This will be the last entry I make on this version of the Quantum Brainfield (What? He's made other entries?).

From here on, all postings will be made at the new Quantum Brainfield at
http://www.romers.org/user/mark_romer/blog

The RSS feed is:
http://www.romers.org/user/mark_romer/blog/feed

I guess I just don't care for Yahoo!'s little section of the blogosphere. My main complaint? You cannot allow anonymous comments on your blog. Anyone wanting to comment has to go through the hassle of joining Yahoo! 360. Put simply, that blows. They seem to want to encourage "social networking" with this service. I just want to make any profound or inane comment that I find the time to write about, and see if anyone notices.

So, the big question was, where to go from here? Since I didn't want to do more than, oh, ten minutes of research on other blogging platforms, it boiled down to three choices: Blogspot, WordPress or Drupal. I've got a blog space reserved on Blogspot, but ultimately I'm a control freak. I wanted to build it myself. WordPress is a great blogging package, but I wanted the Romers.org site to eventually be a more general Romer wonderland. So, I built the site on Drupal, which I had already used to run the Knights of Columbus Council 4312 web site.

So, the new Quantum Brainfield is completely under my control. I installed the software...I'm backing up the database...it's running on my server, installed (with permission) on my employer's network. I AM IN COMPLETE CONTROL!!! BWAHAHAHA!!!

And, I am allowing anonymous comments. So there.

If there were any doubts about the irrelevance of the Nobel Peace Prize, the win by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should put them to rest. In its press release announcing the award, the only reference to "peace" is that "There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" because of possible environmental pressures brought about by possible climate change.

To make this award, the Nobel Committee had to:

1. Embrace the theory that the climate is changing for the worse. This has not been proved, but the climate is always changing, so it's reasonable to assume that at this point, the changes may be detrimental to at least some populations.
2. Embrace the theory that human activity is driving the change, at least in part. This really has not been proved. If anything, the actual bona fide science involved in climatological study shows that the climate has changed many times over the millennia without any human intervention. Our industrial society is barely a blip in geological terms.
3. Determine that climate changes will likely cause conflict. This is possible, but it's more likely that conflict and war will happen for other reasons. The cause of war is the desire to war. Any other explanations can be easily dismissed. The aggressor never had to start the conflict.
4. Decide that Al Gore is working to achieve peace and foster tranquility by his efforts. Despite the unlikeliness of (2) above, this is the real stretch of the imagination. Al Gore is using pseudoscience and outright fabrications to cause unrest. He is fostering animosity between industrial nations and developing nations. He is trying to make some of us feel guilty just for having a high standard of living. This is trying to bring peace?
5. Decide that Al Gore's efforts are succeeding in bringing peace. Given that (4) is such a joke, what can be said about this one? Gore's crusade is a complete joke. The only people finding "peace" from it are the empty-headed ones who make themselves feel better by buying "carbon offsets" to counterbalance their own consumption.

Even if we were to give up all critical thinking and grant that all the above points are actually true, the Nobel Committee is really suspending all sense in making the award these days. It used to be given to people like Aung San Suu Kyi, who could not go receive the prize because she was under house arrest for her pro-democracy efforts in Burma. Now, it's being given to guys like Jimmy Carter, whose ineffectual dealings with Iran led to a good deal of the current mess in the Middle East. This time, it's even worse. Instead of recognizing someone whose work has actually achieved some level of peace or justice, the Nobel Committee has instead awarded it to a man who, in their view is doing work that may reduce possible future conflict arising from possible environmental disasters that may arise from potential climate change that some people think might be caused by human activity. I give an appropriate response by adding a little methane to the atmosphere in their general direction.

That was a joke that Steven Wright used to tell. I guess if I had given it any thought, I could have found out that there were several answers to that question. It makes it less funny, but I learned something today, courtesy of the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day e-mail:

thesaurus \thih-SOR-us\ noun

1. treasury, storehouse
2. a book of words or of information about a particular field or set of concepts; especially : a book of words and their synonyms
3. a list of subject headings or descriptors usually with a cross-reference system for use in the organization of a collection of documents for reference and retrieval

Example sentence: The drill sergeant had a thesaurus of insults, and any recruit who stepped out of line became the immediate recipient of one of his zingers.

Did you know? In the early 19th century, archaeologists borrowed the Latin word "thesaurus" to denote an ancient treasury, such as that of a temple. Soon after, the word was metaphorically applied to a book containing a "treasury" of words or information about a particular field. In 1852, the English scholar Peter Mark Roget published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, in which he listed a treasury of related words organized into numerous categories. This work led to the common acceptance of the term "thesaurus" for "a book of words and their synonyms." Finally, during the 1950s, "thesaurus"began being used in the field of word processing to refer to a list of related terms used for indexing and retrieval.

Well, there you go.

I ran across this last night, and I just had to share it here. Apparently, there is a precise mathematical definition of a "weird number". A weird number is one that is abundant but not semiperfect.

Huh? Let's break that down.

1. An abundant number is one for which the sum of all its proper divisors is greater than the number itself (the proper divisors are the whole numbers you can divide into a number but do not include the number itself). For example, the number 12 is abundant because the sum of all its proper divisors (1+2+3+4+6) is 15, which is greater than 12.

2. A semiperfect number is one that you can get by adding up some subset of its divisors. For example, 12 is semiperfect because you can get it by adding 2+4+6 or 1+2+3+6. By contrast, a perfect number could be obtained by adding all of its proper divisors. That doesn't work for 12, because 1+2+3+4+6=15, not 12.

So, a wierd number has quality (1) but not quality (2). Since 12 has both qualities, it is not wierd. The smallest wierd number is 70. 70 is abundant because 1+2+5+7+10+14+35 = 74, which is greater than 70. 70 is not semiperfect because there is no subset of {1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35} which can be added together to make 70.

Do you ever get the feeling that mathematicians need to get out more?

Wikipedia Article on Weird Numbers