Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

There is now a 4 percent chance that the large asteriod 2007 WD5 may collide with the planet Mars in January 2008.  While there is a 96% chance that the asteriod will miss, these odds are much larger than usual for large asteriod impacts.  If the impact is to occur, it will be on 2008 January 30 at 10:56 UT (2:56 a.m. PST) +- a few minutes.

If this asteriod were heading toward Earth, we would be worried.  The fact that it may hit Mars provides a potential scientific opportunity to monitor a large impact on a terrestrial world from the several space probes currently orbiting Mars, or from the ground-based rovers.  The event would be comparable to the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in July 1994.

The asteriod, which was discovered on November 20, 2007 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, recently passed the Earth at a distance of 5 million miles and is currently heading toward Mars at a speed of 27,900 miles per hour.  If a collision were to occur, it will produce a crater similar in size to Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona with a blast of about 10-15 megatons of TNT, which is similar to the Tunguska Airburst in 1908.

The Near-Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory monitors the orbits of known large near-Earth asteroids.  Here are two of their articles on this potential collision.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news153.html
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news151.html

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Astronomy, Mars, Research, Space

Tetris is a great game involving manuevering and rotating geometric shapes rapidly to best fit them into continually evolving template.

Here is a video of a Japanese game show involving Human Tetris.
You have to contort your body to fit through the hole.  If you don’t the wall pushes you into a pool of water… yellow water.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Fun

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association aims to provide one laptop to every school-age child in the developing countries of the world with the goal of improving education around the world.  The program was developed by Nicholas Negroponte who was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory.  His goal was to develop a $100 laptop computer that can endure extreme environmental conditions as well as being useable by people with a multitude of local languages and backgrounds.  The result is the XO laptop.

The OLPC Association currently has a special program in the US and Canada called “Get One. Give One.” 

For $400 you can donate an XO laptop (with $200 being tax deductable) and get your own XO laptop.  This is good for a limited time… 31 Dec 2007.  You have one week!!!

After that, you can still donate of course.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Internet, Inventions, Social Justice, Solutions, Technology

What good is a cortex if it doesn’t dream a little?

I have been thinking about Ariel Caticha and Carlo Cafaro’s derivation of Newton’s Second Law from probability theory (http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.1071).  In this derivation, they assume three things:

1. There exist basic entities called particles
2. There is an intrinsic uncertainty about a particle’s position
3. There is change… not time necessarily, but change.

The first thing I like about this derivation is the fact that distance in space derives from distances between probability distributions describing particles at two positions.  Distance comes from the Kullback-Leibler Divergence, and leads directly to the Pythagorean Theorem.  More on that in another post… 

The derivation results in an expression describing an interaction between two particles and this results in changes in position which, when parameterized, leads to F = ma. 

The mass turns out to be related to the uncertainty in the position of the particle.  The more uncertain one is about a particle’s position, the more difficult it is to accelerate it (change its change in position).

uncertainty in position^2 = 1/mass

This is quite satisfying as it is reminiscent of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

But what implications does this picture hold?
First, it gives us another viewpoint of mass.  Multiple equivalent viewpoints always leads to constraints.  These constraints can be used to figure out how things work… or at the very least to rule out possibilities.
(see my earlier post on E8 to get another picture of mass)

Well, photons have no mass.
So there is infinite uncertainty associated with the position of a photon.  In fact, I am not sure photons “travel”.  I prefer to imagine that they just “are”.  One way to imagine photons might be to see them as lines connecting two particles in spacetime.  The photon is spread out across space.

So now comes the important question.  Given this probabilistic picture, what can we learn about mass?  Do we need a Higg’s boson?  I would think not.  Except, today I spoke with Ariel, and the way that the Higgs imbues mass is by having the particles scatter off of it.  The more the particles scatter, the less certain we are of their position… and the more mass the particle has.  Maybe this is where the Zitterbewegung originates.  And maybe the Higgs boson is just a reflection of an intrinsic uncertainty.

Instead, I imagine that as these ideas are refined to describe more than Newtonian mechanics, and include spin, charge and flavor, a relationship between the particles and their masses would emerge naturally. 

Again, these are raw thoughts… not even half-baked… and should be treated as such.  My grandma always said that eating raw dough will give you worms. 
Just think what thinking raw thoughts might do!!!

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Philosophy, Physics, Probability, Research

Today Roger Pink pointed me to The Freesound Project, which is an online database of sounds. These sounds are free to be used by anyone in accordance with the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.  The Freesound Project makes these sounds accessible by keyword search.

Recently, the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona received a Google Research Award to further develop The Freesound Project.

As someone who has performed scientific research in sound source separation using Bayesian methods (Bayesian source separation), this may be an excellent resource for high quality free sounds. 

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Acoustics, Internet, Research, Solutions