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Superstition

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On of my favorite anecdotes (probably apocryphal, as these things usually go) tells of a horseshoe that hung on the wall over Niels Bohr’s desk. One day, an exasperated visitor could not help asking, “Professor Bohr, you are one of the world’s greatest scientists. Surely you cannot believe that object will bring you good luck.” “Of course not,” Bohr replied, “but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe or not.”

I’ve had two occasions with which to be obsessively superstitious this weekend. The first was Saturday night’s depressing Flyers game. Due to poorly planned family outing (thanks a lot Mike!), I missed the first period and a half of the game. During that time, the Flyers went down 2-0. As soon as I started watching, they scored a goal, much to my relief. But as the game grinded to a less than satisfactory close, I could not help but think, what if I had been watching for that first period?

Even as I thought that, though, I recognized how absurd and arrogant a thought like that is. As a fan, I obviously cannot participate in the game, but all fans like to believe they are a factor in the outcome of the game and will thus go to extreme superstitious lengths to ensure the team wins. That way, there is some sort of personal pride to be gained (or lost, in my case) from the team winning, even though there really isn’t.

I spent the day today at the Belmont Racetrack, betting on the ponies. Longtime readers know that I have a soft spot for gambling, but that I don’t do it very often nor do I ever really play for high stakes. One of the things I really enjoy is people watching, because some people go to amusing lengths to perform superstitious acts that will bring them that mystical win.

One of my friends informed me of his superstitious strategy today. His entire betting strategy dealt with the name of the horse. If the horse’s name began with an “S” (i.e. Secretariat, Seabiscuit, etc…) it was bound to be good. He also made an impromptu decision that names which displayed alliteration (i.e. Seattle Slew, Barton Bank, etc…) were also more likely to win. So today, when he spied “Seaside Salute” in the program, which exhibited both alliteration and the letter “S”, he decided it was a shoe-in! Of course, he only bet it to win, and it placed, thus he got screwed out of a modest amount of money.

John R. Velazquez, aboard Maddalena, rides to win the first race at Churchill DownsLike I should talk. My entire betting strategy revolves around John R. Velazquez, the best jockey in the history of horse racing. This superstition did not begin with me, as several friends discovered this guy a few years ago, but it has been passed on and I cannot help but believe in the power of JRV. When I bet on him, I tend to win. When I bet against him, he tends to be riding the horse that screws me over. As a result, I need to seriously consider the consequences of crossing JRV whenever I choose to bet on someone else.

Now, if I were to collect historical data regarding my bets for or against JRV (which is admittedly a very small data set, and thus not terribly conclusive either way, but stay with me here) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that my beliefs are unwarranted. But that is the way of the superstition – no amount of logic or evidence is strong enough to be seriously considered (while any supporting evidence is, of course, trumpeted with glee).

Now, I don’t believe for a second that watching the Flyers makes them play better, nor do I believe that betting on (or against) John R. Velazquez will increase (or decrease) my chances of winning. But I still think those things… after all, what could I lose?

This could be a manifestation of a few different things. It could be a relatively benign “security belief” (or “pleasing falsehood” as some like to call it – I’m sure there are tons of names for it) which, as long as you realize what you’re dealing with can actually be fun (as my obsession with JRV is). It could also be brought on by what Steven Den Beste calls the High cliff syndrome.

It seems that our brains are constantly formulating alternatives, and then rejecting most of them at the last instant. … All of us have had the experience of thinking something which almost immediately horrified us, “Why would I think such a thing?” I call it “High cliff syndrome”.

At a viewpoint in eastern Oregon on the Crooked River, looking over a low stone fence into a deep canyon with sheer walls, a little voice inside me whispered, “Jump!” AAAGH! I became nervous, and my palms started sweating, and I decided I was no longer having fun and got back into my car and continued on my way.

It seems to be one of the profound truths of human existence that we can conceive of impossible situations that we know will never be possible. None of us are immune, from one of the great scientific minds of our time to the lowliest casino hound. This essay was, in fact, inspired by an Isaac Asimov essay called “Knock Plastic!” (as published in Magic) in which Asimov confesses his habitual knocking of wood (of course, he became a little worried over the fact that natural wood was being used less and less in ordinary construction… until, of course, someone introduced him to the joys of knocking on plastic). The insights driven by such superstitious “security beliefs” must indeed be kept into perspective, but that includes realizing that we all think these things and that sometimes, it really can’t hurt to indulge in a superstition.

Update: More on Security Beliefs here.

The Unglamorous March of Technology

5 Comments / Best Entries, Culture, Neal Stephenson, Science & Technology / /

We live in a truly wondrous world. The technological advances over just the past 100 years are astounding, but, in their own way, they’re also absurd and even somewhat misleading, especially when you consider how these advances are discovered. More often than not, we stumble onto something profound by dumb luck or by brute force. When you look at how a major technological feat was accomplished, you’d be surprised by how unglamorous it really is. That doesn’t make the discovery any less important or impressive, but we often take the results of such discoveries for granted.

