On-Screen Scientist

This is going to be another brief example of how the survival of ancient memories depends, not on the real significance of the remembered events, but on the intensity of the feelings associated with them at the time they took place, a subject I’ve touched on before (Something on Memories). I was fourteen years old on that evening of which some small portions have stuck in my mind. Few, few are the moments that come to memory from that far back.

The occasion was a baseball game. I was on a Pony League team, which in my Texas town near Dallas was the step above Little League, played on a bigger field, but one which I believe was still smaller than a full-sized one. Despite my having come to love baseball (listening to the 1952 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers was the turning point at age ten) a few years before, I had never played in an organized league before the age of thirteen, not having lived any place that had organized youth baseball until I arrived in my new town for the seventh grade. Baseball was a big sport in this town, the Little League all-star team having made it to the State tournament the summer before I arrived to start school in the fall.

Before then, I had done my best to acquire baseball skills without the benefit of organized play or coaching, most of the time without the benefit of a partner to play catch with. I was not that bad at fielding and catching. My arm was weak though, and I had never batted against fast pitching. My hitting skill level was low, and my confidence in it was even lower. In truth, I had been one of those kids that hoped for a walk whenever I was at the plate in a game important enough to have an umpire, such as the sixth versus fifth grade softball game with a teacher umpiring. Yes, I can remember a painful called third strike I took in a crucial situation!

Despite being conscious of my below-average baseball skills, a condition which I still hoped was temporary, I was eager to play at last on a real team, so I had signed up at the first opportunity and had gone to the tryouts, which were conducted on a real field under the lights and open to the public. I don’t remember much about the tryout beyond being nervous, dreading to hear my name called, and then getting ready to field ground balls from one of the league officials, as all the coaches waited to judge my performance. I recall no details of the tryout, just the feeling that went with the knowledge that I had done poorly, worse than I had hoped, and being relieved it was over.

In addition to making the jump to a high-level baseball culture, I had experienced substantial culture shock in this new town and school due to the advanced boy-girl relationships compared to what had known before. There were lots of couples going steady. They danced to “cat music” (more on that some other time). I was not part of this social scene and had slipped into a low status slot, which I was not accustomed to, having the previous year been, in a small school, very popular with the boys and girls alike. I was really quite intimidated by the social scene, and my self-confidence had been battered.

But in that spring of my first year in the new town, I recall that my mere trying out for baseball had evidently impressed one of the fairly high-status girls, who was a baseball enthusiast (perhaps a bit of a baseball groupie). She had approached me with a smile and a glowing face saying she’d heard (I think) that I was playing baseball. Rather than accepting this as a good icebreaker, I had evaded the subject, though I can’t recall the awkward details of how. I felt ashamed of how poorly I had done, and I think I was afraid that she had only heard I had tried out, without getting a performance report, so that it would be better for her not to view me as a “real” baseball player, especially since she valued baseball so highly. I was realizing just how far I was behind the good players in my new league. But for all I know—it would not be surprising—she had been in the stands during the tryouts. Perhaps just being on a team (like playing in a rock band for some) was enough to give me prestige in her eyes. Or maybe she had been wishing for a way to approach me before. Maybe she just relished any chance to talk about her favorite subject. I’ll never know. Though I can picture very well how she looked those many years ago, I can’t recall her name. I do feel a certain tenderness toward her now, though; and retrospective gratitude.

When I started writing this piece I thought that the remembered events I was going to relate had occurred in my first year in Pony League, but on reflection I feel sure they were in the second year. That’s the strong feeling I got from picturing the catcher on my team on the night in question and then remembering who the catcher was on my first team. Catchers are central to the game, so I guess it’s not surprising I can remember them.

Speaking of memories, I might as well relate another that just popped up. It was during an intra-squad game of some sort on that first team, so that half our team was playing the other half. I had just come to the plate to face one of my teammates, a pitcher from the previous year’s all-star team. The catcher was into the game and said to the pitcher the same thing he would have said when an opposing batter came to the plate in a real game: “OK, this guy can’t hit!” Then he must have realized just how true that statement was in my case, and that I might be stung by those words, so he quickly added “Just doubles, triples…” Of course, I understood what had gone on in his mind, and it would have been better for my ego for him to have treated me like anyone else, since the change revealed just how lowly he estimated my batting prowess. It was an attempt at kindness that made things worse, leading me to mutter something in protest of the supposed compliment to show I knew better. Still, I had to appreciate the tough thirteen-year-old catcher’s consideration for my feelings, and I haven’t forgotten it. Thanks, Gary.

After I had been in town for a while and gotten to know more neighborhood kids, I started playing baseball with some of them in a vacant lot practically every day. I enjoyed that a lot more than the organized baseball. I got plenty of batting practice in those games, but our rule was not to throw full speed. We could only try to get people out with pitch location. Other than that it was like batting practice. I’m sure my batting eye and swing improved over time. I was comfortable hitting in those pickup games. Of course a real game with fast pitching and game pressure was something else.

Anyway, the Pony League game I’m going to talk about was one of those in which the other team only had eight players show up. As a coach, I’ve always hated those games and tried to make sure the game just got rescheduled before teams showed up at the field. That only works for anticipated absences though. Once the players, coaches, and umpires have arrived at the field, possibly for a night game which requires a lot of electricity for the lighting, it’s hard to just leave and reschedule. No, if one team is short and the other has more than it needs to field nine, the frequent solution is for the team with a surplus to lend a player to the other team for the night. On this night, I was that player. As a coach, I made it a point not to choose the worst player on the team as the automatic substitute for the other team, but that’s not the way it usually goes.

On this night long ago I was certainly being offered as a substitute because I was deemed by my coach (whose name and face even are lost to me, though I can remember those of my first-year coach) as the worst on our team. It was embarrassing, of course, to have that distinction, even though I imagine I was asked to volunteer and probably thanked for agreeing to. I was performing a service and I would definitely get to play the whole game this way. I can’t remember any details about the team switch; just the fact that it happened and that it was embarrassing. Nor can I remember anything about the game until the first time I came to bat.

So here I was on this night facing a pitcher named Bud, who was wearing the same uniform as I. I can’t be sure if I only remember one pitch or if it was in fact the first pitch I was thrown (as it seems) which I lined into right field for a clean single. I do remember it was very satisfying to be standing at first base, especially under the circumstances. I remember the coach of my temporary team saying “He wasn’t supposed to do that, was he?” to my regular coach.

The next thing that I remember distinctly is being on third base after that hit. I can’t recall the exact details of how I got from first to third base: some forgotten sequence of events drawn from the possibilities of hit, walk, error, and wild pitch. I just remember being on third when the batter took ball four to bring me home: yet another contribution I was about to make to this my adopted team-for-the-night.

As I proceed in my trot toward the plate, the catcher (my “real” team’s catcher) evidently decides to start playing psychological games with me. Or is he just having a little fun with a teammate? But he looks serious and irritated, as though I were rubbing it in that I was helping the other team. It’s not my fault. I’m just playing the game! He’s glaring at me and faking throws to third base. What’s the point of that?

