Simulations, All

I've been reading Richard Dawkin's book about evolution, The Selfish Gene. It's apparent that a lot of ideas about evolution are tested out through computer simulations. Of course, it's not just evolutionary theory where computer simulations are heavily used - there's other areas such as Economics, Physics and Meteorology. But despite the fairly widespread use of simulation, despite its utility, may people seem to consider it somehow lesser than other techniques for understanding the world.

Many people would consider verbal or mathematical means of understanding the world superior to simulations. I believe the argument is that simulations seem so paltry against the complexity of the real world, with the assumption that the other techniques are much better at dealing the nature of the world, perhaps because they don't try explicitly representing it. Against this idea, it occurred to me before -- and this probably has occurred to others -- that all thinking is fundamentally simulation.

Any reasoning about the world -- verbal, mathematical, etc -- involves some conception of the way the world is. In short, when you're reasoning you're manipulating this model in some way in order to see what it can tell you. What does this have to say about the relative efficacy of a computer simulation? That's something I'll consider another time.

This post is really just a quick sketch - I want to come back to this and consider it more fully another time, but now it's beddy-bies time and I need my beauty sleep :-).

An Example of a Mental Bias Towards the Physical

A while back, I gave a glowing review of Harold McGee's The Curious Cook. This post is about a single sentence from that book, which I'm using to illustrate a facet of the way our minds seem to work. This post doesn't provide a complete argument - at the moment I'm just trying to collect examples in order to build a fuller case, one that I'm hoping to present in the future. And you might find its conclusion rather lightweight - but after all, it's only a single, small example...

In the book's article on making mayonnaise, he explains how a microwave can be used to kill the salmonella that can sometimes be found in eggs. A microwave is suitable for the task because it can kill the bacteria without destroying the "rawness" of the egg yolk, which is important for making mayonnaise. It can do so because it can cook yolks at precise "temperatures" for a precise duration of time.

"As for the cooking itself, after years of owning a microwave oven, I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well. On the stovetop, it's very difficult to ..." (pg 99)

It's easy to nod along with what he's saying, and I think it gives us a glimpse of something interesting about the way our minds work to see why he's not really right. When you think about it, a task that microwaves alone can accomplish is the task of heating something up quickly. That's not to say the results are always fantastic, but if it's speed you're after, a microwave is your best bet.

That microwaves can heat things up quickly is a rather obvious fact, and yet you may have noticed that its doesn't come obviously to mind when you read the quoted sentence. Why is that? I think the reason is that our minds have a bias towards thinking in terms of physical entities over more abstract properties such as the duration of something. "Cooking something fast" is definitely valid as a task a microwave can alone do well, but it's far less obvious a task than something physical such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice".

There's an objection to my argument that you may have found yourself thinking. That is, that when he said "I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well" he was only talking about physical tasks such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice". I can't say this wasn't the case, but even if it was, I don't think it really says anything against the point I'm making.

If he intended the sentence to refer only to physical tasks, then perhaps it's illustrative that he didn't feel the need to qualify himself, despite the raher obvious thing microwaves do well (cooking things quickly), even if you don't consider that a task. And regardless of how he intended it, it's still illustrative if people still read that sentence without realising the possibility of a task being "cooking quickly".

Example of Rejecting the "Ridiculous"

People will often reject a notion on the grounds that it's "ridiculous". I want to eventually write a longer post about this, but for the moment I'm just collecting examples. Tim Cahill provides one in his book Remote Journies Oddly Rendered. The particular story in the book recounts the time he camped in Yellowstone National Park near a set of remote geysers, and it notes:

Early white explorers sent back accounts of the boiling water and steam erupting from the earth. One eastern publication, in 1870, rejected what now seems like a solid descriptive manuscript with the words, `Sorry, we do not print fiction.’ And it was in 1870 that men who wondered at the supposedly fictional geysers first expressed the thought that the entire areas would be set aside as a National park. (1st ed, pg 200. Note that in the US the book seems to be called "Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered").

Testing Common Wisdom on 'Drinking Lots of Water' when ill

Researchers have investigated the common wisdom to 'drink lots of water' when ill with a cold or the flu, finding it ineffective and potentially dangerous, as reported in this article.

So why do so many people, including doctors, recommend drinking plenty of fluids when ill? "It's not really clear," Del Mar noted. "All we know is that the idea arose in ancient times, and has been carried on ever since without anyone really challenging it."

(Also reported at: TheAge, Abc.net.au, WebIndia123, TheStar)

Musing

Here's a name for a record label or album: music to f*ck people's heads with. At the time of writing, a Google search for this phrase turns up zero results.

There ought to be...

...keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, when you're in a program like a word processor or text editor. You might think that the page up and page down keys do this, but they scroll the screen up or down when they move the cursor, whereas I want something that keeps the screen the same and just moves the cursor. I think I'd often find this feature useful.

Since, in Windows at least, CTRL + UP ARROW (or DOWN ARROW) are already used, perhaps CTRL + < could be used for 'move cursor to top of page' and CTRL + > for 'move cursor to bottom of page'. I'm also wondering, is there any program or operating system that already has this feature?

An Idea Involving Places, Races and Faces

I've had a number of unsatisfactory attempts at expressing this idea, and it could be who-knows how much longer until I'd be fully satisfied, so enough's enough. Here's my latest attempt, still a little rough around the edges, but otherwise okay, I think...

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Like everyone else, my experience of others is a combination of the people I see and interact with in person, plus those I see through the media -- through movies, documentaries or other tv shows, newspapers, books, National Geographic magazines read in waiting rooms etc.

My familiarity with people from different countries may be more than the average person's because for the last nine years I've either studied or worked at a university, but even if that's the case I think that my knowledge of the different races and cultures is in many ways quite vague and incomplete.

Even so, it often doesn't feel that way. I think that we tend to have a sense that we have a fair, if incomplete, picture of the rest of the world, what the people in various places look like, what their culture is like, and so on. If you show me any country in the world on a map my mind will be able to conjure up notions of things like what the people there probably look like, what sort of existence they have (whether they're fairly industrialised, for example).

But I don't automatically think that because it seems that way, it is that way. I'm aware that our minds, when they don't have the actual details to go on, unconsciously fill in the blanks with stereotyped information, which we gleam from a variety of sources.

I have, for example, a notion of African people, but I'm sure this notion does not properly incorporate, or distinguish between, all the different cultures and racial groups it lumps together. I have certain notions of what an African person looks like, but until I, say, spend time in various places in Africa, how do I know how accurate these notions are? Sure, these notions will be affirmed, negated or expanded by the people I see in person or in the media, but I think it's difficult to claim that these are representative samples.

What I would really like is some real knowledge that is representative of what other people in the world are like. Of course, to understand the people, the places, the culture, the history of everyone on earth would be a mammoth task. But I have thought of an idea for the modest task of presenting a real sense of what people in different places in the world look like.

In theory, this information is already available, and the idea is more than just about providing this information. Part of the idea is about how to present this information such that it is interesting and has a chance of having real reach. It's no good if it's just information sitting around that no one ever sees.

What I want is something that will help create, in the world, a greater sense of others, by giving people a more concrete knowledge with which they can mentally connect up places and races to a more richly detailed set of faces.

The World Seen Though Images

Short of going on a world tour, the only practical way of gaining this understanding is through some form of visual media. Certainly there's a suitable set of images out there if you consider the combination of what's found in the various documentaries, magazines, books, image databases and whathaveyou, but it's too dispersed and awkward to get at and use for these ends.