For instance, how was Pi originally calculated? Chris Wenham provides a brief history:

So according to the Bible it’s an even 3. The Egyptians thought it was 3.16 in 1650 B.C.. Ptolemy figured it was 3.1416 in 150 AD. And on the other side of the world, probably oblivious to Ptolemy’s work, Zu Chongzhi calculated it to 355/113. In Bagdad, circa 800 AD, al-Khwarizmi agreed with Ptolemy; 3.1416 it was, until James Gregory begged to differ in the late 1600s.

Part of the reason why it was so hard to find the true value of Pi (π) was the lack of a good way to precisely measure a circle’s circumference when your piece of twine would stretch and deform in the process of taking it. When Archimedes tried, he inscribed two polygons in a circle, one fitting inside and the other outside, so he could calculate the average of their boundaries (he calculated ? to be 3.1418). Others found you didn’t necessarily need to draw a circle: Georges Buffon found that if you drew a grid of parallel lines, each 1 unit apart, and dropped a pin on it that was also 1 unit in length, then the probability that the pin would fall across a line was 2/π. In 1901, someone dropped a pin 34080 times and got an average of 3.1415929.

π is an important number and being able to figure out what it is has played a significant factor in the advance of technology. While all of these numbers are pretty much the same (to varying degrees of precision), isn’t it absurd that someone figured out π by dropping 34,000 pins on a grid? We take π for granted today; we don’t have to go about finding the value of π, we just use it in our calculations.

In Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson portrays several experiments performed by some of the greatest minds in history, and many of the things they did struck me as especially unglamorous. Most would point to the dog and bellows scene as a prime example of how unglamorous the unprecedented age of discovery recounted in the book really was (and they’d be right), but I’ll choose something more mundane (page 141 in my edition):

“Help me measure out three hundred feet of thread,” Hooke said, no longer amused.

They did it by pulling the thread off of a reel, and stretching it alongside a one-fathom-long rod, and counting off fifty fathoms. One end of the thread, Hooke tied to a heavy brass slug. He set the scale up on the platform that Daniel had improvised over the mouth of the well, and put the slug, along with its long bundle of thread, on the pan. He weighed the slug and thread carefully – a seemingly endless procedure disturbed over and over by light gusts of wind. To get a reliable measurement, they had to devote a couple of hours to setting up a canvas wind-screen. Then Hooke spent another half hour peering at the scale’s needle through a magnifying lens while adding or subtracting bits of gold foil, no heavier than snowflakes. Every change caused the scale to teeter back and forth for several minutes before settling into a new position. Finally, Hooke called out a weight in pounds, ounces, grains, and fractions of grains, and Daniel noted it down. Then Hooke tied the free end of the thread to a little eye he had screwed on the bottom of the pan, and he and Daniel took turns lowering the weight into the well, letting it drop a few inches at a time – if it got to swinging, and scraped against the chalky sides of the hole, it would pick up a bit of extra weight, and ruin the experiment. When all three hundred feet had been let out, Hooke went for a stroll, because the weight was swinging a little bit, and its movements would disturb the scale. Finally, it settled down enough that he could go back to work with his magnifying glass and his tweezers.

And, of course, the experiment was a failure. Why? The scale was not precise enough! The book is filled with similar such experiments, some successful, some not.

Another example is telephones. Pick one up, enter a few numbers on the keypad and voila! you’re talking to someone halfway across the world. Pretty neat, right? But how does that system work, behind the scenes? Take a look at the photo on the right. This is a typical intersection in a typical American city, and it is absolutely absurd. Look at all those wires! Intersections like that are all over the world, which is the part of the reason I can pick up my phone and talk to someone so far away. One other part of the reason I can do that is that almost everyone has a phone. And yet, this system is perceived to be elegant.

Of course, the telephone system has grown over the years, and what we have now is elegant compared to what we used to have:

The engineers who collectively designed the beginnings of the modern phone system in the 1940’s and 1950’s only had mechanical technologies to work with. Vacuum tubes were too expensive and too unreliable to use in large numbers, so pretty much everything had to be done with physical switches. Their solution to the problem of “direct dial” with the old rotary phones was quite clever, actually, but by modern standards was also terribly crude; it was big, it was loud, it was expensive and used a lot of power and worst of all it didn’t really scale well. (A crossbar is an N� solution.) … The reason the phone system handles the modern load is that the modern telephone switch bears no resemblance whatever to those of 1950’s. Except for things like hard disks, they contain no moving parts, because they’re implemented entirely in digital electronics.

So we’ve managed to get rid of all the moving parts and make things run more smoothly and reliably, but isn’t it still an absurd system? It is, but we don’t really stop to think about it. Why? Because we’ve hidden the vast and complex backend of the phone system behind innocuous looking telephone numbers. All we need to know to use a telephone is how to operate it (i.e. how to punch in numbers) and what number we want to call. Wenham explains, in a different essay:

The numbers seem pretty simple in design, having an area code, exchange code and four digit number. The area code for Manhattan is 212, Queens is 718, Nassau County is 516, Suffolk County is 631 and so-on. Now let’s pretend it’s my job to build the phone routing system for Emergency 911 service in the New York City area, and I have to route incoming calls to the correct police department. At first it seems like I could use the area and exchange codes to figure out where someone’s coming from, but there’s a problem with that: cell phone owners can buy a phone in Manhattan and get a 212 number, and yet use it in Queens. If someone uses their cell phone to report an accident in Queens, then the Manhattan police department will waste precious time transferring the call.