Soon, but not soon enough to escape the terrible destiny Fate had prepared for me, I realized my situation. The bases had not been loaded! I could not walk home. The throw was made to the third baseman. I was tagged out. Shame and ignominy fell on me like heavy shrouds! The Earth did not open up to let me escape through an underground passageway, so I must have trotted to the dugout, but I have no memory of anything beyond the realization of my mistake, not of the tag nor of who was playing third. Did anyone on either team or any coach say anything to me? Did I bat again that night? Did I make any plays in the field? Who won the game? All of these details have been wiped clean from my memory.

All that remains is the humiliation of being the player given to the other team, the brief glow of satisfaction from my clean hit, and the anguish of comprehending my boneheaded mistake. Was there no third base coach? I suppose not. Did anyone suspect that I had deliberately made an out to help my real team? I would probably have preferred that to the felt certainty that everyone had clearly seen my mistake, one that a “real” player would never have made, so that in the commission of it I had thereby amply justified my selection as the giveaway player, my blunder having effaced that beautiful single. I don’t remember anything about the rest of the season, before or after that game. Just those few moments have survived. Such is the way of memory.

This will be a brief coda to a couple of recent posts in which I related how I finally solved an ever-worsening (OS changes?) problem of overheating on my first generation MacBook Pro. See “What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really” and “Can’t Boil Water With Vista on My MacBook Pro Anymore” for the details. The solution turned out to be undervolting—setting cpu operating voltages at values (determined by experiment) below the overly conservative ones set at the factory. A great little piece of software called CoolBook enables one to do that on the Mac. A similar program (RMclock) is available for Windows.

I can report that I have encountered neither high temperatures nor computer instability since adjusting voltages lower with CoolBook. After a couple of weeks of stress-free lower temperatures, I realized that the previously necessary evil of the constant droning of the MacBook Pro’s cooling fans was no longer necessary. In my earlier efforts to control temperature I had installed a System Preferences utility called Fan Control. This allowed me to set the minimum temperature at which the fan speed would start ramping up and the rate at which it would increase with temperature. This was not a solution for sustained operation at the highest default voltage used when the cpu was running at maximum speed, but I think it did keep things cooler than what Apple’s normal fan speed algorithm did.

It may seem funny that Apple would have such high operating voltages coupled with such puny fan cooling; but I think we have reason to believe that Steve Jobs hates fan noise (I’m with you there, Steve), perhaps beyond reason. I remember buying a third-party fan that sat on top of my first Mac, the mighty one-megabyte-RAM Macintosh Plus. Word was that it was needed to prevent premature death of the convectively cooled Mac. I can imagine Steve telling the engineers to get rid of that fan noise on the MacBook Pro, or else.

The fans on my machine, even though one of them was relatively new, having been replaced under AppleCare when my original hard drive croaked (Fatal But Survivable: A Hard Drive Transplant Story), seemed to have gotten noisier over time, from overuse I suppose, so they were annoying me more. Why not get rid of Fan Control? Removing it from the System Preferences Panel wasn’t hard (Ctrl-click and make selection), but this merely put the fan speed versus temperature profile out of my control, while leaving the last one set by Fan Control in effect. I saw one unfortunate on MacUpdate warning people not to install Fan Control because it permanently changes the fan settings. This is fortunately not true, but the folks that make Fan Control should probably do a better job of letting people know how to completely uninstall it. Here is the rest of the procedure: remove the following files and folders (both on your start disk)— /Library/StartupItems/FanControlDaemon and /Library/PreferencePanes/Fan Control.prefPane.

In order to have a way of monitoring temperature and fan speed I went back to running smcFanControl, a program that only allows one to set the minimum fan speed. I used it to set the minimum speed back to 1000 rpm, down from the Fan Control minimum of 1600 rpm I’d been enduring. This is really quiet!

Having smcControl running enables me to step in to raise the fan speed if necessary. Shades of the past: yesterday I was reinstalling the iPhone SDK as part of a long battle (probably not to be related here) to be able to test my in-development iPhone app on an iPod Touch, when I noticed the smcFanControl temperature reading said 90° C, while the fans were still whirring away at less than 2000 rpm. I used smcFanControl to raise the minimum speed much higher manually, which had the desired result. When that taxing installation procedure was over, I set the fan speed back to 1000 rpm.

Now that I finally have what I thought I was getting when I bought the MacBook Pro, this should be the last I’ll have to say on the subject of temperature control and fan noise. Peace.

It was a little over a year ago that I got Windows Vista up and running on my first-generation MacBook Pro by means of Apple’s Boot Camp, only to discover that it ran hot—so hot that it seemed pretty worthless. I believe that post (Vista on My MacBook Pro Is Hot—Boiling Hot!) has brought this blog more visitors than any other, which I count as solid evidence that many other Mac users have encountered the same problem and have gone searching on Google for a solution.

Unfortunately, all I could offer my fellow sufferers was the knowledge that they were not alone, but now I have a solution for them, based on the same “undervolting” technique I finally discovered to solve the even greater overheating problem I had encountered running under Mac OS 10.5.6, where temperatures would climb over 115° C and cause the computer to shut down unless I exited certain programs (rendered useless) or web sites in time.

I recently wrote What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really, in which I told of finding a program called CoolBook to be the answer to my overheating problems. The basic idea behind the solution is that the computer’s factory-default voltages, which essentially determine the operating temperature, are for the different cpu clock frequencies substantially higher than they need to be. CoolBook enables one to reset these voltages to lower values, thus gaining much cooler operating temperatures, most importantly for the highest frequency, where sustained heavy-duty computing can lead to overheating. Undervolting with the help of CoolBook really gave me back the full use of my MacBook Pro. I refer anyone having similar problems to that recent post. The procedure for finding the lower voltages your particular computer can live with involves a fairly lengthy trial and error period, but it only needs to be done once.

I mainly wanted Vista on my Mac in order to test the Vista-compatibility of the Windows versions of my science education programs, OnScreen Particle Physics and OnScreen DNA. Having done that, and not having a new version to test, I could easily live without Vista; and the overheating problems encountered under 10.5.6 were much more serious for me. Nonetheless, it was an ongoing irritation in the back of my mind that Apple’s promise of being able to run Windows with Boot Camp was really a false one so long as the temperature went up so high under normal use. Thus it was natural to ask if I could apply the same undervolting procedure under Vista to eliminate the heating problem there as well.

Of course, CoolBook was no help for running Vista, since it is a Mac program, but a Google search for undervolting led me to a Windows solution. If you Google with the search string “undervolting guide,” you will find The Undervolting Guide, which tells you everything you need to know to undervolt under Windows. There is a free downloadable program called RMclock that allows you to reset the default voltages, just as CoolBook does for the Mac. The guide is written under the assumption that you have no previous information about temperature or the lower voltage limits at which your computer can operate stably. It leads you through a procedure similar to what I outlined in my post on Mac undervolting. Since I had already gone through this under Mac OS X and couldn’t see any reason why the lower-limit voltages would depend on the operating system, I assumed my results would still hold under Vista. The whole procedure seems a lot easier on the Mac side, so I would recommend anyone trying to cool down Vista on a Mac to determine lower-limit voltages under the Mac OS. Be sure to write down the lower-limit voltages you have found before booting into Windows to set voltages there.

