What I believe, but cannot prove

Recently (in fact, right after I cashed my first paycheck here at Umass), I walked into a book store and found of copy of John Brockman’s “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”. For those of you who dont know, John Brockman is not a writer, but rather an editor who focuses a lot on the “Third Culture” (his term). The third culture refers to the scientists in the world who are taking the forefront of public interest by publishing their ideas in ways that are accessible to most people (popSci books). He runs this site, edge.org, which always has a bunch of articles related to science, mathematics, or the culture surrounding the two. As part of the edge’s activities, every year he poses a question for which he collects responses from leading thinkers in a lot of fields and publishes their responses in a book. Before this one I just got, I had purchased “What is Your Dangerous Idea”, which turned out to be pretty good. The responses to these questions range from half of a page to about three pages, with most responses being a page and a half. Obviously, these works aren’t intended to give you any real scientific thought, but they leave you with some cool things to think about.

 

While reading “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”, I noticed that many authors chose to write about the afterlife (or rather the lack thereof). Now, I suppose this is the ultimate example of something that we believe but cannot prove, but I was very discontented by these responses. First of all, the response is a cop-out from writing something more interesting and intellectual. Secondly, many of the responses went on to implicitly, if not explicitly, insult those who believe in a higher power or an afterlife. It almost seems that the authors would welcome a continuation of the schism that rests between “persons of reason” and “persons of faith” (quotations meant to emphasize the fact that I find both of these terms to be an unfortunate use of language). I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone valued the scientific method and the knowledge derived from it. Certainly our nation would be better off if we had more people pursuing science as a career. However, those in the scientific community who help drive the wedge between the two existing cultures do nothing but hurt that goal. By publishing books with titles such as “The God Delusion” and telling people they are stupid for believing in a god will never get us anywhere. In fact, I understand the need for a god in people’s lives. I understand the fact that people want to believe in the afterlife and want to believe that humanity is not just some chance happening. Its really not that unreasonable (of course, there are those in religion that take it too far, but I am talking about faith not religion). People who hold faith as their #1 belief are going to be reluctant to join a community full of people who will consider them inherently stupid for their belief. 

 

What I believe, but cannot prove is that those in science who feel that they must ridicule a belief in a higher power are only following a crude and primitive human desire for conflict. Furthermore, I believe they are necessarily stupid in some ways for viciously fighting over something that is inherently unknowable. But perhaps they need that. To quote John Lennon, “whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright.”

 

 

 

WordPress ignores leading whitespace

So week 2 is winding down here at my REU in Umass amherst and its going pretty well. I know what my project has to do with (social networks) but I am not entirely sure exactly what I am doing. Everyday I get a different feel for what it is that I am doing. My professor has outlined some longer term (and interesting goals) that stand more on the theoretical aspects of social networks, but every time I have brought them up when we are talking, he gives me the “stay away from that for now” vibe. I have spent the last two weeks getting used to python, installing and using some packages (networkx and matplotlib), and writing some basic python scripts to compute some statistics on graghs. Today, I realized that some of the statistics that I had come up with on my own are very insignificant. It was an awesome feeling to finally finish coding the program to do it, looking at the output, making sure my program was correct, and then realizing that the results that I got would have been obvious to anyone with a half of a conception about the project. Oh well.

 

I spent a good amount of time today finding an interpreter for and learning Whitespace (check It). Ignoring the fact that the only characters used are space, tabs, and newlines, its not too bad to use. It provides a decent amount of functionality, which doesnt make doing things too much of a pain in the ass. Of course, the really awesome things about whitespace is you can embed whitespace code in other source code. In fact, today I wrote a C program that prints “1″ and a newline. It compiles and runs fine in C. But if one were to run it through a whitespace interpreter, it does the same thing! It was kind of a pain in the ass to integrate the two, so Ill probably write a program to do it for me. Since it doesnt make a difference where you put extra whitespace in C, I suspect it will be a simple process to integrate the two. If I do a decent job, I will post some source here.

All this whitespace stuff is going to be used to submit complicated solutions to trivially easy coding assignments. I will probably write a C program that just invokes the whitespace interpreter on itself and the whitespace does the rest. It could be considered a clever hack or it could just be considered stupid and annoying. I shall see I suppose.

For the sake of being a nerd, I tried to make the title of my post an instruction in whitespace, but after viewing the post, I discovered that WP ignores leading whitespace. There goes my hope of embedding whitespace programs in my post titles. Maybe I shouldn’t write my integrator program or else everything will end up with whitespace programs embedded in it.

I have been meaning to write posts on the science, thought, the meaning of life, the great beyond, stones, philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, the mind, and all those grandiose things, but I will get to it later.

My Blog v2.0

So this is actually the second time I have tried to start a blog. My last one was last summer, got one post, and then died (it was buried at sea). Hopefully I can get a little bit more mileage out of this one before I lose interest in writing to no one. 

In other news, I am at Umass Amherst for the summer doing another Computer Science REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). The campus here is really cool, probably at least double the size of Binghamton. The Computer Science department has its own building complete with a lounge containing a small library of various CS-related texts, a coffee machine, and a foosball table! Binghamton should really think of getting some lounges, they make students feel much better about their institution of (sometimes last) choice. My advisor here works on various topics related to social networks, so I am having a pretty cool time learning about them and analyzing a few data sets, including a facebook data set that we just got a hold of. 

 

The REU here is in its first year, so a lot of the kinks are being worked out just like happened last year at Binghamton. The site director here seems to be a CS department secretary, which is interesting. I had a great time last summer at Binghamton, so its going to be interesting to see how these two experiences compare. So far Umass has some pretty cool stuff going for it…

- Better CS building

- Better dorms

- Free lunches

- Free REU baseball hat (definitely the deal-breaker here)

- Some very good faculty. Not saying that Binghamton doesnt have good professors, but the professors here seems to be more cutting edge. We had an awesome presentation earlier about Computer Science as an actual science, which was awesome for me because defining CS as a science is something I have been struggling with.

Since it has only been a week, I dont have too much to go of off, but there are some things that Binghamton has done better.

- Presentations about summer projects in the very beginning. Coming from a research stand point, this really helped me get a lot of the important questions answered very early. This year, the beginning process seems to be a little bit slower, partially because I think many people are confused about what they are actually doing.

-More $ plus a food stipend

- Awesome guidance from Professor Lewis

 

All in all, the two programs are pretty similar, so I guess it really comes down to my project now. With any luck, I will do something cool or of use to my professor and get it published. 

 

The only downside to these programs is they tend to be pretty lonely. I miss Alia and I miss my friends. On the plus side, the relationship between my roommates is getting stronger. They are good guys, so we shall see where that goes. Until then, I will have a lot of free time, so hopefully I will manage to get at least more entry before I lose interest in the whole inter-blag thing.

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