Periodic Table of the US Navy?

My son brought home a Periodic Table from his school science class. It's also an ad for "America's Navy", "A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD (tm)".

I don't suppose we can get equal time for other navies?

I didn't think so.

Why coupons? Price concealment information and memetic archeology in the pre-web world

Emily and I were wondering what business purpose coupons serve. They make brand price comparison labor intensive and hence unaffordable for most of us; this presumably allows both price discrimination (selling things at different prices to different markets), but it also enables companies to hide their prices from one another.

I couldn't find a good recent overview; the best I could do was a 1984 article by MC Narasimhan (A Price Discrimination Theory of Coupons).  A modern paper would want to include comparisons to Amazon's experiments with dynamic pricing, price hiding in pharmaceutical distribution, the regulatory and strategic concealment of physician office fees all in the context of game theory, information asymmetry (Akerlof, 1970s), and behavioral economics.

I can't find anything like this. So either we have a Google fail or yet another failure of modern economic academia (or perhaps a success of journal publisher information concealment, which is probably somehow related to coupon clipping).

Update: I gave this another 30 minutes of thought and realized there's a much more interesting explanation for this meme absentia.

This is pre-web economics; work done in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussions of affinity discounts, coupon clipping, frequent flyer mile economics and the like are the province of undergraduate textbooks. I shouldn't be looking in scholar.google.com, I should be checking out DeLong and Krugman's posts, tumblrs, and tweets.

Except, of course in the 1970s Brad and Paul were high school students. Google's Usenet (1980s blog posts) archives start in 1981, and email lists aren't much older. The memetic gulf stream [1] that swept ideas from academia to geekdom didn't exist.

So this isn't really a Google or Academia fail, it's a need for new innovations in memetic archeology [2] within the pre-web world (early singularity: 1820-1995).

[1] As of 5/28/2012 Google has no results on "memetic gulf stream". Try it now.
[2] Seven real hits today. Try it now. 

PS. Emily points out that the OpenStax nonprofit textbook movement will expose many of these memes to the Google filter feeder. (Meme phracking?). Incidentally, I found that reference through my pinboard/wordpress microblog/memory management infrastructure now integrated into my personal google custom search.

A millennia of European history in six bullet points

A thousand years of European History - special needs history version ...

• 1000 Middle Ages. Lots of small Kingdoms and local rulers. Church very powerful. Terrible Black Plague wipes out much of Europe. 
• 1500 Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. Knowledge from ancient Greece and Rome and from China and India and the Middle East comes to Europe. New World “discovered” by Europeans. Catholic church loses control of power during Protestant Reformation. 
• 1600 Scientific Revolution Late in the Renaissance Europe invented the idea of Science. That changed the way people thought about the world and how they made things. 
• 1700 The Enlightenment Machines and ideas traveled around the world and caused Revolutions. 
• 1800 The Industrial Age The steam engine and other machines meant that animals and human muscles weren’t as important. The world population started to grow very quickly. Energy was important. 
• 1950 The Modern Age Today machines are starting to replace or extend the human brain. We don’t know what to call this age.

I'll update the PDF later today. When it's done I'll do an ePub version too.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Ancient Rome in a nutshell (an earlier excerpt from my special needs version of 9th grade history)

Euthenasia will come to America within the next twenty years

Thirty years ago I was distressed by the NIH's relative disinterest in demential research. Anyone who could do arithmetic knew what was coming; the time for major action was 1982.

Now we have an "urgent" NIH program focusing on dementia [1] -- but it's 25 years too late. Post-boomers will face a deluge of former-people whose bodies outlast their brains. You'd call us Zombies, except that there will be a cure of sorts ...

Parent Health Care and Modern Medicine’s Obsession With Longevity -- Michael Wolff - New York Magazine

... after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Things that can't go on don't. One way or another, America will figure out how to shorten the duration of Boomer dementia. My own plan is to buy a cottage by a cliff with no railings.

[1] "Better treatments by 2025", a meaningless goal that is sure to be met. Funded with $50 million, or what modern CEOs make every four months. Wake me up when it's funded with $50 billion.

Entanglement and the emergence of time

There's an international competition underway to create the first secure quantum cryptographic channel to an orbital satellite. Today's record is 150 kilometers.

I can't judge the security significance of this competition; it probably depends on how good quantum computers will be at factoring. Perhaps a quantum communications channel will be the only practical defense against quantum computing decryption, though my trusted expert is somewhat skeptical.