I went directly to the RMclock instructions in the guide, skipping the parts dealing with stressing the computer at different voltages. You need to follow the RMclock instructions closely, as the procedure is considerably more complicated than what it is for CoolBook, there being several steps to go through before you reach the point of actually setting voltages. Things look quite a bit different too. Instead of showing the frequencies in physical units of MHz, RMclock shows “multipliers,” which are presumably the factors by which some reference frequency (unspecified) is multiplied to obtain the actual frequency. I just made the reasonable assumption that the maximum multiplier corresponded to the maximum frequency (2.004 GHz in my case) and set the voltage to what I had previously determined was sufficient under Mac OS X for my MacBook Pro. For the other multipliers I scaled accordingly, but chose voltages on the conservative side, i.e, a little higher, just to be safe. For keeping the maximum temperature down, it’s really only the top frequency voltage setting that matters much anyway. Lowering the other voltages below that used for the highest frequency just gives you a lower average temperature and longer battery life.

Did it work? Yes, I can run the most complex simulations of OnScreen DNA at a “cool” 80° C, instead of the previous 100° C. Undervolting has made it comfortable for me to run Vista on my MacBook Pro, so I don’t feel cheated anymore. Maybe I’ll actually use Vista for something other than testing my software now.

To start with an aside, let me say that I have made the move from “thank yous” to “thank-you notes,” thus avoiding a “word” I didn’t like to see in print, but had nonetheless used a few times here. Sometimes the obvious solution to a problem takes a while to become visible. I will not be giving any “shout-outs.”

As usual, this blog got a ten-fold increase in daily visitors while MacSurfer’s Headline News™ had a link to a post (What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really) here. Thank you, Darren.

Other Mac sites that continue to send visitors here are PowerBook Central, and LowEnd Mac. Thanks, folks. I’m so glad that I actually have a solution to the MacBook overheating problem to point to now.

My post Some Observations on College Guides and Their Usefulness was included in the Carnival of College Admission: Kick A@$ College Links. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Joe, aka Coonass in italy, referenced and commented on Dante’s Heavenly Vision and the Physics of the Proton in his March 13 post “religion and science.” Thank you again, Joe.

David of D Dubs Reads found a lot to think about in the Dante post and added On-Screen Scientist to his blogroll. Much appreciated, David.

Denyse posted a long excerpt from the Dante piece on her Colliding Universes blog and linked to it. Thanks again, Denyse.

Harry of The Kudzu Files has placed this blog on his Blogopedia list. Thank you, Harry.

I’m programming an iPhone app (baseball related), which is taking a lot of my time, so posting will no doubt continue to be less frequent for a while. I’ll probably record another of the oldies for an audio post before long. Requests welcomed at the email address toward the upper right of this page.

Oh yes, I’m now on twitter as onscrn.

Let’s face it: knowing the structure and workings of DNA is part of basic scientific literacy these days, which is why, after all, millions of us celebrate DNA Day. If you’re still doing last-minute DNA Day shopping, do we have a great deal for you! OnScreen DNA, the world’s best three-dimensional computer model of the double helix structure of DNA, complete with on-screen, tutorial-based simulations of how DNA works, is on sale at 50% off.

And what better way could there be to celebrate fifty-six years since the 1953 publication of the Watson and Crick paper elucidating DNA’s double-helix structure than buying OnScreen DNA for only $19.53? It’s perfect for those students, teachers, and science lovers of all ages on your shopping list. And don’t forget to treat yourself.

Don’t worry if you don’t see this until DNA Day itself—the online offer and the ability to get the software immediately by download will still be available right through April 25. Yes, we are celebrating with the “traditional” April 25 instead of moving to April 24, as many national national organizations, evidently wanting to avoid a weekend day, have done this year.

Seriously, there is nothing that I know of that teaches DNA structure and functioning in such a complete and thoroughly three-dimensional way as OnScreen DNA, which I designed and programmed myself. The software runs on Macintosh OS X or Windows XP/Vista. The on-screen tutorials explain everything you’re seeing, and practically no prior knowledge is assumed.

The animations of DNA and RNA chain-construction in OnScreen DNA are a lot of fun. I still enjoy them after having gone through them countless times during programming, debugging, testing, and just playing. You really need to see the three-dimensional structure of DNA, not just the two-dimensional ladders which animations encountered on the internet seem to invariably fall back on. Having programmed the OnScreen DNA animations, I can see why they do that—it’s a pain to do the three-dimensional programming. But it is worth it. Take a look at the results and judge for yourself. Just go to <onscreen-dna.com/buy_dna_online.php> to take advantage of this special offer.

Just in case anyone has arrived here desperate for a solution to MacBook overheating, let me put it in this first sentence: CoolBook is what you need. I last wrote about the ever-worsening tendency of my first-generation MacBook Pro to go into a runaway heating mode back on November 22 of last year in an optimistically titled post called New Firefox Cures Overheating? I knew better than to be confident that something as simple as a browser upgrade could have taken care of my overheating problems, but I wanted so much to believe it. The Firefox upgrade probably did alleviate overheating associated with Firefox, but before long it became obvious that it was only a small part of the problem.

Since my lonely corner of the blogosphere receives several visits daily from unfortunates with the same overheating problems (I can tell from the logs of their visits: Google search terms), I’ve felt bad that all I was really offering them was the knowledge that they were not alone, even if Apple has never said anything about the problem. My computer got a slight amount of symptomatic relief by using the Fan Control utility, which goes into the System Preferences panel. With Fan Control, I was able to control the fan speed versus temperature profile to some degree, but the maximum fan speed, no matter what temperature it kicks in at, is no match for a true runaway heating episode.

The overheating problem only got worse for me with the 10.5.6 OS upgrade. Some apps became completely unusable. For example, Winclone, a great program for backing up your Boot Camp Windows partition to a compressed file on your Mac partition, thus allowing you to have a Windows backup on your Time Machine drive, would reach 100° C before 5% of the Windows partition had been read! The temperature never reached a plateau, and the high temperature caused a shutdown the one time I decided to let it keep going and hope for the best. I tried reverting back to an earlier version of Winclone, which had never caused a problem before, but that didn’t help.

The funny thing was that the runaway heating often seemed to be associated with periods where one might expect the computer to be cooly twiddling its thumbs. For example, EPSON Scan, the software that runs my excellent Epson Perfection 2450 Photo Scanner, would operate at a reasonable temperature when actually scanning, but once I clicked to tell it that, yes, I wanted it to scan another page, it seemed to go into a rage for some reason, and I heard, not the purr of a resting Mac, but the ever loudening buzz of the cooling fans, which were vainly trying to get it to cool down. Click to begin the next scan, and the temperature would drop. Similar odd behavior was observed with the Microsoft Office upgrade installer. Once the installation, which occurred coolly enough, had finished, the fans would start to buzz; and quitting the installer was the only way to bring the temperature back down.

