Sunday, July 04, 2010

Longevity - Homo neandertalis and technicalis

In a world where climate oscillated violently*, and humans wrestled with large animals, was male longevity not an evolutionary priority?

BBC - Radio 4 - Melvyn Bragg - In Our Time - The Neanderthals
... If you were a 30 year old Neanderthal, you were a very old man indeed...

Today, in terra technicalis, at least one population of Homo technicalis has a biological life expectancy of 88. Given what we know about how quickly humans evolve, has our aging rate changed?

Today a 30 yo male today in not remarkably less fit than a 20 yo male; marathons are often won by "older"men. Some loss of strength and healing speed is more than offset by experience. So why did earlier humans die so young?

Maybe we do age more slowly, but if we assume a 20% annual mortality rate among active hungers only (.8**20) *100% or 1.2% will live 20 years. So maybe they just led very dangerous lives ...

* What we have thought of as the "ice ages" might be better thought of as the "age of the chaos climate".

How I bought The Best of Oscar Wilde

Most of the categories in iBooks have free books on the right, retail books on the left.

That's how I flipped through several categories, adding free books to my mother's accessibility-friendly iPad.

Except for Classics.That category is all pay. So when I picked an interesting title on the right I bought "The Best of Oscar Wilde" for $5.

The sunk cost principle says I should give it no particular attention, but the serendipity principle says I should move it up my reading list.

Apple's iBookstore and a FairPlay DRM review

I'd delayed updating to iTunes 9.2, but the upgrade seems to have gone well.

I can now browse my "Protected book " (FairPlay 2) in iTunes, but of course I can't read them on my Mac. Surprisingly, I can't buy a iBooks.app "books" [1] using iTunes...
... the iBookstore is only available through iBooks on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch at this time.
That's a curious limitation. I wonder if the publishers insisted on it. If they did, I assume it has something to do with copy protection.
 
Apple's book DRM rules are similar (identical?) to their app rules (emphases mine) ...

Books downloaded from the iBookstore can be placed on up to five computers you own that you’ve authorized with your iTunes Store account. You can sync your books to all iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches you own...

Apple says "five computers", not "five user accounts". A single computer can have a very large number of separate accounts, and each account can have a distinct iTunes account.

From past experiments I believe it is correct that Apple authorizes at the computer level, not the user level. The FairPlay DRM however is iTunes Store account specific. I don't think there's any documented limit to how many user accounts can share the same iTunes account, so in principle a single machine could have 100 iTunes accounts that could all share the same iTunes store account and thus the same FairPlay material. In turn each account can sync to an unlimited number of iDevices (I thought there used to be a limit!) -- though technically one person should "own" them. (How is that established?)

This DRM implementation means that DRMd material can be shared by a group of people so long as one person is making all the purchases ("ownership"). It's not a bad proxy for a "family of residence". So books can be shared within a family, as can music, video and apps.

It's never noted anywhere but on my blog, but this makes iPhone apps much cheaper for families than apps on other platforms (example: Wii).

The strategic impact of Apple FairPlay is underrated. It seems to suit everyone to keep it that way.

[1] Apple needs a word for the "books" that are rendered by iBooks.app.

Friday, July 02, 2010

Broken bike path, Google and the postmodern world – good news

Do I trust my memory, or do I trust Google?

I was pretty sure the Hamline pedestrian bridge over the rail yard was closed, but Google said it was open:

image

I know my memory. I went with Google. The bridge was open.

A week later I planned out a bike trip for the family. We decided to take the Shepard Road trail. It’s bright green on Google.

image

Alas, this segment is under construction. The shape of the new trail looks beautiful, but it’s closed for now. We had to turn around. A bit of a bummer.

I thought of several ways that local bicycling groups could submit updates to Google, and how they could work with cash strapped local government to manage these trail closures. While I composed plans in my head I also submitted a problem report to Google. It took about 30 seconds. You can do this too. Just right click on a problem area in Google maps and select “Report a problem” …

image

About three days later I got this note from the Google Maps team:

Hi John,
Your Google Maps problem report has been reviewed, and you were right! We'll update the map soon and email you when you can see the change.

Wow. I mean … wow.