I can say, however, that humans are remarkably blase about how insanely weird it is to have technologies based on magic.

Magic, or something indistinguishable from it. This stuff is all powered by "entanglement", the modest little word that means measurement of entangled states at opposite "ends" of the universe will be "instantaneously" "correlated". [1][2]

It's been said physicists deal with this by not talking about it. I am certain, however, that many physicists think about it quite a bit. I imagine I see these thoughts around the edges of blog posts on nature of time.

Since I'm very much not a smart enough to be a physicist, I can speculate freely about what I think they're thinking. I think they think that entanglement is telling us that time is not fundamental; that in a sense everything and nothing happens all at once. When correlation can happen outside of a light cone, then time isn't what we thought it was.

I'm on the lookout now for physicists starting to mutter these thoughts aloud.

[1] Words really fail at this. I'm trying to avoid words like "cause". Also "instantaneous" is almost certainly wrong or right.

[2] We're told that there's no way to communicate information through this correlation; though something I read recently made me wonder if physicists were finding a way to cheat this rule (I can't find the link).

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Entanglement and the realness of time 8/2011
• Gordon's Notes: Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental? 9/2011
• Carroll: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time 9/2011
• Carroll: Quantum Mechanics and Decision Theory 4/2012
• The Quantum Biology Conundrum  - Technology Review 5/2012
• Biophoton Communication: Can Cells Talk Using Light? 5/2012
• Quantum Biology and the Puzzle of Coherence 3/2012
• A Photonic C-NOT Gate Breakthrough for Quantum Computing 5/2012
• Gordon's Notes: Quantum Entanglement: what does it tell about the nature of reality? 6/2004

Post-singularity life is burning a lot of neurons

In 3 days I've tackled three monster Apple bugs.

One is with Apple ID infrastructure, one with Image Capture in Snow Leopard, and a third probably arose in an iTunes server during an iOS tunes purchase.

Two of these bugs defeated Apple 2nd tier support. All of them are likely rare; I will probably never see these particular bugs again. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these bugs arising from interactions of Cloud and software and data.

One bug I've definitely solved -- it was bizarre. I have a good theory and a test case for another. The third might be fixed but needs more testing.

It's mildly satisfying to figure these things out, but it's an insane waste of time and neurons. I could have been learned options trading [1] in the time I've wasted.

Note that only one of these was OS X specific. Two of them are Apple Cloud bugs. The ones I understand best appear to be complexity problems -- too many moving parts, too many edge cases, too many ways for things to break.

Post-singularity life does not scale.

[1] Yeah, there are no good investments any more.

Update: This Stross essay is pertinent.

SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - Charlie's Diary 

... We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980... 

... to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF...

 Even dystopian science fiction didn't predict we'd spend all our time keeping our whizzy tools working.

Who were the crazy genius scientists?

Which famous scientists and/or mathematicians were also "crazy" (e.g. - far outside behavioral "norms") during their adult productive lives (excluding those, like Pauling, who became eccentric at an age where dementia is common)?

My current list is ...

1. Newton: Perhaps autism spectrum, but he was so brilliant, and so bizarre, that he's untypable. He's outside of the human range. He may have hard mercury poisoning late in life, or perhaps a late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis.
2. John Nash: paranoid schizophrenic, though somewhat late-onset. His recovery is remarkable, as was Newton's -- but he was psychotic for a longer time period.
3. Kurt Godel: schizotypal, later in life delusional beliefs with paranoid features.
4. Nikolai Tesla: OCD, Autism spectrum?
5. Henry Cavendish: social phobia, anxiety disorder.
6. Boltzmann: bipolar disorder (classic)

Our classifications of mental illness are pretty weak even in normal IQ adults; this group is probably unclassifiable. Who else should be on the list?

Update: Philip K Dick wasn't quite in this group, but his late-onset pyschosis experience resembles Tesla's. Matt suggested Godel and Boltzmann. The pattern of schizotypal personality disorder behaviors with late-onset deterioration or psychosis might apply to Tesla, Newton and Godel. Botlzmann and Nash had more classic neurospychiatric disorders.

These are most extraordinary minds. It would not be surprising if they had extraordinary dysfunctions.

Update 6/7/2012: An academic opinion.

Is Siri Tom Cook's Newton?

After Jobs 1.0 John Sculley championed The Newton. Wasn't ready. Flopped. Sculley left.

