E2science

It was an interesting day my freshman year at Oberlin. I was taking Intro Mechanics and for the first time, I would get to go to a talk given by an interesting mind in the world of physics at large. The weather was a bit rainy, but being in Ohio in the fall, this was no great surprise. The days were still pleasant, but a bit damp. It seems odd but it's been nearly five years since then 2003.

That morning brought an interesting bit of news. The journal Nature published an article by one Jeff Weeks which proposed a good deal of mathematical evidence for the thesis that the universe was curved in on itself. Specifically, that it was curved back on 12 sides at once. The universe that morning became a d12, though at this point I had yet to get into gaming so it really meant little to me. The fact that the universe's geometry resembled a dodecahedron was just as unfathomable to me as any other explanation. This explanation roused a great deal of hub-bub. News articles were written. My Dad sent me a link by email.

That evening, the Physics Department was hosting a talk by David Spergel of Princeton, an animated professorial type (read: bearded) and one of the lead researchers of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data. For those that don't know, the WMAP, as it is called, provides us with a set of data about the structure of the very early universe. It shows us, with high accuracy, which parts of the early universe were hotter and which were colder. Wilkinson was one of the scientists who pioneered the study of the early universe. He and his colleagues at Princeton were working on Cosmic Microwave Background in the 1960s when Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs managed to scoop them by measuring it first. These earliest measurements showed that the entire universe was suffused with a ubiquitous field of microwave radiation that made empty space a few Kelvin above absolute zero. In the 90s, the COBE satellite was sent to measure things again, but within a narrower band, to see if there were anisotropies in the CMB, which it found. And the WMAP was sent to measure those tiny differences within an accuracy of ~20 microKelvin.

What the WMAP found was just being released in 2003 after 5 years of data collection. In February, NASA made the first press releases about the WMAP data collection coming to a close. It was October when the first trickle of analysis began to seep from that mountain of data. It was the previous day, October 8th, when Spergel and his team put the first paper of analysis on arXiv. That Thursday evening, a pair of talks were given by Spergel in the room where Intro Physics Lectures were taught. He held up a copy of Nature, dodecahedron speckled with stars on the cover, and gave a response to the curved universe.

He explained how the topology of the universe can be constrained by the data they had collected and that the world is flat. The tests done on the data were very brute force methods, looking for mirror images using large amounts of computer time. The tests showed that either the universe was flat or it was much, much larger than we think. In a pair of hour-long lectures, I had the basics of Big Bang cosmology explained to me by one of the people who was up to his elbows in it every day. One of the thoughts I had as I left the auditorium was that I had just met a man destined to win a Nobel Prize for his work.

Thinking back on this experience, I realize that seeing this talk may have been a major impetus for my entrance into the field of Astrophysics. It was an inspiring look into how science changes the world around us. The very shape of the universe was made as malleable as moist clay for one fall afternoon in 2003. That morning, people woke up to the possibility that the universe was shaped like the damage done by a Great Axe, and that evening, for me and the physics community at my school, it was smashed flat once again by the most complete and precise data we have of the Big Bang, it's long dying embers simmering the universe lightly in 2.7 Kelvin radiation. Astrophysics is like Engineering, it takes everything we know and uses it all at once and the things we can learn continue to astound us.

After five years of analysis, study and probably a dozen Ph.D.s granted, the teams working on this project and data have announced that the age of the universe is 13.73 ± .12 billion years old, <1% error. In science this is what is generally referred to as fact. If anything the WMAP is one of the triumphs of science in the contemporary world, one which will shape my field for the next century.

Post-workout shakes, or "PWO shakes" as they are commonly referred to around internet forums, refer to the drinks that many gymrats will consume after some sort of workout in which resistance has been overcome. Generally, these are high-protein content shakes made from whey protein and some sort of solvent, usually water or low-fat milk. I've used everything from those bottled Starbucks frappuccinos to various fruit juices, depending on the situation.