Sometimes the postmodern world really does work quite well.

Google to make Gmail conversation threading optional - and apologizes for arrogance

I've screamed loudly about Gmail's obligate threading. It wouldn't be so bad if we could do Outlook-style subject editing to break the threads, but we can't. The fact that replies hide subject lines by default makes thread breaking even harder.

Google has been quite uninterested in my screams. There's a new boss though, and a new attitude ...
Disabling Gmail Conversations
... Last month, Henry Blodget reported that Google intends to make Gmail's conversations optional. 'Some Gmail users loathe the Conversations format -- complaining that is confusing and causes them to miss important messages. Google recently handed control over Gmail to a VP named Vic Gundotra. Vic regards Google's prior attitude toward issue as 'tone deafness' and plans to offer another option soon, sources say.'...
I love this guy. Google, I forgive you.

I hope Vic's attitude is contagious, and that Google is learning a reasonable amount of humility. Even as Apple has gone off the deep end of arrogance ...

See also:
Update: More evidence that Google is changing. They may be looking, for the first time, beyond the algorithm.

How quickly can humans evolve?

Even fifteen years ago cognitive science courses taught that the human mind was frozen in the Paleolithic Pleistocene. Humans didn’t evolve any more

Now we wonder how fast can humans evolve ...

Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution – Nicholas Wade - NYTimes.com

…. Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans…

This is vicious selection; in pre-technological times the infant mortality gap was probably even greater.

Which reminds me of something I wrote two months ago

… Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?

What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal…

Six thousand years is twice the time it took humans to adapt to the Tibetan plateaus. So that’s plenty of time for brains to change.

Except brains are qualitatively different from red cells. Brains are a platform for minds. Left handed people flip hemispheric specializations, and yet seem to think very much like right handed people.

Think about that. Mutations that flip cardiac orientation are 100% lethal. Flipping hemispheres though – the mind adapts. People born with half a brain can function in human society. Five percent of the population have big ugly looking mutations in brain development systems – yet they seem fine.

The human mind can run similarly on a diverse infrastructure. The software analogy is irresistible. A browser running on an iPhone can look and act a lot like one running on a Win 7 box – but the two systems are very different.

This gives a lot more leeway to evolution. It means that the ‘variation controls’ on the genetic programs for neural development can be “set” (by evolution) to “high variation” – and we can still turn out functioning humans minds. It means that brains may be evolving very quickly – over the course of a thousands of years.

It will be interesting to compare the DNA of Homo sapiens 2000 BCE with Homo sapiens 2010 ACE.

See also

Update 7/20/2010: John Hawks reviews the evidence for active selection. I think when he talks about "demographics" he might be talking about how the unification of dispersed human populations causes new phenotypes to emerge -- but he's tip-toeing around something and is being cryptic.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

The standard human lifespan is 88

Amidst all the coverage about genetic markers for long lived people, evidence that the maximal average lifespan is about 88:
BBC News - Genes predict living beyond 100 
... To live the additional 10-15 years beyond the age of 88, our paper is indicating that genetics are playing an increasingly important role.'
The scientists said that, when it came to genes associated with a predisposition to age-related diseases, centenarians and non-centenarians did not really differ.
'This is very surprising,' said Professor Sebastiani. 'It suggests that what makes these people live a very long life is not a lack of genetic predisposition to diseases, but rather an enrichment of longevity.'
So if one gets good medical care and avoids bad luck and bad habits, then the average person white American [1] can probably get to 88. To live much beyond 88 you need to have a slower than average aging rate.

Update: [1] I haven't seen this paper, but an earlier article by the same group suggests they were studying white Americans. This biological age limit may differ between human gene groups. I bet it does.

Jonathon Ive lays a second cube: The iPhone 4

Remember Apple's cube?

It was designed by Jonathon Ive. It was beautiful. It became a museum piece. It's a collectors item. It was incredibly stupid design and a commercial failure.

The cube showed what was great about Apple -- and how the company jumps the shark every few years.

They've done it again with Jonathon Ive's iPhone 4. It's not just the sensor and antenna bugs, the thing is as fragile as .... glass.

I'll buy one of course. With a protective case like the one my 3G has long lived in.

