by that I mean he's hiring them. And it's a good thing. He seems to be courting the feminist vote, what with hiring Amanda Marcotte and Shake's Sis. I've always liked Edwards, and I think this speaks well for him. I have grave reservations about Hillary Clinton, mostly because I think she's just too much of a politician, too much about compromise, and making a deal, and not enough about standing up for the issues. I also like Obama, but I think it's a bit early to put him on the ticket, maybe when he's got some more experience under his belt (though I would probably forgive him that if he weren't so pushy about religion).
Of course none of the candidates are perfect, but Edwards it at least worth consideration in a race most consider to be between Hillary and Obama.
(neurotic note: I call Hillary Clinton by her first name to avoid confusion with Bill Clinton, but call the other candidates by their last names because other than Barack Obama, all of their names are nondescript)
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
hmm... this could be bad
so my computer is making strange noises, and the power supply fan is not running. The power supply isn't hot, but as that is where the noises are coming from I am going to replace it (with a really beefy 550w one).
In other news, I need a job, if anyone in the Philadelphia region is looking to hire an undergraduate physics student for six months drop me an email
In other news, I need a job, if anyone in the Philadelphia region is looking to hire an undergraduate physics student for six months drop me an email
Sunday, January 28, 2007
a qualitative comparison of music websites
I have found 4 relatively new music sites. All offer free music listening, 3 offer music downloads, 1 for free and 2 for money. The sites are:
I liked Magnatune the most, the music is all very good, the interface is good, and the downloads are cheap. It seemed to be the most developed, having the largest number of download options. Oh, and it has Amarok integration. Jamendo is also good, the music is a little bit more iffy, and lots of the "albums" are very short, more properly EPs, but the interface is very nice and offering free bittorrent downloads (which are always well seeded) is very nice. Jamendo is a Luxembourger website, so the music is very Europe biased, whereas the others seemed more American biased, so it was a nice change. Mindawn seems to have a very large selection, but requires its own client to listen to music, and is more expensive than magnatune. One thing that is nice about it (for someone like me who is an amateur musician) is that all the artists get at least 55% of any profits, and 75% for Mindawn exclusive content. Magnatune splits all profits 50-50 with the artists. iRateRadio is a promising idea, but I found the client clumsy and slow (it is java, so these things are to be expected), and I listened to 3 songs that I didn't like before I gave up. It might be nice if you give it a chance, and maybe I will, but be prepared to listen to some stuff you don't like first.
- Magnatune, a music store that offers free streaming as well as cheap ($5) album downloads, with no DRM (you can get a plain mp3).
- Mindawn, a music store that offers free demos that self-destruct after 3 plays, and not quite as cheap downloads ($6.99 for a lossy format, 8.99 for a lossless format, or pay by minute) without any DRM either.
- Jamendo, a free music site that offers streaming music and bittorrent downloads. It also has the prettiest website I've ever seen.
- iRateRadio, a java app that runs on all the major platforms and streams music from a variety of free sources, and tries to determine what you like from how you rate the music.
I liked Magnatune the most, the music is all very good, the interface is good, and the downloads are cheap. It seemed to be the most developed, having the largest number of download options. Oh, and it has Amarok integration. Jamendo is also good, the music is a little bit more iffy, and lots of the "albums" are very short, more properly EPs, but the interface is very nice and offering free bittorrent downloads (which are always well seeded) is very nice. Jamendo is a Luxembourger website, so the music is very Europe biased, whereas the others seemed more American biased, so it was a nice change. Mindawn seems to have a very large selection, but requires its own client to listen to music, and is more expensive than magnatune. One thing that is nice about it (for someone like me who is an amateur musician) is that all the artists get at least 55% of any profits, and 75% for Mindawn exclusive content. Magnatune splits all profits 50-50 with the artists. iRateRadio is a promising idea, but I found the client clumsy and slow (it is java, so these things are to be expected), and I listened to 3 songs that I didn't like before I gave up. It might be nice if you give it a chance, and maybe I will, but be prepared to listen to some stuff you don't like first.
Nonlinear Dynamics: what is it?
So I'm taking a course in nonlinear dynamics this term, and its really cool. Nonlinear dynamics is the study of chaotic systems in physics. So what does that mean?
Chaos is a technical term in physics meaning that something is deterministic (follows knowable laws), but unpredictable. Weather is chaotic, we understand a lot about how temperature and air pressure affect the weather in the short term, but long term prediction is almost impossible, very small errors in the measurements of the weather now leads to very large errors later on, and since there is always some error in any measurement we are stuck.
That doesn't mean that things are hopeless, however. There is quite a bit we can learn about chaotic systems, especially by studying simple mathematical chaotic systems. One of the simplest is the logistic map. Basically given some value x, you can get a new value x' by x' = λ * x (1-x). Given suitable values of λ x will stay between 0 and 1, no matter how many times you iterate it. It is used to model populations in biology. I you iterate this a whole bunch of times (like 10000) one of three things will happen depending on your value of λ: 1) x could diverge off somewhere, these are what we would consider unphysical solutions, these values of λ are not interesting, and we do not study them. 2) x could settle on one (or more) stable values, we call these orbits. 3) x could be chaotic, essentially be randomly distributed within a certain range.
