New Year's To-Do List

Well, it's once again the time of year when I review the state of my life, and resolve to do something about all the shortcomings that inevitably present themselves. Unfortunately, although I have no trouble coming up with worthwhile resolutions, I've never had much success in keeping them, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld. Therefore I don't think I'm going to waste time with making any resolutions in the traditional sense. Resolve is such a weighty word. I'm going to try taking a less serious approach here. I see that Jane has given herself a to-don't list, but I'm a little skeptical of this approach. The standard truism applicable here is that it is better to prescribe the desired behavior than to proscribe the unwanted behavior, and I have to agree with this advice. However, I do like the idea of a to-do list -- it's much more matter-of-fact than a resolution. A to-do item is like doing the laundry or paying the bills; it's something you do every day. Most importantly, it's something you know that you can do. So, here is my to-do list for 2008.

Where to start? According to Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily, having too many resolutions reduces your chances of success, so I'm going to limit myself to five items. His list of most-commonly made resolutions looks depressingly predictable, but as I am not one to break with tradition, I will start out with a health-related to-do.

One

I'm currently about 20 pounds over my "ideal" weight. I figure that if I set my goal at the modest target of losing about one pound per week, and allowing for a little bit of back-sliding, I should reach my ideal weight by mid-year. I debated about whether to include this item in this post (since, after all, who out there cares about how much I weigh?), but it gives me an opportunity to demonstrate the neat little chart API from Google. This API lets you generate graphs on-the-fly just by specifying a URL with the necessary parameters. So for example, here's a line graph I can use to chart my weight progress:



I'll have to post an updated graph every month or so, so that you can shame me into staying on target. (Hat tip to Brian Hayes at bit-player for this.)

If you need an extra incentive to get going on your own health to-do, this news item about a recent health study might help. Researchers in England found that middle-aged men and women who followed four good-health practices (don't smoke, consume alcohol in moderation, get some exercise, and eat lots of fruits and vegetables) were 4 times more likely to have survived through the duration of the study than those who followed none. Participants who only followed 1, 2, or 3 of the practices still showed (correspondingly smaller) benefits. Not surprising, but I think that one of the points of the study is that a few simple, relatively easily implemented practices can make a big difference in your health. You can read the whole article at PLoS Medicine.

Two

Also high on Dave Munger's list of typical resolutions is getting organized. If you've ever seen the HGTV show Mission: Organization, you have an idea of what my personal space looks like. I can't think of an aspect of my life that couldn't benefit from some organization, but just to keep things simple I'm going to focus on one item: my filing cabinet. I need to redo my filing system, and I'm going to set a target date of March 1st, which will force me to get my tax records together in plenty of time for tax season. I don't have any fancy links to help with setting up the physical files themselves (although I do like the looks of these MAGNIfiles). However, once the files are set up the tricky part is keeping them in order. I've been told that the adage to keep in mind is "handle each piece of paper only once", and if you Google that expression you'll get hundreds of relevant links. This one (somewhat randomly chosen) seems pretty sensible. Of course, since most of this is just common-sense stuff, the trick is not knowing what to do, but actually doing it.

One final link on filing, just to keep this post from being too un-mathy: Jeff Erickson had a neat post a couple of years ago on the time-complexity of various filing strategies. It turns out that the system I've been using isn't so bad after all!

Three

Next up, I want to try to improve my productivity. To keep this concrete, I'm going to set as my goal to write for 2 hours a day. I'm using "write" very loosely here, to mean pretty much any form of output in which I'm creating something instead of just passively reading or viewing. Now, this kind of goal is notoriously hard to keep, and I'm deliberately choosing it in order to try out some motivational techniques. On his blog, Jim Gibbon describes the Seinfeld method, which consists of getting a big, full-year wall calendar and making a large mark on each day you meet your goal. The aim is to try to keep the resulting string of marks from being broken. I love the simplicity of this technique, and I can use it to track my progress on my other goals as well. Jim Gibbon also describes a technique called contingency management, in which you give yourself a reward each time you complete your daily goal (or a punishment when you fail). I suspect that I would be too tempted to cheat using this method, but I'll give it a try as well.

One general problem I've had with writing is that ideas invariably occur to me at the most inopportune times, and I end up forgetting them before I have a chance to write them down. I can't be bothered with carrying a journal around with me all the time, and I tried using a voice recorder but was too self-conscious to make good use of it. But I recently read that Vladimir Nabokov did his writing using index cards, and this seems like such a great solution that I can't wait to give it a try.

