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Minisode 0.4: Comin' Up Next
408 Plays7 years ago
Jonathan and Gabriel talk about the next four episodes coming down the pike, including Humanity 2.0, which debuts Tuesday, April 2nd 2017.
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Transcript
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Podcast Announcements & Tools
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00:02:31
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The following clips are not studio quality recordings. They are on-site discussions.
Introduction to Transhumanism
00:02:38
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to a brand new minisode. This is Breaking Math Minisode 4, and we have got a real treat for you today. Today we've got a nice little appetizer. We are going to talk about our four next full-length episodes. We've been real creative lately. Yes, and the one coming out on the second is called Humanity 2.0. And what's that one about?
00:03:00
Speaker
Humanity 2.0 is a combination of a few things. The main topic is transhumanism, but we decided to present it in a way by talking about how the topic has been introduced in science fiction. Now Jonathan, can you explain essentially what transhumanism is?
00:03:17
Speaker
Sure, transhumanism is all about what happens next in humanity. We're at a crossroads where machines are getting increasingly advanced and we're at a crossroads with them and this is about what happens after that. That's the best way I could explain it.
00:03:35
Speaker
I think you did wonderful. Now what's really cool is anyone can do a simple internet search on transhumanism and you'll have articles pop up from National Geographic, you'll have articles from Wired magazine, you'll have articles from many many magazines and we talk about this. And essentially a lot of these topics include things like brain implants, you know somehow is there some way that we can
00:03:58
Speaker
combine our brains with a computer in some way or even a whole other route is genetic engineering in fact. Now you might be wondering why is a math podcast doing an episode about
00:04:09
Speaker
transhumanism, which is not really related to math at all. And the reason why is because breaking math, as you may or may not know, is part of Santa Fe Trail Media. And Santa Fe Trail Media is releasing new podcasts coming probably this summer and afterwards. Yes, yes, actually. So in addition to having breaking math, we're actually going to have an entire podcast just dedicated to the topic of transhumanism.
00:04:32
Speaker
And I believe it'll heavily involve transhumanism as it's introduced and used as a concept in science fiction. So we thought this next episode might actually be a nice preview for it. Yes.
Exploring Encryption
00:04:45
Speaker
And of course, after transhumanism, we have an awesome episode on encryption.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yes, yes, that episode is a very, very exciting one. That also brings us back to mathematics. With encryption, that involves a lot of combinatorics. That's used heavily in computer science. Not to mention prime number factoring.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, some of the topics that we're going with that we actually plan to talk about on the encryption episode, one of my favorite subjects, one of my favorite authors and physicist is Richard Feynman. I actually made sure to include a section in the script where I retail his tale of picking into locks in Los Alamos Labs. That's a fascinating story and very relevant to encryption in general.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the encryption that's inherent to things like Bitcoin and the Onion Web. Yeah. Let's see here. So we also have a featured guest on that one, a very good friend of mine from years ago. He's actually an engineer currently. He works at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's a computer engineer and his passion is encryption. We're going to talk about how safe we really are. We're going to talk about password security.
00:06:05
Speaker
And also, one of my favorite topics, I realize I keep saying one of my favorite topics, but it's true, so many topics are my favorite, social engineering. I love social engineering. Yeah, social engineering is all about hacking people instead of hacking systems. And then, do you want to talk about the next episode after that? Yes, yes. Actually, and you know, there's so much that we can say about any one of these episodes, but you guys will just have to stay tuned.
Forensics in Mathematics
00:06:33
Speaker
This next episode we have is just in the planning stages and I'm also extremely excited about this. As I was looking at a couple of podcasts and a couple of groups, I noticed that one real popular theme right now is true crime podcasts. How long has that been popular for?
00:06:51
Speaker
at least three years and one of my favorite podcasts is actually about true crime last podcast on the left and we really thought that it'd be cool to merge the two fields of forensics and Mathematics and they already are merged. There's something called accounting forensics that is part of what we're gonna do and there's a whole TV show about this kind of math called numbers and
00:07:15
Speaker
Interesting, yeah. So what's really cool is with forensics. My first thought with forensics is, of course, the science of following crime scenes. How do you collect samples from a crime scene and how do you gather information from your samples about what happened? That whole field has gone through so many developments in just the last 100 years. Is it possible to preview a little bit about some of how that field has changed? Sure. There's this one guy.
00:07:43
Speaker
I promise we'll have his name on the episode. I'm pretty sure is Jacques and I will be able to have his last name. I promise he discovered that anytime that you touch something with cloth, you leave some strands behind and that leads to a trail. I mean,
00:07:59
Speaker
For example, then you have a fingerprint analysis, which is somehow less robust than we, like it's becoming less robust actually, but we're gonna talk about that. It has a lot to do with information theory and the way that fingerprints are matched, which is by circling a lot of the gaps in the fingerprint.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, oh my gosh, you know, one thing that just excites me so much, and here's why I love to plan these episodes is every time we plan an episode, we can circle back to a previous topic that we talked about. So who knew that in talking about the science of forensics, that brings us right back to Shannon's information theory, because with mathematics,
00:08:35
Speaker
It's these principles that apply, you know, it's basically a general principle that applies in describing a phenomena in the universe. Is that a good way of describing it? Yeah, I mean, just like systems of linear equations are good for solving bookkeeping things that have to do with trading different goods. They're good for quantum mechanics. And the same thing with information theory being applied to forensics, or even to talk about DNA evidence and how that mathematicized a biological
00:09:02
Speaker
information gathering system in the light of forensic evidence.
