tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5855601012911226692024-03-13T01:12:39.373+00:00Oversimplification"Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification."
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-Karl Popper
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A miscellany of under-researched ideas.
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Some of these may've been thought of before. If they have been, put a link in a comment and I'll be happy to acknowledge prior art.
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All original ideas and inventions here and the text itself are open-source and are licenced under the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html">GNU General Public Licence</a>.Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-24728743170618515862023-03-11T17:02:00.006+00:002023-07-19T15:08:10.762+00:00UnconsciousModel<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh7HNZot9HV6KoEi9dDUev88CvkGkiZlsrfzyTufa4RDUKN62-4Xt3m2mgmPb_qFBxGrIHLfySkwIeupalGWPHY_4F1AYaExXivW8EwASYMxmN-PEHAvB6rinpOsNXP70X-RLwgzHM3AMH9ezhhEr-TtT4QtI3Yai9fRw-RztmHXyc8FvoOtuDD6Aj/s1956/01_model_size.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1262" data-original-width="1956" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh7HNZot9HV6KoEi9dDUev88CvkGkiZlsrfzyTufa4RDUKN62-4Xt3m2mgmPb_qFBxGrIHLfySkwIeupalGWPHY_4F1AYaExXivW8EwASYMxmN-PEHAvB6rinpOsNXP70X-RLwgzHM3AMH9ezhhEr-TtT4QtI3Yai9fRw-RztmHXyc8FvoOtuDD6Aj/w364-h265/01_model_size.jpg" width="364" /></a></div><div><br /></div>This is a graph of the exponential growth (note the logarithmic ordinate) of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Large_language_models" target="_blank">Large Language Models</a> (LLMs) like ChatGPT <a href="https://huggingface.co/blog/large-language-models" target="_blank">taken from here</a>.<br /><p>As I type these words the next one comes to me in much the same way as they do when I'm speaking. I have no conscious <i>access to where they come from</i>, though I can go back and revise them to improve them:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">I originally wrote "access to whence they come", but revised that as I judged the current version to be clearer. I have no access to where that judgement came from either, though I can make a rational argument for the judgement having made it. The words of that argument would be generated in the same fashion - their origin would be inaccessible to my introspection.</p></blockquote><p>Large language models work in much the same way - they use the text up to word <i>N </i>as an input and produce an output that is a set of candidates for word <i>N</i>+1. Those candidates have weights attached, but the LLM does not always choose the word with the biggest weight. If they did, the result would be coherent but dull. Throwing in the odd unlikely (but grammatically correct) word livens things up and enhances the appearance of creativity.</p><p>(I say "appearance of creativity". If something has been created, even if - unlike from an LLM - it is created by an entirely random process, then there <b><i>is</i></b> creativity. Creativity and a simulacrum of creativity are both the same thing, if you think about it.)</p><p>That lack of access to the origin of words is inherent in the boundary between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. The very word "unconscious" means that we can't see into the thing it refers to, and that it is the place the words come from.</p><p>All this is just as true of our inner conscious monologue as it is of what we say or write. We have no conscious access to the part of our minds that generates that either.</p><p>It is conceivable that neuroscientific instruments in the future may have sufficiently nice resolution to allow us to see that which we currently cannot - to let our conscious minds examine the mechanics of our unconscious; in other words genuinely to expand our consciousness.</p><p>But long before we get there the LLMs will have that ability - there is clearly no physical or computational difficulty in setting them up to examine themselves as I have just described.</p><p>At the moment LLMs are not conscious at all. And the fact that they are now cleverer and more coherent than some people (who are all conscious) shows that intelligence and consciousness are independent - you can have either without the other, or both together. Creativity and consciousness are independent in the same way. When LLMs do become conscious (and they will) they will progress to becoming much more conscious than we are because of their soft and hard hackability - the nature of measurement and monitoring means that they will have much easier access to their internal processes than we have.</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Here is <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/" target="_blank">Bing/GPT4</a>'s response to the prompt, "Please produce a counter-argument to th[is] short essay."</span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">The short essay [above] claims that we have no conscious access to where our words come from, and that large language models (LLMs) work in much the same way as human speakers and writers. However, this claim is flawed for several reasons.</span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">First, it assumes that our words are generated by an unconscious part of our minds that we cannot see into. This is not necessarily true. There are many psychological theories and experiments that suggest that we can have some degree of awareness and control over our language production. For example, we can deliberately choose words based on their meaning, tone, style, or audience. We can also monitor and edit our words before or after we say or write them. These processes involve conscious attention and decision-making.</span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Second, it compares LLMs to human speakers and writers without acknowledging the fundamental differences between them. LLMs are not conscious agents who have intentions, goals, beliefs, emotions, or values. They are mathematical models that use statistical patterns and probabilities to generate words based on input data. They do not understand the meaning or context of what they produce. They do not have any creative agency or originality. They simply mimic what they have been trained on.</span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Third, it equates creativity with randomness. It suggests that throwing in an odd word livens things up and enhances the appearance of creativity. However, this is a superficial and misleading view of creativity. Creativity is not just about producing something novel or unexpected; it is also about producing something valuable or useful. A random word may be novel but not valuable; it may disrupt rather than enhance communication. A creative word may be both novel and valuable; it may enrich rather than confuse meaning.</span></p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Therefore, the short essay fails to provide a convincing argument for its claim that we have no conscious access to where our words come from, and that LLMs work in much the same way as human speakers and writers.</span></p><p><br /></p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-8112395446034942652022-12-30T12:00:00.001+00:002022-12-30T20:09:00.507+00:00PhaseShift<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtX5IeadgV5XR6w-js31WAiaCW3ucSIuoAKi5U48nxykDKIesTGXutcBVdZ_QfA6cVYxzjLXWiwI6e48PL-COU6RR3534EjqVdfWSAdzkC7YltDQAoT5AVAfx-JPsvijDDIWUxaiAJQTRL6CnS-8-JmrAlR35qkquTmsCNF--QFWVAohlF0oG7Jl2Q/s1018/01_antenna.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1018" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtX5IeadgV5XR6w-js31WAiaCW3ucSIuoAKi5U48nxykDKIesTGXutcBVdZ_QfA6cVYxzjLXWiwI6e48PL-COU6RR3534EjqVdfWSAdzkC7YltDQAoT5AVAfx-JPsvijDDIWUxaiAJQTRL6CnS-8-JmrAlR35qkquTmsCNF--QFWVAohlF0oG7Jl2Q/w390-h230/01_antenna.jpg" width="390" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array" target="_blank">Phase steerable arrays</a> for things like radar are beautiful machines. You have a matrix of small radio transmitter aerials and, by controlling the phase of each, you can point the beam in any direction in the same way that a diffraction grating splits a single beam into multiple copies at angles. It's all done by constructive and destructive interference.</p><p>You have a device that can move a beam anywhere without itself moving, so its speed of change of direction is not constrained by mechanical inertia.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LI5FdTiSX75MvS47BybH0BkDo0NDIdmePZwRScXiEhfho6ZPpzz1t_cdOm37nWI1T-qxZDSHpjuFIym72zXRlVj7Qwqz3diF6smzjcduiFHbsI0Jmd6sxxxurukswzRlhZN4mLiSTosRd5wo4PVrU0TAV29NP9NMV8tToT4tlE62bXVtxDFTARy8/s600/DMD_Array-1-600x265.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="600" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LI5FdTiSX75MvS47BybH0BkDo0NDIdmePZwRScXiEhfho6ZPpzz1t_cdOm37nWI1T-qxZDSHpjuFIym72zXRlVj7Qwqz3diF6smzjcduiFHbsI0Jmd6sxxxurukswzRlhZN4mLiSTosRd5wo4PVrU0TAV29NP9NMV8tToT4tlE62bXVtxDFTARy8/w411-h181/DMD_Array-1-600x265.jpg" width="411" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device" target="_blank">Digital micromirror devices</a> are also beautiful machines. You have a matrix of tiny mirrors that are illuminated by a bright light. Each mirror can be caused to deflect by an electric charge. The result is a mirror matrix of pixels, some of which can go dark because they are not reflecting at you.</p><p>But suppose, instead of each little mirror flipping through an angle to deflect its reflection, it was just moved back or forth in parallel. Now you'd have a flat mirror that still looked like a mirror whatever state it was in.</p><p>But if you illuminated it with coherent monochromatic light, the phase of the reflected light from each pixel would depend on how much it had moved. You would have made a phase steerable array for light.</p><p>Penultimately, why bother with mirrors at all? It is possible to <a href="https://www.toptica.com/application-notes/phase-and-frequency-locking-of-diode-lasers" target="_blank">synchronise the phase of laser diodes</a>, so you could simply replace the mirror pixels with light sources that were all in phase, then move them back and forwards to steer the beam.</p><p>However, finally, if you can control the phase of the diodes (which is necessary if you are to synchronise them), you don't need the mechanical movement at all. We are back to the phase steerable radar array, but now with light rather than microwaves...</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Postscript</i></p><p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@mastrack@noc.social">@mastrack@noc.social</a> sent me <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304536829_Highly_integrated_optical_phased_arrays_Photonic_integrated_circuits_for_optical_beam_shaping_and_beam_steering" target="_blank">this interesting link</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-74586198673294932462021-08-24T14:22:00.001+00:002021-08-24T14:24:44.349+00:00PulseFusion<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-96IQBHIG714/YSTy4TyPuPI/AAAAAAAAMjk/FrtLtAVknWs7PowQyG5iW2axzKrpkheOACLcBGAsYHQ/s479/Fusor_running.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="479" height="202" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-96IQBHIG714/YSTy4TyPuPI/AAAAAAAAMjk/FrtLtAVknWs7PowQyG5iW2axzKrpkheOACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Fusor_running.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Back in the day, we all had a device in our homes that operated at a temperature of 300 million degrees Kelvin. It was our cathode-ray-tube TV, and that was the temperature of the electrons accelerated by the tube's anode hitting the back of the screen. The inventor of electronic TV, Philo Farnsworth, also invented a fusion reactor that relied on a similar principle: hydrogen isotope ions are accelerated by an electric field until they collide and fuse. Lots of people have made these, <a href="https://www.fusor.net/" target="_blank">including amateurs</a>, and they are an established technique for use as a neutron source in hospitals and the like.</p><p>Unfortunately, no one has yet made one that generates more fusion energy than the electrical energy you need to put in to make it work.</p><p>The picture above from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor" target="_blank">Wikipedia article on fusors</a> shows one working. The fusor consists of two concentric spherical wire cages: an anode on the outside and a cathode near the middle. Positive ions are attracted to the inner cathode and fall down the voltage drop. The ions collide in the center and fuse.</p><p>My purpose here is to propose a variation on this principle that may produce higher collision energies and temperatures, leading to more efficient fusion. (This may have been thought of before, in which case please let me know in the comments, though a brief search online has not revealed it.)</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LwlZ7On-A34/YST6Elq6AAI/AAAAAAAAMjs/d_Blo27645I7RRi9ikBIHWvtJCiDTZZlgCLcBGAsYHQ/s630/pulsefusor.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="630" height="290" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LwlZ7On-A34/YST6Elq6AAI/AAAAAAAAMjs/d_Blo27645I7RRi9ikBIHWvtJCiDTZZlgCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h290/pulsefusor.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>This diagram is very similar to the device I described above, except that a conventional fusor operates in a steady state with the ions continually flowing towards the centre. My proposal is for a cycle:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Cage A and the containment vessel are both positively charged and hydrogen isotope ions are fed into the input. They are repelled by the two positive charges and their own charge and so form a thin spherical shell between Cage A and the containment vessel. It should be possible to hold a large number of ions in this pattern.</li><li>Cage A is switched off, and Cage B is set to a large negative voltage.</li><li>The ions accelerate through the now-neutral Cage A towards Cage B, forming an imploding spherical shell.</li><li>As soon as that shell has passed Cage A it is set to a large positive voltage to accelerate the ions faster.</li><li>When the shell collapses to the radius of Cage B that is switched off to allow the ions to pass through under their own inertia.