Okay, this is my last MIT-related GoC for the near future. I couldn’t resist this post because a friend of mine is editing a book by Walter Lewin, the well-known MIT physics professor (emeritus) whose lectures plunk physics solidly into the realm of the knowable for the average person (or undergraduate).

And who doesn’t want to impress her friends and colleagues with an understanding (however shallow) of quantum physics? That’s what I’ll be gabbing about at Mah Jongg next weekend, filling my competitors ears with a fuzzy explanation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as they try to make a hand. (Clever strategy, no?)

And I’m challenging you to hop to the head of the class with this lecture, the last in Lewin’s course on classical mechanics, which is available in its entirety through MIT OpenCourseWare. And for those of you who prefer to read, you can find the entire transcript here.

Why should you care about quantum mechanics? Because, as Lewin says, “[it's] a bizarre world that we rarely experience in our daily lives, because we are used to basketballs, baseballs, tennis balls [classical mechanics].” In other words, quantum mechanics is not intuitive. And this is an important concept in and of itself for practicing science, politics and life: Intuition does not equal truth.

But enough tiny philosophy. Next week we’re back to brass tacks – an inexpensive computer build you don’t have to build.

With the New Year just a few days away, I’m thinking about time. Why must time move in one direction — forward? Why isn’t it reversible? Why can’t the future become the past? Because it just can’t, you say impatiently, already bored by the naiveté of the question.

And yet…

The fundamental physical laws of nature such as gravity, electricity and magnetism are reversible. Even molecular collision is reversible. So why aren’t the phenomena that happen according to these laws of physics reversible — the phenomena that constitute our perception of time?

How do we resolve this paradox?

In Richard Feynman’s lecture, “The Distinction of Past and Future,” he explains how the laws of physics do not have a obvious relevance to the world as we experience it. Don’t know Feynman? He’s a professor famous for a series of lectures taped by the BBC at Cornell University in 1964. Last July, Bill Gates made these lectures publicly available through a Microsoft Research initiative called Project Tuva.

But let’s get back to the question of time: How can it be that our experience of time is so different from the fundamentals that constitute it?

To me, this is similar to the false intuition that a heavy object should fall more swiftly than a light one. It doesn’t. (Gravity, unlike your mother, is blind to how much something weighs, though it might agree that you look fat in those pants.) If you drop a book and a fork, they’ll hit the ground at the same time, even though you might think the heavier object — the book — should hit first. I’m always guilty of thinking this way. I was reminded of my wrong intuition recently as I was reading about Newton’s Second Law of Motion in The Great Equations. (At least Aristotle was wrong, too.)

Why do we get these things wrong? Because, as Feynman explains at the end of “The Distinction of Past and Future,” the world is both fundamentally simple and tremendously complex, “to stand at either end and to walk out off the end of the pier only, hoping out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake.” In other words, maybe our (incorrect) intuition that heavier objects should hit the ground first comes from the fact that they hit the ground harder, and we connect this to the idea of velocity, which takes us around to the idea of heavier falling faster. Makes sense, but it’s wrong. We’re standing at the wrong end of the pier and can’t see what’s really happening.

As for time, what phenomenon could be more straightforward: a simple line of actions connected dot to dot, the single constant in our lives, irrevocable. So why do we wonder and wish to make the past the future — to jump backwards, branching out in a new direction? Because our knowledge of time is complex, our understanding of what could have happened instead as real to us as the memory of what did.

Remorse and regret, hope and aspiration — these complex thoughts and emotions spring from our perception of time passing. They are as real as the law of gravity and sometimes so heavy they sink you into a hole, other times so light you feel as if you’re floating. At this time of year, it’s nice to be reminded that there’s always the other end of the spectrum; it exists all the time. You don’t have to wait until next year for things to turn around because in some way they already are.

But enough of this. All I really wanted to say was Happy New Year! Simple.