The cube was last sold in 2001. Apple, let's not do this again before 2020 ok?

Deficits, climate, BP and immigration: Saving America is suspiciously easy

I wasn’t smart enough for my undergrad, but the financial support was so good I couldn’t quit. Poverty is the mother of persistence. So I worked the system. I got credits for hanging out at USC [1] and learning “student advocacy” in a class full of beautiful women.

Man, I was good in those days.

During one particularly delightful class “retreat” we played prisoner’s dilemma. Course we didn’t know that’s what we were playing; we were supposed to defeat ourselves and learn valuable lessons. Except I figured it out, and, miraculously, I was able to convince my team to sabotage the game by always cooperating.

The retreat leaders were not happy.

These days it feels like America is in a game like that. A game we could win, except we choose to lose. The game masters must be getting desperate, because they keep making the answers easier.

We have serious problems with our demographics (hence health care costs, declining tax base), our CO2 production, our energy policies, and badly behaved corporations.

We can solve all of these problems, and win the game, with a few obvious moves.

Surely you can guess?

They are …

  1. Canadian-style immigration policy.
  2. Carbon tax.
  3. Percentage fines for corporate malfeasance rather than fixed dollar fines.
  4. End tax deductibility of corporate fines.

Obvious, ain’t it? I tell you, this game is rigged. The answers are so obvious I’ll just talk about the first one.

Sometime in the past twenty years a group of freakin’ geniuses in Canada ran the numbers. They didn’t look good. Canada’s demographic transition [2] was particularly quick, the government pays for health care, and Canadians had stopped smoking.

So they tried to figure out Canada’s value prop. It ain’t the climate or the wealth opportunities. They decided it’s the society. Relatively diverse, fairly peaceful, very secure from invasion, not much of a terrorist target, decent albeit rapidly decaying infrastructure, and all located on the border of a vast money machine.

Canada started selling citizenship. It worked brilliantly. Canada skimmed the cream of the world in the prime of their life, without having to educate most of them.

We could do that. That takes care of our demographics problem.

Four obvious fixes. Problems solved. Easy.

That leaves only the interesting question. Who’s running this rigged game?

[1] Didn’t cost a thing. USC had an “exchange” relationship with us. I never saw a USC student at tech, so it was all to our advantage.

[2] Quebec went from families with 10+ kids to 1-2 kids in about 10 years. Fastest demographic transition in history, and a marker for how quickly a society can change without quite blowing up.

See also:

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Dell reaches road's end

I recommended a computer to a friend made by a company called  "PCs Limited". They were built by a kid in Texas who’d started building them in school.

PCs Limited made great products. They copied the big guys, focused on quality, and eliminated retail channel costs. They got bigger, and even did some innovation of their own.

Later they decided their business was process improvement, and they could leave innovation to someone else. They became full time parasites. They fired all their engineers and their creative people. They were so successful as parasites, they killed their hosts.

Then came Foxconn and China, and the margin fell out of the low cost imitation market.

Dell has been dying for years, but they’re entering the end game…

In Suit Over Faulty Computers, Window to Dell’s Fall - NYTimes.com

After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.

Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses.

“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.”

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute….

… For the last seven years, the company has been plagued by serious problems, including misreading the desires of its customers, poor customer service, suspect product quality and improper accounting.

Dell has tried to put those problems behind it. In 2005, it announced it was taking a $300 million charge related, in part, to fixing and replacing the troubled computers. Dell set aside $100 million this month to handle a potential settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a five-year-old investigation into its books, which will most likely result in federal accusations of fraud and misconduct against the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell.

The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break.

According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.

A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year period, according to the lawsuit.

As complaints mounted, Dell hired a contractor to investigate the situation. According to a Dell filing in the lawsuit, which has not yet gone to trial, the contractor found that 10 times more computers were at risk of failing than Dell had estimated. Making problems worse, Dell replaced faulty motherboards with other faulty motherboards, according to the contractor’s findings.

But Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems. In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning.”

In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.”

“They were fixing bad computers with bad computers and were misleading customers at the same time,” said Ira Winkler, a former computer analyst for the National Security Agency and a technology consultant. “They knew millions of computers would be out there causing inevitable damage and were not giving people an opportunity to fix that damage.”