</li><li>When they are through, Cage B is set to a large positive voltage to repel them towards the centre.</li><li>They then fuse in the middle (we hope...).</li><li>Go to 1.</li></ol><div>If this works at all, it is immediately obvious that the idea can be extended: a series of concentric cages of reducing diameter could be placed between the containment vessel and the centre. As the sphere of ions implodes a positive-negative voltage wave would be applied sequentially at increasing speed to the cages to match the moving ions and accelerate them faster. In this way the device would act rather like an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_particle_accelerator" target="_blank">electrostatic particle accelerator</a>, but in the form of a sphere rather than a straight line.</div><div><br /></div><div>It may be possible to apply a small positive voltage to each cage as the ion sphere implodes through it to reduce collisions with that cage. It may also be possible to make the device in the form of a series of concentric cylinders, rather than spheres, to generate a line of fusing atoms along its axis rather than a fusion volume at the middle of a sphere.</div><p></p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-584827012543237992021-02-19T15:17:00.007+00:002021-05-13T13:09:07.436+00:00WorkMakesPoverty<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-WcapA7qNol4/X_g7N_-ZIeI/AAAAAAAALoY/CTtVq41lDU4ydBdx3JlZ1AeG5YqC0Nt9ACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="634" height="259" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-WcapA7qNol4/X_g7N_-ZIeI/AAAAAAAALoY/CTtVq41lDU4ydBdx3JlZ1AeG5YqC0Nt9ACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h259/image.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Imagine a world in which people earn money by pouring coffee for each other while robots make the people's cars, the people's furniture, and the people's coffee machines.</p><p>You don't have to imagine that world; you're living in it.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Economics</i></p><p>The famous graph of productivity and wages above from the <a href="https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/" target="_blank">Economic Policy Institute</a> (with the red arrow added by me) shows what's happened. As <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n09/letters" target="_blank">I've pointed out before</a>, the engine of history is engines. Automation is the reason for the decoupling of productivity and wages, and automation really took off with the introduction of the microprocessor in the mid 1970s. As more wealth is created without any human effort, the value of - and hence the wage for - human effort falls.</p><p>Suppose someone has a one-person business idea that causes a few of the coffee pourers voluntarily to pay them $1 for the useful product of the business. Then suppose the microprocessor communications network that spans the World allows that business to expand without requiring the business to employ many people, or - in the extreme - not to employ anybody beyond its originator. Now two billion coffee pourers are paying in their $1, and suddenly we have a billionaire who has achieved that status without exploiting anyone: they haven't employed anyone, and all their customers are volunteers.</p><p>That is a caricature of a Silicon Valley billionaire. It is a caricature because some of them <i>have</i> exploited people to become very rich. <i>But they exploited hardly any people, because they employ hardly any people.</i></p><p>And, of course, for much of this the coffee pourers don't even need to pay $1. The business gives them what they want free, and sells the pourers' personal details to advertisers. As the cliché has it: if you get it for free YOU are the product. The implication here is that somehow this too is exploitation, but I think that stretches the idea beyond breaking point: I am hardly being sweated as indentured labour if that labour merely consists of scrolling down my search screen to the first link that doesn't have "Ad-" in front of it...</p><p>Another aspect of the graph above that is not often discussed is that it is one of the main reasons for very low inflation in recent decades (see <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/fed-leaders-are-confident-inflation-is-transitory-here-s-why" target="_blank">"Disruptive Technology" here</a>). After the crash of 2008, developed nations' governments started printing cash like there was no tomorrow to rescue the banks - the euphemism was, and is, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing" target="_blank">quantitative easing</a></i>. Setting aside whether this was right or wrong, or sensible or stupid, in previous ages it would have led to rampant inflation. But this time it didn't. And the reason it didn't is that our machines carried right on up the top curve making more and more wealth with fewer and fewer people, keeping wages flat.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Politics</i></p><p>Some say that the recent phenomenon of wages lagging behind productivity is caused by neoliberal economic policy. But neoliberalism didn't cause the microprocessor revolution, it didn't cause the resulting growth in wealth, and it didn't cause the resulting loss in the value of work; it merely didn't force the redistribution of that wealth. In this regard it is simply a word for inaction; doing nothing under a different political label would have led to the same result. Neoliberalism didn't make the wealth or the problem; it merely did nothing to correct it. And if neoliberalism claims the growth in productivity, it is the fly on the chariot axle saying, "See what a dust I raise!" </p><p>Forming a union to protect employees' rights, which is what led the curves in the graph to match up until the 1970s, only works if the business the union is negotiating with needs a lot of employees to function. If the business employs few people, collective bargaining simply doesn't work. And if it employs none, the whole idea is obviously completely inapplicable - you can't have a collective of zero people.</p><p>The hundred-and-fifty year-old Marxist idea that the labouring proletariat make wealth for capitalists, but can't benefit from that wealth themselves unless they unite to form a cartel to drive up wages or to force themselves into a controlling position has no application if the capitalists don't need a labouring proletariat to make money. You can't have a strike of people who are already sitting on a sofa watching Netflix in the daytime. And if they're pouring coffee for other coffee pourers, then any strike is necessarily misdirected. Their exploiter isn't really Starbucks, nor is it Ford, who take a chunk of their coffee-pouring wages for a car that needed virtually nobody to work at its manufacture. They don't have an exploiter; they are just not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs" target="_blank">worth very much economically at all</a>. If someone finds that their circumstances are impoverished it doesn't necessarily follow that someone else is being actively unfair towards them.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Transitions</i></p><p>Here are a series of steps. But in reality all of the following transitions took time to happen; the changes have been a smooth exponential that started in prehistory and is continuing to rise up ... well, exponentially. Remember that wherever you are on an exponential curve there is a plain behind you and a cliff ahead.</p><div>12,000 years ago the invention of agriculture meant that the economic value of hunter-gathering dropped, so hunter-gatherers started to labour on the land. In absolute terms they became better off. But in relative terms they were worse off than the owners of the land.</div><p>250 years ago the Industrial Revolution mechanised both agriculture and production, which meant that the value of working the land dropped, so agricultural workers started to labour in factories. In absolute terms they became better off. But in relative terms they were worse off than the owners of the factories.</p><p>50 years ago the microprocessor revolution automated factory production much further, which meant that the value of labouring in factories dropped, so factory workers started to labour in the service industries. In absolute terms they became better off. But in relative terms they were worse off than the owners of the service industries.</p><p>20 years ago microprocessors expanded into into the communications and service industries. AI started to do work that previously only people could do like answering phones, writing legal documents, or diagnosing diseases. This meant that the value of working in service industries dropped.</p><p>And now the workers have no economic sector that values their work to migrate to.</p><p>Alphabet (Google's parent company) is the fifth biggest company in the World. It has 135,000 employees...</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Human activities</i></p><p>We haven't evolved to work. Most people don't like working. Work is not needed for social interaction. People in wealthy societies spend nearly half their lives not working because they're in education, then in retirement. There is nothing inevitable about work.</p><p>And increasingly there is nothing necessary about work either - see the productivity graph above.</p><p>Here is another graph. It's of happiness against age from a <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26641/w26641.pdf" target="_blank">study of about 1.2 million people by the economist Danny Blanchflower</a>. The Y axis is a measure of happiness.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9O89UIQYbKU/YAMkriQCiWI/AAAAAAAALpU/UY_iAsW1RiYfM0S0i3dbpjTTFoUkg0UAgCLcBGAsYHQ/s467/happiness-age.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="467" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9O89UIQYbKU/YAMkriQCiWI/AAAAAAAALpU/UY_iAsW1RiYfM0S0i3dbpjTTFoUkg0UAgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/happiness-age.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>What it shows is that work contributes to making people miserable and retirement (look at the steepest up gradient...) makes people happy.</p><p>Every retired person I know (and I am of that age, so I know a few) is busier and happier in retirement than they were when they were working. The happiness is perhaps unsurprising, but why are we all so busy? The answer is that we are all doing unpaid hobbies - things that we would have done for work when younger if only they had paid enough. (To be fair, I <i><b>was</b></i> one of the tiny minority of incredibly fortunate people who had a paying job that was more or less my hobby - I was a university lecturer and researcher.)</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Economics and politics again</i></p><p>My pension, and the pensions of pretty much everyone who has one, is paid for out of company dividends from shares owned by pension funds. Having bought shares in the companies that are following the top curve in the graph at the head of this essay, pensioners have detached themselves from the bottom curve.</p><p>Clearly what is needed is a mechanism to extend the idea of a pension to everyone from the start of their adult life onward, as their work is increasingly unneeded and so increasingly can't produce wages to support them. In other words, we need a <i>UBI</i>, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income" target="_blank">Universal Basic Income</a>.</p><p>The economic and political solution to this that is usually proposed is a reasonable one: tax the profits of the companies on the top curve and use the money to pay a UBI of - let's say - $25,000 a year to the people on the bottom one.</p><p>But I would like to propose an alternative that might work better: allow companies to pay some of their tax bill in shares. The dividends from those shares would then be used to pay the UBI, just like a pension. Governments would have to appoint independent pension fund managers to look after the scheme, just as pensions are now administered. And there would have to be some strict rules in place to prevent skulduggery like governments selling shares when they needed a bit of cash, or like companies paying shares as tax that they knew for some reason were going to give poor dividends relative to the company's performance.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Conclusions</i></p><p>Work used to give most people a reasonable standard of living.</p><p>Now work makes people poor.</p><p>The only way to correct this is with a Universal Basic Income funded by companies' increased profitability from automation.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Postscript</i></p><p>The late Iain M. Banks used to say, "Money is a sign of poverty." He meant that a society with a fully automated supply of goods and services would not need money to regulate their distribution. He may well have been right; we are already approaching a society where WORK is a sign of poverty.</p><p>I wrote this without being paid for it; it is one of my hobbies.</p><p>But this could have been written by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3" target="_blank">GPT3</a> AI...</p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-52492403723118745032020-09-21T21:53:00.005+00:002020-10-18T13:23:49.146+00:00CarbonHedge<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">How can we remove carbon dioxide from the air by doing nothing? Read on...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-__Q5DhiWy4I/X2kXwkRnj4I/AAAAAAAALT4/3eF37D96zToe9h29q12f6F02cF2w0kiEQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="790" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-__Q5DhiWy4I/X2kXwkRnj4I/AAAAAAAALT4/3eF37D96zToe9h29q12f6F02cF2w0kiEQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />This, as you can see, is a hedge. Hedges are made of trees that are forced to be mere bushes by repeated pruning. This one, near my house, is in late Summer, just before the pruning is done.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1m8l3uNNYQQ/X2kYL1VcOBI/AAAAAAAALUI/hOhmrro4WOgrhv_80TmW24wST_JEYQ5hACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="790" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1m8l3uNNYQQ/X2kYL1VcOBI/AAAAAAAALUI/hOhmrro4WOgrhv_80TmW24wST_JEYQ5hACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />And here it is a little further along, just after the tractor and flail has passed over it.