It is true, I have been neglecting my blog. I have plans for brief reviews of ancient astronomy in the Book of Abraham, more posts about names in the Book of Mormon, and ancient rituals of conversion detailed in the Book of Mormon. But right now my time has been consumed with getting my code to work for my research. The other day I cleaned up two files that I had been working on for some time and I removed all the lines of code that I didn't need. All together I think I removed over 4,000 lines of code. It took me a few days to work through it and determine what I need and what I don't need.
In the meantime I uploaded a video of one of my simulations that I did as a proof of concept. I did this simulation to show my advisor that my fixes to the code are working and that more time should be devoted to the approach that I have been taking. He was impressed.
Here is the description that goes along with the video:
This is a short video that I made of a simulation that was done as a proof of concept. It shows a fractal distribution of density in the center of a star forming galaxy. This simulation is done using the MHD code Athena. The box size covers 1 kpc in each dimension and has a grid size of 128 in each dimension. The star forming region injects mass and energy into the center region of the simulation.
The proof of concept is for a flux fixer that allows the code to handle high kinetic energy situations where the total kinetic energy is a significant fraction of the total energy.
I know I haven't been posting a lot lately, but I have been busy and most of my mental energy is going into my research at the moment. Which means I don't have a lot of time to write. I just wanted to post something simple.
This is a graph of my ride to work. On the days that I can (or want to) ride my bike to work I have to go up and down a few hills. Using Google Earth I figured out distance and altitude for the path I take to work. It takes me straight through campus and is quite nice except for the one big hill and the last long hot stretch.
The x axis is the distance that I ride (in meters). The y axis is the altitude (in feet).
Each dot represents a place where I have to turn (even if it is a slight turn, it is somewhere I can't just go straight). I start at 400 ft. and I end up at 500 feet (there is a reason why they call the place Chapel Hill, where I work is a short distance from the location of the original chapel on Chapel Hill, now home to the Carolina Inn), with a minimum altitude of 352 feet. I have a total altitude change of 276 feet and an absolute change of 100 feet, over a distance of ~2.1 km. The worst part is one long hill with 60 foot climb at a 9% grade. It's great coming down, not so fun going up.
Recently lightning struck a tree near by the building I work in. I took a few pictures of the lightning damage to the tree before they cut it down. The tree is very old and UNC was considering removing it anyway, but with this much damage they will just have to remove it as soon as possible. I spoke briefly with someone who works for the grounds crew and he said, "The tree is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet."
I would like to point out the distinct spiral pattern of the lightning strike. From all the trees I have seen that have been struck by lightning, they all have the same distinctive spiral pattern. I don't know why follows the spiral pattern, but I do know why lighting causes trees to explode like this. If the tree is dry (i.e. no rain has fallen) then the lightning will travel down through the living part of the tree, where the sap and water is. The water super-heats and expands rapidly (it literally explodes) causing the outer layer of the tree to blow out. In some cases, such as this, the damage is extensive enough that it will kill the tree outright or do enough damage to severely reduce its ability to survive.
You can see two separate spiral patters here where the lightning traveled down the tree.
If you look carefully you can see the splintering going all the way up the tree.
From the exact opposite side of the tree from the previous picture.
A close up of where the lightning traveled down the tree. The section where the bark has been removed is about 8-9 inches wide, and you can see two groves where the lightning actually traveled. One is at the extreme left of where the bark has been stripped, and the other is slightly off to the right from the middle of the stripped area.
Recently a few letters to the editor that appeared in the Daily Tar Heel caught my attention. What struck me about them was not necessarily the topic, but the mindset of the writers that lead them to write what they did. First I need to explain the background. Recently UNC has started requiring that all of its students have health insurance coverage. Because this requirement is mandatory the university has provided a low cost health insurance option for the students. Unless the student provides proof of their own insurance coverage, they are automatically enrolled in the student health insurance plan, which costs the student about $750 a year (WOW! How did they make it so cheap? It was subsidized by the state and federal governments). It turns out that one of the things covered by this student health insurance plan is the cost of having an abortion.