Four

One of the things I plan on doing with that writing time is to produce some actual mathematical content for this blog instead of the typical link-fests (like this entry). But to present the math properly, I think I need to bite the bullet and convert this blog to WordPress. After all, if it's good enough for Terry Tao's What's New, Scott Aaronson's Shtetl-Optimized, Tyler DiPietro's PowerUp, and Foxy's FoxMaths! (among others), then it ought to be good enough for me.

Now, just setting up a new blog takes almost no time at all. But it's been ages since I've updated anything else on this site, so I think I need to give the whole place an overhaul. Since I've committed myself to getting my files in order first, I think I'll set a leisurely goal of May 1st for my new web digs.

Five

So if all goes according to plan, by mid-year I'll be fit, organized, and churning out math posts on my remodeled blog. That leaves the second half of the year open for something perhaps a little more ambitious.

Bill Gasarch recently posted his predictions for 2008, and I couldn't help noticing a hint of a contradiction between his 2nd and 3rd items:

2. There will be a big breakthrough in theory. Very hard to predict what it will be- note that this years big breakthrough, faster algorithm for integer multiplication, would have been hard to predict.


3. P vs NP, P vs BPP, will not be solved.

Now, to me that seems almost like a dare. So, this gives me the perfect project for the second half of this year: write a proof that P≠NP.

To help guide me with my proof-writing, Scott Aaronson recently posted a list of Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong. If I take care to avoid the pitfalls on this list, I'll be sure to get everyone to read my results. Actually, the one item that I think I would deliberately indulge in is this:

8. The paper wastes lots of space on standard material. If you’d really proved P≠NP, then you wouldn’t start your paper by laboriously defining 3SAT, in a manner suggesting your readers might not have heard of it.

Since a proof of something like P≠NP would be of interest to a wider audience than your typical math result, I would try to make it as self-contained as possible.


So to recap, here's my to-do list for 2008:

1. Lose 20 pounds.
2. Organize my files.
3. Commit to writing for 2 hours a day.
4. Update this web site and switch to WordPress.
5. Write a proof that P≠NP.

As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, since these are to-do items and not resolutions, I can be confident that I can matter-of-factly complete each task. We'll check back in December and see how I did!

What have you changed your mind about?

A couple of months ago I wrote about Edge Foundation's What is your formula? question. Well, the results of the Edge annual question for 2008 are now online. The question posed to Edge's contributing scientists and thinkers this time around was, What have you changed your mind about? Why? (You'll need to scroll down past a bunch of blurbs on that page before you come to the list of responses.)

It's a challenging question to answer, and I was expecting some intriguing responses. There are some interesting answers, to be sure, but not as many as I initially expected. In retrospect, I guess that's not too surprising. (Ha! Look, I changed my mind about that!) Since a change of thinking is required, it kind of implies that the holder's original point of view was wrong. So, if someone has an important idea, but it is their original point of view on a subject, then it just isn't going to show up in this year's mix. In fact, in browsing through the responses I frequently found myself thinking, "Of course you changed your mind--your original ideas were clearly wrong!" And there were also a couple of entries were I'm pretty sure the authors changed their minds in the wrong direction.

When I try to answer this question for myself, I have a hard time coming up with a clear-cut example. Of course, there are lots of little mundane day-to-day opinions that change, like what kind of toppings I like on my hot dogs. But for the "big ideas", it's more a matter of gradual refinement over time as I learn more about a subject, than a complete change in direction. (I am of course limiting myself to my opinions as a mature adult. If my opinions during my teen years were included, I'm sure my parents could produce many examples where I've since done a complete about-face, but thankfully I have pretty much total amnesia about that time of my life.)

Here are just a few selections that struck me as I read through them...

Susan Blackmore talks about how she stopped believing in paranormal phenomenon. I've never been a real believer in this kind of stuff, but I did spend a lot of time researching it in college because it's the kind of thing that would be so cool if only it were true. I quickly realized, however, that nearly all the research published in parapsychology journals was just plain crap. It made me wonder how any self-respecting scientist could continue to work in the field.

I had to re-read Daniel Hillis's entry more than once to convince myself that I understood him correctly. He talks about how, as a child, he was told that hot water froze faster than cold water and he refused to believe it because it defied common sense. He challenges the reader to try the experiment for themselves in order to convince themselves otherwise. I'm pretty sure that he's just trying to taunt us into adopting an experimentalist mindset, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to have to try this for myself now.

