Truth Tables

Summary: There's a short program that can run all possible programs, OMG

Alternative Summary: Just about any universe that can exist must contain ours, OMG.


I was thinking about diagonalization arguments. Does this make any sense? Can anyone debug it for me?

Self Evident Truths

The universe is computable.

All computations can be performed by Turing Machines.

The mind is made out of atoms.

The name of the empty string is epsilon.

Truths

Binary Strings are enumerable : epsilon, 0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, ....

There's a way of converting binary strings to Turing machines and back again. It gets all Turing machines.

Consequence

Consider tables TT(n), which are numbered by binary strings along the top and side, representing turing machines and inputs respectively.

Construct a series of finite triangular tables which are defined iteratively as follows:

TT(1)

To construct the first table, we need one element, the top left, which corresponds to the turing machine epsilon working on the input string epsilon.

Convert the string epsilon to its corresponding turing machine, which has no states and no transition rules, and which therefore halts immediately without accepting.

The value of TT(1)(epsilon,epsilon) is therefore F0 (Fail after no steps).

    eps
eps F0 

That's it for TT(1).

TT(2)

TT(2) will have three cells, the topleftmost three

To construct the second table, consider again the element at the top left. Since it represents a halted state, copy it verbatim from the last table.

Then consider the element corresponding to (epsilon,0) , or  row epsilon, column 0, or (TM(epsilon), "0")

Again TM(epsilon) is either a machine with no states, or an invalid specification, and so it halts immediately on the input 0.

For the third step in constructing the second triangle, consider (TM("0"), epsilon).

TM("0") is another dud. It halts immediately without accepting.

So TT(2) is the table

     eps 0

eps  F0  F0

0    F0

Towards Infinity...

It should be reasonably clear how to continue the construction of these tables

For instance TT(3) looks like

     eps 0  1

eps  F0  F0 F0

0    F0  F0

1    F0 

Eventually we will reach a row whose string represents a TM which does something other than halt immediately without accepting.

As an example of what to do then, consider the string 1001111, which is the 207th string.

In the usual encoding, this string will represent the TM with start state 0, and transition function delta(0,B)=(0,0,L).

The first time we consider the 207th row will be when we calculate TT(207), the 207th triangular table.

The first cell we consider in that row will be ("1001111", epsilon). Since 1001111 represents a valid machine, we construct the Instantaneous ID (epsilon,0,epsilon), which represents a machine in state 0 with a blank tape.

That's the value of TT(207)("1001111",epsilon).

When we construct TT(208), we take that ID from TT(207), and execute one step.

In this case, the machine head moves one step left, writing a zero, and so the instantaneous ID becomes (epsilon,0,0) (State zero, tape reads ...0...., head just to the left of the zero)

And so on. The values of TT(n)("1001111",epsilon) are undefined for n<206, since the tables are not that large, but for n=207 onwards, they are:
(epsilon,0,epsilon), (epsilon,0,0), (epsilon,0,00), (epsilon,0,000), and so on, with the tape head moving ever leftward, leaving a run of zeros behind it.

Other strings may represent TMs that do things that are even more interesting.

But Not Beyond, (Or Even As Far As)

As we construct the successive tables, they become larger and larger.  Some cells will stabilize after a finite number of steps, either accepting or
rejecting their input strings, at which point their contents become
either F??? or A??? where ??? is the number of steps taken.

Some cells will loop. By comparing the instantaneous state of the table with the state of the cells in all previous tables, loops can be detected. We can mark them as loops, continue computing as before, or re-use the values in the previous tables to avoid performing the computations again.

And some cells, like the ones at ("1001111", epsilon)  will keep producing new instantaneous IDs, without looping.

But every TT(n) is a finitely computable object. Indeed the program to compute them all is very short and will run on any computer worthy of the name.

I Find This A Bit Worrying, Because:

As we continue to construct the successive tables, we will perform every conceivable computation.

We will simulate in precise detail every possible world, universe and multiverse. Even though our computer is not quantum, we will simulate all quantum computations.

In particular, if you believe that you are a computation, or that simulation of your brain is equivalent to your existence, then you will be present in the computation, with exactly as much free will, and with your behaviour as precisely determined, as it ever was or will be.

Some of you will live in universes in which artificial intelligences rise and successfully paperclip everything.

Some of you will live in universes where friendly AIs are built, if that is possible.

It will not be possible for these copies to tell which copy they are, and so they will not be able to tell what is about to happen, or what has happened. Any more than you can.

There will be hells and paradises.

In some universes, copies of you will set programs running to calculate the successive triangular tables TT(n), and they will keep adding memory to their computers as needed (only actually one extra storage location per step of computation, at worst).

And so the sequence of finite truth tables will contain itself, as well as everything else. Everything that has ever happened will happen again. You will be reborn and live and possibly die. You will not know whether you are in the 'base universe', or in the computation. If that even means anything. And every computation that occurs as part of this great computation is utterly "Beyond the Reach of God".

Exercises

1/ It will take me about a day, a packet of cigars and a machine full of coffee to write this program and start it running. That is what I am doing now. When I start it running, will I have done a bad thing? If someone were to stop me before the program started running, would that make any difference to anything important?

2/ Can anything except what is computed by this program be said to exist in any sense? Continua, and sets of all sets, and so on, are very problematic. And if the human mind is itself a computation , contained in a universe which itself is a computation, how can we think of or interact with any non-computable thing?

3/ Does the ultimate Truth Table, which the finite tables TT(n) approach as the process continues, exist? What does that question mean? The values of many of its cells are determined. Many of them are not computable. The ratio is unclear.

4/ We can perform the initial stages of this computation with a finite computer with finite memory. At no point does the amount of memory required become infinite. If the computational power of the universe is infinite, then it can contain not only itself but every other thing. If the computation power of the universe is finite, where does that number come from?

5/ The program is very short. Any randomly chosen computation has a good chance of being it. It would probably be very hard to construct an interesting universe which did not contain every possible universe and person.

6/ Does it make any sense to talk about 'not being part of this computation'?

Blue Jasmine (Film)

Unbelievably good. Rivetingly edge of seat heart-tearingly good. A masterpiece. I only went to see this on the off-chance. Someone told me that it was a remake of A Streetcar Named Desire. It's not. This portrait of a soul utterly damned is a modern Faust. Cate Blanchett is awesome and if she doesn't get an Oscar for a performance that must have torn her apart then there is no justice.

Gravity (3D) (Film)

A beautiful and thrilling special-effects spacefest. I have certain concerns related to angular momentum. Five stars anyway.

Two Modern Operas

The Nose (Shostakovich, Metropolitan Opera Live Broadcast, don't bother it's awful)

Over the last few years, I've started to notice that the operas which I'm least looking forward to turn out to be the memorable jewels which stay with me for months, whereas the famous works that everybody knows and loves have started to seem a bit flat and possibly even a bit clichéd.

I've also noticed that whereas, when driving, I used to do a sort of awkward Markovian radio-dance (Five Minute Advertisement for Henry Kelly's Hundred Greatest Classical Hits Selection -> back to Radio 3, Three Hours of Mongolian Nose Music -> back to Classic FM), nowadays I tend to think that Classic FM is like a continous diet of icing and that I quite look forward to the bleeding meat that is two consecutive performances of a deservedly little-known baroque opera by the same people but in a slightly different tuning. I wouldn't quite say 'enjoy', but perhaps 'find interesting' might work.

I take this an an ominous sign that my tastes are becoming jaded, and that I am starting to tire of what the bourgeois calls 'good' music, and must seek out the 'edgy', the 'dangerous', the atonal, the 'interesting', the 'piss-poor'. This is the sort of mental decay that causes people to resort to listening to modern jazz or the music of the Second Viennese School.

So imagine my surprise when Shostakovich's 'The Nose', which on the face of it appeared to be an absurd modernist ordeal about a singing nose, turned out to be every bit as dreadful as I'd thought it would be.

It's difficult to describe how unwatchably bad it is. There's literally no plot beyond 'A man's nose sets up on its own, to his distress.' Everything else that happens is apparently just completely random, and presumably you can read into it all sorts of things about Stalin and despair, and the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century and the horror of a writer whose work has become public property and taken on a life of its own, but for fuck's sake why would you do that?