Area codes are also used to determine the billing rate for each call, and this is another way the abstraction leaks. If you use your Manhattan-bought cell phone to call someone ten yards away while vacationing in Los Angeles, you’ll get charged long distance rates even though the call was handled by a local cell tower and local exchange. Try as you might, there is no way to completely abstract the physical nature of the network.

He also mentions cell phones, which are somewhat less absurd than plain old telephones, but when you think about it, all we’ve done with cell phones is abstract the telephone lines. We’re still connecting to a cell tower (which need to be placed with high frequency throughout the world) and from there, a call is often routed through the plain old telephone system. If we could see the RF layer in action, we’d be astounded; it would make the telephone wires look organized and downright pleasant by comparison.

The act of hiding the physical nature of a system behind an abstraction is very common, but it turns out that all major abstractions are leaky. But all leaks in an abstraction, to some degree, are useful.

One of the most glamorous technological advances of the past 50 years was the advent of space travel. Thinking of the heavens is indeed an awe-inspiring and humbling experience, to be sure, but when you start breaking things down to the point where we can put a man in space, things get very dicey indeed. When it comes to space travel, there is no more glamorous a person than the astronaut, but again, how does one become an astronaut? The need to pour through and memorize giant telephone-sized books filled with technical specifications and detailed schematics. Hardly a glamorous proposition.

Steven Den Beste recently wrote a series of articles concerning the critical characteristics of space warships, and it is fascinating reading, but one of the things that struck me about the whole concept was just how unglamorous space battles would be. It sounds like a battle using the weapons and defenses described would be punctuated by long periods of waiting followed by a short burst of activity in which one side was completely disabled. This is, perhaps, the reason so many science fiction movies and books seem to flaunt the rules of physics. As a side note, I think a spectacular film could be made while still obeying the rules of physics, but that is only because we’re so used to the absurd physics defying space battles.

None of this is to say that technological advances aren’t worthwhile or that those who discover new and exciting concepts are somehow not impressive. If anything, I’m more impressed at what we’ve achieved over the years. And yet, since we take these advances for granted, we marginalize the effort that went into their discovery. This is due in part to the necessary abstractions we make to implement various systems. But when abstractions hide the crude underpinnings of technology, we see that technology and its creation as glamorous, thus bestowing honors upon those who make the discovery (perhaps for the wrong reasons). It’s an almost paradoxal cycle. Perhaps because of this, we expect newer discoveries and innovations to somehow be less crude, but we must realize that all of our discoveries are inherently crude.

And while we’ve discovered a lot, it is still crude and could use improvements. Some technologies have stayed the same for thousands of years. Look at toilet paper. For all of our wondrous technological advances, we’re still wiping our ass with a piece of paper. The Japanese have the most advanced toilets in the world, but they’ve still not figured out a way to bypass the simple toilet paper (or, at least, abstract the process). We’ve got our work cut out for us. Luckily, we’re willing to go to absurd lengths to achieve our goals.

Thinking about Security

Best Entries, Security & Intelligence / /

I’ve been making my way through Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter archives, and I came across this excellent summary of how to think about security. He breaks security down into five simple questions that should be asked of a proposed security solution, some obvious, some not so much. In the post 9/11 era, we’re being presented with all sorts of security solutions, and so Shneier’s system can be quite useful in evaluating proposed security systems.

This five-step process works for any security measure, past, present, or future:

1) What problem does it solve?

2) How well does it solve the problem?

3) What new problems does it add?

4) What are the economic and social costs?

5) Given the above, is it worth the costs?

What this process basically does is force you to judge the tradeoffs of a security system. All to often, we either assume a proposed solution doesn’t create problems of its own, or assume that because a proposed solution isn’t a perfect solution, it’s useless. Security is a tradeoff. It doesn’t matter if a proposed security system makes us safe. What matters is that a system is worth the tradeoffs (or price, if you prefer). For instance, in order to make your computer invulnerable to external attacks from the internet, all you need to do is disconnect it from the internet. However, that means you can no longer access the internet! That is the price you pay for a perfectly secure solution to internet attacks. And it doesn’t protect against attacks from those who have physical access to your computer. Also, you presumably want to use the internet, seeing as though you had a connection you wanted to protect. The old saying still holds: A perfectly secure system is a perfectly useless system.

In the post 9/11 world we’re constantly being bombarded by new security measures, but at the same time, we’re being told that a solution which is not perfect is worthless. It’s rare that a new security measure will provide a clear benefit without causing any problems. It’s all about tradeoffs…

I had intended to apply Schneier’s system to a contemporary security “solution,” but I can’t seem to think of anything at the moment. Perhaps more later. In the mean time, check out Schneier’s recent review of “I am Not a Terrorist” Cards in which he tears apart a proposed security system which sounds interesting on the surface, but makes little sense when you take a closer look (which Scheier does mercilessly).

Inherently Funny Words, Humor, and Howard Stern

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Here’s a question: Which of the following words is most inherently funny?