Many respondents talked about changes in religious belief. Conflicts between fundamentalist religious beliefs and science have been in the news a lot lately (for example, in the context of the primary election debates), but moderate religious beliefs are generally portrayed as compatible with modern science. Clay Shirky has come to disagree with this perspective and argues that even moderate beliefs are not reconcilable with science, and we are entering a long period of societal restructuring on this issue.

Finally, there were a number of mathematically oriented entries. These tended to deal with philosophical shifts, such as Keith Devlin's move away from platonism and toward socially or evolutionarily constructed mathematics. But Bart Kosko had a very specific change of mind: he argues that the median should be the preferred measure of central tendency, instead of the mean.

Some inspirational videos to close out the year

2007 has been a depressing year, and I don't think that it's just me. I've pretty much given up on watching TV news or reading newspapers. Doing so just adds to the malaise. And because of the writers' strike, the one remaining palatable news source has been unavailable. (Now if I could only wean myself from the Web, I might start feeling better...but that's a topic for another post.) So to close out the year, here are a couple of items that have managed to cheer me up and inspire me, in the form of Internet videos.

First up is TED. TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and at its core it is an annual conference where the movers and shakers of the intellectual world gather to make short (15-20 minute) presentations on what is challenging and inspiring them. The best of these presentations have been made available as streaming video on the TED website. There is a truly eclectic assortment of topics, so there's bound to be something of interest for everyone. The TED staff maintains a blog where you can find out about the latest talks to go online. A while back they posted a list of all the talks that are available, which makes a handy reference point even though it's a couple of months out of date now.

Here's a quick sampling of some TED talks: Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran describes how we can learn about how the brain works by looking at how it fails to work normally in patients with neurological disorders. Ramachandran is a great lecturer and I was blown away by this talk. Biology student Eva Vertes talks about her ideas for finding a cure for cancer. Watch this not so much for the specific ideas presented but just to be reminded of the promise of youth. (Hat tips to Mo and Bora, respectively, for these two talks.) A couple of my own picks: Computer scientist and entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins talks about modeling the human brain on a computer. This talk is basically an executive summary of his book, On Intelligence. In the time constraints of the talk, Hawkins comes across as less than convincing, although in his book he develops a much stronger case for his ideas. Finally, for the math-ed crowd, be sure to check out "mathemagician" Arthur Benjamin, who puts on an amazing display of rapid-fire mental arithmetic. It's interesting to look at the comments for that presentation--some of the viewers seemed to think that Benjamin must have had a secret radio receiver in his ear with an accomplice sending him the answers! Michael Shermer joins in the comments to point out that he and Benjamin co-authored a book on how he performs his mental feats.

The second item for your consideration is the Last Lecture by Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch. Pausch is suffering from incurable pancreatic cancer, and in his recorded farewell lecture at CMU, he recapped his career and his perspective on life so that his now-young children would one day be able to know a little more about him. This talk has become something of an Internet sensation after being reported about on network news and in other media. The "last lecture" is also going to be developed into a book, with the assistance of Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Zaslow. (Hat tip to my mom for this one--as I mentioned, I don't follow the main-stream media much any more.)

Pausch described his lecture as being for his children, and I think he's absolutely right about that. The lecture will be extremely meaningful for his kids as well as for other family and friends. But for outsiders, I'm not sure I understand the appeal. I mean, Randy Pausch is an extremely positive person, and there is no doubt that his attitude played an important part in helping him achieve his goals in life. But this is a lesson that pretty much everyone already understands. The problem is that for someone who feels beaten down by life, telling him or her to be more positive simply isn't going to help. It's just not inspirational to someone who's not already on the program.

So why am I including this video here? Well, one of the accomplishments that Pausch mentions in his lecture is a programming language named Alice. Pausch's research areas included human-computer interfaces (HCI) and virtual reality, and he was also interested in attracting kids, especially girls, to computer science. These combined interests gave birth to Alice, which is a programming platform designed to be easy to learn, and which uses story-telling as its central paradigm, instead of a more abstract treatment of algorithms. This is supposed to work as a hook to draw girls into programming, and it seems to have been very successful at Carnegie-Mellon. My daughter has taken an interest in learning Alice, and I'll be keeping an eye on how things progress. You can find a demo video of Alice on this page. I would recommend skipping the promo video at the top of that page, and scrolling down to the demo at the bottom.