I couldn't care less about any of that and if I did I could go and read about it directly. It's not Zen. It's not some unknowable mystic crap that you can't perceive directly but can just vaguely sense if you hear the right hints in a carefully cultivated frame of mind. You don't have to approach it obliquely, trying to sneak up on it like a man sneaking through a forest stepping on hundreds of miserably mistuned twigs and being screeched at by vultures made out of old newspaper.

It's fairly normal in modern operas not to have an interval, because the audience tend treacherously to take advantage and escape, and this can dishearten the performers, who have worked terribly hard to learn the incomprehensible sequence of random notes.

Many people left anyway. I stuck it out, mainly because by the time I realised that I just couldn't take another half an hour of it, and asked my exhausted and suffering companion if she knew how long it was, it was only fifteen minutes from the end and even though by this time I could see a clear path of empty seats to the exit as long as I didn't mind climbing over things, I figured I should dig in for the bitter end and get my money's worth.

It's a fabulous argument against public subsidy, or it would be if the Metropolitan Opera was subsidised. As it is, what are they thinking? Are they just so absurdly overbooked that they can put on anything at all and sell out anyway?

It is at least mercifully short at two and a quarter barren, hopeless, interval-free hours.

But the music is appalling, and Shostakovich knows this perfectly well, because there's a point where the noseless bureaucrat's drunken flatmate takes out a balalaika and plays a foot-tappingly good folk song.

By contrast with the murderous squeaky-gate plinking that has been going on for the last 93 horrid minutes it's an aural paradise, an oasis of relaxation, like when a torturer decides that it's time for a tea-break.

Halfway through the folk song the no-nose bureaucrat comes home and stops it, shouting "What are you doing messing about with this rubbish?". Which is admittedly hilarious and gets a terrific laugh from everyone still present.

The staging and general production values in this performance are wonderful. I can't imagine how it could have been done better. I spent quite a lot of time wondering what the hell it would be like to sit through a bad production.

I would like to compliment the singing, but apart from one lovely soprano snatch, which again I'm sure is in there as a sort of anti-audience taunt, there isn't any. But there are some quite funny angry shouts from time to time. Particularly the three people on the balcony who shout "The most bewildering thing of all is why an author would waste his time on this material".

I was bewildered to notice that it got a quiet, unenthusiastic, but nevertheless standing ovation, and I can't quite imagine the confusion of mind that could produce such a thing. Presumably you had to be there. The audience watching in the cinema just groaned in pain and rolled their eyes at one another. I heard someone say "Wild horses wouldn't get me to another one of these" to his wife.

Throughout the ordeal, I was sustained only by the thought "It can't possibly be as bad as Wozzeck. Treat it as a warm up."

Wozzeck (Alban Berg, Royal Opera House)

Wozzeck is a sort of Everest of Awfulness.

Alban Berg was the most talentless, over-rated, screeching horror of the lamentable Second Viennese School of just limitlessly terrible composers. He wrote something about Napoleon that a dear friend once lent me,  that I had to listen to all the way through because he had kept looking at me with such hope.

"You're clever, John, you like all sorts of things and you love patterns and structure and are interested in the properties of sound and you've liked opera since you were a little boy and you even sat through an entire ballet once you are that hard...

"Surely you can see the inner beauty in this work that no-one else can begin to understand.", said JB silently with his sad little eyes as he lent me his treasured CD and hoped sincerely that I'd enjoy it.

And I couldn't face giving it back and saying that I'd managed ten minutes and then given up because it was too painful.

So I listened to the whole bloody thing. You remember that Monty Python sketch where someone is making music by smashing live mice with a mallet and they are making a jolly tune with their death-squeaks? Well that is only funny because it is short, and not actually happening.

Alban Berg's accursèd  (<-look, I hate it so much that I found the out where the è key is!!:-))

Alban Berg's accursèd Napoleon is without a shadow of a doubt the worst piece of music I have ever heard. I include the Birdie Song. I include sugary professional 1950's versions of 'Enniskillen Dragoons' cynically designed to appeal to blue-collar plastic paddies in the United States and performed half-heartedly by people who had grown up wanting to be famous singers and clearly loathed everything about what they were doing and everything about their lives. I include a certain video of 'Rose Garden' that is available on YouTube and that Sipper played me when I laughed at him for admitting that he liked it (in strict confidence) when he was drunk.

Napoleon is like someone doing the mice-smashing-mallet-death thing with real mammals. Real living mammals whose hopeless cries for pity tear incessantly at the heart like badly-oiled bandsaws with grit in them.

Just in case there was any danger of anyone being moved by the purity of its despair, the cover picture shows that it is being performed by an unbelievably oily-looking fat man wearing really bad schoolgirl make-up and swallowtails and smiling like Margaret Thatcher.

But the worst thing about Berg's Napoleon is that it doesn't even exist. It's a false memory. Apparently Schoenberg wrote something called Ode to Napoleon but I'm pretty sure that wasn't what John lent me. What sort of sewer of a mind do I live in that can imagine an experience like that? I suddenly empathise with the man who wrote to the Times complaining about the increasing amount of sex and violence in dreams.

I realise that it's probably unfair to blame Berg for it.

But those who have spent their lives studying the music of the Second Viennese School tell me that of all Berg's music, there is nothing remotely as bad as his opera, Wozzeck.

Apparently it's entirely without discernible structure, almost impossible to play or listen to, and about a deserter and a prostitute, who live in hopeless misery and then die. They say it's only possible to appreciate it by reading the score, and that actually turning it into sounds spoils it.

So imagine my joy when my dear friend Bob told me that she had a freebie ticket for the dress rehearsal of a new production of Wozzeck that she is playing in, but had given it to someone else on the basis that I was too much of a philistine to come.

'Oh', I said, one part of my brain not quite believing that the other part of my brain was actually saying this, 'that's a shame.

'I've been getting a bit worried about being unadventurous recently, and I'm trying to do as many new things as possible. I would probably have quite enjoyed that.' The sane hemisphere, unable to take control of my mouth, had gone into spasm.

Bob rang back, of course, a couple of days later, after the original recipient of the golden ticket had been found hanged in his garage.

I'd been a little worried about the logistics of getting to London in time. Early mornings are not really 'my time', and getting to Covent Garden for 11 o'clock would involve facing rush hour commuter trains, which are not really 'my thing'. But Bob very kindly looked up all the train and tube transit times for me and sent me a detailed text message telling me that if I could manage to make it to Cambridge station for the 09:20 train then I could get a return ticket with tube for £23 and make it to pick up my ticket at the box office in plenty of time. So there was no escape.

I figured if I got up at eight then I'd make the train easily enough even allowing for a certain amount of uselessness on my part, and so I diligently left my office at ten o'clock on Sunday, intending to get an early night.

I phoned Bob to check that the plan was all in order, and she mentioned in passing that she was going to London that night and staying over, having fallen victim to Storm Fever. She seemed slightly surprised that I hadn't heard anything about this storm.

I stopped off for a kebab on the way and was slightly amazed that by the time I got home it was eleven thirty. But it was a hella kebab (thanks Gardenia!, we've missed you, welcome back, your new look is lovely), so maybe it had taken slightly longer to eat it than I'd budgeted for.

Still, that's still 8½ hours sleep, which ought to be enough even if it's sub-optimal.

When my alarm went off my first thought was 'Oh God, not already?', but after about fifteen minutes of staring hopelessly at the ceiling wishing I was dead I manned up and got dressed and headed off on my bicycle to the station through the curiously deserted and darkened streets of Cambridge. My sources inform me that everyone else in the entire world gets up at about 8, and I was expecting things to be pretty busy at 8:30, but no.

Even the station was curiously quiet, in fact there was only me and a couple of other bewildered looking elders, and a polite guard who told me that there was absolutely no possibility of getting to London by 11 o'clock, never in a million years, there have been 102mph winds on the Isle of Wight and everything south of a line between Birmingham and Bishop's Stortford has been effectively destroyed and the absolute best we can offer you is that there might be a train at 9:30 but it will be going very very slowly because of the danger of fallen trees and pit vipers and everyone on the world will be on it so you'll either have to climb on over the bodies or lie on the floor and be crushed under a pile of sweaty fat men and palely attractive women in suits who smell of early morning cigarettes and twitch because their souls have been sucked out by management consultancy.

And even if you do that there is no way you are getting to Covent Garden for 11, mate. I would give your friend's opera (in Cambridge they are trained to say that sort of thing without even sneering even slightly) a miss. We are advising people to make only absolutely essential journeys and if I were you I would go home and sit in front of the fire and not get killed, if you take my meaning.