Mr. Winkler served as the expert witness for Advanced Internet Technologies, which filed the lawsuit in 2007, saying that Dell had refused to take responsibility for 2,000 computers it sold A.I.T., an Internet services company. A.I.T. said that it had lost millions of dollars in business as a result. Clarence E. Briggs, the chief executive of A.I.T., declined to comment on the lawsuit….

… Dell’s supply chain had always stood out as one of its important assets. The company kept costs low by limiting its inventory and squeezing suppliers. If prices for components changed, Dell could react more quickly than its competitors, offering customers the latest parts at the lowest cost.

But the hundreds of Dell internal documents produced in the lawsuit show a company whose supply chain had collapsed as it failed to find working motherboards for its customers, including the firm representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird….

Apple also had severe capacitor problems with iMacs, but they couldn’t hide them. Apple customers screamed. Apple fixed some iMacs, but many died just out of warranty. To my knowledge, however, the fixes worked.

I don’t think Apple’s strategy was very different from Dell’s, except Apple customers communicate loudly and are harder to ignore. What saved Apple was a much better customer relationship, and innovative products in the pipeline. Dell’s customers have been unhappy for many years, and Dell doesn’t do innovation. Dell didn’t have a cushion to protect them.

In an era where Foxconn builds everything, we’re likely to hear more about collapsing supply chains for years to come.

Incidentally Nichicon is dismantling its company in anticipation of the settlements ahead. It’s a Japanese corporation.

See also:

Update: In the light of Dell’s ending, it’s interesting to read this leaked Apple memo on their iPhone antenna debacle

1. Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important…

2. Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns…

4. … ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.

5. We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.

There’s not a great difference between Apple and Dell corporate culture. The real differences come with the obnoxious Apple customer base (folks like me), the media attention Apple gets, and the benefits Apple delivers along with their bungles.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Google: The Quick, the Sick and the Dead - 3rd edition

I wrote my first Google Quick, Sick and Dead list in January of 2009 and the second in November 2009.

It's interesting to look back a year and take note of what's gone (Notebook, Page Creator, Knol?) and what's improved (Documents).

It's been over six months since the last edition, so here's version 3. Note the choices are entirely my own. Nobody else would put Android in the "Sick" category. 



The Quick
  • Search and Scholar (Scholar deserves more applause)
  • Google Reader including Like and Share (brilliant work, even though Buzz tries to kill it)
  • Google’s Data Liberation Front (my heroes!)
  • Gmail (even though they'll never fix the !$$@ threading)
  • Chrome browser
  • Picasa and Picasa Web Albums (esp. with new pricing)
  • Calendar (CalDAV support is slipping though)
  • Maps / Earth
  • News
  • Translate
  • Custom search engines
  • YouTube
  • Books (because they keep trying)
  • Google Docs
  • Google Apps
The Sick
  • Google Profile
  • Google Contacts: pathetic
  • Google Mobile Sync: multi-calendar control is ridiculous
  • Android – increasingly desperate need for curated apps and a Google controlled phone.
  • Buzz – Brin needs to stay out of social
  • Google Reader Comments and Notes - irrational confusion, though Reader itself is great
  • Google Voice (iPhone web app is frozen in time)
  • Chrome OS (feels stillborn)
  • Google Video Chat
  • Google Calendar CalDAV support
  • Google Checkout
  • Orkut
  • iGoogle
The Walking Dead
  • Blogger (because Google can't fix the #$!$!$ draft editor, there's still no mobile view, and the 5000 item limit goes unfixed)
  • Google Groups
  • Google Sites
  • Google desktop (search)
  • Google Base
  • Gmail Tasks (forgotten, useless)
  • Knol
  • Google Wave
  • Firefox/IE toolbars (killed by Chrome)
  • Google Talk (neglected, Chat confusion)
  • Google Parental Controls
Compared to a year ago Google has more sick and dying projects. I think the war with Apple is really hurting them. I'm quite sad about Blogger's pending demise.

Google should turn control of Google Profile and Buzz to the brilliant Google Reader team.