**********************************

So that's it for another year. I hope that you survived 2007, and here's looking forward to a better year in 2008.

String Theory

Physicists in the lab have produced hard data for string theory! Well, for a theory about strings. Actually, knot theory might be technically a more accurate label. Okay, the truth is that the only reason I'm writing this post at all is so I could make a pun about string theory in the title.

This research evidently made the news when it was published a couple of months ago, but I missed it until Keith Devlin mentioned it in passing last week on NPR. Physicists Doug Smith and Dorian Raymer at the University of California at San Diego have developed a mathematical model for how loose string in a box becomes tangled when the box is jostled. Their paper, Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string, was published this past October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (The full article can be accessed without a subscription here.) There have been numerous write-ups about it in science and math publications; a couple of particularly nice articles were in Science News Online and in The Mathematical Tourist column in MAA Online.

The experimental apparatus consisted of clear acrylic boxes of various sizes which were rotated by a computer-controlled motor. Strings of various lengths and stiffnesses were placed in the boxes, and after being spun, the strings were analyzed to see what knots had formed. This was done in large part by taking digital photos of the ending configuration of the strings and using a computer analysis to compute the Jones polynomials of the knots. The PNAS website contains Quicktime movies of the apparatus in action, which are definitely worth a look.

As for any practical advice from the study, the bottom line seems to be that you should pack your loose cords tightly to prevent them from moving around. I don't think that's going to be of much help when I put away the Christmas lights next week. Each year they inevitably come out of the box a tangled mess, in spite of being packed more snuggly than sardines. Perhaps Smith and Raymer can do a follow-up study using Christmas lights instead of string, that are shaken side-to-side instead of being spun. (My Christmas lights, despite being tangled, are usually not knotted at all in a strict mathematical sense, and I don't think that Smith and Raymer examined this type of phenomenon in their study.)

What is your formula?

[Note: I goofed up in describing What is your formula? as an Edge annual question. It's not, and I've updated the post below to correct this.]

Edge Foundation does a yearly thing where they pose a question to an array of scientists and other intellectuals, and collect together all their answers. They have also had occasion to pose a question outside of the normal cycle, when after the 9/11 terrorist attacks they asked, What Now? Earlier this month, as part of a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery in London, Edge posed another question to their collection of thinkers. The question was What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm? and browsing through the answers is a great way to waste an afternoon. Because the replies consisted mainly of diagrams and equations (many of which were hand-drawn), they are displayed as scanned images, which adds a personal touch to the results.

Unfortunately, the format of the question also limited the form the answers could take, most of which express some kind of heuristic relationship rather than a true formula. I did like this entry by psychology professor Danny Kahneman, which seems to explain a lot of popular culture.

As might be expected, the entries by mathematicians tended to have actual formulas in them. I can relate to the sentiment expressed by Nassim Taleb in his entry. Over a typeset page of equations on how to price stock derivatives, he hand-wrote, "I spent a large part of my life working on this equation. I am glad it is over."

Many of the entries were just plain silly. I'll single out this one by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, because of his abuse of mathematics. He has a nice diagram illustrating composition of functions that would make any algebra teacher proud, but follows it with a fallacious argument that shows he has not mastered basic logic.

Let me mention one more entry before I stop. Popular math writer Keith Devlin uses an analogy to speculate on how math will be taught in the future, and it looks like he would like to see virtual manipulatives taken to a whole new level.

Be sure to also check out the archive of annual answers to questions. Because they are not constrained by the "formula" format imposed on the current question, the answers are better developed and far more insightful.

SocialRank (and MathBloggers) is now live

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about SocialRank, which seems to be a new blog search engine that identifies which blogs entries are currently generating a lot of interest. These entries are categorized by subject matter and daily 'top 15' lists are created for the top blogs and top blog entries. The result for each category appears under its own domain name, and for math blogs the end product is MathBloggers.

At the time I last wrote about this, the SocialRank sites were all password protected while under development, but an anonymous commenter has pointed out that as of today SocialRank is now live. The first 30 blog categories are now open, and this includes MathBloggers.