Well I am the sort of man who can take a hint, I like to think, so I fucked off home and on the way I bought a newspaper and some croissants so I could enjoy reading about the Great Storm over breakfast. As I got towards home I noticed that the common was covered in willow branches, which I hadn't noticed on the way out, and a couple of friends were walking up and down the bank with mallets and mooring pins, rescuing distressed narrowboats, which seemed pretty Christian of them, so I made them tea and apparently the storm had been through while I'd been at the station, and smashed everything in its path except immediately around my boat, which seemed curiously undisturbed.

Breakfast seemed to go on for a extraordinarily long time, and then after that grim Woman's Hour came on, and so I went back to bed.

And I'd been in bed for about 15 seconds when Bob rang up to say that they'd put the opera back to 12 o'clock because Nick Clegg had been hit by a falling storm-gherkin, and I could still make it.

And I said, but it's ten past eleven, there's no way I can get to Covent Garden from here in fifty minutes, even if the trains weren't sneaking carefully from station to station for fear of fallen trees. And she said "you haven't put your clocks back yet, have you?", which was a bit embarrassing but did make better sense of all sorts of little discrepancies that I had been noticing for the last day or so.

So off again to the station and it was all a bit groundhog day only this time the light was much brighter and people were up and about but there was still no-one at the station, and the very same guard, who had visibly grown a beard since I last saw him, patiently explained that there was no possibility of getting to London until at least three o'clock, what with the roof having blown off St. Pancras and the Potter's Bar tunnel being full of water and the electricity being down all over the South of England and all the wheels having blown off all the trains.

Lucky escape, I was thinking, and I'm sure that all that cycling around has been good for me and there's a certain sort of early rising-bastard who'll tell you that accidentally getting up at 7am is character building but obviously they only say that because they can't bloody sleep because their souls are so laden with sin and horror and there is no rest for the wicked ones. Dear God what is this evil that they must have done?

But here's the thing. I had been really looking forward to Wozzeck, I now realise. I was confidently expecting it to be one of the worst experiences of my life and I was anticipating just how bad it would be with exactly the sort of enthusiasm that I used to muster for a bad Channel crossing in a tiny yacht, or a game of rugby in the sleet against Newmarket III. And so now it is a sort of Everest of Awfulness which I keep glimpsing distantly through the clouds but some sort of mystic force is preventing me from getting to it and I am taking it personally.

And so now I'm going to have to go and buy a ticket. And spend serious money supporting something I am confident that I will utterly despise and loathe and sincerely wish would be banished forever from the memory of man. And Covent Garden are going to interpret my ticket purchase as meaning that there is a market for this sort of thing, and that maybe the common philistine-in-the-street is finally coming round to modernism at last and we should put some more of these on......

Gis Job (£500 reward)

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I want.

CV at http://www.aspden.com

I make my usual promise, which I have paid out on several times:

If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts whom I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.



And I also make the following boast:

I know all styles of programming and many languages, and can use any computer language you're likely to use in the style which it was intended to be used in.

I have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of all kinds. I can become very interested in almost any problem which is hard enough that I can't solve it easily.

I have a deserved reputation for being able to produce heavily optimised, but nevertheless bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack together sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is appropriate when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.

I've worked in telecoms, commercial research, banking, university research, chip design companies, server virtualization, a couple of startups, and occasionally completely alone.

I've worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit microcontrollers and gigantic servers, and once upon a time every IBM machine in the Maths Department in Imperial College was running my partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.

I'm smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.

I know what it means to understand a thing, and I know when I know something. If I understand a thing then I can usually find a way to communicate it to other people. If other people understand a thing even vaguely I can usually extract the idea from them and work out which bits make sense.

Baby Steps

This is little Cameron Dawson, Gareth and Lisa's son:

He is just learning to walk, and has taken to using me as a sort of intelligent zimmer frame. His joy in this is extraordinary.

Today Gareth and I showed him all around the Maypole!

Petrov Day

On September 26, 1983, when I was thirteen years old, I nearly died. So did you.

1983 was a terrifying time.

A child with an active imagination, I would often look through the big picture window, across the beautiful Loxley valley to the great city of Sheffield nestling in the hills beyond.

Sheffield is a huge city, and for centuries it was the city where steel was made. It had been heavily bombed during the second war.

I used to imagine the air burst of the bomb that would kill the great city.

First there would be a siren. A screaming from the sky. People would look up.

And then the flash. A flash so bright it would blind everyone looking at it forever.

I would be standing in the big room of my parents' house in the village I loved, but I would be blind and screaming in pain.

The bomb would explode above the ground. They do more harm that way. A piece of the sun brought to earth.

The terrible light would flash over the city, melting anything near, setting fire to everything it touched.

I would be standing in the big room of my parents' house in the village, looking at the city I went to school in, where all my friends lived. But I wouldn't be able to see anything. My skin would be burned. My clothes would catch fire. The carpet and the sofas would burst into flames. I'd be blind and screaming in an inferno.

And then the blast would come. And the window would shatter under the hammer of the wind.

Flying glass fragments would lacerate our home. If I was lucky one might kill me.

But probably not. I'd imagine I'd get a few in the eyes though. I imagine losing even blind eyes hurts.

I might make it out of the fire. You never know.

But I'd already be dead. I'm burned and cut and blind and no one is coming to help.

My father might have lived. He was always in the garden, on the wrong side of the house.

We were miles away from where the bomb would burst. The big stone house might have shielded him. He might even have kept his eyes.

But not for long.

The last horror is the ash of the great city itself. Falling everywhere as radioactive poison.

An agonising, humiliating death that takes days. The fate of anyone unlucky enough to survive a nuclear attack.

That was what we worried about in the last days of the Cold War.

On September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov chose not to destroy the world.

Today is Petrov Day.

Honour him.

Why does Evolution look like Intelligent Design?

When an engineer designs something, he tends to think in a hierarchy of parts.

For instance, a car is thought of as an engine, transmission, wheels, chassis and bodywork.

The engine is a self-contained part. I live on a narrowboat, and its engine is actually a diesel engine designed for a van.

So independent is the engine from the rest of the van that it can be used as a component in a different vehicle entirely.

The engine itself has distinct independent transferable components. Identical pistons can be used in several different types of engines, and the same is true for many other parts.

The engine parts themselves have components, like screws and washers, that are interchangeable with screws and washers in many other types of machinery.

This hierarchical principle is even more pronounced in the design of computer programs.

The history of programming, and computer systems in general, is the history of abstraction and combination.

Abstraction is the breaking of complex ideas and difficult techniques into simple reusable components which are understandable on their own.

Combination is used to make ever more complex and useful structures out of the simple pieces.


It is thought that this 'hierarchical design' is psychological. It makes things easier to understand if they can be understood piece by piece.

But the same hierarchies are evident in animals and plants.

I have a heart, which is interchangeable with other human and animal hearts.

There have been experiments where the hearts of pigs have been exchanged with the hearts of humans.

Arms, legs, eyes, lungs, fingers, fingernails, bones, skin have distinct functions, are transferable and independently understandable as pieces.



But evolution has no mind.

So this apparent hierarchy cannot be psychological.

What is its cause?

It is possible that the hierarchical design in nature is illusionary, and that we are, with our hierarchical minds, perceiving a structure that is not there.

I do not believe this.

I suspect there is a mathematical answer, that causes mindless evolutionary processes to produce hierarchical designs.

And I further suspect that that answer might explain why our minds like to make hierarchies.

But I do not know what the answer is, or even how properly to ask the question, and I do not know whether anyone has asked or tried to answer the question before.

Coursera : Universities are Dead

The last time I was this enthusiastic about a new thing it was Amazon, in the days when no-one had heard of Amazon but it had just allowed me to buy in seconds a rare book that I'd been looking for for years. (for comparison, I was mildly enthusiastic about google, and I loathed, and still loathe, facebook)

The new thing is coursera:     http://www.coursera.org

I loved being an undergraduate. Partly because I loved being young and brave and free and surrounded by clever girls and subsidised beer, but at least a little because every day some wise elder would reveal one of the secrets of the universe to me.

I haven't felt that rush of learning lots of new important stuff for such a long time. I hadn't realized quite how much I missed it.

The difference now is that I'm capable of dealing with it all. I know how to learn things much better than I used to, back in the days when I thought that talent was inborn and practising was cheating.

