separation of duties

There have been various times in my life when I've felt "smart". Sometimes this goes along with some context in which others think I understand what is going on. When I realize that in some context I am considered "smart", my usual response is one of something of the sort: "wow, but I am so confused! I know so little!" Now, one might put this down as modesty, and say, no, in fact I know quite a bit and such and such. But to me this dynamic seems to expose something of the structure of knowledge in society (as I have encountered it). There are people who feel they are not so smart and that others have most things figured out, and there are those who realize they don't know very much, but somehow represent structured knowledge to the others. To me this feels like a hoax that doesn't serve either person very well.

Now, this is a caricature, and I wouldn't want to say that it says much about the actual validity of knowledge. I only point out that this is a dynamic that may complicate things when evaluating how much ground a particular area of study actually covers. Consider perhaps a set of different areas of study, each overlapping with the other in some way, and as a whole covering a large amount of ground. Suppose further that the people studying each area take the subject matter in the surrounding areas to be more solid than those actually studying them do themselves (though they may be less forthright about this aspect than they should be). How do we evaluate the total ground covered by the overlap of these different disciplines? I suppose, we need to try to gain a bit of expertise in each of the areas and ignore some of the sociology and build up our own picture of the total ground covered.

distributed consciousness

Ok, I was getting worried before about the internet and distributed consciousness.
Nice to read from Crispin about collective consciousness. Here and here.
Yes, I like to think that if there are thoughts, that those thoughts belong to someone.
In any case, I am here. I interact with many others through this funny medium, but my consciousness is associated with me body, here and now.

commucations theory

I recently read this article by William Deresiewicz on the history of friendship, and how social networking is changing the definition. I guess its about ideas from one area of technology, development coming into another. In this case, communications theory is being applied to human interaction. So we have nodes that are sending messages to other nodes through channels. Those channels have various properties, such as (?) latency and bandwidth. Thus, we can communicate with each other over the phone, through email, through Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other messaging services. Now, from our perspective, we are living our lives, and these are modes of communicating with others. From the system designer's perspective, we are nodes trying to communicate with each other. Face to face contact through light and sound that travel through the air becomes another channel. It is prized for its "high bandwidth".

Like each such system, the difficult part from a human perspective is that one is put on the defensive. One may be required to put ones values into this new language in order to defend them. I was complaining about Facebook recently and how many of your actions become publicly available. The response of the person I was speaking to was "don't you know about privacy settings?" There was a dismissive attitude to this. It was my job to understand the way in which Facebook had designed the system, and to address my concerns within that system. Rather than keeping things as they are, Facebook allowed more information to be shared publicly than was previously being done, and then put the burden on the user to figure out its system to reinstate those values. Its a similar situation with environmental concerns and economics. Within the domain of economics, those who don't think that species should be wiped out, or forests destroyed, or rivers polluted must phrase these goods within the language of economics.

Let me add one more point. In his article Deresiewicz discusses a Facebook friend who tells everyone that they are at Central park, and Deresiewicz asks why this person felt the need to share this. The thing about these new technologies is that they make this sharing just incredibly easy. The amount of effort to share such a thought is minimal. So, if in the end, one decides that such sharing is actually detrimental to one's relationships, then one must see these technologies as rather dangerous. Or, at least, something that requires a new kind of thought and understanding. A new kind of ledge one may fall off if one isn't careful. The new tools encourage us to externalize our internal worlds. This has much potential, and can improve self expression. But one can also give away important things, and not get much back in return. So, I note the dangers. And hopefully use this as a reminder to those developing this technology to use humility and don't expect everyone to fit into your system.

Computer science is the new physics?

I've been meeting a lot of people doing research in various topics in either computer science, machine learning, or various areas of somewhat related applied math topics. I was discussing pure vs. applied research with someone, and they were telling me that it was a very good time to be doing relatively abstract research in computer science. It was perceived that any kind of results, no matter how abstract can have practical benefit in a relatively short amount of time.

This reminds me of how I imagine it to have been for physics following the creation of the atomic bomb. The physicists were seen as miracle workers. Give these guys some money, and they will do magic with it. It seems to me like we are coming to the end of this. Physics has lost some its sway on the popular imagination. Observing the public perception of the LHC, for example, its hard not to see the last gasps of this former power. I don't think the physicists have no culpability in the impression that the LHC may create black holes to swallow up the world. Although not actively pushed, I think that it is also not actively discouraged. The problem with this, and I think the whole unification of everything via string theory falls along the same lines, is that no real result can live up to this hype. No matter what happens, it will be a let down to the public.