I can think of things which give various pictures of people in places, but it's usually a scattered set of images, not comprehensive to cover all of the different racial groups in a place or a representative sample of each. Often the images are not labeled sufficiently to determine exactly where the person is from or what sort of racial background they have. A further issue is that people are often not the focus of the images: the focus is often the scene the person is in or the task they are performing, and this means that you can't as clearly see what they look like. It also means that people are in different positions, taken from different angles, making it difficult to get a comparative sense of their features.

The short of it is, if you want to do this with what's out there, you'd have to do a lot of work, and why would anyone in an ordinary situation bother to do this? The problem would be hard enough even if you just were interested in a single place or racial group, and if you're interested in every country in the entire world you have that multiplied by about one hundred and ninety.

You can think of my idea as a coffee table book containing a page for each country in the world, each of which shows an image of a collection of people representative of those in that country. Each page/image/country might have twenty five or so people, and they are standing side-by-side and facing the viewer. It could also have a bit of textual information indicating the country, the racial make up of the people in it, and so on. That's the essential idea, though there is more to it which I'll explain further down, after commenting on these basic details.

Since the focus should be on the people and what they look like, I think they should all be standing next to each other, facing the viewer. I think the background to the image should be fairly neutral and I don't think there should be anything in the pictures that could bring up racial or cultural stereotypes or associations, like people wearing traditional dress or having images of the landscapes 'typical' for that country in the background. For this reason, I think it would be best if they were, in all of the pictures, wearing the same type of clothing, something minimal, plain and as culturally neutral as is achievable.

And that's basically it. I have in mind something that's visually striking, memorable, and which fascinates the viewer. I think this idea could meet those criteria, criteria which bring to mind those Benneton ads by Oliviero Toscani and Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from the Air pictures. Consciousness raising, largely.

A Zoomable Kaleidoscope

While book-form has its advantages, you could do a lot more with this idea on the computer. When I originally thought of the idea, I had in mind a web-site or a multimedia program (I think it would work both on the computer and in book form). The static arrangement of images in a book could, on a computer, be arranged in any number of ways. Want to show the image of New Zealanders aside the image of Mexicans so you can view them comparatively? Want to show just the images of all the Asian countries? Want to show the images of all the racial groups that share some common ancestry? The computer could give you the means to show together whichever collection of images you wanted, in a kaleidoscopic number of potential arrangements.

I think a really interesting think you could do on the computer would be to allow the viewer to 'zoom' in or out, so they could, for example, see a larger, more representative, set of images for a particular country, or see a single image for a larger area, such as Europe. So even if you've just got the time to view the single image for each continent, you're getting at least as best a view as you can with that much information, and if you want to go deeper and more detailed you can. So you can get an image that gives you some idea of the people in a particular country, but if you want to get a more representative view you can zoom in and see perhaps three pictures for that country, and so on.

Corrective Lenses

What this idea is really about is giving ourselves a better perspective on the world. For most of us, myself included, the people of the place we've lived in exist in a much different part of our minds to those elsewhere in the world. Being able to see everyone one in the world, together and on equal footing, would hopefully help put things into proper perspective.

Favour the Intrepid in the Search for Knowledge

Favour the intrepid in the search for knowledge, for their job is far easier than the naysayer's. The naysayer says, I know there is not an answer out there. The intrepid says, how do I know there is not an answer out there? The intrepid must search for an answer somewhere in the landscape of knowledge, for a path that will lead them to it, and they have all of the future -- and the developments it brings -- in which to find one.

The naysayer too must search for an answer somewhere out there in the landscape of knowledge, an answer which says that there is no path, no where, that the intrepid could ever follow to reach their answer. This is a fundamentally more difficult task, and one which puts the seeker at a far greater risk of finding a mirage when they think they've found an answer, for when they have found their answer, everyone else has all the future to prove them wrong.

Article on Effectivenss of Open Dissent in Organisations

Effective organisations are nourished by an internal culture of open dissent, while pressure to conform is damaging. Take the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster as an example: the report into the accident cites the lack of such a culture as the major cause. Cass Sustein, in his (I checked, he is a guy) Los Angeles Times article, takes this example as a starting point for a brief look at this issue, in which he further illustrates his point with examples involving Enron, judges and private investment clubs. (for some reason that URL is not currently accessible to me, nor any others at uchicago for that matter, and an alternative source for the article can be found here).

Thoughts in Few Words (4)

Oh, how the foolish have risen. (or, How far the foolish have risen).

Feeling the Physics

I've recently started reading Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, which is derived from a text written by Richard Feynman back in the sixties (it's the six easiest chapters from that text). The text itself was derived from a series of undergraduate lectures Feynman gave at Caltech.

Despite the fact its derived from a text book, it's quite readable and I think he explains the concepts well. Reading it, it's easy to picture the things he's describing. His explanations are not perfect, though. There's a few places where it seems he knows too much for his own good, where he doesn't sufficiently anticipate some of the things a naive reader's will want to know in order to understand what he's talking about. But they're relatively minor complaints against a book that scores well in terms of readability and the clarity of its explanations.

And I can say now that I have finally progressed beyond my high-school knowledge of physics. This knowledge consisted of simplifying but ultimately incorrect concepts such as the "solar-system" view of an atom, with the electrons orbiting around the neucleus. I had some idea of the true story, but it's satisfying to have a more concrete picture there in my mind.

And that's the thing that's struck me while reading the book -- having that concete picture in my mind and realising that that's what's really going on, everywhere. In every speck in every part of your field of vision (if you are sighted, of course) there's a whole world, radically different to ours, made up of strange particles interacting in quirky ways. From your eyes, recieving the light carrying that picture, through your optic nerve, to your brain, to you -- all these things, too, are part of this strange world. It's there, right now, right in front of you, in you, you.

Blogging in the Open Air

The other day I bought a laptop, one of those ones with built-in wireless networking. Right now I'm sitting on a bench outside, in the Queen Street Mall, which is in the center of Brisbane. Sitting here typing this blog post, because the mall has got free wireless access, and watching the people go past. I think that's great, to be able do everything you can do with a computer and access to the Internet, not stuck at a desk, but in an environment like this or anywhere else that has wireless net access.

Type Letters In Your Own Handwriting

Fontifier is a neat looking web service that lets you create a computer font based on your own handwriting. What you do is write each letter of the alphabet (plus the numbers and symbols) on a template, which you can download from the web-site and print out, then scan in the filled-in template as an image, which you then upload to the web-site -- and voila, it sends you back a font constructed from your filled-in template. I can't try it out on my computer here -- no printer or scanner -- but I'd like to have a go when I get a chance.
(via http://del.icio.us/, via Many2Many)

Species, Language and Reality

You may have heard that the fossil record shows surprisingly little evidence of gradual transitions between species, which is the kind of evidence we should expect if the theory of evolution is to be believed. So then what's going on? Nothing, Richard Dawkins argues, in his book Climbing Mount Improbable, as the whole issue is actually a phantom created by language overshadowing reality.

From pages 95 and 96 of the first Penguin paperback edition of the book:

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There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. I can explain it best with an analogy. Children turn gradually and continuously into adults but, for legal purposes, the age of majority is taken to be a particular birthday, often the eighteenth. It would therefore be possible to say, 'There are 55 million people in Britan but not a single one of them is intermediate between non-voter and voter.' Just as, for legal purposes, a juvenile changes into a voter as midnight strikes on the eighteenth birthday, so zoologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore the creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has not implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions.