Coursera is offering, entirely for free, elite-university courses on line.

Not just the lectures, which would be no more use than textbooks are, but the exams, tests, course structure and collaborative environment which make it possible to learn.

You need to be very motivated indeed to study something alone from a textbook, no matter how good. Twice in my life I've managed it, once with the incredible Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and once with David Mackay's Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms.

Over the last few months I've done two world-class university courses. Daphne Koller's famous Probabilistic Graphical Models course from Stanford, and Tim Roughgarden's Algorithms I course, also from Stanford. PGM is a graduate-level maths course, and Algorithms I is a core component of Stanford's computer science degree.

Both of them have been mind-blowingly interesting and fun. Twenty years I have made a good living as a programmer, and Algorithms I has convinced me that I've never known that much about programming.

What's really freaking me out is that they're every bit as good as the best courses I remember from Cambridge, and that I have found the continuous assessment / easy-ish problems to do every week structure of them fantastically motivating. Even addictive. There are things I should have been doing, and want to do, and would enjoy doing, that I have not done because I would rather spend the time watching Daphne and Tim's wonderful explanations of concepts that, with hindsight, I realize I should have learnt about years ago. Both courses have unexpectedly turned out to have been directly relevant to my current real-world project.

So I recommend coursera very highly indeed, but I also wonder if they realise what they have done.

---

There is a thing called a winner-takes-all market. You don't want to be in one.

What happens is that you're, say, a man who makes his living playing the piano in public houses. There were once many such men.

You make a modest living, because there are many people who can play the piano, and many pubs, and the market is quite competitive, but you are compensated on roughly the right scale for the effort you put in to learning to play.

Or say you are a football player, who plays for his local football club. It is only a game, so you have to have a proper job as well, but tribalism being what it is, once a week, you play at your local ground for the honour of your town, and a couple of thousand people turn up to watch. Together they pay enough to keep the stadium running and pay the expenses of the club and there's enough left over to distribute round the players in salaries, and maybe even some of the really good players manage to make it a full time job.

This world is gone. Dead and no-one can remember it or believe it or understand what it might have been like.

It is as gone as the world where literate scribes copied books by hand, and only a very wealthy man could afford the abbeyful of people that it took to copy out whole books with quills.  Can you imagine a world where owning a single book would be evidence of enormous power, wealth and status? Can you imagine a world where the ability to write legibly would guarantee a man a good income for life?

What happens is that someone finds a way of making the labour of one person, which used to satisfy the needs of a few, satisfy the needs of many. A printing press, a record player, a live TV broadcast. Often these ways are referred to as media, because they stand between.

This is a great thing for the many. Suddenly the world is full of books, full of music, full of televised sport. Things that were expensive or impossible luxuries (like being a Manchester United supporter who lives in Cork, or owning Several Books, or listening to the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in your croft in the Shetlands) become widely available and cheap. Staggeringly good news for almost everyone.

But what happens to the army of people who used to do all the writing, football playing, music playing, acting, etc, etc?

A clue. Think of a profession where there are stupidly, staggeringly rich individuals, and yet most people who do it pay to do it.

Let us say: George Clooney versus your nearest friend who does amateur dramatics, or (I do not know the names of any current good football players but I predict their existence and characteristics with confidence) versus the best football player you know personally, or Bryn Terfel versus the world's tenth best interpreter of Wotan, or JK Rowling versus anyone you know who's paid to publish their own book. On and on and on this list goes, covering the huge number of professions and people that used to provide widely used services on a personal basis for modest reward but where someone found a way for everyone to enjoy the output of a few people who were very good at it.

---

As I say, this is very very good news indeed for almost everyone.

Clever inhabitant of a little village in Tanzania whose parents can't afford to educate him past primary school? Welcome to Stanford.

Middle aged computer programmer who'd quite like to do a second degree for fun but has never quite wanted to commit the three years and £50,000 that it would probably cost in total to a project which may not be quite as much fun as he imagined? Screw that. You can take your pick of the interesting sounding courses from all the best universities in the world, and do them in the order you want, and try stuff and bin it if it's boring.

Hell, I even thought I'd try a literature course, just to see if there was anything to it. The lectures were fun and the lecturer inspiring, but I still think it's the singer not the song. They know lots of stuff, these literature types, it's just that none of it is true. Which is why they're so into post-modernism I guess. You would be if you built on quicksand and kept finding your house had sunk.

---

But what about the universities? I can't imagine how anyone could beat Tim Roughgarden's charmingly macho Algorithms I course, and I'm certain that he's one of the best teachers of that subject anywhere in the world. But I bet there's someone somewhere who can do it even better.

And if that guy or girl puts in the months of work to make a better version of the course, everyone will want to watch that instead. There is no room for two people doing the same thing in a winner takes all market.

And what about the sea of relatively uninspiring no-hopers in the world who have dedicated their lives to teaching important things to the young?

These people are fucked. And they do not deserve the fucking, because they are good people who have spent years doing good things for good reasons.

But who will want to pay £30,000 to do something they can do much better for free on their computer?

A shame. I will miss the universities. I hope the places who do research and consider teaching a distraction from that will weather the storm and maybe even benefit.

I wonder if any of them have seen the tsunami that is coming for them yet. I talked to a very eminent academic the other day and he thinks that coursera's an interesting experiment that might do some good. It isn't. It's an onrushing wall of death. I give the universities ten years, tops.

Schools have a child-control function. They're somewhere for society to imprison the young people it has no use for. But I suspect that quite soon they'll be places where people look after children who are doing on-line courses rather than places where people teach.

As I say, excellent news. For almost everyone.

The Haymakers, Cambridge

While I'm on the subject of much improved pubs, I should mention the Haymakers. Twenty years ago I worked at Philips Telecom, and I used to eat in the Haymakers every lunchtime. The people were friendly and the food was terrific.

Unfortunately, as Philips and its fragments declined, the Haymakers did too, until it eventually became a tragic hell-hole offering pitiful 'Live Music' of the sort that you'd go a long way to avoid.

My friend Richard Naisby, eminence rouge of Milton Brewery, has recently taken over the Haymakers, gutted it, and pretty much built a new one.

The transformation is astounding. Richard's a fine brewer, but I think he might have been a world-class interior designer. Who knew that there was a vaulted timber beamed ceiling above the Haymakers' nasty old chipboard?

The whole pub has changed out of all recognition to become a beautiful quiet open space. The beer is the excellent Milton range, they sell coffee at £1/cup, and there's an solid wireless connection. Again it's just an open wifi router rather than the horrid Cloud arrangement with its irritating and intrusive log-on page.

The real point of the place, though, is the food. They're doing traditional Italian cooking, and have a traditional Italian chef to do it for them. There are huge (and superb) pizzas, and the rest of the menu feels much like a little Italian village restaurant.

Good luck to the Haymakers and to Milton Brewery in general. (The Devonshire Arms on Mill Road is also a Milton pub and is also very good. There are an awful lot of Cambridge pubs that could benefit from Richard's genius.)

The Clarendon Arms, Cambridge

Lawrence Dixon, long time landlord of the Champion of the Thames, took over The Clarendon Arms a few months ago.

His first act was to get rid of the TVs, piped music and fruit machines that had blighted it for years, and to redecorate. The pub is hugely improved as a result.

His second has been the bizarre and unorthodox move of offering good pub food at reasonable prices. He said to me "Everywhere I go people get obvious things wrong, and it drives me up the wall. I just want to do a traditional pub well". I could feel a michelin star coming on as we spoke. Lawrence and all his staff obviously really really care about their new pub.

The food in the Clarendon is absolutely exceptional! You would be pleased to find a restaurant this good, and yet the menu is traditional orthodox English cooking, and the prices perfectly normal for a city centre pub.

I'd particularly recommend the Scotch Eggs, one of the cheapest things on the board. They're like nothing I've ever tasted before. The platonic ideal to which all scotch eggs aspire.

The beer is standard Greene King, but very well kept, as it always was at the Champion. I think I'm not alone in thinking that Greene King's ubiquitous IPA is actually a very good drink when it's been looked after. It's just terribly hard to find a pub where they know how to keep it well.

The Clarendon also does the superb Greene King mild, which is a rarity these days and quite difficult to find. It's a reminder of why the old traditional real ale brewer Greene King that I remember from my student days grew into today's behemoth that everyone loves to hate.

Well done Lawrence and good luck!

