Friday, 29 August 2008 by bbbeard.

Well, Mother Goose, anyway – Sarah Palin has five kids.

The consensus will no doubt evolve over the next few days, but right now conservative circles are reportedly ecstatic and the Obamaites are in disarray. It seems like a masterstroke, slashing the twine and pulling on the chewing gum with which the Obama campaign has tried to bind the “puma” faction, while simultaneously reassuring the red-staters that there will be a conservative presence in the administration. She has a lot to recommend her, including experience running the nation’s largest state. I had fretted over the possibility of a 4 x Senator race.

I have to say, this has been the smartest campaign McCain has ever run. I might even vote for a McCain-Palin ticket.

UPDATE: Well, as I said, the situation is evolving. Bristol Palin is reportedly with child, and unmarried, and the left is in a tizzy. I wish Bristol well, but in this unforeseen development, she will be an issue in her mother’s campaign.

The left is salivating at the prospect of inflaming the Jerry Falwells of the right. I predict that once again, the Kossacks will be outraged at the “hypocrisy” of the right — meaning, Christians just won’t react with the hatred that Hollywood has led them to expect. In the end, just as the trumped-up campaign against Mary Cheney fell flat, Bristol Palin will evoke smiles from the right — because she will marry her baby’s husband and raise a chubby, happy baby.Meanwhile the “liberals” will fret that Bristol is “too young to have a baby”. Welcome to the real world.

I think there is a gulf in worldview between the leftist humanists and the rightist religionists. In the left’s ideal world, Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin would openly cohabiting, for sure, but Levi would have worn a condom, and if Bristol had gotten pregnant anyway, they would have had “the tissue” removed, as though it were cancerous. In the right’s ideal world, Bristol and Levi would wait until they were married. And in the right’s real world, they would be discreet and careful — and if Bristol got pregnant, they would get married a little sooner and raise a baby (which appears to be their trajectory). Because life happens while you’re waiting for something better to come along.

UPDATE 2:

BO remains, umm, geographically challenged. In response to a question about experience from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he pointed out the diminutiveness of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, AK, and by all appearances seemed unaware that a Governor runs a state and that Alaska is a state. Ordinarily one might not even notice this omission, dismissing it as “clever” campaign-rhetorical jujitsu. But Obama now has a considerable track record of geographical goofs: misplacing Auschwitz, Poland; confusing Rapid City with Grand Rapids; confusing Sioux Falls and Sioux City; confusing Sunrise, FL, with “Sunshine, FL”; misstating the number of states in the Union; not knowing that the state he represents, Illinois, shares a border with Kentucky; and just last week confusing St. Louis and Kansas City. Not to mention acting as though Germans had votes that will count in November. Weird.

A Spenglerian would speculate that Obama is not merely “post-racial”, but “post-Faustian” — a candidate free of the tyranny of number and map.  Someone should ask him about his web experience.

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Wednesday, 27 August 2008 by bbbeard.

I read with fascination AmSci’s book review of “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind” by Sherry Turkle. Dr. Turkle is a professor of sociology at MIT, and though I’ve never met her, it sounds like we would have a lot to talk about. She is most famous for her books on the interactions of people and cyberspace. This latest book is a collection of essays and insights from former students and current professional scientists. They were all asked the same question, “Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?”

My immediate reaction was that the question as posed is a trifle silly (who “meets” objects?) and possibly tendentious, inasmuch as the book review starts with the binary stereotype that “Some people are oriented primarily toward other people, others toward things,” the latter folks being inclined toward science. But as I read on, I appreciated the depth of this insight: that many of us are captivated by the beauty and functionality of objects in our lives. And, like Lorenz’s butterfly, these objects lead us in directions we might not have predicted.

And it put me in mind of Jubal Early, the villain from the ‘philosophical’ Firefly episode, “Objects in Space“. If you haven’t seen the episode, order the DVD. One theme of the episode is the meaning which we humans imbue to physical objects, and how that meaning inheres to the observer, not the object. Joss Whedon has remarked the episode was inspired by Sartre’s Nausea.

Anyway, Proustishly, I recall the many “objects” that I appreciated in my childhood, objects which collectively contributed to the trajectory of my life.