  • Boob (and its variations, such as boobies and boobery)
  • Chinchilla
  • Aardvark
  • Urinal
  • Stroganoff
  • Poopie
  • Underpants
  • Underroos
  • Fart
  • Booger

Feel free to advocate your favorites or suggest new ones in the comments. Some words are just funny for no reason. Why is that? In Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a character says:

Words with a ‘k’ in it are funny. Alkaseltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a ‘k’. ‘L’s are not funny. ‘M’s are not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomatoes is not funny. Lettuce is not funny. Cucumber’s funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny — not if you get ’em, only if you say ’em.

Well, that is certainly a start, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. Words with an “oo” sound are also often funny, especially when used in reference to bodily functions (as in poop, doody, booger, boobies, etc…) In fact, bodily functions are just plain funny. Witness fart.

Of course, ultimately it’s a subjective thing. To me, boobies are funnier than breasts, even though they mean the same thing. To you, perhaps not. It’s the great mystery of humor, and one of the most beautiful things about laughter is that it happens involuntarily. We don’t (always) have to think about it, we just do it. Here’s a quote from Dennis Miller to illustrate the point:

The truth is the human sense of humor tends to be barbaric and it has been that way all along. I’m sure on the eve of the nativity when the tall Magi smacked his forehead on the crossbeam while entering the stable, Joseph took a second away from pondering who impregnated his wife and laughed his little carpenter ass off. A sense of humor is exactly that: a sense. Not a fact, not etched in stone, not an empirical math equation but just what the word intones: a sense of what you find funny. And obviously, everybody has a different sense of what’s funny. If you need confirmation on that I would remind you that Saved by the Bell recently celebrated the taping of their 100th episode. Oh well, one man’s Molier is another man’s Screech and you know something thats the way it should be.

There has been a lot of controversy recently about the FCC’s proposed fines against Howard Stern (which may have been temporarily postponed). Stern has been fined many times before, including “$600,000 after Stern discussed masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima.” Stern, of course, has flown off the handle at the prospect of new fines. Personally, I think he’s overreacting a bit by connecting the whole thing with Bush and the religious right, but part of the reason he is so successful is that his overreaction isn’t totally uncalled for. At the core of his argument is a serious concern about censorship, and a worry about the FCC abusing it’s authority.

On the other hand, some people don’t see what all the fuss is about. What’s wrong with having a standard for the public airwaves that broacasters must live up to? Well, in theory, nothing. I’m not wild about the idea, but there are things I can understand people not wanting to be broadcast over public airwaves. The problem here is what is acceptible.

Just what is the standard? Sure, you’ve got the 7 dirty words, that’s easy enough, but how do you define decency? The fines proposed against Stern are supposedly from a 3 year old broadcast. Does that sound right to you? Recently Stern wanted to do a game in which the loser had to let someone fart in their face. Now, I can understand some people thinking that’s not very nice, but does that qualify as “indecent”? Apparently, it might, and Stern was not allowed to proceed with the game (he was given the option to place the looser in a small booth, and then have someone fart in the booth). Would it actually have resulted in a fine? Who knows? And that is what the real problem with standards are. If you want to propose a standard, it has to be clear and you need to straddle a line between what is hurtful and what is simply disgusting or offensive. You may be upset at Stern’s asking a Nigerian woman if she eats monkeys, but does that deserve a fine from the government? And how much? And is it really the job of the government to decide these sorts of things? In the free market, advertisers can choose (and have chose) not to advertise on Stern’s program.

At the bottom of this post, Lawrence Theriot makes a good point about that:

Yes a lot of what Stern does could be considered indecent by a large portion of the population (which is the Supreme Court standard) but in this case it’s important to consider WHERE those people might live and to what degree they are likely to be exposed to Stern’s brand of humor before you decide that those people need federal protection from hearing his show. Or, in other words, might the market have already acted to protect those people in a very real way that makes Federal action unnecessary?

Stern is on something like 75 radio stations in the US and almost every one of them is concentrated in a city. Most people who think Stern is indecent do not live in city centers. They tend to live in “fly-over” country where Stern’s show does not reach.

Rush Limbaugh by comparison (which no one could un-ironically argue is indecent in any way) is on 600 stations around the country, and reaches about the same number of listeners as Howard does (10 million to 14 million I think).

So in effect, we can see that the market has acted to protect most of those who do not want to hear the kind of radio that Stern does. Stern’s show, which could be considered indecent is not very widely available, when you compare it to Limbaugh’s show which is available in virtually every single corner of the country, and yet a comparable number of people seem to want to tune in to both shows.

Further, when you take into account the fact that in a city like Miami (where Stern was taken off the air last week) there may be as many as a million people who want to hear his show, any argument that Stern needs to be censored on indecency grounds seems to fly right out the window.

Anyway, I think both sides are making some decent points in this argument, but I hadn’t heard one up until now that took the market and demographics into account until last night, and we all know how much faith I put in the market to solve a lot of society’s toughest questions, so I thought I’d point this one out as having had an impact on me.