P.S. There's also a wifi connection. A proper one, not this "_Cloud" rubbish that infests most pubs now. I think that's an example of Lawrence's attention to detail. It must have been very tempting to go with Greene King's standard arrangement.

Spring Breakers (Un Film d'Harmony Korine)

In recent years I've become more and more worried about the ability of modern youngsters to let their hair down and enjoy themselves. Their parents' generation, which cared very much about self-expression and exploration, seemed to have failed to pass on the flame.

Harmony Korine's fundamentally feminist, and yet light-hearted remake of the Bacchae has fully put my mind at rest. I am relieved to note that with one glorious exception, the music is execrable throughout, as it should be.

If the film is to be taken seriously, with its many scenes of young people enjoying themselves in the most life-affirming manner, then it must be said that it's essentially about what it means to be a man.

But you can tell that it's a feminist film because it passes Wossname's test: It contains more than one woman. The women have a conversation. That conversation is not about men. Job done bitches. Also the powerful eroticism of the water pistol.

Act like you're in a movie or something.

It is come that we might have life, and have it more abundantly to boot. I shall never listen to Britney Spears in the same way again.

I really want to get out of here. Everybody else already left.

We're just having fun. We didn't do anything wrong. This wasn't the dream. It's not supposed to end this way.

You can't be scared yall. Let's just get the fucking money and go on spring break.

Spring Break Forever.

We robbed the chicken shack with squirt guns.

I really wanted to hear more of the history lecture.

There was blood on the piano keys.

Descent into evil / descent into hell / fundamental message of redemption through suffering blah.

unfortunate effect on race relations

unfortunate effect on race relations

the wages of sin seem rather generous

The film contains several disturbing scenes of religious activity, and is unlikely to be suitable for the very young.

Maths Tuition (Cambridge STEP)

A plug for Chris Metcalfe ( email chris@cambridgesteptuition.co.uk tel: 07752 532811)

If anyone has children (or is a child!) wanting to do maths in Cambridge then they'll need to pass the ferocious STEP examination.

A friend of mine is setting up as a private tutor for these specific exams, and is in the process of making a website.

Chris is a brilliant teacher, and is familiar with STEP both through having been an examiner for it for many years, and from having been on the sharp end of it when we were eighteen years old.

I recommend him absolutely unreservedly.

The new website's here http://www.cambridgesteptuition.co.uk, although at the moment it's just a plain page with contact details.

Chris has taught maths to bright students aspiring to Cambridge at Villiers Park for many years, and while there he produced some short videos and activity sheets to be used while teaching bright teenagers that despite being completely impossible to find are the site's most popular pages:

http://www.villierspark-online-extension-activities.org.uk/ActivityList.aspx?subject_id=13

Chris was clearly born to teach maths, and loves it, and I really hope that he makes a success of his new venture.

Please recommend him to all your friends, and if you control web sites, link to http://www.cambridgesteptuition.co.uk and use words like Cambridge, STEP, and tutor in your link.

He really is as good as I'm trying to make him sound. Give him a hand getting hits if you can.

A Perfect Day

It snowed last night, so I gave the fire its head for the first time this year, and woke up to the boat at a decadent 25 degrees.

The coal man had promised to come round 'late morning', so I cleared the snow off the roof where the coal goes, and sat in front of the fire drinking tea and listening to the radio in anticipation. While I was waiting I dusted things and cleaned things and read books. Eventually there was a tap on the window, just as the sun was at its brightest and the snow melting away.

The Tills are lovely people and it's always a pleasure to get coal from them. They'd noticed that I'd written a blog post recommending them and were very grateful. They deliver direct to the roof despite the trouble it takes to bring a coal lorry onto Midsummer Common. We stuck half a ton of Taybrite on the top. That should last the winter with some to spare.

Once they'd gone I changed out of my coal clothes and sat in front of the fire again, meaning to go out, but the radio had become enchanting.

Ruby Hughes was singing Schubert's romantic songs live from the Wigmore Hall in a thrilling voice.

There's something about a soprano singing German well that takes the breath away.

How cruel the world is to make me so in love with such sounds; a platonic ideal, of which birdsong is only a shadow on the wall; and yet unable ever to make them.

It's bizarre to find yourself sitting completely alone, crying and clapping and shouting brava at the radio.

But it did make me feel like I'd had a part in bringing her back for her encore, just as the announcer had given up and was handing us back.

She sang a Benjamin Britten arrangement of various sentimental songs that I know from childhood. I've always thought that Britten's arrangements of folksongs rather missed the point, but when Ruby sang O Waly Waly you could see what he'd been driving at after all.

I had to turn the radio off once she'd finished. It seemed a terrible shame to overwrite the memory of something so beautiful with any further music.

I have gone for a walk in the snow.

Animated Factors

This is cool:

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/

Hacking Your Own Mind at the Age of Four

I have a friend, who for the sake of his anonymity I shall refer to only as Sips.

Sips has a wonderful, a remarkable ability with dates and numbers. Until recently, I thought that he had savant abilities. It was said of Ramanujan that every number was a personal friend, and Sips is like that with history. If you give him a random date in the last 2000 years, he will tell you all the interesting things that happened in that year.

I am a useful man in a pub quiz, but there is little point to having me along if Sips is there, because he appears to know a strict superset of all the things I know.

My only comparable talent is an in-depth knowledge of the rules of 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons, which isn't even much use for playing Dungeons and Dragons these days, since the young departed from the wisdom of their elders and forsook the ways of Gygax.

When Sips was a child, he liked to play snakes and ladders, and, one day, he noticed that the numbers on a snakes and ladders board go 'as the ox plows', which is to say that they go from left to right 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, then up to 11, then right to left 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11, and continue.

Like this:

Sips liked the pattern, and he noticed that historical events make nice patterns on a snakes and ladders board.

If you number the squares 00-99, you can draw centuries.

Here is the Black Death, as it affected England in the years 1347-1352.

See what a nice shape it makes:

A symmetrical box in the middle of the right hand edge of the board.

Now you will remember for the rest of your life the dates of the Black Death in England, which were ??47 to ??52.

If you're like me, then that will go on a very select list of historical events

53BC Julius Caesar invades Britain
53AD Claudius Caesar invades Britain and stays
1066 Norman Conquest. William the Bastard kills Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings
1914-1918 First World War
1939-1945 Second World War
1966 English victory over Germany in Soccer World Cup
195? Death of King George VI. Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
18/07/1970 Birthday
15/01/19?? Mother's Birthday
??/??/1980 ZX80 released. 10 year old John begs parents incessantly for one
??/??/1981 ZX81 released. Parents worn down after one solid year of begging
18/07/1981 ZX81 acquired
??/??/1982 ZX Spectrum
18/07/1982 ZX Spectrum acquired. Parents gave in without a fight.
14/02/19?? Valentine's Day and date of first proper sex.
11/9/2001 Islam becomes (mildly) interesting.

That's it for me. All the dates I can remember.


--------------------------

When I was a child, I was a slave.

My country considered it so important that I know certain things that they took my childhood away, and replaced it with mostly dreary years of sitting in stuffy rooms on cheap uncomfortable chairs at nasty vandalised desks coated with old chewing gum listening to lectures.

I had no choice in this matter. I was a slave.

The most egregious horror of all those years was called 'Music'.

Some pillock decided that one hour of my precious childhood every week was to be spent, not learning to play music, or acquiring the difficult and valuable skill of listening to music, but to memorizing the dates on which various composers lived and died.

As if the most important thing about Mendelssohn was not the sublime violin concerto in E minor, or how his runaway success poisoned Wagner's mind with anti-Semitism. Or how that led Wagner to write an essay which led to the most important, the most gifted, the most human and the most humane of all the romantic composers to be remembered as a partisan of a retarded ideology invented sixty years after his death by a stack of nasty comic fatheads who didn't understand the first thing about the Ring.

As if the most important thing about Mendelssohn was not his music, but his fucking birthday.

I am happy to say that I have no idea when Mendelssohn's birthday was.

Sips, who has little interest in history, and who considers that music began and ended with Bach and then reawoke only with the invention of the five bar blues, and who considers the entire romantic movement to have been an unfortunate failed experiment, can tell you not only Mendelssohn's dates, but can tell you a significant historical event for every year of his life. He will know the date of 'The Jewish Influence in Music'. He will know the date that the Ring was first performed in Bayreuth, even though he has never heard the Ring.

There was widespread amazement recently when he bet a historian a bottle of whisky over the date on which Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church. He lost. He was out by two years. The smart money had been on Sips.

