Radiation hormesis: contradicts all we know about evolution, can be shown false with elementary physics and math.

See Radiation hormesis. This thing is on the rise (just like intelligent design), with potentially grave direct consequences if some nuclear regulatory body accepts this 'theory' and relaxes nuclear pollution standards - and similarly grave consequences if nuclear power opponents pick up the idea and use it their way, hints at which you can see in this wiki article ("In all likelihood, recognizing that low dose effects can't be predicted from high dose experiments would force a strengthening of public health standards, not their weakening, as hormesis proponents would argue.").

Putting aside that hormesis is just a new name for old bullshit (see quack medicines of early 20th century. Radium toothpaste, uranium ore teapots, you name it), there's outline of what is fundamentally wrong with "hormesis theory":

Firstly, according to the understanding of evolution, a wholly beneficial "defense response" does not need to be switched off in absence of ionizing radiation. Even more, the 'switch', even if present, very quickly goes away if it is not needed. For real biological examples of this see permanent tan in blacks (tan doesn't switch off in absence of light, because in tropics you always need tan), lactose tolerance in whites (lactose production doesn't switch off in adulthood). Those are just 2 most obvious examples, which are also examples of very quick evolution that happened recently in the history of homo sapiens. I'm sure there's a lot of more obscure examples in animals; I am not really a biologist.
(It's interesting that hormesis proponents love to refer to tan as example of defense response triggered by radiation. Well, used to. Hopefully, with election of Obama, whites will stop defining 'human' as something which produces melanin mostly in response to sunlight)

Secondly, humans today are exposed to about same level of radiation as in the past - or higher because of sealed homes and radon (in case you want to talk about cavemen, don't bother. Caves were never the primarily habitat of humans, nor are habitable caves well sealed. Bones are found in caves so much because bones preserve in caves a lot better than outside caves).

Thirdly, it wouldn't be a problem for living organisms to evolve to concentrate naturally radioactive elements, had those been so beneficial. Seriously, there's enough naturally radioactive elements around. Better yet, cells are producing some free radicals all by themselves without any ionizing radiation.

But okay, let's just follow less sophisticated of radiation hormesis proponents and speculate that radiation in small doses produces some chemicals that are required for some cell metabolism.
After all, cellular machinery being complex it seems very reasonable that cell's response to radiation would be nonlinear... or does it? A single cell wouldn't make good particle counter... it is, after all, very tiny, and rarely gets hit by ionizing particle or gamma ray photon. How bad of a Geiger counter a cell would be, you might ask? Turns out cell sized Geiger counter would be far worse than I would have thought.

Did you know that you have on order of hundreds times more cells in your body than you absorb ionizing particles in a year, at background radiation level? I didn't know, but fortunately it is quite easy and straightforward to calculate number of particles (of specific type) that your body absorbs when you get specific dose.
From the definition of Sievert, the general formula for number of particles for given dose is:
Number of particles = (Dose in Sievert / Q factor) * body mass / kinetic energy per particle
Background dose is 2.4E-3 Sievert per year. (http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/gareport.pdf)
Let's take body mass as 80kg.
For 1MeV soft gamma ray photons (Q=1), the max number is:
N = 2.4E-3 J/kg * 80 kg /(1E6 electron volt) = 1.2E12
About hundredth of number of cells in your body, which is estimated as 1E14
Let's redo the calculation for Radon's alpha particles, of which you need much smaller number for same 'dose':
N = (2.4E-3/20 J/kg) *80kg / 6E6 electron volt = 1E10
That's some ten thousands times fewer alpha particles than there are cells in your body.
The cells which suffer impacts to the cell nucleus are even smaller percentage.
Alpha particles usually stop within a few cells. Gamma photons ionize when they get scattered, meaning that gamma photon doesn't just rip through your body ionizing stuff on its path, but delivers focal damage at few spots. The bottom line is, individual cell is very rarely affected by background radiation at all.