The first object that sprang to mind was a perfboard “computer” kit, comprising a backboard, six perfboard disks, and a bunch of wires, screws, jumpers, and lights. It came with an instruction manual with dozens of “programs”, which one implemented by installing wires connecting the screws installed on the backboard, and labeling the various positions of the disks, which acted as multipole switches. It had limited capability, of course, the equivalent of about two or three bytes (!) of RAM, but was capable of some non-obvious computation. I suppose on one level its attraction was how it made accessible the mysterious world of computing, but on another level, it struck at that boundary between comprehensible and incomprehensible.

Another favorite was a tiny microscope that my father brought me from one of his many trips to the Orient. It came with a dozen or so slides of prepared, stained specimens. I spent countless hours fiddling with it, marveling at the intricacy of nature and the length scales beneath the visible, and trying in vain to find household items that would yield to its power. (In hindsight, some stain would have helped greatly.) Ultimately, of course, we used very nice microscopes in high school biology class, and the toy microscope yielded to entropy.

I was also the proud owner of a Tasco 60mm refractor with azimuthal mounting, which offered tantalizing details from the night sky. I spent many cold hours scanning my favorite constellations, star-hopping – and dreaming of having a larger scope. At one point I bought a 6″ refractor lens grinding kit from Edmunds, the idea being that grinding your own lens was so much cheaper than having a professional do it. I spent many hours pushing the lens back and forth over the grinding glass, but lens grinding is slow work. I gave up after a while and decided it would be quicker to go to college, get a job, and pay a professional to do it after all. So now I have a 10 inch Dobsonian sitting in my garage, where it serves as my wife’s favorite parking target.

I have to mention an “object” that was a profound talisman for me, the book “Calculus: One and Several Variables” by Saturnino Salas and Einar Hill. The first edition was a big red cloth-bound book which I found absolutely delightful, both from a tactile and an intellectual standpoint. I’m pretty sure I read it from cover to cover. I loved the beautifully hand-drawn figures, the cozy typeface, and especially the intuitive but rigorous presentation. For awhile I carried this book everywhere, and it is the text from which I learned calculus. I have noticed that subsequent editions have completely lost the magic, going to the soulless modern format: computer-generated plots, gray sidebars, and Times New Roman.

I could go on… the assorted bits of schwag from the Star Trek Fan Club, the Radio Shack Science Project Kits that came packaged in a neat red and clear plastic perfboard box, my first electric guitar, the Morse code set I had in elementary school, the hefty steel-ringed glass lens I still use as a paperweight…. These all provided little impulses on the trajectory I have followed.

So, as Jubal Early said, “Well… here I am.”

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Tuesday, 19 August 2008 by CVM.

On a recent trip to China I was struck by the many variations of Buddhism that I encountered. I was particularly struck by the various forms of Buddhism that were deeply superstitious. In particular, there was much reference to praying to Buddha and how Buddha bestows his blessing etc. A brief perusal of the internet shows there is similar diversity of opinion on this subject. I wonder if BBB would give us a tutorial on the denominations of Buddhism and their doctrinal distinctions. Which is right and which is wrong? A rather non-Buddhist question of course!

RESPONSE by bbbeard:

Well, a broad question. And there is a collection of terminology that is a form of busy-work for people not satisfied with mere enlightenment.

The two main trunks of Buddhism are called Mahayana and Hinayana, commonly translated as “Greater Vehicle” and “Lesser Vehicle”. “Vehicle”, apart from being the really cool 1970 hit from  “The Ides of March”, is the translation of the Sanskrit “Yana” and means “way of enlightenment”. There is a third vehicle, Vajrayana, which is really an offshoot of Mahayana. Vajrayana is also called Tantric Buddhism.

Of course, the way such things go, some folks disagree with this taxonomy; in particular the term “Hinayana” has been called “pejorative”. Such folks tend to group non-Mahayana sects into a trunk called Theravada. You are encouraged to find other taxonomies if that suits you.