Update 6/29/10: I used Windows Live Writer to repair Blogger editor mis-formatting. On reflection I moved a few more items from “Sick” to “Walking Dead” and I realized I should include “Parental Controls” as a (walking dead) product. 


Update 8/11/10: Blogger has since improved to Sick from Walking Dead. I like this graphic of Google's past flops. Also, I hate, hate, hate Blogger's new editor.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

How could Krugman be wrong?

Paul Krugman, the Cassandra* of our era, is getting ready to delcare “The Third Depression”, a long interval of @ 10% unemployment and slow US economic growth. He says our only hope is ongoing stimulus and massive deficits over the next five years.

Alas, a coordinated stimulus isn't going to happen.  Bruce Bartlett gives one example why …

Debt Default: It Can Happen Here
… As of right now, outstanding debt subject to limit is a little over $13 trillion and the debt limit is $14.3 trillion. At the rate the Treasury is borrowing, it can continue for about 10 months before the debt limit must be raised again…
… to be sure, the debt limit has always been raised in time to prevent a default, although Treasury sometimes had to push the limits of the law to move money around to pay the government’s bills. However, I believe the game has changed …
… a growing number of conservatives have suggested that default on the debt wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It is often said that default would lead to an instantaneous balanced budget because no one would lend to the U.S. government ever again. Therefore, spending would have to be cut to the level of current revenues. Writing in Forbes last month, the Cato Institute’s John Tamny was enthusiastic about the prospects of default…
… Tamny is not an isolated crackpot; reputable conservative economists have been writing sympathetically about the idea of default for decades...
Other prominent conservatives who have been favorable, even enthusiastic, about debt default include Murray Rothbard, Dan Pilla, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, and Christopher Whalen. In 1995, then House speaker Newt Gingrich publicly warned the Public Securities Association that he was prepared to default on the debt unless Bill Clinton acceded to Republican demands for budget cuts. “I don’t care what the price is,” Gingrich said.
..Last year, The Economist’s Greg Ip wrote an article in the Washington Post saying that financial markets were placing the risk of default at 6 percent over the next 10 years. “Default is unlikely,” he said. “But it is no longer unthinkable.”…

So even if Krugman is right, the American people don’t have the wisdom to apply his recommendations.

Is there some way, however, that Krugman could be wrong?

It seems unlikely, his record is very good. Still, it is a bit peculiar that the Euro crisis seems to have arisen from somewhat different economic roots than the American crisis. Yes, Krugman and others argue that the economic fundamentals are identical, but I think I see some unspoken anxieties in their conclusions.

So if these crises aren’t really of the same root causes, why should they occur together?

Perhaps we’re simply seeing an economic form of the sort of synchronization that may cause earthquakes to occur close in time. Or perhaps there are root causes beyond traditional economic modeling.

That’s one way in which Krugman could be wrong. He’s unlikely to be wrong within the framework of economics, but what if our economies have drifted into turbulent domains where linear economic models no longer apply? A whitewater world, in other words.

What if the root cause of our crises can't be found in traditional economic models, but in deeper causes such as the technological discontinuity of networked computers and the historic discontinuity of a resurgent China and India? What if these two shocks are stressing every aspect of the world's economic infrastructure?

If we accepted those twin revolutions as root causes, then we might imagine they would manifest differently in different economic settings. In each case the "machine" would come apart at its weakest point. In the US that would be our insanely complex Finance operations, in Europe it would be the strains of a single currency for Greece and Germany, and in China it will be ...

If we take these as the root causes, then traditional economic stimulus might get the machine going again -- but it might blow up in a different direction. The focus would need to be on managing and ameliorating disruptions, while perhaps sprinkling a bit of sand in the gears of an overheating engine. Managing China's bubble economy, including currency value changes, would become a great US priority.

It's not a great change from what Krugman recommends, save for less focus on spending and more on management for the long haul - including stripping benefits (health care, etc) from employment. There's also in this model more room for surprises -- meaning we may do better than another Long Depression. Or we might do worse ...

* Cassandra as in always depressing, always right, always ignored.

Update 6/29/10: I really don’t think Paul K and Kevin Warsh are reading Gordon’s Notes, but I do think I’m tuning a meme.