When some people found out that the default health insurance plan for the students included coverage for abortions, some concerned individuals strongly objected to the university and the university provided an option where the students could opt-out of paying for abortion coverage. This would not change the cost of the insurance premium but it would ensure that none of the money paid by someone who had opted out would be used for abortion coverage. Essentially, if someone opted-out then their insurance premiums would go into a separate account that would not be used to pay for abortions. This seemed like a sensible compromise given the situation (though some may argue that it would have been better to have the students opt-in rather than opt-out, but that is a separate issue). In response to this policy there were several letters to the editor in the Daily Tar Heel that addressed this issue. The three letters that I will write about were all pro-abortion and were lamenting the fact that the students were even given the option to opt-out of providing funds to cover the cost of abortions. (Links to the letters: Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3).
The three letters included the standard arguments for allowing abortions, which was not surprising, but what was particularly noticeable about what they wrote was their response to the option to opt-out of paying for abortions. As stated in letter 1, "we are concerned about the precedent set by President Erskine Bowles’ recent decision to allow students to “opt out” of sharing the costs of comprehensive reproductive health care in the new student insurance plan." Essentially the letter writers were not expressing a concern about any argument against abortion, or even that someone would be denied an abortion, but that the students were given the choice to not pay for abortions. As expressed in letter 3, "It is upsetting that the DTH [Daily Tar Heel] employs “right to choose” language to portray this opt-out policy". In other words, the main issue here for the writers was not that someone objected to paying for the abortions, but that the students were even given the choice to opt-out of paying for them, and as expressed in letter 3, they were equally offended that the DTH used the phrase "right to choose" to refer to the opt-out policy.
One of the things that was expressed in letter 2 was the idea that refusing to be part of the collective that pays for abortions is equal to denying someone an abortion. Even though abortions would still be covered by the insurance plan, the writers were scandalized by the fact that those who have moral objections to abortion would be given the right to choose not to participate. Again from letter 2, "Regardless of one’s personal feelings on abortion, this trend in removing a standard insurance benefit due to moral objections is disturbing." In other words, for these letter writers, it does not matter the opinions or objections of anyone, everyone should be forced to help, support, and pay for abortions. In short, moral objections are meaningless.
After reading these letters it makes me wonder if they really know what they are saying. Because if they understood what they just wrote, they would realize that they were advocating a tyrannical society in which only a small set of elites were able to have or express an opinion. They are saying that it does not matter what anyone else thinks on the subject, only they are allowed to have their opinions acted upon and become public policy. No one else's opinions are valid. I wonder if they really understand what they are advocating, and if they do, then we really do have problems.
I passed my qualifying exam. I actually took it two weeks ago but I just found out today that I passed it. I have a much longer explanation of the qual over at The Eternal Universe, but I just wanted to say something here that I did not mention there.
When I was preparing for the qual I was wondering what I should do to focus my studying. It was something that I was praying about and thinking about a lot. There are so many things I could study and look at that it would not be possible to look at them all, so I had the be selective in the things that I studied. As I was praying about this I got the impression that I should focus on the statistical mechanics portion of a book containing old qualifier problems from the University of Chicago. So I went to that portion of the Chicago book and looked it over and selected the problems that I thought could turn up on the test (I selected 17 of the 22 problems) and worked them out. As it turned out two of those questions turned up on the qualifying exam, and I was able to answer them easily.
The test was also spread over two days. Initially it was scheduled to be on Sunday and Monday the 9th and 10th of May, but the department secretary pointed out that Commencement was that Sunday and there would be several people in the building making noise and it would be hard to reserve a room. This prompted the chair of the qualifying committee to propose moving the first day of testing to Friday the 7th. I sent an email to him saying I would much prefer moving it to the Friday, so it was moved from Sunday to Friday.
Also, I was preparing for the test by studying with two other people, who were also taking the astronomy test like me. We had looked at many different things and we were finalizing our last minute studying. We had two tests on the Friday and four on Monday. So we planned to spend Saturday studying for the first two tests (stat mech and quantum) and then they wanted to spend Sunday studying for stars and high energy. I decided that even though it would help to study for stars and high energy some more as those were the two that I had not studied as much, it would be better for me to keep the sabbath and not to study. So I studied with them on Saturday and then on Sunday I went to church, had our home teachers come by and spent the day "resting" (i.e. worrying about my tests the next day). But when it came time for the tests, it turned out that everything that I was able to answer on the tests was stuff that I had already studied, or already knew, and thus it turned out that if I had studied on Sunday then that would not have helped me any on the two tests. It was such a good feeling to see a blessing of keeping the sabbath.