To look no further than our own ancestry, the transition from Australo pithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to 'archaic Homo sapiens' to 'modern Homo sapiens' is so smoothly gradual that fossil experts are continually squabbling about how to classify particular fossils. Now look a the following, from a book of anti-evolution propaganda: 'the finds have been referred to either Australopithecus, and hence are apes, or Homo and hence are human. Despite more than a centruy of energetic excavation and intense debate the glass case reserved for mankind's hypothetical ancestor remains empty. The missing link is still missing.' One is left wondering what a fossil has to do to qualify as an intermediate. In fact the statement quoted is saying nothing whatever about the real world. It is saying something (rather dull) about naming conventions. No 'missing link', however precisely intermediate it was, could escape the teminological force majeure that would thrust it one side of the divide or the other. The proper way to look for intermediates is to forget the naming of fossils and look, instead, at their actual shape and size. When you do that, you find that the fossil record abounds in beautifully gradual transitions, although there are some gaps too - some very large and accepted, by everybody, as due to animals simply failing to fossilize. In a way, our naming procedures are set up for a pre-evolutionary age when divides were everything and we did not expect to find intermediates.

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Contab's Clever Table

I always find it strange that while lunches or dinners with groups of people are meant to be social events, people there for the other people, they tend to -- if there's more than a handful attending -- split up into little isolated islands.

I've always wished my hearing was better so I could hear more than those people immediately next to me, but a New Zealand company called Contab have come up with an elegant solution to this problem, in a special type of table they've devloped.

The tables are designed such that your chair, as well as the table top in front of you, moves, ever so slowly, revolving around the table's circumference. Because the table is longer than it is wide, this means that over one two hour revolution of the table, you'll have ended up having spent an equal amont of time near each of the people at the table.

I think that's great, and I'm encouraging every restaurant in Brisbane to go out and buy one right now. At the very least, I would like to try one out and see how effective it is in practice.

Their web-site (as linked above, and also here) has more information, including more pictures, time-lapse videos, and info about a few other potential applications for the tables, such as in business meetings.

Two bits 'o good news

The toothache lasted for a few days, but is gone now. Ohhhh, that's a relief [*]. And an even bigger relief: I got the PhD scholarship I had applied for! :-). I'm starting in late February next year.

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[*] Well, it's largely gone. Prepare to find out more about my teeth than you wanted to know: it's a long story, but the problem isn't actually a cavity, but a funny shaped gap between two teeth that causes food to get stuck there and from this, gum pain (and don't think that gum pain can't be as big and burly as tooch ache...), which ultimately can't be fixed (short of removing teeth or something equally drastic).

PowerPoint, Faux Analytical Techniques and Sales Pitches

This article on PowerPoint contains some nice quotes from Edward Tufte on what's wrong with so many PowerPoint presentations: PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. [...] Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

Toothache

Ughhhhrr, the last three days I've been captive to a damn toothache. The pain killers don't seem to help much. Last night was, at times, pure, fangs-gleaming agony. I'm really looking forward to that fresh, springtime-air of life without it.

Honda believes that robots will become its most important business

That's a claim made in this short update on commercial robots. It seems they're starting to take off and be used in real applications outside of factories, such as a 1 meter tall doctors assistant and a sentry robot. As the article explains, much of the drive seems to be coming from economic imperatives brought on Japan, such as an aging population and declining birthrates. The last half of the article goes into some technical details concerning the need for standard components and operating systems for robots - so people can focus on important tasks such as the robot's AI and vision.

Triple Take

To improve my fitness and to loosen up a bit of muscle tension, I've taken to swimming once a week. I usually swim at the UQ (University of Queensland) pool, and lately I've been swimming on Sundays in the later afternoon when the sun isn't so intense and things are quite pleasant.

Last Sunday I was riding down to the pool, which is about 20 minutes from my place. Most of the trip runs near the river, which lends a pleasant something to the surrounds, even if it isn't actually visible most of the way.

I was riding along a long flat stretch of road not far from the university when an interesting sight caught my eye. On the other side of the road about 50-100 meters ahead of me there was an older guy on the footpath.

He was standing side-on to me, leaning in towards some plants -- and there, projecting from his mouth, down and towards the plants was a big, continual spray of water, as if he was one of those water fountain statues, a plant-watering water-statue.

That image held place in my perception for, probably, a few tenths of a second, before being overthrown by the far more plausable notion that what I was seeing was a visual illusion, probably a result of the particular angle and distance I was viewing the scene from, rather than the sight being the University's latest research into genetically-engineered retirees.

The more realistic interpretation was that the water was coming from a hose was being held up by something that was actually further away than the man was, and that the nossle of the hose just happened to line up exactly with the guy's mouth. It was like one of those pictures which starts out looking like one thing then suddenly resolves itself into something else.

I had to laugh when I got a little closer and saw what was really going on. Neither of those perceptions was right, and I experienced a third shift of perspective. I had to laugh because I thought I'd seen -- with my second impression -- the truth behind the illusion, and as it turned out the first one was, in a certain sense, actually closer to the reality.

The water wasn't coming from some source behind him, it did originate from where his head was. At the same time, the water was coming from a hose. The answer? He was holding the hose in his mouth. It was a quite graphic illustration of the ambiguity our perception has to work with, and how interpretations that can seem so right can turn out to be so wrong.

More Than Words for Snow (2)

I've talked recently about language influencing and shaping thought; here's another example of that.

John: "Come on Fred, we need a real effort here. We need to have that report done by the end of the week, we need to try really hard at it".
Fred: "Okay, but this isn't a matter of how much I want to get it done - this isn't a matter of simply trying hard".
John: "Thomas Edison said 'Success is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration'"
Fred: "Umm, but... alright, whatever".

Assume that Fred is right, it really isn't possible to finish it by the end of the week. Fred couldn't think of a way to respond, though some of us may be able to. The bare claim that all it takes is effort is there in your face, what can you say to that? Anything you say might make it look like you're trying to avoid putting in the hard yards.

How do you argue that it's not a matter of putting in enough effort? If you put in enough effort anything is possible. Supposedly. Of course, that's not really true, but it is difficult to argue that in such situations - we're talking about a report here, not jumping over the moon.

Success here is referring to two things. There's success-as-hard-work and success-as-finishing-report. Success-as-hard-work is referring to a success that came about as a result of hard work -- a success that exists. Once you have that notion of success in your head, that notion of successes that have come about, it's easy and natural to connect the success in success-as-finishing-report up to it. They're both successes, they can't be successes and at the same time not both successes. Doing so, however, is a mistake.

One -- the success in success-as-hard work -- refers to something that has come about, while the other -- the success in success-as-finishing-report -- refers to something that may or may not come about. As soon as you connect the report-finishing success with the hard-work success you are taking it to be something that exists -- and if a success is there, it's been achieved, it's possible.

This is entirely independent of whether finishing the report is, in reality, possible to do before the end of the week. This linking is, I suspect, what is primarily responsible for that gravitational pull towards agreeing that, yes, it is just a matter of hard-work.

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BTW, if anyone who happens to read this has any pointers to web-pages, books, papers etc on the intersection of langauge and thought, I'd be interested to hear about them.

Thoughts in Few Words (3)

If you want to engage with reality you have to try understanding it

More Than Words For Snow

Ever hear that Eskimos have scores of words for snow? Apparently it's a myth [1], as their language has around the same number of words for snow as English does (snow, sleet, powder, slush, etc).

Whether language shapes and influences perception and thought is a hotly debated issue, and while I do think it does, I don't think it does so in the same ways as it is typically considered by people on either side of this argument.