In the end, I don’t know the answer, but there is no easy solution here. I can see why people want standards, but standards can be quite impractical. On the other hand, I can see why Stern is so irate at the prospect of being fined for something he said 3 years ago – and also never knowing if what he’s going to say qualifies as “indecent” (and not really being able to take such a thing to court to really decide). Dennis Miller again:

We should question it all; poke fun at it all; piss off on it all; rail against it all; and most importantly, for Christ’s sake, laugh at it all. Because the only thing separating holy writ from complete bullshit is your perspective. Its your only weapon. Keep the safety off. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

In the end, Stern makes a whole lot of people laugh and he doesn’t take himself all that serious. Personally, I don’t want to fine him for that, but if you do, you need to come up with a standard that makes sense and is clear and practical to implement. I get the feeling this wouldn’t be an issue if he was clearly right or clearly wrong…

The Eisenhower Ten

Best Entries, Politics, Security & Intelligence / /

The Eisenhower Ten by CONELRAD : An excellent article detailing a rather strange episode in U.S. History. During 1958 and 1959, President Eisenhower issued ten letters to mostly private citizens granting them unprecedented power in the event of a “national emergency” (i.e. nuclear war). Naturally, the Kennedy administration was less than thrilled with the existence of these letters, which, strangly enough, did not contain expiration dates.

So who made up this Shadow Government?

…of the nine, two of the positions were filled by Eisenhower cabinet secretaries and another slot was filled by the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. The remaining six were very accomplished captains of industry who, as time has proven, could keep a secret to the grave. It should be noted that the sheer impressiveness of the Emergency Administrator roster caused Eisenhower Staff Secretary Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster (USA, Ret.) to gush, some 46 years later, “that list is absolutely glittering in terms of its quality.” In his interview with CONELRAD, the retired general also emphasized how seriously the President took the issue of Continuity of Government: “It was deeply on his mind.”

Eisenhower apparently assembled the list himself, and if that is the case, the quality of the list was no doubt “glittering”. Eisenhower was a good judge of talent, and one of the astounding things about his command of allied forces during WWII was that he successfully assembled an integrated military command made up of both British and American officers, and they were actually effective on the battlefield. I don’t doubt that he would be able to assemble a group of Emergency Administrators that would fit the job, work well together, and provide the country with a reasonably effective continuity of government in the event of the unthinkable.

Upon learning of these letters, Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, asserted that the “outstanding authority” of the Emergency Administrators should be terminated… but what happened after that is somewhat of a mystery. Some correspondance exists suggesting that several of the Emergency Administrators were indeed relieved of their duties, but there are still questions as to whether or not Kennedy retained the services of 3 of the Eisenhower Ten and whether Kennedy established an emergency administration of his own.

It is Gen. Goodpaster’s assertion that because Eisenhower practically wrote the book on Continuity of Government, the practice of having Emergency Administrators waiting in the wings for the Big One was a tradition that continued throughout the Cold War and perhaps even to this day.

On March 1, 2002, the New York Times reported that Bush had indeed set up a “shadow government” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. This news was, of course, greeted with much consternation, and understandably so. Though there may be a historical precident (even if it is a controversial one) for such a thing, the details of such an open-ended policy are still a bit fuzzy to me…

CONELRAD has done an excellent job collecting, presenting, and analyzing information pertaining to the Eisenhower Ten, and I highly recommend anyone who is interested in the issue of continuity of government to check it out. Even with that, there are still lots of unanswered questions about the practice, but it is still fascinating reading….

Welcome to the Hotel Baghdad

2 Comments / Best Entries, Politics / /

Steve Mumford has made his way back to Iraq and posted the seventh installment of his brilliant Baghdad Journal. Once again, he puts the traditional media reporting to shame with his usual balanced and thoughtful views. Read the whole thing, as they say.

For those who are not familiar with Mumford, he is a New York artist who has travelled to Iraq a few times in the past year and published several “journal” entries detailing his exploits. I’ve been posting his stuff since I found it last fall. Here are all the installments to date:

They’re all excellent. I highly recommend you check them out. There’s usually some nice art as well. In the most recent installment, he meets up with several friends he made, and written about, on previous visits:

At Hewar, I meet Qassim, who says he’s waiting for some of “your countrymen.” He’s preparing one of his renowned grilled fish lunches. Soon the guests arrive: it’s the Quakers with Bruce Cockburn, who eye me warily. I don’t think Qassim realizes how much foreigners tend to avoid one another in their jealous rush to befriend Iraqis. Or maybe he does, and enjoys watching the snubs and one-upmanship. I take my leave, and relax in the teahouse, when the artists Ahmed al Safi and Haider Wadi show up. They seem like old friends now, and I’m happy to see them.

That evening Ahmed and the painter Esam Pasha come by the hotel for dinner. Esam gives me a great bear hug. It’s terrific to see him again.

Again, excellent reading. [Thanks must go again to Lexington Green from Chicago Boyz for introducing me to Mumford’s writings last fall]

Updates: Several updates have been made, adding links to new columns in the series.