During intense workouts involving resistance training, the body interprets overcoming a lot of heavy resistance as a stressor. Cortisol is released into the blood stream, causing a break down of body tissue - including muscle - in order to increase blood-sugar levels. This puts the body in a catabolic state, or a metabolic state in which tissue is broken down into smaller units for energy. This trend continues for several hours after resistance training has been completed. This is obviously the single most undesirable effect for someone lifting weights with the intention of building muscle.

Consuming food, particularly high-protein foods, immediately or shortly after training reverses this trend. Cortisol, among other things, causes the breakdown of muscle protein. Bringing an outside source of protein into the body aids in the rebuilding of muscle tissue after a catabolic workout, swinging the body's metabolism back to anabolic - or, a state in which body tissue (muscle) is being built from smaller units. PWO shakes make this process much more convenient. Most protein powders are made almost specifically to serve as a post-workout restorative in that they are fast-absorbing and pass into the blood stream very quickly. Whey protein's peak absorption occurs something like an hour after consumption.

Ideally, PWO shakes don't serve as the primary inducer for an anabolic state, merely as a fast way to stop or minimize catabolic effects until you can actually get real food into your body and start rebuilding tissue.

Depending on the intent of the consumer, PWO shakes can also include large amounts of carbohydrates to induce a stronger insulin response (insulin is an anabolic hormone, in that it signals the body to send nutrients into the liver and muscles), "healthy fats" like omega-9 fatty acids (found in olive oil), or calorie-dense foodstuffs, such as peanut butter, to aid in developing mass. Some of the real die hard folks I'm sure put electrolytes and extra vitamins in there to get an extra restorative kick out of their post-workout nutrition.

PWO shakes aren't just for people looking to build muscle. People wanting to lose or maintain weight and/or lose fat should also consume some sort of post-workout drink because 1.) catabolism results in the breakdown of both fat and muscle tissue, meaning that while food-deprivation post-workout might result in fat loss, it will also result in significant muscle loss which defeats the purpose of weight-training, and 2.) calorie intake is the primary controller of weight, and it's entirely feasible to make a low-calorie PWO shake. Most whey protein contains something around 100 calories plus or minus per serving.

There are some folks who put whey protein shakes in the same category as like, anabolic steroids, but I don't think they realize that whey protein doesn't introduce exogenous hormones or chemical signals into the body to induce some kind of "unnatural" physiological effect. I mean I guess since it's obviously a processed dietary supplement, some die hard whole foods-only types might not be too hot on it, but from a macronutrient standpoint, consuming whey protein is pretty much like eating a 10oz steak without the fat, the 500 calories, or the chewing.

sources:

- gymratting around

- there are about eight quadrillion billion thousand articles floating around everywhere that at least correlate high-protein diets to muscle building and while i love e2 and believe that high standards should be held for factual - ok fuck it, here's one: Paul GL. Dietary protein requirements of physically active individuals. Sports Med 1989; 8:154-176.

- Human Anatomy & Physiology. Marieb, Elaine N. 7th ed. Benjamin Cummings, 2006.

A Bug’s Life

Like sharks, ants haven't physically changed much and are still successful after at least 60 million years. Workers, on the average, live about one year. In some species they can live for four to five years. Some queens live longer than 20 years. One of the largest known ant colonies is on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. With “306,000,000 ants, there are 1,080,000 queens in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 square kilometers. “ Highly adaptive to their environment, when moved to a different climate or location, ants can swiftly acclimatize. Resistant to radiation, ants will be giving the cockroaches a run for their money. They can adjust their environment by controlling the airflow through their nests, as well as, regulating the temperature and humidity. They build mounds. They clear pathways.

Through a complex system of chemical communication and constant feedback, an ant colony regulates the amount of worker and soldiers, and controls the timing of production of males and fertile females. Some are brutally ruthless survival machines. When food is plentiful for honey ants, young adults are stuffed until they get huge and heavy and become living food-storage containers.

