I have written before about past winners, and of research sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Yet I have not found explicit writing that attempts to join together the separate strands of science and the divine through the prism of chaos until I read some of Heller's works. This may be because of his very obvious dual hats: Heller is both a cosmologist and Catholic priest, who managed to thrive in communist Poland.

Heller is really interested in the ultimate beginnings of everything. His work and speculation must necessarily include theology because his target is the start of everything before there was a Start to Everything:

Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

The Problem with Wikipedia. (Click to  enlarge)

Recently, Joshua E. Blumenstock of UC Berkeley performed a statistical analysis of 1000's of wikipedia pages, looking for predictors of quality articles. (Where "quality articles" was taken to be featured articles. These articles are given this rating by Wikipedia editors, using specific criteria.   As of this posting, there are approximately 2000 featured articles out of over 2.4 million wikipedia articles.)

In his paper Automatically Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles Blumenstock describes the search for correlation between "featuredness" and a a wikiload of possible variables. The variables included surface features (e.g. # of characters, words, one-syllable words), structural features (e.g. links , images, tables), a variety of readability metrics (e.g. Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau Index), and part of speech tags (e.g. nouns, past participles, perterites).

He needn't have looked so deeply. It turns out that word count alone is an incredibly potent predictor. Amazingly, Blumenstock found that whether an article had greater or less than 1830 words was all that was needed to predict whether an article was featured with 97% accuracy!

Now why is this?

Fractal tumor on Wild Cabbage Leaf

Now there's a different way to consider time-fractals - proposed by Carlos Escudero and colleagues of the Institute for Mathematics and Fundamental Physics in Madrid, in their Dynamic Scaling of Non-Euclidean Interfaces

Escudero "performs calculations of the dynamic scaling (how a surface changes in space and over time at several different scales) of growing structures, such as the kind of semiconductor films used in the microchip industry where, even under the most carefully controlled of conditions, rough (non-Euclidean) geometries can exist. He found that the moment-by-moment behavior of the surfaces are strongly effected by the fractal geometry."

Complex Suture

One often pictures fractals as consisting of pretty pictures generated by computer programs, but they are quite prevalent in nature. A notable example can be found in the fossils of ancient cephalopods, specifically nautiloids and ammonoids. Nautoloids and ammonoids are the ancient ancestors of modern squids, octopi, and the nautilus. The ancient organisms looked like modern squids and octopi with shells, some elongated and some coiled like a snail. These shells had internal chambers that the organism filled with gas for buoyancy. Each chamber is separated by a wall, or septa. The contact line between the septa and the inner shell wall is called a suture line. The structure of the suture line determines how well the organism can resist water pressure and adjust its buoyancy. The evolution of suture lines follows an increasingly fractal-like pattern from straight sutures to highly undulated sutures. In complex sutures, the dips and folds in the undulations are called lobes and saddles, respectively.

Often times what comes out instead is "science," a stream of misapplied, poorly understood concepts. Maybe it's writing for deadlines, or maybe it's just the overall scientific illiteracy that grips many, but there is no doubt that the world needs more reporters that know the very basic scientific ideas. Otherwise we are all faced with an every growing body of articles and blog posts that will only reinforce the already shaky scientific foundation that many apparently have. (I have already noted recent media errors in articles on friction and gravity.)

My latest gripe? The May 12, 2008 issue of Newsweek contains a very positive article about students at MIT trying to lower energy costs wherever "energy hogs" exist, with a major hog - your typical vending machine - one of the main targets of their energy-waster-busters attention. Unfortunately, the amount of energy consumed by an average vending machine is incorrectly stated. According to Newsweek "The average soda dispenser consumes 3,500 kilowatts a year." As anyone who actually pays utilities should know, a kilowatt is a rate of energy use (it's 1000's of joules/sec). The actual unit of energy used is then found by multiplying the Rate of energy use x running time, i.e. the kilowatt-hour (kW-hr). One kW-hr is the amount of energy used by a device running at a rate of 1 kW for 1 hour. This energy amount is typically how your electric bill is determined by the electric company that services your home. The price per kw-hr will vary depending on the area of the country, the source of the electric company's energy, and time of year. Current rates for my area are approximately 17cents/kw-hr.