On the computer science front, I suppose there may be fruitful years of research ahead. What personally scares me about this is that the research is about our own imaginations, and not about the world. (But then, maybe this is just my bias, from not being very involved in it.) I do hope that this research doesn't get too far ahead of itself, and leave the world, and people behind. I suppose that physics has its control aspect as well.

A friend/colleague of mine forwarded me this link to these lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman about computer programming based around Lisp. One can only hope that some of this kind of spirit survives in the discipline of computer science. It is a joy of discovery and appreciation of simplicity and clarity that has a kindness and humanity behind it.

For me, I prefer to stick with the science. I prefer to try to understand what's already here, rather than create infrastructure to dramatically change things. And on the creation front, I prefer more modest modes of expression.

Looking back, I'm glad we have found quantum mechanics, and it is said that CERN produced the internet. I'm sorry that it has to be at the cost of a certain group of people presenting themselves as magicians.

A final comment I'd add, is that even though I phrased this in terms of "popular imagination", I think there is more to the story than this. I think that it is accurate to say that there isn't much chance that elementary particle physics will produce practical/technological benefits at this point. Certainly its possible, and one never knows the results of research. But it certainly doesn't appear that the Higgs Boson has any practical benefit, nor do the superparticles for that matter. And I don't think many particle physicists think this either. I think they just believe very strongly in reductionism, and this is the main argument as to why particle physics research should continue. I have to admit, I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning. But I also think something has gone wrong with this approach- it has gone too far- and it will be very interesting to see what the effects of LHC research are, whatever the results!

philosophy of science

Hmm, so my interest in Nancy Cartwright isn't so idiosyncratic after all perhaps.

wreckage?

I look around accelerator physics and see that there are so many tried and aborted projects.
I think of this process of working on an open source project, and I see its been tried before with the UAL framework. Every idea one has has already been tried and failed.

Perhaps I should try to put a more positive spin on this, and list the open source beam physics projects. We have Zgoubi, and the previously mentioned UAL. Then there is XAL, which is an offshoot of UAL developed for the SNS. Each of these is rather project related, I believe.
UAL is an attempt at generality, but from a physics perspective seems to be more about absorbing existing codes, than developing new algorithms. It is used in the RHIC online model.

Also, I think beam physics should look to other fields such as HEP, with GEANT, and on the synchrotron optics side with codes such as shadow.

cyber

I came across this piece of writing called iGooglesque by E. Sartwell, who is actually a cousin of mine (second cousin, once removed?). It was satisfying to see some analysis of what a large amount of time interacting with a web browser might mean, and what it says about personal choice and identity.

It left me with a desire to better understand these things, and led to a flurry of web searches and wikipedia reading on cyborgs. Particularly disturbing was the idea of distributed consciousness. I read something about this, and it opens up a new concept that then pushes me away from the path I've been following. To me, the concept of grounding oneself, of being very much in touch with one's surroundings, and of consolidating experience, and slowing down; all these things are very important and I would like to do them more often and be better at this. But reading about the idea of a distributed consciousness left me wondering if there wasn't a short cut to all of this. This left me with the same uneasiness I used to feel when contemplating the concept of determinism, after reading Richard Dawkins, for example.

beam optics codes

So I'm continuing on with my conversion of the Excel optics code into Open Office Calc. I've been calling the code Open Optics. I've almost finished the part where a lattice is copied together with the appropriate formulas for calculating some uncoupled parameters by adding them up around the ring. Hard to keep up momentum on this project, because I think that no one will really use it.
But its really not that hard of a job to do, so I can keep moving forward slowly.

For a second project, I have two different possibilities. One is working on the idea of developing a TPSA library to work with Accelerator Toolbox (AT), so that the one turn map can be computed and used to optimize various quantities.

Secondly, there is the need for more collaboration on Accelerator Toolbox. Many different people use it at different labs and they are repeating the work. I can try to put the code in a central repository so that people can work together on it. This is probably the first thing to do before working on the TPSA project. Once more people are working together, it may be easier to use existing code and get more ideas about the right way to combine AT with TPSA. Of course, then, something like a normal form algorithm should be written- or at least something to find tune shift with amplitude.