I hope it should be fairly obvious that there couldn't be any 'nonlinear' response of individual cell to such rather low probability of it getting struck by gamma or alpha particle during its lifetime. It either gets struck and has response, or it does not, and has no response. Probability is by definition linear. Only at the doses approaching 1 Sievert, a significant portion of your cells would be struck by ionizing particles [that's well in the 'glow in the dark' territory. Human's lethal dose is 3..5 Sievert], and cells could start actually responding to count of events per time. (It is indeed well documented that cells do exhibit defene response at doses approaching 1 Sievert. The response (cell division arrest) is in no way generally beneficial (if your cells stop dividing, you'll die when your existing cells wear out), but you might survive otherwise lethal dose if cells are not dividing)

Conclusions: The linear no threshold model is based upon understanding that cells respond to ionizing radiation in probabilistic way; the linearity does not come from any simplified assumption about organism or cellular machinery, but rather from how statistics and probabilities work. When you increase dose ten times over background, you do not increase dose to any cells by ten times. You're increasing the very small population of cells which suffer an ionization event in the nucleus, ten times, thus increasing ten times the population of cells that can turn cancerous. (actually, worse than that. You're increasing hundred times the population of cells which suffer two ionization events, and thousand times population which suffers triple ionization event. Quadratic or cubic dose response effect has not been observed, though. There's a lot of other sources of DNA damage besides radiation)

But what's about multiple cells, you might ask? Immune system and whatnot? Well, this is pretty much covered by evolutionary objection above. Try imagine evolved organism that would somehow measure level of radiation by monitoring a lot of cells, just to handicap itself when the level of radiation is at or below natural background - and 'unhandicap' itself on the level of say 10x natural background (which is still very low and not life threatening, but is also very unusual in nature).
Makes no sense whatsoever. That's no strawman; that's what it takes for organism to exhibit effect of radiation hormesis. Barring any possibility of direct beneficial effect, the 'beneficial response' to a stimulus is equivalent to detrimental handicap in absence of stimulus.

Furthermore, hormesis is just bad science. Studies are fraudulent - consisting of comparisons between populations without control for the age group and smoking. As typical in scientific fraud, research conclusions focus entirely on the non-scientific aspects such as safety policies, entirely ignoring the scientific implications (if the response is not linear, then you have to throw entire concept of dose out of the window. It is only the linear no threshold response model under which all kinds of ionizing radiation are equivalent (up to the scaling factor)). To put it very bluntly, there's all reasons to think that hormesis proponents are not merely mistaken, but are actively lying. A genuinely mistaken scientist explores the scientific consequences of his erroneous research. A fraudster, on other hand, focuses solely on promoting the policy changes which he wants to enact through his fraud, and shies away from the scientific implications of his research; for the science is interlinked, and scientific implications of fraudulent research would contradict a lot of other, seemingly unrelated experiments and knowledge.

Tiny Linux update.

The 00e version is same 00d from 15th august, except the Linux package now includes latest libstdc++.so.6 so that it can work on older distros which do not have compatible version of this library. Thanks to users for reporting the issue.

Polynomial update.

Minor middle of the month update.

Gameplay: now the screen "glitches" in the old-tv way when you're being hit while having low health (not just when dead). Now you'll know when to run for your life. The backstory is that electromagnetic shield is down, and enemy shots are actually hitting your ship, causing your onboard sensors and computer to glitch.
The "insane" gameplay is more insane now (it is actually really hard to get score above 1000 on insane).

Bugfixes: fixed some crashes on old graphics cards.

System, all platforms: Migrated from ALUT to ALURE, added ogg loader libraries (but not music yet).

OS X platform: Now includes latest OpenAL version in the bundle, all because Apple's software OpenAL is crashing randomly in mixer thread.

Bug in download page fixed.

Downloading of old version (for paid customers) sometimes served previously downloaded version (=latest) instead of requested version because of broken caching. Fixed and tested.

Drake's equation

I think that one's given far too much credit.
reference
Parameters in it just do not correspond to any real, measurable quantities, and there's far too many assumptions.

Reality is very complicated. There is a wide variety of stars, some of them more variable than others (and thus more of hazard to life), with a range of lifetimes. There's wide variety of planetary systems possible. Some systems may be slow to develop intelligent life and may require long-lived, old stars - and some systems may develop intelligent life relatively quickly.
It could be that unusually large moon is a requirement - Earth got one, and we do not even know if irregularity of combination of moon&sun tides is absolutely essential or unimportant. Nor do we know how common are planets with large moons. Most curiously, looking from Earth, moon has almost same disk size as Sun - we don't know if that doesn't matter or is very important to development of culture.
It could be that Jupiter is very important for diverting comets and protecting earth from constant asteroid bombardment - if there was a dinosaur killing sized meteorite every 20 millions years, intelligent life might never have evolved on Earth (that's what Stephen Hawking thinks about it, and it seems quite reasonable). Some stars are poor in heavy elements, and life as we know it requires heavy elements. Position of star within the galaxy may matter a lot.

