Steve Landsburg, over at Marginal Revolution, has a post about coordinating game theory in a quantum world. Imagine you and a partner are trying to coordinate your answers to some questions. You don't know what you'll be asked before hand. All you know is the potential questions and which combinations of answers will win and which will lose.
Landsburg says that in a world governed by classical physics, you can devise a strategy before hearing the questions. The strategy will let you win 75% of the time.
But if you and your buddy each had some sort of quantum widget, you could use it to instantly react to what your buddy answers. And you could be win as often as 85% of the time. Landsburg says this shows "game theory changes dramatically when players have access to quantum technology". I say it looks a lot like cheating, and if you're going to cheat, you should skip the widgets and just whisper the answers to each other. Why stop at 85% when you can get 100% and don't need to learn any physics?
Joking aside, fancy quantum widgets that instantly react to each other across distances sound awfully useful, but I don't understand how they are more useful than any other communication link.
All the timeless questions of the universe are religious in nature. Debates range from creation to evil to the afterlife to morality and religiion is the quest for authoritiatve answers. The questions are huge and they are answered with suprising brevity, even pith, in The Official God Faq.
My only remaining question is, "What makes it official?"
I stopped drinking coffee a few years ago to reduce my caffeine intake. I didn't bother switching to decaf because, well, decaf is to coffee as piss is to beer. It tastes like shit, you get no buzz, and your friends will mock you endlessly for drinking it.
The reason decaf tastes so bad is that the process of removing the caffeine also removes much of the taste. The only way to get a decent decaf is to grow coffee plants that don't have the caffeine in them in the first place.
Now, through the wonders of genetic engineering, scientists are doing exactly that. They are growing decaf coffee. They've basically knocked out the genes that create caffeine in the plant. Of course, these coffee beans are GMO, so if you're some ecoterror hippy shade-grown whackjob, you're out of luck.
Or are you? The frankenfood coffee guys have competition from the earth-friendly, natural Gaia coffee guys. They've discovered coffee plants in the wild that don't produce caffeine. They've started cross-breeding with their other coffee plants, which seems a lot like genetic engineering to me, but whatever.
So there it is-- you can have big, scary trans-national conglomerate decaf or you can have patchouli beans. Can Middle East peace be far behind?
Via Apostropher.
Jim, over at Vice Squad (the newest addition to our blogroll), links to a story on Walmart's latest attempt to target the puritan market-- a DVD player that censors DVDs during playback to skip all the sex, violence and swearing.
Like Vice Squad, I think this technology is great. Vice Squad is a big proponent of voluntary, individualized censoring-- prudes can enjoy clean versions of mainstream movies without the mainstream being prevented from producing the dirty stuff most of America gets off on.
I like the technology for a different reason. The ability to recognize and delete naughty bits is also the ability to recognize and delete everything but the naughty bits. Imagine a DVD player or a TIVO that removes all the filler from porn. It could also skip to all the fight scenes in kung fu movies. It would even boil hockey games down to just the boxing. I want one.
Today, I signed up with the Small World Project, a study that tests the power of extended social networks. They give you a picture, a name, and a bunch of personal data about a target person. You take that info, think of people you know who might be closer to the target than you are, and pass the buck to them. They do the same. Repeat until you have actually found the target. The idea is to test whether the target is found and how many hops it takes to do so.
My target is a retired nurse with former ties to a hospital my sister works at. I'm going to call my sister, get her email address, and send it to her. The target worked at that hospital for one year in the late 1970's, so it's not much, but it's something. We'll see if it works.
My other leads are other nurses, especially people that have been nurses for a long time, and maybe English folk, since the target spent 10 years in Norwich and Manchester.
Of course, finding people by asking around is so 10 years ago. I googled my target and found a guy who write about her on his web page. All the available details match (age, town of residence, name, occupation), so I have no doubts it's her. I'm not supposed to just email this guy (that's cheating), but I'm tempted to at least use the information to decide which of my friends to next send her info.
