Category: Science

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3D Printing

 

The launch of a missile into space is not news. The fact that the rocket was made by a three-D printing process is.

The process is explained (in greater detail than you want to know) here.

The Guardian reports:

Rocket Lab is one of about 30 companies and agencies worldwide developing small satellite launchers as an alternative to firms jostling for space on larger launches or paying around $50 million for a dedicated service. The company said in a statement it has now received $148m in funding and is valued in excess of $1bn.

Rocket Lab’s customers include NASA, earth-imaging firm Planet and startups Spire and Moon Express.

A newspaper rarely carries any actual news. Most of the time the headlines are the equivalent of “Pope says mass at Easter” such as “Muslim kills 30 in bomb explosion”. Today something novel got the through the screen.

Related articles here, and here

CBC makes a fool of itself – again

Today, May 14th, the “Tops News Headlines” section of the CBC website has the following headline on top: “More people could be hit by global ‘ransomware’ cyberattack Monday, police agency warns”.

Do the CBC reporters not read news from other sources? Consider the following news item which was on the BBC website yesterday.

Global cyber-attack: Security blogger halts ransomware ‘by accident’

Yes, this particular cyberattack is over. For some background here are some relevant tweets, in chronological order, from the twitter feed @MalwareTechBlog. This Twitter handle is registered to the guy who accidentally stopped this cyberattack.

May 12

From what I can gather the NHS ransomware is WannaCrypt (wcry) spreading using P2P exploitation of SMB with leaked NSA exploit.

May 12

Some analysts are suggesting by sinkholing the domain we stopped the infection? Can anyone confirm?

Retweeted

May 12

propagation payload contains previously unregistered domain, execution fails now that domain has been sinkholed

Retweeted

May 12

Infections for WannaCry/WanaDecrpt0r are down due to registering initial C2 domain leading to kill-switch

May 12

I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after i registered it, so initially it was accidental.

May 12

So long as the domain isn’t revoked, this particular strain will no longer cause harm, but patch your systems ASAP as they will try again.

  3h3 hours ago

Thanks to who found what looks like a new ‘kill switch’ domain and who registered it and transferred it to our sinkhole.

Retweeted

5h5 hours ago

My bad – finished analyzing all worm mods we have and they all have the kill switch inside. No version without a kill-switch yet.

Yes CBC, you read that right. This “particular strain” of cyberattack is over because the virus will go check for the domain name and execution will fail. A new cyberattack will require a different virus code which doesn’t rely on checking for the status of this domain name. You should have known this two days ago.

It is strange that after every Ottawa Senators playoff game this season, CBC has been able to find “8 tweets that defined Game….“, but the reporters cannot find tweets relevant to other news.

Doomsday and archiving human knowledge

Doomsday vault:

In the side of a mountain atop the frigid wastelands of the Norway’s Svalbard archipelago sits the Arctic ‘doomsday vault’ – an ominous facility that’s locked away close to a million seed samples from almost every country on Earth.

Designed to keep the seeds safe from nuclear war or some other global catastrophe, the Svalbard Global Seed Bank just got a new neighbour, with a second doomsday vault opening up nearby. But instead of storing seeds, this vast library has been built to ensure the survival of the world’s most important books, documents, and data….

Oddly enough, instead of taking advantage of the most advanced data security systems available, researchers at Piql have opted for a more analogue approach – they store everything on photosensitive film, which they say is a far safer option than anything digitised.

“It’s digital data preserved, written onto photosensitive film,” Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand told Live Science. 

“So we write data as basically big QR codes on films.”

The idea is that while digital data is stored on our computers as codes of 1s and 0s, analogue data is physically etched into reels of film, and can be ‘read’ like the bumps on a vinyl record.

As Bjerkestrand observes, it’s like having your data “carved in stone.”

Hopefully this technology will keep the material more accessible than the multimedia version of the English Domesday Book which had its problems with technology, even though the original from 11th century is still readable. The BBC Domesday Project was the multimedia edition of Domesday which was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986 but within 15-years it was showing its age.

In 2002, there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer. Aside from the difficulty of emulating the original code, a major issue was that the still images had been stored on the laserdisc as single-frame analogue video, which were overlaid by the computer system’s graphical interface. The project had begun years before JPEG image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available….

The deputy editor of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticized the UK’s National Data Archive to which the archive material was originally entrusted, arguing that the creators knew that the technology would be short-lived but that the archivists had failed to preserve the material effectively.

