How I’ve spent the last few moments

I was catching up on XKCD cartoons.  Some only a nerd would get – or a liberal arts major – but some just made me laugh out loud. I hear this one spoken in my brother’s oh so cynical voice.

But then it tells you just how servers really communicate with your smartphone or why scientists hate the mainstream media. Or gives us insights into human wants. Or philosophy. Sometimes you learn new words, like trochee.

Some things we wish were true. Others we wish were not.

I love it.

This is what sex is like to many of us

xkcd: Heaven
[Via xkcd]

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It may take a little bit to get it if you have never played Tetris. But what makes this of special pleasure to many of us is what you see pop up if you hover your cursor over the cartoon at the site. That’ll help explain my title.

This is what makes xkcd more than just a funny, cynical web comic. It portrays such an insight into a certain type of mind, which includes me. If you want to gain an inkling into how my mind works read xkcd.

Models drive us

by TheIguana

Make: Online | Model It, or Make It Modelable
[Via Make]

This past summer I had two great interns in my lab. As usual, they taught me more than I taught them. One in particular helped me refine my thoughts on the theme that pervades my every day.

When Geoff first arrived in my office, I described his summer project to him. I had written 2,000 lines of code in MATLAB to model the Ackerman steering geometry of a tilting (leaning) vehicle. He was to take that code, check it, improve it, and finish it, and we’d build the vehicle as a tilting, steering, cargo-carrying tricycle. He said, “It’ll take three days.” I countered, “I’ll bet it takes six weeks.”

Geoff dove into the code. He only looked up from his computer for two reasons: to hear instructions for using the vintage hand-pulled espresso machine, and to go stare at the physical prototype of the tilting trike to orient himself to the problem. He missed his own three-day target, but crushed my six-week estimate when he proudly showed me the first working computer model in just two weeks.

And that’s the theme pervading my whole life right now: computational modeling.

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Computers now allow us to model instead of build. Science is all about creating models that help us understand the world around us. We can easily test models to see how accurately they describe the world we see. They permit us to do things that would be just too time consuming or complex to do ourselves.

They also tremendously speed up of understanding. Computer models is now permitting us to understand much of the genomic work being done by DNA sequencing, even thought the ability to sequencing is following a trend faster than Moore’s law:

A million letters of DNA for pennies. We have to use models to deal with this huge amount of information. Models will be a major way we understand the world around us because they permit very complex things to be examined at one time. They permit synthesis of multiple information streams to occur, rather than the simple analysis that human brains like most.

It is a whole new world.