One very cool thing about this, is that if you start with a stable orbit and increase λ by a certain amount, you will have 2 orbits, increase it by a smaller amount and you will get 4 and so on, we call this a period doubling cascade and it goes on until the number of orbits is essentially infinite and the system becomes chaotic (the picture from wikipedia is a graphical representation of this). The interesting part about this is that if you take the ratio of the amounts you have to increase λ by to go from the start of the orbit to the end of the orbit, and the same for the next one you get a number that is constant for lots of similar types of systems. This is called quantitative universality.
OK, that's enough for now, maybe I'll post some more on this in the future.
Chaos is a technical term in physics meaning that something is deterministic (follows knowable laws), but unpredictable. Weather is chaotic, we understand a lot about how temperature and air pressure affect the weather in the short term, but long term prediction is almost impossible, very small errors in the measurements of the weather now leads to very large errors later on, and since there is always some error in any measurement we are stuck.
That doesn't mean that things are hopeless, however. There is quite a bit we can learn about chaotic systems, especially by studying simple mathematical chaotic systems. One of the simplest is the logistic map. Basically given some value x, you can get a new value x' by x' = λ * x (1-x). Given suitable values of λ x will stay between 0 and 1, no matter how many times you iterate it. It is used to model populations in biology. I you iterate this a whole bunch of times (like 10000) one of three things will happen depending on your value of λ: 1) x could diverge off somewhere, these are what we would consider unphysical solutions, these values of λ are not interesting, and we do not study them. 2) x could settle on one (or more) stable values, we call these orbits. 3) x could be chaotic, essentially be randomly distributed within a certain range.
One very cool thing about this, is that if you start with a stable orbit and increase λ by a certain amount, you will have 2 orbits, increase it by a smaller amount and you will get 4 and so on, we call this a period doubling cascade and it goes on until the number of orbits is essentially infinite and the system becomes chaotic (the picture from wikipedia is a graphical representation of this). The interesting part about this is that if you take the ratio of the amounts you have to increase λ by to go from the start of the orbit to the end of the orbit, and the same for the next one you get a number that is constant for lots of similar types of systems. This is called quantitative universality.
OK, that's enough for now, maybe I'll post some more on this in the future.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Election result madness
So I'm probably just about the last person in the world to post about the election, but we did pretty well. Both Rick "Man on Dog" "santorum" Santorum and George "Mcaca" Allen lost (though the virginia race was damn close. South Dacota threw out its abortion ban, and I got to vote for Rush Holt again.
These all make me happy.
These all make me happy.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
A tale of misogyny
So I work for the army research lab (ARL) as a co-op. I have a female co-worker who I was reminded of reading this post by Molly of Molly saves the day regarding an event of misogyny in the sciences. This co-worker (who shall remain nameless) was transferred from one post to another (as the army likes to do) and she went to duty. She did a variety of things (as she still does) but no one ever gave her a job description. Eventually someone came to give her a job description and found that she did duties that should have earned her much more pay. She could have sued for lots of money (she chose not to because she wanted to keep her job).
After writing this it seems much less damning than hearing it in person and knowing most of the people involved. Very few are explicitly misogynists, but many seem to have internalized the woman = clerical labor idea that lead to this (not that there is anything wrong with clerical work, I know nothing would get done without the branch and division secretaries, and it's a shame they aren't paid enough to make it an attractive position). That she performs many clerical tasks (making phone calls, making sure things get shipped, etc) may play into it, but she nonetheless was treated like something she wasn't and paid less because she is a woman.
There are other tales I could tell of misogyny, but that is the most egregious one. The reason there are few more is largely because there are so few women at ARL. It is mainly physicists and electrical engineers, and there are so few women among those groups that I can count on one hand the number of scientist/engineer positions held by women at ARL that I know of.
That is the real tragedy.
After writing this it seems much less damning than hearing it in person and knowing most of the people involved. Very few are explicitly misogynists, but many seem to have internalized the woman = clerical labor idea that lead to this (not that there is anything wrong with clerical work, I know nothing would get done without the branch and division secretaries, and it's a shame they aren't paid enough to make it an attractive position). That she performs many clerical tasks (making phone calls, making sure things get shipped, etc) may play into it, but she nonetheless was treated like something she wasn't and paid less because she is a woman.
There are other tales I could tell of misogyny, but that is the most egregious one. The reason there are few more is largely because there are so few women at ARL. It is mainly physicists and electrical engineers, and there are so few women among those groups that I can count on one hand the number of scientist/engineer positions held by women at ARL that I know of.
That is the real tragedy.
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