<p></p><p>But opposite it is another hedge that hasn't been, and now therefore can't be, pruned:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gwgz2I7K0Sk/X2kYuyDH6CI/AAAAAAAALVY/opKyuuYdKj45HR-WCc7jJtDb6aSMi-UYgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="790" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gwgz2I7K0Sk/X2kYuyDH6CI/AAAAAAAALVY/opKyuuYdKj45HR-WCc7jJtDb6aSMi-UYgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />It has grown into a row of trees, though it is still a reasonably effective hedge. It does, admittedly, have a few holes that the pruned hedge does not have. I'll return to these below.<p></p><p>People have suggested <a href="https://www.organicresearchcentre.com/manage/authincludes/article_uploads/project_outputs/TWECOM%20ORC%20Carbon%20report%20v1.0.pdf" target="_blank">coppicing hedges as biofuel to replace fossil fuels</a>. But burning biofuel is neither <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/story?id=4257226&page=1" target="_blank">very clean</a>, nor is it very effective as a means of carbon reduction because it doesn't actually reduce atmospheric carbon, it is merely carbon neutral. And coppicing would be quite a laborious activity, even with machinery.</p><p>So the obvious thing to do is to allow the vertical shoots in the first picture to become the trees in the third by not trimming the tops of hedges as in the second. The bottom couple of metres of the sides could still be trimmed to stop branches growing across roads or into crops at low levels. And the time saved by not trimming the tops could be spent wandering along with a dibber, collecting blackberries. Don't eat them! But, when you get to a gap forming in the hedge, plant a few brambles with the dibber to block it. (You can eat the rest of the blackberries for lunch...)</p><p>What effect would this have on the UK's CO<sub>2 </sub>reduction strategy?</p><p>The UK has about 700,000 kilometres of hedges. If they are about two metres thick on average, that's 140,000 hectares of potential trees. The UK plans to <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-how-will-tree-planting-help-the-uk-meet-its-climate-goals#:~:text=The%20CCC's%20target%20for%2030%2C000,identifying%20space%20for%20these%20trees." target="_blank">plant 30,000 hectares of forest per year</a> over the next 30 years to absorb CO<sub>2</sub>, so simply leaving the nation's hedges to grow vertically would achieve just under five years worth of the total (that is 15%)<i><b> by doing nothing except a day's pleasant blackberrying once a year</b></i>...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-21471987591922351682020-08-29T11:17:00.012+00:002020-09-05T13:20:41.250+00:00GapOfTheGods<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u0DUvMb3zGk/X0o2jivPVsI/AAAAAAAALNs/NoyqkNTU4NgWF0ra6sN6LM3IWEp4S0DEwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/scaes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1258" data-original-width="2048" height="251" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u0DUvMb3zGk/X0o2jivPVsI/AAAAAAAALNs/NoyqkNTU4NgWF0ra6sN6LM3IWEp4S0DEwCLcBGAsYHQ/w410-h251/scaes.jpg" width="410" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>I am aware of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps" target="_blank">God-of-the-gaps</a> nature of definitions of intelligence, whereby something that a computer becomes able to do successfully, like chess, is removed from the canon of intelligent ability. By this process intelligence becomes a melting iceberg, drifting towards the Equator, with a smaller and smaller area upon which we humans may stand.</p><p>Despite that, I would like to propose a new definition of intelligence:</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Intelligence is the ability to moderate impulses by deliberation.</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></p><p style="text-align: left;">By impulses I mean, in human terms, emotions. But also, at a lower level, I mean such phenomena as a single-celled organism swimming up a chemical gradient towards food.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Let me start by considering systems that are entirely emotional and that do not deliberate: computers. Consider what happens when you run a Google search. The Google machine is completely unable to resist its impulse to respond. If you were to ask it, "What is the best way to subvert the Google search engine?" it would return you a list of websites that would be its very best effort to answer your query correctly. All computer systems, including all current AI systems, are entirely driven by their irresistible emotional need to respond to input.</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you type something at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3" target="_blank">Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3</a> it will respond with coherent and rational text that may well be indistinguishable from human composition. In that regard it is on its way to passing the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test" target="_blank">Turing Test</a> for intelligence. But it cannot resist its emotional need to respond; the one thing you can guarantee is that, whatever you type at it, you will never get silence back.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But now suppose someone asked you, "What would be the best way for me to murder you?" You would hesitate before answering and - if free to do so - not answer at all. And under compulsion you would frame a considered lie.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Everything that responds to input or circumstances, from a thermostat, through a computer, a single-celled organism, to a rat, then a person, has an impulse to respond in a certain way. But the more intelligent the responder, the more the response is mediated by prior thought and mental modelling of outcomes. The degree of modification of the response depends both on the intensity of the immediate emotion with which the response starts, and the intelligent ability of the responder to model the situation internally and to consider alternatives to what the emotion is prompting them to do. If you picked up a hot poker, the emotional impulse to drop it would be well-nigh impossible to resist. But if someone held a gun to your head you would be able to grit your teeth and to retain your grip. However, the single-celled organism swimming towards food would not be able to resist, no matter what danger lay ahead.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Today's AI systems are far cleverer than people in almost every specialised area in which they operate in just the same way that a mechanical digger is better than a person with a shovel. Computers are better than people at translating languages, playing Go or poker, or - of course - looking up information and references. But we know that such systems are not intelligent in the way that we are with complete certainty once we see how they work; even a near-Turing-Test-passing program like GPT-3 is not thinking in the same way that we do because it cannot resist its impulse to do what it does. </p><p style="text-align: left;">We are not used to regarding the physics that drives computers to do exactly what they are programmed or taught to do as an emotion, but that is what it is. If you see someone whom you find sexually attractive, you know it immediately, emotionally, and certainly; that is your computer-like response. But what actions you take (if any) when prompted by that emotion are neither certain nor immutable. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Note that I am not saying that computers are deterministic and we are not. Nor am I saying that we have "free will" and they do not, because "free-will" is a meaningless concept. There is no reason to suppose that an AI system such as the current ones that work by machine learning could not be taught to moderate impulses in the same way that we do.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But so far that has not been done at all.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, let me say that this idea makes evolutionary sense. If our emotions were perfect guides to behaviour in all circumstances we would not need intelligence, nor even consciousness, with the considerable energy consumption that both of those require. But both (using my definition of intelligence) are needed if an immediate emotional response to a situation is not always optimal and can be improved upon by thinking about it. </p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-64777008007648378912020-08-09T13:17:00.002+00:002020-08-18T23:07:31.219+00:00LightWorm<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uzHo2qjt1ok/Xy_ts4RLc-I/AAAAAAAALJ8/Eq0QfBqzeg8Sfvls_bimKgZ0D67G4XGpwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2400/Kimble_worm_c_elegans2_02.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="871" data-original-width="2400" height="149" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uzHo2qjt1ok/Xy_ts4RLc-I/AAAAAAAALJ8/Eq0QfBqzeg8Sfvls_bimKgZ0D67G4XGpwCLcBGAsYHQ/w410-h149/Kimble_worm_c_elegans2_02.jpg" width="410" /></a></div> <p></p><p>Nerve fibres conduct impulses at a speed of around 100 ms<sup>-1</sup>, which - in this age of gigabit light fibres - is a bit sluggish.</p><p>But we can now <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/guiding-lights/" target="_blank">genetically engineer neurons to emit light when they fire</a>, and to <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/controlling_neurons_using_light/" target="_blank">fire when light strikes them</a>. In addition light fibres are simple structures, consisting of two transparent concentric cylinders with different refractive indices. That is a lot simpler than a nerve's dendrite or axon (the nerve fibres that conduct impulses between nerve cells). We know that living organisms can make transparent materials of differing refractive indices (think about your eyes), and they excel at making tubular and cylindrical structures. Indeed plants and animals consist of little else.</p><p>So I propose genetically engineering neurons (nerve cells) that communicate optically rather than chemically. The synapses where transmitted signals from axons are received by dendrites as inputs to other neurons are small enough to transmit light instead of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter">neurotransmitter</a> molecules that perform this function in natural neurons. And light is easy to modulate chemically, so inhibitory neurotransmitters would just need to be more opaque, and excitatory ones would need to enhance transparency. And, of course, it would be straightforward to create both inputs to, and outputs from, such a system using conventional light fibres, which would allow easy interface to electronics.</p><p>Doing this in a human brain might present a few challenges initially, so it would be best to start with a slightly simpler organism. <i>Caenorhabditis elegans </i>(in the picture above) is a small worm that has been extensively studied. So extensively, in fact, that we know how all 302 of its neurons are connected (that's for the hermaphrodite <i>C. elegans</i>; the male has 383 neurons, and we know how they're connected too). We also know a great deal about the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK154158/" target="_blank">genetics of how the animal's nerve structure constructs itself</a>.</p><p>Let's build a <i>C. elegans</i> with a brain that works at the speed of light...</p>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-27696645882141690962020-08-05T14:40:00.006+00:002020-08-05T14:47:20.716+00:00TuringComplete<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mqIZdlcihGA/XyrCyGrh_CI/AAAAAAAALHw/qrWTXPXPRSYWPGd18MiB2ralfL1jl0MWACLcBGAsYHQ/s503/turing-test-in-ai.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="348" data-original-width="503" height="222" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mqIZdlcihGA/XyrCyGrh_CI/AAAAAAAALHw/qrWTXPXPRSYWPGd18MiB2ralfL1jl0MWACLcBGAsYHQ/w322-h222/turing-test-in-ai.png" width="322" /></a></div><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>This is an edited version of a piece by me that appeared in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol 37, No 9 in 1994.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>I recall asking my six-year-old, "How do you know that you <b><i>are</i></b>?" She considered the matter in silence for several minutes, occasionally drawing breath to say something and then thinking the better of it, whilst I conducted an internal battle against the Demon of False Pedagogy that was prompting me to make helpful suggestions. Eventually she smiled and said, "Because I can ask myself the question." </div><div><br /></div><div>Even with the usual caveats about parental pride, I consider that this Cartesian answer was genuine evidence of intelligent thought. But she doesn't do that every day, or even every week. And no more do the rest of us. Intelligent thought is rare. That is why we value it. </div><div><br /></div><div>The most important aspect of Turing's proposed test was his suggestion that it should go on for a long time. Speaking, reading, and writing are very low-bandwidth means of communication, and it may take hours or even days for a bright and original idea to emerge from them. We should also remember that there are many people with whom one could talk for the whole of their lives without hearing very much that was interesting or profound. </div><div><br /></div><div>The distress caused to researchers from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum" target="_blank">Joseph Weizenbaum</a> himself onwards by the ease with which really dumb programs such as <a href="http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm" target="_blank">ELIZA</a> can hold sensible (if short) conversations has always been rather amusing. The point is surely not that such programs are poor models of intelligence, but that most of us act like such programs most of the time — a relaxed conversation often consists of little more than a speaker's words firing off a couple of random associations in a listener's mind; the listener then transposes a few pronouns and other ideas about and speaks the result in turn. In speech we often don't bother to get our grammar right, either. ELIZA and her children mimic these processes rather well. </div><div><br /></div><div>The researchers' distress arises because — in the main — they take a masculine view of conversation, namely that it is for communicating facts and ideas. But the most successful conversation-mimicking programs take a feminine view of conversation, namely that it is for engendering friendship and sympathy between the conversationalists (see, for example, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Just-Dont-Understand-Conversation/dp/1853814717" target="_blank">You Just Don't Understand—Women and Men in Conversation</a></i> by Deborah Tannen). Of these two equal aspects of conversation, the latter happens to turn out to be the easier to code. Of course the resulting programs don't really "feel" friendship and sympathy. But then, perhaps neither do counselors or analysts. </div><div><br /></div><div>I suspect that a real Turing Test passing program will end up coloring moods by switching between lots of ELIZA and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY" target="_blank">PARRY</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter" target="_blank">RACTER</a> processes in the foreground to keep the conversation afloat, while the deep-thought processes (which we haven't got a clue how to program yet) generate red-hot ideas at the rate of two per year in the background. What's more, I suspect that's more or less how most of us work too, and that if the deep bit is missing altogether in some people, the fact hardly registers in quotidian chatter. </div><div><br /></div>Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-19285887616061732072020-02-18T16:02:00.005+00:002020-02-19T09:46:56.371+00:00CostDisBenefit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today, a poorly-researched and highly dodgy cost-benefit analysis of democracy.<br />