But, of course, Drake's equation has nothing of that. No, it just has abstract "planets within continuously habitable zone". Err. Our own orbit is not 'continuously habitable' for most animals larger than rat - because of asteroids and comets that intersect it once in a while - look at what happened to dinosaurs, and exact same thing would happen to us, should dino-killing meteorite strike tomorrow. Not to mention that solar variability results in ice ages. Such somewhat hostile but not too hostile environment may be yet another requirement for intelligent life.
It's not hard to imagine a habitable world where survival is too hard for anything big, and nothing intelligent ever evolves. It is not hard to imagine Eden without the apple, a world that is too perfect for life, where apes are never forced off the trees then forced to survive ice age. Would the competition between species compensate, leading to intelligence even on such very hospitable planets? Or would it not? We do not know. Worse yet we don't even know what factors we do not know. All what we know is that a planet with history identical to that of Earth's would result in human society - with no knowledge whatsoever as of how closely similar a planet needs to be to develop something else that also sends radio signals.

There is far more variables in reality than in Drake's equation, and those variables are not merely multiplied together, but are all inter-linked in very nonlinear ways (and its not probabilities that vary, but probability distributions). There could be probability of intelligent life on planets with huge moon, and another, lower probability for planets without huge moon - or it may just take longer for intelligent life to emerge without moon, requiring much older, lighter, earlier star - which may be poorer in heavy elements. There can be varying size moons. And then probability of having a planet with huge moon within habitable zone may depend to mass of star (which is linked to lifetime). You cannot meaningfully dissect that mess into half dozen abstract parameters that are just multiplied together. It's like dissecting a hologram - each piece will still be as complex as whole, unless you get to *really* tiny pieces.

A huge number of screenshots.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dmytryl/Staged2PolynomialScreenshots
(its not stage2, its staged2 which means screenshots staged for picking a few for website)

I also totally forgot that i shared album of my old CG renders, using Picasa. See it here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dmytryl/

Monthly Polynomial Update - version 00c

Changes:

• Arenas have names now.
• Random selection of arenas for demo, instead of first 10.
• Improved the 'Dynamic Reactor' effect. Now, bullets and explosions imprint onto background. You can also customize background's update speed.
• Booster bonus (lets you fly 3x faster). [of questionable goodness though - it seem to make things feel smaller, for me :/]
  
• Bonus icons improved.
• 'Insane' is more difficult now (autoaim lasts less long, enemies shot faster and thus harder to dodge).
• Added death effects - when you're killed, image 'loses synchronization', stretches, and/or whites out, in random combinations.
• Free demo has 11 levels now (numbered 0 to 10), full has 33
• Configuration stored in your home folder by default now (if you want to make portable install, see readme for instructions).
  
• Various bugfixes

If you bought full version, click on "check updates" to get onto update downloads page.

Todo: I'm going to make a new gameplay video sometime soon.

Polarized light in.... beetles

From BBC

Under left circularly polarised light, which matched the direction of the helices, the beetles appeared "super-green", because, as Dr Srinivasarao explained, "there weren't that many other wavelengths of light reflected back at you".

That's just amazing. (see the post below for less natural example of colors from polarization of light)

Strain patterns in plexiglass.

Polynomial: I am still working on multiplayer, and there is not much to show off. I made a science video, though.



Using regular polarizing sunglasses as a filter (I do not have real polarizing camera filter).

How it works: Light waves are not like sound waves, but more like displacement waves in a stretched rope - the light "waves sideways". Usually light is waving kind of randomly, in all directions. When the light is waving in just one direction, that direction is said to be a 'polarization direction' for the wave. LCD displays emit polarized light, which is usually waving in approximately diagonal direction (I do not know if direction is same for all displays or just for LG displays); polarizing sunglasses only pass vertically polarized light. So when you look through polarizing sunglasses on LCD display, at right angle, no light goes through, because display gives out \ diagonal polarized light, and glasses at that angle only pass / polarized light.

