The Cogitator

Entropy is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit.  Often times “disorder” is used as a synonym for entropy.  This works pretty well most of the time.  For example, scrambled egg has higher entropy than an uncooked one and a paper-strewn desk has higher entropy than a tidy one.  But there are some instances where making the disorder-entropy equivalence can get us into trouble.

For example, imagine a glass filled with crushed ice and water.  Imagine an identical glass filled with just water.  Which has higher entropy?  Which is more “disordered”?  Most people I know would say the glass with the crushed ice looks more disorderly, but it is the glass with just water that has higher entropy.  Why?

Entropy is really a measure of how many ways you can rearrange something and have it look the same.  The number of ways you can rearrange the water molecules in a glass of liquid water is smaller than the number of ways you can rearrange the glass with the ice.

…because other operating systems are too mainstream.

Actually I just used Ubuntu to resurrect a dead laptop.  Very impressed overall.

Because there is.

It’s called IceCUBE.  Neutrinos are subatomic particles with almost no mass.  They are very tricky to detect even though the universe is chock full of them.  Billions pass through us all the time, but you would be lucky to have more than one or two interact with one of your atoms during your lifetime.

Because they are so hard to detect, it is much easier to indirectly detect them.  When a neutrino interacts with an atom, it often produces a muon, or sometimes an electron and a positron.  All these particles have electric charge so when they move through matter, they produce light which you can detect.

IceCUBE is made of strings of detectors frozen in over 1,000 meters of ice.  When the products of a neutrino reaction travel through the ice it produces light (called Cherenkov radiation) which is then detected and recorded.  The detectors are buried deep in the ice to ensure a minimal level of background radiation.  Otherwise you couldn’t determine whether the light you measured was from a neutrino reaction or another source.

So what can we learn with this thing?  Well, quite a bit actually.  One of the more interesting things it could potentially teach us about is dark matter.  We still don’t know what dark matter is, or if it even exists.  However, some potential dark matter candidates (like supersymmetric particles) might interact with each other to produce neutrinos.  If there is a neutrino source that can’t be otherwise explained, it could give us clues about what dark matter is.  Neutrinos are also produced in absurd amounts when stars explode, giving us another way of detecting surpernovae.

Neutrino detection is a super exciting area where a lot of potentially new physics could be hiding.  IceCUBE is just one detector, but there are others like Super Kamiokande in Japan.  Many work in the same way, detecting neutrinos by observing light produced by the particles made in neutrino-nucleon interactions.

For a more technical, but still highly readable summary of topics in neutrino astronomy, I recommend the following two articles. Here and here.  They are a part of an excellent, but somewhat dated review of neutrino physics from the free-to-read New Journal of Physics.

The plight of a would-be academic.

Previously, I asked whether or not secularists should become more active as a political group.  This is a question that I think should at least be asked and debated. If there is a reasonable case to be made against my position or portions of my position I will be more than happy to acknowledge it.

We might as well vote as a bloc on some issues.  One critique I have heard about atheists getting political is that other than being irreligious, atheists and or secularists have little in common.  Indeed we cannot even decide on an effective label for ourselves.  If we tried to unify politically we would become far too fractured to get anything accomplished.  I think this is a reasonable critique.  I also think it is one we can bypass if we are careful.  Most secularists agree on issues of equality and gay rights.  This is an area where we could speak with one voice and mobilize a lot of votes to back it up.  If we don’t agree in some areas…well we do the best we can and try to respect each other as we vote separately on some issues.

US policy needs an injection of rationality.  I don’t think it would be considered unreasonable to describe our current political situation as “afactual”.  Policy today is set according to standards set by dogmatically-held ideologies and well moneyed investors.  Stop me here if you think I am overreaching.  I don’t think I am.  Imagine instead a world where policy is crafted from analyzing data and making logically coherent arguments.  It is a world so different from our own it might be hard to picture, but it doesn’t have to be.

The separation of church and state is weakening.  In a few months we will see who the Republican party nominates to run against President Obama.  As it stands now the field is full of Christian evangelicals who don’t believe in evolution, don’t believe in gay rights, and don’t believe in climate change (Jon Huntsman excluded).  They don’t hold these views because there is a reasonable logical or empirical argument to be made in favor of them.  They hold these views because they are the views espoused in a book composed by woefully ignorant Bronze-Age goat herders.  If ever there was a time for the irreligious to demand a voice, it would have to be now.

Over the past ten years or so we have seen a strong push by atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists to not only demand acknowledgment, but also to criticize the claims made by theists and others.  Targets have ranged from mainstream religions to New Age mystics and from homeopathy practitioners to anti-vaxxers.  One can certainly argue movement’s effectiveness in lambasting these targets.  Religion obviously still exists, but at least today’s bookshelves carry a fair number of counter-apologetics titles.  Yesterday’s repositories can’t make as strong a claim.

For a long time religion monopolized the conversations concerning morality, cosmology, and human nature.  For the first time in the United States we have a strong counter-narrative about the world and what it means to be human.

My question is, should American politics be our next stop?

In some areas the rationalist movement has already made inroads into politics, particularly in the realm of gay rights, womens’ rights and other so-called social issues.  Many also acknowledge the threat of climate change and the failure of the United States to begin to address it.

So should we as a group spread out to other political issues like, say, fiscal policy?

I ask because I don’t think the question has yet been posed directly or if it has, it hasn’t been done very often.  It is a question important enough that it should be discussed.  

I will withhold my own opinion from this post.  Tomorrow I will make my case in another post.

neuropsy:

The production effect is the substantial benefit to memory of having studied information aloud as opposed to silently. MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) have explained this enhancement by suggesting that a word studied aloud acquires a distinctive encoding record and that recollecting this record supports identifying a word studied aloud as “old.” This account was tested using a list discrimination paradigm, where the task is to identify in which of 2 studied lists a target word was presented. The critical list was a mixed list containing words studied aloud and words studied silently. Under the distinctiveness explanation, studying an additional list all aloud should disrupt the production effect in the critical list because remembering having said a word aloud in the critical list will no longer be diagnostic of list status. In contrast, studying an additional list all silently should leave the production effect in the critical list intact. These predictions were confirmed in 2 experiments. 

Source: “The production effect in memory: Evidence that distinctiveness underlies the benefit.” from Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Might have to try this myself…