DSD

After more than 3/4 of a mil­lion guesses, in over 50,000 games played in 67 coun­tries, the results are clear: Sci­ence sounds like gobbledygook.

arXiv vs. snarXiv has been live for 6 months now, and it’s time to take a look at the results. Here’s how the game works. The user sees two titles: one is the title of an actual the­o­ret­i­cal high energy physics paper on the arXiv, and the other is a com­pletely fake title ran­domly gen­er­ated by the snarXiv. The user guesses which one is real, finds out if they’re right or wrong, and then starts over with a new pair of titles.

I’ve been record­ing the result of each guess, orig­i­nally just out of curios­ity. I never expected to get rea­son­able sta­tis­tics on the over 120,000 high energy the­ory papers on the arXiv. But after more than 750,000 guesses, that’s exactly what I’ve got, which means we can do some fun stuff. Con­tinue reading…

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less random.

Actu­ally, the snarXiv only gen­er­ates tan­ta­liz­ing titles and abstracts at the moment, while the arXiv deliv­ers match­ing papers as well. Details of the imple­men­ta­tion are below. I’m the author, and I don’t remem­ber exactly why I decided to do this. I did already have the frame­work lying around from a pre­vi­ous project, and I swear I spent more time doing research last week­end than imple­ment­ing snarXiv.org.

Sug­gested Uses for the snarXiv

• If you’re a grad­u­ate stu­dent, gloomily read through the abstracts, think­ing to your­self that you don’t under­stand papers on the real arXiv any better.
• If you’re a post-doc, reload until you find some­thing to work on.
• If you’re a pro­fes­sor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the lit­tle hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the mu prob­lem, and the con­fine­ment prob­lem. Then expe­ri­ence pro­found disappointment.
• If you’re a famous physi­cist, keep reload­ing until you see your name on some­thing, then claim credit for it. Con­tinue reading…

New Phi­los­o­phy

Con­tinue reading…

This is the story of how Honda engi­neers screwed up a big expen­sive project with a sim­ple arith­metic mis­take, tried to fudge their result with sound edit­ing soft­ware, and con­grat­u­lated them­selves for being totally awesome.

When I was a kid, my fam­ily used to drive up to The Pin­ery in Ontario, a beau­ti­ful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour out­side of the park. To dis­cour­age reck­less Cana­di­ans from bar­rel­ing past the houses and barns, the local gov­ern­ment carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.

My Dad is a musi­col­o­gist, with a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in tun­ing. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to exper­i­ment with this instru­ment. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descend­ing scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncom­ing traf­fic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascend­ing scale as we sped up. Con­tinue reading…