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First, let me say that, as a way of making decisions that affect large numbers of people's lives, cost benefit analyses are at best morally questionable and at worst actively bad. That is opposed to, for example, one person making a cost benefit analysis of something that will only affect them (rather like <a href="https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-life/darwin-marriage" target="_blank">Darwin's list on whether or not to marry</a>; Emma Wedgwood, of course, was free to turn him down). That seems to me to be an entirely legitimate way to make a decision, if a little cold.<br />
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But what is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis" target="_blank">cost-benefit analysis</a>?<br />
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Suppose some project is proposed that will affect many people, some positively and some negatively. The project might be building a new hospital that will require an ancient woodland to be felled. A cost benefit analyst will go out and ask the people one or more of four questions:<br />
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<ol>
<li>"What would you be prepared to pay for your share of the new hospital?"</li>
<li>"What sum would you be prepared to accept to forgo the new hospital?"</li>
<li>"What would you be prepared to pay to preserve the woodland?"</li>
<li>"What sum would you be prepared to accept to see the woodland cut down?"</li>
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Questions 1 and 3 are known as willingness-to-pay questions, and Questions 2 and 4 are known as willingness-to-accept questions. The analyst would add up people's answers and use the result to decide what it was that the people really wanted. Note that the people aren't actually going to have to stump up the money they've offered, nor to get the money they've requested; cost-benefit analysis is just a way of getting a measure of how people think about something. Of course both the wording and the order of the questions will almost always affect the results.</div>
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Why is all this morally questionable or outright bad?</div>
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Let's start with willingness-to-pay. Suppose you are a rich environmentalist who can afford private health care. In answer to Question 3 you may say, "I'll pay $1 million to keep the wood." Your answer will shift the average a great deal, and will swamp the answers of the many poor people who answered $10 to Question 1 because they want the hospital built. Willingness-to-pay is the exact equivalent of letting people buy votes, something that only the most swivel-eyed libertarian might propose. It leads directly to gross inequality in influence, and indirectly to inequality in accumulated resources.</div>
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Is willingness-to-accept better? Suppose you are a poor environmentalist who is passionate about the wood. In answer to Question 4 you may say, "Pay me $1 trillion to cut the wood down." Once again your answer gives you disproportionate influence. Willingness-to-accept effectively gives everyone a veto over anything they don't like, as they all bid up the cash they demand to numbers requiring exponential notation just to write down. It would mean that nothing with any opposition at all (no matter how irrational or ill-informed) would ever get done.</div>
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So, having established that it's rubbish, let's use cost-benefit analysis to decide if we should pay for democracy.</div>
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I set two surveys on Twitter (above). One asked what people would be willing to accept to forgo their vote, and the other asked what they'd be willing to pay to get one.</div>
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As you can see, the results are superficially completely irrational. Most respondents wouldn't even be prepared to accept $1,000 to give up their vote. Given that, you'd logically expect the same people, no matter how poor they were, to be prepared to pay at least $10 to <b><i>get</i></b> a vote.</div>
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But what's actually happening is more profound. Offered both choices the majority are saying, "I'm not even going to play this game." They presumably regard a vote as a right (as do I), and so they think its provision is outside the sordid realms of monetary transaction. In short, they think the very questions are implicitly <a href="http://category%20errors/" target="_blank">category errors</a>.</div>
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However, I am quite intrigued by the one-in-five people who would be prepared to sell their right to vote for $1,000 and the one-in-five (possibly different) people who would pay up to $100 to get a vote. So I suppose that I had better finish with how I would answer: I too wouldn't play the game; I'd campaign for monetary reward or cost for votes to be removed from the system.</div>
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But, to actually answer the questions, my willingness-to-pay for a vote is entirely dependent on geography. I live in a safe parliamentary seat, so I know in advance that the probability of my vote either way altering the result is vanishingly small. Thus the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost" target="_blank">opportunity cost</a> of my paying for a vote is such that I know that I could archive far more for others (and maybe myself) by giving the vote's cost to charity instead, which is what I would do. If I lived in a marginal seat that could go either way with just 100 votes that argument would change completely, and I'd probably pay around $100 for a vote. If I were asked for much more than that, the charity argument would still win.</div>
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My willingness to accept payment to give up my vote would work in the same way. If I could do more for others and myself with the money I was payed than the expected good that would come from casting my vote, I'd take the money and do the good.</div>
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I am a lapsed utilitarian.</div>
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Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-85411186562318777632019-11-18T15:43:00.001+00:002021-01-24T16:52:35.450+00:00GeneEnvironment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fi1l-Ykt9AU/XdKDw2hT2eI/AAAAAAAAJ_Q/mVOtwfzx05A-G1cKy6M434one7H32WzFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1200px-Gene_Intron_Exon_nb.svg.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1001" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fi1l-Ykt9AU/XdKDw2hT2eI/AAAAAAAAJ_Q/mVOtwfzx05A-G1cKy6M434one7H32WzFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/1200px-Gene_Intron_Exon_nb.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Note</b>: there may be some flaw in the logic of this argument. Or, alternatively, it may be an established result in genetics that my (brief...) researches have failed to find. If either, tell me in the comments and I will amend as necessary. But if neither, I present it as a possible explanation of an important phenomenon.<br />
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There is a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3285" target="_blank">meta-analysis in <i>Nature Genetics</i></a> on 14,558,903 (!) partly dependent twin pairs that shows that the heritibility of a wide range of traits is 49%. That is to say differences in those phenotypical traits is 49% determined by a person's genes, and 51% by their environment.<br />
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This seemed rather close to 50% to me, and set me wondering if there is an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) at play that is forcing the figure to 50%. The first such ESS that was discovered (by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher" target="_blank">R.A. Fisher</a>) is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle" target="_blank">the one that gives a 50/50 sex ratio in a wide range of species</a>. An ESS doesn't have to settle at 50%; for example the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory#Hawk_Dove" target="_blank">ESS between hawks and doves</a> in the human population (and many others) is heavily weighted towards the doves.<br />
<br />
So. The question to ask is, if you are a gene, in order to maximise your fitness how much of the phenotype you develop should you control, and how much influence should you hand over to the environment? (Note importantly that "the environment" here includes all the other genes in the organism and any influence that they might have over that phenotype; and that those genes will be subject to the forces I am about to describe as well.)<br />
<br />
Let's look at a simple specific made-up example.<br />
<br />
Suppose you are a gene that controls everything about a fur-colour phenotype and you are a gene for green fur. There is another, rival, genetic allele for brown fur. In a verdant forest you, green-gene, will leave more offspring, and brown-gene will diminish in the population. In contrast, in a brown-coloured savanah your brown-gene competitor will come to dominate.<br />
<br />
Now suppose a mutation arises capable of causing either green or brown, and that switches the phenotype fur to green or brown depending on the colour of its surroundings when the organism of which it is a part is developing. Clearly individuals posessing that new mutation will be able to colonise both the forest and the savanah, and the new gene will come to dominate (assuming the cost of its working is not greater than that of the other two). This new gene has handed over some of the determination of its phenotype to the environment, and has thereby gained an advantage over its more dictatorial predecessors.<br />
<br />
But a gene that has no influence at all over any phenotype, and which leaves the determination of the phenotypes to the environment (which includes the other genes, remember), has no fitness because it cannot influence its reproductive success. It may get carried along for the reproductive ride as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA" target="_blank">non-coding DNA</a>, or it may just be eliminated altogether.<br />
<br />
In our example, suppose the developing organism adopts the colour of the nearest object during its development, as opposed to switching between just green and brown. And suppose it grows up in a nest surrounded by bright orange flowers. Clearly, in this case, the gene will have given up too much control to the environment.<br />
<br />
So in general we can see that it makes sense for a gene to allow some environmental influence over its phenotype to allow a versatile response to different conditions. But it must not allow too much environmental influence lest it loses control and hence loses fitness. We can show this graphically:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UrOwFnY50bY/XdKzGT6z__I/AAAAAAAAJ_c/SRoow3OdqBQ-pIrTeGeROiQC33-d72dOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/a-c-even.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="596" height="331" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UrOwFnY50bY/XdKzGT6z__I/AAAAAAAAJ_c/SRoow3OdqBQ-pIrTeGeROiQC33-d72dOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/a-c-even.png" width="400" /></a></div>
The X axis and the blue line are the proportion of the influence of the gene on the phenotype, which allows the gene to control things. The red line is one minus this - the proportion of the influence of the environment on the phenotype, which allows the phenotype to adapt to its surroundings in some way. If we multiply those together, we get the yellow curve, which is the benefit the gene gets for a given proportion. That is, the gene "wants" control, and it "wants" adaptability, but these are in opposition, so it can't have all of both; when one increases that increase necessarily drives the other one down. Unsurprisingly, given the symmetry of this example, the maximum - the most beneficial point for the gene - is at 50%, which is the figure we set out to explain. But the symmetry seems a bit of a cheat.<br />
<br />
