Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

Here is an interesting piece from 2007 in which Eliezer Yudkowsky draws an analogy between the rise of fanaticism in cults and the physical process of evaporative cooling.  Be sure to have a play with the Java applet at the foot of this page.

Mistakes as Spurs to Research

Here are a couple of examples in which young researchers submitted papers for publication which contained potentially embarrassing mistakes.  But, rather than being put off by their mistakes and retiring into obscurity to to lick their wounds, both researchers were spurred into doing the work which made them famous.

From this biography of the mathematician Neils Henrik Abel:

While in his final year at school, however, Abel had begun working on the solution of quintic equations by radicals. He believed that he had solved the quintic in 1821 and submitted a paper to the Danish mathematician Ferdinand Degen, for publication by the Royal Society of Copenhagen.  Degen asked Abel to give a numerical example of his method and, while trying to provide an example, Abel discovered the mistake in his paper.

Abel went on to prove that there is no general solution in radicals to quintic equations (the Abel-Ruffini theorem). In his book Finding Moonshine, Marcus du Sautoy suggests that Degen actually recognised that Abel's solution was flawed and, by asking for a numerical example, he was gently prompting Abel to look at his work again, without discouraging him.

The second example is from here on the web-site of the computer scientist Leslie Lamport:

When I first learned about the mutual exclusion problem, it seemed easy and the published algorithms seemed needlessly complicated.  So, I dashed off a simple algorithm and submitted it to CACM. I soon received a referee's report pointing out the error.  This had two effects. First, it made me mad enough at myself to sit down and come up with a real solution.  The result was the bakery algorithm described in.  The second effect was to arouse my interest in verifying concurrent algorithms.

Lamport's bakery algorithm was just the first of many important contributions he made in the field of concurrent algorithms.

Bud

A bud on an as yet unidentified shrub.  (Identifiying plants can be rather difficult before their leaves come out.)   Photo taken beside the middle lake, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-03-15.

Alexandra Road

Alexandra Road, Reading, with the red roofs of Caversham and the hills of south Oxfordshire in the distance.  Photo taken from Upper Redlands Road, Reading, UK, on 2009-03-15.

A QuickTime 7 Problem and its Solution

This afternoon, I upgraded from QuickTime 6 to QuickTime 7 on my Windows XP Professional machine.  When I tried to use QuickTime from a user account it gave the following error message:

Error 46: Could not find or load activex control

A little Googling led to a solution suggested by Gerhard Schwoiger ("Ger Ger") here (see under "Apple QuickTime 7.x Annoyances").  I implemented this solution from an administrator account.  This fixed the problem.