Elon Musk on artificial intelligence

Forty years ago I argued that the idea that we would travel through space in ships (mechanical canisters) to find extra-terrestrial intelligence was one of the dumbest ideas ever, and that it would seem to future humans to have been incredibly culture-bound mechanistic idea. I suggested that the way we would first start to experience aliens was through computers.

Well, dear readers, Elon Musk agrees with me.

The business magnate, who was being interviewed by Mohammad Abdulla Alergawi, the Minister of Cabinet Affairs and the Future for the UAE, told the slightly perplexed crowd: “One of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence. I don’t mean narrow A.I  – deep artificial intelligence, where you can have AI which is much smarter than the smartest human on earth. This is a dangerous situation.”

He also warned world governments: “Pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence.

“Make sure researchers don’t get carried away – scientists get so engrossed in their work they don’t realise what they are doing.”

When asked if he thought A.I was a good or a bad thing Musk said: “I think it is both.

“One way to think of it is imagine you were very confident we were going to be visited by super intelligent aliens in 10 years or 20 years at the most.

 “Digital super intelligence will be like an alien.”

Male genius is not a “stereotype”

This from the Groniad:

Girls as young as six years old believe that brilliance is a male trait, according research into gender stereotypes.

The US-based study also found that, unlike boys, girls do not believe that achieving good grades in school is related to innate abilities.

Andrei Cimpian, a co-author of the research from New York University, said that the work highlights how even young children can absorb and be influenced by gender stereotypes – such as the idea that brilliance or giftedness is more common in men.

“Because these ideas are present at such an early age, they have so much time to affect the educational trajectories of boys and girls,” he said.

The trouble with this view – perceptions of males being more likely to be geniuses – is that it is not a “stereotype”, a form of false idea.

Quite the contrary, it is true. There are more very smart males than very smart females. It is also true that men are more likely to be savage criminal morons. No accounting of sex differences in intelligence fails to show that the distribution of male intelligence is wider than that of the female, at both ends.

I turn to Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, which no person may call himself educated who has not read it. In Chapter twelve “Of dead white males”, Murray writes:

 

One aspect of this male tendency towards extremes seems to apply to cognitive ability. Although the mean IQ of men and women is apparently the same, the variability of male IQ is higher – meaning that more men than women are to be found at both the high and low extremes of IQ. Conjoined with this is evidence that men’s and women’s cognitive repertoires are somewhat different….

The existing circumstantial evidence is already strong enough to have persuaded me that disparities in accomplishment between the sexes are significantly grounded in biological differences, but nothing in this brief rehearsal of the arguments need sway readers who are confident that science will prove me wrong. I close the discussion of sex differences with the point I made at the outset: All we need is a few decades’ patience and we won’t have to argue any more. (pp.289-291)

Finally I would like to quote Charles Murray, writing in the Afterword to The Bell Curve in 1995.

 

A few weeks after the Bell Curve appeared, a reporter said to me that the real message of the book is , “Get serious”. I resisted his comment at first, but now I think he was right. We never quite say it in so many words, but the book’s subtext is that America’s discussion of social policy since the 19670s has been carried on in a never-never land where human beings are easily changed and society can eventually become a Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average. The Bell Curve does indeed imply that it is time to  get serious about how best to accommodate the huge and often intractable individual differences that shape human society. (pp. 574-575)

Today’s rubbish on stereotypes indicates that the getting serious has yet to occur.

The Guardian’s article concluded:

Dame Athene Donald, professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge, agreed. “If we are to facilitate a gender-balanced workforce of engineers, mathematicians and physicists in the future it is clear interventions at secondary school just aren’t going to be sufficient,” she said. “Parents, teachers and the media need to work much harder eradicating gender stereotypes in the way they talk about adults to children of all ages.”

To which I say, “Get real, snowflake”. The miracle is always that girls as young as seven see through the bullshit, and have some inkling that very smart boys are really smarter tan they are. Only by the time they have reached university have their minds been sufficiently warped to be fully ideologically ‘correct’.

Women make up about 2.2% of the most important figures in science and the arts. Read Human Accomplishment. Get the facts. It costs less than a good bottle of wine and its value is perpetual.

Michael Lewis: The Undoing Project

 

Michael Lewis is the author of books on Wall Street: Flash Boys, The Big Short,  and Moneyball. He recently published The Undoing Project: a friendship that changed our minds. The book recounts the extremely productive intellectual relationship between two Israeli psychologists, Amos Tverski, and Daniel Kanneman.