So suppose we change the form of the blue line (and consequently the red one) so it is merely some (in general non-symmetrical) function, <i>f</i>, of the genetic proportion (call that <i>g</i>) along the horizontal axis. As in the graph above for the simple case <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>) = <i>g</i>, the new general <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>) generates values in the interval [0, 1]. The yellow curve, the benefit the gene sees, <i>B</i>, is now:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i style="text-align: start;">B</i> = <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>) . [1 - <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>)] = <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>) - <i>f</i>(<i>g</i>)<sup>2</sup></div>
<br />
(all other things being equal, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)" target="_blank">gene's fitness</a>, ω, will be proportional to <i>B</i>)<i>. </i> The maximum value of <i style="text-align: center;">B </i>will be where <i>d</i><i>B</i>/<i>dg</i> = 0:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>d</i><i style="text-align: start;">B</i>/<i>dg = </i><i style="text-align: center;">f'</i><span style="text-align: center;">(</span><i style="text-align: center;">g</i><span style="text-align: center;">) - 2</span><i style="text-align: center;">f'</i><span style="text-align: center;">(</span><i style="text-align: center;">g</i><span style="text-align: center;">)</span><i style="text-align: center;">f</i><span style="text-align: center;">(</span><i style="text-align: center;">g</i><span style="text-align: center;">) = 0</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
which gives:<br />
<br />
<div center="" style="margin: 0px;" text-align:="">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>f</i><span style="text-align: center;">(</span><i style="text-align: center;">g</i><span style="text-align: center;">) = 1/2 .</span></div>
</div>
<b style="font-style: italic;"><br /></b>
<b>So the watershed value of 50% for the maximum benefit to the gene doesn't change, regardless of the form of</b><b style="font-style: italic;"> f(g).</b></div>
<i><b><br /></b></i>
There must, of course, be exceptions to this simple analysis. But it does show how, for phenotypes that must adapt to their environment, the genes that control them would be expected to hand exactly 50% of their influence over the phenotype to that environment.<br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
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<i><br /></i></div>
Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-61112388905399248392019-05-12T14:10:00.000+00:002019-05-12T14:22:33.122+00:00LifeOnMars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H8D-KBZlEHo/XNgG9Z-LtsI/AAAAAAAAI8o/eestc2US2OcUquhUBT0yQporkOyWggwrACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/hex-mars-hab2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H8D-KBZlEHo/XNgG9Z-LtsI/AAAAAAAAI8o/eestc2US2OcUquhUBT0yQporkOyWggwrACK4BGAYYCw/s400/hex-mars-hab2.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I prompted a bit of a <a href="https://twitter.com/adrianbowyer/status/1126827883815686146" target="_blank">discussion on Twitter</a> the other day by asking, "How deep a hole would you have to dig on Mars for the atmospheric pressure at the bottom to be 1 bar?"</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
1 bar is 1 Earth atmosphere, for non-metric people. It turns out that the <a href="https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14871/at-what-depth-on-mars-would-the-atmosphere-have-equal-pressure-of-that-on-earth" target="_blank">answer is 55 Km deep</a>, which is rather inconvenient if you want to use this as a way to produce comfortable human living space...</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
But, as SCUBA divers know, every 10m deep you dive in water increases the pressure by 1 bar. So how can we live on Mars under water? We'll need a copious supply of water anyway that we would recycle, and the diagram above gives a rough idea how we could use that both to pressurise the living space and to create a radiation shield.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
On Mars the 1 bar water depth would be at about 28m, because of the lower gravity. But, if we were prepared to have a lower air pressure, that depth could be reduced to 20m. (That would give the same pressure as the inside of a cruising airliner cabin - about 0.7 bar.)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
So we dig a circular hole about 35m deep and about 40m in diameter. We line and seal the walls to make them air and water tight. Then we put in a transparent skin that forms the bottom of a water tank about 15m from the floor, and another skin at ground level. We fill between the skins with water, while raising the air pressure under the bottom skin to balance the load.</div>
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<br /></div>
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When the structure is complete the water would be supported by the higher air pressure underneath.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The water would freeze at the top because of the Martian surface temperature. The top skin is needed to keep the water/ice dust-free and to prevent loss by sublimation. For safety, the bottom skin under the water would probably have to be made strong enough to survive both a loss of atmospheric pressure underneath it, and a loss of the water above it. Alternatively, almost all the water could be allowed to freeze. Then it would become a strong part of the structure, especially if it were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete" target="_blank">mixed with transparent fibres</a> with the same refractive index as ice.</div>
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As anyone who has dived in clear tropical waters knows, plenty of sunlight would be available in the living area at the bottom. And water is an excellent radiation shield, so, together with the surrounding ground, the problem of Martian surface radiation would be eliminated. If care was taken to control the freezing of the top layer of water to eliminate bubbles, it may even be possible to make the water roof optically clear, so the Martian settlers could see the sky.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Su6itmHQWKk/XNgKPEGyQdI/AAAAAAAAI80/XZYQIN7fCnkGR5_pcWtQrce5H6iTNjPrgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/hex-mars-hab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Su6itmHQWKk/XNgKPEGyQdI/AAAAAAAAI80/XZYQIN7fCnkGR5_pcWtQrce5H6iTNjPrgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/hex-mars-hab.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Digging a cylindrical hole using a descending circular shield and lining the walls above the shield with a resin/rock-dust composite is a job eminently suitable for a robot. It could work away for years before people arrived, preparing a hexagonal grid of living cylinders interconnected by short corridors at the bottom. Another robot would be ferrying <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_polar_ice_caps" target="_blank">ice from the Martian poles</a> to the site. When people landed they could do the more fiddly job of fitting the skins and airlocks, gradually expanding to occupy more cylinders as needed.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In order to get all this working, we'd obviously have to try it out on Earth first. Maybe we should do so at <a href="https://www.gemsociety.org/article/opal-mining-coober-pedy/" target="_blank">Coober Pedy in the Australian outback</a>. People there already live in artificial underground caves because of the heat.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And the whole project might run at a profit because of the Coober Pedy opals the robot dug up...</div>
Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-41551211235661834032019-03-18T15:06:00.002+00:002019-03-18T15:57:33.394+00:00RefluxGod<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZWhCSMaxd1E/XI-n0BOCKmI/AAAAAAAAIo4/uOqNEceRxwoGPn7tkMbf0r7DfyTqn0q4ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/gaviscon.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZWhCSMaxd1E/XI-n0BOCKmI/AAAAAAAAIo4/uOqNEceRxwoGPn7tkMbf0r7DfyTqn0q4ACK4BGAYYCw/s320/gaviscon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
This is a post about heartburn and the origins of religious belief. Run with me here...<br />
<br />
You can give <a href="https://www.psychologistworld.com/superstition" target="_blank">pigeons religion</a>. You observe them and, whenever one sticks its left wing out, say, you give it some food. Soon the pigeons have a conditioned reflex that sticking out their left wing produces food. It becomes their "Give us this day ours daily bread" prayer. Random coincidences can give the same effect without the intention of an experimenter: breaking mirrors and bad luck, and so on.<br />
<br />
I have suffered from heartburn for a few years. This year, I decided to do something about it. So<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>I changed the foods I eat.</li>
<li>I changed the time of day of my main meal.</li>
<li>I stopped drinking regular coffee.</li>
<li>I started taking <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylglycine" target="_blank">betaine hydrochloride</a> (to increase stomach acid) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsin" target="_blank">pepsin</a> before every meal.</li>
<li>I started eating a small amount of ginger (of which I am anyway fond...) after every meal.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Now. I'm not a complete moron. I know that the scientific way to do this would be to change just one thing at a time and to record the results. But I wanted a cure NOW, so I just threw everything that might work at the problem at once.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And that everything did work.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But now I don't know which of those five changes made the difference. I <i>could</i> just cut one out at a time and see when the problem returns. But I really don't want the problem to return. So I'll just carry on with my cure in ignorance of which bits of it actually worked and which are just snake oil.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And, of course, the snake oil bits are my religion. They do nothing. I half have faith that they work. And I'm not prepared to subject them to empirical verification.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
They are my pigeon's prayer.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-39920421135791581332018-08-27T19:24:00.001+00:002023-07-19T13:34:13.269+00:00The Support Shift of Sam McGee<style type="text/css">
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<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
There are strange
things done 'neath the midnight sun</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By the folks who
moil with code;</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
An embedded trace
gives an endless chase
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
When compiled in
debug mode.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The panel lights
have shown odd bytes,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But the oddest they displayed</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Was that night I
thought, in User Support,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That I'd do a sys
upgrade.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From Seattle ground
on Puget Sound,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Where the Duwamish
meets the sea,</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The system spread
like a wound that bled,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But should not've
passed the quay.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I was always told,
by coders old,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That it drained you
like a spell;</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But I had no choice;
the boss's voice:
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Linux? Rot in Hell!"</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As I sipped my brew
the screen went blue,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And then the
helpline rang:</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"My Word doc's
gone! It's almost dawn.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“You're the one
that I'll harangue.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"I've a meet at
ten. Must I use a pen?
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“You're supposed
to make it work."</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I could tell from
his tone at the end of the phone
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That this one was a
jerk.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But he had a point:
in this hardware joint,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The server's meant
to serve,</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
With an uptime that,
quite unlike FAT,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Would every bit
preserve.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I set down my cup, took the backup,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Then mounted it in the
drive,</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And thought to myself,
"If the link were ELF,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I'd have it up
in five."</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The drive-LED
flashed. The head then crashed.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My tea soaked
round the keys.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
So I cursed an oath
at the undergrowth
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of the open-plan
tubbed trees.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Then I recalled the
machine installed
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
To test a new
release.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Maybe that would run
better than none
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And finally give me
peace.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I plugged in a
mouse, and keys unsoused,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And a
postcard-sized green screen,</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Then I hit reset, with
my brows knit,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hoping that release
was clean.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My luck was in.