Deterministic Chaos and the Simulated Universe

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After several months of absence, Chris Wenham has returned with a new essay entitled 2 + 2. In it, he explores a common idea:

Many have speculated that you could simulate a working universe inside a computer. Maybe it wouldn’t be exactly the same as ours, and maybe it wouldn’t even be as complex, either, but it would have matter and energy and time would elapse so things could happen to them. In fact, tiny little universes are simulated on computers all the time, for both scientific work and for playing games in. Each one obeys simplified laws of physics the programmers have spelled out for them, with some less simplified than others.

As always, the essay is well done and thought provoking, exploring the idea from several mathematical angles. But it makes the assumption that the universe is both deterministic and infinitely quantifiable. I am certainly no expert on chaos theory, but it seems to me that it bears an importance on this subject.

A system is said to be deterministic if its future states are strictly dependant on current conditions. Historically, it was thought that all processes occurring in the universe were deterministic, and that if we knew enough about the rules governing the behavior of the universe and had accurate measurements about its current state we could predict what would happen in the future. Naturally, this theory has proven very useful in modeling real world events such as flying objects or the wax and wane of the tides, but there have always been systems which were more difficult to predict. Weather, for instance, is notoriously tricky to predict. It was always thought that these difficulties stemmed from an incomplete knowledge of how the system works or inaccurate measurement techniques.

In his essay, Wenham discusses how a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz stumbled upon the essence of what is referred to as chaos (or nonlinear dynamics, as it is often called):

Lorenz’s simulation worked by processing some numbers to get a result, and then processing the result to get the next result, thus predicting the weather two moments of time into the future. Let’s call them result1, which was fed back into the simulation to get result2. result3 could then be figured out by plugging result2 into the simulation and running it again. The computer was storing resultn to six decimal places internally, but only printing them out to three. When it was time to calculate result3 the following day, he re-entered result2, but only to three decimal places, and it was this that led to the discovery of something profound.

Given just an eentsy teensty tiny little change in the input conditions, the result was wild and unpredictable.

This phenomenon is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” For the systems in which we could successfully make good predictions (such as the path of a flying object), only a reasonable approximation of the initial state is necessary to make a reasonably accurate prediction. Sensitive dependence of a reasonable approximation of the initial state, however, yields unreasonable predictions. In a system exhibiting sensitive dependence, reasonable approximations of the initial state do not provide reasonable approximations of the future state.

So here comes the important part: For a chaotic system such as weather, in order to make useful long term predictions, you need measurements of initial conditions with infinite accuracy. What this means is that even a deterministic system, which in theory can be modeled by mathematical equations, can generate behavior which seems random and unpredictable. This manifests itself in nature all the time. Weather is the typical example, but there is also evidence that the human brain is also governed by deterministic chaos. Indeed, our brain’s ability to generate seemingly unpredictable behavior is an important component of both survival and creativity.

So my question is, if it is not possible to quantify the initial conditions of a chaotic system with infinite accuracy, is that system really deterministic? In a sense, yes, even though it is impossible to calculate it:

Michaelangelo claimed the statue was already in the block of stone, and he just had to chip away the unnecessary parts. And in a literal sense, an infinite number of universes of all types and states should exist in thin air, indifferent to whether or not we discover the rules that exactly reveal their outcome. Our own universe could even be the numerical result of a mathematical equation that nobody has bothered to sit down and solve yet.

But we’d be here, waiting for them to discover us, and everything we’ll ever do.

The answer might be there, whether we can calculate it or not, but even if it is, can we really do anything useful with it? In the movie Pi, a mathematician stumbles upon an enigmatic 216 digit number which is supposedly the representation of the infinite, the true name of God, and thus holds the key to deterministic chaos. But it’s just a number, and no one really knows what to do with it, not even the mathematician who discovered it (though he could make accurate predictions on for the stock market, though he could not understand why and it came at a price). In the end, it drove him mad. I don’t pretend to have any answers here, but I think the makers of Pi got it right.

Pynchon : Stephenson :: Apples : Oranges

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The publication of Cryptonomicon lead to lots of comparisons with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in reviews. This was mostly based on the rather flimsy convergences of WWII and technology in the two novels. There were also some thematic similarities, but given the breadth of themes in Gravity’s Rainbow, that isn’t really a surprise. They did not resemble each other stylistically, nor did the narratives really resemble one another. There was, I suppose, a certain amount of playfulness present in both works, but in the end, anyone who read one and then the other would be struck by the contrast.

However, having recently read Stephenson’s Quicksilver, I can see more of a resemblance to Pynchon. With Quicksilver, Stephenson displays a great deal more playfulness with style and narrative. He’s become more willing to cut loose, explore language, fit the style to the situation he is describing and even slip out of “novel” format, whether it be the laundry list compilation style of Royal Society meeting notes (for example, pages 182 – 186), the epistolatory exploits of Eliza (pages 636 – 659 among many others), or theater script format (pages 716 – 729). Stephenson isn’t quite as spastic as Pynchon, but the similarities between their styles are more than skin deep. In addition to this playfulness in the narrative style, Stephenson, like Pynchon, associates certain styles with specific characters (most notably the epistolatory style that is used for Eliza). Again, Stephenson is much less radical than Pynchon, and only applies a fraction of the techniques that Pynchon employs in his novel, but Stephenson has progressed nicely in his recent works.