The Eskimo words for snow are often cited as evidence of language as a shaper of perception and thought, and revealing it as a myth is often used as evidence that language does not shape thought. Another example I've heard concerns the fact that one language may have a term for a particular concept, while there may not be a way to directly express that concept in other languages.

Even if any of these were true, I think they would at most provide pretty weak evidence. And I'd say the same for the other 'evidence' I've heard -- I don't think they really capture the ways that language really does influence perception and thought. I'm not saying that no one has any strong examples, just that I haven't seen any -- in what I've read on the web, in magazines and in books [2] -- and certainly not in any of the popular discussions of this issue.

I want to present an example that illustrates a way I think language does influence thought, and fairly significantly influence it. The setting is as follows. There's a research group in a university computing department who have a novel idea for a piece of computer security software. The idea itself is quite general, and could be applied in a number of situations, and what they're currently looking to do is find some commercial interest that would allow them to pilot the system in a more concrete setting.

They are in a design meeting where they are trying to put together requirements for the system, as a starting point for any potential commercialisation. One member of the team is at the whiteboard, where he's written up two colomns, one saying 'needs to have' and the other 'wants to have'. These coloumns are referring to features the software could have -- and how critical the team thinks they are.

After these colomns have been drawn up on the board, one member of the team interjects that perhaps there could be multiple sets of 'needs to have' and multiple sets of 'wants to have'. The person at the whiteboard turns to the person and with a look of incredulity asks how there could be multiple set of 'needs to have'.

He goes on to say: if the software needs to have a feature, then it goes under 'needs to have' and if it doesn't need to have the feature, then the feature has to be something that we want the system to have or something we don't want the system to have -- there's no other possibility!

And regardless of how watertight that argument may sound, it's wrong. There can be multiple, different sets of 'need to have' because what features are critical (need to have) depends on the context the system will be applied in. As was mentioned earlier, the idea behind the software is quite general, and could be applied in a number of situations. The particular situation may influence which features the system needs to have, and which are merely desirable.

So if the argument was wrong, how can it sound convincing? Well, it's basically because the argument was based on the meaning of the words 'need to have' rather than on a consideration of the situation that those words were being applied to. If you just consider those words you have to conclude that you either need to have something or you don't need it, and that there's no two ways about it.

Essentially, the mistaken argument arised from putting words before reality. That is, thinking of the words first, then trying to think of the reality in terms of those words. We can see the truth by considering the reality first, then considering the words we're concerned with in terms of that reality. This means realising that we're considering features of the system, then thinking that the possible set of features will depend on what setting the ideas are applied to, and that thus 'need to know' depends on the setting.

I'll stop there. Perhaps I haven't made the strongest case for why langauge strongly influences thought in this fashion. Though I've seen a number of other examples of this nature in the past, other examples aren't things I can come up with from memory, so I'll be on the look out for more examples in the future - watch this space. Another thing I'd like to get into someday, hopefully soon, is why I think people tend to put words first. I think there is a very general mechanism at work in our minds that gives rise to this way of thinking -- and much else. Anyway, I've had enough for tonight -- I'm tired and my lower back is killing me sitting here on the chair. Mumble mumble, grumble grumble, bah humbug :-).

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[1] See, for example, here and here.
[2] I'm afraid that I haven't kept notes on what I've read, but I can recall Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct and that there were some articles in New Scientist.

New Hope for Heart Disease

You might have seen this news already -- it's from earlier this month -- but I thought it's still worth posting: [paraphrased] Researchers have discovered a treatment involving good cholesterol that, for the first time, appears to significantly reverse heart disease (ABCNews).

The Razor Wire Looking Glass

Greg Egan has written a great piece overviewing Australia's detention of Asylum Seekers. Nicely written and informative.

Here's the first part:

Port Hedland is a sleepy, sun-drenched town, 1300 kilometres north of Perth. Early in September I travelled there for the fifth time, a year on from my first visit.

Each time I return it's as if I've never been away. The tranquil streets and cloudless sky must seem idyllic to someone in the right frame of mind, but whenever the heat and silence start to lull me into a pleasant daze, I remember the words of one of my friends who lives here all year round. He had trouble sleeping, he told me, because his room felt like the grave. For him, the sense of being stranded, untouched by time, isn't restful at all. It's exactly like being buried alive.

The immigration detention centre lies at the eastern end of town. The former BHP single men's quarters, now enclosed by a high fence topped with razor wire, is surrounded by ordinary buildings: a library, a school, a recreation club. This facility is known officially as a "reception and processing" centre, but there hasn't been much reception or processing going on here for a while. These days it's more like a human warehouse. Nearly everyone here has been locked up for close to three years, and many for more than four.

Four years without freedom is a long sentence in anyone's language. Some people who tell their families back home that they're still in detention after all this time are simply not believed. "Did you rob a bank?" they're asked. "Did you kill someone?" How could anyone be imprisoned for so long, just for crossing a border to ask for asylum?

There are people here who began their incarceration at the age of four, at nineteen, at twenty-six, at thirty-four. The ordinary possibilities of childhood, youth, marriage, and parenthood have either been lost to them completely, or distorted beyond recognition. There is no stage in life when a loss like this can be borne without damage; you might as well try to remove a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. Worse, immigration detention does not mean serving a fixed term, with days you can count off with mathematical certainty. The sentence is open-ended.

Everyone here has been told by the government that it's safe for them to return to their homelands. Of eight Afghanis I know who've gone back, unable to bear detention any longer, six found the situation so perilous that they had to flee again. People returning to other countries have been arrested at the airport and imprisoned without charge or trial. In at least three cases documented by church groups, rejected asylum seekers returning from Australia have been murdered. That's the choice we're offering people: be delivered into the hands of your enemy, or stay here and rot in prison.

It's hard to imagine just how corrosive that kind of stress must be. Many people here are on antidepressants and sedatives. Many have been driven to self-harm. But even those who aren't plainly psychologically ill are exhausted, debilitated, by the impossible situation they're facing.

Language in Perception and Thought: Misleading Metaphor for Nanotech

When people talk about nanotechnology machines, particularly self-replicating nanotech, they often invoke biological metaphors, such as biological cells and their self-replication.

These metaphors can be misleading, however, as -- the article claims -- "artificial replicating systems [...] are going to bear about as much resemblance to the biological variety as, say, a 747 bears to a duck".

These metaphors may be causing unnecessary concerns about some of the dangers associated with nanotech.

Thoughts in Few Words (2)

Societies have habits called traditions.

Quote on Perception and Making Breakthroughs

 
The difference between making a breakthrough and not can often be just a small element of perception
     -- Brian Greene

---

This line is from an interview in Sentific American, entitled "The Future of String Theory -- A Conversation with Brian Greene". Brian Greene is a physicist and author. The line comes from the following paragraph:

To me that suggests what a fundamental discovery is. The universe in a sense guides us toward truths, because those truths are the things that govern what we see. If we're all being governed by what we see, we're all being steered in the same direction. Therefore, the difference between making a breakthrough and not often can be just a small element of perception, either true perception or mathematical perception, that puts things together in a different way.

Thoughts in Few Words (1)

What greatness has been stifled by this world? The vast majority, I'd say, for everyday, in subtle and overt ways, unknown potential is oppressed. A potential I think is carried by most of us.

Round, Round, Round We Go

Can you imagine someone dictating a memo onto a tape and then mailing that tape overseas and waiting for it to be mailed back so they can listen to it, before continuing with their composition? Sound ridiculous? Why would anything so here-and-now and connected to the author involve such an extravagant interposition?