The essence of the Tverski/Kanneman approach was to look at the way the human mind has characteristic ways of miscalculating probabilities, such as risks, chances and expected outcomes.

When I first read Daniel Kanneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, I confess that I was irked, and that in some sense I thought the author was just being a smart-ass. I gather from reading Micheal Lewis that my reaction is quite common,  because the results are so devastating to one’s belief that, more or less, we humans get it right. We do, and we do not. Kanneman and Tverski show how we do not correctly appreciate risks,  in quite exact and well described ways. By so doing they launched a direct attack, via statistical results from psychology, on the notion of the economically rational man. More than this, their thinking about our error-pronedness  has had an effect on how hospitals treat  patients, even so far as why cell phone use while driving has been banned, and why governments now enroll you automatically for benefits rather than expect you to tick a box to express your assent.

Oban once remarked that “economics was a peculiarly anorexic discipline”, because of the extreme narrowness of assumptions about human behaviour and the excessive mathematization of the issues with which it deals. The mathematization allows for precision, but the assumptions that allow the mathematical approach drastically limit the range of thequestions that may be asked. Nowadays the works of Tversky/Kanneman are among the most cited works in economics papers.

The Lewis book examines the remarkable collaboration between two utterly different psychological types as represented in Kanneman and Tversky. It also covers the effects of their thinking on other domains. I recommend it highly.

For a more complete discussion of the Tversky/Kanneman approach to thinking, you will well served by Kanneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Turing

 

 

turing

I have just plowed through Andrew Hodges‘ definitive biography of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who devised the computer, the first application of which was to break the German Enigma codes.

I recommend it, despite its drawbacks.  Hodges writes from a position that is so deeply inside of British culture and assumptions as to be difficult to understand even for an English-speaking outsider. He is a mathematician himself, teaches at a university, and is capable of explaining the science and maths which formed the core of Turing’s concerns. As his website makes clear, he is (or was) an advocate for the  liberation of homosexuality from its ongoing social and former legal prisons.

It is scarcely credible that until the 1970s homosexual acts in Britain were illegal, as they were nearly everywhere else, that is to say, they would get you punished by law for engaging in. Turing himself was prosecuted two years before his suicide in 1954, although it should be clear that his death came a year after his probation period was over.

Two enormous transformations have occurred since the time of Alan Turing. One has been the penetration of computers in every corner of our lives, and the second has been the two sexual revolutions. The use of the plural is deliberate. One was the (hetero)sexual revolution, the other was the homosexual revolution, which in my view came about a decade later. We tend to forget that our mothers and  older sisters were  subject to strict sexual oversight and segregation before the widespread use of the birth control pill. Girls were allowed to attend university, all right, but they tended to be locked away at night in guarded dormitories. The age-old social restrictions on females  vanished like snow in spring once it became possible for them to control their fertility. We take too easily for granted the scale of the transformation since the 1950s.

I think the two revolutions are deeply related events, in that the hetero majority was hardly able to condemn recreational sex for those inclined to same-sex activity when it was beginning to enjoy widespread reproductive, and therefore sexual, liberation for itself.

As for the computer revolution, if you wish to see its effects, look around you. Its transformative  importance does not need to be argued.

Alan Turing was a supreme individualist. He never wanted to join a group, upset society, start a revolution, be important, or be in the public eye. All he wanted was to pursue his intellectual and sexual interests. Turing’s moral compass was very sure, and in the end, he was, by about the age of forty, unable and unwilling to dissimulate further. I am reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s comment that “communism would not last a day if every soviet citizen merely spoke the truth”. You can replace the word “communism” with almost any label you like, and the one I would insert there is “the tyranny of sexual hypocrisy”. Alan Turing’s life  reminds us that we are our own kind of KGB, and I do not see any end of its reach or duration, because we embrace and enforce sexual hypocrisy ourselves.

 

 

Bourgeois Dignity: Why economics can’t explain the modern world

McCloskeyT

Deirdre McCloskey is a phenomenal writer, economist, and thinker. Visit her website for an explosion of academic productivity and a highly intelligent viewpoint. We share one thing in common. Both of us have had the gravest doubts that economics as it is usually practiced is capable of explaining much. My friend Oban calls it the anorexic profession: not merely starved, but self starving. Its insights are few, but powerful, but it has become wedded to asking very narrow questions and getting very narrow, if important, insights.

