The Parable of the Thermostat

Posted on 2015-09-24 by M. Eric Carr

I usually keep religion and politics out of these posts, since learning more about science, math, and engineering can benefit anyone, no matter what his or her political beliefs. However, on occasion, it is important to point out logical fallacies — especially when those espousing the fallacies are running for President — and should know better. Recently, Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for President, stated that he believed Darwin got the idea for Natural Selection from Satan.

This is NOT how science works, Mr. Carson. (You’ve given up your right to be called Doctor, in my opinion.) Science works by considering the evidence. It doesn’t matter — at all — what result you want to see. What matters is what results you actually get — and what evidence is actually there, waiting to be measured and quantified.

To explain this difference, and why it matters, I offer a cautionary tale in traditional religious / folk-knowlege anecdotal form. Here, then, is The Parable of the Thermostat.

The Parable of the Thermostat

Once, there were two identical houses, built side by side. Each was constructed in the same manner, from the same materials. 

These houses were bought by a Scientist and a Mystic, respectively.

One day, the weather became cooler. The Scientist consulted her thermometer. “It is getting colder out,” she noted. “The temperature in my house is too cold. I shall build a Thermostat to automatically measure the temperature and connect it to a Furnace, so my house remains comfortable this winter. If my house becomes cold, the Thermostat will sense this and cause the Furnace to correct it.”

So the Scientist did just this. She created a Thermostat from an Arduino and a DS18B20 temperature sensor.

At first, the new Thermostat caused a few problems. First, the relay would not fire, due to too low a coil voltage. Then, a programming glitch caused the whole house to become quite warm.

The Mystic, visiting his friend, chuckled. “God provides for me, friend Scientist. I have no need of your theories and Scientific Method. See, my house is quite comfortable.”

The Scientist agreed. “Yes, the temperature in your house is perfect. But that’s because it’s early October. You really should consider making a Thermostat, so that when your house becomes cold, it will turn on your Furnace, and make you warm.”

As she spoke, the Scientist continued to refine the thermostat’s design. With a reasonable two-degree-C hysteresis setting and a new drive transistor, the thermostat was soon working well and keeping the house nice and comfortable.

Her job done, the Scientist went next door to the Mystic’s house, to offer advice on how he could also build a thermostat. (The Scientist didn’t always understand the Mystic, but loved his stories and the stained glass and ever-present smell of incense, which made his house a peaceful place.) Making a second Thermostat would now be easy, thanks to the Scientist’s efforts in documenting what did and did not work when building the first one.

“I do not need a thermostat,” the Mystic answered. “God provides for His children. My house is warm and comfortable, since I have built it as my Book of Lore says.”

The Scientist, noting that she could see her breath, was inclined to disagree. “It does seem chilly in here.”

“Ah, yes,” the Mystic replied. “This is clearly a test of my faith. This house is warm. I need no thermometer or furnace. God will provide,” he explained through slightly chattering teeth.

The Scientist shrugged. “Well, if you should change your mind, I will be happy to help.”

…

And so it was. While the Mystic was able to bundle up and survive the winter (he never did explain the sudden need for blankets in a “warm” house), he was mysteriously ill for much of the winter season. The Scientist, meanwhile, remained comfortable while collecting more data to improve the thermostat’s functionality.

The moral of this tale? Even the wiser religious leaders agree that we must look out for ourselves if we are to thrive — or even survive. Science provides us the power to greatly improve our lives and the lives of others, if we are willing to listen to reason. Science is simply a collection of noting what works and what doesn’t, under various circumstances, and then creating and most importantly, testing hypotheses about how the world works. If a hypothesis doesn’t correctly predict real-world results, it is incorrect — no matter how beautiful it may be and no matter how ancient the text that suggests it.

Mr. Carson: Please start acting like the intelligent MD you supposedly are, rather than an agent of the Spanish Inquisition. You’re embarrassing yourself. Nobody in his or her right mind would question that thermostats work. They work because the science behind them works. Evolution is the same. It really works. It really happened. If your religious views are not compatible with this, then they are wrong.

