It's 9:02 pm, do you know where your family is? Mine is flying over the Yukon right now, preparing to enter the air of the great state of alaska (hopefully the plane is high enough the smug from palin and her cronies won't cause too much delay).
Awhile ago someone said "We're going to meet at 17:00," to which they were met with blank stares by most everyone and then they quickly responded, "5:00 pm, there are 24 hours in a day you know." This was a bit humorous. This person recently came off of active-duty (hopefully there wasn't much latrine duty-I love stupid childish humor) so it can be excused wanting to have the day be assigned 24 different hours, though I typically like mine to have at least 30. Stupid planet won't rotate slower no matter how much ice I dump into the volcano.
For those that don't like the video above, you need a sense of humor. For everyone else, including those that didn't like the video, we're going to talk about something unrelated (by talk I mean I'll write and maybe you'll skim though and catch a word here and there). Can you prove god doesn't exist? Can you prove god exists? Exactly! If you want to label the day from 0 to 23, because there are 24 hours in the day (and you program in C, not Fortran) then why don't you label the days of the year 0 to 364 (excluding leap years)? I'll tell you why, it's too hard.
IF! YOU! TYPE! ALL! IN! CAPS! IT! MEANS! YOU'RE! YELLING! AS! DOES! THE! EXCLAMATION! POINT! Please stop abusing them (I'll bet exclamation points get paid less than periods and commas too).
How often do you have to stop and think for a few minutes about which day of the month it is before finally giving up and looking at a calendar? Just as we broke up the unions in Wisconsin, we have broken up the year into more manageable pieces. The problem is that we need at least an extra pair of hands or feet to be able to keep track of which day it is. How cool would that be?
"So, would you like an extra pair of hands or an extra pair of feet for your kid?"
"Well, Doc, we like you so much we want him to have extra arms like you."
"You know I'm not a real doctor right?"
"Wait, what?!"
"Doom, doom, doom..."
Haha, if you actually get that you have issues and probably should stop watching cartoons, reading comics, and go see a real doctor.
Today is 112, 2014. How am I supposed to know what 21 days from today will be? I only have 20 digits with which to count. Much in the same way as we break up the year into months which have different numbers of days, causing much confusion (let's see, 30 days september, april june, and november, we're all going to die before I can remember...), we have broken up the day into two pieces (we all know two is more than one) making it more manageable, though the whole 12 thing is kind of a damper since I only have regular easy access to 10 of my digits. Counting, counting, courting, courting, country, country, county, county, county, county, county. That's a really funny looking word. Every once in awhile the word 'the' strikes me as the most awkward and strange word in the english language even to the point where I question whether I'm spelling it correctly. So until you start keeping track of the days of the year counting from 0 to 364 don't lecture me on there being 24 hours in the day we should call them as such. Consistence, it seems to consistently be missing from everything except moderation, where people are of the consistence of consistence inconsistency. That's another strange word.
Last thought with some honesty: for those that don't like global warming/climate change, do you know where it first showed up and why? I'll give you a hint, it has nothing to do with earth and everything to do with physics. It's not political, at least its origin, and is based in science not politics. Besides, just as you can't go to a camp ground and leave it relatively unchanged without picking up after yourself, similarly, we can't exist here without causing effects and especially if we don't pick up after ourselves. At the same time though, it honestly doesn't matter any more either to the extent that the damage is done, though we do need to prevent even more harm from being done. A recent study has shown that even if everyone were to implement drastic changes right now, the damage is done, and we're going to be dealing with the effects that global warming will affect for the next couple hundred years. Thanks to all those opposing change, you've helped ruin many, not all (you're not that impotent), things for several generations. You parents must be so proud.
The fact that so many people have such disregard for the earth makes me sad. The fact that people insist they know the facts based on allegory and rhetoric rather than based on good science (studies have shown that the majority of scientists that don't 'believe' in global warming also don't actively do research or have it reviewed/scrutinized by their peers for flaws-the rest are politically motivated) also makes me sad. There's a reason we have such great things in our life. Science works and when applied properly it helps us live better lives.
So until next time, try not to eat any small children. Their soft bones are choking hazards.
P.S. it's now 11:25 pm and she's over the boring sea.
I think the title says it all
Monday, April 21, 2014
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Telling tells of tails
Even though I'm in my late early thirties there are days I feel like I'm teenager again, and I'm not talking about raging hormones and acne, though those are both problems I have. I thought the acne was supposed to clear up once you got passed a certain age? I feel like the teenager stomping up and down saying, "Quit trying to tell me what I am/what to be!" in a nasally whiny voice (so my normal way of speaking). I tend to consider myself a reasonable person, reasonably intelligent anyway, which is not always a valid assumption.
In quantum chemistry there is this interesting phenomena where people like to use relatively inexpensive, computationally speaking, methods to solve the many-fermion Schrodinger equation. More specifically, they like second order many-body perturbation theory (MP2) and density functional theory (DFT). They both have some benefits, but if you want an accurate description of the problem, at the electronic structure level, they are not very reliable without some major work which can often muddle if not entirely obfuscate the physical interpretation of the results, more particularly with DFT. So not only do you end up with results that may or may not be accurate (maybe this is a lengthy and cruel joke playing off of Schrodinger's cat) and which may not even have a straightforward or even real physical meaning. For DFT you can imagine it as you have a giant machine with lots of knobs, switches, buttons, and even a henchman to do the work of twisting, flipping, switching, and manipulating all of the controls for you. This machine has the potential to provide you with very accurate answers, but only when the toggles, knobs, switches and dials are placed in the correct configuration, even then it's not always clear what they do exactly or what they mean. The problem is that no one knows what this correct configuration should be and even worse, from the stand point of trying to find that correct configuration, people like to add more adjustable doo-hickies to get a "better" answer, whatever that means.