McCloskey breaks the mould. Here is how she begins Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010) “Sixteen. The magic number is sixteen. The world is on average sixteen times wealthier than it was in 1800.” She finds that the economic discussion fails to comprehend or explain why ‘the largest revolution in human affairs since the invention of agriculture’, as she puts it, has occurred in the past two hundred years. She looks at all the explanations proferred by the economics profession , and finds them inadequate to explain the scale of the transformation from $3 a day world average in 1800 to $48 a day world average (or $147 a day in formerly impoverished Norway).

After demolishing the usual explanations (rule of law, expansion of trade, rise of the middle class – without reference to ideas, war, slavery, imperialism, or population growth) she settles on changed ideas and social attitudes towards innovation.

Changing social ideas, in short, explain the Industrial Revolution. Material and economic factors – such as trade or investment or exploitation or population growth or the inevitable rising of classes or the protections to private property – do not. They were unchanging backgrounds, or they had already happened long before, or they didn’t actually happen at the time they are supposed to have happened, or they were weak, or they were beside the point, or they were consequences of the rhetorical change, or they required the dignity and liberty of ordinary people to have the right effect. And it seems that such material events were not in turn the main causes of the ethical and rhetorical change itself.

Most of the book consists of a careful elimination of the causes usually offered for the Industrial Revolution, and involves naturally a series of disputes with the standard materialistic explanations offered by the economics profession. Many if not most of the economists with whom she disputes  have been at various times her teachers, mentors or students, and on the whole the arguments are kept at the friendly tone with which old friends argue.

I grant that I am inclined to non-materialist explanations. Materialism is the doctrine that there is only matter and its motions, and that mind is an epiphenomenon, as a shadow is to the body for example, and not a primary cause in its own right. Yet anything we know to be important in our own lives has occurred by decisions we have made, that led to actions on our part.

McCloskey argues in this book that the standard sets of explanations for the huge rise in human wealth since 1800 are insufficient, when they are not merely wrong. Bourgeois Dignity is the second of a series of six books she has planned. The next in the series, Bourgeois Equality (2015) is already out. I have already ordered it.

McCloskey is one of those writers who are so enlightening and well argued that you need not fully agree in order to profit from them greatly.

She may think it relevant, but I do not, that she underwent a sex change from man to woman in 1995. More pertinent, in my view, was that she was an atheist and is now an Episcopalian, and was an acolyte of Milton Friedman and now entertains a broader conception of her profession.

 

What science fiction got wrong

We were drinking at Irene’s the other night, guys of a certain age. We were contemplating what science fiction got wrong, what assumptions science fiction writers made in the 1960s that did prove true.

If you were young in the sixties, you were exposed to Robert Heinlein, J.G. Ballard, A.E.Van Vogt, and many others. One man who appears more and more significant as time passes is Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, whose stories have been the basis of numerous science fiction movies, most notably Blade Runner, but also including Johnny Mnemomic, Total Recall, Minority Report and others. I have just finished reading a handsome hardback compendium of four of Dick’s most significant short stories.

 

PhilipDick

Philip Kindred Dick, 1928-1982

It is curious and interesting that Dick was no better at predicting the technical attributes of what was, in 1965,  the near future of 2015, than any of the more conventional science fiction writers. Despite imagining psychoactive drugs engendering collective participatory social hallucinations, and the commercial battles for world control that would come from such hallucinogenic drugs, he was as unable as Heinlein to imagine how different the world would be socially from 1965 to 2016. Moreover, the common theme of the science fiction writers was that transportation would be the area of human endeavour   subject to the greatest changes, not communications and computers.

Thus, for all of them, it seems, it was possible to conceive of colonizing Mars by 2015, but that women would still work as secretaries answering telephones. There would still be switchboards, and paper messages left by one’s secretary.

It is quite bizarre, how completely unforeseen was the effect of the computer in the science fiction of the era 1950-1975.

Today, contrary to the order foreseen by the imaginations of 1965, the communications revolution is invading transportation. The combination of massive computer power, and ubiquitous wireless networks, will keep driverless cars on the road and not colliding. What will Google do with all the terabytes of information that the automated car will collect every block, every mile of driving? It will process the information to improve the algorithms governing the car. Cars increasingly are computers with engines and wheels attached.

You have probably heard the story of the poor computer who (should I say “which”?) was tricked by humans into talking and responding like a devoted Nazi? It is going to take as much learning as a human has to go through to prevent  other humans from conning the interface bot into a completely false appreciation of reality. How do humans treat the rube from the country? the sucker born every minute? We con them. We cannot help it.  We engender lack of trust and a resulting degree of skepticism in younger minds as a cruel duty.

