Yeah, but...

The FDA has also said that Vioxx was safe even though conservative estimates indicate that more than 25,000 people died as a consequence of using Vioxx.

Sometimes The Mighty Google Suffers the Stupids

I'm grading corrections to a test. The kids did poorly the first time around so the professor offered to have them submit corrections, we would grade the corrections and average the grade from the corrections with the original grade. In coming up with the corrections the kids were allowed to use their book and notes. Since the answers are all in the text book we figured that the corrections would all be, you know, correct. They're not. It's really depressing. Many kids wrote down the same wrong answer. The only difference is that the handwriting is neater the second time around. I can feel that I'm slowly turning into a math grouch -- "What is the world coming to? The kids these days!" 

I decide to take a break. I fire up Google Earth because I like to use the flight simulator to fly up the Colorado River from the Grand Canyon to the Glen Canyon Dam. I like to see how low down in the Canyon I can stay. Google Earth launches, and a window pops up indicating that there is a new version available. I try to click "OK" but another window pops up covering it. The second window is replaced by a third telling me about a not-so-useful tip. I need to click "OK" on the window with the not-so-useful tip, but I can't because the focus is on the window indicating that there is an update, but it's under the tip window. My efforts to move or rearrange the windows fail. I try to quit Google Earth but can't. I have to open a terminal, use 'ps' to find the process id and kill Google Earth by hand. Maybe it's just a fluke. Maybe there was an unexpected delay and something asynchronous caused the windows to open in the wrong order. Sadly, no. Twice I've launched Google Earth and twice the exact same thing happened. Did those geniuses at Google test the software they're writing? If they did, they missed that obscure usage case: starting the software! 

What pisses me off, is that now it looks like I have to re-install Google Earth, but the last time I did, it wasn't until after I had downloaded Google Earth that the software informed me that Google Earth wouldn't run on my operating system.  Grr. 

Blown Out Calf

Two weeks ago I went for a run and got what felt like a cramp in my calf. A few days after the run I was walking down a flight of stairs and had this feeling like something in my calf got crushed and ruptured. It was unexpectedly painful and I was hobbling for the rest of the day. I decided to lay off it until I felt better. Last weekend my calf felt marginally better and I tried to run on Saturday and Sunday, both attempts lasted less than a quarter mile. There are two problems with stopping running. First, running is how I combat stress and maintain some sense of equanimity. Second, I'm training for the half marathon next week in Nashville. Taking several weeks off from training in the month before the event seems sub-optimal. 

I'm writing about this now because I just went for a 5 miler and my calf is pretty unhappy. I was limping after the run. I don't entirely know what to do. Should I just keep training in the hopes that if I run gingerly, I wont aggravate things? Should I keep resting and hope that running thirteen miles after three weeks of not running wont be too much of a shock to my system? The kicker is this: This is the first year that I'm running the half marathon, and how I do this year will determine how I get staged next year (this is what I've been told from friends who've run it several years in a row.) On the sign up sheet I put down a time corresponding to an eight minute mile. I feel that, with a healthy calf and sufficient training, this is a reasonable goal. With a bum calf and not so much training an eight minute mile might be beyond me. 

This is one of those situations where I need to recognize that there are certain circumstances that are simply outside my control. My effort to run the half may just be a wash, and there may not be anything I can do about that. 

On an unrelated note, I gave a talk in the partial differential equations (PDE) seminar yesterday. It went mostly well, several professors told me that I did a good job and that the material was engaging. I was encouraged to consider a career in PDEs. I was happy to give the talk because it was the most thorough presentation of the technical machinery my advisor and I have developed. Most of the talks I've given to date have been half an hour or less and the audience has been so broad that I can do little more than describe the setting and roughly what the results are. The shortcoming of Friday's talk is that I had probably two hours of material to present and I was nervous. When I get nervous, I go faster. A professor asked me explicitly to cover the material more slowly. 

