[FRIAM] Splitting? was Re: How do forces work?

[Robert J. Cordingley]

Some (semi-serious) suggestions around how to split the list (use 
subgroups):


Philosophy
Physics of Quanta and the Continuum
Phunny stuff
Phuture trends in sociology/crowd sourcing/etc.
Sophtware
oh and... Complexity and ABM

Seems neither Mailman (the current listserv) nor Google Groups support 
subgroups tho'.  FWIW, Lsoft's Listserve might, see 
http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/maestro/4.0/htmlhelp/data%20administrator/ClassicLSListTargetGroups.html 
- where they are called Target Groups.


Robert C


On 4/20/13 10:47 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin 
mailto:stephen.gue...@redfish.com>>wrote:


Aya, it turns out Bruce recently unsubscribed from FRIAM. I hope
you guys on the list are happy with your signal to noise ratio ;-)
   Just kidding...keep it up.


OT, but:  I think we failed a test.  Maybe we should split the list? 
 Or use wedtech exclusively for physics, programming, etc?


I now simply don't know who is on what list, nor what their interests 
are.  I'm sure Russ wanted Bruce's post, right?


 -- Owen




FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Re: [FRIAM] Splitting? was Re: How do forces work?

[Sarbajit Roy]

lists.riseup.net (SYMPA based) allows sub-groups.
http://www.sympa.org/manual/managing-members

Sarbajit

On 4/21/13, Robert J. Cordingley  wrote:
> Some (semi-serious) suggestions around how to split the list (use
> subgroups):
>
> Philosophy
> Physics of Quanta and the Continuum
> Phunny stuff
> Phuture trends in sociology/crowd sourcing/etc.
> Sophtware
> oh and... Complexity and ABM
>
> Seems neither Mailman (the current listserv) nor Google Groups support
> subgroups tho'.  FWIW, Lsoft's Listserve might, see
> http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/maestro/4.0/htmlhelp/data%20administrator/ClassicLSListTargetGroups.html
>
> - where they are called Target Groups.
>
> Robert C
>
>
> On 4/20/13 10:47 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin
>> mailto:stephen.gue...@redfish.com>>wrote:
>>
>> Aya, it turns out Bruce recently unsubscribed from FRIAM. I hope
>> you guys on the list are happy with your signal to noise ratio ;-)
>>Just kidding...keep it up.
>>
>>
>> OT, but:  I think we failed a test.  Maybe we should split the list?
>>  Or use wedtech exclusively for physics, programming, etc?
>>
>> I now simply don't know who is on what list, nor what their interests
>> are.  I'm sure Russ wanted Bruce's post, right?
>>
>>  -- Owen
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>
>


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[FRIAM] PHPLint

[Robert J. Cordingley]

Quick question... Does anyone have any experience/success compiling and 
running PHPLint  on Mac OSX 
(Mountain Lion)? Are there alternatives?


Thanks
Robert C


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Re: [FRIAM] How do forces work?

[Russ Abbott]

When I asked AskA{Mathematician,
Physicist} the
force question, here's the answer I got -- which includes a pointer to the
Feynman video mentioned earlier.

In quantum field theory we talk about forces being conveyed by "force
carriers".  Photons for the Electromagnetic force, W+, W-, and Z bosons for
the Nuclear Weak force, and Gluons for the Nuclear Strong force.  There's
also a theoretical particle called the "Graviton" for gravity, but there
are a lot of issues with that.

As for the more fundamental question of how those carriers do anything at
all, or why they interact with some particles but not others (e.g., photons
only interact with charged particles), there unfortunately may never be a
particularly good answer for that.

There's a video here  where
Feynman addresses (a little snarkily) this very problem.



*-- Russ Abbott*
*_*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  CS Wiki  and the courses I teach
*_*


On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Russ Abbott  wrote:

> Yes, I definitely wanted Bruce's post.
>
>
> *-- Russ Abbott*
> *_*
> ***  Professor, Computer Science*
> *  California State University, Los Angeles*
>
> *  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
> *  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
>   Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
> *  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
>   CS Wiki  and the courses I teach
> *_*
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 9:47 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin <
>> stephen.gue...@redfish.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Aya, it turns out Bruce recently unsubscribed from FRIAM. I hope you
>>> guys on the list are happy with your signal to noise ratio ;-)Just
>>> kidding...keep it up.
>>>
>>
>> OT, but:  I think we failed a test.  Maybe we should split the list?  Or
>> use wedtech exclusively for physics, programming, etc?
>>
>> I now simply don't know who is on what list, nor what their interests
>> are.  I'm sure Russ wanted Bruce's post, right?
>>
>>-- Owen
>>
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>
>
>

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Re: [FRIAM] How do forces work?