There were also certain websites that would cause both Safari and Firefox to get a fever that ramped up rapidly and could only be stopped by jumping to another site. This could happen on certain sites without any video or anything I’d seen associated with the problem before. A web site featuring high school athletic event schedules was one such innocuous looking site with pyromaniacal pages.

At some point a few weeks ago Safari became completely useless, as it would invariably start up the runaway heating ramp within seconds after launch. How can it happen that a program permanently changes its behavior? I don’t know, but reinstalling with a freshly downloaded copy of Safari 3.2 did not help. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have tried the Safari 4 beta, but I had nothing to lose at that point, so I installed it, and it ran normally. I believe running Safari 4 instead of its formerly stable predecessor actually caused an overall lowering of the average temperature at which my MacBook Pro ran, but it by no means cured the overheating problem. I was pretty well resigned to having it indefinitely until the day before yesterday, when I got my hopes up again.

I can’t remember how I came across CoolBook, but I downloaded and installed it yesterday, and it has really solved my problem. Hopefully it has no undiscovered side effects. How does CoolBook work? In a word: undervolting. CoolBookController (to use the program’s full name) allows you to scale down the operating voltages assigned to different frequencies, thus allowing the computer to run at a cooler temperature without reducing the computing power, which depends on the frequency. Apple has set a default table of these voltage and frequency pairs that is quite conservative. Chips vary, and Apple must have chosen the voltages so that almost no cpus will be unstable for any frequency. This makes life easier for Apple, from the warranty standpoint no doubt, but in the case of the laptops it sells, it makes for a lot of unnecessarily high operating temperatures. So why doesn’t Apple do a chip-by-chip calibration to minimize the number of hot MacBooks? Well, it probably took me at least two hours to get CoolBook all set up for my MacBook Pro. First, it takes a while to figure out what to do, though everything you really need can be found in the instructions.

Then it’s just a matter of trial and error to determine what is the lowest voltage you can use with a given frequency on your machine. A utility called CPUTest is provided to verify cpu stability for the voltage/frequency combination you choose. This utility evidently does uninterrupted heavy-duty computations until it catches an error or until you decide it’s run long enough to call it a successful combination. The documentation recommends running the test for at least ten minutes; so you can see how an hour can easily be used up. In my experience, failures usually occurred in the first minute or so though.

I followed the recommendation to determine the maximum frequency at which my machine could run without trouble at the lowest voltage setting of 0.95V. Following the result reported in the documentation I tried 1.837 GHz for this voltage and got an immediate black-screen shutdown. i should have known mine couldn’t match that. I cut the trial frequency way down and worked my way up. I found 1.503 GHz was the highest stable frequency. Apple’s default frequency for the lowest voltage is 1.0 GHz.

Here are the frequency/voltage pairs that my formerly hot MacBook Pro ended up with (original Apple voltage settings in parentheses):  1.503 GHz, 0.95 V (1.1125 V); 1.67 GHz, 0.9625 V (1.1625 V); 1.837 GHz, 1.0125 V (1.2125 V); 2.004 GHz, 1.0875 V (1.2625 V).

How much difference do the lower voltage settings make? A very big difference in operating temperature for my machine. It has cool (58° C) and silent operation during times of cpu-loafing such as the computer is experiencing while I type this piece. During the stress of the CPUTest, I saw the temperature reach 98° C for the 2.004 GHz frequency, but it stopped there, and I know from experience it would only have been stopped by a computer shutdown at 115° C using the Apple default voltage.

The fix of the overheating problem still doesn’t explain why the computer thinks it needs to go to to maximum frequency for no apparent reason. CoolBook’s cpu-frequency monitor allows you to see what the current frequency is. Sure enough, it goes to the maximum 2.004 GHz on that baseball schedule page. I think I may just now have seen the culprit though. That page has one of those continually scrolling stock-ticker-like message things, which perhaps eats up computer cycles somehow. If that’s it, it doesn’t even have to be visible to cause the effect.

I also see that gathering permissions info in Disk Utility throws it into the highest frequency mode, as I would have expected from previous temperature rise observations. Why is that, I wonder? Quitting Disk Utility in midstream had no immediate effect on the computing frequency though. It’s stuck there at the highest frequency, though no running program is doing anything I’m aware of. I think this must really be an OS X issue. Fortunately, instead of being in the upper nineties, the temperature is around 70° C. That’s still high enough to cause an annoying fan noise though. Already complaining!

Anyway, the $10 I spent on CoolBook was nothing for the amount of relief it has brought. I’d have spent ten times that much to be guaranteed a solution to the overheating problem, which was ongoing and had become quite limiting, witness my not being able to run Winclone. This time, there really has been a solution. I successfully made a backup with Winclone yesterday at around 70° C. Unless Apple breaks CoolBook with its next update (and the danger of that will give me pause), I’m set for being a normal Mac user for the foreseeable future. CoolBook is evidently the creation of Magnus Lundholm and is found on a web site with an se domain. Hats off to the guy in Sweden!

In the past year or so I have been doing quite a bit of reading and research on undergraduate programs, student life, admissions procedures, and financial aid policies at different colleges (mainly in the Northeast), as my son, now a high school senior, has prepared to apply and then actually applied to a number of them. In truth, my son has only spent a small fraction of the time that I have in such preparatory research, since he has a pretty good idea where he wants to go and where he can get in. Happily, the school he most wants to attend is also one he can almost certainly get into. Even more fortunately, it is our State university, so it is also the most affordable of those he’s considered, and, depending on what offers of financial aid he should receive, possibly the only affordable one.

Some of my son’s classmates applied to our State university for early action, got accepted by early December, and didn’t have to worry about applying elsewhere. That procedure has a lot to be said for it. Nonetheless, based on his school counselor’s recommendation and our feeling that it’s a good idea to have more options, our son has applied to a number of colleges in our area. I should add that these are schools both he and his parents agree might conceivably become the top choice once an acceptance letter (and sufficient financial aid package) made it a definite option. He was not shy about rejecting outright several of our suggestions, and not always for any obvious reason. My wife has sometimes gotten the feeling that her suggesting a school gives it the kiss of death. It’s definitely true that his knowing that a favorite high school teacher attended a certain school raises that college’s acceptability quotient considerably, which is actually not bad reasoning.

In our effort to learn more about colleges we already knew were of interest and to discover new ones that might be worth considering, we utilized a few of the numerous college guides that are available. I thought sharing my observations on some of the leading college guides and how they compare might be useful for others about to embark on the same journey of college choice. Note that I said “observations”–I’m not making thorough reviews.

The first college guide we bought was the Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges: Northeast (also available for other sections of the country). Its listing is quite complete and contains basic facts about all the schools, grouped by State, including the editors’ evaluation of how “selective” each one is. The Barron’s guide also has a section where schools are grouped by selectivity, which can be useful both in identifying schools to investigate further and in sorting them into “reach”, “match”, and “safety” categories. Among the facts this guide includes, and which any guide will have, are the application deadlines, SAT/ACT test submission requirements, percentage of applicants admitted, and percentage of those admitted actually enrolling. Of course, all of the guides have some kind of summary of what the schools most popular majors are and what the students are like, including the percentage of those enrolling who were in their high school class’s top 10%, etc. for each school. Breakdowns along ethnic and public vs private school lines are usually provided. Barron’s had all of these standard data and more information about the programs offered, student housing, campus security, etc.

