making sense of the absurd

If you have time on your hands, then the following piece is recommended for reading; Making Sense of the Absurd. It sort of goes through a list of things that starts to blur the line between absurd, right and wrong. It isn't making the case that religion isn't absurd, but that we probably take too many scientific statement for granted. for instance:

7. Parallel lines never meet.
8. The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180°.

Well, these aren't quite accurate. There's an implicit constraint on these statements that they are true only in euclidean (planar) geometry. In non-euclidean geometry, these statements can take wild turns. For example, on the surface of a sphere like our own planet, we can start at the north pole, walk south 1 mile, east 1 mile and north 1 mile and return exactly to our starting point. Our turns were approximately right angles and our return also consists of a right angle, meaning that the triangle we walked had interior angles summing up to almost 270° (to the nit-picky, this isn't strictly true--in order to get exactly 270°, we'd need to walk all the way down to the equator, but I'm too lazy to walk that far). And while we're talking about the globe, we can observe the long parallel longitudinal lines to see that they can indeed meet twice: once at each pole. In other more intriguing spaces, such as lobechevskian space whose shape is often compared to that of a saddle, we can find parallel lines that intersect exactly once. And if the real-world example of the globe isn't enough to discredit the universality of propositions 7 & 8, we could look at the math supporting Einstein's theory of special relativity which relies on non-euclidean math to derive its results.

profiling shooter?

livescience.com you can't profile school shooters

One of the problems, they say, is : There are far too many people who are depressed and lonely are not mass-murderers. And how ever finely you make up a profile, the number of false-positives* will be more than true mass-murderers that fit that profile. This reminds of the Bayesian estimation "paradox" that Arunn on Nanoscience posted a while back.

Example: False positive in a medical test (example taken from [1])

A “false positive” in medical terminology is a situation when ... a person not actually having a particular disease or conditions may be returned a positive result in a test. ... Suppose that a test for a disease generates the following results.

(1) If a tested patient has the disease, the test returns a positive result 98% of the time, or with probability 0.99
(2) If a tested patient does not have the disease, the test returns a negative result 96% of the time, or with probability 0.96.

Suppose also that only 0.1% of the population has that disease, so that a randomly selected patient has a 0.001 prior probability of having the disease. The question now is what is the probability that a positive test results in a false positive?

from back of the envelope calculations:

If there are 1000 people, 1 person has the disease. of the 999 people only 96% were detected. so 39.96 were detected positive, but don’t have the disease. So only 1 in 40 people detected to have the disease really do have the disease.

local ad search

FindBuffalo:

Q: With a $1,000 or less annual budget, what 3 things should a small business execute online?
Paul: Getting their correct business information to the online portals, get social (online), and proactively encourage customers to provide online ratings and reviews … and up the budget (ok, that’s four).

Matt: Less than $100/month? That’s ultra-small budget. Okay… 1) A blog. 2) A listing in all the free local search sites. 3) A PPC campaign on low-cost, long tail phrases (including geo-targeting).

Local Ad sites: truelocal iBeginsource yelp

Nina Hale shares her views on strategic internet marketing:

What do you think of Google getting into Pay Per Action (PPA) advertising? Do you see yourself recommending this for some of your clients?

This is a fascinating idea, and I’m studying it seriously for some clients. This is another great form of disintermediation that Google is getting into, but also supports their goal of building their user base by providing successful web experiences, because they will rank good converters higher.

Aggregators like Lending Tree, Search for Colleges, etc., have made enormous amounts of money in this space and I love the idea of putting some of that power back into client’s hands. Of course, the aggregators will also love it! I think it will be most successful overall in fragmented industries.

Electric car timeline

Time line for 'Electric Car design' dates back to 1834 when Thomas Davenport invented a car run on non-rechargeable batteries. Thomas Davenport was the first to hold patent on Electric car design. His auto shop where he did this work is still preserved in Forestdale, Vermont.


for the full time line see the Who killed the Electric Car movie page from Sony Classics.

U.S. Predicting Steady Increase for Emissions

NY Times article says the U.S predictions for emissions over the next decade will increase at the same rate as last decade. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come out with a report and have upped the certainty of human involvement to 90%. There are now people trying to confuse the concern of global cooling in the 70s to global warming concern now. To set the record straight: the excessive particulate matter in the atmosphere helps scatter the heat before it reaches the earth and thus causes cooling. This has been addressed using particulate matter regulations since the 70s. However volcanoes continue to play a role in global cooling. This is not to be confused with the excessive amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped in to the atmosphere which causes global warming (unfortunate use of language).

from the NASA website (link to .rtf file):

• How do volcanoes affect the atmosphere? As volcanoes erupt, they blast huge clouds into the atmosphere. These clouds are made up of particles and gases, including sulfur dioxide. Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide gas can reach the stratosphere from a major volcano. There, the sulfur dioxide converts to tiny persistent sulfuric acid (sulfate) particles, referred to as aerosols.
  
• How do volcanic emission influence climatic changes? Global cooling often has been linked with major volcanic eruptions. Sulfate particles reflect energy coming from the sun, preventing the sun's rays from heating Earth thus lowering temperatures in the troposphere, and changing atmospheric circulation patterns.

pain in the neck?

Rdoctor has a very lengthy blog on just that. Neck pain and whiplash.