Geographically, Hinayana is mostly associated with India and Southeast Asia. The stereotypical lesser vehicle fellow dresses in a saffron robe and doesn’t masturbate. Mahayana is mostly associated with China and Japan, also pulling in Mongolia, Taiwan, and Tibet. The stereotypical greater vehicle fellow dresses in a black robe and sits a lot. Zen is a Mahayana sect.

Again, the way such things go, despite the geographical correlates you can pretty much find any kind of Buddhist anywhere. So your mileage may vary.

One of the more colorful Mahayana offshoots is Tibetan Buddhism, which is kind of like the outrageous eccentric uncle whom you love to have at parties but wouldn’t necessarily bring to church. The isolation and relative poverty of Tibet has bred a number of practices and doctrines that are peculiar to that region. Or, if you look at it benevolently, Tibetan Buddhism is kind of “technicolor Buddhism” – all the features of greater vehicle doctrine are taken past the point of saturation, producing a gorgeous mosaic that is larger than life (not to mention more photogenic than garden-variety Buddhism).

I recommend “The Monk and the Philosopher” by Jean-François Revel for a glimpse into the life of a Tibetan monk. This is quite a fascinating book. Revel, of course, was a noted French philosopher. His son Mathieu Ricard is a scientist, with a doctorate in molecular genetics from Institut Pasteur. Shortly after he earned his doctorate, Mathieu left for Tibet, where he became a monk. The book is a dialogue between father and son about matters religious, secular, and scientific.

There is also an old but fascinating classic text by Alexandra David-Neel called “The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects“, which I have to say I found profoundly influential when I read it as a young man. It was the first time, I recall, that I read a really coherent account of the difference between exoteric and esoteric religious doctrine – a difference which, I am given to understand, also applies to Christianity to some extent.

Maybe that should be the jumping-off point for any account of the diversity within Buddhism. Broadly speaking, exoteric doctrine is “doctrine for the public”, while esoteric doctrine is “doctrine for the enlightened”. The idea is that the great mass of humanity has neither the capacity nor the inclination to study the esoteric doctrine. In Christianity, or so I have been led to understand, esoteric doctrine is “secret doctrine”, but I don’t think that is quite the case in Buddhism (unless, of course, there is a layer of secrecy underneath the “public” “esoteric” doctrine… but that way madness lies….) Exoteric doctrine is the set of beliefs that are promulgated for public understanding and practice. They are complementary, not antagonistic, kind of yin-yang and all that jazz.

A typical case is doctrine regarding the divinity of Buddha. If I dare speak for esoteric doctrine, Buddha was an enlightened person who showed that there is a middle way to enlightenment, neither hedonistic nor ascetic, neither atheistic nor animistic, neither excessively public nor intensely private. He also showed how there are enhanced states of understanding which can be reached through meditation. One of the aspects of that understanding is the realization of the interconnectedness of everything, which I suppose a wag might interpret as a restatement of the horizon problem in cosmology. An aspect of that interconnectedness is that when a person dies, i.e. when their body stops working, the manifestations of that person’s existence continue to ripple down through time. When Buddha died, or so the story goes, his nature (”Buddha-nature”) merged with all of existence. So in esoteric doctrine, there is no Buddha sitting in Heaven, processing prayer requests. He’s gone, he’s everywhere, and he’s not coming back because he never left.

But that’s all kind of high-falutin’ for your typical farmer/engineer/soldier/courtesan, so the esoteric doctrine explains that it’s okay to have an exoteric doctrine for the regular folks. In the exoteric doctrine, people collect little Buddha figurines and pray to them. I can’t really say whether this prayer is different from Christian prayer or not, since I’ve not done either. But it’s fair to say that it’s common in the exoteric doctrine to visualize a personal Buddha, as it were, who hears the prayers and acts on them. Of course, one of the major Buddhist doctrines is the doctrine of karma, which is variously translated as “what goes around comes around”, “you get what you deserve”, “a circle has no end”, etc., so I suppose that in the esoteric view, worthy prayers do get answered.