I can't remember my own mobile phone number. Nobody remembers mobile numbers these days. Why would you? How could you? You never dial them. Every time someone drops his mobile in the river while drunk they change anyway. You get an e-mail with the new one, and put it in your phone. The whole number is ten digits or so long. Human beings cannot remember ten digits in short term memory. As it goes from your screen to your phone, you do not hold it all at once, and that's the last time you ever see it.

The other day, as a test, I picked a mutual friend's mobile number from my phone at random. It was 07942672385.

OK, what was it? No looking back.

So I asked Sips what that friend's mobile number was, and he knew. He'd never dialled it, he said.

I asked him how he knew.

07942 is a common mobile prefix. But all mobile phone numbers start 07, and 1942 is the date of the fall of Singapore.

1672 is the date of the Synod of Jerusalem, when the Orthodox church met up to see what it could do about the Reformation.

1385 is the birthyear of Lady Margaret Beaufort, after whom Lady Margaret Boat Club, Sips old college boat club, is named.

He'd just noticed that as he was typing it in.

Fall of Singapore, Synod of Jerusalem, Birth of Maggie.

Now all you have to do is ignore the ones, and remember that it's a mobile number:

07 (1)942, (1)672, (1)385


Once upon a time I read a book called, ironically, Something Something something Something Your Memory!

It described a complicated scheme for remembering long numbers by turning them into English words. One number, when written out using the system, made 'A beautiful naked blonde jumps up and down'. Unfortunately I can't remember the system. But if I could, that number would still be there.

Sips developed, by accident, at the age of four, a way of associating a strong mental image with every number from 0 to 2000, and like Ramanujan, without any effort, over the course of his life, he has made a friend of every number from 0 to 2000.

----------------------------

Once he'd explained this to me, and how he did it, I challenged him to multiply two big numbers in his head, racing me doing it on a piece of paper.

He protested. He's no good at mental arithmetic. I'd beat him hands down.

I wanted to see.

I chose two three digit numbers as randomly as I could, and we began multiplying.

It took us both one minute and ten seconds to finish our calculation.

Neither of us was at all confident in our answer. Neither of us had done a long multiplication for years. Both of us had had to reconstruct the algorithm from first principles while doing the calculation.

So it is of no relevance whatsoever that he was right and I was wrong.

You can't do this in your head. You just can't.

    715
    267
-------
   5005
  42900
 143000
-------
 190905

You haven't got enough short term memory to hold all those digits while working out the small sums and products that make up the bigger numbers, and simultaneously working out the algorithm from first principles.

I found it hard enough on paper. I have a degree in mathematics, which I may have mentioned.

I just checked the above sum on computer. I couldn't remember the two numbers I was supposed to multiply, and had to come back and look, and say to myself a couple of times seven hundred and fifteen two hundred and sixty seven.

There are countless experiments that prove that seven digits (plus or minus two) is it for the human memory. You can't hold two five digit numbers reliably in your short term memory even if they've got your undivided attention.

But Sips can. Once he's thought of a number, however long, it becomes a sequence of historical dates.

And anyone can remember Catharine the Great, publication of Schubert's lieder, Agincourt for a few minutes while thinking about something else.

-----------------------------

Now of itself, this is just a magic trick. My friend has superhuman powers, but not of a particularly useful kind.(although as long as humankind organise quizzes in pubs he'll not starve).

But it got me thinking about how immensely powerful our minds are, and how crap they are at the same time.

I can ask my computer what the factorial of 10000 is (1x2x3x4x5x....x9998x9999x10000), and it will tell me, in much less time than it takes me to ask the question, what the answer is. It will not get a single digit wrong, and the only way for me to check that is to ask a different computer the same question in a different way.

The interesting, brain bits of a computer are five or six very small pieces of silicon, on which some exceedingly intricate patterns have been engraved.

My brain is a large piece of exceedingly intricate flesh, of roughly the same complexity per tiny bit as a computer.

In an evolutionary sense, it cost a fortune. Your ancestors had very many fewer children than they could have had because they had to pay the enormous energy cost of their brains.

It has to be about as well designed as evolution can make things. Which is not as well as intelligence can make things. But it is very good indeed.

The complexity of the two things, brain and computer, is not even comparable. The brain blows the computer out of the water. It is very, very much larger that the thinking parts of the computer, which are about the size, in complexity terms, as the brain of an insect. On the other hand, the computer is so much faster that brain and desktop computer may be around equivalent these days in terms of raw processing power.

And yet the computer can do, effortlessly in minutes, things that all the humans on the planet working together single-mindedly could not do in a million years.

Where is all that human brain power going? What is it for? How did it pay the cost of its existence over evolutionary time?

We're not some weird sport. We are the cleverest of the animals, but we are animals. And other animals also have brains. Large, complex, expensive brains that are utterly *rubbish* at things that are very easy for computers.

An insect could not calculate the factorial of 10000. An insect could not calculate the factorial of 5. I can. It's 120. But it took me 10 seconds, and holding all those little numbers in my head at once took about as much short term memory as I have.

What is it that animals do with all that brain?

Why are computers not clever?






Notes

-----------------

My phone no 07943 155029
1943 is Stalingrad
1550 is the birth of John Napier, inventor of the logarithm

I just remember the 29.

Sips told me that. When I asked him how to remember my phone number, which I had been unable to remember for some five years until that date. Now it's easy. As a bonus, I can also remember the date of Stalingrad, and when John Napier was born. And the number 29.

Six months after this article was written, I decided to show it to Sips before publishing it.

He tells me that I must have made up the multiplication example, because the answer was 231256.
I don't remember writing the article.

And he tells me that that can't be the phone number, because he doesn't remember any phone numbers that start with El Alamein.

And he tells me that in any case I have got the wrong Margaret Beaufort. I'd looked it up on the internet, which isn't good enough apparently, because I got her Mum or something.

Seven plus or minus two (digits) is only for English speakers. If you speak Mandarin apparently you can remember exactly ten digits. This is because Mandarin digits are all one short syllable. And apparently the audio-loop we record is exactly the same length in everyone.


There's considerable doubt as to the dates of the Black Death. Sips' dates are not the modern accepted dates.

But now they are in your head.

For ever.




























   

Why the Shangri La Diet Cannot Work as Supposed

A man should treasure his doubts:

If consuming tasteless calories lowers your set point, then anyone who loses their sense of smell should lose weight like crazy.

I do not know, but I think that this is not true.


The Shangri La Diet book was a best-seller. Many people must have tried it, even though it sounds crazy and I can quite see why people would not go around admitting that they were trying it. But if it works for most people, then surely people who tried it and had it worked would tell other people. People are usually happy to go around spouting the worst craziness once they are convinced it's true.

So it should have spread by word of mouth and taken over the planet by now.

More arguments please. We can be like Greek philosophers, finding the truth without troubling ourselves to ask reality.

The Master (Film)

Absolutely riveting. Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams all give performances as clear and simple as the truth.

I like Lancaster Dodd and his goodness and folksy charisma. I wish his Cause well. I like his psychotic sidekick and his scary kind wife. I think their epistemology needs work.

I have no idea what this film is about. What it is trying to say. Why it was made. I would like to know. I would like someone to explain it to me. I wonder who is master.

The Shangri-La Diet Needs Our Help

A while ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man whose thinking and writing I very greatly respect,
mentioned a crazy-sounding diet in a positive light. He said effectively: "It sounds like it should work, but it doesn't work for me." (http://lesswrong.com/lw/a6/the_unfinished_mystery_of_the_shangrila_diet/)

I decided that I'd try it out on myself. And to my surprise, it does seem to work.

It seems that Seth Roberts has found a hack into the process that controls how much we eat, and (he says) that it works for most people. I am reasonably confident that it works for me. There are a fair number of experiments on rats that show that the various mechanisms work in rats.

If so, then Dr Roberts has found a cure for one of the great scourges of life in the first world.

Obesity is a great problem for many people, and made worse by the incredible lack of sympathy shown by people who never have the slightest trouble with their weight.

But anyone who believes that anecdotal evidence is more than a suggestion of a good place to look, will assuredly end up going to aromatherapy sessions to cure whatever problems they have. And that may even work.

So it seems that we need to do a randomized controlled experiment to find out whether this hack works, and also from a less practical but more curiosity-satisfying point of view, whether it works for the reasons Dr Roberts says it does or not.