What is most striking is that I look back at my posts from pre-Blogger days and see that I was pretty worried about making it through my first year of grad school and that I've come quite some way from there.  When I stop to think about it, it makes me feel good.

Science and Knowledge

I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter about issues relating to science. The last two weeks the author has expressed frustration at the extent to which acupuncture has become accepted even though there is no scientific explanation for how it could work. In my opinion what ought to be asked is, "does acupuncture work?" because this is a question science is able to answer, and the answer would be relevant to all the people who believe so fervently in it. It is important to remember that there are lots of truths that science has yet to validate. (On a related note, I found the following excellent post on Good Math, Bad Math.)

As a mathematician I find that there are lots of things that engineers and physicists believe, that do not have a solid mathematical proof. For example, there is not, as far as I know, a proof that the hexagonal lattice is the ground state for particles interacting through a spherical, decreasing potential in two dimensions, and yet I have been told by many capable physicists that this is obviously the case. Pointing out that there is no proof only signifies that I'm a pedant.

The question then is what is our criteria for accepting something as true. Certainly superstition allows too much, and mathematical proof allows too little -- math alone can say nothing about observation. What I find most interesting is how people answer this question, or don't as the case may be. I have met many people who do not seem to have a standard that is independent of any particular statement. This seems especially true with politics where people will accept statements they are predisposed to believe with the most minimal of examinations, and reject other statements on the basis of the most stringent examination of details. 

Interesting Blog

I found this via Boing Boing. To be honest I don't always see what's wrong with the images, but some of them are very, very wrong. 

Grading

The human brain is excellent at learning and this is abundantly apparent grading math tests. Students are extremely adept at recognizing and reproducing patterns. Often times this stands in for an understanding of the underlying concepts. The result is that a student will try to solve a problem using an approach that is completely inappropriate, but similar in some regard to the correct approach. Here is an analogy by Feynman (intended for slightly different purposes) that captures what I'm talking about perfectly:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.

The full text can be found here. 

Green Grass

In an attempt to improve my once-per-week rate of posting, I shall write something today, Sunday, as opposed to tomorrow.

I cut the grass today. It's part my responsibilities as a renter. My wife and I pay quite low rent on an apartment we love, so when our landlady asked us to take care of the yard, we said yes. The yard is really quite ratty. It's more weeds than grass, but if it's all the same length it has a certain passable presentability. "I don't care, just so long as it doesn't look like a jungle." was our landlady's response to our questions about the particulars of lawn-care. I bought a push mower because I like the quiet and have a small yard, although as I'm sure I've written before, you have to stay on top of the lawn otherwise the push mower is a lot of work. Today was the first day of the year that I mowed the back yard. The grass and weeds were way too high, and it took hours to do what normally takes me forty minutes. The blisters on my hands demonstrate the effort I put in.

The experience brought back memories for several reasons. First, the smell of the cut grass evoked seemingly forgotten scenes in a way that only smells can. Second, I was listening to Physical Graffiti. I was never the biggest Led Zeppelin fan, but the music was so much a part of my teenage years. WBCN would play a Zeppelin track at midnight, and if I was still up doing homework, I could shut off my own stereo, open the window to my bedroom and hear other stereos all over my blue collar suburb tuned in, and blasting Zep. It was like some teenage call to prayer. Again, it wasn't that the music had any deep meaning for me, but that it was everywhere. The words "Led Zep" crossed with the "Led" vertical, and the "Zep" horizontal, so that they shared an 'e' was spray painted on everything -- sidewalks, walls, cars, I suspect that if you walked too slowly someone would spray-paint Led Zep on you. 

The experience differed.  As a kid I used a gas mower and my push mower is so quiet and understated in what it does. When the grass isn't too long, the view of the blades whirring in their revolutions makes one think of an electric paddle boat accelerating down a wide green river, churning the grass into the air. As an adult I like the the look of the neat rows and the sense that all that grows in my yard is even, at least in height anyway. With minimal effort I get to bring arbitrary order to something that did not, and soon will not, have any.