Month: March 2011

Integration

Ha, this post gets loads of hits over ten years later, but in terms of “Integration” it’s but one tiny work-life example plus the work-life-self example in the post note. Need to link to a proper post on the topic 🙂

- Dilbert by Scott Adams

Dunno, but this just tickled me. I guess because I’ve made a point of fitting a little R&R around the business travel recently.

(Broken links to pictures since Google Picasa went down.)

Long weekend in Queensland.

Long weekend in Aransas.

Long weekend in Barcelona, with Sylvia.

Week in US South West after conference in Phoenix next month, also with Sylvia.

Beats airport lounges.

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Post Note 2022:

Nuclear Sense of Perspective

Nuclear Power radiation risks are largely in the mind.

[Post notes thanks to Facebook activity.

From Smiffy http://understandinguncertainty.org/node/1272

From Smiffy and XKCD http://xkcd.com/radiation/

From every man and his dog, George Monbiot is a convert http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

Anyone who was already pro nuclear power, and has had their beliefs reinforced by Fukushima, probably already recognizes the real risks … not the radiation, but the radioactive materials entering the body – giving you a long ongoing personal dose – from escaping materials – airborne / waterborne from a loss of containment … including long term processing and storage of fuel and spent fuel.]

No Messi’n

Lucky enough to see FC Barcelona with 91,000 others under the stars at the Nou Camp on Saturday evening. With Barca clear of Real’s galacticos and both well clear of the rest we weren’t sure if they would field their star team against lowly Getafe, but we needn’t have feared. Starting line-up included Messi, Iniesta, Villa, Xavi, Alves, Macherano. Iniesta had an off-day – so many incomplete passes – David Villa showed how frustratingly one-footed he is for a winger, but the rest did not disappoint. Xavi and Macherano ran the show, Alves and the other full-back-winger ran miles (with the ball); Alves and Bojan scored, but Barca should have had 5 or 6 if they’d bothered to shoot and a couple of pens before Getafe’s consolation made for an unexpectedly exciting final ten minutes. Mostly felt like an exhibition match, despite the 2:1 result.

The great thing about seeing a game like that live is the venue and event itself, choosing what to watch – unlike the editorial “action” as seen on TV – or the thick of the competitive action watching the team you actively support – and it was hard not to watch Messi. Plenty of other “tourists” taking photos, wearing the No.10 shirt and doing the same.

Messi is one of a kind. There were periods of many minutes at a time where he barely plodded three paces in any direction, others when you’d notice he’d apparently sprinted / ghosted into another position. Always receiving passes from team-mates already surrounded by three or more opponents, and always stumbling effortlessly free to find three more to beat before getting bored and either passing or returning to take on the first three again if no opportunity presented. Childlike, almost comedic bright orange feet and baggy shorts on the little man. Deceptive.

(As well as minute’s silence for the Japan earthquake fall-out, a full three minutes pre-match applause for Abidal undergoing three-hour surgery on a liver tumour in the same week.)

Weird, after being mesmerized by Messi, I don’t have a single shot of him in the 20-odd pics I took. Still, a good weekend to lose yourself at the Nou Camp instead of the Stadium of Light ? Coincidentally, lots of Liverpool fans on the A19 driving south from Sunderland on our way home from NCL airport.

Interestingly last time I mentioned Messi was a reference to this piece by Robbo. Worth a read.

Information on Trust

Trust and information go hand in hand. There is no information without trust. Limited data maybe, information of real value; no.

Interesting to read this piece on Three Mile Island in the light of the current Japanese problems:

“The understated equivocations of their spokesmen – and their genuine uncertainty about the situation – engendered mistrust, particularly among those in the vicinity. Media coverage citing concerned nuclear experts served to heighten fears.

Soon, misinformation about a hydrogen bubble, which had formed in the containment vessel after zirconium fuel rods were exposed, turned into full-blown and mostly unfounded anxiety about an atomic explosion.”

Mostly Unfounded, yet, despite a massive (but contained) meltdown seen with hindsight only, a monumental event historically, created by Media Coverage.

Perversely and counter-intuitively yet again, less is more – less communication is better – yes, free communication makes things worse. Is that a political statement ? If I were a conservative-techno-phobe that would not be an interesting statement, but I’m a web-savvy-liberal. Must I post the W3C Fig 7 picture again for the techies ? Trust at the top – clearly trust and information feed off each other, but it’s the trust that’s paramount.

Working thesis: Current information value depends on a current stock of trust, current trust depends on previous experience (of information, and action, and … ) not on current information. No amount of “data communication” now, can fix a pre-existing lack of trust. Something like that 🙂

Japan Nuclear Situation

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin explains what has happened at the Fukushima plant:

“The power plant is supposed to be earthquake-proof and shut down automatically in response to the quake,” he says. “But this starved power from the stations’ cooling systems. Then the back-up diesel cooling system also failed. Reactor number 1 overheated, and it is said that hydrogen released exploded, causing the concrete roof of the plant to blow off. Now that’s been repeated at Number 3 reactor, Numbers 2 and 4 have problems with cooling.”

Repeated ? I think not.

Need some clarification on specific Daichi and Daini plants now. Fukushima 1 has reactors 1 to 4 in the one block and two further reactors (5&6 ?) in a second block immediately north. Fukushima 2 has four further reactors 12/15 km south of Fukushima 1. (Update F1 is Daichi, F2 is Daini)

Anyway, key point whatever the existing and ongoing difficulties with cooling water systems, and whether all the plants were actually shut down successfully (control rods fully home) before these cooling water difficuties …. the two explosions so far were quite different.