I have been swapping e-mails with Seth Roberts, and he reports that there is barely any interest in academic circles in testing his theory.

I quote with permission:

I disagree that a trial would be dead easy. Let me explain some of the difficulties. 1. Who would do it? Not any grad student: after you get a Ph.D. associated with a quack diet, who would hire you? The only people I could hire would know zero about this sort of research, which is very rare. 2. Where? 3. What comparison group? Nothing, placebo control, or best alternative treatment? 4. If placebo control what would it be? 5. Enormously difficult to measure compliance and equate compliance between the two groups. 6. There are maybe 10 labs in the whole world experienced in doing this sort of expt. Unclear why they would want to do this. I would need a lot of money to convince them.

This is clearly insane. There is a very great benefit to be had if this is true, so the fact that it looks a priori rather unlikely is no reason not to test it, if the test is cheap by comparison to the obesity crisis.

But I have also been talking to academic friends, and they find it all too plausible that what Dr Roberts says about nobody being interested in testing his theory is true.

From which we can conclude that academia is very badly broken.

So we need to do it ourselves.

I would like to come up with a way of testing this, that will not cost me very much money, and yet will provide some more reliable evidence than 'try it yourself and see if it works'.

But of course, I have absolutely no idea how to go about this.

My initial intuition is that we should make a vast number of little gelatin capsules, some containing 15g of extra-light olive oil, and some identical-looking ones containing something harmless with no calories in it.

And we should get around twenty volunteers to promise to take one first thing every morning, and not to eat or drink anything for an hour afterwards, and to record every day their weight at the time they got up, and whether they felt hungry or not during the day, and to keep this up for a couple of months.

We should send each volunteer a selection of these capsules, with a pattern like 'one week of olive oil, then one week of placebo, then one week of olive oil, then one week of placebo'.

And each volunteer should get a different pattern, which pattern is recorded secretly by me.

If Seth's theory is correct, then the secret patterns should be reflected back clearly in the data, with perhaps some sort of time-lag.

I have no idea whether this is a sensible sort of experiment to run, or how to analyse the data. I have just made all this up.

And I wonder if anyone else can make suggestions, or explain why this sort of experiment is so badly flawed that we will learn nothing useful from it.

One suggestion that has been made is that there should be a third group, or a third part of the random patterns, where no capsules are taken, but the same data is recorded.

That's probably a good idea, but of course it makes the trial half again as much work. So how do I tell whether the extra information from that is worth the extra effort?

Anyone know how to do this sort of thing?

Feel the Spirit (Wolfson College Choir)

A lovely hour of accompanied solos, instrumentals, and songs from the full choir. The music was uniformly good, although sometimes too slow.

Lee Hall was far too bright, and the performers in the harsh light too obviously the postgraduates and fellowship of Wolfson College. Something should be done to dim the lights for future concerts, but with eyes closed the sound of the choir was bright and loud, with several fine voices over a skillfully interwoven background. If I had a recording of this I would listen to it often. I wished it longer.

The choir of an elite institution of the race responsible singing the songs of slaves in crystal accents could have been incongruous and off-putting, but it was touching to think that the descendants of the perpetrators remember the horror and sympathize with the victims. Has that ever been true of an atrocity before?

It made me imagine the scholars of a future society remembering this doomed generation, the first that will die, knows it is going to die, and stares that fact in the face unflinching.

I hope they sing our songs.

The Paradox of the Envelopes

Oswald Mega, the always welcome, has two envelopes and some money. He divides the money into three equal stacks.

He puts one of the stacks in one envelope, and the rest of the money into the other. He seals the envelopes, takes them to the usual watering hole, describes what he has done, swaps them around behind his back a few times, and then he hands you one of them.

The envelope contains £1000.

"Would you like to swap envelopes?" he says.

The Paradox of the Swans

A wise man once observed that "All swans are white." is true if and only if "Things that are not white are not swans".

So one day, you see a green mini. That is a thing that is not white, and lo, it is not a swan.

So the green mini is evidence that things that are not white are not swans, and so it is evidence that all swans are white.

If you do not buy this argument, why do you believe that swans are white?

The Paradox of the Children

Suppose you meet a mathematician in the street. Around here that is not such a far fetched thing.

And it comes to pass that she mentions that she has two children.

"Are either of the children boys?" you ask.

Yes, she says, with a cryptic smile, and speaks no further word.

And later, you meet another friend, who is a betting man. And you tell him your story.

He says "I bet you £50 that the other child is a boy."

Should you take the bet?


Consider: Had you asked "Is the older child a boy?", then the bet would be fair.
And had you asked "Is the younger child a boy?", then it would be fair.

And the boy must be either the older or the younger.

Related: How likely is the king to have a sister?

Music in Cambridge

Someone's gone to the trouble of collating the various sources of information about local concerts. There is some variety of classical music going on in Cambridge every day.

http://www.cambridgeconcerts.com/

The best bit is they make the data available using google calendar as well, so if you've got a google account you can see all the dates and times in your diary.

It looks wonderful so far.

Shangri-La Diet, Month Four, Success, I'm Convinced

I declare victory for the Shangri-La diet. My belt now prefers to be on its fourth notch more often than on its third, and I think that counts as a win. My appetite still seems suppressed.

Updating for (down a notch/appetite loss)
Priors H87 : W2 : S11
Likelihoods: H 25/203: W 5/134: S 75/134
Posterior: H63: W 1: S36

My original prior was H60:W39:S1, so what's happened over these four months is that the fad diet looks more likely by a couple of orders of magnitude while the conventional wisdom has proved to be utterly wrong.

According to my analysis, I'm now licensed to believe that the theory "Shangri-La Diet causes belt size to contract by one notch a month" has a half chance of being true.

But actually, of course, what's happened is that after an initial quite dramatic loss of body fat, I've been slowly losing weight for four months, and my belt measurement is now about 3 inches less than it was.

At this point, I think I can claim that this crazy diet works for me exactly as it's supposed to. Slow weight loss without any use of willpower.

And I'm also claiming that the prediction almost everyone made that if I deliberately ate an extra 300 calories every day I'd get fatter is just wrong. Badly, hopelessly wrong.

That's the end of my experiment, because my belt won't come in any more. Its diameter is now fixed by the size of my hipbones. All the clothes that I found I couldn't wear four months ago fit again, and I feel lighter on my feet.

I've still got a fair bit of abdominal fat that I'd like rid of, so I'm going to keep on with it, but I don't think my belt measurement will go down any more. I predict that it won't go back up as long as I keep up with the olive oil. Even over Christmas, where my Mum usually manages to leave so much lovely food lying around that I become visibly fatter over the fortnight.

The formula that seems to have worked for me is:

Drink 300 calories worth of extra-light olive oil first thing every morning and immediately wash the taste away with water. Let nothing except plain water pass your lips for one hour after that. Apart from that, eat whatever you like, whenever, for whatever reason. It doesn't matter in the slightest if you miss the odd day.

According to Seth Roberts himself, this diet works for lots of people but by no means all.

I am convinced that it works for me.

I recommend you try it if you're overweight and would like not to be. If it works for you, you'll know within a month. I'd also recommend you read Seth Robert's book 'The Shangri-La Diet', for his explanation of why he thinks it should work, which is helpful if it stops working and you need to work out why and what you can do to fix it.

If you're of a technical bent then http://sethroberts.net/science/ is interesting as it reviews his theory of why his diet works, and lists lots of published papers that demonstrate various components of his theory. To be honest, I don't quite buy the mechanism proposed, but it's really not my field so I'm not competent to judge. On the other hand, it's definitely much closer to real science than most psychobabble and self-help. I'm pretty sure the guy's sincere.

My only worry here is that it does have to be Extra Light Olive Oil, not the tasty Extra Virgin sort. ELOO is produced by a nasty manufacturing process that pulls out the last drops of oil from olives that have already been squeezed, and it's not much fun to eat as it's nearly tasteless. However the consensus opinion seems to be that it's fairly healthy stuff.

Someone needs to do a proper randomized controlled trial on this.

D K Till, Cambridge Coal Merchant, 01223 232947

Getting a lorry onto Midsummer Common is an arcane and exotic process, which changes every year at the inscrutable will of Cambridge Council.

I'd like to recommend D K Till, our local coal merchant, who has managed this feat three times in order to deliver 15 bags / £150 worth of coal directly to the roof of my narrowboat. He even lifts it up there, which considering I once put my back out throwing 25kg coal bags around is a very fine thing for him to do.