The other day I came across an interesting talk at TED.com. The subject matter I found very enlightening.
There are several implications to what Dr. Ariely has shown here. I will start with the one that he explicitly mentions, the stock market. Based on his work it would imply that stock markets would always contribute to dishonest behavior. Because stocks, bonds and securities are a step away or more from actual money or commodities people will naturally try to cheat at trading them. This point was made with his test where subjects were given tokens in reward for answering questions right. As he pointed out, that one additional step lead more people to cheat. This would seem to imply that an unregulated stock market will always fail due to dishonest and unethical practices.
Based on his work we could conclude that there are only two ways to have a stock, bond or securities market that will not be overrun by dishonest behavior sooner or later. The first is heavy regulation (similar to the control set where everyone turned in their tests to be graded and were paid accordingly). The second is to have a consistent moral system and to constantly remind the participants of it (his example where test subjects were asked to recall the 10 commandments).
These ideas can be extended into other areas, such as corporate management, government bureaucracy, classroom administration and business transactions. On the one hand most problems with dishonesty can be taken care of through either regulation or reminding people of their moral codes. In the absence of a moral code, or a consistent moral code, it would seem that the only way to keep most people honest would be through active regulation of their actions. This of course runs into the problem of who will then regulate the regulators etc.. It would seem that the easier option would be to simply remind people of their moral code. This seems to be the route taken by the University of North Carolina.
At UNC all students are required to sign the university honor code, and also whenever they turn in an assignment they are required to write a note stating that what they are turning in is their own work (i.e. they did not cheat) and then they must then sign it. This is done on every test, paper, lab report and homework assignment (as an interesting note, this is required of all undergraduates but for graduate students this requirement is hardly ever enforced, but for graduate students there is a greater expectation of maturity, and the punishment for cheating is usually much more severe). So upon watching Dr. Ariely's talk I realized that the UNC policy of signing the honor code for everything including single page homework assignments was an attempt to remind the students of their "moral code" and to try to prevent most cases of cheating. The efficacy of this particular method is debatable and open to interpretation.
This effort to reduce dishonesty may be intentional, but after reflecting on it there are many places where this method of reducing dishonesty is used almost unintentionally. In the case of the BYU testing center there are pictures of Jesus and Karl G. Maeser along with his famous chalk circle quote. These serve as reminders of the BYU honor code and the moral system in general that inspired it. These pictures, quotes and reminders were placed with the intention of reminding people about their moral duties and thus preventing, to some degree, cheating.
This method does not prevent all cheating but it does work to prevent the majority of it, because as Dr. Ariely pointed out, the increase in cheating did not come from one or two individuals who "skewed the curve" but rather from a significant portion of the people cheating just a little bit. So the purpose of using the moral reminders is not to prevent all cheating but to prevent almost everyone from doing it. The rest of the people can be taken care of through regulation.
In the case where moral reminders are not allowed or are not permissible then the default to preventing unethical behavior must be through regulation, or enforcement of specific rules. Again to show this I turn to the honor codes of both UNC and BYU. A quick comparison between the two shows that the UNC code (known as "The Instrument") is much much longer. I think a pdf version of it is about 50-60 pages long. On the other hand the core of the BYU honor code consists of nine short statements (one line each) and then four specific policies. The whole code, including disciplinary policies and procedures is only slightly longer than the Preamble to the UNC honor code. Why the difference? Again the BYU code relies on a common and consistent moral system that is shared (or should be shared) by everyone at BYU. The main enforcers of the BYU honor code are the students themselves, they are given the duty of reminding themselves and each other about the moral commitment they have made, and in general it works.
The UNC honor code is much longer and full of lots of rules and regulations. Despite this BYU has arguably a stricter honor code. So again why the difference? The UNC code does not (and some would say could not) rely on a common moral system shared by the students and thus it (meaning the honor code and UNC in general) must create its own moral framework. In the absence of the ability to appeal to a moral code we are either left to deal with people cheating (being unethical, if only to a small degree) or have to resort to imposing systems of rules and regulations.
