the idea is.

Eating foie gras may increase your risk of Alzheimer’s. Still, this could be for the best if the first neurons to go are the ones that allow us to feel empathy for geese.

Via Slashdot: Ars Technica takes a trip to the Creationist Museum. There’s a nice Flickr set of the trip here.

I don’t know… Between the relatively high production values and the tantalizing promise of Triceratops rides, I think they make a pretty good case.

Scientists say the bees are probably dying from a fungus, possibly in combination with a virus. They’re also optimistic about it being treatable with antibiotics:

Beekeeper: Now listen bees, you’ve got to take the entire bottle. Don’t stop just because you’re feeling better.


Bees: [DEAFENING BUZZ]


Beekeeper: Alright then.

Via Slashdot.

First, a discussion of Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. I haven’t got much to add; it’s interesting stuff, though.

Second, this article on Numenta, the brain-like computing startup from one of the guys behind Palm and Treo. I’d read this Wired article on the startup a little while ago. What they’re doing is interesting, and I’m sure they’ve got some very smart people working for them. But in both articles Hawkins takes pains to poo-poo neural networks as a failed AI technology, and to distance his own “HTMs” from them. Yet after reading the descriptions of his technology (and the training and parameter-tuning it requires) and accounts of the sorts of tasks that HTMs can perform, the tech sounds a lot like multilayer perceptrons. The dog-identifying tasks he points to are really just a more advanced case of the sorts of problems they had us solve in Intro to Neural Networks.

I’m all for moving beginner toolkits out of Matlab and into the open source world — I’m excited about Numenta, and hope it does well. But there’s no reason to put down the accomplishments of those who came before you when what you’re doing seems to be a variation on the techniques they pioneered.