After Jobs 2.0 Tom Cook brought us Siri. Wasn't ready. Flopped. Cook ?

Canada vs US: What happened in the 90s?

I was playing around with Google's astounding Google Data Visualization tool [1] and I compared GDP per capital between Canada (my birthplace) and the US over the past forty years in US dollars.

WTF?!

That's one huge gap in the 90s. I assume it has to do with some exchange rate divergence and a purchasing power parity gap ...



Whatever the cause, the divergence starts @1990, but shortly after 2001 (9/11?) Canada US$ GDP/Capita skyrockets. The crash of 2008 by this measure is huge in the US, but immense in Canada. Now they're converging again even as Canada's currency seems to be ?overpriced ...

I don't see how to graph PPP adjusted GDP/person over this period, but that would be really neat.

Be neat to have an economist comment on this. For me it's mostly fun to play with this amazing tool. I suspect that some people made a lot of money based on those wild PPP fluctuations - whether directly by currency trading or indirectly through other measures. They don't seem to reflect fundamental changes in the US and Canadian economies.

PS. Incidentally, according to this tool, Bermuda is part of North America, but Mexico is not.

Minnesota 2012: Emotional health?

I tend to think bad driving is contagious. Not contagious as in passed from parent to child, but contagious as in a short-lived virus passed from driver to driver. When conditions are right, perhaps in bad weather or after tax filing, one bad driver angers another who angers another ...

So when I'm in my car and I see two people driving badly, I give everyone extra space. The virus is short-lived, typically things are back to normal within a few hours. [1]

Lately, however, it seems as though Minnesota drivers are persistently distracted, irritable, maybe angry. I see it when I'm driving, but especially when I'm walking or bicycling. It's not a mobile device problem; if anything I see less mobile use while driving. It could be demographics; Minnesotans are getting older (certainly I am), and old drivers are not happy drivers.

It's not just drivers though. I watch faces, and pedestrians too seem unhappy and distracted. That would be normal in February, but it's odd in a mild Minnesota spring.

On the other hand, a recent Gallup poll suggests a stable US emotional health index (The difference between 78.3 and 79.8 seems small, but US presidential elections are decided by less margin than that):

... Gallup's U.S. Emotional Health Index score was 79.9 last month, slightly above the previous high of 79.8 recorded in March 2008 and May 2010. Americans' emotional health has generally been improving since September, when it dropped to its lowest level in more than three years (78.3)...

So no conclusions for now, but I do wonder if Americans are starting to weary of economic stress, uncertainty, and increasing inequality. I'll be tracking this meme.

[1] I used to think there were similar epidemics of murder, perhaps with non-linear or chaotic peaks, but so far that theory hasn't held up.

JP Morgan debacle - it's all Krugman's fault

Felix Salmon pins the JP Morgan debacle on the CEO - Jamie Dimon.

Dimon supported Ina Drew's transformation of corporate "checking accounts" into big bets against Europe and the Euro. They turned a risk management fund into a trading operation. It's 2009 all over again.

Dimon's luck with his timing though. The GOP Congress will ensure there are no consequences this election year, and he can put his billions towards a Romney win.

Even better, Dimon can pin the whole thing on the guy traders hate - Paul Krugman. After all, it was Krugman who predicted that Greece would have to drop out of the Euro unless Germany accepted major reforms. 

As it happened Europe made partial reforms, pushing the date of Euro collapse into 2012 and ruining Dimon's week.

Of course Krugman has not really been disproved, but doesn't he make a great scapegoat for Dimon?

In the end, Krugman humbled JP Morgan after all. Just not the way we thought he would.

Facebook and financing a new Vikings stadium: it's a messy world

My Facebook stream has been telling me what my friends read and the movies they watch. 

So far, nothing too surprising.  I'm tempted to click on some of them.

Some of them are click-safe. Others are wee traps. By clicking on them I'm authorizing the apps to share some of the things I read or watch. Robert Wright at The Atlantic has the details.

Take a friend's whale video for example. His post doesn't look like an "app post". There's no "hide this app" option for it. Alas, those cues are so 2011. Apps are more covert now. When I click on the link I get this this dialog from "Chill.com"

Note the blue button doesn't say "run this app". It says "Okay, Watch Video". 

If I did click it however ...