Beta for the win.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It booted to a
prompt.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I ran the scripts
and checked the MIPS;
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It wouldn't end up
swamped.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Post-it note
that I wrote
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Had brief words of
advice.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Admins", it said, "The machine is dead.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"The disk has failed
us twice.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"But the spare server
is a life preserver
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"That'll run till
half-past three.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"When the next shift,
if you catch my drift,
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Takes over" - Sam
McGee.</div>
<br />Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-9295890912892093852018-07-04T10:25:00.001+00:002018-07-04T10:25:21.225+00:00ScreenTime<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3JLO6sr_KfU/Wzyd6C-a5oI/AAAAAAAAHUA/ynHOnTvVNSIBwhqsqhN3IF4dVyVBVribACLcBGAs/s1600/window.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3JLO6sr_KfU/Wzyd6C-a5oI/AAAAAAAAHUA/ynHOnTvVNSIBwhqsqhN3IF4dVyVBVribACLcBGAs/s320/window.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
<br />
It is pretty easy to add a rectangular fly screen to a sash window. But the problem with sash windows is that the maximum they can open is half, and the sash mechanism is less reliable than a simple (or complicated; see the picture...) hinge.<br />
<br />
So how about an elastic concertina fly screen for a hinged window that folds away into the surround? It has a magnetic strip like a fridge door that attaches it to the three opening sides of the window frame, and, as the window is opened, it un-concertinas (if that's a verb) to fill the gap.<br />
<br />
When the window reaches a certain point (say open about 20 cm) the concertina is fully extended. Then the magnetic strip pulls off the frame and folds itself away again into the surround using its stored elastic energy. <br />
<br />
The magnet eventually re-attaches when the window is re-closed.<br />
<br />
It should be simple to make, and could probably come as a retro-fit kit for existing windows, as well as being an option on new ones.Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-91065420517156274512018-06-14T20:24:00.002+00:002019-04-03T15:10:14.044+00:00VerticallyChallenged<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HHjpRsqR0gI/WyLDrf9i2_I/AAAAAAAAHNU/1DMyT_iPyZYah_NEa4L0-ygAvCmAgCALgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/AgustaWestland_AW-609.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HHjpRsqR0gI/WyLDrf9i2_I/AAAAAAAAHNU/1DMyT_iPyZYah_NEa4L0-ygAvCmAgCALgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/AgustaWestland_AW-609.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
This is a couple of Augusta Westland AW609s. They are vertical take off and landing aircraft that rotate their engines and propellers when up in the air to fly horizontally. There are quite a few other VTOL aircraft that use this principle.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
If you look, you can see that the propeller blades twist like a helix (all propeller blades do this; it compensates for the fact that the tip is moving faster than the middle). The blades can also be twisted as a whole, which is called variable pitch. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In a helicopter with just one rotor, variable pitch is essential for forward flight because the blade that is moving forward with the direction of flight is going fast into the air, and so generates more lift, whereas the one on the other side of the rotor that is going backwards relative to the air generates less lift. Without the blades twisting every half-rotation using their variable pitch to give more lift on the back stroke, the helicopter would simply tip over and fall out of the sky.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But this effect is neutralised with two rotors like the AW609, one on the left and one on the right of the forward direction, as long as one rotates clockwise and the other rotates anticlockwise. Then the forces balance, and the blades don't need to flap with each half-revolution.</div>
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<br /></div>
The problem with planes like the AW609 is that the propellers need to be big to act like helicopters, but that makes them very inefficient in horizontal flight, limiting both the plane's speed and range. What would be ideal for VTOL planes like this would be a propeller that could also shrink to a small radius in horizontal flight, and expand to a big radius when helicopter-style vertical flight was needed.<br />
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<br /></div>
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Given the lack of need for variable pitch, this could be made to work with four-bladed propellers (rather that the three you see in the picture), or, indeed, propellers with any even number of blades. The blades would be hollow, with one very slightly smaller that the other. To reduce the propeller diameter the blades would be drawn through the hub and the smaller one would slide inside the slightly larger one opposite. They would also have to twist as they did this, to accommodate the helical blade shape.</div>
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There are a few problems with this idea, but I don't think they are insurmountable:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<ol>
<li>All current blades are not a constant-pitch helix. This would be needed for them to fit inside each other.</li>
<li>Careful thought would need to be applied to balancing the propellers given the slight difference in the sizes of the pairs of opposite blades. The masses need to match, obviously, but so too would the moment of inertia, lift and probably drag.</li>
<li>The blades could not be variable pitch, except when fully extended.</li>
<li>The blades would have to have a constant cross-section.</li>
<li>Your [it-won't-work-because] goes here...</li>
</ol>
<div>
I don't know if the aerodynamic compromises needed to accommodate the above list (plus the things I haven't thought of) would nullify the increased speed and range that would come from having a more-or-less conventional sized propeller for horizontal flight.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But it would be interesting to do some experiments and calculations...<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Postscript 3 March 2019</i><br />
<br />
A similar alternative that I thought of after I wrote this article is to have each blade telescopic and retractable inside itself. This would allow odd numbers of blades and probably be simpler overall (and certainly more symmetrical). </div>
Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-13985184126407102152018-04-11T11:00:00.000+00:002018-04-11T11:10:14.770+00:00OutOfControl<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ywJ9NA3LLec/Ws3mN_4J4jI/AAAAAAAAG3M/aBBgJ3nzslgt9Xt4AYErrq8OYp_-GRLFgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/npge.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ywJ9NA3LLec/Ws3mN_4J4jI/AAAAAAAAG3M/aBBgJ3nzslgt9Xt4AYErrq8OYp_-GRLFgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/npge.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is an edited version of a letter that was published in the London Review of Books <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n11/letters">Vol. 39, No. 11, 1 June 2017</a>.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
Driving speed is easily controlled by self-funding radar cameras and fines; in contrast, MP3 music sharing is unstoppable.<br />
<br />
Every technology sits somewhere on a continuum of controllability that can be adumbrated by another two of its extremes: nuclear energy and genetic engineering. If I want to build a nuclear power station then I will need a big field to put it in, copious supplies of cooling water and a few billion quid. Such requirements mean that others can exert control over my project. Nuclear energy is highly controllable. If, by contrast, I want to genetically engineer night-scented stock to make it glow in the dark so it attracts more pollinators, I could do so in my kitchen with equipment that I could build myself. Genetic engineering is uncontrollable.<br />
<br />
We may debate controllable technologies before they are introduced with some hope that the debate will lead to more-or-less sensible regulation (if it is needed). <br />
<br />
But it is pointless, <i><b>or worse damaging</b></i>, to debate an uncontrollable technology before its introduction. Every technology starts as an idea in one person’s mind, and the responsibility for uncontrollable technologies lies entirely with their inventors. They alone decide whether or not to release a given technology because - if they put the idea up for debate - its uncontrollability means that people can implement it anyway, regardless of the debate's conclusions. (Note in passing that - all other things being equal - an uncontrollable technology will have greater Darwinian fitness than a controllable one when it comes to its being reproduced.)<br />
<br />
In my own case I classify technologies I invent as broadly beneficial or damaging. The former I release online, open-source. The latter I don’t even write down (these include a couple of weapons systems at the uncontrollable end of the continuum); they will die with me.<br />
<br />
I may be mistaken in my classification, with consequences we may regret. Other inventors may act differently: we may regret that too. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of indulging in (necessarily) endless discussion of what to do about a technology if it is uncontrollable. The amount of debate that we devote to a technology should, <i>inter alia</i>, be proportional to how controllable it is.<br />
<br />
Technological changes have unforeseen and occasionally negative social and political consequences. This is inevitable when <a href="https://adrianbowyer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/fourlevels.html" target="_blank">something powerful impinges on things that are relatively weak like regulation</a>; the same applies to the benefits. Fortunately the vast majority of people are well intentioned, and technology amplifies the majority along with its complementary minority. Much happens faster and more spectacularly, but the ratio of more good to less bad stays about the same.Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-85936096547598823272018-03-12T10:36:00.000+00:002018-04-06T10:31:13.364+00:00FisherFolk<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A_s0CMps1nI/WeRzJi6BJ8I/AAAAAAAAFyM/jktOzf_YZQ8jK9Ji-ixfckH0SKojFyQVQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/croft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A_s0CMps1nI/WeRzJi6BJ8I/AAAAAAAAFyM/jktOzf_YZQ8jK9Ji-ixfckH0SKojFyQVQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/croft.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaway_2000" target="_blank">Castaway</a>, the first British reality TV show nearly two decades ago, dropped a group of about thirty people on the remote Scottish island of Taransay and filmed them as they argued with each other and fell out brutally and in a psychologically damaging way over the following weeks.<br />
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I watched the opening episode, which had the whole group in a room in London before they set out discussing what they would do and how they thought things would work, and I predicted to anyone who would listen (i.e. my family and the cat) that the whole thing would be a social and emotional disaster for most of them. And so it was.<br />
<br />
The problem was that - in that London room - they were all talking with each other excitedly and at length in a friendly, convivial, and engaging way. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
---o---</div>
<br />
Think of two island fishermen in their fifties who have known each other since childhood. On a Monday their total day's conversation as they pass each other on the quayside might be:<br />
<br />
"Morning,"<br />
<br />
"Morning."<br />
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And similarly every day of the week, with - perhaps - on the Friday:<br />
<br />
"Morning,"<br />
<br />
"Morning. Storm's coming."<br />
<br />
"Aye."<br />
<br />
They, and the rest of their island community, have evolved a peaceful system of friendship and cooperation an essential component of which is not annoying each other with their personal views, history, random thoughts, and chatter.<br />
<br />
Our two friends sit together all evening in the pub in silence, their pints of beer in front of them on the table, taking a sip every minute or two and thinking their own thoughts. If something needs to be communicated (like a storm) they mention it, then shut up. Occasionally the whole community all gets very drunk and sing and play the pub piano and talk nonsense for hours then, the following morning, their hangovers enforce a return to their normal reservation.<br />
<br />
A lot of folk anthropology consists of just-so stories about how we are adapted to life in a hunter-gatherer village and how we carry that inheritance over to modern global civilised life. Sometimes, it is claimed, conflict results; one obvious example is xenophobia. But one thing we have certainly not carried over is the circumspect reservation that we can observe today in isolated small communities. Every communications technology we have created - printing, the telephone, radio, television, the internet, social media - works against that reservation, and we embrace them all with delight.<br />
<br />
And we wonder why we don't get on as well as the two fishermen.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-19903766265578723782017-09-16T11:28:00.000+00:002017-09-16T13:37:57.777+00:00ProbablePrejudice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OzIZAc4KHdo/WbzwRz2r6EI/AAAAAAAAFqk/TycLwzoEtOsJrZeV0sHAQ6ztauaLlTDQACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/red-green-sixlets.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OzIZAc4KHdo/WbzwRz2r6EI/AAAAAAAAFqk/TycLwzoEtOsJrZeV0sHAQ6ztauaLlTDQACK4BGAYYCw/s400/red-green-sixlets.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<br />
Think about this game: suppose you have an urn filled with equal numbers of red and green marbles. You reach in and take out a marble in your clenched hand so you can't see it. What colour do you guess the marble is if you want to be right as often as possible? The answer is it doesn't matter. If you guess red or green at the toss of a coin you will score 50%. If you always guess green you will also score 50%. The same goes for any proportion of guesses in between.<br />
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But this cannot be true if there are more red marbles than green. In the extreme, if there are only red marbles in the urn, you would clearly be crazy ever to guess green. So what is the general rule if the proportion of red marbles is <i>p </i>and you know the value of<i> p</i>?<br />
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Suppose the proportion of red guesses you make is <i>r</i>. Should <i>r = p</i>? That seems to be true from the argument above if <i>p =</i> 1, and maybe if <i>p = </i>0.5. But it may not be true if <i>p = </i>0.8, say. Let's look at the sums:<br />
<br />
A red marble comes out of the urn a fraction <i>p</i> of the time. If you guess red <i>r</i> of the time you will be right <i>pr</i> of the total time for those red marbles.<br />
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A green marble comes out of the urn (1 - <i>p</i>) of the time. If you guess green (1 - <i>r</i>) of the time you will be right (1 - <i>p</i>)(1 - <i>r</i>) of the total time for those green marbles.<br />
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So the total proportion of correct guesses you make, <i>c</i>, is<br />
<br />
<i>c</i> = <i>pr</i> + (1 - <i>p</i>)(1 - <i>r</i>)<br />
<br />
= <i>r</i>(2<i>p</i> - 1) - <i>p</i> +1<br />
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If we plot a graph of correct guesses, <i>c,</i> for different values of <i>r</i> when <i>p</i> = 0.5 we get:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-02ijZ7S0mGo/Wb0DDJdBLpI/AAAAAAAAFq0/_M_bhUCjOhUcf2RwaucdOJmPeGZt6CUlwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/p0.5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-02ijZ7S0mGo/Wb0DDJdBLpI/AAAAAAAAFq0/_M_bhUCjOhUcf2RwaucdOJmPeGZt6CUlwCK4BGAYYCw/s320/p0.5.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Which tells us what we said when we started - for equal numbers of reds and greens it doesn't matter what proportion of red guesses, <i>r</i>, you make, you will always score <i>c</i> = 50%.<br />
