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date
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2000-12-03:19:08
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Physics
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Richard Feynman wrote somewhere that part of being a scientist meant going that extra mile to ensure that you aren't misleading anyone, even by accident. I agree with this, in both my personal and professional life, and it gets me into trouble in both areas.
I've recently been working in an area of technology where there are techniques used that claim to be measuring a particular physical quantity. There's even been a specialized terminology developed in the field so that it seems to an outsider that they are measuring that quality. But when you look at what the technical meaning of the terminology is, you find that they are in fact measuring something that is only very indirectly related to the quantity they want to measure. I consider this to be very close to scientific fraud.
We don't live in a looking-glass world. Words don't mean just what we would like them to. Someone once asked Abraham Lincoln, says a story, "If you count a tail as a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" and Lincoln replied, "Four--calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The words most likely to be used in a misleading way in the sciences are "uncertainty" and "error", both of which describe the deviation between the desired and actual results of measurement. Depending on the detailed mathematical assumptions one makes, these can mean very different things. In one area I used to work in, it became common to quote 95% confidence levels, and to compare these results to two-sigma confidence levels from other measurements. But the two-sigma level is something like 97% confidence, which is a big difference. Without the kind of excess of scrupulousness that Feynman was talking about, it's easy to make these sorts of mistakes in all innocence, and easier still if one is careless about such things. |
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SelfConciousness
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What will other people think?
That's a thought to kill your soul. What will other people think if they know what I think of religion, or politics, or sport, or sex, or love, or any of a million other things?
There are people who live their lives naked, and people who live their lives clothed. On the whole, I'd rather be one of the naked ones.
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Poem
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This poem is full of references to Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", who is the "he" who has nothing to show me, because I've seen all the things he names. The mermaid I've heard singing is Caro, and she has sung to me on occasion, very beautifully, however unreachably distant and far away. |
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Reading
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My reading patterns vary from highly linear to highly chaotic, and I'm going through a chaotic phase just now. I've got lots of things on the go, but don't seem to be making much progress on any of them. Too much turmoil in my life, in my mind, to make much sense of anyone else's words and thoughts, perhaps. |
