Reversing Entropy

Ant mega-colony takes over world

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Following: http://impey.info/blog/?p=139

I’m already getting Michael Jackson spam in the comments for this blog. Those guys are quick. One day, we will get all our news from spam.

I read the Guardian every day. I don’t think that I will ever have the stomach to take without feeling a little nauseous. The self-loathing of middle class lefties and defeatism inherent in an ideology that holds that levelling down is a price worth paying for aiming for equality makes me feel more than a little bit sick.

Another problem with the paper is that it’s not always very accurate. In this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/22/reducing-office-emissions

the writer complains about “air conditioning systems burning up huge amounts of carbon dioxide”. How much does this guy know about climate change, electricity production or even high school level chemistry? If a/c systems burned up CO2, then climate change could be solved in about five minutes. We would simply need to turn them all on, burn up the excess CO2 and not worry about the coal power stations belching out CO2. The only conclusion that I can draw from this article is that the journalist knows next to nothing about chemistry and has probably read very little on climate change, the science, as opposed to climate change, the social phenomenon. However, we read articles by such people arguing about draconian measures to combat climate change. Such measures might have a drastic impact on the quality of life whether we take them (in terms of lost productivity) or if we don’t (in terms of environmental chaos). If we get our news from such uneducated fools, what hope have we?

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a telecommunication network is proportional to the square of the number of users. If there were only one fax machine in the world, it would be useless. Two fax machines can have some use, but three allow twice as many connections as that, and so on.

A more modern example is that of social network sites. One’s choice of social network site is not determined by the colour scheme or the correctness of the technical implementation but by the number of friends that one has on the network. One result of this is that social network sites are forced to be free to use in order to drive adoption. This results in a rather curious business model: give away the product for free, hope that there is explosive growth, pray that you can somehow make a little money from your millions of users once they are in place.

Fuel distribution has a parallel problem. It might be possible to replace petrol and diesel cars with ones fuelled by hydrogen, methane, alcohol, ammonia, compressed air, electricity, deep-fat-frier oil or even cow dung. The problem is that drivers will not buy cars that uses one of these fuels, unless they can buy that fuel ubiquitously. Conversely, nobody’s going to finance the fuel distribution network, until there are the cars to burn the fuel.

A new car company, Riversimple, is trying to break this chicken-and-egg problem by leasing their cars.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/motoring/features/hydrogenpowered-car-makes-debut-1706673.html

Leasing certainly makes more sense for a customer entering a market that has no guaranteed future.

On top of this, part of the design of the car is being released as an open source project:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103106.stm

The hope seems to gain an economy of scale and allow the car to adapt to local conditions. The company is working with BOC, who presumably would do very well from a hydrogen economy. The situation is similar to Google, Mozilla and Chrome. Google want to make money from increasingly sophisticated web applications, so they finance open source projects to build better browsers. Financing a closed source browser would not achieve their aims as efficiently. What is more, as soon as they pulled the plug on a closed source browser, the project would finish. Opening up the source provides a multiplier effect. I imagine that BOC are hoping for a similar multiplier effect with open source fuel cells.

I’ve put together a bingo card generator:

http://tefl.impey.info/TEFL_BingoGameHTMLPage

It’s a response to the Bingo card generator at

http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/materials/bingo/

I’ve been using the Teach-nology generator for a while for making bingo cards. My generator makes a few improvements to the way that the user operates. In particular, the user doesn’t have to hit ‘Shuffle’ and print for each student.

My kids tend to enjoy bingo. I let them play a game as a reward after a test. It’s more suited to less experienced learners, especially ones learning to match sounds to the words that they read. With more experienced learners, one can say the definition of the word, draw a picture on the board or do a charade instead of just saying the word.

Google’s latest offering,

http://www.google.com/squared

is rather fun, but I’m not convinced that I will use it very often.

Compare search results like this:

http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=premiership+clubs

with

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Premier_League_clubs

The page on Wikipedia is much more useful. It seems that humans are better at making tables of data from diverse sources of information that computers are at this point. Will it always be this way?

Wikipedia has strict guidelines on how articles are written and how propositions should be backed by reliable sources. Could these guidelines be further formalised and pave the way for an algorithm that could write something like Wikipedia from scratch? Google seem to be attempting to build a system that can produce the pages on Wikipedia with names like “List_of_*”. For all I know, Google might have looked at all the articles on Wikipedia whose names match that pattern and used them to get their tables started.

Sport is a popular subject. It’s safe to say that there are lot of people who are willing to give up their free time to collate data on the subject. If some joker changed the Wikipedia table to say that Manchester United were relegated at the end of the previous season, this error would be corrected quickly as there is no lack of people who care deeply about the matter.

