A Graphical History of Religion
Something I found the other day while browsing in my archives for Google Reader, but its a graphical history of the rise and spread of today’s major modern religions Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Its pretty astonishing how different things looked just a few hundred years ago — as late as the 1400s and 1500s it was not clear that Christianity, one of the later religions relatively speaking, would grow to be the dominant religion. You can find the original here.
Kryptonite
(Hat tip to Eric):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6584229.stm
Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science.
Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral’s chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature – albeit fictional literature.
“Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide – and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.
“The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.”
And another step towards me becoming Lex Luthor…
Sadly, Not the Worse Idea I’ve Heard
Enlisting Iraqis to rebuild their country
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff | April 11, 2007FOUR YEARS, more than 26,600 American casualties, more than 100,00 Iraqi casualties, 2 million refugees, and $410 billion later, large parts of Iraq and a vast majority of Iraqis are stuck in an unmitigated hell, with no end in sight. The routine massacres of scores of innocent people, the bombings of schools, hospitals, mosques, and universities, the grizzly tortures, and now the gas attacks and use of children as bomb delivery systems are resulting in the mutual assured destruction of the Iraqi people.
If Iraqis are engaged in competitive genocide, the United States is engaged in staticide — the maintenance of a suicidal status quo. The United States has not committed and will never commit enough troops to achieve security given its tactics.
Many Americans and Iraqis suspect that the presence of US soliders is making the security situation worse and exacerbating whatever carnage our inevitable departure will engender. This is why the majority of both Americans and Iraqis think it’s time for the United States to withdraw.
In the meantime, the Iraqi government should implement a policy that will put an end to its Armageddon.
The Iraqi government should institute a draft of all Iraqi men between the ages of 18 and 35. This is the demographic most responsible for the violence. The removal of these 3 million men from the cities and countryside to army barracks would likely bring an immediate end to Iraq’s horrific nightmare. Any men older than 35 suspected of involvement in terrorist or insurgent acts would also be enlisted in the Iraqi army.
The role of the enlarged Iraqi army would not involve bearing arms or training in the use of arms. Rather the role would be to reconstruct the country. All army units would be assigned specific reconstruction tasks and be jointly commanded by a Shia, a Sunni, and a Kurd who would make unanimous decisions. If any threesome can’t agree, they would be replaced by a threesome that can.
Inductees would be taught the skills needed for their assigned reconstruction tasks, receive general and practical educational instruction, and learn respect for diversity and human rights. They would be paid well, by the United States, for their national service. Annual per capita income in Iraq is now roughly $3,000. This is also the base salary paid to Iraqi soldiers.
Were the United States to pay 3 million Iraqi soldiers $10,000 yearly, the bill would be $30 billion. This is a small amount relative to the savings it would accrue from leaving the country. It would also make service in the Iraqi army highly desirable and spur voluntary enlistments.
Eventually, the country’s oil revenue would be used to cover these premium payments to Iraqi soldiers and provide a precedent for distributing oil revenues directly to Iraqis — something that is long overdue and would eliminate much of the basis for the sectarian violence.
The current Iraqi military would be assigned to train and supervise the new recruits, including enforcing discipline and arresting and prosecuting deserters.
Upon induction into the Iraqi armed services, each inductee would be given a polygraph to determine if he had been involved in terrorist/militia/insurgency activity. Those who fail the test would be assigned to reconstruction details with a much heavier presence of officers and military police.
Conscription would be for three years or longer depending on the security situation.
The new recruits would be permitted short-duration home leave with no advance notice and on a randomized basis. This would limit the chance of coordinated violence by disaffected soldiers on leave.
A 3 million-man Iraqi army would be large compared with other regional militaries. But this would be an almost entirely unarmed, reconstruction army, not one training for war.
Instituting a draft is hardly a radical proposal. Scores of countries, including many in the region, have compulsory military service.
Enlisting young Iraqi men to rebuild their country would permit Iraqi children to attend school in safety, let the country rebuild its infrastructure, and let Iraqi women and older men work, shop, and pray in peace. And it would let the US military leave Iraq with a real sense of mission accomplished.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University.