Posted in Current Events, Digital Citizenship | Leave a comment

Jumping Across The Galaxy

Posted on 2015-09-15 by M. Eric Carr

I’ve recently been busy exploring the galaxy in Elite:Dangerous, which I’ve written about before. It’s an interesting game, and the in-game universe is beautiful and awesome, at least once you get away from “civilized” space (where other players and NPCs often shoot at you for no logical reason.)

However, as you quickly find out, the galaxy is a big place. It’s about 100,000 light years (ly) across. Even in a 34th-century starship with faster-than-light drive, that’s a long way. The FTL frame-shift drives in E:D work by jumping from star to star. The farther the destination star from your current location, the more fuel is consumed. Also, for each ship+engine combination, there is a maximum possible jump distance.

When out exploring (heading out to find the lucrative Neutron Star fields, for instance), it doesn’t take long to start thinking of distances in terms of jumps. Soon, those fancy ship accessories start looking more like boat anchors, and you start to think about offloading them to get that last bit of jump range.

But that begs the question — how important is that last little bit of jump range, really? If your ship can do 30.1ly at a jump, is it really worth downgrading to Class D thrusters to get that last little bit of range?

Sometimes, yes, it does matter. If your path goes through sparse patches of stars, gaps in star placement can look like bottomless chasms that cannot be crossed (since none of the stars on the other side are in range.) For want of that last light-year or two, you might have to go around the void, adding many jumps to your trip — or you might not be able to reach these stars at all.

At the other extreme, sometimes more range isn’t important. If you can get to a destination in fifteen jumps with a 30.6ly range, increasing your max range to 31.6ly might not matter, if the best path still has the same number of jumps.

How to calculate this? Well, without the actual data from the Stellar Forge engine, it’s all ultimately guesswork. However, we can take a stab at finding the conditions under which range increases matter, based on a random scattering of simulated stars.

This simulation code (written for FreeBasic for Windows) creates a 1000 x 100 x 100 block of space and populates it with a fixed number of stars. All of the stars except the first and last are placed at random locations within this block, and Dijkstra’s Algorithm is used to navigate from one side of the block to the other. For extremely small jump distances, the ship cannot reach the other side. However, once the available jump range passes a given mark (17.0ly, in one simulation), the destination star becomes reachable. Further increases in jump range often result in the destination being reachable in fewer jumps.

Based on a preliminary simulation of 100,000 stars in the 100 x 100 x 1000 light-year “box,” here are the results for how many jumps were needed to reach the destination. (The same star positions were used for each run, so as to give a fair comparison.) The percentage of stars reachable from the starting position is also given. (Some of these may be isolated along the edges of the box, and would be reachable in a more realistic simulation. Another item for the to-do list.)

Jump Range Jumps TMJ % Efficiency % reachable
15 67 0 35.9
15.5 65 0 40.8
16 63 0 42.69
16.5 61 0 46.87
17 94 59 62.76 52.71
17.5 86 58 67.44 53.84
18 78 56 71.79 60.63
18.5 74 55 74.32 67.35
19 71 53 74.64 68.51
19.5 67 52 77.61 71.05
20 66 50 75.75 72.36
20.5 63 49 77.77 76.79
21 61 48 78.68 77.53
21.5 58 47 81.03 79.69
22 57 46 80.7 84.37
22.5 55 45 81.81 84.72
23 53 44 83.01 84.89
23.5 52 43 82.69 86.41
24 51 42 82.35 86.7
24.5 48 41 85.41 86.8
25 47 40 85.1 86.9
25.5 46 40 86.95 90.51
26 45 39 86.66 90.85
26.5 44 38 86.36 91.34
27 43 38 88.37 91.44
27.5 42 37 88.09 91.6
28 42 36 85.71 91.64
28.5 41 36 87.8 92.36
29 40 35 87.5 92.43
29.5 39 34 87.17 92.44
30 38 34 89.47 92.53
30.5 37 33 89.18 94.02
31 37 33 89.18 94.09
31.5 36 32 88.88 94.14
32 35 32 91.42 94.34
32.5 35 31 88.57 94.63
33 34 31 91.17 94.69
33.5 34 30 88.23 94.72
34 33 30 90.9 96.26
34.5 33 29 87.87 96.28
35 32 29 90.62 96.53
35.5 32 29 90.62 96.57
36 31 28 90.32 96.9
36.5 31 28 90.32 96.96

I’m currently investigating the effects of star density on these calculations. I expect the results to scale according to the average distance between stars, which should intuitively go by the cube root of the number of stars (since a lattice of stars with half the distance would have 8x as many stars per unit volume, on average.)