For the moment, I need to learn better how to use Sourceforge and SVN. I did this with the Tracy code, but my collaborator knew more about it than me. I should set it up myself, and figure out how to do it from behind the firewall, etc.

Finally, there is MAD-X and PTC. This is the existing rich TPSA, normal form code. But its not used that much for light sources, and the tracking routines are somewhat obscure- buried in the PTC Fortran 90. Getting this physics (well, sort of- symplectic integration) out in the open, would be part of the point of collaborating on AT. The tracking routines are very easy to find and read there.

mumbling

And one day we woke up, and everyone we ever knew was there.
The familiar smiles, the wry comments, each distinctive approach.
But there was a strange slowness and vagueness to each individual. Focus as you will, you couldn't quite grasp them. Small pieces came through, but not the whole. There was a kaleidoscope of moments, a flooding of halting attempts to communicate.
"This is who I am!", Alan said. "Ok, we believe you." But he had spoken too loudly. His mumbling had been mistaken for clarity. His words parsed, the structure analyzed, but his face was foggy, and the impressions he received were not coming through.

direction

One can choose direction in many aspects of life.
I guess on this blog I have mostly dealt with my work and attitude towards online stuff.
Can analysis help? We may try to think about who we are communicating with, how we are doing it, and what we hope to gain from this. In a blog, you mainly put stuff out there and don't get a lot back. It can be valuable for the purpose of collecting thoughts and recording moments, but as far as interaction, its rather minimal. I suppose this is not set in stone. Some blogs may cultivate communities in which the relationship is quite different. Perhaps blog is just not a very good word, or its meaning is not specific enough.
Anyway, if one is to be serious about online communication and work this into one's life as a positive thing, and not always an experimental, rather unconscious hope that it will be therapeutic in some form, maybe a little more clarity and direction is required.
This is just to note here that I would like to do this. Either fade this aspect of my life out, or clarify it. The one to anonymous connection doesn't feel like a long term healthy solution. It is too murky, and though perhaps part of development, should be clarified.

works too well

There are some things that work just too well.
Like google search, whatever you put in, you get something back, as if you meant it.

I was going to try to run a program I am writing, and realized that I hadn't written everything that I need to yet. I was thinking, could the code somehow be smart enough to guess what I wanted to do, and then just run? Why do I have to take the time to put all these explicit instructions in there? Of course the reason is that it is based on rules that I understand, so I have a certain measure of control in the situation. If the code could decide itself what it thought that I wanted to do, then its no longer a situation based on rules that I can understand to whatever degree I want.

I'm not saying I think Google should crash on badly phrased searches, but having hidden rules with a goal of never failing and always trying to guess what you want takes the control away from the people using the code and puts it into those writing it.

Again

Just because something has been done many times before, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done again. Yes, the awareness is helpful to some extent. But you will always bring something new.

I'm thinking of my project of writing an accelerator optics code in Calc. What can I do differently? Can I document it better than MAD? Can I make it easier to use?
This area has such a heavy history. Too many codes already. Yes, I'm writing another one. But maybe I can bring something good to the process, and even the result?

harmonizing

Realizing that there have been a number of situations in my life, where try as I may, I just can't put it all together, and can't find a nice picture. Ah well. No reason not to try to harmonize in other contexts, perhaps on a smaller scale.

computers as tools

I came across this article (seems to be badly formatted- should be run through some wiki software?- I cut and pasted it into emacs to get the line breaks...) by Chris Dent at University of Indiana.

He says that there are two different views we have of computers. One is as "interactive artifacts", and the other is as tools. He suggests that the view as being interactive is flawed and the source of computers resulting in much less increase in efficiency than you might expect. He says that basically it is a flawed metaphor. We think of the computer as like a person, able to interact with us. However, for the forseeable future, computer programs are still rule based within a given domain, not able to form their own categories and make connections between domains. Thus, we have overly high expectations for how easy the interaction will be (the computer can understand what I want!), and also too low expectations for how that experience actually goes (I guess I just don't know how to talk like a computer :( )

