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...

MaxwellRainCoat

Goretex (invented by the Gores père et fils and Rowena Taylor) famously allows air and water vapour to pass through, but not liquid water.  It is a waterproof fabric that breathes.  Its trick is to sandwich a thin film of PTFE punctured by micropores in between two reinforcing sheets of conventional cloth.  The micropores allow air and vapour through, but are too small for a liquid to pass because of surface tension.

But it doesn't have a directionality.  The ideal garment would behave like Gortex, but only allow air and water vapour to pass out, not in.  That would keep you warm as well as dry, while still allowing a healthy flow of air.

The simplest one-way valve is a flap valve.  This uses the fluid medium that it is regulating as the source of power to prevent flow in one direction while allowing it in the other.  It ought to be possible to make micropores with additional microflaps over one end all out of the same material.  The flaps would not have to be perfect - we are after an aggregate effect (rather like Velcro, where not every loop catches a hook, but it still works fine).   A fabric made of such a material would allow gases to pass one way through it, but not the other and be exceptionally comfortable to wear.

Of course, if you can make the flaps small and light enough, right down at the atomic scale, then you have constructed a Maxwell's Demon...

ClockWork

If you live a blameless life, and then develop a brain tumour that turns you to violence, the law may need to restrain you, but it has no business punishing you.  This is a general legal principle that extends to pleas of insanity, diminished responsibility and so on.

In the - seemingly eternal - philosophical debate over free will a key point is often made that universalises this idea.  It is that, if there is no such thing as free will, then it makes no moral sense to punish criminals at all.  If all acts that people make are either determined or spontaneous, and people have no magic Cartesian inner pilot exercising willfulness, then every accused criminal is effectively in the same position as the tumour sufferer.  Their actions are the products of circumstances, rather than a brain lesion, but their social and moral position is indistinguishable.  Once again, restraint may be appropriate, but not punishment.  (Irrelevantly, I hold that view.  But this is not a blog about my views.)

This argument, though, contains a profound asymmetry that - as far as I have been able to find - is never pointed out.  If the criminal has no free will, and hence no moral culpability, then neither do the judge and jury.  We can't say that the criminals couldn't help robbing the bank without also saying that the jury can't help convicting them, and the judge can't help punishing them.

Either all the people in the system are clockwork, or none of them are.

FreePatent

This week, patents.

There are conservation laws for things like matter, and angular momentum.  You can't make more of either, or get rid of them.  If I have some angular momentum, and you take it, then I have less angular momentum.  But if I have an idea, then it doesn't matter who else knows about it - I still have the idea.  Information isn't a conserved quantity like the matter in my TV and my car, and the energy they use.  (And yes - I do know about the quantum Liouville theorem...)

It makes sense to prevent people stealing real physical property like TVs and energy.  But how can someone "steal" an idea?  The idea's creator is not, after all, deprived of it.

The creator is not even deprived of reasonable profit from the idea if someone else uses it.  All the creator has lost is their monopoly.  We usually consider monopolies to be a bad thing, and yet a monopoly is precisely what a patent or a copyright gives the creator of an idea.  If I want to make and to sell toothbrushes, then - quite rightly - I can't prevent your doing so too.  Why should I be able to restrict your freedom just because my idea is new?

The whole mad principle of "intellectual property" makes about as much sense as faith-based education or chiropractic, but it is entrenched.  How could we improve things without lots of lazy vested interests like drug companies and music producers bleating?

I propose the concept of a free patent (and its equivalent for copyright).  We keep patent law exactly the same, but add a "Free Patent" tick box to the patent application.  If a new idea's creator doesn't tick that box then they get their patent just like now.

If they do tick it, however, anyone else can use the creator's idea without paying any royalties.   But they have to pay tax on what they do, whereas the creator doesn't.

Governments would actually make more money in taxation - the non-idea-creator's tax bills would almost always outweigh the tax that would have been paid just by the creator alone.  The creator of the idea gets a real advantage from it - exclusively, no tax needs to be paid by them on the idea's exploitation.  And they also have no need to pursue patent infringers to keep their advantage (something individual inventors find financially impossible anyway).  So, finally, lots of lawyers have no patent infringement cases to fight and end up unemployed.

Result all round, I think.