College guides generally include some report of the SAT (and/or ACT) scores of enrolling students. Typically this is given as the range in which the middle 50% of the students lie. The Barron’s guide had SAT scores broken down further, by 100-point range, so if you’d like to know what percentage of students at a given school scored, say, over 700 on the Math SAT, you can find it there. This finer-grained reporting can be useful in seeing how your student stacks up, which should help in evaluating not only the potential for admission but for “merit-based” financial aid.

One thing to note in gauging the competition for spots in a school is that the test scores of applicants will almost surely differ from those of enrolling students due to two factors. First, the students who were not accepted will presumably on average have lower scores than those accepted. Perhaps less obviously, the scores of those admitted are, for all but the most competitive schools, going to be on average higher than the average for those actually enrolling. Some high scorers will have applied to the school as a “safety school,” and will enroll elsewhere unless their more favored options all reject them. Still, being able to compare one’s SAT scores to those of a given school’s students seems useful.

All of the information in the Barron’s guide was actually quite helpful for someone just starting the college search and selection process. One important fact it revealed to us was just how expensive all of the private schools are, from top to bottom. We experienced substantial “sticker shock” in our college search: the total cost of attending a State university outside of one’s own State turns out to be about 70% of what one would pay for a private school (roughly $35,000 as opposed to $50,000!).

The next book we bought was The Best 366 Colleges (latest edition has 368) by the Princeton Review. There were probably at least 250 schools in this book that I wouldn’t have been able to place on such a list with any confidence. A surprisingly large number of these were small schools I had never even heard of. I’m afraid there was also some blind prejudice involved in my failure to know what schools would be found in the group of the “best.” I would never have guessed that the University of Tulsa was a really good school, for example, my hazy impression of Tulsa having been formed by some ancient movie poster featuring oil wells. I noted with some gratification that a number of the small private schools included were ones I had first encountered when a physics professor had purchased my modern physics teaching software OnScreen Particle Physics.

The Princeton Review guide is one of several books that attempt to give a more in-depth picture of what a student’s life is like at different colleges. It uses student questionnaires to gather data on many aspects of college life, both academic and social. Obviously these evaluations are subjective, but that’s not a bad thing to the extent that measuring student satisfaction and perception is the goal. The reliance on student surveys could leave the process vulnerable to  a concerted effort to slant certain evaluations in a particular direction, however. The Princeton surveys are done on a three-year cycle with about a third of the whole batch resurveyed each year. An amusing feature of the Princeton guide is its compilation of the top twenty schools in many categories—relating to academics, bureaucracy, social life, and campus environment—based on the student questionnaire responses. Looking for a party school? The Princeton Review may be able to help.

The third guide that we utilized was the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2009. While the Barron’s guide was all-inclusive, the Princeton Review and Fiske guides restricted themselves to the “best” three hundred something schools. Finally, I couldn’t resist buying the US News (USN) America’s Best Colleges, which is actually very complete at least in its listings of four-year colleges. The USN guide is the one that gives an overall rank to schools in various institutional categories: National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, etc. Its most subjective feature is the peer rating of faculties. Student opinion is not consulted, but the USN rankings take into account some hard numbers, such as percentage of freshman returning for second year and, of course, SAT scores of enrolled students. Naturally, USN doesn’t reveal the secret formula they use in turning these factors into a single number that determines a school’s national ranking. USN also has useful summary information on all the four-year colleges in the country.

We’ve been using last year’s Princeton Review guide, but it seems the text of the college descriptions has not changed for any of the schools I scanned for differences. There are now 368 in all in the new edition, which I’ve only seen online. What has been revised is the top-twenty lists, which could change if only some schools re-evaluated things. How consistent are they from year to year? Not as consistent as Princeton’s claims of remarkably stable ratings would lead one to believe.

Northeastern University, located in Boston, is an interesting case to consider both for highlighting the very subjective nature of the ratings and the lack of consensus among guides and for hints that some ratings (supposedly based on student surveys) may be manipulable. Fiske, or whoever wrote the Northeastern review for the Fiske guide, clearly does not think very highly of Northeastern. In fact, he rates its academics so low (a 2 out of 5), one wonders how it made it into the book. I only saw ten other included schools (out of the more than 300) with a rating that low.  But over in the Princeton Review (based on student surveys), Northeastern has a respectable 79 (out of 100) academic rating, which, for example, according to Princeton, is somewhat better than the University of Illinois, pegged at 74 by Princeton, but given a highest rating 5 by Fiske. Who’s right? The question really doesn’t have much meaning, since there is no actual number for a college’s academic rating, but such differences point out that relying on a single source may not be a reliable way to gauge even a school’s reputation.

When we look at the US News ratings, we find Northeastern ranked number 96 among “national universities” in the USA and with a peer-based faculty rating of 2.9 (out of 5—Harvard is 4.9), while Illinois comes in nationally at number 40 and with a faculty rating of 4.0). So in addition to wondering what Fiske has against Northeastern, we have to consider that Princeton may be underestimating Illinois. But USN doesn’t incorporate student opinion of their professors into the rating. Fiske says he does. Princeton definitely does. I just noticed that Caltech was tied with Northeastern in the Academic rating last year in the Princeton guide due to Caltech students’ putting their professors at number 3 on the “Professors Get Low Marks” list. Caltech’s Academic rating jumped up 10 points to 88 this year, despite its holding on to the third place in that bad professors’ category. Perhaps Princeton changed the weighting to de-emphasize student opinion; perhaps after some complaints by Caltech.

Princeton acknowledges that they allow schools to contest rankings they perceive to be unfair. There is no way to know how those things are settled; nor, of course, is there any reporting of when a change has resulted from a college administration complaint. Princeton notes that some schools refuse to participate in the student surveys. Though there don’t seem to many colleges at all that are currently opting out, Princeton wouldn’t want that number to start rising, especially among elite schools. Fiske gives CalTech a 5 academic rating, and USN has them with a 4.6 peer rating of faculty (and number 6 overall in the National University category). Of course there is a a difference between being a highly regarded scientist in one’s field and being a good teacher. Are Caltech professors really that bad as teachers? Is there a language problem? Could Caltech students be blaming their professors for the students’ own shortcomings in handling a very difficult curriculum? I don’t know, but the academic ratings definitely seems to be a case where the Princeton Review differs from Fiske and USN, due to its giving more weight to professors’ teaching ability and their availability.