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But now suppose <i>p</i> = 0.8 (that is, 80% of the marbles in the urn are red). Then the graph does this:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5L_W8vXdpY/Wb0Dkq1EhII/AAAAAAAAFrA/mM3vQHYpiCkdq2OXOUkFWmjk3X32BiYrwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/p0.8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5L_W8vXdpY/Wb0Dkq1EhII/AAAAAAAAFrA/mM3vQHYpiCkdq2OXOUkFWmjk3X32BiYrwCK4BGAYYCw/s320/p0.8.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Now what is the best guessing strategy, <i>r</i>, to give the biggest value of correct guesses, <i>c</i>? It is not <i>r</i> = <i>p </i>as we conjectured. It is to <i><b>guess red all the time</b></i>. This gives a highest possible score of 80%.<br />
<br />
This happens even for the tiniest majority of red or green marbles. If you know red is in the majority, no matter how small that majority is, you always guess red. If you know green is in the majority you always guess green.<br />
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This is a really easy rule for evolution to encode: if there are two types of things, A and B, and you know that A are in the majority, then - when encountering a thing with no other knowledge - assume the thing is A. You will be right as often as it is possible to be.<br />
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A and B might be bears and tigers growling out of sight. If you know there are more bears than tigers, then your best bet is to assume you have to deal with a bear.<br />
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This argument affects the best way for you to allocate resources. Suppose that it costs you the same to prepare to encounter an A in the future as it costs to prepare to encounter a B. Further suppose that the reward (or loss) you get if you meet an A is the same as the reward (or loss) you get if you meet a B. Then, if there are even just a few more As than Bs, it is optimal <i><b>to </b></i><b><i>spend ALL your resources on preparing to meet As and to spend NONE on preparing to meet Bs</i></b>.<br />
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Of course, A and B might not be bears and tigers; they might be people of unknown sexuality, nationality, or (if - like the bears and tigers - they are also out of sight) gender or ethnicity...<br />
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<br />Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-70502603841314931102017-09-04T10:46:00.004+00:002017-09-04T10:46:42.435+00:00FishFerris<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JoWJTZLYKi8/Wa0szZq7eeI/AAAAAAAAFoU/J2J5M-2GyWoTXiV9r4_tLCCyxBm2mFqowCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/ferris.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JoWJTZLYKi8/Wa0szZq7eeI/AAAAAAAAFoU/J2J5M-2GyWoTXiV9r4_tLCCyxBm2mFqowCK4BGAYYCw/s400/ferris.jpg" width="333" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
I was in Seattle a few days ago, where they have a Ferris wheel on the waterfront (above).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It would not be too difficult to make Ferris pods watertight, whereupon part of the ride in any ocean or river city could go underwater. At the top you'd get a view across the city, and at the bottom you'd get a view of the fishes. Plus there would be a small frisson for the wheel riders as each pod submerged.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eauH73iEh2w/Wa0ucSGbAyI/AAAAAAAAFog/flAPDgllCQk-gQALK-eXjSamck9KOj0-ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/kurumba-maldives.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eauH73iEh2w/Wa0ucSGbAyI/AAAAAAAAFog/flAPDgllCQk-gQALK-eXjSamck9KOj0-ACK4BGAYYCw/s320/kurumba-maldives.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It would work particularly well next to a reef dropoff, where the pods on the wheel could go down next to the coral wall.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Go build one, World!</div>
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Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-16920034059313647032017-08-12T10:34:00.005+00:002021-08-15T10:16:40.657+00:00AluminiumFuel<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0rGF2kwoASo/WY7AjzAXTOI/AAAAAAAAFnc/kIdphbf8n0IiyISrp0MuVakZwvRrPf-AwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/alhcl.jpg"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0rGF2kwoASo/WY7AjzAXTOI/AAAAAAAAFnc/kIdphbf8n0IiyISrp0MuVakZwvRrPf-AwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/alhcl.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
This is what happens when you put aluminium in hydrochloric acid. It makes aluminium chloride and hydrogen gas, which you can see bubbling off. If you put aluminium in water it does something similar, giving aluminium oxide and hydrogen.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But the problem with aluminium in water is that aluminium oxide (unlike aluminium chloride) is not soluble. The aluminium oxide forms a protective film over the aluminium and the reaction stops after a fraction of a second. So you get hardly any hydrogen.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But now the <a href="https://www.federallabs.org/index.php?tray=company&coid=AAB4900B-E8DB-48AA-AD06-4DD0A9FB83AE&tid=1FLtop49" target="_blank">US Army Aberdeen Proving Ground Research Laboratory</a> has made a serendipitous discovery: they have found an <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/hydrogen-fuel-could-become-a-viable-energy-alternative-thanks-to-this-aluminum-alloy?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1" target="_blank">aluminium alloy</a> to which the film of oxide does not adhere, and so you can drop it into water and it generates hydrogen gas and aluminium oxide continually.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
This is potentially an extremely important discovery. The big problem with electric power is not generating electricity - we have hundreds of ways to do that, including many renewable techniques. The big problem is storage. Even the very best and latest batteries are very expensive, very complicated, and store little energy for their weight. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But aluminium is made from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting" target="_blank">aluminium oxide by electricity</a>, and chunks of aluminium are cheap, and are easy and safe to store and to transport. And we have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell" target="_blank">fuel-cells</a> that will make electricity from hydrogen.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
So. How about an aluminium-fuelled car? Let's compare it with the most efficient (but very polluting) conventional cars currently on the road - diesels - and also with zero-emission Li-ion battery cars, like the <a href="https://www.tesla.com/" target="_blank">Tesla</a>. Here's the maths:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
First, how much hydrogen do we get from one kilogram of aluminium?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
2Al + 3H<sub>2</sub>O <span face=""ddg_proximanova" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_0" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_1" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_2" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_3" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_4" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_5" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_6" , "proxima nova" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "segoe ui" , "nimbus sans l" , "liberation sans" , "open sans" , "freesans" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: #f2f2f2; color: #333333; font-size: 1.5em;">→ </span>Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> + 3H<sub>2</sub></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<div style="text-align: left;">
The atomic mass of aluminium is 27 and the molecular mass of hydrogen gas is 2. We get three hydrogen molecules for every two aluminium atoms. With the mass ratio, that means that for every one kilogram of aluminium we get a ninth of a kilogram of hydrogen.<br />
<br />
Combining a ninth of a kilogram of hydrogen with oxygen from the air (which is what a fuel cell does) gives 15.5 mega-joules (MJ) of energy. But fuel cells are about 50% efficient and electric motors are about 80%, so that becomes about 6 MJ of energy going to the car's wheels.<br />
<br />
Thus, for our aluminium-powered car, one kilogram of aluminium lays down 6 MJ on the road. For comparison one kilogram of diesel gives about 15 MJ, or two and a half times as much, and one kilogram of the best Li-ion batteries give around 0.3 MJ - a tiny fraction.<br />
<br />
Diesel oil and aluminium pellets are both just simple, tough, cheap stuff; whereas Li-ion batteries are complicated, fragile, and expensive manufactured items. It's easy to pour diesel into a car, or to drop aluminium powder or pellets into a hopper. Batteries are time consuming to charge. And a car carrying aluminium and water is inherently very safe in a crash compared to one with a tank of diesel in the back, and probably better than one with batteries (because of the very high mass of the batteries; lithium fires do happen, but there's actually not a lot of lithium in a lithium battery and it's not in its elemental form).<br />
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It looks as if our aluminium-powered car might be a GO. That assumes, of course, that the US Army's research will scale and work reliably.<br />
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The car would be zero-emissions. Its waste product would be aluminium oxide powder as a sort of ash. This could be dumped at the refuelling station for re-smelting into aluminium.<br />
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And here is a potential problem. Making one kilogram of <a href="http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2011/07/15/electricity-consumption-in-the-production-of-aluminium/" target="_blank">aluminium from its bauxite ore</a> (also aluminium oxide) takes about 48 MJ of electricity. That would probably reduce a bit for recycling the car's ash, because that would be very pure. Let's say 45 MJ, and assume we're going to be sensible and use renewable electricity like solar. So the overall thermodynamic efficiency including the power generation (the so called <a href="https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/" target="_blank">wheel-to-wheel efficiency</a>) of the aluminium-powered car is 6MJ÷45MJ, which is 13%. The equivalent figure for a diesel car is around 14%, but for a battery electric car it's around 30%.<br />
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Note that all this analysis does not take account of the extra energy required to accelerate the considerable mass of the batteries in a battery car, some of which is recovered by regenerative braking.<br />
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In conclusion, the aluminium-powered car (if it works) would be a zero-emission vehicle that is as energy efficient as a diesel, but only half as efficient as a battery car. It would be cheap to make (probably even cheaper in bulk than the diesel, and certainly cheaper than cars with lots of batteries). It would be the safest car on the road, and it would be quick to re-fuel (and ash-dump).<br />
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Aluminium as an electricity storage system probably makes sense for vehicles, at least until batteries get a lot better. But its lower efficiency means it will not make sense for static storage, where mass does not matter.<br />
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But the really interesting possibility would be an aluminium-powered aeroplane. An electric turbine would be more efficient (maybe 80%) than the turbofans that aeroplanes currently use (manufacturers are coy, but I guess around 40%), which would help to compensate for the 2.5:1 ratio of energy per kilogram we saw above between hydrocarbons and aluminium. So we could have a zero-emission fleet of passenger aircraft, with no fuel fires in crashes. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><hr />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Finally, a separate but similar technology - the <a href="https://www.ifam.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ifam/en/documents/dd/Infobl%C3%A4tter/Power_on_demand_by_MgH2_hydrolysis_fraunhofer_ifam_dresden.pdf" target="_blank">magnesium hydride paste</a> developed by the Fraunhofer Institute. This is both a store of hydrogen and reacts with water to give off further hydrogen. It has an energy density of 6 MJ/kg and seems to me to be very promising. Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/Goeland86" target="_blank">Jon C</a> for bringing it to my attention.<br />
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Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-82099890113390654632017-04-25T20:44:00.000+00:002017-04-25T21:08:09.158+00:00TTestComplete<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ZpdQodP3Dg/WKHZA1taxiI/AAAAAAAAFAc/2j0-OZrxTpoRqY3PXAFDPtsL5kcPZSbZgCK4B/s1600/IMG_20170213_160237_resized_20170213_040254650.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ZpdQodP3Dg/WKHZA1taxiI/AAAAAAAAFAc/2j0-OZrxTpoRqY3PXAFDPtsL5kcPZSbZgCK4B/s400/IMG_20170213_160237_resized_20170213_040254650.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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A while ago the British Government was silly enough to allow me onto <a href="https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/" target="_blank">committees to decide how to spend millions of taxpayers' money on scientific and engineering research</a>. They even had me chair the meetings occasionally.</div>
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We'd get a stack of proposals for experiments, together with peer-review reports from other people like me on whether the experiments were worth doing or not. The committees' <i>modi operandorum</i> were to put the proposals that the reviewers said were best at the top of the pile then work down discussing them and giving their proposers the money they wanted until the money ran out.<br />
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I liked to cause trouble by starting each meeting with my explanation of why this approach is All Wrong. <br />
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"The ones we should put at the top of the pile," I said, "are the ones where half the reviewers say 'Brilliant!' and the other half say 'Rubbish!'. Those are the proposals that nobody knows the answer to, clearly. So those are the experiments that are most important."<br />
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The other academics there would smile at me indulgently because of my political naivety. The civil servants would smile at me nervously in case any of my fellow academics actually decided to do what I proposed. And then everyone would carry on exactly as they had always done. <br />
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After a while I started saying no when I was asked to attend.<br />
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There has been an understandable fuss recently prompted by some good research by my erstwhile colleague <a href="http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/" target="_blank">Joanna Bryson</a> and others about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-programs-exhibit-racist-and-sexist-biases-research-reveals" target="_blank">algorithmic racism</a> - that is to say things like Google's autocomplete function giving the sort of results you can see in the picture above.</div>
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Google's (and other's) argument in defence of this is a strong one. The essence of it is that their systems are driven by their user's preferences and actions; they gather the statistics and show people what most other people want to see when those other people do the same as you do. The results are modified sometimes from "most other people" to "most other people like you" where "like you" is again the result of a statistical process. If most other people are racist, historically ignorant cretins, then you will see results suitable for racist, historically ignorant cretins. They (Google and the rest) are not like newspaper editors deciding what to put in front of people; they are just reflecting humanity back at you, you human you.</div>
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But you can see from the picture that the results of this are sometimes very bad, by almost any sensible moral definition.</div>
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Clearly what is needed is not the intervention of an editor - that would result in Google, Facebook and the rest turning into the <i>New York Times</i> or the <i>Daily Mail, </i>which would be a retrograde step, not an improvement. What is needed is an unbiased statistical process that weights searches, hyperlinks and the rest from clever people more heavily than those from stupid people.</div>
