IceCube Construction Featured on National Geographic Channel

According to my Librarian, The National Geographic Channel will be re-airing a show on man made marvels tomorrow and next Thursday on antarctic construction, with a partial highlight of the IceCube Experiment.  IceCube is a cubic kilometer of arctic ice laden with photomultipliers, and a surface array to detect air showers.   The PMT’s pick up Cherenkov light from fast moving charged particles (mostly muons), which come from cosmic rays and neutrino collisions with the water molecules.  Once completed, you can think of IceCube as being, among other things, a giant cubic telescope that views the universe with neutrinos instead of light.  It also contains an earlier detector called AMANDA, which is shown here as the yellow cylinder.  Photo comes from  gallery.icecube.wisc.edu.

NeuroBayes: Sometimes sans Neuro

I went to the weekly computing seminar yesterday, because it was on a statistical data mining tool that is being simultaneously used by physics experiments and marketing firms. The speaker is a physics professor, used to work for the PLUTO Collaboration, DELPHI, and now is variously associated with CDF and CMS. The company, Phi-T, is now totally private, and employs a couple dozen ex-physicists, or physicists, depending on how much of a purist you are. The software is proprietary and closed source, and the speaker was severely vague about what specific tools were actually used, but there is an interface in C++/ROOT/C#/Lisp already made, so its (supposedly) trivial to use, with a discounted academic licence.

So what is it? Basically, you have a vector of measureables, like detector channels, and some target, like say Resonance mass. Or Age, profession, #kids, and your target is “How much will this person cost us in Health Care in the next n years.” You then train the thing on your historic or simulated data, and it generates Bayesian posteriori distributions for new data. This is pretty common in neural computing literature, but this thing seems actually practical.

The only really fascinating thing is the generality of the thing, which was (supposedly) applied with minimal expert consultation on problems like car insurance premiums, to B_s mixing at CDF. Here’s a list of referred journal articles with their stamp. So whats inside? A neural network you say? No! The guy said in most applications they skip the neural net entirely and just use “Other” statistical methods. It’s clear that he was using some kind of input decorrelation like principle component analysis, but he wouldn’t say what specifically. He used a bunch of phrases that were cryptic to me like “zero layer network” to mean something other than a perceptron (I asked), and “zero iteration training” of a network. Maybe these things mean something to yall statters, but nothing to me. Anyways, the output of whatever was a discretized probability histogram that got splined together.

I’m unconvinced that the “default settings” he mentioned could schedule re-stocks for the largest book distributor in Germany AND find the X(3872) resonance, but what do I know? He also said that the companies own stock were controlled by this thing, but that selling it for this purpose is somehow illegal. Anyone know what he was talking about? Here’s a paper on it, by the speaker.

In the end, the talk was a sales-pitch/head-hunt, but if anyone out there needs to solve a highly nonlinear problem and has a cushy grant, go nuts.

Download Hermann Weyl’s 1919 Book For Free

If you speak German, and like science history, you can download Weyl’s 1919 Zeit, Raum, Materie book in PDF for free from The Internet Archive. I wanted a sort of journalistic, “this is how it went down” kind of book, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s some nice first person stuff in the forward, and some nice philisophical musing at the end, but mostly is seems textbook stylie. I just skimmed it a bit, so maybe the gems are buried deeper.

If anyone can find anything on his early attempt at gauge invariant therory of unified electronmagnetism and gravity, I’d be grateful to hear from you.

You can also check out a collection of original papers on Relativity from before 1920, too. These are all translated into english.

I thought that was a joke….

Maybe yall remember when I was writing some conference proceedings last month. I finished them at the last minute (like everything else I do) and mailed in the LaTeX source, the original figures in eps and the resultant dvi/ps/pdf, just like the webpage said. I saw something about instructions for a photograph-ready hardcopy, and assumed it was a courtesy for participants who work in caves* and code on pre-RISC DECs with orange-on-black CRTs. I just got an email from the secretary who is gathering the contributions for the publisher. Everyone has to send in hardcopies. Like, mail in paper. Like, tree-paper. Like, physically. Like, with a stamp. …? I could see it if you submit via Word or some other format that intentionally discourages interoperability, but I used their LaTeX format with no additional (ie modern) packages.

This wasn’t my first rodeo, and I ain’t never had to do this before. I asked an olderwiser about it, and they said “Sometimes they ask you for it. Don’t.” I mean, I will do it, but man, that’s silly.

*no offense to folks at neutrino/DM experiments. Those are mines, not caves.

Quantum Mechanics in Your Face

If, today, you feel as if you should be doing work, but don’t really want to do any, may I suggest a video of a Sidney Coleman Lecture: Quantum Mechanics in Your Face? You’ll learn and be entertained.

The lecture is fantastic and consists of the late, great Coleman discussing a version of Bell’s theorem (which is much easier to understand than the standard treatment), and then going on to discuss the “mysterious” “collapse of the wavefunction”. It’s great stuff. All that’s required for enjoyment is a basic undergrad QM course…