• Everything I watch from Chill going forward would be Public on my timeline. (I periodically run the FB app that sets all my posts to friends-only; that's what I want. FB has ways to work around that.)
• Chill would get my private email address and my profile info
• Chill will post all videos I watch, all that I react to, "and more" -- on all my friends feeds. From their privacy policy "When you use our Service, all of the information that you submit, which may include name, email address, photographs and comments, will be publicly available to third parties and we may not have control over what they do with it. By using our Service, you consent to such disclosure. "

Chill isn't breaking any rules. It's "How Apps Work Now" - frictionless "Social Running".

Facebook, like Google+, is incorrigible. There will be a bit of an upset about this, but not as much as with their last 50 violations.

So why do I stick with Facebook when most of my geek friends have left it?

Because it's still where the non-geeks are. The kids on my son's baseball team don't all have email (or don't use it). They don't all have mobile phones with text plans (and besides, mass texting is a pain). They do all, however, use Facebook. So to communicate them I put up a Facebook Page for the team. Same thing with our inline skating club and our special hockey team.

I put Facebook in the same bucket as the state gambling operations we're using to fund a new football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings (just in time for the twilight of American football). State lotteries and the like are a tax on people who are bad at math -- or who just need a bit of hope. We'd never get stadium funding by taxing income or real estate, but voters are willing to tax the poor. Facebook is just another annoying part of the imperfect world we make the best of.

The Wart Blog

This is my 7420th published post since July 16, 2003.

Of all 7,420, the comments and hits on one whimsical post about duct tape treatment for warts far exceed all other comments put together.

That post is my legacy.

Oldest web news portal - refreshed

For about 340 web years (@ 17 human) Emily and I have used the same web news portal. It's a basic HTML 2.x table based layout link page. The links change very slowly - the BBC World link may be original. It may be older than the Yahoo news page.

I did the first version in a text editor, perhaps BBEdit. Then FrontPage 95, 98, 2000, 2002 ... and back to FrontPage 98. FrontPage 98 lives in an old XP VM on my iMac; I start it up every few months to update the page (my old web site is archived). There's still nothing like FrontPage that will run on a Mac, so perhaps I'll go back to BBEdit next.

I've updated the page again - Yahoo and Salon broke some links and I finally replaced my defunct iframe embedded Google Reader Shared Posts. Instead of the GR Shares there's a somewhat awkward embedded Pinboard Mobile page (my microblog/GR Share replacement).

Feel free to bookmark it if you're looking for a simple news links page -- the URL hasn't changed in over 250 web years. It will probably last as long as me.

Understanding the Middle East: Iran's 16th century Safavid Dynasty (IOT)

Around the time Spain and Portugal were swarming over the Americas and the European Renaissance was firing up, a semi-divine Sufi Ruler [2] created modern Shiism and reshaped Iran and its neighbors.

This was the time of the Safavid Dynasty (and empire).

I had no idea - until I listened to this excellent In Our Time podcast [1]:

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - In Our Time, The Safavid Dynasty 

... In 1501 Shah Ismail, a boy of fifteen, declared himself ruler of Azerbaijan. Within a year he had expanded his territory to include most of Persia, and founded a ruling dynasty which was to last for more than two hundred years. At the peak of their success the Safavids ruled over a vast territory which included all of modern-day Iran. They converted their subjects to Shi'a Islam, and so created the religious identity of modern Iran - although they were also often ruthless in their suppression of Sunni practices. They thrived on international trade, and their capital Isfahan, rebuilt by the visionary Shah Abbas, became one of the most magnificent cities in the world. Under Safavid rule Persia became a cultural centre, producing many great artists and thinkers...

The role of Armenian Christians in the dynasty puts the infamous Turkish genocide in a historical perspective. The Ottamans and Safavids were great rivals, and the Christian Armenians seem forever caught in the crossfire.

This history, and the myths that arose from it, explain a lot about modern Iran and the great Shia-Sunni struggles of the 21st century.

[1] This link is to the almost impossible to find archived podcast. Despite the BBC's stated podcast policy these are no longer discoverable from the primary In Our Time episode archives. You can find them on on the hidden BBC IOT Podcast archive. You may be able to also extract them from the iTunes archive or the BCC IOT Podcast feed. I blame it on Cameron.
[2] The last of the Iranian Shahs, prior to the latest revolution, was accused of favoring Zoroastrian ideas, including divine rule. The God-King is a worldwide tradition. (Aside, I met one on his sons when I was at Williams College in @ 1979/80.)