Update: The project reports that, on average, 6 hops would be needed to reach the targe, but that only 3 percent of targets are actually reached. The path exists, but it is difficult to find.
The Guardian put together 4000 balanced and insightful words on the treatment of homosexuality as a disorder. The article covers the main players for and against this idea, the studies and professionals behind the idea, and some people who have undergone treatment (with varying degrees of success).
For years, "curing" homosexuality was a laughable idea, but then it was legitimized (to some) by the very psychiatrist who had led the battle to stop treating homosexuality as a disorder in the 1970's. This guy, Dr. Robert Spitzer, conducted a new study and concluded that it is possible for therapy to help some people change their sexual orientation from gay to straight.
Of course, the study is deeply flawed. It consisted of telephone interviews with several hundred self-described ex-gays. These men and women were extremely religious folks, many of whom were steered to the study by organizations that sell the therapy being tested. Indeed, many of the people studied were in the business of promoting or providing sexual reorientation therapy. As the article notes, "These are people who get paid to say that therapy works." What's more, at least some of the people who claimed to be ex-gay have been outed quite famously as being ex-ex-gay.
The study's flaws aside, its conclusions are rather timid. Although newspapers reported Spitzer's findings as "Gays can change if they try really really hard", in truth Spitzer is careful not to go that far. He says that he wanted to test the proposition that orientation never changes. So he found some cases where it changed. Still, he says,
I think change is probably extremely rare, otherwise it would not have taken so long to find the participants. And, yes, the change I found was seldom from one extreme to the other. But nevertheless, there was change.
In other words, Spitzer's claim is that somewhere, somebody changed, so it's not accurate to say orientation never changes. Spitzer still does not claim that reorientation therapy is a viable option for most people, draws no conclusions about the cost of failure, or anything else. That some people claim to be ex-gay is not enough to prove that gays should try to be ex-gay.
Even the therapists promoting the treatment admit its limitations. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the leading pyschologist pusing the treatment, defines success not as reorienting patients on opposite-sex partners but instead on eliminating same-sex desires and acts. Nicolosi says
[S]exual reorientation, half of it is to get rid of same-sex attraction. The other half is hopefully opposite-sex attraction. Most clients just can't imagine being attracted to women. A lot of them say, I just want to stop being attracted to guys. And, hey, that is a workable treatment.
In the end, Nicolosi treats homosexuality as an addiction to gay sex. He refers to indulging homosexual desires as "acting out". The pay-off for a man to tame his wild desires is
instead of living a gay lifestyle, he has a wife that he loves emotionally and sexually, and he has three kids, and his friends are married men.
But even this guy living the straight fantasy
may still get a little same-sex titillation from time to time, sure, and he'd better be realistic about that. I mean, he's setting himself up for a fall if he really believes he won't.
And so I wonder what kind of cure Nicolosi is really peddling here. What kind of straight man experiences "same-sex titillation"? What kind of straight man isn't attracted to women? These people aren't really cured. They're just abstaining because "acting out" can cost them their families and send them to hell. That might or might not be a good reason for abstaining, but those people are not cured. They're still gay in the sense of being attracted to same-sex partners.
As for the legal implications of Spitzer's study, it's complicated. If you accept the premise of the anti-gay crusaders that homosexuality is a complex of behaviors, then you already think homosexuality isn't an innate characteristic, and Spitzer doesn't really add much. If you accept the premise of the gay advocates that homosexuality is all about your sexual desires, then Spitzer's study showing some people can, with great effort and fear of hell, deny those desires, doesn't undermine the belief that the desires are innate. I'm calling this one a wash.
Update: There is, of course, a blog devoted to following ex-gay issues, Ex-Gay Watch. It is from a firmly gay-positive viewpoint with no ranting and lots of good points about the ex-gay sales pitch. Thanks to Denny for tipping us to the link.