One of the benefits and why some people like to use DFT is it has this nice property that it's variational. This means that the answer you get will always be greater than, or equal to the exact answer. This leads many people to say, "Wow! That's amazing! I'll never get answer lower than the real one!" But let's think about his for a second. We need to introduce the idea of a model space (I'm not going to be mathematically rigorous here because I don't want to be too over bearing, I just want to get the idea across. So if by some chance a person mathematically inclined reads this and says "That's not really true..." you can comment on it and I'll likely agree with you. It's called heuristic for a reason). Take earth, for example, and say we want to model the ocean. We need a good representation of the earth and so we shouldn't use a model space like mars, jupiter, saturn, pluto, or the sun as they will not give us a proper space/description of what we wish to model. When we first start with the Schrodinger equation we have a proper model space, we know we are not only on a planet, but on the correct planet. As we start to add knobs, dials, toggles and switches to manipulate things we start to change the landscape of the planet we are. Oceans might become deserts; the size, gravity, temperature, etc. might be changed too and we don't know how because there it not a specific physical meaning assigned to these adjustable parts. All we have to compare against is some numbers of what we know the answer should be for various situations. So we adjust all the different variables, which before we made any adjustments we were in the correct model space, or on the correct planet, and by the time we're done we have answers that come out close to the 'correct' ones, but we don't know anymore if we're still on an earth-like planet or if we've morphed into a rocky, barren desert, or even a giant ball of gas without any solid surface, or something else entirely (maybe a black hole?). This is a real problem because we're using these approaches to model reality but which reality does it belong to? Am I sitting comfortably on a beach watching the oceans rise slowly? Or am I stranded on the surface of venus scrambling to get inside before the sulfuric acid eat through my space suit and then my face? The numbers may come out being similar, but that's where it ends.
I would rather spend a longer amount of time using computer resources to compute an answer that has a physically meaningful and relevant interpretation. But this is definitely in the minority and many of the people that use DFT have most likely never even thought about this. Science is indeed in sad shape in some areas. A little more understanding, and math background, would go a long way to help advance many fields, as this is not a unique problem to my field.
In quantum chemistry there is this interesting phenomena where people like to use relatively inexpensive, computationally speaking, methods to solve the many-fermion Schrodinger equation. More specifically, they like second order many-body perturbation theory (MP2) and density functional theory (DFT). They both have some benefits, but if you want an accurate description of the problem, at the electronic structure level, they are not very reliable without some major work which can often muddle if not entirely obfuscate the physical interpretation of the results, more particularly with DFT. So not only do you end up with results that may or may not be accurate (maybe this is a lengthy and cruel joke playing off of Schrodinger's cat) and which may not even have a straightforward or even real physical meaning. For DFT you can imagine it as you have a giant machine with lots of knobs, switches, buttons, and even a henchman to do the work of twisting, flipping, switching, and manipulating all of the controls for you. This machine has the potential to provide you with very accurate answers, but only when the toggles, knobs, switches and dials are placed in the correct configuration, even then it's not always clear what they do exactly or what they mean. The problem is that no one knows what this correct configuration should be and even worse, from the stand point of trying to find that correct configuration, people like to add more adjustable doo-hickies to get a "better" answer, whatever that means.
One of the benefits and why some people like to use DFT is it has this nice property that it's variational. This means that the answer you get will always be greater than, or equal to the exact answer. This leads many people to say, "Wow! That's amazing! I'll never get answer lower than the real one!" But let's think about his for a second. We need to introduce the idea of a model space (I'm not going to be mathematically rigorous here because I don't want to be too over bearing, I just want to get the idea across. So if by some chance a person mathematically inclined reads this and says "That's not really true..." you can comment on it and I'll likely agree with you. It's called heuristic for a reason). Take earth, for example, and say we want to model the ocean. We need a good representation of the earth and so we shouldn't use a model space like mars, jupiter, saturn, pluto, or the sun as they will not give us a proper space/description of what we wish to model. When we first start with the Schrodinger equation we have a proper model space, we know we are not only on a planet, but on the correct planet. As we start to add knobs, dials, toggles and switches to manipulate things we start to change the landscape of the planet we are. Oceans might become deserts; the size, gravity, temperature, etc. might be changed too and we don't know how because there it not a specific physical meaning assigned to these adjustable parts. All we have to compare against is some numbers of what we know the answer should be for various situations. So we adjust all the different variables, which before we made any adjustments we were in the correct model space, or on the correct planet, and by the time we're done we have answers that come out close to the 'correct' ones, but we don't know anymore if we're still on an earth-like planet or if we've morphed into a rocky, barren desert, or even a giant ball of gas without any solid surface, or something else entirely (maybe a black hole?). This is a real problem because we're using these approaches to model reality but which reality does it belong to? Am I sitting comfortably on a beach watching the oceans rise slowly? Or am I stranded on the surface of venus scrambling to get inside before the sulfuric acid eat through my space suit and then my face? The numbers may come out being similar, but that's where it ends.
I would rather spend a longer amount of time using computer resources to compute an answer that has a physically meaningful and relevant interpretation. But this is definitely in the minority and many of the people that use DFT have most likely never even thought about this. Science is indeed in sad shape in some areas. A little more understanding, and math background, would go a long way to help advance many fields, as this is not a unique problem to my field.
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