He says that the two main ways in which computers are tools are in terms of automating tasks that are now or were previously done by people, and by acting as tools to augment ourselves.
I must say that I get a little uncomfortable thinking of augmentation. But I really like this idea of thinking of computers as tools. It throws away the fiction that we are somehow creating beings, or entities, or some kind of abstract existence out there. Instead we are using tools. These tools may store, represent, and manipulate information. And much more. But turning it back into tools, gives us the responsibility. What tools do we want? How effective are they? What do we want them for?

living with networks

Whenever I hear that something is "on the internet", or to "buy it on the net", or search "the net", a little feeling of hopelessness creeps in. I guess the reason is that this view of the internet as an undifferentiated ocean out there, serves a role as a panacea. Or maybe the problem is the identification of the internet as a place, which to me seems to inevitably devalue our physical world. Now there have been video games and virtual reality games of varying degrees of simulation and imagination since when, the '80s?
This is the view of the internet as "cyberspace".

The problem is that to the extent that it makes sense that we exist in this space, we certainly have to change, and this change sometimes feels forceful, like its not recognized the level of discomfort resulting from these changes, and not dealt with in a delicate way.
Of course we can revisit the philosophical questions of life, and what it is, and of consciousness and what it is. And like all technologies, they can actually give new perspective on old philosophical questions. In the sense that one doesn't have to work as hard in "what if" statements.

I recently read Vannevar Bush's rather prescient article from 1945 Atlantic (available here, -- I found this thanks to John Jowett again). He describes the ways in which various technologies pushed forward will link us together, and make examining "the record" more powerful. It is somehow satisfying to see "the internet", or something like it, described at a much earlier date. It gives a new head space in which to think about it, not seeing its current incarnation as inevitable.

few thoughts

A little more on the previous topic.
First, Jodi Dean discusses the UC strike, in a rather abstract way.
Here, she says that the crisis in universities is that universities are a part of the capitalist system, designed to create whatever type of labor capital needs. But supposedly "capital doesn't need us anymore". Is this really true? Does she mean that computerized systems can do everything that people can, and perhaps better? I think this goes too far, and is a mistake in some way, but I may also misunderstand what she's saying. Not that I really want "capital" to want me so badly, or even that I quite know what "capital" is. (Oh, looking at this more, I see that she is actually critiquing that view of the university... I should read this more carefully...)

I've been trying to create systems for myself, and then follow through on them. Every time I start following a linear procedure, something in me tells me that this is dehumanizing, and I ought not to be doing this. I know there's something wrong with this. The most healthy of people have working systems they are a part of, and being a part of that system will certainly involve following linear procedures.

On this topic, I should quote from Karl Popper (stolen from here)

As I wrote many years ago at the very beginning of the debate about computers, a computer is just a glorified pencil. Einstein once said "my pencil is cleverer than I". What he meant could perhaps be put thus: armed with a pencil, we can be more than twice as clever as we are without. Armed with a computer (a typical World 3 object), we can perhaps be more than a hundred times as clever as we are without; and with improving computers there need not be an upper limit to this.

Karl Popper, The Self and Its Brain, p. 208

The French seem to really like bureaucracy. But it also seems to me to be a functional bureaucracy- one that really involves people. Something about this is reminding me of how Americans sometimes see nature, in terms of something totally separate, totally wild. This idea of not separating ourselves from our systems quite so much is also hitting me in terms of how I've seen Europe. I've seen it as a place of history. Its tempting, as in the case of nature, to see contrast civilization with the wild. Likewise, we can contrast living, modern places, with places steeped in history. But Europe, with longer experience of dealing both with nature and a longer history, maybe has developed a different, more interactive approach here.

People and computers

Sometimes it feels like we are designing/(haphazardly pushing forward) a world in which we have no part. Its moving faster and faster, and one wonders whether a different creature- perhaps some digital descendant of ours is better fit to survive here.
We can think of previous revolutions such as mechanical and chemical. In the end we still found a role for ourselves. We found ways in which to buffer ourselves and take advantage of the power of these new technologies. We created cars and airplanes to travel fast and still be in relative comfort. And we don't have to use these fast technologies.
Here's an interview with Ray Kurzweil. Actually he kind of pisses me off. Notice at around 2:30, he is asked the question of what we can do to prepare for the change. He doesn't answer the question, instead, he seems to revel in the predictions of how fast things are changing.
For him, the human brain is something to copy, source material for something else. That's ok, but why do we want to do this? Why just build and build and build. Ok, there's a certain inevitability to some of it. But what's more interesting to me, is people and how they interact with these changes. There's a cheapening effect. Where's the depth? Sure, he might say that the power is there for even more depth. But shouldn't we start with the depth that we have and try to increase that? Where is literature and art and experience of nature in this kind of vision? Its just faster and faster and faster? I guess this is just another kind of conversation to have.
But for me, the thing to remember is that there's no reason why things have to be worse. We don't need to just try to get faster stuff for its own sake.