F1-Daichi-R1 was a very clean and fast explosion initially – Hydrogen ? – with all the smoke appearing to be concrete dust, with lighter weight panels flying away from the building. (See the initial shock wave rising vertically above the building, before the smoke, and no fire or subsequent visible emissions.)

F1-Daichi-R3 was not. There was a hydrocarbon yellow flash and a plume of black smoke, with large heavy pieces falling quickly back to earth around the building. And the live footage seems to show steam and ongoing fire escaping from that building ?

F1-Daichi-R2 (and R4 ?) now seems to be having cooling difficulties.

[Update: 4, 5 & 6 were already shutdown before the quake / tsunami, with fuels rods in the holding ponds as the reactors underwent work. The other good news is that Daini  / Fukushima 2 do not appear to have had the post-shut-down cooling failures (cooling pump electric power and water supply failures), so in principle the design is earthquake safe. This one will run and run.

So, the real problem now is that Daichi-R2 explosion seems to have cracked primary containment – how did that happen ?!? The pressures involved however seem miniscule, so the residual heating energy in the shutdown state must be small – don’t panic and maintain ad-hoc cooling seems the order of the day ?]

Success = Redundancy

I have an adage that no-one ever seems to buy, that aiming to make oneself redundant is a primary driver (for me and quite a few people I know, at least). If something takes effort to explain and sell, implement and extract value, then there is work for consultants, sure, but boy it becomes boring very fast, if that thing doesn’t get easier for people to pick-up and use. The object really is to put yourself out of a job, and move onto more interesting (rewarding) work, rather than giving the same presentations to the same conferences year after year.

I was struck by the same motive in laying quantum theory(ies) to rest in this paper by Christopher Fuchs of Bell Labs.

The issue is, when will we ever stop burdening the taxpayer with conferences devoted to the quantum foundations? The suspicion is expressed that no end will be in sight until a means is found to reduce quantum theory to two or three statements of crisp physical (rather than abstract, axiomatic) significance. In this regard, no tool appears better calibrated for a direct assault than quantum information theory. Far from a strained application of the latest fad to a time-honored problem, this method holds promise precisely because a large part – but not all – of the structure of quantum theory has always concerned information. It is just that the physics community needs reminding.

For me the quality of information is a root topic, and whilst being a David Deutsch fan, I’m not an Everettic – the multi-verse flavour of many worlds is usually a kludge IMHO.

Fuchs is the keynote speaker at Quantum Interaction 2011 in Aberdeen, 27 to 29 June.

Is it possible to imagine that any mind – even Einstein’s – could have made the leap to general relativity directly from the original, abstract structure of the Lorentz transformations? A structure that was only empirically adequate? I would say no.

…

The quantum system represents something real and independent of us; the quantum state represents a collection of subjective degrees of belief about something to do with that system … The structure called quantum mechanics is about the interplayof these two things – the subjective and the objective.

My emphases. Wow, that’s a scientist talking. And the obligatory apology to avoid the new-agey jibes.

I should point out, however, that in contrast to the picture of general relativity, where reintroducing the coordinate system – i.e. reintroducing the observer – changes nothing about the manifold … I do not suspect the same for the quantum world. …

Observers, scientific agents, a necessary part of reality? No.
But do they tend to change things once they are on the scene? Yes.
[space-time with and without mass present]
If quantum mechanics can tell us something deep about nature, I think it is this.

Previously, I have not emphasized so much the radical Bayesian idea that the probability one ascribes to a phenomenon amounts to nothing other than the gambling commitments one is willing to make on it. To the radical Bayesian, probabilities are subjective all the way to the bone. … Believe me … if the reader … fears that I will become a crystal-toting New Age practitioner of homeopathic medicine – I hope he will keep in mind that this attempt to be absolutely frank about the subjectivity of some of the terms in quantum theory is part of a larger programme to delimit the terms that can be interpreted as objective in a fruitful way.

And nearing conclusions:

Quantum states – whatever they be – cannot be objective entities.
A quantum state is as a state of belief about what would happen if one were to approach a standard measurement device.
Quantum entanglement is a secondary and subjective effect.
A measurement is is just an arbitrary application of Bayes’ rule – an arbitrary refinement of one’s beliefs – along with some account that measurements are invasive interventions into nature.

Subjective. Subjective! Subjective!!

It is a word that will not go away.
The last thing we need is a bloodbath of deconstruction.
At the end of the day, there had better be element in quantum theory that stands for the objective, or we might as well melt away and call the whole world a dream.

So finally:

A grain of sand falls into the shell of an oyster and the result is a pearl. The oyster’s sensitivity to the touch is the source of a beautiful gem.

A’s attempt to surreptitiously come into alignment with the B’s predictability is always shunted away from its goal. This shunting of various observer’s predictability is the subtle manner in which the quantum world is sensitive to our experimental interventions. Maybe this is our crucial hint! The wedge that drives a distinction between Bayesian probability theory in general and quantum mechanics in particular is perhaps nothing more than this ‘Zing!’ of a quantum system that is manifested when an agent interacts with it.

It is this wild sensitivity to the touch that keeps our information and beliefs from ever coming into too great an alignment.

Can’t help seeing the macro-level, non-linear “game theory” view in this final statement.

BTW in a nutshell.

Measurement (interaction / participation)
disturbs information about a physical system,
NOT the real physical system itself.