So how good of a job did MathBloggers do on its first outing? Well, in addition to several blog entries that I had already read and might expect to see on a 'top 15' list, there were several entries (and blogs) listed that I was not familiar with. So MathBloggers succeeded in broadening my reading. The MathBloggers list also included a nice mix of pure math, math ed, mathematical physics, and theoretical computer science blogs. The blog Good Math, Bad Math, while being a very good blog, seemed to be over-represented on the list, so SocialRank may need to fine-tune their ranking system to keep very popular blogs from overwhelming the little ones. There was also one noticeable bug: blog URLs only contained the actual domain name and not any path info. As a result, Good Math, Bad Math shows up as ScienceBlogs, for example, and Jacques Distler's Musings appears simply as the host server name Golem. (This problem did not affect the URLs for individual blog entries, only for the blog home URLs.)

Overall, it seems like an interesting effort, and I'm going to keep checking MathBloggers on a regular basis to see how it develops.

Update

Hmmm, maybe I spoke a little too soon on this. There is definitely something a little "off" about the Top Blog Posts list. A couple of entries currently listed there are from Skrentablog, which is a tech blog with practically no math content. The other blogs represented on the list seemed to fit the category better, but some of the particular entries seemed like peculiar choices. Vlorbik wonders how his own blog got so highly rated. His particular entry that made the list was about the Excel number formatting error that was a big news item last week; maybe the overall blogosphere interest in the story somehow rubbed off indirectly on his post. In any event, the SocialRank ranking algorithm seems to be doing some weird things. It will be interesting to see how well it tracks blog interest later this week when the next Carnival of Mathematics comes out.

Link this, SocialRank

[Update: I thought, since I mentioned Snap Shots in this entry, that I should just turn this feature on in this blog instead of sending you elsewhere. Done. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a magic bullet, as you'll see if you scroll over the mathbloggers.com link. However, the cached Snap Shots image at The Unapologetic Mathematician that I refer to below still worked the last time I checked.]

I've noticed in the past couple of days, trackbacks appearing on many math blogs for a site named mathbloggers.com. Well neat, I thought, a new math blog. Unfortunately, that site is password protected, so clicking on that link is not going to get you very far. However, the site is evidently not shielded from search engines and the like, and if you roll over the trackback link on a blog that has the Snap Shots feature enabled, you can see that it appears to be just a link aggregator site. (For example, as of this writing you can use this post at The Unapologetic Mathematician and scroll to near the bottom of the comments.) There is one other thing, though, and that is the phrase "powered by SocialRank" on the trackback link.

What is SocialRank? On the Snap Shots image I can make out the blurb, "SocialRank brings you the most popular stories that people are paying attention to right now." If I try Googling "socialrank", I find a great number of these aggregator sites on all variety of topics, and all apparently password protected. Well now, SocialRank isn't going to be bringing me much of anything if I can't get to any sites powered by it... Could this be some bizarre new kind of comment spam? Did someone figure out a new way to hack search engine rankings or something? I tried doing a whois lookup on some of the sites and found that they were registered to someone named Michael Reining at a company called MindValley.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. MindValley appears to be a "Web 2.0" type of company dealing in e-commerce and web marketing and the like, based in Kuala Lumpur. And, they have a blog. On it, they explain a little bit about SocialRank:

We develop breakthrough applications that have the power to be very disruptive. We are currently working on a project called SocialRank that will instantly be able to surface the top blog posts for 1,000 blogging communities online. To help us pull this off, we have hired one of the smartest mathematicians from the leading technical school in India and assembled an all start team of developers. The algorithm is nothing short of breathtaking because for the first time you will instantly be able to see 1) the top stories coming out of every blog community and 2) see which blogs are the hottest right now to see where the conversations are happening online.

So there you have it. I'm guessing that when they feel their product is ready for public consumption, the password protection will come off those sites.

Oh, and that mathematician, a fellow named Talat, has a blog entry with a math anecdote from his youth. Maybe we can get him to submit something to the Carnival of Mathematics :)

A simple plea to all computer scientists

I was trying to do a little background reading on a problem in complexity theory (this problem, to be precise), and I was dismayed to find myself thwarted by the unavailability of papers. Not being an academic type, I don't have ready access to a research library. (I can, in theory, get papers from my local public library via inter-library loan, but it takes a couple of weeks. I can also drive to the nearest university that has a CS graduate program, but I'm not going to count that as "ready access".) So I depend upon papers being available online, and a lot of researchers are very obliging in this regard. However, there are still a lot of exceptions.