[Steve Smith]

S -

I'd like to think Gil and I could take credit for running Bruce off with 
our Light/Dark Boson/Lepton nonsensery but I think he's hardier than that!


Carry On!
 - S
Aya, it turns out Bruce recently unsubscribed from FRIAM. I hope you 
guys on the list are happy with your signal to noise ratio ;-)Just 
kidding...keep it up.


Anyway, Bruce, as I had hoped, had a nice response, albeit offlist. If 
you want to respond to this thread, please cc: Bruce. I copy his 
response below.


//** Bruce Sherwood response offlist
Feynman diagrams give one visualization of "forces". In this picture, 
consider two electrons moving near each other. With a calculable 
probability, one of the electrons may emit a photon, the "carrier" of 
the electromagnetic interaction, and this electron recoils. The other 
electron absorbs the photon and recoils. At least for electric 
repulsion, this is a nice way to think about the interaction, but it 
has obvious problems for talking about attraction. The exchanged 
photon is a "virtual" photon which unlike unbound photons has mass. At 
the individual "interaction vertices" (emission event and absorption 
event) momentum and energy need not be conserved, but for the 
two-electron system momentum and energy are conserved.


For the strong (nuclear) interaction, the interaction carrier is the 
gluon. It is thought that the gravitational interaction is carried by 
a "gravitron" but we have no direct evidence for this.


The weak interaction is mediated by the W and Z bosons and is so 
similar to electromagnetism that one speaks of the "electroweak 
interaction". A key example is neutron decay, and here is the story:


http://matterandinteractions.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/neutron-decay/

Or, if you have an up-to-date browser and a graphics card with GPUs, 
here is a central animation from that article:


http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/Bruce_Sherwood/folder/Pub/program/NeutronDecay

On the other hand, the March 2013 issue of the American Journal of 
Physics has a very interesting and perhaps important article by Art 
Hobson on the modern (last few decades) perspective on quantum 
mechanics. Maybe this is familiar to you, but it wasn't to me. The 
basic idea he reviews is that everything is fields; there are no 
particles. Here is what seems to me a key paragraph in the conclusion:


Thus Schrodinger's Psi(x,t) is a spatially extended field representing 
the probability amplitude for an electron (i.e., the electron-positron 
field) to interact at x rather than an amplitude for finding, upon 
measurement, a particle. In fact, the field Psi(x,t) is the so-called 
"particle." Fields are all there is.


There is a popular science book by Rodney Brooks on the subject: At 
amazon.com  search for "Fields of Color: The theory 
that escaped Einstein". Brooks was a student of Schwinger, a major 
contributor to quantum field theory.


Here are related references, dug out by Stephen:

http://physics.uark.edu/Hobson/pubs/05.03.AJP.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/henry.hobson.pdf

I've finished the Brooks book. It's not very well written and much of 
it is taken up with material that is familiar to physicists (but needs 
to be there for the nonphysicist reader). The main message is however 
very clear. He feels that it is deeply unfortunate that the quantum 
field theory (QTF) developed especially by Schwinger has been way 
underappreciated by the physics community in general, and the Feynman 
emphasis on particles (and particle exchange) has had unfortunate 
consequences. He makes a convincing case that for several decades the 
big names (Weinberg, Wilczek, etc.) have all worked within the QTF 
framework. He stresses that wave-particle duality is a mistake which 
unnecessarily makes quantum phenomena more paradoxical than they need be.


I checked with a powerful theorist colleague at NCSU who agrees with 
the basic thrust of these arguments, though he's not comfortable with 
the phrasing, "There are no particles." He says that all reputable 
quantum field theory texts spend a lot of careful time defining what 
is meant by a "particle" in this context.


Bruce

P.S. The Kindle version of the Brooks book had badly mangled format, 
but a few days ago Amazon updated my copy so that it now looks good.


**// Bruce Sherwood response offlist

BTW, the book I recommended to Bruce was by Rodney A. Brooks. I was 
surprised he was writing on QFT and was excited as I assumed it would 
have a lucid explanation as he tends to write well. The book actually 
isn't as great as I had hoped. I had assumed it would be the same 
Rodney Brooks we know from the Alife/robotics world from MIT. Turns 
out there's another Rodney A. Brooks that was in Cambridge, MA with 
Schwinger who had a career at NIH and then retired to New Zealand. Oh 
well.