During a presentation for Wolfram Alpha, Stephen Wolfram was asked whether he had taken data from Wikipedia. He denied it and said that the problem with Wikipedia was that one user might conscientiously add accurate data for 200 or so different chemical compounds in various articles. Over the course of a couple of years, ever single article would get edited by different groups. The data diverged. He argued that these sorts of projects needed a director, such as himself. However, he said that his team had used Wikipedia to find out what people were interested in. If the article on carbon dioxide is thousands of characters long, is edited five times a day, has an extensive talk page, is available in dozens of languages, and has 40 references, it is safe to say that carbon dioxide is a chemical compound that people are interested in. This is true regardless of the accuracy content of the article. It would be pretty trivial for Google (or any Perl hacker with a couple of hours to spare and a few gigs of hard disk space) to rank all of the pages on Wikipedia according to public interest using the criteria that I just listed.

In many ways, an algorithmic encyclopaedia is to be preferred because of the notorious problems of vandalism and bias. However, tasks like condensing and summarising are not straightforward. The problem of deciding what to write about could analysing Wikipedia, as described above, and tracking visitor trends. Is there going to be a move to unseat Wikipedia in the coming years? How long before humans can be removed from the algorithm completely?

As I was walking to work today, I was not listening to an ipod. I never do. In part, I do not use one for reasons of safety. Korean pavements can be dangerous places. Motorbike riders use the pavement as much as the main road, and it is vital that one has all the senses tuned to what’s going on. As well as motorbikes, one hears conversations and shouting, haggling and laughing, and all the other sounds that make up day-to-day life.

Today, my ears picked up on a plaintive melody from a cello soloist. There was so much other sound, from air conditioner heat sinks and the like, that I didn’t devote much thought to it at first. But the melody did not stop as I walked along the street. To walk more that a hundred metres, listening to the same sound, without the volume of the sound varying and without being able to identify the source is a peculiar experience. Listening to the conversation of a fellow walker is easily understood, as is the increasing din when approaching something far off but very loud. But a continuing piece of music, as other sounds rise and fade away, is eerily unusual.

Quickly, I realised that all of the televisions, which can be heard on the street from every shop, were on the same channel. It’s not normal for every set on a road to be on the same show. I was reminded of getting off a coach and walking through the streets of Bangkok on September 11th 2001 and wondering why there were crowds of people outside every cafe, staring in the same direction towards the TVs. My first thought, alarmist coward that I am, was that Pyongyang had done something outrageous and that the melancholic cello was to make the four minute warning somehow easier to absorb. However, the cello solo was part of former president Roh Moo-hyun’s funeral, which I think is occupying the thoughts of Koreans even more that the North’s current sabre-rattling.

A few steps later, I was back in everyday Korea, as a tune from the Wondergirls blared out from some shop’s TV. I couldn’t help asking myself why people deprive themselves of the sounds of the world. Wearing headphones and having complete control over what one hears is like looking at waxed, silicone enhanced and Photoshop-ed pornography during sex.

Which of these embodies quiet despair of loneliness better?

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/post/108152628/original

http://gallopingnelly.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/gas-station.jpg

I heard the track “Pandora” by Cocteau Twins today.

I fell in love immediately. It sounded really familiar. After a bit of brainwracking, I remembered the track “A Wolf at the Door” by Radiohead.

Do I win a prize?

If we are going to make thought unnecessary using technology (that is our aim, isn’t it?) we’re going to need some sort of search engine where we can ask “What else does such-and-such-a-song sound like?” It seems like a common enough question. As the pace at which new media passes over our cerebra increases, the desire for such support will no doubt increase.

How might such a search engine come about?

To some extent, we already have such system. This blog post is part of the system. Everytime someone writes about a song reminding them about another song on the internet, the search engines add that information to the database. I’m not sure how many posts of this sort there are in the world, but over time, a large body of knowledge should fall into place.

One can imagine some sort of wiki springing up along similar lines. There are probably already several good ones already.

Once there is enough data out there connecting songs to others by reported similarity, it’s only a matter of time before someone throws some AI (artificial neural nets? evolutionary computation?) at that data and a fully automatic system that trawls myspace and youtube will be in place.

In the meantime, parallel systems will probably be developed in order to protect intellectual property against plagiarism and copyright theft.

It’s easy enough to see the reasons that would cause an artificially intelligent system that can recognise similarities between songs to come about. It’s not see easy to understand why the human brain has this ability. Why do certain songs make us pause to wonder about what they remind us of? How was this ability useful for our ancestors when they were fighting sabre tooth tigers and woolly mammoths? Why is it so annoying when we can’t remember? Why do we think that it’s important that we do?

One of the joys of maintaining a blog is the daily checking of the moderation queue for comments. This involves passing my eyes over enormous amounts of spam. I find this a little bit irksome, but I’ve also grown to enjoy it. Not only does it keep me up to date with the names the most popular sexy women, the latest advances in pharmacological science and the category titles of the world’s paraphilias, but it also keeps me informed of what search phrases people are trying to high jack. Predictably, this morning, I cleared out a load of swine flu spam.