No single ant is "calling the shots" yet colonies grow more proficient over time. Although individual ants live only 12 months, the colony actually develops and "learns" for up to 15 years. Collectively they build nests that are engineering wonders, able to sustain ambient temperature and comfortable levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide while the nest grows. In fact special castes of large, powerful soldiers are bred and side by side with these soldiers, the workers will fight for the survival of the colony, despite the consequences to personal safety or survival. Some colonies use chemical propaganda in warfare. There is no mercy and no surrender, enemies are killed and babies eaten. Some ants steal the eggs and larvae of other species and raise them, as slaves. Ants are debatably the most thriving creatures in the world.

All Signal, Lots of Noise

Biologists call this emergence behavior which happens "when individuals combine to form a whole and create something unexpected or smarter then (sic) its individual parts, or a relationship that is beneficial to the independent pieces over a pattern of time." Emergent behavior has been studied in biological organisms from ants to slime molds. In the case of insect colonies it is the outcome of “swarm logic.” Low-level workers in due course produces ant colonies that labor, ones where the trash is collected and dumped outside of town and the deceased are taken to a “cemetery” even further away. The worker ants generate all of these organizations and systems without perceiving the big picture. All that is necessary is an adequate amount of low-level ants for lots of trial and error, as well as the freedom to succeed and fail within the framework of a few simple rules.

Swarm logic (SWOHRM law.jik) is a noun phrase which is currently defined as, “The process by which a large number of unintelligent entities can, by working together without central direction, produce intelligent action.” It occurs whenever a group shows evidence of organized behavior outside of the capabilities of any individual member. Several sociologists have taken this term and applied same logic to other disorganized systems—like the Internet, for example. They postulate that emergence happens when relationships are formed from the bottom-up and not top-down. Complexity is determined through simplicity. The same laws are obeyed universally and the unchanged swarm logic is at work. The earliest known citation is from a 1995 review of Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World:

"Technology and biology are becoming one. (Kelly) pursues this notion through to the idea of 'swarm systems', collective structures like beehives and ant colonies in which the behaviour of the whole emerges from the operations of the individual elements but does not have a simple, causal and predictable relationship with them. ... Kelly convincingly argues that contemporary business practice, for example, is benefiting from the application of swarm logic to manufacturing structures and to traditional company hierarchies. Swarm logic underpins the Internet and could significantly transform our understanding and operation of television."
—John Wyver, "Lights, camera, action, e-mail?".

Computer programs at sites like Amazon.com take advantage of swarm logic by examining buying habits and then suggesting purchases, “You liked John Grisham, try Along Came a Spider. Emergent properties of merit-based social interaction beget social order and from it a compelling self-organizing principle. Corey Doctorow called it "whuffie" in his science fiction work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which is a fluid, complex system of cultural currency and reputation. One defining example of this theory at work is at Slashdot and "karma", where the community rates the postings. Several sociologists theorize that it is fast becoming clear that lives revolve around the powers of emergence. They hold up the cities inhabited, the media frenzies suffered and the games played as evidence for how individual actions without central planning often build a wonderfully adaptive mutual intelligence. “Local turns out to be the key term in understanding the power of swarm logic. We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior.”

Everything2 displays swarm logic with its Voting/Experience System and honor roll system. E2 arrives at the core of what’s happening by using group intelligence as a way to filter out the inanity, and intelligence rising to the top. Actions are performed together smart ideas emerge without one central direction. As E2 is wired into a hivish network, many things will emerge that users, as mere neurons in the network, don't expect, don't understand, can't control, or don't even perceive. That's the price for any emergent hive mind.

Ants in your pants

In 2001 author Steven Johnson released the phrase swarm logic into the lexical wilderness. In Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software . Johnson explores the artificial emergence which is bringing sweeping cultural and political change in its wake. He recognizes the problem of making analogies from relatively brainless ants to self-reflecting human beings who have a free will and are able to make decisions that are not based on simple exchanges of pheromone, the chemical substance. He does however identify a way to evaluate these two and other phenomena on the basis of what he calls "emergent intelligence." In other words, the future has to emerge, but no one knows where or how.

