OpenNetwork

Inventions sweep the world with increasing frequency, as is only to be expected with an exponentially growing pool of inventors and an exponentially growing foundation of science upon which they can base their inventions.

One of the big sweeps is unquestionably the mobile phone.  Anyone over the age of thirty can remember a world without it, but for all of us that world seems impossibly distant and unconnected, both with itself, and with us.

The frequency-shift communication that makes mobile phones possible was famously invented by Hedy Lamarr.  Indeed, it is an interesting aspect of fame that her invention will probably turn out to be the one by which future ages will remember her.  Anyone in the 1940s would have been flabbergasted if they could have known that back then.  To them it would be as if a time traveler from 2500 were to tell us that Einstein will be principally famous for his haircut.  (Hedy Lamarr was called "The Most Beautiful Woman in Film"  by her biographer Ruth Barton; form your own judgement from the picture.)

Now all over the world dictators are beginning to tremble as ordinary people take an instrument they use for chatting, and with it scythe off trigger-happy riot squads at the knees with the deadlier weapon of documentary exposure.

But the weak point in the system is the service providers and their base stations.  The base stations are too vulnerable to being turned off by those dictators, and the companies succumb to injunctions to surrender up call records and the like.

However, now that we have open phones that we can program ourselves, those service providers and base stations should become redundant.  That is because every mobile phone can be a base station for others nearby.  If I make a call it would hop from phone to phone across the city, then maybe dive down a wi-fi connection a few miles away to emerge at another on a different continent and then to go hopping on to my interlocutor.  The nice thing about this scheme is that the bandwidth of such a system is proportional to the number of phones in a locality.  (To be pedantic, the bandwidth is proportional to the square-root of the density of phones in the locality.)  Just where you need a lot of bandwidth, there are a lot of phones.

There is a problem.  To preserve your battery, your optimal strategy is to be a parasite - to use the open network, but selfishly not to forward the links needed by others.  But this is easily remedied: the software in the other's phones simply tests your phone to see if it is programmed like that and - if it is - other phones don't give you your calls.  That way everyone is rewarded if they add their bit to the commonwealth.

The system could be fully protected using hard encryption, with friends Diffie–Hellman-swapping their public keys just as for encrypted e-mail.  No one in the middle could listen in.

And then what would we have?  We'd have a completely free universal phone system that no company or government could shut down, and in which anonymity and untraceability would be preserved.  All you would have to buy would be the phone and electricity needed to charge its battery.

OnHold

When you walk down a corridor and someone is behind you, it is obviously polite to hold any doors you encounter open for them.  They arrive at the door, put their hand on it to hold it open, and you walk on while they walk through.  If they too are polite they will say, "Thanks."

But if it is a long corridor with many doors, you will find yourself holding each and all of them for your follower.  After about three doors this becomes a slight embarrassment to you both.  Your follower will grin at you sheepishly and make I-am-hurrying-up gestures  as they approach.  You will smile back with a slight air of condescension.

It would make a bit more sense to swap: you hold Door 1 for them while they walk through, they (now ahead) hold Door 2 for you while you walk through that, and so on.  For some reason we never do this.  Maybe it is because the follower feels that - if they were to walk ahead - they would be usurping your leader's position, and that that would be presumptuous.   This is despite the fact that the swapping scheme would allow them to return your favour at the next door - immediate reciprocal altruism.

The swapping scheme even extends to arbitrarily many people walking down an infinite corridor with doors: the leader holds the next door for everyone, then joins the back of the procession.  (Though why a bunch of people would want to walk in Indian file down an infinite corridor I'm not quite sure.)

Game theoretically, of course, the Nash equilibrium is the selfish let-the-door-go-in-the-follower's-face strategy; the equivalent of defaulting in Prisoner's Dilemma.  But - as we all know - people don't behave like the individual self-interested rational actors of naive game theory because our utility function is not individual advantage, it is the advantage of the genes that we both carry and share with others.

PolyDiFluoroMethylSiloxane

Chemists are a species of German: when they have something new to name they take all the names of its component parts and string them together.  This is an admirably reductionist approach, but the result is usually something like polytetrafluoroethylene.   If I am reading out loud I have to take a run-up to stand a chance of pronouncing this sort of thing, and I suspect that others - even chemists - have to do so as well.

This is a problem that the computer scientists have attacked and solved.   They are under the constraint that the parsing rules of computer languages don't usually allow them to put spaces in names.   So, if they have a multi-component name, they have somehow to chain it together.  One solution is to use the underscore character, so, for example, a garbage collector heap pointer gets named garbage_collector_heap_pointer.   The other, and more elegant, solution is this: again like the Germans, they use capital letters judiciously; but they don't just put them at the start; they distribute them throughout the name to make its components stand out.  GarbageCollectorHeapPointer is as easy to read and to pronounce as garbage collector heap pointer (though I'll allow it does somehow seem to be in a hurry...)