In a lot of ways, that scenario is actually pretty similar to what's going on as I'm writing these weblog posts. As I'm writing the post with my browser pointed at Blogger's editing page, I like to keep another window open showing my weblog's page, so I can see what I've written in a nicer rendered HTML than the small, cramped up text shown in the editing page.

So I type away for a bit, click on 'post and publish' -- at which point my text gets sent from my browser here in Australia to (I presume) some server in the US -- then I reload the rendered display of the post in the other browser window -- whereby the text of the post gets sent back from the US.

This round-the-world routine only takes a few seconds to complete, and I do it frequently, without giving it a thought. But imagine how ridiculous this scenario would have seemed to someone, say, 15 years ago! Who in their right mind would even think about doing that?!

A point that I think can be made is that small details can be significant -- in this case the insignificant cost and time of sending that data back and forth -- and that we tend to assume that only the large details count, with everything else being roughly in line with what we'd expect with the large details being as they are -- that large distances involve large times and costs.

One place where we are prone to making this mistake is when we consider our future. With any issue, such as transportation, health or technology, we assume that the details that aren't mentioned will stay the same as they are today.

Opinions Aren't Always Just Opinions

Everyone has opinions, but we alone own ours. To a certain extent they define who we are, and while not all of our opinions are dear to us -- so far I haven't fought anyone to the death over my view that green is a nice colour -- some of them obviously are.

Not only do we hold certain opinions strongly, but we strongly believe in their sanctity. When I express my opinion it's not the same as me expressing a fact about the world, I'm just saying what I feel. How could anyone dispute my opinion - it is just my opinion!

Nobody would argue with that, except that right now I want to suggest that things aren't always so simple and it's not always completely true that opinions are beyond criticism.

One reason is that what gets passed off as 'opinion' is quite often not really an opinion. The ostensible meaning of 'opinion' is 'simply what I feel'. I'll call this 'pure' version of opinion. In the pure version, you've got things like "I like it, because it has qualities that are, purely in my subjective opinion, good". In the common version of opinion you're saying: "I like it because it's good". Often statements of opinion are veiled claims of fact.

But that still leaves the 'pure' version of opinion intact. What about some teenager who's really into one style of music, and who honestly doesn't like the sound of any other kind of music? This might be their honest and sincere opinion. They just don't like the sound of other kinds of music.

Is there anyway someone could be critical of this opinion? I want to suggest that there might be, though this will depend on certain details of that situation being the case. But before I explain, I just want to make clear that being critical doesn't necessarily mean being nasty or attacking someone.

OK, imagine if the person has never really tried listening to any other kind of music other than their favourite, and thus haven't had a chance to get used to another kind of music in its own terms? Perhaps their opinion is based more on lack of exposure than anything else? I think this is a reasonable way to be critical of an opinion - to be critical of its foundations.

There's a prevalent, though unstated, belief which is probably going to sound a bit strange when I say it: that opinions don't come from anywhere; they just are. Under this view, criticising an opinion is a bit like criticising the colour blue. You can't do it, because it's type of thing, like a colour, which the notion of criticism can't apply to.

But that view doesn't stand up to close examination. There's always something behind an opinion, some reason you feel that way. The reason doesn't have be a consciously chosen one, nor does it have to be significant, but this doesn't change the fact that it exists. I didn't choose to like the colour green, but no doubt my like of it arises from the structure of my brain or its chemistry, or perhaps it has to do with associations I made with the colour when I was younger.

And if we trace things back, we might discover things that we might not consider so reasonable. Should we consider that person's opinion to be just as reasonable as a well-informed one, with it being the result of not being informed? Or a more in-your-face case: should we consider someone's racist opinions expressing dislike for certain skin colours just as reasonable as anybody else's opinions on the matter?

There's another reason why opinions are more than "just opinions". They have a real impact on the world. Obviously, if someone holds an opinion, then this can effect their actions. If I like green then I might be inclined to buy a green t-shirt. While it is self-evidently true that opinions have consequences, people often talk about them as if they don't.

In Australia you'd have a hard time arguing that the average person's high-level of devotion to sport is a bad thing. You'd be told that it's just their opinion, that they're free to like what they want. That assumes that there are no consequences of them holding that opinion.

Consider this, then: we all have a limited amount of time, and time spent on one thing means less time for other things. Devotion to one thing can lead to underexposure to other things, things like making yourself informed about the way the world works, and the way things are at the moment -- remembering here that an intelligent, informed populous is important for successful democracy.

Or think about how the exultation of sporting heroes comes at the expense of exposure to other, perhaps more worthy, types of people. Anyway, I don't want to get bogged down in the details of arguing this point, but I hope I've gotten the basic point across - that opinions have an impact, for better or worse, on the world outside our heads.

At this point I'm going to try summarising things. There are three main points. First, though we tend to consider opinions to be opinions in the pure sense ("I like this movie"), most opinions are really expressions of what we think is really the case ("I think this movie is good"), that is, claims of fact. Second, I believe we can criticise the foundation of an opinion, even a pure opinion, and that by doing so, we may be able to say that it is less, or more, reasonable than other people's opinions on the topic. And finally, while it is often presumed that people are free to have opinions because that's just their own personal thing, free from any connection with the outer world, opinions can and do have an impact on the world and others.

So there you have it, my take on why opinions aren't always "just opinions". I can easily imagine some people reading this post and -- boom boom -- saying "yeah, but that's just your opinion". I just thought I'd get in first :-).

Quote on Opinions and Facts

 
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts
     -- Patrick Moynihan

---

I came across this quote while doing some rambling browsing. I saw a reference to the Wayback Machine, which archives the web, and decided to take a look at it. Through that, I ended up looking up the earliest archived page for Slashdot, from back in 1997 -- and this quote was the one they had on the bottom of that page.

A Book in the Hand, and New Eyes for its Complexity

A change of perspective gives rise to an intuitive image of dazziling complexity

Think of some piece of sculpture, real or imagined, it doesn't matter. Visualise it, see its shapes, its curves, its lines, its angles. How could the complexity of such a work be expressed? How could it be measured? I have no idea what the answer is, but I'd expect that a major part of it would involve the complexity of its shape. Perhaps mathmatical tools of topology could be used to give some fairly objective measure of it, for example. Hold that thought.

Now imagine you have a book in your hand, again any book will do. We can also think about a book's complexity. This is something which has no doubt been done by various people, and I imagine that issues such as the complexity of the writing, the plot and the characters are common parts of such attempts. The other day it occurred to me a very different conception of a book's complexity. I'm not saying it's a better way, but it is quite different, and I think it is quite provocative.

It's really quite simple, you look at its shape. Turn it around in your hands and you'll see it's a prism. Open it up and look inside and you see what really makes up the book, the words. This change of perspective reveals a dazzlingly complex construction: the intricate shape of a letter, appearing in each of the book's letters, chained one after the other, in an edifice spanning thousands and thousands. This, the combined shape of each and every letter stretching from page one to the end, is the shape of the book.

Book Review: The Curious Cook

The Curious Cook: Taking the Lid Off Kitchen Facts and Fallacies, Harold McGee, 1990.

There's a kind of spectrum of tasks, at one end of which are those things you learn by doing, and the other end those things you learn by studying. We might learn history in books, but our knowledge of cooking is, by and large, firmly placed over the kitchen stove.

It's not hard to see why. Over many generations and millennia, people have figured out what works and what doesn't. In a continuing cycle, most of us learn from a parent or relative or from some cookbook, in a process of imitation, which gives way to an intuitive understanding of what works and what doesn't, and on and on from generation to generation.