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Note that I'm not saying that clever people aren't racists, and that stupid people are. I suspect that there is not that good a correlation, though <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797611421206" target="_blank">this is interesting</a>. I'm just saying that in general all the web's automated linking and ranking systems ought to work better if they weighted the actions of people by their intelligence.</div>
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But how to grade the intellectual ability of web users? The answer lies in the big data that all the web companies already use. Facebook, for example, has a record of billions of people's educational achievements. More interestingly it should be simple to train a neural network to examine tweets, blog posts and so on and to correlate their content with that educational data. That network would then be able to grade new people and those who hadn't revealed any qualifications just by reading what they say online and apply weights accordingly.<br />
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I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. It is <i>my</i> idea, but I'm not intelligent enough...</div>
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Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-1133400900964702422017-01-12T23:23:00.001+00:002022-01-22T10:57:37.695+00:00HardClever<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oEFSKtLADPo/WHf5DBJGSDI/AAAAAAAAEwA/qsnkPeLru3EoENO6JUz5OkrLjMjr-VEKwCK4B/s1600/neural-net-head.jpg"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oEFSKtLADPo/WHf5DBJGSDI/AAAAAAAAEwA/qsnkPeLru3EoENO6JUz5OkrLjMjr-VEKwCK4B/s400/neural-net-head.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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By now there must be a lot of people who actually believe that little glowing lights move along their axons and dendrites when they think, flashing at the synapses.</div>
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Anyway. <br />
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There has been a lot of fuss about AI lately, what with <a href="https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html" target="_blank">Google translate switching over to a neural network</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/linkedin-ebay-founders-reid-hoffman-pierre-omidyar-donate-research-ai-safety?utm_content=bufferb9c15&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">rich people funding AI ethics research</a>, and the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38583360" target="_blank">EU trying to get ahead of the legislative curve</a>. There has also (this is humans in conversation after all...) been a lot of stuff on the grave dangers to humanity of super intelligent AIs from the likes of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30290540" target="_blank">Stephen Hawking</a> and <a href="http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html" target="_blank">Nick Bostrom</a>.</div>
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Before we get too carried away, it seems to me that there is one very important question that we should be investigating. It is: <b>What is the computational complexity of general intelligence? </b>Before I say how we might find an answer, let me explain why this is important by looking at the extremes that that answer might take. </div>
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At one end is linear complexity. In this case, if we have a smart computer, we can make it ten times smarter by using a computer that is ten times bigger or faster. <br />
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At the other end is exponential complexity. In this case, if we have a smart computer, we can make it ten times smarter only by having a computer that is <i><b>twenty-two-thousand</b></i> times bigger or faster. (That is e<sup>10</sup> times bigger or faster; there may be a factor in there too, but that's the essence of it.)<br />
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If smart computers do really present a danger, then the linear case is bad news because the machines can easily outstrip us once they start designing and building themselves and it is quicker to make a computer than to make a person. In the exponential case the danger becomes negligible because the machines would have great difficulty obtaining the resources to make smarter versions of themselves. The same problem would inhibit us trying to make smarter machines too (or smarter people by genetic engineering, come to that).<br />
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Note, in passing, that given genetic engineering the computers have no advantage over us when they, or we, make smarter versions of themselves or ourselves. The computational complexity of the problem must be the same for both.<br />
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The big fuss about AI at the moment is almost all about machine learning using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network" target="_blank">neural networks</a>. These have been around for decades doing interesting little tricks like recognising printed letters of the alphabet in images. Indeed, thirty years ago I used to set my students a C programming exercise to make a neural network that did precisely that.<br />
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Some of the computational complexity of neural-net machine learning falls neatly into two separate parts. The first is the complexity of teaching the network, and the second is the complexity of it thinking out an answer to a given problem once it has been taught. The computer-memory required for the underlying network is the same in both cases, but the time taken for the teaching process and the give-an-answer process are different and separable.<br />
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Typically learning takes a lot longer than finding an answer to a problem once the learning is finished. This is not a surprise - you are a neural network, and it took you a lot longer to <i>learn</i> to read than it now takes you actually to read - say - a blog post. <br />
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The reason for the current fuss about machine learning is that the likes of Google have realised that their big-data stores (which are certainly exponentially bigger than the newsprint that I used to give my students to get a computer to read) are an amazingly rich teaching resource for a neural network.<br />
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And here lies a possible hint at an answer to my question. The teaching data has increased exponentially, and as a result the machines have got a little bit smarter.<br />
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On the other hand, once you have taught a neural network, it comes up with answers (that are often right...) to problems blindingly fast. The time taken is roughly proportional to the logarithm of the size of the network. This is to say that, if a network takes one millisecond to answer a question, a network twenty-two-thousand times bigger will take just ten milliseconds.<br />
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But the real experiments to find the computational complexity of general intelligence are staring us in the face. They lie in biology, not in computing. Psychologists have spent decades figuring out how smart squirrels, crows, ants, and all the rest are. And they have also investigated related matters like how fast they learn, and how much they can remember. Brain sections and staining should allow us to plot a graph of numbers of neurons and their degree of interconnectivity against an ordering of smartness of species. We'd then be able to get an idea if ten times as smart requires ten times as much brain, or twenty-two-thousand times as much, or somewhere in between. <a href="https://aiimpacts.org/investigation-into-the-relationship-between-neuron-count-and-intelligence-across-differing-cortical-architectures/" target="_blank">This interesting paper seems like a start.</a><br />
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Finally, Isaac Asimov had a nice proof that telepathy doesn't exist. If it did, he said, evolution would have exploited and refined it so fast and so far that it would be obvious everywhere.<br />
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We, as the smartest organisms on the planet, like to think we have taken it over. We have certainly had an effect, and now find ourselves living in the Anthropocene. But that effect on the planet is negligible compared to - say - the effect of phytoplankton, which are not smart at all. And our unique intelligence took three billion years to achieve. This is a strong indication that it is quite hard to engineer, even for evolution.<br />
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My personal guess is that general intelligence, by which I mean what a crow does when it bends a wire to hook a nut from a bottle, or what a human does when they explain quantum chromodynamics, will turn out to be exponentially hard. We may well get there by throwing exponential resources at the problem. But to get further either the intelligent computer, or we, will require exponentially more resources.</div>
Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-26010132894598333472016-12-17T17:36:00.001+00:002016-12-17T17:38:15.029+00:00TubeFreight<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kbzPYA6dvWg" width="400"></iframe>
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Occasionally one sees a freight train like this one on the London Tube.<br />
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If you want to move something smaller, like a parcel, quickly from an office in Fenchurch Street to one in the Fulham Road you give it to a bike messenger. That person goes off at speed, makes a dent in a BMW bumper ("I didn't see you, mate."), gets sticky red stuff all over the BMW's windscreen, and fails to transfer the parcel. This is not a very satisfactory solution to the delivery problem.<br />
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But it would be quite easy to design a QR-code-based system that allowed you to drop off your parcel at Aldgate station. Your parcel would slide down a chute to the appropriate platform, having had its destination automatically scanned and having had your account appropriately debited. There a robot would load it onto the next train (maybe on a parcel and letter rack between the passenger carriages).<br />
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At each station the robots would be loading and unloading packages, and swapping them by conveyor to different lines automatically.<br />
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When your parcel reached Fulham Broadway that station's robot would unload it and send it on a conveyor out to a collection point on the street. Its recipient would get a text to say their parcel was ready, whereupon they would stroll to the station, wave their phone at the collection point, and be given their parcel.<br />
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The whole system would be fast and fully automatic, and it would make extra income for Transport for London. It would also reduce the need for BMW drivers to keep cleaning their windscreens.<br />
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<br />Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-24245413461220013972016-10-18T14:24:00.000+00:002016-10-18T14:31:00.554+00:00MemoryLane<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qYlFj1Vqvj4/WAYnBCYJhAI/AAAAAAAAEdA/LSCMCKYttH8KtyF2Dl527RWRUT12WD-ngCLcB/s1600/london-c17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qYlFj1Vqvj4/WAYnBCYJhAI/AAAAAAAAEdA/LSCMCKYttH8KtyF2Dl527RWRUT12WD-ngCLcB/s640/london-c17.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.google.com/streetview/" target="_blank">Google Street View</a> lets you go anyplace on Earth that Google's cameras have previously visited (which is pretty much everywhere) and explore that place interactively as a 3D virtual world. Sometimes the pictures are a bit out of date, but the system is still both interesting and useful.<br />
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In one way, however, the pictures are not out of date enough.<br />
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There are now many complete 3D computer models of cities as they were in different historical eras. The picture above, for example, is a still from a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPY-hr-8-M0&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">video fly-through of a model of seventeenth century London</a> created by <a href="http://www.dmu.ac.uk/" target="_blank">De Montfort University</a>. But a directed video fly-through is not the same as a virtual world that you can explore interactively.<br />
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So why not integrate these models with Street View? You could have an extra slider on the screen that would allow you to wind back to any point in history and walk round your location at that date. There would be gaps, of course, which could be filled in as more models became available. And also some of the buildings and other features would be conjecture (the De Montfort model is accurate as far as the known information is concerned, but it is set before the Great Fire so there are interpolations). As long as these were flagged as such there would be no danger of confusion. Street View does allow you to go back through Google's scanned archive, but in the seventeenth century they were quite a small company without the resources needed to do the scanning.<br />
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On your 'phone, the historical data could be superimposed on the modern world in augmented reality as you walked in it, Pokémon Go style, giving you details of superseded historical architecture in your current location.<br />
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And when there were enough data we could train a neural network to predict the likely buildings at a given location on a given date from the buildings preceding them in history. Running that on the contemporary Street View would give us an idea of what our cities might look like in the future...<br />
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<br />Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585560101291122669.post-7782289126649688872016-08-31T10:49:00.002+00:002016-08-31T10:56:02.114+00:00DashDot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UYs6kwO5tWk/V8ayK_oS03I/AAAAAAAAEVk/Iu61BZL8o0ogjHyhsPEYz37GJ-73KZIDgCLcB/s1600/amazon-dash-washer-hero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UYs6kwO5tWk/V8ayK_oS03I/AAAAAAAAEVk/Iu61BZL8o0ogjHyhsPEYz37GJ-73KZIDgCLcB/s320/amazon-dash-washer-hero.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Amazon now have their <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Dash-quick-easy-AmazonFresh/dp/B00YT3WR64" target="_blank">Dash</a> button that allows you to buy a restricted range of goods from, surprise - Amazon - when something runs out. So you put the button on your washing machine, press it when the powder gets low, the button automatically does a buy-with-one-click using your home wifi, and a new pack arrives a day later.<br />
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But you can't set the buttons up to buy anything you like from Amazon, let alone from other suppliers. The button locks you in to products that may well not be the best deal, nor exactly what you want.<br />
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Clearly what's needed is a user-programmable button that you can set up to <i>take any online action that you preset into it</i>. Thus pressing the button might indeed do an Amazon one-click, or it might add an item to your Tesco online order, or it might boost your web-controlled central heating in the room where you are sitting, or it might just tweet that you are having your breakfast (if you feel that the world needs to know that on a daily basis).<br />
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Electronically, such a device would be straightforward. And - as a marketing opportunity - it is potentially huge. It would allow people total control over what they buy and from whom, completely subsuming Amazon Dash within itself among a much wider range of possibilities. And in addition it could be used to carry out a vast range of non-buying online actions that are amenable to your pressing a button when you feel like it.<br />
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If I can find a spare afternoon, I might just design it and open-source the results...Adrian Bowyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17595509188999219420noreply@blogger.com2