Spaced

(From Spaced Season 2, Episode 1, aired Feb 2001)

Daisy: "So how are you then, you big bloody man?"
Tim: "I'm good, I'm good ... I just ... I've had a few things to work through ... you know"
Daisy: "With Sarah?"
Tim: "No, with George Lucas"

(cut to scene of Tim in the forest in the dark, using a flaming torch to light a large bonfire labelled "Star Wars Stuff", while the slow Star Wars theme plays....)

(cut back to Tim in the kitchen looking lost, distressed)

Daisy: "Tim, its been over a year..."
Tim: "Its been 18 months Daisy ... and it still hurts."
Daisy: "Well, I didn't think Phantom Menace was that bad."

(zoom in on Tims face, looking increasingly angry)

- originally a comment from this metafilter thread

Confusopoly

Two gems from Scott Adams in his May 7th blog post.

1 - The definition of Confusopoly

A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers so no one can do comparison shopping.

Cell phone companies are the best example of confusopolies. The average consumer finds it impossible to decipher which carrier has the best deal, so carriers don't have normal market pressure to lower prices. It's a virtual cartel without the illegal part.

2 - Some Free Market pragmatism

... Before you call me a socialist, I don't have an informed opinion on national healthcare. But I also don't have an automatic bias in favor of a free market that gave us Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, derivatives, and mortgages to hobos. I think you have to look at the specifics.

Tea Rules

How to make a good cup of tea is a problem that has vexed our best minds for many years. George Orwell put forward his eleven rules of tea-making in the 1940s. The Royal Society of Chemistry published their own instruction for how to make the perfect cup of tea in 2003. One area that these two heavyweights disagree on is the old controvery of whether the milk should go into the cup before or after the tea.

Orwell puts it very well:

Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

However the RSC counters with:

Milk should be added before the tea, because denaturation (degradation) of milk proteins is liable to occur if milk encounters temperatures above 75°C. If milk is poured into hot tea, individual drops separate from the bulk of the milk and come into contact with the high temperatures of the tea for enough time for significant denaturation to occur. This is much less likely to happen if hot water is added to the milk.

Perhaps wisely, ISO 3103, the international standardized method for brewing tea, sits on the fence with this issue, stating that "milk can be added before or after pouring the infused tea".

However, I think its time for us to realise that times have changed, and perhaps there are more important problems to tackle in the world of tea. Consider this:

• Most of the cups of tea made today are made with a teabag in the cup, not with a teapot


• In a frighteneing number of instances, milk is going into the tea straight after the teabag

If that last sentence didn't strike fear into your heart, you've probably drifted off and need to go back and read it again.

Yes, milk is going in straight after the teabag. Even worse, the main perpetrators of this crime are the supposedly beverage-worshiping cafes that pretend to understand the importance of tea, and charge you £1.50 (or whatever) for sampling their expertise. Tea needs hot water to brew in. If the milk goes in right after the teabag, the water is cooled and you are left with a forlorn luke-warm teabag swimming in a pale tea of disappointment.

When you've got to the front of the queue and they are making your tea, when they ask you if you want milk, be careful what you say. I've found that 'Yes, but not yet' is quite a good answer. If you simply say 'Yes', you are in danger of ending up with tea like this:

Arthur C Clarke predicts the Internet, sort of

Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed the novel '2001 - A Space Odyssey' in the mid 1960s, parallel with the screenplay for the film. I read the novel recently, and the following passage in which Arthur C Clarke imagines the future of newspapers caught my eye.

What he describes is a sort of mashup between a non-interactive internet, teletext and a zooming interface somewhat like the iPhone. The passage takes place when Dr Floyd is on his was to the Moon...

There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest news reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen, and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word 'newspaper' of course, was an anachronistic hang-over into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

John Gray's Straw Dogs

I've already written quite a lot about one of the claims that John Gray makes in 'Straw Dogs' about the bandwidth of consciousness, but I also wanted to post a general review of the book, because its a very interesting piece of work.

On the front cover of the UK paperback, Jim Crace writes that "Straw Dogs has enraged me and engaged me more than any other book this year". This seems to sum up the experience a lot of people have with the book - its a bracing read, but there's plenty to disagree with.