Elsewhere in Emergence, Johnson argues that it has already started in web sites like Slashdot.com, and in the form emergence theory and its applications. Explaining why the whole is at times smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson offers surprising illustrations of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning.” How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected group of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web?” His response comes in two parts. The organization, Johnson explains, is potent enough to…”even make the Web think — but it is both the promise and the peril of swarm logic that . . . you never really know what lies on the other end of a phase transition.”

Sources

Out of Control:
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-g.html

RCCS: View Book Info:
www.com.washington.edu/ rccs/bookinfo.asp?BookID=163&ReviewID=185

Swarm Intelligence:
www.darwinmag.com/read/070103/swarm.html

Swarm Logic:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/swarmlogic.asp

Theory of emergence: Building a new world from the bottom up:
www.lansingcitypulse.com/020911/internet/

In the beginning...

Born on 28 December 1903 in Budapest, Hungary, Janos Neumann was the eldest son of the wealthy banker Max Neumann. The 'von' section of the family name did not appear until later on his life when his father purchased a title, but strangely didn't change the family surname, and used the German form, von Neumann, where the 'von' indicated the title. Janos' name was anglecised to 'John' when he moved to America in later life.

John was a mathematical prodigy; he could easily divide two eight digit numbers in his head at the age of six, by eight he had mastered calculus, and by 12 he was at the graduate level in mathematics. He regularly stunned family guests by memorizing columns from phone books, then reciting names, addresses and phone numbers perfectly. His formal studies started at the local Lutheran Gymnasium in 1911, where his teachers soon picked up on his mathematical talents, and alongside another boy, Eugene Wigner, he was singled out for extra tuition. The boys' tutor was an teaching assistant from University of Budapest, known only as M. Fekete, with whom von Neumann later published his first academic paper in 1922, which investigated the zeros of certain minimal polynomials.

Max von Neumann was not entirely happy with his son's academic choice of career, and persuaded a family friend, Theodore von Kármán, to speak to him in an attempt to persuade him to take up a more profitable line of work. The upshot of this little conversation was von Neumanns stopping his attendence of his lectures at Budapest University and his entry into Berlin University to study Chemistry in 1921. He graduated from Berlin with a diploma in Chemical Engineering in 1926, the same year that he finished his exams at Budapest University, despite never having attended a lecture. This minor point did not prevent him getting outstanding results, and he was awarded a doctorate for his work developed by George Cantor on ordinal numbers. His definition is the one still in use today. At this point he held two degrees, one an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering and the other a Ph.D. in mathematics, all by the time he was twenty-two.

John continued in academia despite his father's protests. He was appointed was as a nonstipendiary lecturer at Berlin from 1926 to 1929, whilst he studied under Hilbert at Göttingen between 1926-27, before going on to lecture at Hamburg from 1929 to 1930. His work at this point concentrated on mathematical logic and the axiomatics of set theory, alongside classical quantum theory and statistical mechanics. His main achievement during this time was his 1929 work on the theory of operator algebras when they were applied to quantum mechanics, in an area known as 'abstract Hilbert space', which were later renamed Neumann algebras

The Princeton Years

Oswald Veblen invited von Neumann to Princeton in 1929. He accepted, but claimed he had some personal matters to attend to first. This personal matter was a young woman called Marietta Kovesi whom he married in 1930, shortly before moving to the USA. Despite being equally at home in pure and applied mathematics, John was not a hugely popular lecturer, primarily due to the sheer speed that he used to teach, which left students complaining that they had no time to copy notes down, let alone understand them before they were erased from the board. Despite this criticism, von Neumann was still one of the six scientists who founded the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1933, alongside such luminaries as Albert Einstein.

