Elements of Noise
by Andy Turudic
Claude Shannon's theorem should apply to all communications, regardless of whether they occur on fiber, copper, or in air. The theorem basically states that information carrying capacity is directly related to the bandwidth available, scaled by the logarithm of an adjusted signal-to-noise ratio. Since bandwidth is always a fixed and precious resource, all we can really control is the SNR. At the risk of stating the obvious, in a really noisy environment the capacity to convey information is usually impaired for a given bandwidth.
The bandwidth of greatest concern here is not that which enables Tbit/s on a strand of fiber optic cable, but rather the bandwidth manifested as our own personal time. As the threat of outsourcing looms over the employed engineer or scientist, more and more are working 60 and 70 hour weeks to try to keep from being the branch that is pruned from the corporate money tree.
With this large amount of uncompensated time being diverted from our personal lives, and with the demands of, and attention to, family and friends, the precious little bandwidth we have left to transfer new information into our brains is degraded, according to Shannon's Theorem, by the substantial noise levels in the popular media. A recent example of this is the popular media's fortnight-long obsession with the events that transpired at a football stadium, particularly with the "accidental" exposure of what's sadly becoming more fashionably a flesh-enveloped bag of saline; an incident regarded by the citizens of Europe and Ontario, Canada as a laughable yawn. This high level of noise blocked the transfer of some really interesting news information to the public, quite coincidentally news that was also related to past events at a football stadium, news that was another notch in mankind's amateur efforts towards eventually attempting to replace the Creator of the Universe.
If you're a mixed-signal, or analog, chip designer and you want to stick in the craw of that process engineer who's given you fits over the years with silly layout design rules, or with transistor betas or gms that don't allow much more than the emulation of a piece of copper wire at frequency, read on. Earlier this month, about when nipple shields were being deployed for 140 million viewers to see, Lawrence Livermore National Labs announced the synthesis of two new short-lived elements, numbers 113 and 115, making countless millions of periodic tables on walls, and in text books, as worthless as the versions Marie Curie last had in her lab. Now, only you know this, knowledge is power, and you can have some fun with Mr Beaker's obsolete and publicly-displayed reference materials.
While this recent discovery was actually made using the facilities of the JINR at Dubna, Russia, no doubt good old American cash from periodic table printing lobbyists, and WMD paranoia, had a lot to do with the research credits on our side as well as lending credibility to allow publication in The American Physical Society Journal. Dubna's lab is the equivalent of a Star Trek Replicator, having synthesized a number of elements over the years, including 104, 105, 106, and 107. Of passing interest to superman basement-hobbyist readers, element 118 was allegedly created from Lead and Krypton(ite) by Lawrence Berkeley Labs using, ahem, cold fusion; no doubt some of the researchers were bombarded with Lithium soon after withdrawing their paper to, perhaps, a more suitable venue.
So how do significant discoveries and achievements, by engineers and scientists toiling for years in laboratories, go unnoticed, yet 2s of work by a nipple piercer, possibly one that dropped out of 9th grade after 3 tries at graduating from it, hits an all-time record for TiVo replays and gets weeks of airtime? Perhaps engineers and scientists are personally satisfied and content with functionality or in achieving a research objective. Perhaps the work of scientists and engineers is not translated well to the general public by MBA-only marketing suits. Perhaps we've dedicated and disciplined ourselves to maximizing our own SNR out of efficiency in interacting with our peers and don't realize that the general public is only resonant to random, infinite spectrum, large- noise-content events. The Mars Rovers have very successfully spoken to the public though their photographic images, particularly in their drama of being comatose for a week and having an earlier peer DOA. Contrasting this popularity, the press conferences by excited human geologists seeing unique crystal formations is apparently not inspiring enough for rich women to dash off to Tiffany's to have a Martian salt-ball mounted. All the public sees is an excited nerd and the TV channel immediately flips to a more interesting rerun of The Simpsons.
Perhaps it's time the world's physicists and scientists got their heads out of their vacuum chambers and figured out a way to get the public, and its families, more excited and involved. Maybe the goal of boosting the noise level, in an effort to drown out the noise that's already out there from the idiots, could be achieved if a lottery was held, much like Powerball, where the winner not only gets a lot of cash, but also the Warholian benefit of naming an element. With the noise resonance to which our society seems to be exclusively tuned, the Bohr-ing traditions of naming elements after geeks, like Einsteinium, Nobelium, and Rutherfordium, will be replaced by the likes of newly discovered elements like Britnium, an element that splits after 24 hours, or Shaqilium, an element exhibiting an unusually tall Fermi level. Old people might go for Buickium, a heavy and long-lived metal, or young kids might opt for Barnium, an element with purple phosphorescence.
With a half dozen unnamed heavy elements right now, it's time to put
in a little excitement and personality in science, and to raise the noise
level in what we do in order to block out those noisy competitors for public
mindshare. Contrary to our training and theorems, in the presence of noise
we need to create even higher noise levels to get the information across.
In our silly tradition of naming elements after our own, do we really need
or want the public to hear about Gatesium, an element known for its holes and leaks?
Contact the author