Most of the time, Stephenson is considerably more prosaic than Pynchon, and even when he does branch out stylistically, it is done in service of the story. The Eliza letters again provide a good example. The epistolatory style allows Stephenson to write for a different audience. We know this, and thus Stephenson has a good time messing with us, especially towards the end of the novel where he takes it a step further and shows Eliza’s encrypted letters and journal entries as translated by Bonaventure Rossignol (in the form of a letter to Louis XIV). All of this serves to further the plot. Pynchon, on the other hand, is more concerned with playfully exploring the narrative by experimenting with the English language. The plot takes a secondary role to the style, and to a certain extent the style drives the plot (well, that might be a bit of a stretch) and while Pynchon is one of the few who can pull it off, Stephenson’s style doesn’t really compare. They’re two different things, really.

Nate has a great post on this very subject, and he shows that a comparison of Quicksilver with Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon is more apt:

The style of Mason Dixon is a synthesis of old and new that hews remarkably close to the old. Stephenson, on the other hand, writes in a much more modern style, only occasionally dotting his prose with historical flourishes … The distinction here is an old one; classical rhetoricians spoke of Asiatic versus Attic style – the former is ornate, lush, and detailed, while the latter is lean, clean, and direct. Stephenson is a master of Attic style – a fact that’s often obscured because, while his sentences are direct and elegant, their substance is often convoluted and complex. You can see it more clearly in his nonfiction – look at his explanation of the Metaweb for an excellent example. Pynchon, as an Asiatic writer, will elicit more “oohs” and “ahhs” for the power and grace of his prose, but will tend to lose his readers when he’s trying to be florid and tackling difficult material at the same time. Obviously, both authors will tend toward the Attic or the Asiatic at different points, but in general, Stephenson wants his language to transparently convey his message, while Pynchon demands a certain amount of attention for the language itself.

I haven’t read Mason & Dixon (it’s in the queue), but from what I’ve heard this sounds pretty accurate. Again, he makes the point that Pynchon and Stephenson are on different playing fields, appropriating their styles to serve different purposes… and it shows. Stephenson is a lot more fun to read for someone like me because I prefer storytelling to experimental narrative fiction.

I recently read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and was shocked by the clarity of the straightforward and yet still vibrant prose. In that respect, I think Stephenson’s work might resemble Crying more than the novels discussed in this post…

Update: As I write this, Pynchon is making his appearance on the Simpsons. Coincidence?

To the Moon!

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President Bush has laid out his vision for space exploration. Reaction has mostly been lukewarm. Naturally, there are opponents and proponents, but in my mind it is a good start. That we’ve changed focus to include long term manned missions on the Moon and a mission to Mars is a bold enough move for now. What is difficult is that this is a program that will span several decades… and several administrations. There will be competition and distractions. To send someone to Mars on the schedule Bush has set requires a consistent will among the American electorate as well. However, given the technology currently available, it might prove to be a wise move.

A few months ago, in writing about the death of the Galileo probe, I examined the future of manned space flight and drew a historical analogy with the pyramids. I wrote:

Is manned space flight in danger of becoming extinct? Is it worth the insane amount of effort and resources we continually pour into the space program? These are not questions I’m really qualified to answer, but its interesting to ponder. On a personal level, its tempting to righteously proclaim that it is worth it; that doing things that are “difficult verging on insane” have inherent value, well beyond the simple science involved.

Such projects are not without their historical equivalents. There are all sorts of theories explaining why the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built, but none are as persuasive as the idea that they were built to unify Egypt’s people and cultures. At the time, almost everything was being done on a local scale. With the possible exception of various irrigation efforts that linked together several small towns, there existed no project that would encompass the whole of Egypt. Yes, an insane amount of resources were expended, but the product was truly awe-inspiring, and still is today.

Those who built the pyramids were not slaves, as is commonly thought. They were mostly farmers from the tribes along the River Nile. They depended on the yearly cycle of flooding of the Nile to enrich their fields, and during the months that that their fields were flooded, they were employed to build pyramids and temples. Why would a common farmer give his time and labor to pyramid construction? There were religious reasons, of course, and patriotic reasons as well… but there was something more. Building the pyramids created a certain sense of pride and community that had not existed before. Markings on pyramid casing stones describe those who built the pyramids. Tally marks and names of “gangs” (groups of workers) indicate a sense of pride in their workmanship and respect between workers. The camaraderie that resulted from working together on such a monumental project united tribes that once fought each other. Furthermore, the building of such an immense structure implied an intense concentration of people in a single area. This drove a need for large-scale food-storage among other social constructs. The Egyptian society that emerged from the Pyramid Age was much different from the one that preceded it (some claim that this was the emergence of the state as we now know it.)

“What mattered was not the pyramid – it was the construction of the pyramid.” If the pyramid was a machine for social progress, so too can the Space program be a catalyst for our own society.

Much like the pyramids, space travel is a testament to what the human race is capable of. Sure it allows us to do research we couldn’t normally do, and we can launch satellites and space-based telescopes from the shuttle (much like pyramid workers were motivated by religion and a sense of duty to their Pharaoh), but the space program also serves to do much more. Look at the Columbia crew – men, women, white, black, Indian, Israeli – working together in a courageous endeavor, doing research for the benefit of mankind, traveling somewhere where few humans have been. It brings people together in a way few endeavors can, and it inspires the young and old alike. Human beings have always dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Where would we be without the courageous exploration of the past five hundred years? We should continue to celebrate this most noble of human spirits, should we not?