Throughout his early years in the USA, von Neumann still held posts at several German Universities, and travelled back to Germany each summer, but he relinquished these after the rise of the Nazi party and decided to settle permanently in the USA. Unlike many others, von Neumann was not a political refugee but rather he stayed in the USA, mainly because he thought that the prospect of academic positions there was better than in Germany. On his re-location to America in 1933 he was made editor of the the journal, Annals of Mathematics and a year later he started work on what would eventually become game theory, and published the Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, which he co-wrote with Oskar Morgernsten, in 1934. A year after this, he was appointed co-editor of Compositio Mathematica, a post which he held until his death.

John and Marietta had a daughter, Marina, in 1936 but their marriage ended in divorce a year later. The following year he married Klara Dan, also from Budapest. The pair were hardly your average stuffy academics. Klara von Neumann had quite an active social life whilst in Princeton, and John had been a star in the pre-war Berlin cabaret scene, causing the couple's parties to be described as being frequent, and famous, and long.

In 1937 John was accepted as an American citizen, and a year later was awarded the American Mathematical Societys Bôcher Prize for his work Almost Periodic functions and Groups.

WW2 and beyond

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, von Neumann worked on an incredible number of projects for the War Deparment, including but not restricted to ordnance, submarine warfare, bombing objectives, nuclear weapons, including the Los Alamos atomic bomb project, military strategy, weather prediction, intercontinental ballistic missiles, high-speed digital computers, and computing methods.

Postwar, von Neumann concentrated on the development of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). Von Neumann’s experience with mathematical modelling at Los Alamos, his knowledge of the computational tools he used there, and his associations with Alan Turing, gave him the experience he needed to push the development of the computer. He made significant contributions to the development of logical design, and came up with the von Neumann Architecture in 1947.

In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects, whilst building his own computer, which was completed in 1952. It was the first computer to use a flexible stored program, the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator And Computer, or MANIAC I for short. His work with cellular automata, an n-dimensional array of cells where the contents of a cell depend of the contents of neighbouring cells, paved the way for the modern era of computing and also popularized the binary digit as the unit of computer memory.

In 1954 he was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission. and two years later was given the Enrico Fermi Award for outstanding contributions to the theory and design of electronic computers, to add to two Presidential Awards, the Medal for Merit which he was given in 1947 and the Medal for Freedom earnt in 1956<> John von Neumann’s own death came far too early. He died on February 8, 1957, 18 months after he was diagnosed with cancer. In his last months he struggled to complete his last work, the posthumously published The Computer and the Brain in 1958.

The eclectic nature of von Neumanns work is truly staggering. Apart from inventing Game Theory alongside Oskar Morgenstern, his work in ergodic theory, quantum logic, the axioms of quantum mechanics, the digital computer, cellular automata and self-reproducing systems was ground breaking.

Sources include:
www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Von_Neumann.html
www.nationalacademies.org/history/members/neumann.html
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html

A friend and I have been discussing the danger of static electricity causing fires at gas stations. I told him that, in dry air, a 1 cm spark equates to 30,000 Volts. He was quite surprised at this, and asked,

But what I don't understand is how you could ever equalize a potential difference of several thousand volts instantaneously without getting cooked. I've experienced many static electric discharges in my life, as I'm sure nearly everyone has, and yet I'm still alive to talk about it.

Having nothing much better to do, I decided to write him a little explanatory essay. When I was finished, I realized it might be of interest in the context of Everything as well, so here it is. I'm an adult and don't get homework assignments other than the ones I give myself; consider this as noding my homework.

Physical Science pedants may object to my gross simplification of some matters, and my wild-guess estimates. Please consider that this is an explanation aimed at laypeople. Scientists already know this stuff anyway.

---

If you're still a bachelor, you may consider looking into a book I recently saw advertised on Slashdot: "I'm only here for the food: Food + Heat = Cooking". This is a cookbook which explains the chemical and physical background; a cookbook for geeks. Along the lines of its title, "human limb + energy = cooking".