I haven’t really addressed the doctrinal differences between Mahayana and Hinayana trunks. Some people have tried to make an analogy with the Catholic/Protestant divide, but I find this somewhat baffling. (I’m not aware of a conflict where Hinayanists and Mahayanists have resorted to bloodshed over doctrine.) Mostly, Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhists are “originalist” in that they claim their doctrine stems directly from the teachings of the Buddha, while the Mahayanists have a markedly more evolved theology and philosophy of the soul, much of it contributed by numerous other enlightened folks over the course of several millennia. (So which of them is more “Catholic”?) Hinayana is closely associated with the Pali Canon, which is essentially the meeting minutes of the “Third Council” held in Pataliputta in 308 BC. Mahayana, as remarked, has a diverse lineage, starting with Nagarjuna (c. 200 AD) who wrote extensively about nothingness (hence foreshadowing the inscrutable modern doctrine of the close connection between vacuum expectation values and particle propagators).

As far as “which is right and which is wrong?” goes, well, yeah, that’s a different paradigm. I tend to incline to the Mahayanist and esoteric view. But I also tend to the “translational” view of religious beliefs, that is, I understand when some person talks about God or angels or prayer they can mean something similar to what another person might call totality or spirit or hope. Languages are the coordinate systems we use to navigate through our lives, but, well, the map is not the ground. (”People ask me where I live and I say ‘E-4’”).

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Friday, 15 August 2008 by bbbeard.

I found this post at National Review Online as blood-curdling as anything I’ve seen lately. An anonymous friend of Rich Lowry is suggesting that the U.S. Sixth Fleet take up residence in Sevastopol when the Russian fleet is booted out by Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia has reminded us what a dangerous world we live in. Various armchair strategists have pointed out the unfeasibility of a NATO military response (at least, one that involves ground troops). However, the real obstacle is political, as in “political will”. Almost no one on either side of the Iraq war issue is willing to let any NATO soldiers die for Georgia by Russian arms — not the anti-war, anti-American left, nor the anti-Islamofascist right.

Which raises the question, and the spectre: what action by Russia would it take to provoke a response from NATO? What if Putin embarks on a course that aims to reassemble the Soviet Union, in “authoritarian”, not “totalitarian” form? Even right-wing analysts would pause if global totalitarian domination is not in the balance, merely “regional” rearrangement.

Lowry’s friend is apparently in favor of “forward defense“, as the euphemism goes. But moving into Sevastopol would be provocative in the extreme. Russia would likely take it as well as Kennedy took to the idea of Russian missiles in Cuba. And their response might be similar — a naval blockade, possibly initiated during the buildup phase of basing, “before we are ready”.

So I think Sevastopol is a non-starter, though the mere contemplation of the move brings a frisson of remembrance of childhood rounds of Diplomacy.

But returning to the question, here are some other non-starters: (1) letting Putin grab as much territory as he wants, (2) drawing a line in the dirt somewhere west of Ukraine, (3) begging, (4) hand-wringing, (5) hoping, (6) strong words from the UN Security Council, (7) starting a new league of democracies, and (8) depending on the French to lead the way.

Here are some constructive suggestions: (1) install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, right now, (2) admit Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Ukraine to NATO, and fast-track Albania, Croatia, and anyone else willing to get in line, including Sweden and Finland,  (3) initiate joint military training with Ukraine, right now, (4) call Putin’s bluff and immediately withdraw from the INF treaty, citing Russian aggression against Georgia as the reason, and (5) release RFQs for the development of a new generation of stealthy, GPS-guided, intermediate range missiles. The intent of all these moves is not to provoke a war — for which Putin is not ready — but to prevent a war by rearranging Putin’s strategic calculation. He must be made to understand that the Georgian invasion was a blunder, and not “audacity“.

We live in a dangerous time. Again. As always.

[h/t Rand Simberg, once again.]

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Thursday, 7 August 2008 by bbbeard.

There is new research into the Milgram hypothesis (”six degrees of separation”), which was last discussed in Compuserve SCIMATH about two years ago. This time, some folks at Microsoft investigated the connectivity of the Microsoft Messenger network. They looked at 30 billion records of messages sent among 180 million users and came up with an average (not median!) link length of 6.6. From the WaPo article:

“To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. “People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.”

Funny, this triggered a memory. From the BBC news story on Judith Kleinfeld:

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram’s original research notes and found something surprising.

It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target.

Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all.

Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence that the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments.

“I was shocked. I was horrified,” she said.