Future Mathematical Concepts & Episodes
00:09:06
Speaker
What I really like about this minisode is we get to talk to our audience right as this episode is in the planning stages. So this episode can go one of many ways and we've got so many ideas here and as you're talking, Jonathan, I'm thinking of other mathematical ways of describing forensics. I think of thermodynamics. I mean, clearly there's a lot of relevancy there. We already mentioned information theory.
00:09:28
Speaker
What are some other ways that we can tie mathematics into, oh, crime patterns, of course, of course. Oh yeah, like distance from the crime where they are. There's a little bit of a bunk science called, what's it called? It's where they, profiling, and it doesn't really work as well as people think it does, but mathematically you could do some better profiling techniques and
00:09:57
Speaker
One other thing that I wanted to talk about was the science behind forensic accounting. Well, forensic accounting was invented in the 1900. No, but it's actually really exciting. In accounting data, the number one is more common than number two, which is more common than three and so on. So a lot of times when people manipulate accounting data and try to steal money,
00:10:22
Speaker
they manipulate the accidentally manipulate the frequency of numbers and are caught that way. That is insane. Isn't it crazy how just by the nature of things, the number one occurs more often than the number two. Now, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing are we giving people information who are then going to go and know how to manipulate data?
00:10:41
Speaker
I mean, you know, it's always a cat and mouse game. But the cool thing about that is the reason why that happens is because most data is unwittingly logarithmic. Interesting. Now, again, for our eighth grade listeners who are not yet familiar with logarithms, how do you explain when something is logarithmic? What does that mean? Okay. So just imagine you have the number one. The log of that in base 10 is zero. Then 10 is one. 100 is just two. 1000 is just three.
00:11:11
Speaker
10,000 is just four and so on okay, so it increases very slowly and the more time that goes on it increases even more slowly Yeah, so there's really a lot to talk about here now actually okay, if you want a really really great pop culture reference of forensic Accounting look no further than Albuquerque's own Show on AMC breaking bad now Jonathan do you remember some of the discussion? About about about accounting forensics that happened. I think it was in season four, right?
00:11:41
Speaker
I think so. I need to rewatch that show to be honest. Yeah, I think it was Ted Benneke and see what was amazing was that Walter White's wife, Skylar White, was a very good accountant and she was very, very well aware that a lot of things in a lot of ways of
00:12:01
Speaker
cooking books can show up in how the numbers show up. Not only how the numbers show up, but also what notes are recorded in accounting books. And I think that's why she tried so hard to make sure that they had a cover story that worked for Walter White's DVS deeds for all of his money. And again, this is a horrible thing, but it's a fictional show and a very popular fictional show. And it's a great example of forensic accounting.
00:12:30
Speaker
Now we're gonna round off what we're gonna be talking about with our last episode that we are planning right now, which is in the very infancy stages, is math and nature. Oh gosh, yes, yes, math and nature. Now that's obviously a great one because it's been said a million times, even in previous episodes, language of the universe, mathematics is the language of nature, mathematics is the language of the universe, however you wanna word it, there's really quite a bit that we can go with from there. What are some great examples?
00:12:59
Speaker
Well, one cool thing is that anything like a pine cone or a pineapple, anything with pine in it, no. But anything that has two spirals going around it, if you really look at a pine cone, it has a spiral going left and a spiral going right. Not just one, but it'll have
00:13:18
Speaker
for example, eight and 13, those are Fibonacci numbers. Fibonacci numbers are those such that, okay, the first two are zero and one. Add zero and one together, what do you get? Oh, zero and one is one. And one and one? Two. One and two? Three. Two and three? Five. Three and five? Eight. So then, yeah, and then you get this amazing sequence that you have all these numbers that you just find in nature. Like, for example, an apple core,
00:13:46
Speaker
has five segments. And five is a Fibonacci number. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So now I've seen some beautifully done phenomenally produced videos on YouTube about the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence. That's a great topic to get somebody initially interested in mathematics. And of course, not only the Fibonacci sequence, but also it's very close relative, the golden ratio.
00:14:13
Speaker
Oh yeah, in fact, the successive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, when divided by one another, approach the golden ratio. And so, for example, 8 divided by 5 is 1.4. And it gets, is it 1.4?
00:14:28
Speaker
No, it's 1.6, and it gets closer to 1.618, which is the golden ratio. So that episode I think is going to be out further out in June. We've had a long time to think about it. I know we'll probably talk about Pi, of course, as well as the beautiful number E. And we're even going to be talking about a thing called cellular automata.
00:14:46
Speaker
There's a thing called rule 22 which is exhibited by some shells so shells grow in a certain pattern That is you'll have to listen to the episode to find out what it is. But in the meantime Google rule 22 Yes, you know and also I'm thinking about as well So, you know, obviously we talked about with mathematics nature the numbers but also also there's some phenomenally beautiful Geometric things we can talk about not only the geometry itself, but also the function of geometry, you know, I mean
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, and we can even talk about things like the distribution of spiders on small islands is about the cubed root of the size of the island. Oh, wow. Goodness. So, so, wow. So that, sorry, that gets me really, why am I apologize? I don't apologize. Never apologize for your love of mathematics. I'm telling myself that, but that applies to you listeners as well.
00:15:34
Speaker
So there's a lot brewing. There's a lot coming down the pike. Should we go ahead and do a quick cursory overview of everything? So just as a quick summary, we have episode 9 on transhumanism that will either be out very shortly or already is out depending on when you hear this minisode. We've got episode 10. Encryption.
00:15:58
Speaker
Episode 11, two crime and forensics. Yeah, it's not really titled yet, but yeah, true. The Breaking Math true crime episode and episode 12, mathematics and nature. Yeah. So check those out. And episode nine on transhumanism is called humanity 2.0. Watch for it May 2nd. Alrighty. And this has been Breaking Math, minisode number four.