We should, and I’m glad we’re orienting ourselves in this direction. Bush’s plan appeals to me because of it’s pragmatism. It doesn’t seek to simply fly to Mars, it seeks to leverage the Moon first. We’ve already been to the Moon, but it still holds much value as a destination in itself as well as a testing ground and possibly even a base from which to launch or at least support our Mars mission. Some, however, see the financial side of things a little too pragmatic:

In its financial aspects, the Bush plan also is pragmatic — indeed, too much so. The president’s proposal would increase NASA’s budget very modestly in the near term, pushing more expensive tasks into the future. This approach may avoid an immediate political backlash. But it also limits the prospects for near-term technological progress. Moreover, it gives little assurance that the moon-Mars program will survive the longer haul, amid changing administrations, economic fluctuations, and competition from voracious entitlement programs.

There’s that problem of keeping everyone interested and happy in the long run again, but I’m not so sure we should be too worried… yet. Wretchard draws an important distinction, we’ve laid out a plan to voyage to Mars – not a plan to develop the technology to do so. Efforts will be proceeding on the basis of current technology, but as Wretchard also notes in a different post, current technology may be unsuitable for the task:

Current launch costs are on the order of $8,000/lb, a number that will have to be reduced by a factor of ten for the habitation of the moon, the establishment of La Grange transfer stations or flights to Mars to be feasible. This will require technology, and perhaps even basic physics that does not even exist. Simply building bigger versions of the Saturn V will not work. That would be “like trying to upgrade Columbus?s Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria with wings to speed up the Atlantic crossing time. A jet airliner is not a better sailing ship. It is a different thing entirely.” The dream of settling Mars must await an unforseen development.

Naturally, the unforseen development is notoriously tricky, and while we must pursue alternate forms of propulsion, it would be unwise to hold off on the voyage until this development occurs. We must strike a delicate balance between the concentration on the goal and the means to achieve that goal. As Wretchard notes, this is largely dependant on timing. What is also important here is that we are able to recognize this development when it happens and that we leave our program agile enough to react effectively to this development.

Recognizing this development will prove interesting. At what point does a technology become mature enough to use for something this important? This may be relatively straightforward, but it is possible that we could jump the gun and proceed too early (or, conversely, wait too long). Once recognized, we need to be agile, by which I mean that we must develop the capacity to seamlessly adapt the current program to exploit this new development. This will prove challenging, and will no doubt require a massive increase in funding, as it will also require a certain amount of institutional agility – moving people and resources to where we need them, when we need them. Once we recognize our opportunity, we must pounce without hesitation.

It is a bold and challenging, yet judiciously pragmatic, vision that Bush has laid out, but this is only the first step. The truly important challenges are still a few years off. What is important is that we recognize and exploit any technological advances on our way to Mars, and we can only do so if we are agile enough to effectively react. Exploration of the frontiers is a part of my country’s identity, and it is nice to see us proceeding along these lines again. Like the Egyptians so long ago, this mammoth project may indeed inspire a unity amongst our people. In these troubled times, that would be a welcome development. Though Europe, Japan, and China have also shown interest in such an endeavor, I, along with James Lileks, like the idea of an American being the first man on Mars:

When I think of an American astronaut on Mars, I can’t imagine a face for the event. I can tell you who staffed the Apollo program, because they were drawn from a specific stratum of American life. But things have changed. Who knows who we’d send to Mars? Black pilot? White astrophysicist? A navigator whose parents came over from India in 1972? Asian female doctor? If we all saw a bulky person bounce out of the landing craft and plant the flag, we’d see that wide blank mirrored visor. Sex or creed or skin hue – we’d have no idea.

This is the quintessence of America: whatever face you’d see when the visor was raised, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

Indeed.

Update 1.21.04: More here.

Each will have his personal Rocket

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I finally finished my review of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Since I blogged about the novel often, I figured I’d let everyone know it’s out there. Oddly, when writing the review, I wrote the last paragraph first:

If I were to meet Thomas Pynchon tomorrow, I wouldn’t know whether to shake his hand or sucker-punch him. Probably both. I’d extend my right arm, take his hand in mine, give one good pump, then yank him towards my swinging left fist. As he lay crumpled on the ground beneath me, gasping in pain, I’d point a bony finger right between his eyes and say “That was for Gravity’s Rainbow.” I think he’d understand.

Heh. I also wrote up a rather lengthy selection of quotes from the novel, with some added commentary. And in case you missed the previous bloggery about Gravity’s Rainbow, here they are, in all their glory:

Update: Only marginally on-topic, but Pynchon is due to be on the Simpsons this season. Typical hermit-like behavior. Thanks to Nate for the link. Also, I recently completed Quicksilver and wanted to comment on the differences/similarities between Pynchon and Stephenson, but it turns out that Nate has already done so on his blog a while back. He does a great job, but I still think I’ll be posting something on that subject relatively soon…