Crystals of various sorts, strained plastics, and similar materials act in a very interesting way. The light waving along the stretch direction moves at slightly different speed in such materials, from the light waving orthogonally to the stretch direction.

If plastic's strain direction is at angle to the polarization direction, the polarization of light appears to flip as light goes through the plastic. Polarization of different wavelengths (spectral colours) of light flip at different rate as light goes through such material (it is flipping again and again). In result, for some wavelengths (colours) the polarization is completely flipped(flipped odd number of times) and the light passes through sunglasses, and for some wavelengths, the polarization is not flipped (flipped even number of times) and no light goes through. That's where colours in this video come from. The colours remind of soap bubble film, and indeed, the spectra of those colours is pretty much identical to thin film interference that you see in soap bubbles or a thin layer of oil/gasoline/etc on water.

For more precise details, see Wikipedia:Birefringence.

(By the way, LCD display itself uses flipping of polarization in liquid crystal (which is put under electrical strain rather than mechanical strain, i.e. electric field) to form the image, but I digress)

Todo: sometime I'm going to make better video with narration and pictures how polarization works.

For now, I recommend simply trying it yourself and showing it to some friends!
Just get some polarizing filter (I'd recommend linear, though circular will work. The polarization in material is actually flipping like horizontal, right circular, vertical, left circular, horizontal, right circular, and so on. Circular polarization is like swinging rope in circle pattern - a rotating wave moves through the rope). Stay away from those uv polarizing filters, those are probably totally irrelevant. You can also get polarized sunglasses, those are better for visual observation.

Actually, you can do this experiment even without buying any fancy stuff. Look in the reflection of display in piece of glass, at approximately 50 degrees angle. Tilt the glass to the side while maintaining reflection angle, until reflection becomes 'dark'. (I did not manage to get a good picture of this with my camera, due to lack of third arm, but it works very well). At some angle, only one polarization of light is reflected. That's why polarizing sunglasses help filter out reflections from water or ice - the glasses let other, orthogonal polarization direction pass, but I digress.

In fact you can even do that without LCD display. Light from blue sky (at the 90 degrees angle from sun) is polarized! So you can impress your friends by showing that off with piece of broken glass, and some plastic garbage. The hidden beauty of everyday things. (Practice first, the good angle might be hard to get right at first)

[BTW. As you can see, I'm still experimenting with ads. I'm very interested in efficiency of ads, naturally, as the time will come when I'll be possibly paying for ads for The Polynomial]

Amarok again.

Looking at it again, 2.1.1 seems somewhat better than 2.1 (a huge, massive, ground breaking improvement: you can disable context thats in the middle and gets in the way of drag)

[edit: installed 2.1.1 . How the fuck do I actually disable that damned panel and get 1 splitter here? A shame, such huge disappointment, I thought I was wrong in my rant. Paranoya: RIAA probably would love that context thing. ISP stores logs for a while and it can potentially be useful as evidence in a court case if they can get logs from isp. Not that I personally care but anyway. Pirates better watch out.]

Upcoming amarok 2.2 (with dockable dialogs, if those will work) look kind of promising on the video, even though the way features are listed (docking just last, not even 'last but not least') doesn't look terribly great if it is any indicator of views on usability or priorities.

What made 2.1 particularly annoying (and prompted lot of ranting everywhere, myself included) is that in case of Mandriva (and, I heard, Ubuntu), after routine update we just find 1.4.10 removed without any straightforward way to revert. I'd blame packagers if it was 'Amarok 2.0.2' or 'Amarok2 0.1' or something else labelled unstable - but as it is labelled stable, it is entirely reasonable for a distribution to have it default.
On Mandriva in particular, you need to get 1.4.10 from 2009.0 repository - you are not supposed to do this (and it may fail to work for people whom did install 2009.1 afresh. 2009.0 RPMs are not supposed to be used on 2009.1 install. It's a luck when that works).

All the problem stems from how "rewrite" retained the name but entirely lost what the name used to stand for. It is not "excellent player 2.1", it's "average player 0.1", and pretty much nobody wants to overwrite "excellent player 1.4" with "average player 0.1".