Our understanding of cooking is on an intuitive, functional level. We can understand that adding a bit of salt will enhance the flavours, and we know roughly how much salt is required to do this - and how much would make the dish unpalatable. Which seems fair, for if we were to get an understanding at the next level down, we'd be getting into the realms of chemistry. And at this level, things get pretty damn complex!

It would seem that you'd have to know a hell of a lot about the chemistry, the structure of the cooking materials, how they combine and interact in the process of cooking in order to improve upon the millennia of trial and error experience and incremental improvement!

It is in this context that Harold McGee's "The Curious Cook", aimed at the lay reader, successfully brings to bear some understanding of underlying science onto various matters food. The result of this rare combination is interesting, informative and a pleasure to read - and it shows that a deeper understanding can sometimes be very useful. McGee not only knows his science, he also knows how to write in a clear and entertaining manner.

The book is organised as a collection of essays split over three sections. The first covers some kitchen experimentation to uncover the truth behind some kitchen lore, and to troubleshoot some common problems, such as how to keep salads green and fresh. The second looks at matters of health, covering the role of food in heart disease and cancer, and what part aluminum might play in Alzheimer's. The third entails some miscellaneous reflections relating to science and food.

In the first section we learn such things as why searing meat doesn't really seal in the juices, why bleurre blanc is so simple yet other similar sauces are so complex, a simple way of making mayonnaise, and simple formulas for getting the right proportions of ingredients for making various different types of water ices (something that you won't be able to find elsewhere).

As you've probably sensed from that list, the range of topics he covers is fairly eclectic, and, speaking as someone who's more interested in Indian and Asian cooking, it's also oriented towards European food. But even so, it's fascinating stuff, and a lot of it reads more like a mystery novel than a science text or cookbook. He'll have a promising lead, go down the path of exploring it, only to discover it was a red herring, and off he'll go on another lead.

One thing I found quite surprising was how wrong certain kitchen lore was, and how easy it was for him to systematically check it out using a simple kitchen set up (as opposed to an industrial lab and equipment). Like searing meat to seal in the juices - it makes intuitive sense, but if you actually check it out, it doesn't make any difference at all. Yet it's common lore that's been handed down and accepted from generation to generation. The only benefit seems to be that the searing helps to initially brown the meat.

The second section moves from food and cooking to its effects on our health. Specifically, he covers heart disease, cancer, and the potential link between aluminum and Alzheimer's. I'm a bit squeamish about these kinds of things, but I actually found these chapters more interesting than anything else. It's fascinating, and at the same time kinda mellowing, to realise that heart disease and cancer are more the result of imperfections in our body's functioning than anything else - for example, most carcinogens are do not themselves cause cancer, but are turned into things which cause cancer by our own bodies.

Most popular treatments of these issues often talk in very simplified and vague terms, and I thought this section really helped you understand the issues by giving you an account of what's actually going on in the body. In particular, the description of heart disease was very nicely written.

While he attempts to summarise the current scientific understanding of these matters, it's worth noting that the book is close to 15 years now, and I wonder how much things have moved on since then. In any case, I expect the understanding of the fundamentals he presents is unlikely to be much changed.

The third and final section is a scattered collection of three essays related to science and food. The first two are historical in nature, one talking about Brillat Savarin (remembered for a handful of epigrams, such as "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are"), who was one of the first to foray into the world of food and science, and the other chronicling the history of the substance Osmazome, which people once thought contained the essence of the flavour of meat. The final essay reports recent research findings that shed light on why we find the flavours of cooked food so desirable (while most animals, and indeed our predecessors, don't).

Entertaining, practical, informative and unique - The Curious Cook is well worth a look.

Home Laser Engraver/Etcher

The VersaLaser is basically a PC printer that allows you to engrave and etch designs onto wood, plastics, leather, stone and other materials. It uses a powerful laser, which can also cut through various materials (Article; Pics/Specs; Discussion). Apparently, similar laser-based systems have been around for a while, but not as a PC peripheral. One will set you back about $10 000 (US, I assume). Futher encroaching of the world of information onto the world of atoms.

Today's Comics

Monty - Night Vision Goggles, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

A Nice bit 'a UI Innovation

DateLens is a piece of Calendar Software with a very interesting focus + context, zoomable user-interface (Details and flash-based demo).

The basic view is a grid, with each cell representing a day. You can zoom in on a particular day, whereby that cell will enlarge and, to give it more space, the surrounding cells will contract a little. The zooming is smooth and works in a progressive fashion: you can go from a small cell for the day, to a summarised view, to the full details. I haven’t tried it myself, but the interface looks quite natural and flowing.

Idea for Web-browser feature: Highlighting Equivalent Links

Here's a simple idea that could provide a minor enhancement to the web-browsing experience. If there's more than one link on the visible portion of a page pointing to the same target, then when the user mouse-overs one of those links, have the browser highlight the rest of them. This way, the user can be alerted to the fact that they all point to the same place. As far as I know, there aren't any browsers that implement this and I'm not aware of anyone having tried it - but then I hardly keep close track on these matters.

It's not uncommon for a webpage to contain multiple equivalent links. Links on the site's navigation side-bar can also appear with in the body of the page. Or the page may simple reference the same document in multiple contexts; sometimes these links may point to different parts of that document. For example, a page on the university site may make repeated references to the university's as policies outlined on a particular page. Or certain links from within the body of the page may be distilled as references at the end of an article.

That all these links point to the same place may not be clear, however. The link text may not be the same on all links, for one thing. (In Internet Explorer, if you open one of the links in a new browser window it gets marked as read but the other equivalent links stay the same until you refresh the page, but this issue would be best remidied by immediately marking them all as read).

Even if the link text is the same for all the links, it won't necessarily be obvious that they're all pointing to the same page. I've had a number of experiences like the following. You might have seen a link in one paragraph and decided not to follow based on its link text and the context. Then, a minute and a few paragraphs later, you see another link and click it, because it this context it seems interesting or useful - only to realise that it's the same one you didn't want to visit earlier.

Because you were like most readers and didn't devote a heap of attention to the target of each link you mouse over, you forgot that the two links were the same. Memory is made more difficult by non-mnemonic URLs that are hard to read let alone remember. If the relationship was shown by the browser, I think this mistake would be harder to make.

If pages were written well, the destinations of links would be clear, and this problem wouldn't help provide justification for such a feature. But often they're not, and tools such as well browsers should be designed to best support the realities of the task they're facilitating.

I think it'd be interesting to try this idea out and see how it flys. It looks like it'd be easy to implement, and aside from it potential usefulness, I think there are other reasons it might fly: it's an incremental, evolutionary addition to the browsing toolkit, and it requires no overhead or change of habits to use. I also don't think it'd be too distracting, nor too confusing to inexperienced users.

Unfortunately I've got too many things I'm pursuing that are higher-priority for me than learning enough about a browser to have a go at implementing this. So if anyone is interested in giving it a go, please let me know how it went.

---

There's a lot more I'd like to say about this feature, because I think there are a few other situations it'd be useful in, and I'd like to go a little deeper into the underlying reasons why it's useful (or at least seems so to me). There's also some more sophisticated ways this could be implemented (so you can see all the equivalent links on the page, not just those that are currently visible), and I think the technique that could be used to do this would be useful in a number of contexts. There's just not the time at the moment :-), so I'll have to deal with these matters later...

Updating the food pyramid

The well known food pyramid, offering simple prescriptions for a good diet, is now just over ten years old. Scientific American have an article from earlier this year on what we've learnt about dietry health in the intervening years. It's both fortunate and unfortunate that, as the title of the article ("Rebuilding the Food Pyramid") suggest, we've learnt a fair bit more. Unfortunate, because better health will require changes in habits and established lore, but fortunate, because it ought to help bring us closer to that goal.