Posted in BASIC, Coding, Current Events, Math, Science | Leave a comment

Amazon Dash

Posted on 2015-09-06 by M. Eric Carr

I’m starting to think Amazon is evil. They keep coming up with cool ways to make me spend money.

Recently, I tried Amazon Fresh — Amazon’s new grocery-delivery service. I’ve been very impressed so far: they give one-hour delivery windows, have been on-time so far with very professional service, and the convenience can’t be beat. Plus, frozen goods ship with little packets of dry ice, which is always fun to play with (as long as you’re careful to not get frostbitten.) More about that, later.

Now, Amazon has come up with Amazon Dash.

Amazon Dash. (Click for larger.)

The new Amazon Dash shopping-list gadget. (Click for larger.)

Setup involves taking the Dash out of the box, putting in the two supplied AA batteries (they even sprung for Energizers), holding down both buttons to turn it on, and running through the Dash Setup on your smartphone or tablet. (There ought to be a way to do this with a PC, too, but I’m not sure that’s supported.) All told, it took about a minute, including entering the WiFi access code into the app to finish configuration and get the Dash on the home network. They really went out of their way to make the process smooth.

Using the Dash is ridiculously easy. There are two options: Scan a UPC barcode (which works very well and is very fast), or press the microphone button to add a voice note to your list. Log in to Amazon Fresh, and the items you’ve scanned and voice notes you’ve recorded are shown and can easily be added to your shopping cart.

It’s the second-easiest way I’ve ever seen to shop, and the easiest that I’ve tried, so far. For ultimate convenience, though, there’s Amazon Dash Button. Buy one for $4.99 (and you get $4.99 credit for its use), configure it, and reordering commonly-used items (for instance, cat food or litter) is literally a single press of a button away.

Amazon Dash Button. Press this one, and detergent shows up in a day or two. Talk about convenient!

And, apparently, they’re hackable!

…although, if the Internet of Things translates into a separate button for everything, I’m gonna have to go with a Class A network and get a bigger router…

Posted in Current Events, Design, Networking, Reviews, Toys, User Interface Design | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Microcode

Posted on 2015-08-30 by M. Eric Carr

Every so often, you come across an idea that is truly brilliant. Such ideas can sometimes make complex, expensive problems seem trivial. The idea of microcode is one such idea.

In order to work its magic, the* Central Processing Unit(CPU) in a computer needs to move data around between various sub-units inside itself. Every clock cycle, a control logic circuit dictates what electronic gates must open and close to move, for example, a byte of information from the B accumulator into the adder, and then a byte from the A accumulator into the L register. The control bus and the logic behind it are the choreographers, dispatchers, and traffic cops of the CPU.

In the early days, designing a CPU involved not only deciding on the number and width of registers and choosing and implementing an instruction set, but designing and simplifying the Boolean logic required to distinguish between various opcodes, which may or may not have been numbered with regard to ease of coding.

Microcode, conceived in 1951 by Maurice Wilkes, makes all of this much easier. Instruction cycles are broken up into T-states. For each T-state of each instruction, the CPU architect decides which gates should be active and which should be off (tristated). These are collected into a matrix, which is simply implemented as a ROM array on the chip. Each bit of the ROM corresponds to the desired behavior of a particular gate (the bit number), at a particular time (T state) in a certain instruction (the opcode). There’s no need to employ complex Quine-McCluskey simplification methods — it’s just a question of connecting the ROM to the gates.

 

* okay, “the CPU”, or “one of the CPUs.” Sheesh.

Posted in Design, Digital | Leave a comment