Thanksgiving is this Thursday in the U.S. and I’m looking forward to eating platefuls of turkey, squash, stuffing and whatever else catches my eyes-too-big-for-my-stomach. But I want to give you something else to sink your teeth into, fellow Americans (and you others around the world who will not be gorging yourselves). Here is some delicious food for thought.

V.S. Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego (director of the Center for Brain and Cognition; professor with the Psychology Dept. and Neurosciences Program; and adjunct professor of Biology at the Salk Institute). Although all these titles may lead you to the swift conclusion that any talk he gives would be boring and jargon-filled – incomprehensible without the benefit of a PhD/MD — Ramachandran is actually quite funny. And he has the ability, like Oliver Sacks, to describe the inner workings of the brain through clever example.

But why is he a geek on the cheap? Because in trying understand phantom limb syndrome, he came up with a $3 therapy that works — a mirror box. A simple cardboard box with a mirror in the middle. This was instead of trying to create a virtual reality for an amputee, which would cost millions of dollars. Ramachandran’s therapy is now used routinely at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on soldier amputees.

Brilliant, funny and cheap. That’s my kind of geek.

For more fascinating lectures, be sure to check out TED.com, “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” It’s an incredible resource and, as they say in their tag, it’s free.

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel has just come out in print but you can read Makers for free. And the author is the one giving it away.

Doctorow is a well-known blogger, near-future sci-fi writer and electronic rights activist who has been serving up his writing for free since publishing his first novel in 2003. That book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first work of fiction to be covered by a Creative Commons (CC) license. The license basically allows people to share or adapt a work as long as they: include attribution, don’t use the work for commercial purposes and distribute the new work under a similar license.

Why is any of this fodder for a Geek on the Cheap? Because the issues of “free” and “copyright” are as integral to what I talk about in this blog as they are to our technological and social lives in general.

Why offer something for free? Is this a sustainable idea? (Yes, if free leads to payment elsewhere or elsehow.) How should copyright work in our digital age? Should we be restricted from using digital works we own in any way we like? (Is it right that I can’t resell a digital book in the same way I can resell a paperback?) These are serious questions being debated by artists, technologists and politicians all over the world.

This is Doctorow’s take on offering his books for free:

CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace [the physical world]: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it. (Read more)

As you may know, I’m a novelist (seeking representation) and I believe this offer-a-free-version business model makes sense. As Doctorow says elsewhere, one of the biggest hurdles writers face is getting eyeballs on their work. It’s like when you go to the local bakery and snag a free cookie sample. You might just buy yourself a cookie if you like the way it tastes, right? Maybe, or maybe you’ll go to the bakery every day and eat for free. But you’re not going to buy any of those cookies if you don’t even know they exist.  (Now I’m getting hungry.)

This topic is gigantic and complex – far too multifaceted to be summed up here – but you already know more about it than you think. You’re already living it.

No, this is not a metaphor for that crazy-out-of-control feeling of trying to keep track of ten things at once. It’s a theory that the brain is always on the edge of turbulence, in a state of “self-organised criticality,” which is one of the things that enables it to react quickly and assimilate new information. So when you sometimes have a random thought, it truly is random and not connected to the feelings you may have for your mother or the fight you had last night with your boyfriend or the movie you watched last weekend.

And yet we try to find the connection, don’t we? The idea of disconnection points frighteningly in the direction of madness. And there’s good reason for that: too much disconnection is mad. So then our ability to posit connections is what makes us sane, right? Not really, because the insane can posit connections just as readily, although they may not be based in what we consider to be reality.

Is all this making you dizzy? Watch the video and you’ll really feel some vertigo.

LINK:
- Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain

What does that mean? It means you ask WolframAlpha a question and it gives you an answer. I asked “What’s the population of Vermont” and got a nice little stack of information. Or you can put in just one word such as “timbuktu.” Or you can put in two words, such as “Vermont North Dakota” or “IBM Apple,” and see the two sets of data compared side by side. (FYI, VT and ND have almost exactly the same population; IBM has fared better than Apple in stock price over the past year.)