For example, compare Terry Eagleton's generally dismissive review in the Guardian with the much more positive one that Jason Cowley wrote for the Observer in the same week. They both make plenty of points that I agree with:

"Drawing on a wide range of sources, from science to fiction to more speculative theories such as Gaia, Straw Dogs unfurls in a series of numbered paragraphs. The style is terse and pithy; sometimes bold assertion supplants argument and there is repetition, overstatement and too much direct quotation from the work of EO Wilson and others. But there are moments of beauty and insight, too, and disgust at the excesses of history - the wars, destruction, the ideological follies." - Jason Cowley

"It is just that Gray cannot resist mixing these vital truths with half-truths, plain falsehoods, lurid hyperbole, dyspeptic middle-aged grousing and the sort of recklessly one-sided rhetoric he would surely mark down in a student's essay. ... In rightly stressing the affinities between humans and other animals, he slides shiftily over some key differences ... Gray does not want to hear of human value, which would wreck his sensationalist case." - Terry Eagleton

One persuasion trick that John Gray deploys a couple of times is this:

- People say that attribute A makes Humans different from animals
- But animal Y can do A- (where A- is something a little bit like A)
- Therefore, Humans are vain to imagine they are any different from other animals

For example, in chapter 1, section 5, this mechanism is used with A = Technology, Y = Ants and A- = fungi growing by leaf-cutter ants. The point he seems to be making is that the technology created by humans is nothing worth getting excited about because other species also farm and use tools in a limited way. But this argument obviously ignores the degree of complexity of the technology or tool-use.

In chapter 2, section 8 he does it again with A = Language, Y= Birds and A- = Birdsong (also Y = Wolves and A- = scent traces). He goes on to say "what is distinctly human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing". Again, he seems to be saying that human language is no big deal because other species of animals also have forms of communication. Again, the degree of complexity is brushed aside.

A few pages later, in chapter 2, section 10, we have A = Consciousness, Y = Bacteria and A- = Sensing the environment. Gray points out that sensation and perception exist throughout the animal and plant kingdom. He also points out that apes have shown to have versions of some of the mental capacities that we once thought were uniquely human - "Despite an ancient tradition that tells us otherwise, there is nothing uniquely human in conscious awareness". Degree of complexity is not examined.

Gray does concede that humans have a sense of Self that other animals may not have. Before we have time to pat ourselves on the back though, he pulls the rug from under our feet. Self-awareness is not worth having, he contends, and is an illusion that hold us back. He argues that human consciousness is overrated, using a three pronged attack based on the bandwidth of consciousness, the supposed power of subliminal adverising and Benjamin Libet's famous experiments. I've written about the first of those in detail, and I hope to get around to the other two sometime.

So, I agree with Terry Eagleton that John Gray (who, by the way, is Professor of European Thought at the LSE) sometimes uses "the sort of recklessly one-sided rhetoric he would surely mark down in a student's essay". But there is still a lot of great stuff in the book. The foreword to the paperback edition has some very thought provoking concentrated pearls of Grayness:

"Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people. Today liberal humanism has the persuasive power that was once possessed by revealed religion. Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition ... outside of science, progress is simply a myth ... the prevailing secular worldview is a pastiche of current scientific orthodoxy and pious hopes. Darwin has shown that we are animals; but - as humanists never tire of preaching - how we live is 'up to us'. Unlike any other animal, we are told, we are free to live as we choose. Yet the idea of free will does not come from science. Its origins are in religion - not just any religion, but the Christian faith against which humanists rail so obsessively"

He goes on to explain the Christian roots of secular humanism; how ideas such as Christian salvation were transformed into secular ideas of universal human emancipation. From the paragraph above it might appear that he is moving towards being an apologist for religion, but that is not his aim. It is interesting stuff, but I remain unconvinced by his argument that our free will is an illusion and that our consciousness is overrated.

Still, there are lots of enjoyable quotes from the book that I'd like to share here, either for their insight or their audacity:

"As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs."

"Justice is an artefact of custom. Where customs are unsettled its dictates soon become dated. Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats."

"The ideal of the chosen life does not square with how we live. We are not the authors of our lives, we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen ... Yet we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.
The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen."

"Nirvana is the end of suffering; but this promises no more than what we all achieve, usually without too much effort, in the course of nature. Death brings to everyone the peace the Buddha promised after lifetimes of striving ... For those that know themselves to be mortals, what the Buddha sought is always near at hand. Since deliverance is assured, why deny ourselves the pleasure of life?"

"We are approaching a time when, in Moravec's words, 'almost all humans work to amuse other humans'."

"Bourgeois life was based on the institution of the career - a lifelong pathway through working life. Today professionals and occupations are disappearing. Soon they will be as remote and archaic as the ranks and estates of medieval times."