The Miracle Year
Everyone knows Einstein is one of history’s most formidable geniuses. But, and this is something I just discovered, almost all of his seminal, scientific-revolution inspiring work was published in ONE YEAR (1905, today considered to be the Annus Mirabilis or the “Miracle Year”).
And did he do this while working at a premier research institute? Working with the best and brightest minds? No. He did this while working as an inept examiner at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland working more or less alone. In fact, most of his papers were considered oddities or impossibilities until several years later…
What did Einstein do?
- Photoelectric Effect – The only work of his own that Einstein has ever pronounced “revolutionary”, it used Max Planck’s theoretical work which had, at the time as a purely theoretical manipulation to make a derivation easier, postulated that energy can only exist at discrete points (ie. 1 and 2 and 3, but not 1.1 or 1.3) to explain an experimental phenomena which scientists could not understand. Einstein took this work and used it to explain another problem which scientists were baffled by and postulated the wave-particle duality of light. Max Planck himself wasn’t a fan of his quantized energy assumption or even of Einstein’s work, although apparently at a meeting between the two Einstein was finally able to convince him (one can only imagine what that conservation was like). Regardless, this was a seminal piece of work in the burgeoning field of Quantum Physics and netted Einstein his only Nobel Prize.
- Brownian Motion and Atomic Theory – Although the existence of atoms had been postulated by the Greeks and more formally by the big chemists of the 18th and 19th centuries, many scientists still considered the idea of the atom to be just a useful theoretical manipulation and the logical consequence of atomic theory, statistical mechanics, to not have any “deep” meaning. Despite Planck’s (reluctant) use of it in his analysis of Blackbody radiation, it was Einstein who was able to finally prove the value of statistical mechanics and, fundamentally, the existence of the atom by showing how Brownian motion, the phenomena where small objects can be seen to “dance” around under a microscope, which was not understood by scientists could be understood through statistical mechanics. Einstein was thus able to arrive at an actual numerical figure for the Boltzmann Constant (and hence Avogadro’s Number) and hence provide a real empirical basis for molecular/atomic theory.
- Special Relativity – With a single, very interesting hypothesis that light had a constant speed in all frames of reference, Einstein was able to provide a framework which tried to unify classical mechanics with Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetic phenomena. Amazingly radical at the time, it was met with quite a great deal of skepticism (and who wouldn’t be skeptical, after all it poses some bizarre and counter-intuitive ideas) but has been supported by so many experimental observations that it’s now accepted simply as validated today (with the extension by Einstein later to General Relativity which considers gravity).
- E=mc^2 – Yet another seminal paper producing what is possibly the most famous equation in all of physics, Einstein proposed the radical idea that energy and mass are interconvertible and even a tiny amount of mass can be converted into an enormous amount of an energy which stands as the basis for the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
History is indeed full of many brilliant people (Gibbs, Gauss, Boltzmann, and Feynman immediately come to mind as just a few of the other crazily brilliant people) — but to publish four revolutionary papers in ONE YEAR — makes me kinda give up on the whole big-name scientist thing…
The Thesis is Dead
The thesis is dead. The thesis is dead. Long live the thesis
If you’re interested in reading my 45 page monstrosity in all of its LaTeX’d glory, be my guest. I didn’t use a pdf LaTeX package so the pdf is not as nice as it could be (ie pdf-hyperlinks, Table of Contents linked directly into Acrobat, etc), but I’m proud — its my most advanced use of LaTeX yet (because I couldn’t get the Prosper presentation to work last year) utilizing a full range of BibTeX (for my references) and figure/caption/spacing packages (for the body).
Sadly, the data is not very good, and my analysis is somewhat exaggerated, and most of the experiments were actually completed within the two weeks before today — but I can’t help feeling a sense of pride and relief that its over.
Now, to catch up on all the life I missed — aka, all the problem sets and reading that I did not do.
But its good to not have to treat lab as something stressful now 
.