Update: And for balance, there's Exodus, a blog with a section on "former homosexuals". Exodus seems to link articles with little or no comment, but it's stance is pretty clear when you see what it links.
It's hard to believe in kooky science in this age of supreme rationalism, but the kooks (sometimes I'm one) are starting to figure it out. They're using (some would say co-opting) science to justify their theories and prove it's not all hand-waving and placebos.
Homeopathy is a "system for treating disease based on the administration of minute doses of a drug that in massive amounts produces symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the disease itself." By conventional scientific standards, it sounds crazy, and some people believe homeopathic cures work about as well as tap water and snake oil.
But some scientists are starting to investigate whether there is some truth to the miracle claims. In 2001, Ananova reported, "Scientists may have found homeopathy proof". New Scientist also covered the story. More recently, experiments on water memory show that pure water and homeopathic water have different physical properties.
So what's going on here? Is homeopathy fraud or fact? Even the researchers admit that they are engaged in "pure speculation", but their research points to a possible scientific basis for an area of medicine previously relegated to the back alleys of folk cures.
And so I say to all you strict rationalists: Don't shit on homeopaths. It's bad karma.
Ben's Beta Blog blogs some neat programming and math stuff, and today he's on about Peasant Multiplication.
Basically peasant multiplication allows you to multiply two large numbers using a different method from the long multiplication you learned in grammar school. The algorithm is simple: Take two numbers, A and B. Halve A and double B successively until A = 1. Throw out any remainders. Every time A is odd, add B to a running total. When you're done, that total is A times B. Here's a quick example:
| Number A | Number B | Addition |
|---|---|---|
| 375 | 1793 | 1793 |
| 187 | 3586 | 3586 |
| 93 | 7172 | 7172 |
| 46 | 14344 | |
| 23 | 28688 | 28688 |
| 11 | 57376 | 57376 |
| 5 | 114752 | 114752 |
| 2 | 229504 | |
| 1 | 459008 | 459008 |
| Total: | 672375 | |
So that's peasant multiplication. Ben is curious as to whether that's easier or harder than traditional long multiplication. I say it's harder, but that's not my concern. What I want to know is how it works. Long multiplication works because multiplication is associative: 1793 * 375 = 1793 * (300 + 70 + 5) = 1793 * 300 + 1793 * 70 + 1793 * 5 = 672375.
But why does this peasant math work? Why only add when column A is odd? What happens to remainders when you halve A? After a moment's thought I realized, it's pretty much the same as the traditional long division, except it's all done in binary. 1793 * 375 = 11100000001 * 101110111 = 11100000001 * (100000000 + 00000000 + 1000000 + 100000 + 10000 + 0000 + 100 + 10 + 1) = 11100000001 * 100000000 + 11100000001 * 0 + 11100000001 * 1000000 + 11100000001 * 100000 + 11100000001 * 10000 + 11100000001 * 0 + 11100000001 * 100 + 11100000001 * 10 + 11100000001 * 1 = 1110000000100000000 * 1 + 111000000010000000 * 0 + 11100000001000000 * 1 + 1110000000100000 * 1 + 111000000010000 * 1 + 11100000001000 * 0 + 1110000000100 * 1 + 111000000010 * 1 + 11100000001 * 1 = 10100100001001110111. Feel free to check my math. You only add when odd because when column A is even, you're multiplying by zero. And you lose remainders in the same way. Pretty neat math trickery.
So what have we learned? Peasants get screwed six ways to Sunday. Their math is longer, more inscrutable, and requires more number juggling than ordinary math. "Farm boy, fetch me that pitcher."
Scientists have found a way to fertilize eggs without sperm. In place of sperm, they use modified somatic cells. This is huge news for men who cannot produce viable sperm and is also great news for lesbian couples. Now they can have children that include the genes of both parents.
The only wrinkle for lesbians is that women lack some of the genetic material that men have (they have those Y chromosomes where men have those X chromosomes). So lesbians will only be able to have girls through this method. Still, this is amazing.