They're a very friendly family firm, father and son-in-law. All their smokeless coal is £10/25kg bag and they sell Taybrite and Supertherm, the most popular brands for boat stoves, as well as several other brands. It's hard work to get it any cheaper than that round here. Their coal is fine quality and comes in their own heavy waterproof bags.

I'm told, although I have not yet experienced this for myself, that they also sell wood, kindling, and gas bottles.

They have no web presence, so I thought I'd try to give them one with this post. Their phone number is 01223 232947 and I recommend them without reservation.

Personality Metrics (November 2012)

I've spent the day doing web-based personality tests. There is no subject more fascinating than oneself. Anyone who isn't me may want to skip this post.

---

The first one was for political opinions. It's at:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

and it tries to classify your politics along two separate axes. I scored:

Economic Left/Right: -2.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.97

Apparently this makes me a libertarian lefty, a political ally of Ghandi and the Green Party.

The libertarian bit seems fair. Fuck off government.

But the left-wing bit strikes me as a bit unlikely. I do often vote Green, but that's because I love trees and hate cars, and want to send that message to the larger parties. I think the Greens' economics is loony, and I'd cheerfully die in order to prevent them getting their hands on power.

My ideal government would have been be the old Liberal party, before it merged with the lefty Social Democrats.

But out of Labour and the Tories, I feel happier when the Tories are in power. They seem to mess up less and interfere in my life less. The current Lib-Dem/Tory compromise strikes me as about right economically.

But the political compass has me as an anarcho-syndicalist, with all the major British parties well to the right of me economically, and way more authoritarian than me. One of my beliefs must be wrong. I wonder which it is?

---

Next one was the so-called Big Five test:

http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/

Apparently this is taken quite seriously by psychologists, and when I first heard about how it was designed, I thought "Yes, that's the way I would have liked to design a personality test".

I'm Open 95% Conscientious 41% Extravert 91% Agreeable 17% and Neurotic 4%

So, crazy open to new ideas, slightly less conscientious than average, very extrovert, very calm in a crisis, and rather disagreeable and rude.

All that seems terribly plausible. However I took the same test 6 months ago, and it came out:

Open 96% Conscientious 46% Extravert 93% Agreeable 79% Neurotic 11%

So it looks as though four of these traits are stable, but sometimes I'm very rude and disagreeable and sometimes I'm very tactful and nice. Or more accurately, since this is measuring my own answers to various questions, sometimes I think I'm nice and sometimes I think I'm nasty.

I'm quite impressed by the stability of the test over six months on four of its axes, but really, what sort of measurement is it that can go from 17% to 79% on the exact same questions answered six months apart by the same person?

---

An IQ test next (I wanted a second opinion):

http://www.iqtest.com/

On which I scored 148. That sounds about right, I always used to get somewhere between 150-170 on IQ tests. The scores are a bit variable at the ends of the scale. And I'm aging and have probably poisoned my brain a bit with alcohol over the years, so it's no surprise if I'm in a bit of a decline. Also there's the Flynn effect, which means that modern IQ tests have to be harder to make up for the fact that people are getting better at IQ tests. No one knows what is going on here, although I'm inclined to believe that people really are just getting cleverer. This means that an IQ of 165 in 1980 is about the same as an IQ of 150 in 2010.

The weird thing here is that I'm pretty sure that I got all the answers right, so I cheated and did the test again. The questions were the same, so I was able to do them a lot faster. On the second pass my score was 151, which isn't much of an increase. On the third pass I had all the answers memorised, and so I filled them in about as fast as it's possible for a human to do. That was worth 152.

I don't see how it could be done better, so unless I've got an answer wrong, this test probably tops out at 152, and speed seems to be worth very little.

---

And a second IQ test:

http://www.free-iqtest.net

On which I got 147. Again, I think I got every question right, so I think I'm just topping out the test, like a fat bloke finding that his scales hit the bar.

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Then there's the Myers-Briggs personality score, widely used in industrial personality profiling.

http://www.humanmetrics.com/

ENTJ
Extravert(56%)  iNtuitive(75%)  Thinking(12%)  Judging(1%)

So as far as I can tell from reading the explanation on the site, the Myers-Briggs type indicator is just some incoherent rubbish thing mainly designed so as not to offend anyone.

It does seem nice and stable though. About six months ago, I took this test and got ENFJ with strengths for each factor of 67/50/12/1. That evening, I tried the test again and got ENFP 22/38/25/11, and now apparently I'm: ENTJ 56/75/12/1

So it looks like I'm pretty normal on the last two factors, but am strongly extroverted and prone to abstract theorizing.

I think that's probably what you'd conclude if you talked to me for five minutes.

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Next, the question that everyone who likes numbers must ask themselves: Am I Autistic?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

Score 13 ( A bit less autistic that the average person)

So happily not. And this despite having spent the day doing personality tests on the web.

What is going on here?

Spoiler warning: This post contains a picture of one of the Raven's matrices from the IQ test suggested in the Less Wrong reader survey.

There's rather a nice little IQ test app here:

http://iqtest.dk  (If you want to go and take it, do so before you look at the picture below!)

I scored 130 on it, which makes me think that the leetle grey cells may be falling apart under the influence of alcohol and old age. In youth, I usually got between 150 and 160 on these things (they're not terribly accurate near the ends of their scales).

Anyway, my powers are obviously declining. What's worse is that even when not under time pressure, I can't figure out what the answers to the questions are. Can anyone figure out which of the eight possible choices here completes the figure? And explain why? It's completely opaque to me.

If anyone has a go at this, the questions I can't do are 26, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. And I'd be really grateful for an explanation of what any of those are about.

---

Aha! http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/how-to-ace-an-iq-test gives an explanation of how these things work. After reading it I went back and can now complete the test in about 10 minutes (which gives me a score of 145+, apparently that's as good as you can do.). Most of the answers are indeed obvious in retrospect, although there are a couple where I can't decide between two choices, and one where I'm a little sceptical I could have worked out the pattern having never seen it before.

The particular one above works by adding the dots. dots outside the figure cancel with dots inside. As far as I can see, the dot positions are irrelevant and random. In terms of crossword clues, this would be OK in the Telegraph but not meet the standard for the Times.

In fact, I've now got some thoughts about the analogy between IQ tests and cryptic crosswords. They seem closely related in terms of what they're measuring, although obviously these visual patterns are language neutral, whereas I can't see how you could hope to do a cryptic in English unless you were a native-standard speaker. I might try to work this up into a blog post later.

Personal Ad

In a recent discussion of eugenics, someone pointed out that there are sperm banks selling donor sperm by donor type, so you can choose a tall sporty white father with blond hair and a PhD. The service is expensive and a little impersonal. I reckon I can undercut these people.

Ladies! High-IQ Donor Sperm, Delivered Direct to your Ovaries!

Good Looking Cambridge Graduates of Immaculate Caucasian Ancestry, Proven Sporting and Earning Ability, and above-averagish height await your call. No Gingers.

Donation sessions tailored to your preference at our standard rate of only £60/hour!! . Sadly no appointments are possible before lunch but we do go on until long after midnight if necessary.

Conceive in the privacy of your own home, or call at our floating clinic.

(!) For reasons of confidentiality donors will be heavily disguised throughout the procedure, pretend to be called Ivan, and claim to be from Paraguay.

(!!) ( + VAT and taxi fare from central Cambridge if not easily cycleable )

Gis Job (£500 reward)

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I want.

I make my usual promise:

If, within the next six months, I take a full-time job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts whom I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.

Anyhow, if you're interested in helping out, my CV is at http://www.aspden.com

And I also make the following boast:

I know all styles of programming and many languages, and can use any computer language you're likely to use in the style which it was intended to be used in.

I have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of all kinds. I can become very interested in almost any problem which is hard enough that I can't solve it easily.

I have a deserved reputation for being able to produce heavily optimized, but nevertheless bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack together sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is appropriate when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.

I've worked in telecoms, commercial research, banking, university research, chip design companies, server virtualization, a couple of startups, and occasionally completely alone.

I've worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit microcontrollers and gigantic servers, and once upon a time every IBM machine in one building in Imperial College was running my partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.

I'm smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.

I know what it means to understand a thing, and how to go about understanding a new thing, and I know when I know something. If I understand a thing then I can usually find a good way to communicate it to other people.