One of the ill-defined but definitely interesting factors that both the Fiske and Princeton Review guides attempt to rate is the “quality of life” (QL) at the various colleges, and there are clear differences of opinion. Not only does Fiske rank Northeastern low in academics, he gives it a 2 for QL. Princeton, however, gives Northeastern a well above average QL rating of 83. I think this must be partly due to a bias against urban schools by Fiske. Boston College and Boston University get a 93 and 81, respectively, from Princeton; but Fiske gives them just OK 3 ratings. Fiske loves the University of Vermont and he certainly makes it sound appealing: “The size is manageable, Burlington is a fabulous college town, and Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains are on your doorstep.” He gives it a 5 for QL, while Princeton says Vermont is right there with Northeastern with an 83. UNH, a small-town school, gets a 4 for QL from Fiske, but only 68 from Princeton. NYU gets a Princeton 87 versus a Fiske 3, so it seems the Princeton-urban and Fiske-nonurban preference holds. Of course, the Princeton results are supposedly based mainly on student surveys and the Fiske ones less so, which seems to me to be saying that students like urban campuses better than Fiske does. It seems clear that it is the locale that causes Northeastern students to rate their experience so highly. Their responses put Northeastern at number 11 for “Great College Towns,” up from 15 a year ago.

A really big jump occurred for Northeastern University in the category of Best Career/Job Placement Services, where they came from out of nowhere to be number 1 in the latest edition. Has there really been that big a turnaround in those services in the past three years? Possibly, but mightn’t there have been a little encouragement by the school administration for students to highlight an area that Northeastern should shine in, given its co-op plan? I know nothing about it, but I can’t help wondering. Or perhaps some students took the initiative to help boost their school’s standing by organizing a campaign to get people to praise the Job Placement Office in their survey. There’s no way to know, but also no way to prevent it. I note that Northeastern has been touting their first-place Princeton Review finish in their recruiting letters this year.

There is also a self-consistency problem in the Princeton Review ratings. For example, The College of the Holy Cross gets a high (93) rating for Financial Aid, yet ranks number 16 (up from number 17) in student dissatisfaction with their aid. This isn’t strictly speaking a logical contradiction except that the 93 rating is supposed to be based on student reports as well as school reports. Is there something misleading in the school report, or is there something different about Holy Cross students? Can it be that only a relatively small minority are so dissatisfied with their aid as to make a big point of it but that this group still outnumbers those at most other schools wanting to raise it as a major issue? We’d need to know more of the details on how the ratings and rankings are arrived at to answer that question. It’s just another indication that it would be a mistake to make too much out of any one rating.

My wife and I have been rather dismayed that all of the schools our son has applied to have the notation “Lots of beer drinking” in the margin of the Princeton review. All but one also add “Hard liquor is popular.” It’s almost as if we were deliberately looking for hard-drinking schools, which is far from the case. I think we may have been a bit negligent on this issue, as I now see schools without the alcoholic notations exist, though not all that many in the Northeast.

An interesting case of an overall negative trend in the Princeton top-twenty rankings from one year to the next is the University of New Hampshire (UNH). In the 2008-9 edition they were number 7 in the “Party School” category, so it’s good (from a parent’s standpoint) that they’ve dropped a bit to number 11. They have, however, moved up from 4 to 3 in the “Lots of Beer” list, and they now appear as number 20 for “Reefer Madness,” while being “unranked” the previous year. Is there some sort of rivalry building with the University of Vermont on this cannabis-loving category? UVM had already staked out a place near the top (number 4) in the category. UNH is now number 5 for “Homogeneous Student Population” (up from 9) and has maintained its position at number 4 in “Little Race/Class Interaction.” To make matters worse they check in at number 6 in “Town-Gown Relations are Strained,” which wasn’t mentioned the previous year.

Those changes could be just due to changed perceptions or some particular incident (for the strained relations) probably. New this year at UNH is high dissatisfaction with professors: number 18 for “Professors Get Low Marks” and number 14 for “Least Accessible Professors.” Maybe this is just a statistical fluctuation from only somewhat lower, but invisible to the list, ratings last year. Or could a few students at UNH be trying to put heat on the school by organizing a campaign to give the faculty bad grades in the Princeton survey? How many would it take really? We aren’t given figures on how many students participate in the surveys for each school. Given that the Princeton surveys are done on a three-year cycle with about a third of the whole batch resurveyed each year, fluctuations could be due to new answers from the school’s students or from changes by students at other schools. Given some fairly big changes with UNH, I’d say they must have been resurveyed. Otherwise, how could the jump from off the list to number 6 in strained community relations have occurred?

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has seen one major improvement (from the parent’s standpoint). It went from number 4 in “Students Never Study” to not being in the top 20. The list still exists (Florida took the top spot), so there must have been a decided change at UMass in the last three years, assuming the disappearance from the top twenty is due to resurveying. For all I know the campus newspaper published an editorial urging students not to make UMass look bad by saying they hardly ever studied. How would I know? How would the Princeton Review know? On another positive note, UMass has dropped out of the top twenty for “Long Lines and Red Tape,” where they held down the 17th position a year ago. The students at UMass are nonetheless (perhaps because of increased study time) even more unhappy than before—up to number 18 (from 20) in the “Least Happy Students” category. The campus isn’t looking any better, at least in the students’ eyes: UMass has moved up from 12 to 8 on the “Least Beautiful Campus” list. The students (now that they’ve had to start studying?) are showing their dissatisfaction with professor accessibility, coming in at number 17 for “Least Accessible Professors.”

That should be enough to show everyone that college guide evaluations are not gospel, don’t always share consensus, and are possibly subject to gaming by schools or organized groups of students. While I wasted way too much time on reading them, I know I learned a good deal too. I started writing this several weeks ago before much had happened in the way of college admission decisions and financial aid offers, and I’ve left everything about those matters in the future tense. I may have more to say later about the whole process of applying for admission and financial aid and deciding what to do.

This piece may appear to many readers (that is, I imagine it might if there were many readers) to be an exercise better suited for a medieval theologian, an effort which most people today would deem a waste of mental energy spent elaborating a dubious odd abstraction having no relationship to the real world. Nonetheless, I am going to report my observation of interesting parallels between the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as envisioned by the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri in his Paradiso, and the picture modern physics presents of the fundamental nuclear particle called the proton. Structuralists may take some pleasure in seeing an unexpected example of the human mind’s convergence on certain images for representing conjectured interactions between entities which are not directly observable by means of our senses. Of course, the theoretical picture of the proton is based on objective experimental data and is in no sense arbitrary, though it may be incomplete; while theological consensus is that the Trinity can be known by revelation only.

First let us briefly review some important facts about protons. Protons are the electrically charged particles that, along with the electrically neutral particles of slightly higher mass, the neutrons, make up the nuclei of atoms, in which almost all of the atomic mass is concentrated. The number of protons in an atom’s nucleus determines how many electrons the atom has—the same number—and from this everything about the atom follows.

Given the laws of physics that govern the electrons in the atom, the mere number of protons in the nucleus determines the chemical properties of the atom of which it is a part. For example, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom consists of a single proton. Hydrogen thus has one electron; and, by virtue of that fact, two hydrogen atoms love to join with oxygen to make that extraordinary chemical compound that Life requires—water. Helium, on the other hand, has two protons in its nucleus and thus two electrons; it won’t combine with anything else. These are the two simplest elements, but their examples suffice to illustrate how definitive the number of protons in the nucleus is for establishing atomic properties.