If every science fiction writer I know assumed that transportation was going to be revolutionized first, and computers and their social impacts were almost completely unforeseen, then how good are we at envisioning the future, thirty to forty years out?

Which is a way of saying that Nicholas Taleb was on to something vitally important in The Black Swan. There is the known, the (known) unknown, and the unknowable, and of all of them, the unknowable is an immensity beyond …knowing.

We will rely massively on driverless cars long before we have colonies on Mars. That is predictable now. Thus it is safe to say that, projecting forty years out, society will be different in ways we cannot now imagine. Whatever that change is, it will have nothing to do with Islam, the role of women, energy policy, gay rights, human fertility and reproduction, or anthropogenic global warming. It will be unimaginable.

 

 

Lifting the gross national product with a set of tongs

The expression I use for a category error is “like trying to lift the gross national product with a set of tongs”. I could just as well say “he is trying to surf on a crime wave.” You cannot apprehend a statistical abstraction, such as the GDP, or a crime wave, with a physical object, a tool you hold in the hand, or a front-end loader.

Thus I was entertained by a recent interview with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman in Quanta Magazine.

The virtue of Donald Hoffman is that he takes the conclusions of quantum physics seriously, and he addresses some issues underlying the attacks on neuroscience launched by Raymond Tallis and others. Says the article on Hoffman:

“while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality”

As you read the interview, it is apparent that Hoffman is using the worldview of quantum physics – the interaction of consciousness with matter – to put questions to an evolutionary account of human consciousness.

The argument of Hoffman tends to say that because we humans only evolve to greater fitness, we do not necessarily evolve to apprehend truth. We evolve mental apprehensions of danger, for example, called “snakes” or “traps” or “poison mushrooms”. We learn to avoid them.

Hoffman goes much further, however, by asserting that “physics tells us there are no public physical objects.” I do not believe quantum physics necessarily implies this conclusion. The many commentators on this article in Quanta magazine also appear to agree that Hoffman goes too far in that regard.

However, Hoffman takes proper aim at the neuroscientific community for failing to advance their ideas of physics from Newton to Heisenberg, from Einstein to John Wheeler.

“Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observer…. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”

The many commentators on this interview provide some important perspectives, corrections and suggested readings on issues such as materialism and the role of consciousness in nature. Those who seem well grounded in philosophy accuse Hoffman of self-refuting solipsism, and more, and worse. It is an education to read them.

 

At first glance, it seems that Hoffman may have modernized his physics but has fallen too far into his own metaphors of consciousness as a user-illusion.By this I mean that he sees the picture that consciousness brings us is like the screen on a computer: it provides the representation of where “files” may be found in the computer, but it is not a circuit diagram and provides no insights as to how the computer works behind the screen.

I would offer the writing of Raymond Tallis as a much deeper and philosophically literate examiner of these issues of consciousness, evolution, and the adequacy of Darwin to get us to where we are.

Raymond Tallis is a British physician and intellectual who holds that neuroscience is in the grips of what he calls Darwinitis and neuromania. By this he means that, by adopting a strictly materialist position on the evolution and operation of of consciousness, we have failed to begin to understand issues such as intentionality, culture, meaning, and what it is like to be human.

All true. I recommend Tallis highly. His take on Darwin is insightful. He considers that evolutionary explanations fail to explain any form of consciousness. Here is a sampling, taken from Aping Mankind (2014) at page 183:

Much of the strength of the case for a Darwinian account of the human person and human society lies, as we saw, in the way language is used to anthropomorphize animal behaviour and animalize human behaviour. The case for the neuralization of consciousness and, in particular, human consciousness has also depended on the misuse of language, but with Neuromania the lexical trickery goes much deeper. While Darwinitis requires  its believers only to impute human characteristics to animals (and vice versa), Neuromania demands of  its adepts that they should ascribe human characteristics to physical processes taking place in the brain.

I cite Dawkins’ “selfish genes” meme, as a prime example of the ascription of human characteristics to physical processes. For a telling attack on Dawkins I recommend David Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales“, (2006) essay 7, Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins, which is scathing as well as funny.

And for something completely different,that is, an interpretation which sees the neuromania and Darwinitis as manifestation of a deep seated attack by the hyper-rationalist and over-developed part of the brain on our intuitive and connecting aspects of our minds, you might like Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.”