Recently in Science Category

I've never teared up looking at pictures of the sky before, but this one is worth it. If this doesn't strike a chord with you, then either you live an amazingly interesting life or you're missing something. To recap, this is an image of what would appear to be empty night sky to the naked eye. In reality there's a teaming soup of galaxies, each hosting millions of starts, each undergoing their own local dramas. At a glance, I see a well defined spiral galaxy that appears to be thicker than is typical; a pair of galaxies interacting; a diffuse, globular galaxy and dozens of others that range from bright enough to make out some detail and so faint that they fade into noise. When I look at this, there is no doubt in my mind that there must be other life out there. There are just so many stars in so many galaxies that I can believe that any form of life must have, at one point, come to be.

Over the past many years, I've been maintaining, re-writing and extending a program that I call mkpasswd (an unfortunate name, it turns out, since others have used it as well, but for inferior tools). The goal of this program is the pseudo-random generation of passwords. This might sound like an easy thing, but since nearly everyone makes the same mistakes in creating a password generator, I think it's instructive to go over why I wrote mine the way I did.

If you want to find integer square roots of arbitrary integers you can use this Perl code (or adapt it to your language of choice). I devised this, while working on the 2^2x+1 problem. So why is finding an integer square root interesting? Well other than the problem I was working on, you might be trying to find prime factors, and the highest number you have to test for a prime factor of a larger number $x$ is which just happens to be what this function will calculate.

An essay regarding evolutionary theory and the use of language to describe it — This article originally appeared on the AJS.COM Wiki

Theories and facts are often misunderstood and the terms misused in the debate over the validity of scientific knowledge in our society. Probably the best known example of this was in the debate over Intelligent Design that spilled over into the Federal Court System in the United States in the form of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a case that pitted eleven parents of Dover, Pennsylvania students against the Dover Area School District and many organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union. In this case, the parents wanted the school board to require this phrase to be read aloud in biology classes:

Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact.

This essay originally appeared on the AJS.COM Wiki in 2008,and is being re-published as a test

The Singularity AKA the technological singularity is a concept that has a few variations, but one of the most popularly discussed variants can best be summarized as such:

Over the millennia of recorded history, we can see that the pace of technological development has been on an exponential curve, and continues to increase in pace. Plotting this forward, there is a time in the future where that curve will go to infinity. What this means is not exactly clear, but speculation about the nature of self-accelerating technology and the removal of human beings from the innovation loop is a common next step in the articulation of this phenomenon.

This is often backed up by charts that show the number of technological advances in a given period or the span of time between them. Indeed, any such chart will converge on a recognizable exponential curve! Is this proof that technology is about to advance so rapidly that we will have little or no control over it, resulting in a potentially apocalyptic surge in advancing changes to our society and even selves?