Electrons can and do exist separately from nuclei and are freely exchanged among them. Protons do not spontaneously join together to form nuclei here on Earth. All atomic nuclei, except for that of hydrogen, which formed shortly after the Big Bang, and that of helium, much of which formed during a short time where conditions in the early universe resembled those in a star’s interior, have to be made in the furnace of the stars. Most of the matter of the universe (the normal matter, anyway, not the “dark” matter) is still in the form of the first-made element, hydrogen. The number of protons in the universe is estimated to be around 10⁷⁹!

Born from the Big Bang, protons seem destined to last as long as the universe. All the other heavy particles (baryons), such as the neutron, are unstable and subject to decay into lighter particles. A free neutron (not bound in an atomic nucleus) will on the average last only around fifteen minutes before decaying into a proton, an electron, and an ultralight particle called the antineutrino.

Although theories have been put forth in which the proton would also decay, no one has ever observed proton decay, and not for want of carrying out experiments deep below the Earth’s surface that specifically look for such events. According to experiment, the lower limit on the average lifetime of the proton is around 10³⁴ years! Considering that this is about 10²⁴ times greater than the age of the universe, I’m comfortable calling protons as “eternal” as matter can be.

In summary, protons, which may be totally stable, make up most of the normal matter of the universe and by their mere number in the atomic nucleus determine the chemical properties of atomic elements. All of the complex chemical reactions that take place in the universe, though they involve most directly the electrons of the atoms, ultimately trace down to the number of protons in the nuclei of the atoms involved.

Now let us move from science to theology. One of the features of Christianity that sets it apart from the other major monotheistic religions—Islam and Judaism—is its peculiar notion of the Trinity, that somehow God, although one and indivisible, is also three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, traditionally). The idea of one God in three persons is different from that of multiple independent gods and goddesses in polytheistic religions, although Islam holds that Christianity is polytheistic because of the Trinity belief.

Now I want to consider Dante’s attempt to convey through poetry the mysterious concept of the Holy Trinity, which in his faith was a certainty. On reading the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso recently, I came across an image that immediately reminded me of something else I’d thought of before: the conceptual similarities between our scientific description of the proton and the Triune God; only now a particular detail of Dante’s description of what he had seen made the similarity appear stronger than I had realized before.

Near the end of his time in Heaven (Paradiso) Dante was finally empowered to behold God, his ability to comprehend mysteries directly by sight alone having been enabled by Divine grace. Here is the Singleton translation of lines 115-120 of Canto XXXIII of Paradiso.

“Within the profound and shining subsistence of the lofty Light appeared to me three circles of three colors and one magnitude; and one seemed reflected by the other, as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other.”

This is far from being a clear picture, and Dante had said beforehand that description—even distinct memory—of what he had  beheld was impossible. But I was struck this time by how much Dante’s word-painting resembles our own nebulous physical picture of the proton. The essentials of Dante’s vision were three equally sized circles (or spheres) of three colors and two distinguishable types, with some sort of continual interaction occurring among the circles. The image of the rainbows reflected in each other, with each circle yet of a different color, seems to my mind to be saying that the colors are changing, but in a co-ordinated way. I might add that Dante’s original description of God was as a point of blindingly bright white light.

Why does this vision of Dante’s make me think of the proton? Modern physics has discovered that the proton has within it three particles, whose existence a theoretical physicist had predicted and named quarks years before they were first experimentally observed. Two of the quarks in the proton are identical and are called “up” quarks. The other is a “down” quark. In this context, the terms up and down have no meaning except as a way of distinguishing the two types of quark. No directionality is implied by the names. Up and down are examples of what physicists call quark “flavor,” and of course there is nothing related to the sense of taste implied by the name flavor; it’s just a conventional way to designate this particular quantum number or characteristic.

Now, by probing the proton with high-energy particle collisions we can “see” that the quarks are inside the proton, but there is no way to observe an individual free quark, due to the peculiar nature of the force between quarks, which, contrary to the action of other known forces, actually gets stronger as the quarks are separated further from each other, making it impossible to pull or knock a single quark free from its mates. It is possible to break up a proton with a high-energy collision, but only by making new quark combinations, never in a way that makes a single quark visible.

Thus nature seems to present us with a stable and indivisible proton consisting of three quarks, two of which are identical, but no one of which can be seen apart from its union with the other two. What I hadn’t realized before re-reading Dante was that Catholic theology viewed the Holy Spirit as different in some way from the Father and the Son. The Son was “begotten” by the Father, whatever that might mean, and the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the two other Persons, whatever that means. Thus in Dante’s vision two of the “circles” seemed reflected by each other, these being identified by commentators as the Father and the Son of the Trinity. For me it seems natural to mentally map this pair to the two up quarks. Dante clearly sees the third circle as being distinguishable from the other two, and this third circle would correspond to the down quark in my whimsical analogy.

Can we go further? There is more to the quark picture of the proton than the quark flavors. The quarks all have another quantum characteristic which physicists, for want of a better term, have called “color,” though, of course, without any real connection to what we mean by color in the world we perceive directly. The proton as a whole is colorless, however, meaning that proton states must be made up of one “red” quark, one “blue” one, and one “green” one, which taken together make for a colorless proton. However, the colors are not fixed on any given quark. The quarks are continually exchanging particles called “gluons” between each other. These gluons carry color, so that each quark is changing color continually, but always in a way so that there is one red, one green, and one blue quark at any time. This color exchange is the source of the force that binds the quarks together. I invite the reader to judge the extent to which Dante’s description resembles the picture of quarks held together through color exchange.

Do the similarities between Dante’s poetic vision of the Christian doctrine of the Triune God and our modern, well-established theory of the tri-quark proton amount to more than a curious historical coincidence? Does this analogy go beyond the merely amusing to the deeply significant?

Of course not.

It can’t, can it?

Maybe.

How could it not?

But that’s crazy.

Isn’t it?

Frederick Copleston, S.J., in the second volume of his superb work, A History of Philosophy, says in summarizing a fundamental teaching of the preeminent medieval theologian-philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, that God “creates the world as a finite imitation of His divine essence.” One aspect of this is that we human beings with our power of reason and our ability to appreciate beauty and to discern good are created “in God’s image,” as Genesis says. But can this finite imitation of God’s essence also be be seen in the most fundamental parts of the physical universe?

As one who has come to recognize God’s existence, but who has not embraced Christianity fully, partly because of the difficulty in affirming belief in “revealed truths” such as God’s Three Persons, I can’t help wondering if the protons of the universe (all the multitude of protons!) are not so many messages in bottles thrown into the sea of the cosmos, just waiting to be read once their language had been mastered: “Yes, doubting Scientist, here is a coherent image of the Trinity. Ponder my depths and believe.”

I’ve been traveling and otherwise occupied a lot lately, so I’ve really fallen behind my one post a week goal for this blog. I don’t have anything very substantial to post today, but I would like to share some more of the possibly amusing or interesting Google search strings that have brought visitors here.

As I noted before, the most striking thing revealed by an examination of the search strings (of words) people use in Google is how many people approach Google as some sort of artificially intelligent being one can ask questions of, as though of a person. This seems especially to be the case when they have medical concerns (at least pet medical concerns). My post Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig gets a visit or two almost every day, usually from people with a guinea pig they are worried about.