Wow. Two shocked researchers. But then I recalled the other thing Milgram was famous for.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.

Hmm, I’m beginning to see a pattern. Perhaps the Milgram hypothesis is part of a diabolically Byzantine scheme to see how far science journalists can be pushed into torturing innocent researchers.

But seriously. To my mind there is nothing ideological about the Milgram hypothesis, although I know several folks who have gotten quite exercised in their interpretation of the meaning of the six degrees of separation. The hypothesis seems to me to be a more-or-less obvious property of percolating networks, essentially a consequence of the logarithmic nature of shortest-path length.

To bring you up to date, here is what I wrote about six-degrees in 2006:

It seems to me that one first has to proffer a specific meaning for “link between two people”. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that we settle on something like “a link is said to exist between two people if neither would be surprised to receive a communication from the other”. I suppose the sociologists or psychologists could spend a lot of time arguing about more precise meanings for “link” — but I conjecture that, except for pathological meanings of “link”, the connectedness of humanity as defined by the Milgram hypothesis and the discussion below would not vary very much.

Okay, so once we agree on what we mean by “link”, I suggest that the six in “six degrees of separation” is a median number, not a maximum. By that I mean: pick two living persons. Determine their Milgram number, that is, the minimum number of links traversed to connect them. Add that number to a list. Continue with a different pairs until all O(36E18) pairs have been examined. Order the list and find the median Milgram number. Then the Milgram hypothesis corresponds to the median Milgram number being six.

Note this allows the possibility that some persons (or small groups) could be entirely isolated from the rest of humanity. Simply enter their Milgram numbers as infinity. If the number of these “hermits” is not overwhelming, their existence won’t shift the median. For example, if there were 10,000 hermits, then there would be roughly six billion times ten thousand (6E13) pairs that give infinite entries in the list, and these comprise less than the last 0.0002% of the list. Also, there could *conceivably* be a number of people who are really hard to get to, but who have Milgram numbers less than infinity. It seems to me that having a Milgram number of, say, 100, requires that one or both ends of the chain connecting a pair of people is populated by folks who are linked to *exactly* two people — neither of whom know each other! (Hypothetically, the very ends of the chain could know just one other person). Once you connect to “normal” people who know dozens or hundreds of other people, the jig is up and the logarithmic nature of Milgram connectivity takes over.

Your mileage may vary. It seems to me that the important observation is that the Milgram number is small, something smaller in fact than the common log of the number of nodes in the network. FWIW it seems to me that people’s intuitive rebellion against the Milgram hypothesis has nothing to do with the number actually being 6. I don’t think that a person uncomfortable with 6 would be comfortable with 7. I can’t imagine what a person who thinks the Milgram number should be 100 or 1000, or greater, is thinking .

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Wednesday, 6 August 2008 by bbbeard.

SpaceX loses yet another launch vehicle.

For those of you not familiar with SpaceX, it is at the forefront of the NewSpace movement, whose advocates believe it is imperative to harness the power of private enterprise to make mankind a spacefaring species. Its colorful and brilliant founder, Elon Musk, is one of those Internet Billionaires that populate the new technology landscape these days. SpaceX has developed a new commercial launch vehicle, the Falcon I.

Unfortunately, the first two “demo” flights failed to reach orbit. This third flight was intended as a “production” flight and carried actual “paying” payloads.

I have mixed emotions about this failure. On the one hand, I agree with the motivation of the NewSpace advocates. I would like to see us become a spacefaring species. I reckon it’s the only way my great-great-grandson will get to fly one of these.

But I have spent the last twelve months helping design NASA’s new launch vehicle, the Ares I. This rocket science stuff isn’t as easy as it sounds. Staging is risky. Propellant slosh can bring you down to earth. In a sense, it’s good to know that the problems I’m working on are not simple.

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Sunday, 3 August 2008 by lukemeister.