For example, Richard Karp's 1972 paper "Reducibility among combinatorial problems" [2] does not seem to be online. (By the way, it is of course possible that this or any the subsequent papers I mention are in fact online but I wasn't thorough enough in my searches. Please let me know if this is the case.) This paper is mainly of historical interest at this point, but it was such an important paper that I'm really surprised by its absence.

Moving forward in time 16 years to 1988, we have another highly cited paper, "How easy is local search?" by Johnson, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis [1]. Again, given how many citations this paper has, I'm surprised no one has been moved to scan it and put it online. (Well, actually, someone has, and I'll get to that in a moment.)

Going forward another 4 years to 1992 takes us to Woeginger and Yu's paper "On the equal-subset-sum problem" [4]. Here we're starting to get recent enough that the authors might still have the source versions of the paper in electronic form. Not to pick on anyone (especially since I'm a fan of his P vs. NP page), but why doesn't Woeginger include this paper on his publications page?

Finally, for a recent example, we jump forward 11 years to 2003 for a paper by Kellerer, Mansini, Pferschy and Speranza [3]. Given the recent date of this paper I would have thought that it would be a matter of routine for the authors to upload a preprint of it to their web pages.

Out of a total of 9 papers I tried to locate online, I was unable to access 4 of them. The good news is that more than half of the papers were in fact freely available on the web. The bad news is the following: with the exception of the Karp paper, the others are in fact online and they're for sale at Elsevier's ScienceDirect. Now, I have nothing against capitalism, and I actually think it's great that these articles are available for sale on an individual basis. But Elsevier charges $30 per article, and that is a bit steep for something that I might skim through once and then discard. Unfortunately, even after reading the abstracts it can be hard to tell which papers will turn out to be worth the expense and which ones won't.

So, my simple request is that researchers take the time to upload papers to their web pages. I'm not sure what kinds of legal issues might be involved, but some of the articles that I did find online were also published in Elsevier journals, so I don't think that copyright concerns are the main impediment. It may be more just a matter of developing the right mindset. So get those papers out there, and students and hobbyists everywhere will be grateful. (If copyright issues are the main problem, I'd like to hear more about that, too.)


1. D.S. Johnson, C.H. Papadimitriou and M. Yannakakis, How easy is local search?, J. Comput. System Sci. 37 (1988) 79-100.

2. R.M. Karp, Reducibility among combinatorial problems, in Complexity of Computer Computations, R.E. Miller and J.W. Thatcher (eds.), Plenum Press, New York (1972), 85-104.

3. H. Kellerer, R. Mansini, U. Pferschy and M.G. Speranza, An efficient fully polynomial approximation scheme for the Subset-Sum Problem, J. Comput. System Sci. 66 (2003) 349-370.

4. G.J. Woeginger and Z.L. Yu, On the equal-subset-sum problem, Inform. Proc. Letters 42 (1992) 299-302.

Updates

Evidently Shiva Kintali would also like to see more papers uploaded to their authors' web pages, and he would like to see it done really, really quickly!

Commenter BarrosH pointed out to me that Karp's paper can in fact be found online, at Papadimitriou's Reading the Classics course.

The End of Blogging?

Late last year the IT consulting firm Gartner issued its 'top ten predictions' for 2007, and among them was the claim that blogging would level off as the number of people quitting their blogs equaled the number of new bloggers.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but now 3 different 'mathy' blogs have abruptly ceased operation this month. Foremost was Lance Fortnow's Computational Complexity, the premier blog for theoretical computer science. The other two blogs, more political but with math as a sideline, were Alon Levy's Abstract Nonsense, and Tyler DiPietro's Growth Rate O(n lg n).

If you click on that link for Tyler's blog, you'll find that it does not even exist anymore; evidently he felt the temptation to blog would be too strong if he didn't just chuck the whole thing. While I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment, I feel obligated to mention for the benefit of anyone else who might be considering this, Bora Zivkovic's plea for the Proper Procedure For Shutting Down A Blog.

Although I wouldn't attempt to compare these blogs, one thing that they shared was a high output. For me, writing is a slow, tedious, and sometimes downright painful process, so I am always amazed by people who are able to write with such apparent ease. Unfortunately, it would also appear that they have simply burned themselves out in the process (at least as far as blogging is concerned). Of course, there is no need to worry about that happening here. At the rate of an entry per month, it would be almost superfluous for me to ever quit.

Finally, by way of balancing the karmic blogging equation, last month the mathematician Terence Tao started his own blog, What's new. Tao is a recipient of both a Fields medal and a MacArthur fellowship, and his blog should be of great interest to mathematically-minded readers.

