Determinism and Choice

I was watching an interesting panel discussion from the World Science Festival 2009 called Time Since Einstein that Sean Carroll, a participant in the discussion, pointed to.  However, during the discussion (in segment 2 of 5), the moderator, who was not a physicist asked the following question:

If there is a future, physically speaking, do you believe that that means that it’s also determined and there’s kind of no point in doing one thing or the other, that it’s all been figured out?  Can there be a non-deterministic future that exists independent of this flow of time?

The second question was the one that was answered, but the content of the first question is what interests me.  The moderator seems to be indicating that if the future is determined, that there’s “no point in doing one thing or the other, that it’s all been figured out”, which betrays an erroneous concept of the relationship between determinism and choice.

Egypt claims the first non-Latin web domain

Yesterday at the Internet Governance Forum, which is being held in Egypt, Tarek Kamel announced that Egypt would put forth the first domain name to take advantage of the recent ICANN revision that allowed for non-Latin scripts to be used in Internet domain names.  The domain, .مصر, which is Latinized as .masr, essentially means .Egypt in English.

It will be interesting to see how the roll out of non-Latin domain names will affect the makeup of the Internet.  In theory, it makes sense to allow people to type in their own languages and scripts to use the Internet.  I know that I would find it annoying to type in things like ووو.گوگا.کم every time I wanted to visit a website, so it’s not hard to see that something like www.google.com would be tricky to someone who could write in Urdu but not English.

Of course one of the fears relating to this expansion of domain possibilities is that with an increased character set to work with, spoofers could fool users into going goهgle.com or 丫ahoo.com instead of google.com or yahoo.com.  And it gets even trickier when dealing with Cyrillic and Greek characters, some of which are indistinguishable from Latin ones.

Another issue is that diversifying the characters allowed to be in a web address makes the web more inaccessible, as someone who can’t type in Arabic wouldn’t be able to access a .مصر website very easily.  However, I don’t think that will be a major problem, as web pages that seek to be registered with non-Latin domain names probably are not seeking to cater to an English speaking audience (or an audience whose language uses a Latin script) at all, thus not being of much interest to those who can’t access it.

I suspect that for multilingual websites, a domain using Latin script will still be the best option, but the diversification of available scripts for domain names will make the web more accessible in areas where the dominant language doesn’t have an alphabet starting with ABC.

A sense of scale

Via both Andrew Gelman and Phil Plait, I noticed a flash representation of the scale of powers of 10 at the microscopic end (from 12pt font to a carbon atom) from the University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Center, so I thought I’d pass it on.

A view of home

Yesterday, the Rosetta spacecraft, which was commissioned by ESA to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko captured this view of the Earth as part of its third and final flyby of our home planet with its OSIRIS instrument:

I suspect that more images will come as the spacecraft completes its flyby, but it’s always nice to have new images of our home world and this one is not a disappointment.

Hat tip: Space Gizmo

Initial thoughts on Google Wave

I recently snagged a Google Wave account and have begun to experiment with it.  I haven’t gotten any invites to distribute, so there isn’t really anyone I know on it, which means that I can’t really test it much yet, but I have been able to participate in some of the public waves.

My first impression is that it is clearly still in the preview stage.  The interface can be quite slow and there is an annoying lag between taking an action, such as sending a Wave to the trash (I’m not sure that you can actually delete waves in the trash yet) and it actually leaving your inbox and there doesn’t seem to be a means of selecting multiple waves for an action as you would normally be able to to with emails.

Fortunately, today, as reported by Lifehacker, the Wave team added a follow/unfollow button which means that not every public wave looked at will end up in your inbox, making the currently bugging sending of waves to the trash less necessary for now.

That said, I can see potential for Wave’s future.  Public waves can often act similar to discussion boards on the web and could potentially open specialized discussions to a broader audience than would be possible at a normal online forum.  This comes at the cost of the sense of community that forums often cultivate, but it’s a reasonable tradeoff.

I wouldn’t want to make too many predictions of success or failure at this stage in the game.  It’s clear that there are a lot of areas left to patch up what I’m currently using is far from being a finished product.  At the same time, it’s unclear exactly how popular Wave will be once it is released as a beta.  It’s seems that Google has ambitions of usurping email as the most popular mode of online communication through their federation scheme, but it’s up in the air as to whether Wave will actually take off as a successful online application and means of communication.

If anyone wants to reach me via Google Wave, my address is the same as my Gmail address off to the right, except it ends with @googlewave.com instead of @gmail.com.  Please note that Wave is not an email client so despite the deceptively similar address format, all emails will bounce.  Also, as noted above, I don’t currently have any invites to dish out, so no invite requests for now.

A map regarding religious freedom

Razib Khan points to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2009 and extracts from it a list of the countries from their section titled “RESTRICTIONS, ABUSES, AND CONCERNS”.  I thought I’d take it one step further and present it in map form (countries listed as having noteworthy violations are red):

Obviously, if you want to know the exact reasons given by the State Department for their designations, you can read the report, but I think that a cartographic aid can be helpful in drawing out patterns.

A map of accessibility

In April, the New Scientist ran a gallery of maps produced as part of a research project by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the World Bank.  The aim was to show travel time to a major city (defined as a city of 50,000 or more people as of the year 2000). This is the final product:

The brightest areas represent areas within an hour’s travel time of a major city (by ground or sea).  The darkest areas, found in Tibet and Greenland, represent more than 10 days travel from the nearest major city.  The blue lines represent the major shipping lanes.

One of the major findings of the report was that less than 10% of the Earth’s land surface is more than 48 hours travel from a major city, an impressive feat of human engineering.

To see the map in its full glory, go here.

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Unsurprising news: WordPress is blocked in China

If anyone was wondering why there haven’t been any of the updates I suggested in the last post, the answer is that I was unable to access WordPress from China and thus was unable to post any updates.

Trip to China

Despite my blog name, I, embarrassingly enough, have yet to actually visit China. That changes in a week, when I get on an airplane to Seoul and then another to Beijing. I’ll be in China for about a month and who knows? I may send in some posts while I’m there.

A pleasant surprise

I subscribe to the White House Blog RSS feed via Google Reader, but most of the time I only skim through the posts.   However, today there was a post that really caught my eye.

“A New Year, A New Beginning” is a post with a video message from President Obama marking Nowruz which is the Iranian celebration of the vernal equinox (which for those of you who like precision istoday at 11:44 UTC, 7:44EDT), which also serves as the Iranian New Year.