Link, see comments for how Ubuntu users generally feel about amarok 2

Amarok 2 sucks.

Amarok 2 (new version of a Linux music player) sucks just as much as old Amarok rocked. A lot of major functionality regressions, not to mention screwed up, less configurable user interface (as of 2.1, you can't even fully disable this stupid 'context' panel in middle, let alone use system skin).
That's really sad. It takes intelligence to fix or improve something that's broken or missing. Fixing other people's bugs is not easy, as well as addition of new functionality. Whereas fucking up user interfaces is very easy and every moron can do that; partial 'rewrites' with lot of regressions are relatively easy as well. So when morons take over when transmissible zombie-like insanity takes over the developers, naturally, there's always huge user interface redesign, lot of fixing of things that are not broken, and lot of regressions in functionality, all while nothing that's broken gets fixed. If I were more paranoid, I'd think KDE4 in general is being sabotaged, but as it is I think it's just got damaged by it's own popularity. (edit: Sorry for the harsh language, but that's how development looks from outside when there is a huge usability regression in a 'stable' release; I don't mean bugs and lack of support for various things [evidently ipods are supported now], I mean craziness like, for example, not reimplementing quite successful layout, but rather trying various totally weird stuff like putting 'context' in the centre, in the way of drag and drop path. Rewrites for new frameworks do not have to result in SO massive usability regression; there's no reason not to reimplement old layout at least until new layout is designed)

Instructions for getting Amarok 1.4 back, for Mandriva:

1. Set up repositories for mandriva 2009.0 , via easyurpmi
2. Install Amarok 1.4.10 through package manager
3. As root, edit /etc/urpmi/skip.list , and add /^amarok/ to prevent auto'updates'.

Similar instructions may work for other RPM based distros.

Version bump.

Version bump to 00b (I improved the sales related scripts, so I can versionbump freely without going through 10-item checklist).
Check Updates button (in full version) should work as well.
Important changes:

• Editor, by user request: In full version, you can now save images of any size (limited by video card). My 512MB geforce 9800 GT works fine all way up to 8192x8192 ; pretty much all cards that run Polynomial should allow that resolution, newer cards may allow even larger. Various glitches happen though when exceeding max resolution, that is to be fixed & workarounded.
  
• Various small fixes, mostly for older cards.
• Further reduced video memory usage.
  

Even more fixes.

Added a workaround for Radeon 1950 (and possibly some other cards). If you have ugly pixelation issue, go to Visuals tab, then enable the workaround. With the workaround, it looks almost as good as normally on recent cards.

In other news, network multiplayer is progressing, but not ready for release yet.

Some more fixes.

Fixes for the above(i.e. below) - mentioned fixes. Shouldn't crash under Mesa 3D anymore, though i dunno how it looks, with pretty much minimal quality.
Important changes:

• Fixed broken reverb (should sound lot better).
  
• Fixed segfault in shipped openal-soft.
  
• Fixed a bunch of segfaults on older graphics hardware, it should draw at reduced quality now.

Some fixes for Linux.

Updated the binaries but did not versionbump. Some fixes for crashes on certain Linux distributions.

Thoughts on Google PageRank and relevancy.

Firstly, pagerank is a great algorithm, when applied to a web not influenced by pagerank.

The problems however lie in how pagerank and relevancy ranking influence the Internet and its own input. Let's use my game The Polynomial as example. At the moment, the top result for "polynomial demo" is gamespot page about my game. These guys do not link to my website at all.
In result, some people whom searched for 'polynomial demo' do themselves link to gamespot instead of my pages even though they would prefer to link original author. That is turning high pagerank into form of self-fulfilling prophecy. It could well be how gamespot managed to get high pagerank and relevancy in first place. I cannot compete. I cannot pay for ad links to artificially inflate search engine ranks - and even if I could, I would not. I do not have time to bother reorganizing links on my website as to focus pagerank on a single page. Neither can most independent developers.
I do not mind gamespot much. They have nice user opinions about my game, and my game contains "get full version" button that is opening my page. I only wish they would play fair and link to original author, or not require registration for download.

In retrospect, I should have created a lot of well-interlinked pages covering all the expected keywords, but well. I'll try to think up something for the final release, as well as write an article about it if I have time.