--- -. .   ..-. .. ...    - .-- ---   ..-. .. ... 
stephen.gue...@redfish.com
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
offi

Re: [FRIAM] How do forces work?

[Nicholas Thompson]

I know I am not qualified to join this discussion, but may I say just one
thing?   

 

As we struggle with our data from our accelerators n' stuff, we bring to
bear models from our experience . metaphors.  The language of your
discussion is full of such metaphors, and full, also, of expressions of pain
that these metaphors are not only incomplete  -- all metaphors are
incomplete - but that they are incompletete in ways that are essential to
the phenomena you are trying to account for.  Now, it seems to me, that this
conversation is like the conversation that would ensure if we were to see a
unicorn drinking out of the fountain at St. Johns, but did not have the
mythology of unicorns, or even the word, unicorn, to bring to bear.  We
would instantly start to apply incomplete models.  "It's a whacking great
horse!"  One of us would say.  "Yeah, but, it's got a narwhale tooth
sticking out of its forehead."  

 

Nick 

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2013 1:40 PM
To: stephen.gue...@redfish.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How do forces work?

 

S -

I'd like to think Gil and I could take credit for running Bruce off with our
Light/Dark Boson/Lepton nonsensery but I think he's hardier than that!

Carry On!
 - S

Aya, it turns out Bruce recently unsubscribed from FRIAM. I hope you guys on
the list are happy with your signal to noise ratio ;-)Just
kidding...keep it up.

Anyway, Bruce, as I had hoped, had a nice response, albeit offlist. If you
want to respond to this thread, please cc: Bruce. I copy his response below.

//** Bruce Sherwood response offlist
Feynman diagrams give one visualization of "forces". In this picture,
consider two electrons moving near each other. With a calculable
probability, one of the electrons may emit a photon, the "carrier" of the
electromagnetic interaction, and this electron recoils. The other electron
absorbs the photon and recoils. At least for electric repulsion, this is a
nice way to think about the interaction, but it has obvious problems for
talking about attraction. The exchanged photon is a "virtual" photon which
unlike unbound photons has mass. At the individual "interaction vertices"
(emission event and absorption event) momentum and energy need not be
conserved, but for the two-electron system momentum and energy are
conserved.

For the strong (nuclear) interaction, the interaction carrier is the gluon.
It is thought that the gravitational interaction is carried by a "gravitron"
but we have no direct evidence for this.

The weak interaction is mediated by the W and Z bosons and is so similar to
electromagnetism that one speaks of the "electroweak interaction". A key
example is neutron decay, and here is the story:

http://matterandinteractions.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/neutron-decay/

Or, if you have an up-to-date browser and a graphics card with GPUs, here is
a central animation from that article:

http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/Bruce_Sherwood/folder/Pub/program/NeutronDe
cay

On the other hand, the March 2013 issue of the American Journal of Physics
has a very interesting and perhaps important article by Art Hobson on the
modern (last few decades) perspective on quantum mechanics. Maybe this is
familiar to you, but it wasn't to me. The basic idea he reviews is that
everything is fields; there are no particles. Here is what seems to me a key
paragraph in the conclusion:

Thus Schrodinger's Psi(x,t) is a spatially extended field representing the
probability amplitude for an electron (i.e., the electron-positron field) to
interact at x rather than an amplitude for finding, upon measurement, a
particle. In fact, the field Psi(x,t) is the so-called "particle." Fields
are all there is.

There is a popular science book by Rodney Brooks on the subject: At
amazon.com search for "Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein".
Brooks was a student of Schwinger, a major contributor to quantum field
theory.

Here are related references, dug out by Stephen:
  
  http://physics.uark.edu/Hobson/pubs/05.03.AJP.pdf
  http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616
  http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/henry.hobson.pdf
  
I've finished the Brooks book. It's not very well written and much of it is
taken up with material that is familiar to physicists (but needs to be there
for the nonphysicist reader). The main message is however very clear. He
feels that it is deeply unfortunate that the quantum field theory (QTF)
developed especially by Schwinger has been way underappreciated by the
physics community in general, and the Feynman emphasis on particles (and
particle exchange) has had unfortunate consequences. He makes a convincing
case that for several decades the big names (Weinberg, Wilczek, etc.) have
all worked within the QTF framework. He stresses that wave-particle duality
is a mistake which unnecessarily makes quantum phenomena more paradoxical
than they need be.
  