So now let us consider these ideas in the most general sense, that of our lives in general. Here it would seem that we have three options: 1. Live without any means of controlling unethical behavior, 2. Prevent unethical behavior by reminding people about their common moral code or, 3. Prevent unethical behavior through rules and regulations.
With option #3 rules must be made for all instances, possibilities, contingencies and situations. The problem with this option is that we eventually end up with a long document detailing all the rules as in the case with the UNC honor code, or worse the US tax code. With option #2 the resulting code of conduct may be greatly reduced (9 lines of general guidelines, or 10 commandments) but it requires that each and every person be committed to living by the code and be constantly reminded of it. This requires more personal involvement and more personal investment to learning and living by the moral system but overall the "cost" or "overhead" of the moral code is greatly reduced. Option #1 is not desirable and is the whole reason for even mentioning options 2 and 3. More later.
As a graduate student at UNC I am given an office with a desk. Because my class was rather large (25 of us, they normally have less than 15) they had to find a place to put us. So they cleared out an unused lab and put 11 of us in one office. It has actually been convenient because generally there is always someone there working on the same homework assignment as me and that makes my homework easier.
The downside is as a first year, and as a member of the large class of students, there aren't the same amount of basic resources, such as desks and bookshelves that grad students normally have. Thus we have to make due with whatever we have. I was lucky (or fast) to get a larger desk, but for a place to put my books I had to improvise, as can be seen from the photo to the right. Yes, that is a sink next to my desk, remember this used to be a lab. (OK, funny side story. As an old lab we used to have a warning sign up on our door detailing the hazards in the lab, level 3 reactivity, level 2 flammability, level 2 radioactivity, and it would scare the undergraduate students that had to come find one of us during our office hours. We would always have people knocking on our door and asking rather timidly, "Can I come in...Is it safe for me to come in? There's a sign out here saying there's radiation." But they eventually took down the sign, so now the only problem we have is that our office doesn't have a number.)
I found the particle board shelves and put them on top of my desk so that I had someplace to put my books. I know it's cheap but we didn't have a lot of stuff. I also had to go through several chairs before I found one that was the right height and wasn't broken. In the photo you can't really see my chair because it has my coat on it. We also have two couches in our office and a padded chair, as can be seen in the photos below (taken from my desk).
That's Dave on the couch. His desk in the other corner (the corner in the photo on the left), he's also an astro student, so we have all the same classes. We also have some very similar research interests. The couches are questionable, as we got them from the undergraduates. Some people will not even touch them, while others in the office sleep on them on a regular basis. We are considered lucky to have this office because we have so many windows. I must say it is nice to have a view of the outside, even when it is freezing cold, it's nice to see out and look at the snow (that's why the windows are so bright in the photos, it's the glare off of the snow).
It's not the most "designer" building on campus, but the building was built for practicality, not looks. It's hard to make the building look nice when we constantly have to add pipes and electrical cables to allow us to do our work. That is something that is entirely missed in Hollywood movies and TV shows, the wires, the cables, the pipes and random things (sinks, next to their desk), and no one really cares. We just work around them.
Today we had our second snowfall of the season. It was pretty cool (ha ha!). I took some pictures:
This is the old well on campus (this is not actually the old well, but the new well built near the old well that served the campus until the 1920's or something like that. The actual old well was covered over and is near by.) When ever it snows the old well becomes very popular and everyone goes to take a picture:This is across the street: This is in the arboretum just down the street:
So we had our first real snow fall this winter. They have been forecasting the storm for a few days and it finally hit last night. I woke up, looked out the window and saw a lot of snow (well, more than I had expected). I will have to post some pictures of it.
In addition to the delightful snow, Chapel Hill went into it's typical emergency mode. Even though there is only a little snow on the ground and it will be gone by tomorrow I still got this email:
"The University has declared a "Condition II" Adverse Weather Alert for today and tomorrow.... Classes are cancelled today beginning at 3:30 p.m. and extending until tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10:00 a.m. Offices will remain open on a normal schedule today and tomorrow. This means...employees are responsible for their regular duties and should make their own decisions about coming to work tomorrow (or leaving work early today) based on their assessments of what is best for their personal safety. They must make up any time missed."
Honestly, they get a little snow and they treat it like a natural disaster. Oh well, I guess this means I won't have to teach this afternoon. Maybe I'll still show up and see if any students show up and need help with their homework.
