Life as a Physicist

We got our kid a LEGO set this year. I had thousands of bits and my sister and I spent endless hours building things from them (including self-supporting 5 foot long space ships). LEGO is good clean kid fun! It promotes imagination, it definitely isn’t a one-trick toy, after all!

After J-mo opened the present and started playing with it my wife noticed something: there were people (cavemen) and dinosaurs together. Now, no big deal, right? This is a toy, after all. Pretend, and just for fun. 8 years ago I don’t think any of us would have noticed this. Now however, things are much more polarized. It just amazes me that we even thought about this. How is it that imagination has been this ruined by these 8 years of cultural wars? To take the edge of the fun of LEGO?

I really hope that the change in presidency is more than just a change at the top and we can waste less time on these cultural wars and get back to making the USA work. What a waste.

I had a fantastic Christmas; I hope everyone else did as well! [Ok, odd note to end the post on…] And I hope your travel was a lot less traumatic than mine was!

I was reading up a bit on the Madoff Ponzi scheme. The sheer size of the money involved is just amazing! Charities totally destroyed. For example, I found the following on the Elie Wiesel Foundation’s web site:

We are deeply saddened and distressed that we, along with many others, have been the victims of what may be one of the largest investment frauds in history. We are writing to inform you that the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had $15.2 million under management with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. This represented substantially all of the Foundation’s assets.

Poof! All their work is gone just like that. Imagine a group of people committed to some cause working for a large part of their life on it and then to have the rug pulled out from under them.

And this foundation is small potatoes compared to some of the foundations losses.

I suppose the key is trust. I trust my bank not to loose my money – or the federal government get it back to me if my bank fails. There are no such guarantees once you get beyond 100,000 or so bucks. But the way the economy was going over the past n-years there were lots of places I would have considered it was just fine to park my money that now look quite shaky.

I like Krugman’s summary of the whole mess:

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

So… how much of the boom of the last 10 or 15 years in the USA was actually fake? Even if we didn’t participate in making loads of money we certainly were a part of the USA – economically invincible [I’m going to totally ignore the war issue here]. How we have fallen! I hope it minimally affects other parts of the world, but as this Madoff mess shows, that isn’t likely.

I just saw this in the NYTimes:

Coordinated terror attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a movie theater and a hospital.

I was there – visited one of the hotels that was bombed, was in that train station that was bombed, when I was attending the CHEP 2007 conference. The city is fantastic – so crowded it makes New York City look deserted. I loved it and the people. So it is very sad to see something like this happening. I don’t pretend to being to understand the politics in a country as large and diverse as India – but it looks like this attack was particularly confusing (i.e. none of the various new sources I read have any idea what drove this attack). But it sounds like it was much worse than before: American and British hostages. Best wishes and I hope no one reading this is unfortunate enough to be directly connected with any of the victims; and if you are, I can only wish you best of luck.

N.B. Clicking on the picture brings you to pictures in flickr tagged with “mumbai”. When I look at the list there are a bunch of unrelated pictures at the top (i.e. life goes on). Scroll down to see lots of user generated content.

Apparently the editorial board of the New York Times is reading my blog:

AS we enter the final week of a seemingly endless election campaign, opinion polls continue to identify a substantial fraction of voters who consider themselves “undecided.” … Comedians and other commentators have portrayed these people as fools, unable to choose even when confronted with the starkest of contrasts.

I had no idea when I wrote that post that others were also making fun of these people. However, I pulled a “Bush” – I went off on the undecided’s without actually doing any research to see what was really going on. In my own defense: this blog is free!

The NYT’s, however, is not the same. They did some research:

Recent research in neuroscience and psychology, however, suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think. They’re not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates. They may be more willing than others to take their time — or else just unaware that they have essentially already made a choice.

Without other information I would have guessed the latter. I’m sure it has happened to you before: someone drops by and asks for advice. After a while it becomes clear they have already decided in their head which way they want to go and are looking for confirmation or just trying to make sure nothing was missed.

They also point out why a common technique of people who are “efficient” (but perhaps not always right) works:

In measurements of decision-related neural activity, after there is enough evidence to reach a person’s decision threshold, his brain can ignore further input even when it might improve accuracy. The brain goes ahead and decides, freeing up mental resources to deal with other problems.

I suppose the key is knowing what decisions to take a long time with and what decisions to make quickly and move on with.

As far as the current contest is concerned: I moved on a while ago!