This is the lesson the chemists need to learn.  Anyone can say  PolyTetraFluoroEthylene on the fly as they encounter it on the page.


PolyTetraFluoroEthylene itself (shown above) is remarkable stuff.  It has this structure:

The fluorine atoms bind so strongly to the carbon that the resulting plastic will easily handle temperatures of 250^oC without breaking down.  It also has one of the lowest friction coefficients of any solid substance, and these two characteristics make it an invaluable material throughout the whole of engineering.  Just about the least interesting use of it is the one everyone has heard of: non-stick frying pans.

Another polymer with similar temperature stability is PolyDiMethylSiloxane:

But this acts like a rubber - it is incredibly elastic and makes moulds that are so good that they will reproduce features down below the wavelength of light.  Again, PolyDiMethylSiloxane is one of the most useful of all engineering polymers.  And also again, its least interesting use is the one everyone sees: bathroom sealant.

As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to combine these two ideas to make this stuff:

which, I conjecture, ought to have a considerable number of useful and interesting properties.

I call it PolyDiFluoroMethylSiloxane.

BeeOil

Beekeeping is a three-way symbiotic mutualism.  The plants get pollinated by the bees, the bees get fed from the plants' nectar (and get extra nectar for their nest), and we get some of the extra nectar as honey and also get our crops pollinated.  We contribute the tilled land for the crops, the beehives, and medical care for both the plants and the bees.  All round, a very satisfactory Darwinian arrangement for the three parties.

But only one of those three parties is smart enough to understand how the whole thing works, and to use that understanding deliberately to enhance or to copy the mutualism.  That would be us.

We all know that leafcutter ants from the two genera Atta and Acromyrmex use the leaf-parts that they gather to farm fungi in their nests for food.  Given the rich social-insect resources of bees and ants, it ought to be possible  to genetically-engineer a species that farms out in the open.   That is, a species that would plant a crop, tend it, sting other species who would eat it, then harvest it concentrating it in one place.  We, once again, would provide the cleared land, the nest boxes, and the Medicaid.

This would be far too useful and powerful a technology to waste on mere honey.  Honey has a specific energy of 13 MJ per kilogram.  Vegetable oil, on the other hand, has a specific energy of 35 MJ per kilogram.  Our social-insect farmers could plant, tend, and harvest an oil crop for their own benefit, the crop's benefit, and our benefit.  (Bees already make wax, of course, so some of the chemistry is more-or-less written in the genes already.)

We could then use the oil in the place of petroleum.  Carbon neutral, future-proof, and entirely solar powered, the oil would simply drain from the insects' nests down a network of plastic pipes to the processing factory, leaving some behind to fuel the insects in their toil...

WellyFlation

Wellington boots are really indispensable.  They turn even the most timid city-dweller into an all-terrain vehicle.  But they are bulky and - if worn for a long time in hot weather - sweaty.  Also, they are not as comfortable to wear as shoes, particularly for extended walks.

Galoshes - that is foot-shaped plastic bags that go over ordinary shoes - go part-way to solving the problem.  You can deploy them just when you have to ford a stream, and wear comfortable shoes for the drier parts of your journey.   But they are not so good for riding horses or climbing - things that can be done in wellies (they have heels, which you need for riding).

So how about inflatable wellies?  These would be much lighter than conventional wellies, and - when emptied of air - would roll up and fit in your pocket.  But if you blew them up they would aquire sprung thick soles, and reasonably stiff calf-gripping sides.  A highly fluoridated outer polymer surface could make them very non-stick, so they could easily be rinsed off before rolling up and putting away.

And if the stream being forded turned out to be a little deeper than expected, they would make an excellent buoyancy aid, though at the wrong end until taken off and slung round your neck...

FeverFace

When our friends are ill, we often know it just by looking at them for an instant.  The lineaments of disease are writ on their physiognomy, and good doctors must become adept at making provisional diagnoses as soon as their patients walk through the door (assuming they are up to walking).


Now.  There are a lot of dead people - their number is increasing all the time; and they all died of something.  In the last century or so, almost all of them will have been photographed as well, and many will have been photographed towards the ends of their lives.  It should be straightforward to establish a truly vast database of late (in both senses) portraits linked to causes of death.  If all the portraits for each cause were then to be averaged, we'd have a typical face for pancreatic cancer, and another for a dissecting aortic aneurysm, and so on.  Non-lethal conditions could also be catalogued in the same way.


A website could then be established to which people feeling poorly could upload their picture from their webcam.  The picture would be compared with the database, and back would come the ten most likely diagnoses, in order of probability.


It would be hypochondriac heaven.