I checked with a power

Re: [FRIAM] digital ethics

[Russell Standish]

In relation to this, AFAIC, if it aint in open access, it aint
visible.  I can count on one hand the number of times in the last 10
years I've rooted around using my university's journal subscription to
download the official journal copy of a paper.

Usually, the stuff I am informed by is, in descending order a) in
arXiv, b) in some other open access journal, c) a preprint (preferably
electronic) that the author sent me, or found by means of a Google
search. I have to be completely desparate to go though universities
onlione subscription. I have never actually paid for a copy of an
article, and at $35 a pop, doubt I ever will.

As a consequence, ever since journals started asking me to sign over
copyright, I insist that I retain a license to publish the articles in
an open access preprint server, and on my on personal web server. This
quite often involved striking out text, or adding text to the
copyright transfer agreement, along with my signature. For the first
few years I did this, there was no pushback (did the publishers ever
read the returned copyright transfer agreement?), however once it had
the effect of delaying the publication of a collection by about a
month while their IP lawyers argued the toss. In the end, I got my
license, and the publication went ahead with my contribution.

More recently, I've found that the copyright transfer forms include
explicit licensing back to the author of certain rights, such as
posting on institutional or other eprint servers. I can't claim to
have single-handedly reformed the academic publishing industry - I'm
sure there must have others arguing their corner like me - but it
must've helped.

Back to the original topic - in today's world, having your article on
arXiv is no guarantee it will be noticed by anybody, but if its not
there, it's almost certain to be ignored.

Cheers

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 03:31:48PM -0600, Owen Densmore wrote:
> Agreed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
> 
> Although I've found:
> - The recent revolution by scholars against paper tyranny hopeful
> - Many authors are posting their papers on their websites
> 
> The ACM was one of the worst, making the Turing Awards for-pay
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Stephen Guerin
> wrote:
> 
> > What about independent researchers not associated with a library
> > system trying to browse academic papers (funded by taxpayers) held
> > behind academic journal paywalls for $35/copy?
> >
> > -S
> > --- -. .   ..-. .. ...    - .-- ---   ..-. .. ... 
> > stephen.gue...@redfish.com
> > 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
> > office: (505) 995-0206 tollfree: (888) 414-3855
> > mobile: (505) 577-5828  fax: (505) 819-5952
> > tw: @redfishgroup  skype: redfishgroup  gvoice: (505) 216-6226
> > redfish.com  |  simtable.com
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:14 PM, Edward Angel  wrote:
> > > Owen,
> > >
> > > As you know, I've never had any real objection to  your position and I
> > agree
> > > as to the lack of a reasonable modern distribution system. I do get upset
> > > when the conversation approaches the "I think the price is too high so
> > I'm
> > > justified in making an illegal copy."
> > >
> > > Ed
> > > __
> > >
> > > Ed Angel
> > >
> > > Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS
> > > Lab)
> > > Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
> > >
> > > 1017 Sierra Pinon
> > > Santa Fe, NM 87501
> > > 505-984-0136 (home)   an...@cs.unm.edu
> > > 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
> > >
> > >
> > > On Apr 18, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > >
> > > I too have had to build an ethics, so to speak.
> > >
> > > Books: For quite a while, I simply downloaded books to see if I wanted to
> > > buy them.  I deleted the download and purchased the book if I liked the
> > > download.  Also download books if I have the paper version.
> > >
> > > EBooks: Similar. Then came the problem of formats.  For example, Amazon
> > only
> > > provides kindle format (.mobi/.azw) while tech books provide three
> > formats
> > > (.pdf, .mobi, .epub).  I found myself downloading pdf versions of .azw's
> > > because the silly books referred to "pages".  Hopefully Az will finally
> > come
> > > around, but until they do, and the book is not available in multiple
> > > formats, I'll download a pdf if need be.  Almost all tech books are
> > ebooks
> > > and on my iPad.
> > >
> > > Video: I downloaded old TV shows which were not available otherwise.
> >  Also,
> > > our net was DSL, so too slow for streaming, even youtube!  With a new
> > faster
> > > network, cable, we're looking at Amazon primarily, and have Az Prime so
> > many
> > > videos are available free.  We also have NetFlix streaming but don't
> > seem to
> > > use it.  We stopped NetFlix DVDs when they hit a 30% failure rate. Not
> > sure
> > > about Hulu, don't use it now.  We record, TiVo, a LOT of sports and
> > cooking
> > > shows and re-runs on SciFi chan