For the last 12 days, I’ve been with my wife, son, and sister-in-law attending Cassini workshops in Paris and London. We tried to go to the Catacombs in Paris but arrived too late. In London I got a second chance to contemplate mortality, because the Wellcome Trust, which funds biomedical research in the UK, currently has 27 skeletons on display, selected from the 17,000 that the Museum of London has in storage. The skeletons on view range in age from Roman times to the 19th century, and were found during routine construction projects. Not being a fan of forensics shows on TV, I had naively thought that skeletons were reasonably impervious to the insults of life, but even I could see the holes in the bones of the man from Roman times with multiple myeloma and the horribly disfigured skull of an 11-year-old boy, ca. 15th century, born with syphilis. I was moved by the skeleton of a young woman with the bones of her 24-weeks’-gestation child still in her pelvis.

Yesterday I saw the Hadrian exhibit at the British Museum, which has gotten a lot of hype. Hadrian is considered one of the greatest emperors of Rome, although I’m not sure why. He quickly abandoned the eastern provinces conquered by Trajan and crushed a Jewish revolt. He did love Greek culture, and one Greek in particular. For a while, the cult of Antinous competed successfully with Christianity, a fact I don’t recall Mr. Babel mentioning in 9th grade Ancient History class. Of course, the Wall was built during Hadrian’s reign to keep those pesky Picts out of Britannia. Mostly what I learned was that even for so famous a figure, much of what has come down to us was written at least two centuries later, and its veracity is disputed. Hadrian wrote an autobiography, but it is lost. Just last year an impressive statue of Hadrian was unearthed in Turkey, and is part of the display in London. Also on display were five Roman funerary portraits from Egypt, which are very moving. Many were used by their finders to build fires, but fortunately some 1,000 survive. They look amazingly fresh.

On an unrelated note, Christine and I saw West Side Story tonight, our last night in London. The idea of seeing an iconic American musical in England first seemed absurd to me, but the play was spectacular, better than even the terrific performance of Cabaret starring Anna Maxwell Martin that we saw two years ago. West Side Story has as much of a happy ending as one can hope for these days.

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Friday, 1 August 2008 by bbbeard.

And maybe this time, there is a valid point to be made.

Wired Magazine’s cover story last month parleyed the “Petabyte Age” into an argument that the scientific method itself is undergoing a revolution. The thrust of the argument is that extreme computation and extreme data have changed the nature of investigation, driving scientists to abandon their paradigm. Chris Anderson writes:

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

As a computational physicist, I have some sympathy with this argument. In my doctoral thesis I argued that computation is a “third discipline”. neither experimental nor theoretical, and with a quality and rigor — and limitations — all its own. Indeed, one of my proudest accomplishments from that era was a paper that reconciled moderate-temperature experimental data with the predictions of low-temperature chiral perturbation theory. The zone connecting these two disparate regimes was largely inaccessible to experimenters and theoreticians alike, but clever algorithmists like my collaborators could accomplish this reconciliation.

But Wired is talking about a different phenomenon. In essence they are lining up to escort the theoreticians and experimentalists off the stage. In my heart I cannot endorse this trend as a good thing. Personally, I would be lost without the framework of theory to explain observations of computational or experimental origin. “No theory should be believed until it has been confirmed by experiment” is the creed of the experimentalists — and conversely, “No experiment should be believed until it is confirmed by theory”. An example of the latter is Rutherford’s classic scattering experiment with alpha particles and gold foil. Without a fit to his theoretical calculation of scattering cross section, his experiment would have been a mild curiosity. But because it conclusively showed the concentration of atomic mass in the nucleus, it revolutionized our view of matter.

Conversely, I see in some of my colleagues that a sincere and debilitating ignorance of theory is costly and dangerous. A recent example is the hunting for resonant instability phenomena in fluids (e.g. Faraday waves) using computational fluid dynamics. Without theory to guide the search, extreme computation is extremely wasteful, since there are sizable regions of the spectrum (especially at low frequencies) without resonances, and a random search is unlikely to turn up these instabilities. An unguided search that is less than exhaustive is more likely than not to guide one to the wrong conclusion.

But at the same time, the time’s they are a-changin’. A whole new generation of investigators is coming of age with Google, and supercomputers on the desktop. So am I headed for the Recycle Bin of history — just as my forebears, who finally had to admit that real calculation could be accomplished without the aid of a tab sheet, and that real documents could be prepared without a pencil and yellow pad?

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