It would also automatically become more accurate with time.  This has nothing to to with the adding of extra data (though that would happen too), but is a specific instance of the general rule that people who exhibit text-book symptoms for a disease have a higher Darwinian fitness than those who don't.  They are more likely to get the right treatment, and in turn are then more likely to survive and to reproduce, passing on their text-book-symptom tendency to their children.  By this means, medical text books also become automatically more accurate with time, even if neither a word nor a picture in them changes.


It would be interesting to test this idea by adding an arbitrary unconnected symptom to a disease in medical training - say that diverticulitis often causes a slight rash along the hairline above the ears.  At the start, the correlation between rash and inflamed diverticula would be no better than random.  But as time went on, and the people exhibiting the rash lived to have more children, the initially nonsensical symptom would become a real one with diagnostic power.

In fact, it may be that many symptoms that you and I exhibit when we are ill have already been established in this way, dating right back to the preposterous diagnoses of pre-scientific physicians in the eighteenth century and before.   The evolutionary mechanism just described will have made them self-fulfilling prophecies.

All this assumes that treatments are effective, even if the diagnoses start off being based on random rubbish.  But, of course, the same evolutionary pressure will work on random treatments too.  So a witch doctor diagnosing demonic possession for what is, in reality, porphyria, and prescribing a course of viper venom is applying a selection pressure on the unfortunate patient to get cured by viper venom.  The first diagnosis and treatment will work no better than chance, but persistence and consistency will make viper venom a cure for porphyria in the long run.

Could this be the basis for much of medicine?  It doesn't matter what the diagnosis and corresponding treatment are at the start.  As long as they are applied consistently and over many generations, they will come to work effectively as the patients evolve to match them.

FriendsClose

Here you are reading a blog.  So, as a user of this new-fangled World Wide Web thing, the chances are that you also, like me, get far too much e-mail.

I don't just mean the tired old stuff asking please could I deposit $10,000,000,000,000,000 from my uncle in the Libyan Government in your bank account for a bit, or how I made $1,000 per hour with a can't-fail scheme that anyone can follow from the comfort of their home.  Those are instant-delete, and actually don't take up too much effort.

The worst e-mails are genuine ones asking you to do something time-consuming with possibly some small benefit to yourself.  You are a busy man or woman.  You have your own projects.  But these at least deserve the courtesy of a polite and (briefly) considered reply.  You make a start on them, and there is half a day of your life gone, never to be seen again.

There are many automatic e-mail filters and prioritizers out there, but I would like to propose a new one:

Sort e-mails by the average time you took to respond to the sender in the past, with the shortest times at the top.

Your e-mail system would then learn the people to whom you like to reply quickly, and put their e-mails at the head of your queue.  It would be simple for the e-mail system to calculate, and it could even be set up retrospectively by having the software run through your existing Sent mailbox compiling the initial set of averages.

Simple, self-modifying, and useful, it would adapt as you worked.  And you could just go down through the top few every day and then stop, confident that you have answered the e-mails most important to you.

NaturalIntelligence

There is no point in genetically engineering an organism unless the result is evolutionarily stable.  Usually that stability comes about as a result of engineering in a characteristic that is desirable to people - making a rice that is more nutritious, say.  The new rice will not be able to out-compete its wild rivals because it's wasting energy laying down beta-carotene (or whatever), but it still prospers because of its symbiotic mutualist relationship with its creators.  We protect and nurture it because it gives us something we need, so it doesn't go extinct.

We also put a lot of effort into eradicating pests.  There is a constant human war against pigeons, rats, cockroaches and the rest.  We rarely win of course (except for smallpox), but we manage.  However, suppose we were to change the balance?  Suppose we were to take a pest and to modify it so that it had a characteristic that people valued?  If we were to release that ex-pest into the wild, it should out-compete its unaltered brethren because it would enjoy human support.  We would have won by overwhelming the pest with competitors from among its own kind.

Doing this agriculturally (like the rice) would be useless.  We concentrate agricultural species into a protected monoculture in one place.  In contrast, the ex-pests would have to survive in the wild to compete successfully with the continuing pests, just occasionally gaining support from people to tip the balance.  How could we engineer a characteristic in the ex-pest that would benefit it in just occasional interactions with people?

How about performing for food?  For example, how about stand-up mice?

Artificial intelligence researchers are fond of computer programs called chatbots.  These are formulaic (and quite simple) pieces of software that are able to hold rather restricted conversations with people.  They are a step on the road to programs that can pass the Turing Test.  That's a long road, and chatbots really are only one step, but they are quite interesting to talk with.  They can be set up to tell jokes, to ask people riddles and to conduct all sorts of other, well, chat.

We can't make a genuinely intelligent mouse, of course (well - not yet).  But we might be able to incorporate the straightforward algorithmic processes of a chatbot, and to alter the animal's vocal tract to form the equivalent of a simple train-announcement-style speech synthesiser.  The mouse would come up to you and tell you a joke.  If you gave it cheese, it would tell you another...

Soon, all the mice in the world would be much-loved well-fed comedians...