From PK’s blog post this am we read Warsh saying “unanticipated, nonlinear events can happen” and Krugman responding

So it’s these “unanticipated, nonlinear events” that are “more certain” than the direct effects of fiscal policy?

Of course that’s only a bit of the blog post, which mostly consists of Krugman reframing a few of Warsh’s statements and ripping them up (he’s very good at that, maybe too good).

Still, the “nonlinear events” bit is interesting. Krugman’s rebuttal is also interesting. He doesn’t actually say it’s rubbish to contemplate nonlinear events that might move us outside of current economic modeling, instead he says they’re relatively speculative compared to the direct effects of fiscal policy.

I think Krugman is wrestling with the possibility that we’re outside model bounds.

Incidentally, I should be clear (fwiw) that I’m not joining up with the austerity group. I’m in the squishy middle ground. I’d be more of a full Keynesian if I believed humans were capable of running surpluses in good times.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Paul Dirac on the surprising history of the Schrodinger wave equation

SciAm is republishing a terrific 1963 essay by a famed physicist, back when Scientific American graphics included serious math. Here Dirac is talking about the surprising history of the Schrodinger wave equation ...
Paul Dirac, Scientific American, 1963: The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature

... I might tell you the story I heard from Schrodinger of how, when he first got the idea for this equation, he immediately applied it to the behavior of the electron in the hydrogen atom, and then he got results that did not agree with experiment. The disagreement arose because at that time it was not known that the electron has a spin. That, of course, was a great disappointment to Schrodinger, and it caused him to abandon the work for some months. Then he noticed that if he applied the theory in a more approximate way, not taking into account the refinements required by relativity, to this rough approximation his work was in agreement with observation. He published his first paper with only this rough approximation, and in that way Schrodinger's wave equation was presented to the world. Afterward, of course, when people found out how to take into account correctly the spin of the electron, the discrepancy between the results of applying Schrodinger's relativistic equation and the experiments was completely cleared up...
This would be a good update to the history section of the Wikipedia article on the equation; it's also a lovely example for people writing about on the philosophy of science. It's all so much neater in retrospect.

Those were the glory days of Scientific American. I love the Sci Am news blog, but the magazine is very slight now. It aims for a different market.

There's so much more in this brief essay. It's required reading for the physics fanboy. Consider Dirac's discussion of "137" (Adams should have used 137, not 42):
.... There are some fundamental constants in nature: the charge on the electron (designated e), Planck's constant divided by 2 π (designated h-bar) and the velocity of light (c). From these fundamental constants one can construct a number that has no dimensions: the number h-bar*c/e^2. That number is found by experiment to have the value 137, or something very close to 137. Now, there is no known reason why it should have this value rather than some other number. Various people have put forward ideas about it, but there is no accepted theory. Still, one can be fairly sure that someday physicists will solve the problem and explain why the number has this value. There will be a physics in the future that works when h-bar*c/e^2 has the value 137 and that will not work when it has any other value...
Dirac gets numerological about 137. He really doesn't like square roots ...
.... Only two of them can be fundamental, and the third must be derived from those two. It is almost certain that c will be one of the two fundamental ones.... If h-bar is fundamental, e will have to be explained in some way in terms of the square root of h-bar, and it seems most unlikely that any fundamental theory can give e in terms of a square root, since square roots do not occur in basic equations. It is much more likely that e will be the fundamental quantity and that h-bar will be explained in terms of c^2. Then there will be no square root in the basic equations...
Genius is sometimes close to dysfunction [1]; it's common in science that elder genius takes odd directions. This stuff is great fodder for crackpots, but there's always the tantalizing possibility that some of it will be borne out one day.

[1] I've lost a recent developmental neurobiology reference that put the old "genius is close to madness" cliche on firm ground. It wasn't this review article, but it was of the same genre. The same mechanisms that make a person creative do seem to make them more prone to "strange loops", perhaps particularly as they age. (Yeah, I'm being self-referential.)

Friday, June 25, 2010

China's water army and my e-cigarette post

A post I wrote on unregulated (Chinese, but really, everything is) electronic cigarettes received a lot of curiously phrased comments. I wonder if that was my first encounter with the water army (wumaodang variant)...
Blood & Treasure: water army
... Another wrinkle on the wumaodang phenomenon. Instead of the Chinese state hiring people to post favourable comments about government policy, you have shuijun, the “water army” paid by private companies to delete unfavourable comments about themselves and their products and services.

