Cutting in line is not selective

by kriegsman
How politeness evolved:
[Via Cosmic Log]

Shoppers in London queue up for a vintage-clothing sale at the Angels theatrical costume shop in 2008. Researchers say waiting in line, and other types of turn-taking behavior, may be hard-wired into a wide variety of species.

Taking turns isn’t just a nice idea. It may be as much a part of the theory of evolution as survival of the fittest – at least that’s the conclusion that British researchers reached after running a genetic simulation through thousands of generations of evolutionary change.

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A very nice demonstration of how cooperative, turn taking behavior can appear as an emergent property from selfish individuals. So many people think that natural selection always means that individuals must try to screw over every other individual. It is all about purely looking out for themselves. Bloody in tooth and claw stuff. The only way you win is to always be first.

Yet, even with this viewpoint, there are important areas where the best strategy is to simply wait in line. So, next time someone cuts in line, just remember that they are actually not following a winning game theory strategy!

Technorati Tags: Science, Sustainability

That voice!

by Arenamontanus
Feynman’s Character of Physical Law Lectures:
[Via Cosmic Variance]

Everyone and their niece is emailing me that I should post these. (And Aatish in comments.) And a good thing, too, because it usually takes at least half a dozen emails before I will do anything at all.

In 1964, Richard Feynman gave the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, aimed at a general audience. They were later collected into The Character of Physical Law, a great little book with a depressingly boring cover. Feynman-worship is often overdone, but man, the guy could lecture. And he knew a lot about physics!

The good news is that Bill Gates has now put the full video of the lectures online, as part of Project Tuva. I had to update some software to view them on my Mac, but it seems to be working now.

Lecture Five is about the arrow of time. If you skip ahead to the 18th minute or so, you’lll hear Feynman explain the Boltzmann Brain argument.

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It has been so long since I heard that accent. What a great speaker and lecturer. I remember sitting in on one of the lectures he gave in Freshman physics when I was at CalTech. There were two tracks of Freshman physics then, one for students on the engineering/physics path and one that was ‘easier’, for the rest of us. Feynman taught the hard one.

Now I was happy to be in the easier class. I was going to be a biologist and only took the class because it was required. Two years of physcs from some of the best physicists in the world. I vividly remember Ricardo Gomez (who sadly died 12 years ago) jumping around the blackboards, with longish white hair bobbing in the air. Hard to understand (He was from Colombia) sometimes but very infectious enthusiasm.

Anyway, back to Feynman. The first week of my Freshman year, several people in the easy class were sure they deserved to be in Feynman’s. So, CalTech, in its wisdom, allowed them to transfer in. Usually after a week or so of Feynman, they transfered back. Sometimes CalTech knew what it was doing.

But, with the right subject and pitched towards a wider audience, he was just amazing. I can’t be certain which of his lectures it was that I attended. (I want to say it was one about how if one assumed that instead of photons producing light there were darkons that produced dark, none of the basic laws were altered. ) Anyway, I just remember that wonderful voice.

Another former Techer also discusses these videos. You will need to have MS Silverlight installed but it is for a great cause. I remember him with long hair and a few more wrinklles but there was only one person in all of Southern California at that time, I think, that sounded like he did.

Technorati Tags: Science

Free paper from my alma mater

Why is there no socialism in the United States?:

[Via CaltechAUTHORS: No conditions]

Rosenstone, Robert A. (1978) Why is there no socialism in the United States? Working Paper. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. Permalink

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Not many would think of CalTech as a hotbed of left wingers. It really is not. This paper, written for a review of a book from 1978 on the radical left, really does not answer the question as much as put the 30 year old book in context..

It critiques some of it, as well as proposes some further work that can be done to answer the question.

Now, I imagine that this could open up a can of worms, mainly because the word socialism has a much different meaning to many people today than it did 100 years ago.

I just like the fact that CalTech is permitting us to access the papers of its professors. This sort of Open Access can only make information transfer better.

Now if they will just publish a nice biology paper rather than all those weird physics/engineering ones. Such as these:

Chan, Jasper and Eichenfield, Matt and Camacho, Ryan and Painter, Oskar (2009) Optical and mechanical design of a “zipper” photonic crystal optomechanical cavity. Optics Express, 17 (5). pp. 3802-3817. ISSN 1094-4087 Permalink

Michael, C. P. and Yuen, H. B. and Sabnis, V. A. and Johnson, T. J. and Sewell, R. and Smith, R. and Jamora, A. and Clark, A. and Semans, S. and Atanackovic, P. B. and Painter, O. (2008) Growth, processing, and optical properties of epitaxial Er_2O_3 on silicon. Optics Express, 16 (24). pp. 19649-19666. ISSN 1094-4087Permalink

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science