Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

There is a slight improvement to TSA’s search and seizure of electronic devices:

“The US Government has updated its policy on the search and seizure of laptops at border crossing. ‘The long-criticized practice of searching travelers’ electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers’ machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.’”

If I take this at the face value (so many things promised by this administration didn’t come to be, so I don’t know if I can), then it means if they search and seize my laptop (after finding the encrypted data, if they do), they will have to return the laptop to me in less than one week. I don’t really care if they destroy their copy of my encrypted data (because, barring breakthroughs in attacks against encryption algorithms in use today, they won’t be able to do anything with it; and it’s at least 5 years or so that I can sleep soundly).

This is a small “improvement”, if that at all, but I will take what I can get. Ideally, I want TSA and its … ineffectual, draconian security theater gone, but some among us do like the pretension of security better than actual security, which I don’t think the government (or maybe even private enterprises) can achieve at all.

I had been struggling with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for a couple weeks. It had been a fascinating read, but the book was much longer than I had suspected: the Kindle book counts 15939 “locations”, and since 7 “locations” are approximately the same amount of text on a single page of a pocket paperback, it’s nearly 2277 pages of a pocket paperback (as a textbook, it might be 500 pages or so, I think). So, I’m only 17% of the way through (i.e. position corresponding to location 2700 or so), but it’s O.K. because it was so long to begin with anyway, right?

… Not!

I also bought the newest edition of Graham’s Intelligent Investor. That was 3 days ago. I am now almost halfway through the book, or, at location 4811.

Clearly the problem wasn’t either with the length of the text or how interesting the material is (from purely intellectual level, I think they are of about the same interesting value, as can be attested from the approximately the same number of notes I made reading). So, how was it that I could read through almost twice as much of the latter book in much less than half the time?

I think it comes down to motivation, and more specifically, profit motive. Adam Smith’s book, while it offers a valuable insight into capitalism and market economy (which is why I started reading it in the first place), it is not, in the practical sense, applicable to today’s economy, e.g. the stock market. On the other hand, the information in Graham’s book is the information I need right now in order to make prudent investments in the stock market, as I have been moving my liquid assets into stocks for a week or two and will be buying even more dollar value of stocks in the next few days. I think this profit motive is what made so big a difference in my, ah hem, performance.

I wonder if something similar could be instituted for my, er, day job, if I would be a more productive researcher.

Airlines are raising checked baggage fees again.

Let me say first that, in principle, I have no problem with this. I like traveling light (I’ve come long way in 5 years of traveling) and I like the principle of everyone paying their own way: checked baggages do incur extra cost to the airlines, so there is no reason I, a traveler who always makes sure that he can carry everything on his back, should subsidize them.

But as with every change, there are unintended consequences. Some people, instead of packing light to make sure that they can carry everything on, simply carry on the bags (especially the medium size rollers) that they might have checked in. At least this seemed to be why overhead space was so scarce on my last flight from So. Cal. I was sitting relatively far in front (in fact, as far front as I have ever sat in airplanes that have 6 seats across), but I couldn’t find an overhead bin for my backpack: I had to trek about four or five rows further before finding a room in the corner somewhere.

Not being an airline manager or even a flight attendant, I don’t know how much this costs, in terms of potential plane delays and personnel costs as some carry-on bags have to be checked in later (and from what I’ve seen, they don’t seem to charge the fee in these instances). But if the airlines are jacking up their checked-in baggage fees, I hope they included the cost of more frequent and severe occurrences of incidences like this into their calculation.

In any case, I am not buying airline stocks any time soon, at least not until they shut down TSA.

The article published on PRL recently reads (abstract):

The arrow-of-time dilemma states that the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e., entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave a trail of information behind (and hence can be studied by physics) are those where entropy necessarily increases or remains constant. All phenomena where the entropy decreases must not leave any information of their having happened. This situation is completely indistinguishable from their not having happened at all. In the light of this observation, the second law of thermodynamics is reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study those processes where entropy has decreased, even if they were commonplace.

I am just not seeing the paradox or brilliant new insight here, at least based on the abstract (I’ll read the full paper more carefully later). I thought the second law of thermodynamics was already a tautology. In my favorite formulation (i.e. the stat mech formulation) the law reads:

What is most likely to happen happens most of the time.

i.e. The macrostate containing the most number of microstates is the one we observe macroscopically—under the assumption of each microstates (all of equal energy) having the same probability of happening, this is self-evidently true.

So, what’s new?

And they are subject to the failings that the rest of the human race is prone to

Last week Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit website cracked the walls of the fortress at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit. A “mole” sent him a sample of global temperature data that CRU Director Dr. Phil Jones had refused to share with the climate audit community. By Sunday Christopher Booker had reported the news in the Daily Telegraph.

For some reason government scientists like Dr. Jones that get millions in government research grants are considered to be disinterested experts. Yet anyone who has ever taken a dime from an oil company is bought and paid for.

Of course that is nonsense. To politicians, scientists are just another interest group competing for favors. It’s pay to play. To get their grant money scientists need to deliver science that helps argue for bigger government. And they do, especially in the climate sciences.

I still believe that scientists, as someone who has taken an oath to trust in the data and believe in the experimental verification (or falsification) of theories (not literally, of course, but anyone who hasn’t taken such oath in his heart is not a scientist—maybe a mathematician, because they don’t believe the “real world”, where experiments reside in, exist anyway), can ultimately be held to be accountable.

Climate scientists, for all their excesses, eventually have to show result by either successfully predicting the impending doom, or successfully predicting the results of the policies enacted to prevent the doom on the quantitative basis. Either they do that, or in time, they will be ostracized and ridiculed by the rest of the scientific community, as string theorists are.

But I don’t know if this will take place in my lifetime, or during my career in science. It can take a long time for a scientific theory to be properly recognized (just look at things like discovery of prion; there is no political agenda or money involved here, but it took decades for the community to recognize the correct hypothesis). And given that, today, practically all academic scientists have their livelihood held hostage by the government (through NSF or other agencies which fund basic science), some more willingly than others (overwhelming percentage of scientists are tax-and-spend Democrats), I don’t know how long it will take for this change to come. I certainly don’t hold out any hope better than 50-50 that this change will come within my lifetime.

Scientists are people too. They can be influenced by money, and they have been influenced. We need to recognize that. Now the only question is, if this dominance of science by the government and political agenda will continue, leading us to death of science (or rather, hibernation—the truth never dies out, only the people who believe in them) and another dark age, or if we can reverse the trend.