The search strings are sometimes of the hopeless (but Google-appropriate) “how to euthanize a guinea pig” sort, but an extreme example of one treating Google as an online veterinarian (and a psychic one at that) was “My guinea pig has not eaten today and he has a cold. What is up?” In the same vein was: “my son has squeezed our guinea pig will it be ok”.

I used the first of those mentioned above to do my own Google search, and—low and behold—my post came up fifth from the top. Here’s what Google returned for it (word matches in bold):

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig
May 25, 2008 … Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I …. Hopefully the vet is open today. 11:00 am. He’s not, but the … My wife has been felled by the same cold I have presumably, … I say to the intake woman, who is looking at me quizzically, “He hasn’t eaten anything in days. …

Since Google just looks for word matches and doesn’t try to make sense of it all, it came up with a good match, although, except for the “He hasn’t eaten” part, the matched words (today, my, cold) weren’t relevant.

For the second string Google brings up my post third from the top thusly:

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig
May 25, 2008 … Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I …. OK, it’s now the morning of the next day. … He didn’t drink water that was squeezed into his mouth this time, as though reflexes aren’t even working. … Chestnut has been buried in the back yard. My son arrived back from …

Thus, there was a hit on nine out of eleven words (and Google probably ignored “it” and “be” as too common)! Yet the circumstances are totally different, except for the shared anxiety about a guinea pig.

It seems to me that there is sufficient text in the Google excerpts above to have shown the searchers that my post was not what they were looking for, but they came anyway, either through blind clicking or just because it was obvious my post dealt with a dying guinea pig, which was a subject on their mind.

The search string “guinea pig isplaying dead after popcorning” brought someone here too. I hope the “playing dead” wasn’t wishful thinking, if the searcher was referring to his  or her own animal. I had never heard of guinea pigs playing dead (possums, yes), but Google finds a YouTube video (which I haven’t watched) claiming to show this phenomenon. Another ask-the-vet type string was “do antibiotics make guinea pigs tired”. This was a good match by Google’s standards, since my post contains all the words, though, of course, no answer to the question. I also fear that that animal was suffering from something worse than antibiotic side effects.

So it goes. People with sick animals or sick computers go online to look for help, and some of them end up in this out-of-the-way spot. I see several people arriving here daily with MacBook overheating problems (or worries) of one kind or another, which shows it is a real problem, though I suppose not a sufficiently serious one for Apple to deal with publicly. The computer users with problems typically have a better idea of how Google works than the guinea pig owners; they just put in a string of keywords for their searches.

Many other search matches must be the result of coincidence, though it’s not always obvious how. The string “black bean death lottery cycling club” leads Google to put my post Times I Might Have Died as number one on the candidate list, since it contains all the words except “cycling” and “club” (though it does deal with my early bicycle riding). It’s unlikely my post was what the searcher had in mind, but whatever it was, it must not be on the world-wide web, for nothing shows up containing that very specific collection of words.

It may well have been a job hunter that searched for “physics phd fbi”; but, whoever it was, found the following as number eight on Google’s list:

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Why Gamble? Hire a Physicist.
I should add that when a physics professor called Ron about hiring me several months … what hourly rate I should get as a new Physics PhD (or near-PhD, whichever it was). …. My Appointment with the FBI and a Long-Delayed Connection …

A somewhat interesting point here is that “Physics PhD” was found in the text of the indicated blog post, while “FBI” appeared in the sidebar listing of the titles of recent posts, so even if the person had been looking for my FBI appointment post he wouldn’t have gotten to it directly. Something to keep in mind when searching.

What was the searcher for “trees shame” after, I wonder? I’d like to think it was someone who’d read my post A Painful Christmas Blessing and wanted to come back to it or to direct someone else to it; and my post does come in at number seven in the Google list, but there’s nothing definitive about the two words and no way to know what the intent was. Still, as in all these cases, the searcher did come here, or I wouldn’t know about it.

My post about exchanges with commenters on an atheist blog, Conversations in the Clubhouse of Truly Smart People, has also brought a few people here via Google searches with other purposes. I feel bad about not having advice for those who seem to be seeking it: for example the one searching on “what smart people say in conversations” and the one searching for “smart things to say in conversations”; young people, I hope. Then, there was the one possibly looking for confirmation of his own observation that it’s best to “never let people know how smart you truly are.” I’m taking that to mean that it’s better to play dumb a little, but it could mean never let them find out how dumb you truly are, which has aways been my concern.

I’ve been at this blogging for almost a year now. Thanks to all who have read and especially to those who have written to me (email address towards upper right) these past months.

I’d like to thank a few bloggers for links and kind words. Annie of AmbivaBlog, in her post “White on Black,” wrote the following about the post I made on the eve of Obama’s inauguration: “A white guy from Texas, who remembers what segregation was really all about, celebrates the casting off of those mind-forg’d manacles represented by the election of a black president.  Especially if you are not old enough to remember what segregation was really all about, read this.” Thank you, Annie.

Jim at Stonekettle Station, in a post called “The LHC and Walter L. Wagner, Dangerously Insane (now with more nuts!),” linked to my post “Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?” with the comment “Walter L. Wagner and his adherents claim the support of a ‘growing number of scientists.’ These scientists, as you might expect, are of the same cloth as Wagner himself. Some are outright frauds, nuts, and kooks. Some, while scientists, are on the fringe of actual science itself, or completely outside their area of expertise. None are actually qualified to evaluate Wagner’s alarmist nonsense, and have jumped on the bandwagon largely for the same reason Wagner has. An excellent breakdown of these people can be found at the On-screen Scientist.” Thanks, Jim.

A similar compliment (with link) was paid my LHC post by John the Scientist of the Refugees from the City Blog in his post called “The Soft Underbelly of Scientific Credentialism,” which deals in detail with the undistinguished scientific career of Otto Rössler, one of the two often-cited eleventh-hour LHC alarmists. “And finally, an awful lot of what Rössler has published in recent years looks just plain weird, even to the non scientist. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will quote the article that the anti-LHC crowd is so fond of, the one that the On Screen Scientist referred to when he took Rössler to school back in the heyday of the anti-LHC lawsuits…” Thanks, John.

Let me add that the research (mostly through the internet) that Jim, John, I, and others have done on LHC critics should have been done by the journalists who just took these anti-LHC characters at their word as being serious and worthy of respect. Without necessarily endorsing every psychological evaluation made in the above-cited blogs, I can recommend them as good references on the facts of the sometimes bizarre past activities and the grossly inflated credentials of the main LHC critics. I hope someone at CERN has become aware of this research and will make use of it during the inevitable “controversy” that will ramp up as the LHC restart approaches.

The Traditio et Virtus blog has added this blog to the blog feeds it displays. I’m not sure of the blogger’s name, but I’m guessing I should say thank you to David. The blog Ro-Theoria, which is evidently devoted to the interface between science and religion, is in Romanian, which unfortunately I am unable to read, but I would like to thank Mihai and Florin for putting my blog on its blog roll.