"The Situationists and the Brethren of the Free Spirit are separated by centuries, but their view of human possibilities is the same. Humans are gods stranded in a world of darkness. Their labours are not the natural consequence of their inordinate wants. They are the curse of a demiurge. All that needs to be done to free humanity from labour is to throw off this evil power. This mystical vision is the Situationists' true inspiration, and that of anyone who has ever dreamt of a world in which humans can live without restraint."

"Financial markets are moved by contagion and hysteria. New communications technologies magnify suggestibility. Mesmer and Charcot are better guides to the new economy than Hayek or Keynes."

"A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible; but it is humanly unimaginable. If anything like it ever comes about, it will not be through the will of homo sapiens ... So long as population grows, progress will consist in labouring to keep up with it."

So this is all great fun, but what does John Gray think we should be doing instead of chasing the illusion of progress? Ultimately, he promotes the Eastern idea of life as contemplation:

"If the hope of progress in an illusion, how - it will be asked - are we to live? The question assumes that humans can live well only if they have the power to remake the world. Yet most humans who have ever lived have not believed this - and a great many have had happy lives. The question assumes the aim of life is action; but this is a modern heresy. For Plato contemplation was the highest form of human activity. A similar view existed in ancient India. The aim of life was not to change the world. It was to see it rightly."

"Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction in itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

Finally, in defence of the book, here is part of Bryan Appleyard's review, quoted inside the front cover:

The book's overwhelming virtue - and it is one that should silence all dissent - is that it counsels only humility. It subverts all contemporary vanities, and, in advocating contemplation rather than action, it asks only that we should find peace within ourselves and the world.

Which is a nice way to offset some of the gloomy predictions within the book. But if seeing the world rightly is important, my own humble view is that John Gray needs to contemplate further. For all his undoubted skill, I am still not convinced by many parts of the book. Although the book counsels humility, and in Bryan Appleyard's view, that 'should silence all dissent', if I don't agree with all of its premises then I cannot go along with everything that it counsels.

Microtubules vs Neurons

A long time ago I read Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose. It was pretty tough going, but the one thing I really remember now is the bit about the microtubules inside neurons.

It was interesting because people often assume that neurons are the basic computational unit of the brain.

For example, when you count the number of neurons inside a brain (about 100 billion) and the speed at which they operate (about 1000 operations per second) you can estimate a maximum processing capacity of the brain of about 10^14 operations per second.

Then if you look at the number of transistors on current CPUs (about 410 million on an Intel Core 2 Duo), and their speed of operation, and take Moore's Law into account, you can get quite optimistic estimates for how long it will take for AI to match human intelligence.

Of course everyone knows that neurons aren't that similar to transistors, and its probably much more sophisticated thinking than that which leads people like Ray Kurzweil to estimate that machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, but I'm sure that comparing neuron counts to transistor counts must be a factor.

So one of the most interesting things I learnt from Penrose's book is that neurons, like most cells, are made up of thousands of microtubules. And Penrose believes that the microtubules may be the basic computational unit of the brain, not the neurons. Because there are thousands more of them, and they operate much faster than neurons, we may have underestimated the processing power of the brain by a factor of up to 10,000,000,000.

This theory clearly has its detractors, but if you look for research on information processing within microtubules, there is plenty of it.

So maybe things like Eidolon AI are a long way off yet.

Chomsky in the Wall Street Journal

When I saw this comment on Slashdot I was curious. The Wall Street Journal had a nice word to say about Chomsky?

Now and again I take a look at the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal and they're definitely not your typical Chomsky fans.

But apparently in November 2005 they did publish this article by Takis Michas, which includes stuff such as:

It's a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky's tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy.

What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: "The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich." He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.

As far as I can tell, the WSJ did publish this, although they don't have any easily searchable archive online that I can check against. The piece was written by Takis Michas in response to Noam Chomsky being voted Prospect magazine's Top Public Intellectual. Its a pretty well balanced article, written by someone who has clearly read his Chomsky.

Takis Michas is a Greek journalist who lives in Athens and writes for the left-leaning Greek daily Eleftherotypia. He also contributes articles to the Wall Street Journal Europe. Why did the US WSJ publish his piece about Noam? I'm not sure, but my guess is that the WSJ needed a couple of pieces to follow up on the news of the Prospect vote - something to help their readers make sense of the European view of Chomsky. I imagine the piece by Takis was published alongside an altogether more sceptical piece by the WSJ US writers. That doesn't seem to have been recorded though.

If anyone can shed light on the story behind the publication of this article, I'd be very interested.