maebmij’s blog

Michio Kaku talks to Bobby Kennedy Jr on his show Explorations - you can listen to it here (may 17th).
Here’s a quote that helped me reconcile my intuitive belief in capitalism with my horror at the actions of governments:

Americans have to understand that there’s a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which is a good thing for our country… and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

I decided to ask Google for “the best thing about x is”, where x is the name of a country. Here are the responses from the first search result for a selection of countries:

• India: “the millions of Christians”
• Australia: “the people!”
• England: “IRON MAIDEN”
• Germany: “Kinder Eier”
• America: “we’re free to tap our potential for greatness when the occasion calls for it”
• France: “the food and vine !”
• Italy: “the ICE CREAM, the CAFES and the Pastries”
• Iraq: “it forced people to choose sides”
• North Korea: “it’s the only state in the world ruled by a dead man (eternal leader, Kim il-sung, died 1994)”
• Indonesia: “the prices”
• Russia: “you can easy hide a corspe of a 14 year old boy with his phone”
• Switzerland: “how cool the cows are”
• Norway: “snow”
• Iceland: “definitely not IcelandAir”
• Sweden: “…I was sitting on the subway today and Deep Purple was on the cover of Metro magazine”
• Denmark: “Spunk”

There’s a myth that eggs can be induced to stand on-end during an equinox. Phil Plait claims that in fact, eggs will stand on end any day of the year. So I had to test this. And then I had to photograph it and show people:

I’ve written a little document to house a couple of animated gifs I made. They demonstrate the way I perceive relative size of objects, and I was using them to think about the moon illusion.

Since I finished my university degree, I’ve been deliberating on what I should do next. I’m in the very fortunate position to be able to take some time over it, and have some flexibility in terms of what kind of thing I want to do (corporate work, private projects, further study, etc), at least in the short term.

So, in true dreamer fashion, I’m going to try something: A list of the things that I want to see happen during my lifetime, so that I can work out what I need to do to get us there, or at least how I can help.

Space stuff

I’m willing to admit that my opinion here is greatly influenced by Iain M Banks, but increasingly I feel that the majority of problems we have are as a result of resource scarcity. And perhaps the biggest resource issue we have right now is physical space - lebensraum. Land is expensive and requires people to work pretty hard to be able to afford it; and a bunch of wars are fought over it. It does not seem to be in our nature to share a finite resource peacefully. I believe it is necessary to work on figuring out how to live sustainably outside of our planet.
There’s a naive streak in Gaia theory that seems to suggest that humans are incapable of living outside the Earth-based ecosystem, and that to suggest otherwise is a dangerous thought that will lead to no care being taken of the current biosphere. While I appreciate the concern, I reject the idea that humans are inherently tied to the planet Earth forever; nevertheless, it’s the only environment we can live in at the moment.

Artificial Intelligence

I approach this subject with trepidation - I have explored the general topic just enough to feel I have an inkling of how very hard the problem is. But the tantalising prospect is that we could create intelligence capable of thinking far more deeply, or at least more quickly, than we can, which has obvious applications to all other research areas.
I suppose I have two goals here: AI could advance science and understanding immeasurably, but it could also, potentially, provide a permanence, a level-headedness, that our society does not have. I’m worried about the permanence of knowledge and advancement when we have such a short lifespan. Keeping knowledge ‘living’ is a task we only just manage - it can take up to 30 years for our education system to make an expert in just one narrow field. And surely sometimes knowledge simply falls out of any living body and resides only in texts. Artificial intelligence might one day have the capacity to absorb all our discoveries and make sure we don’t lose it as fast as we gain it. I fear that there is a limit to the potential progress of even a large number of human brains.

Ubiquitous high-bandwidth communication

A shorter-term goal, perhaps, in that I expect to see it within my lifetime; but it still seems to be arriving agonizingly slowly. By communication, I mean any kind of data transfer - so for the average high-tech home, this currently means radio, TV, internet, and telephone, along with other ‘offline’ transfer formats like DVDs, books, anything on the sneakernet.

As far as communication goes, I’d like to see it disentangled from physical proximity. It shouldn’t be any more expensive or difficult to talk to friends in the UK than to those in the same room. It should not be harder to read an obscure book if you don’t live near a good library. People argue that these kinds of technologies allow a breakdown of communities - “people don’t talk to their neighbours any more!” - but I think what they’re really doing is breaking down insular and parochial groups. I saw an online community mourning the death of one of its members, an Israeli solder killed by a Palestinian guerilla. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to convince the citizens of one country to attack another if many are friends with citizens of the other country.

And that concludes this post, hopefully to be continued.

Spiked Science surveyed a truly impressive number of scientists to ask what single thing they would most like to teach to the world.

Richard Dawkins chose to address Intelligent Design directly:

Not only can natural selection mimic design; it is the only known natural process that can mimic design. And now, here is the most difficult thing that I wish people understood. True design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything, because the designer himself is left unexplained. Designers are statistically improbable things, and trying to explain them as made by prior designers is ultimately futile, because it leads to an infinite regress.

Natural selection escapes the infinite regress, because it starts simple, and works up gradually - step by step - to statistical improbability, and the illusion of design.