Where does WolframAlpha get its info? According to The Guardian, from “the dark corners of libraries, government files and science labs around the world – with a little bit of human quirk thrown in for good measure.” The quirk is there to build credibility with early-adopters, such as geeks who already found these WolframAlpha easter eggs.

But it couldn’t handle a query such as “Can robots think?” or even “robot intelligence.” Oh well.  It’s still getting bookmarked.

LINK:
- WolframAlpha

Most people have an idea of what a robot should do: it should serve us –- cart snacks over to the couch, rub our feet, make the bed. Kind of like a slave, which is when all the worries about robot consciousness crop up. Uh oh!

But the technology coming out of robotics allows your camera to self-focus and gets rid of pink-eye. It’s also allowing for better medical treatment with regard to, for example, prostate surgery (just went to a lecture on this last night, with video).

In fact, maybe someday –- and this is the most fascinating robot-related research I’ve read about recently — you’ll be able to pull a mobile phone out of your pocket and morph it into a laptop. Seriously. I’m shivering over here.

LINKS:
- “Intel Talks Up Our Wire-Free, Robot-Ruled Future”
- “Ready for the Robot Revolution”

My 11th-grade chemistry teacher was five feet tall with four-foot boobs and wore lab coats over her minidresses (no, this wasn’t the ’60s) so all you saw were her spindly toothpick legs on top of platform shoes.  Sounds cool, doesn’t she?

But she wasn’t cool at all.  In fact, she was so crabby and had such an instant dislike to me that I despised chemistry class, including all the experiments that I otherwise would have loved.  (At least my Physics teacher was kind of nice.)  But now I can re-learn fun facts about all the elements with The Periodic Table of Videos.

It’s such a blast!  Just click on an element and discover some of its most interesting qualities.  Right now K (potassium) is my favorite.  It’s highly reactive and according to Professor Martyn Poliakoff (the vid host), one of his colleagues describes it as evil — wha-ha-ha.  Check it out:

LINK:
- The Periodic Table of Videos

A recent story in Newsweek, “Revenge of the Nerdette,” focused on a team of “knock-out braniacs” – the Nerd Girls – a group of women engineering students at Tufts U.

This is a good thing, right? Women engineers should be in the news. Engineering itself should be in the news so that kids (especially girls) can learn how interesting it is. And what the “Nerd Girls” are doing is interesting: they’re building a solar car.

So then why was this story in the “Culture” section of the mag instead of “Technology”? And did the title really have to add the diminutive “ette” to nerd?

Apparently, it’s still news – cultural news – that women can be smart and pretty AND/OR can be interested as well as talented in the sciences.

Let’s at least make it tech news next time, okay?

Links:
- “Revenge of the Nerdette”
- Nerd Girls Reality Television

Are you waiting for the Singularity (i.e., the Rapture for geeks)? If you haven’t heard of it, the Singularity is the rise of the machine, kind of like Terminator: one day machines will achieve consciousness and be exponentially smarter than human beings. At which point, the best option for us meat sacks will be to upload our minds into the machine, thus achieving immortality (except we saw how this turned out in The Matrix). In case you think this is all silly, there are some very intelligent people, such as Ray Kurzweil, who ardently believe in the Singularity.

Alas, I am not a believer. So as IEEE’s Spectrum magazine devoted an entire issue to the Singularity (pro and con), I was chuckling at this letter by a clever Wired reader:

My IQ is probably lower than Ray Kurzweil’s (“Stayin’ Alive,” issue 16.04). Maybe that’s why I can’t follow his reasoning on achieving immortality. He seems to be saying that once a computer can cycle quickly enough, it will stop being an adding machine and become a sentient being. Does Kurzweil also believe that once a knitting machine makes enough mittens , it will turn into his grandmother? [Peter K. Sampson, Portland, Maine]

Hope I won’t be eating my yarn, uh, words, in 2025.

LINKS:
- IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity
- Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Near
- Wired Magazine: Issue 16.06

Note: The beautiful woman above is my grandmother, Barbara, on her 95th birthday.