To cook something means to raise its temperature, and possibly keep it there for a while. This doesn't just take voltage, nor even power: it takes ENERGY. One popular way to measure energy is the calorie, which is defined as the amount of energy required to heat one gram of water one degree Celsius. So here's another formula:

energy / (weight of substance to be cooked) = temperature increase

If I put a cup of water in my 800W microwave for one minute, its temperature goes from about 20°C to 80°C. If I did that with my hand, it would surely be cooked. Here's a couple more formulae:

current * voltage = power

and

power * time = energy

So let's say that to (thoroughly) cook a hand (+ part forearm) requires something on the order of 800W * 60 seconds = 48,000 Watt-seconds.

Now let's look at a static zap: You've wrested enough electrons from a grounded object that you have a charge of some billions or trillions of excess electrons (I don't know the exact numbers, it doesn't matter). The potential difference between you and the ground actually increases in proportion to your distance from it - you can raise the voltage of your charge (relative to some object) simply by moving away. This would require work, because your charge actually pulls you toward the other charge somewhat. Anthropomorphized, a voltage is the yearning of a bunch of electrons to go where they'll even out a charge, and if separated and isolated, they will constantly pull toward where they want to go, and the yearning will increase with distance. Even a single electron can be a kilovolt, if you take it far enough. Again, I won't bother trying to calculate just how far.

Now then... the electrical resistance of your body (mostly skin resistance, because it's pretty moist and conductive on the inside) is measurable with an ohmmeter. This can vary wildly, but let's say it's 100 kiloohms. But in order for there to be a spark, there must also be air between you and whatever. Air is a bad conductor, even when ionized by the spark. Let's guess that we have 10 MOhms (= 10,000,000 Ohms, or a hundred times as much as your hand) of resistance there.

Current = Voltage / Resistance = 20 kv / (10,000,000 + 100,000) Ohm = 0.002 Amps.

Think of this as a flow of 2 gazillion electrons marching through your hand; electrical people call it 2 milliamps. This is enough current to be felt by your nerves. Upward of around 5 to 10 milliamps, it would be enough to make your muscles twitch.

Current moves through a resistance if there's a voltage. Because there are two resistances, the voltage is shared between your hand and the air gap. Turning the above formula around a bit, we have:

0.002 Amps * 100,000 Ohms = 200 Volts

inside your body and the rest (most of the 20,000 Volts) across that air gap. So actually, most of the power of the discharge is heating up the air, not you. Now we can estimate how much power is cooking you:

Power = Current * Voltage = 0.002 A * 200 V = 40 W.

You can get an idea of how much power 40 W is by putting your hand over a 40 W light bulb (don't touch the metal parts!) that's just been turned on: you'll eventually burn your hand on it, but you have plenty of time to pull away before you're hurt. Thus, a steady power equal to that from the spark would eventually cause some burning.

The "secret" of static electricity, though, is that there is no steady supply. Static electricity is a stored quantity of electricity without a backup supply to keep it coming. Those few trillion electrons you ripped off are just a drop in the bucket, energy-wise, and once they jump off your finger and into your car, they're gone, the potential difference is used up and goes back to 0 Volts. A spark crosses over in a very small fraction of a second, so it's able to deliver enough power to sting a very small patch of skin (mostly by direct nerve stimulation) but not to burn anything. Actually, the greater amount of energy released to the air is sometimes enough to ignite a small amount of gasoline vapor, which is where the problem at gas stations comes from.

Another way to look at it: 800W, the power of my microwave, happens to be just a little over one horsepower. So the amount of energy required to cook your arm is about one horsepower-minute. Now a static charge doesn't come from nowhere, energy must be expended in order to build up a charge. Assuming you had a very efficient and lossless static electricity generator, you'd have to exert truly athletic power for a full minute to work up enough energy to cook your arm. Contrast this with the amount of energy that goes into taking a couple of shuffling steps over a carpet, or sliding off a car seat, and you'll understand that there can never be THAT kind of energy in a static charge that's built up by a casual motion of your body.

Good thing, too!