Related shakedowns include commercial websites spamming negative comments about companies in order to pressurize them into advertising on their site, and companies suing websites carrying genuine complaints on the grounds that they are faked, but basically to get them to censor themselves.
In a similar vein see Internet 2025 (very new and a classic already) and Bruce Sterling's (free) short story about post-apocalyptic astroturf - The Exterminator's Want-Ad.

China is the new California*.

* Land of the future.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Churches of the Singularity - is Horgan truly an unbeliever?

Once upon a time if you put two phone handsets together, speaker to microphone, you get a massive burst of positive feedback. Each handset amplified the other’s signal. This acoustic eruption was a form of acoustic singularity.

You have to be of a certain age to remember that. Modern systems cut the feedback.

The ”Technologica Singularity” is positive feedback in the realm of technological innovation. New tools makes new tool creation faster and easier. Data storage units that costs millions and filled a room cost 50 cents to make and are the size of a small fingernail. Technology that makes things smart makes things smarter.

It’s the “smart things” bit that’s the problem. We know how to make human level intelligence; we make billions of ‘em. There’s obviously no chemistry barrier to creating artificial intelligences at least as smart as the smartest possible human. These entities will then will create their smarter descendants and so on. (Unless they are smart enough to know that’s a very, very, bad idea. They will then kill us so we don’t make any more of them.)

The “explosive intelligence” form of the technological singularity dates back to about 1960, but it’s been a feature of science fiction since the 1980s. It’s most often associated with the seriously fun writings of Vernor Vinge, but many of my favorite writers have taken a whack at it. Over the past 10 years it’s become an obsession for geeks who, through great leaps of hopeful imagination, have come to believe that “the rapture of the nerds” will make them immortal.

Now we have the Churches of the Singularity. The Vingeans (sorry Vernor) believe we can’t avoid Strong AI and that this may be a good think or a very bad thing. (Bad for humans and dogs anyway, whales might be delighted.) Vingeans usually put the date for Strong AI between 2040 and 2200.

The Kurzweilians and Moravians believe that humans will integrate with Strong AIs, and that this will occur soon enough that they will, personally, become immortal. Their date predictions are always within their personal life expectancies.

The Heretics suspect that the Programmer and the Player have excluded Strong AI from the Program. The Denialists believe that something will prevent Strong AI, but they rarely say what. They have an uneasy relationship with the Heretics.

I have mostly of the Vingean faith, but I’m tempted to Heresy.

It’s pretty easy to put most people in one of these churches. Sometimes, however, one of the Faithful will deny their roots. For example, Scientific American’s John Horgan considers himself an unbeliever. In a recent critique of the Faith he wrote

Cross-check by John Horgan: Singularity Schtick: Hi-tech moguls and The New York Times may buy it, but you shouldn't

The New York Times Sunday business section recently ran an enormous puff piece on Ray Kurzweil and the "Singularity" cult (my term, not the Times's)…

… Believers squabble over how exactly the Singularity will go down. Will we just genetically soup ourselves up? Become human–machine cyborgs? Totally synthetic robots? Digitize our psyches and download them into cyberspace? All the predictions entail superintelligence and immortality…

… Bill Gates has blurbed Kurzweil's books. Other admirers include Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and Peter Diamandis, who heads the X PRIZE Foundation, which promotes space travel. … Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, helped Kurzweil establish a "Singularity University" at NASA Ames Research Center in California…

…When I debated Kurzweil at the 2008 Singularity Summit, a revival meeting for the faithful, he seemed all too sincere. But his Singularity schtick is so out of sync with reality that I'm beginning to wonder if even he takes it seriously…

Methings he doth protest too much. Horgan is conflating the Kurzweilians with the greater Church. I am certain he knows better. He never claims Strong AI is not possible, he only says it’s unlikely to happen soon. He is clearly a Vingean in denial. Welcome to the Faith John.

See also:
and more about the strong AI answer to the Fermi Paradox (Church of Vinge, Fermi schism)