Songs that've got me right now.

At any time, there's always a few songs that make me want to crank the radio up when they come on.

I really like that new Outkast song, "Hey Ya!". It's got a great upbeat, funky energy to it, and for some reason it sounds to me refreshingly un-run-of-the-mill. When I listen to it, I get the impression that the guy doing the vocals has a real intimate familiarity with how to use his fairly unique voice: the tone, emphasis and timing combine brilliantly and there's a real smoothness and confidence in the vocal delivery. There's some nice lines, too: "ladies.... give me some sugar, I am your neighbour" and "Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it like a Poloroid Picture".

The other one that's got me at the moment is "That Great Love Sound" by The Ravonette's (listen to a sample, at Amazon.co.uk). It's well-crafted guitar-rock/pop, and definitely worth checking out. I love the bit when the female vocals echo the "makes me want to scream and shout" (or perhaps 'sing and shout', I can't remember) line.

Today's Comics

Monty - Tai Chi Sped Up, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

An interesting future for TV

Director of BBC New Media & Technology on the what the future holds for tv (PaidContent.org). Increased user control, localised content, more user input, ambient tv, programme sharing... and sooner than you might think. The article seems pretty insightful.

Today's Comics

Speed Bump - Author Apparel, not bad
Herman - Afraid of Dogs, not bad
Monty - It's Over, okay
Pearls Before Swine - A Fish Called The Truth, okay - it's a pun
(Others: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Strange Brew)

Qualitative and Quantitative Reality

The terms 'Qualitative Reality' and 'Quantitative Reality' occurred to me the other day, and they seem useful.

These terms aren't new, but they seem less common than I think they ought to be. I checked Google, and if you search for 'Objective Reality' you get 72,000 results, and 32,500 results for 'Everyday Reality'. While 'Qualitative Reality' brings up 176 results, and 'Quantiative Reality' only 158 results.

They seem useful because often the underlying, objective reality is not the thing of importance. The thing of importance is often the reality that we perceive and which we can measure.

In the large, the Qualitative and Quantitative Realities are the ones we live in, and I think these terms help to bring this to the fore. They can help us realise that much of our reality is changing, is a function of our technology and understanding.

Today's Comics

Herman - Welcolme to Earth, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Speed Bump, Monty, Strange Brew)

Office 2003 gets thumbs up for XML functionality

XML capabilities in Word, Excel, and InfoPath help bridge the gap between desktop documents and databases, and give enterprises a reason to upgrade (Udell)

Today's Comics

Monty - The Type of Friends We Need, good
Pearls Before Swine - Truth and Lies, good
(Others: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

Virtual Hurricanes

Supercomputer simulation of earth's weather models down to level of virtual hurricanes (New Scientist). This is the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan -- the world's fastest supercomputer -- which is aparently proving to be a very useful tool for understanding and predicting the weather.

Game Boy Advance to go wireless

Nintendo's Game Boy Advance portable game consoles will soon be wireless, allowing up to five players to play together over a 2.4GHz radio connection (PCWorld). Wireless is getting pretty pervasive - I think increases in our communication capabilities is overall a good thing.

Sci/tech tracking

• Wallami pines, once thougth to have been extinct for millions of years, were discovered in a small grove in a secret location in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, in 1994. In 2005 they'll be available as a household plant (BBC).


• Philips have developed paper capable of displaying high-refresh-rate video using rearrangeable electronic ink (Story: Nature; discussion: Slashdot).


• Differences in human activities on weekdays vs weekends affecting climate (Article: Scientific American; Discussion: Slashdot)

Making the corporate landscape more responsible

As a first step, we need full public disclosure of all factory names and locations. Such transparency will make it much harder to hide abuses (Guardian)

...in today's global economy, the product is protected but not the human being who made it...

Design for a very nice office

Custom designed, highly functional office-space archictecture, developed for company's new office (Joel on Software). Some quite nice ideas, and really great to see considering how awful the design of most offices is.

Today's Comics

Monty - The Body Can No Longer, fairly good
Strange Brew - You May Now, not bad
Speed Bump - Change Machine, okay
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman)

Sci/Tech Tracking

• Bilboards using 'digital ink' developed (New York Times).


• Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells (New Scientist).
  • a few points in the article require some sort of justification
• Single atom laser. A research group at Caltech has successfully constructed a laser consisting of only one caesium atom. The emitted light is very weak but highly ordered, so such a device may be used to control a quantum computer (Story: PhysicsWeb; Discussion: Slashdot).

Today's Comics

...quite a good one I saw recently...
Monty - Schoolyard Memories.

Enabling rich structure in weblogs

Syncato is a very interesting new peice of weblog software. Essentially, posts are XML fragments stored in an XML database, which can be powerfully and easily queried by users (Staken, via Udell).

One important consequence of this is that it provides strong motiviation to add metadata markup to your weblog posts, as then you can use the metadata in queries, to extract useful information from the weblog or to construct custom views of it, etc.

Today's Comics

Strange Brew - He's following me again, not bad
Monty - My Old School Playground, not bad
Speed Bump - Recall Notice, not bad
Dilbert - Only During National Holidays, okay
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, Herman)

Unweaving that Turntable Sound

The other day I saw The Herbaliser in concert. Anytime I see a group or artist who's using turntables, a constant stream of records and a whole heap of pushing buttons and twiddling knobs, I'm always wondering what is it they're really doing up there?

I mean, I know what they're doing on a basic level, with stuff like mixing sounds together, scratching and cuing up parts of the records, but I can't get any sense of the correspondence between actions they do and sounds I'm listening to.

Just what's on those records they're using? What are all the things they're doing contributing to the sounds I'm hearing? To what extent are their actions contributing to that sound?

Not knowing this makes it hard to really engage with the music as a live act - it almost makes it feel like I'm listening to a CD. And I think a lot of people -- the majority, perhaps -- have the same experience. They don't get it.

Not everyone, though. I'm sure it's a lot different if you've got some experience doing this kinda stuff with turntables, and you know what's going on. I've been thinking, it'd be interesting to have a little multimedia program that illustrates the kinda stuff that's going on. So if someone, like me, wants to know -- or there's someone who dislikes the music because of the fact that they don't get it -- you can just point them at it.

Micropayments Pingpong

I think micropayments would be a great technology, should they be feasable. I'd like to be able to pay 50 cents to download a some episode of a tv show I really want to see which hasn't been on tv for years.

I think Clay Shirky is a pretty sharp guy, but I felt the argument against micropayments in his latest article Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content was a bit flaky, and Scott McCloud has a published a fairly convincing (to my mind) demolition of Shirky's arguments. It will be interesting to see what Shirky might have to say in response.

Sci/tech tracking

• New nokia phone allows users to print their own cover-designs with a bubble jet printer (MobileTracker).


• India to use GPS technology to alert train drivers of obstructions on the tracks (BBC, Slashdot discussion)


• High-tech window generates efficiently generates energy from light passing through (Wired)
  

  
  

Today's Comics

Dilbert - The Keeper of the Giant Binder, not bad
Speed Bump - More Facets, Clarity and Brilliance, not bad
Herman - How We Built This, not bad
Get Fuzzy - Spanielle Steel, not bad
Monty - You Can Look But You Can't Touch, not bad
Pearls Before Swine - At Least I Came Close, not bad
(Others: Strange Brew)

Today's Comics

Pearls Before Swine - No Money for Bridge Toll, not bad
Monty - I Was Kicked Out, not bad
(Others: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

Sci/Tech headline tracking

• Simple test for validity of near-death visions (BBC) - nice.
  