Frances Allen receives 2006 Turing Award

The 2006 Turing Award has been given to Frances Allen. This is the first time that this honor has been awarded to a woman. See the ACM press release for details. I have to admit that I am not familiar with Frances Allen. Her background is in compiler design and program optimization, amongst other things. More information about Allen can be found on the IBM Women in technology site. (Hat tip to Suresh.)

I hadn't thought about it before, but I'm surprised that this is only the first time a woman has received the Turing Award. I would have expected that Grace Hopper, for one, would have been a recipient, but perhaps she passed away before the opportunity came up. Past Turing Award winners can be found here.

The Turing Award will be presented to Allen at a ceremony in June. I'm sure that her Turing lecture will be much more edifying than the previous recipient's.

Update

I just noticed that this entry was included in a blog round-up over on ComputerWorld, so if you found your way here from there, welcome. If you haven't already seen it, Mark Chu-Carroll has a personal recollection about Frances Allen over on Good Math, Bad Math. Another item worth checking out is an interview with Allen from 1996 by Ann Devlin. They talk about how the Web will streamline commerce and empower users, and it's kind of weird listening to this from a 10-year-old perspective.

Up-up-date

Also check out Lance Fortnow's blog entry. The post itself is minimal; but read the comments, and you can either weep or get angry as seems fit.

Miscellany

Blogger has finally implemented a backtracking feature (now if only they'll add categories, I can be content), and I've replaced the Technorati trackback link at the bottom of each post with a Blogger 'backlink'. Just in time, as it turns out, for my last post to actually get linked to. Thanks Suresh and Anthony. Of course, you guys realize that my post was not about P vs. NP proofs. I have a real affection for these, flawed or otherwise. The hypercomputationalists are another matter; I may have more to say about them in the future. I'm still mulling over a few things (sorry, I think slowly). In the meantime, here are a few miscellaneous thoughts I need to unload because they're clogging up the works...

Elsevier:

In the comments to my last post, Chris Leonard at Elsevier responds to a remark I made about the journal Theoretical Computer Science. Not being a part of academia, and never having published a research article, I am not familiar with the issues surrounding scientific publishing. But Chris seems to be genuinely interested in receiving feedback from people in the field, so I would encourage you to take advantage of that and send your suggestions or gripes to him. And although I absolutely do NOT recommend it, I can't help mentioning that if you are feeling angry and at a loss for words, you might want to check out this article first (thanks to Bora Zivkovic). (Seriously, though, I'm only joking. Please be polite.)

Cosma's notebooks:

I was trying to find an online copy of an old Claude Shannon article, and in the process came across these notebooks of Cosma Shalizi's. Now evidently Cosma is well known in these parts, at least to people who have been around longer than I have. All I can say is, as someone who loves books and thought he had a nice little collection, I feel so, so inadequate now.

Backlash against editor who published ID:

This story, Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom was on NPR's All Things Considered program two days ago. I haven't noticed any feedback yet about this on the Web, and I'm curious about people's reaction to it. Are academics really this petty and vindictive?

ASCIIMathML and Blogger

Finally, here is a little technical issue I noticed with the new backlink feature: The Blogger backlink display can be garbled by ASCIIMathML. The Blogger template uses variable tags like <$BlogBacklinkTitle$>. Most of these get resolved on the server side, so your browser (and ASCIIMathML) never see them. But the backlinks get resolved on the browser, and evidently ASCIIMathML gets to them before the Blogger script does. So <$BlogBacklinkTitle$> can turn into something like <BlogBackl∈ktit≤>.

According to ASCIIMathML's creator, Peter Jipsen, the easiest workaround is to just remove the dollar sign as a potential delimiter and use the backquote instead. To make this change in the script, find the line near the top of the file that looks like so:

var AMdelimiter2 = "$", AMescape2 = "\\\\\\$", AMdelimiter2regexp = "\\$";

and change the delimiter sequences to something that will never appear in the page, such as the following:

var AMdelimiter2 = "NeverInText", AMescape2 = "NeverInText", AMdelimiter2regexp = "NeverInText";

Happy coding!

Scott Aaronson joins the ranks

I usually avoid short posts like this, but here's a bit of news via Michael Nielsen that I thought warranted an immediate mention: Scott Aaronson has started his own blog, Shtetl-Optimized.

And since I had to look it up myself, here is what a shtetl is.