work vs. research

My new project involves developing a beam optics code based around a spreadsheet. The job is basically to convert this program from Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic to something based on Open Office Calc. Now, despite the fact that open source is nice, and open office seems to be pretty quality stuff, there is something decidedly unsexy about spreadsheets. They suggest doing a large number of small, not particularly interesting calculations. An emphasis on detail, an office setting, and a sense of the mundane come to mind.

But this area of beam optics and particle tracking is a mess. There are multiple codes with lousy interface and difficult interconnection. People become experts at particular codes, and this is what accelerator physicists do. The expertise, however, is often more in the technicalities of the mess- the bureaucracy of the multiple organizations and the history of the field, if you like. Its called research, or physics, or dynamics, or something exciting, just to motivate people to do this rather boring work.

Thus, to me, developing an optics code based on a spreadsheet is confronting this fact about this field honestly. We are managers of many small formulae, doing rather well-known things.
The point is that perhaps this project will allow one to more easily separate what is well known from what is a bit more difficult. In other words, we can train people to do those parts of this work that are already figured out. The operators in the control room should be able to change the quadrupoles to reduce the emittance, or affect a change in the optics to reduce the beta function, or play around with the weights on the non-linear dynamics properties. This isn't research, but it still takes effort, care, and can be done well with pride.

So I see this project less as a research project, and more as providing a tool that will separate out the known from the unknown- give people a tool with which the known aspects of this field can used, in the same sense that knowledge in finance, medicine, or nutrition might be utilized.
At the same time, in order for a field to be healthy, there must be this transition of knowledge into the arena of easily available, well known information. I think this is the value and nature of science, as described in "Laboratory Life" by Latour and Woolgar for example.

I don't want to say that there is no research to be done in this field, but just that there is a lot of known stuff, and it should be made easily available. It may not be popular with those who would rather keep the mess of obscurity. But I think its necessary if there is to be development.

moving and the symplectic camel

Yeah, yeah, more about this tedious moving process, whereby I reduce my digital, physical and mental footprint, so that I can cross the sea and find peace in a new land.
A recent paper someone forwarded to me:
"Symplectic capacities and the geometry of uncertainty: The irruption of symplectic topology in classical and quantum mechanics"
One of the main points is the story of the symplectic camel, that sad creature who could not pass through the eye of the needle. It is in fact a relatively recent rigorous result (Gromov's non-squeezing theorem) about symplectic geometry.
Basically it says that whatever your initial projection onto the different phase planes, a canonical transformation will never decrease, only increase them.
So, yes, I suppose this means that I should get rid of stuff. The connection is obvious, right?

On a different, not really related subject, I just finished reading Alan Watts' "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are".
Some parts really resonated with me, though at times it put me in that kind of trance where he could say just about anything, and I'd nod slowly with a blank stare. No, actually, it did that remarkably little. The image of self as the universe playing hide and seek with itself is an interesting one.

frequency amplitude dependence

So, consider a dynamical system that has an elliptical fixed point. The eigenvalues of the map linearized about the fixed point gives the frequency associated with rotation about that fixed point. Move away from the fixed point and the frequency changes. This is one definition of a non-linear system. A pendulum, for example, has this property; and this changing frequency explains why it doesn't make a perfect clock.

This simple property is what I am trying to get to the bottom of. It becomes less simple when one wants to think of this continuum of frequencies as the spectrum of some operator. So the operator has become rather more complicated from the simple matrix expanded about the fixed point. Suddenly it has taken on an infinity of eigenvalues! Once we say this, however, we are left with the question of what the eigenvectors mean. Are they functions that are basically delta functions except where the orbit is? This is a rather messy singular quantity. How about the eigenvectors of the adjoint operator? These are the quantities we've been looking at, but they seem to be rather strange.
This is the line thinking I've been following lately. I'm hoping I can find a simple reference that explains all this. But I can't seem to.