• Bacterial battery - just add sugar (SpaceDaily).
  
• Hubble sees very small objects in Kuiper Belt, but surprisingly few (EurekaAlert).
  
• Carbon Nanotubes can produce Ideal Photon Emission, which can make fields as quantum cryptography and single-molecule sensors a practical reality (UniOfRochester).
  
• Another phone network switching to IP (Slashdot).

Today's Comics

Strange Brew - Godzilla Gets Inspired, not bad
Dilbert - A Thousand Ways to Say, not bad
Monty - Whose Photo is This?, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump)

Misc Recent Articles: New Aibo, Bangalore's Infrastructure Problems, Cheaper CDs, Mars' Redness

New Aibo - There's a new model of Sony's robotic dog, Aibo (PcMag). Improvements include a new, quite cute look, more realistic and smarter movement, and better pattern recognition.

High-Tech Bangalore's Infrastructure Problems - infrastructure can't match business boom in India's high-tech city (USA Today).

Universal Music Group Reduces CD Prices - ...in an effort to bring customers back into retail stores and boost music sales (CNN).

Meteors Made Mars Red? - It seems likely that meteors, not water, gave Mars its distinctive colour (EurekaAlert from NewScientist). Also talks a bit about the issue of how much water was on surface of the planet in the past.

The economics of application installation - Most computer people are stuck in the "disk space is scarce" mindset, but Sean McGrath has been thinking about some consequences of this no longer being true.

Today's Comics

Speed Bump - I'm an Ideas Person, quite good
Monty - Are We Looking at the Same Bird?, good
Strange Brew - Who's the Joker?, not bad
Herman - If You're So Smart, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy)

Today's Comics

Monty - Bird Watching, not bad
Dilbert - Sending Power Via, okay
Get Fuzzy - Just Got My Beanbag to Fit, okay
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

Today's Comics

Dilbert - I don't have the time, not bad
Speed Bump - Pot Bellied Pig, not bad
Herman - Thirteen Primrose Gardens?, not bad
Monty - She loves me, she loves me not, okay
Pearls Before Swine - Been Asleep for Centuries, not bad
(Others: Get Fuzzy, Strange Brew)

Showing not telling, and not thinking about doing

I get the bus to work and it's cheaper to buy a 10-trip ticket than a ticket each trip. The other day I was in a newsagent waiting in line to buy one (you can't buy these tickets on the bus), when I noticed what the guy in front of me, who was also buying one, did.

When I buy one I'll usually roll out the slightly-awkward line "could I get a adult, ten trip, one zone bus ticket thanks". But what this guy did was simply to hold up his old ticket and ask "could I get another one of these?". So simple and (in hindsight) obvious!

Now why didn't I think of that? Actually, I think I can answer that: I (and I think most people) don't really think about the things we're doing as we go about the day to day tasks of our lives. This is also an example of learning by copying, which I think is a far larger component of our learning than is generally recognised.

Today's Comics

Monty - New Strain of Salmonella, not bad
Pearls Before Swine - Rat's New Philosophy, not bad
(Others: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Speed Bump, Strange Brew)

The Nutritional Value of Spam?

I've been thinking, maybe there's some good that comes out of that constant torrent of junk e-mail. Sure, it's time consuming and a pain, but I'm wondering if it's also doing us some good by making us more critical consumers of information? Although the potential positive I'm thinking of also applies to advertising in other forms of media, I think there's a crucial difference with e-mail which I'll also discuss.

Spam is full of dodgy claims about larger body parts, nigerian money, becoming more youthful, etc etc, and maybe it helps teach us that just because someone says something is true, and just because they've given reasons and justifications for why its true, doesn't mean that it is true. That is, perhaps spam helps us become more discerning about what is a valid justification for a claim.

You might say that, well, people fairly quickly pick up the fact that that all spam is rubbish and from then on simply ignore it. I'd agree with that to a certain extent, but I don't think it necessarily invalidates the idea I'm thinking about. I still think that before someone will competely dismiss all spam off the bat they are likely to have read some. And judgement of the worth of spam's claims must play some part in the decision to ignore it.

I don't know the answer to the question, but I'd be interested to know whether it has already been considered by anyone. Analagous questions in more traditonal forms of media, such as junk mail advertising or radio or tv advertising, may have been considered. There are also analogous issues outside the field of advertising, such as the effect of new media technologies, such as the printing press, on the critical perspectives of people in societies.

But coming back to e-mail, I think spam is different in one significant sense, because spam is locked into an arms race with anti-spam software and measures. As anti-spam software becomes able to identify messages as spam, the spam evolves to outwit the anti-spam software, and so on. It seems likely that spam will therefore become more and more subtle and will find smarter ways to get its message across.

For one thing, spam is likely to camoflage itself a lot better. I can imagine a situation where a person posts to a newsgroup praising the quality of a product being discussed -- where this 'person' is actually a spam-bot (sure, this sort of stuff goes on now, but people have to write it and thus there's economic constraints on its quantity).

The question is, to what extent will people be dragged along in this arms race? Will people have to become more discerning judging spam claims -- and thus any claim they faced with? Will this strip all the guff from peoples judgement centers - so people can no longer belive things simply because their buttons have been pushed?

It'd be nice to think so, but to come close to an answer would require a lot more investigation and consideration than I have given, and more than I can right now.

This whole issue reminds me of the statement that's been made that much of the behavioural complexity of creatures, including humans, derives not so much from the creatures themselves, but their environment, or rather the interaction between those creatures and their environments. Ants are, for example, quite simple creatures, but they can perform some quite complex behaviour because of the complexity of their environment (which includes the physical environment and the other ants).

I'm also reminded that things tasting bad is often an indicator that they are poisonious, but also that just because something may leave a bad taste in your mouth -- like your spinach and brussel sprouts of the world -- doesn't mean it's bad for you.

Commenting Features Added

I've added a commenting feature using the BlogSpeak system. There's a link at the bottom of each post, to the right of the time-of-post, where you can view comments on the post and add your own.

Today's Comics

Speed Bump - Madame Zubali's Seances, good
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, Herman, Monty, Strange Brew)

How much does a cloud weigh?

Yeah, those clouds may look all light and fluffy, but in reality they're big fat bastards. (AbcNews - not their words of course)

Today's Comics

Get Fuzzy - One Name, not bad
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Herman, Speed Bump, Monty, Strange Brew)

Today's Comics

Herman - A Coffee to go, pretty good
(Others: Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Speed Bump, Monty, Strange Brew)

Origami helps cellphone cameras to focus

Picture-messaging phones may be about to get a whole lot more intrusive. Thanks to a novel and ultra-cheap micromotor technology, cellphone cameras should soon be able to zoom and focus with the same precision as the autofocusing lenses used in expensive stills cameras. (New Scientist)

Today's Selection of Comics

Pearls Before Swine - I Have An Idea, quite good
Dilbert - One Good Thing, not bad
(Others: Strange Brew, Speed Bump, Herman, Get Fuzzy, Monty)

Scientists Crack Silk's Secret

Scientists have worked out a feasable method for developing artifical silk that's as good as the real stuff (Tufts, via Slashdot).

Today's Selection of Comics

Dilbert - Blank Business Card, not bad.
Monty - Cartoon Fishing, okay.
Pearls Before Swine - Famous Initials, okay.
(Others: Strange Brew, Speed Bump, Herman, Get Fuzzy)