tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38275779899893982982024-03-08T09:55:34.985-08:00Musings among the Standing StonesAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-37227128542441075412012-11-15T10:50:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:36:02.338-08:00More Money than BrainsLarry Ellison has more money than brains.<br />
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Want proof? He <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/3-million-tax-cut-on-Larry-Ellison-s-estate-3290230.php">built a house</a> for $200 million and then complained, when the house was assessed at $160 million, that it clearly wasn't worth anywhere near that because it was "overdeveloped". He claimed it was only worth about $60 million, and eventually the assessor's office agreed. This is just <a href="http://www.bornrich.com/larry-ellison.html">the tip</a> <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Larry-Ellison-collects-lavish-real-estate-3658238.php">of the iceberg</a> <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/22/business/la-fi-tn-larry-ellison-extravagant-purchases-20120621">of his wasteful</a> <a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/09/27/tour-the-many-homes-of-larry-ellison/">acquisitiveness</a>. <br />
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What does it mean to have more money than brains? It means you knowingly waste money. When you acquire far more of something than you can possibly use or properly appreciate, you have more money than brains. When you pay far more for something than it is worth to anybody else (meaning you could never resell it for more than a fraction of what it cost you), you have more money than brains.<br />
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It means that the value of money has sunk so low for you that it is worth virtually nothing. The attitude, as <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen">Everett Dirksen was misquoted</a> as saying, is "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money." <br />
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It should not be surprising that this becomes the dominant attitude for people with a lot of wealth. Our <a href="http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html">relationship to money</a> follows a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law">power law</a> curve. The effect that doubling your money has drops as it increases. If you have only $100 for the month, getting another $100 may be the difference between <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/oscarwilde395546.html">life and death</a>. If you have $1000 a month, getting another $1000 may mean that you can move out of your parents house or perhaps afford to buy a car. If you receive $10,000 a month, the only difference having another $10,000 is likely to make in your life is increasing the luxuries you can afford. And if you go from $100,000 a month to $200,000, there probably won't be any change to your life or lifestyle at all.<br />
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Having more brains than money means that you stay aware of how much incremental satisfaction spending more money will give you. You still strive for that elusive goal of "Bang for the Buck". If you have serious brainpower and a lot of wealth, you recognize that the low value you place on money is unique to you (and your Billionaire peers) and not shared by the rest of the world, so the resources that are represented by that money are better targeted to the areas where they are more valued. You also recognize the lost opportunity cost when you fritter away money. You realize that your wealth represents a significant amount of the resources of the planet, and handling those resources wisely is a responsibility that should be <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/andrewcarn173234.html">taken seriously</a>.<br />
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I once went to a taping of the Tonight Show back in the 80s when Johnny Carson was host. One of his guests that night was Michael J. Fox who told a story that showed he had more brains than money. He described how he had been browsing through a store with his manager when he saw a fish tank that appealed to him. "Do you want it?", asked his manager. "Sure," he replied. The manager arranged the transaction. Later, Michael discovered that the tank had cost $6,000. He was horrified. He realized that while he could easily afford $6,000 for a fish tank, it wasn't going to bring $6,000 worth of value into his life. <br />
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"Wait," you may be saying. "Larry Ellison didn't waste that money on his house. He gave jobs to all the people who provided the materials and built the house." If you think that then you don't understand lost opportunity cost. Sure, those people were employed and paid a wage, but they also could have received that wage while building hospitals or schools or houses for many more people. By utilizing these resources for a purpose whose value completely disappeared the moment they finished work, all that effort was wasted. The money still exists, distributed among the workers and suppliers, but $140 Million worth of resources just disappeared from the planet as if it never existed.<br />
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Larry Ellison is not the person with the lowest brain to money ratio
of all time. I'm not sure who would be the all-time winner (although I'm
keen to hear suggestions), but in modern times that accolade has to go
to Citizen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst">William Randolph Hearst</a>.<br />
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I have gone on a tour of his "ranch" which is now called <a href="http://www.hearstcastle.org/">Hearst Castle</a>. It is filled with art and architecture that Hearst brought back from grand tours through Europe, thousands of items that he saw, bought, shipped back to the U.S., and then stored in a warehouse. He didn't even look at them for many years, not until he dragged them out to decorate his ranch-house.<br />
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I remember seeing a carved wood architectural feature that came from a 15th century Italian church. It had survived 500 years of wars and weather, with generation after generation maintaining it, looking after it, ensuring it survived. Then Hearst bought it and stored it in his warehouse for 20 years where it suffered from massive rot. When it was brought out to be mounted at the ranch, it had to be repaired with plaster to cover up the damage. The plaster was moulded in imitation of the carving that had disintegrated.<br />
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There is also a tapestry called Mille Fleurs, an important piece of art that was woven sometime around the year 1500. It hangs on the wall of the dining room where many people, often celebrities, got rip-roaring drunk at the famous parties held there. It makes me wonder how many times someone vomited on this beautiful tapestry.<br />
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On the tour, the guide turned to us and asked, "Wouldn't you like to be able to buy all these things and live like this?" All around me, people enthusiastically nodded their heads and muttered "Oh, yeah", while I just felt nauseous at the thought. I realized then that I was the only one in the group who actually wanted to have more brains than money.<br />
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<h3>
Does Wealth Always Destroy Brain Cells?</h3>
Can you be ultra-rich and still have more brains than money? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett">Warren Buffett</a> proves you can. In this quote, he demonstrates that he understands what his wealth can do, maintains his hold on the value that money has for the rest of us, and appreciates the lost opportunity cost in using it wastefully:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's
like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into
consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my
picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But
the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those
10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing.[<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446388.Warren_Buffett_Speaks">1</a>]</blockquote>
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He has the money to indulge himself with his slightest whim, but rejects that behaviour as actually being a negative:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How would I improve my life by having 10 houses around the globe? … I don’t want to manage 10 houses and I don’t want
somebody else doing it for me and I don’t know why the hell I’d be
happier. [<a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/homes-of-billionaires--warren-buffett.html">2</a>]</blockquote>
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These aren't just words, either. He backs them up with his actions. The house he owns in Omaha is <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/48336350/Homes_of_Billionaires_Warren_Buffett">a nice one</a>. It is sufficient for his needs, but it is not a mansion. He has <a href="http://autos.ca.msn.com/photos/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=24777832&page=4">only one car</a> and it is not terribly expensive. His suits are off-the-rack. Almost his <a href="http://monevator.com/seven-surprising-things-you-may-not-know-about-warren-buffet/">whole lifestyle</a> involves buying only what he needs.<br />
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He has also committed to <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity2.fortune/index.htm">giving away</a> almost all of his wealth. He has pledged 83% of it to the <a href="http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx">Bill and Melinda Gates foundation</a>. What is particularly interesting is that he, along with Bill Gates, have engaged in <a href="http://givingpledge.org/">some social engineering</a> among Billionaires to ensure that others follow their lead (<a href="http://givingpledge.org/#larry_ellison">Larry Ellison</a> among them). In this he follows the footsteps of <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/andrewcarn133933.html">Andrew Carnegie</a> who wrote:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The wealthy man should] consider all surplus revenues which come to him
simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer.</blockquote>
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Of course, Buffett is not alone in philanthropy. In fact, giving to charities is a way of gaining <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/11/us-wealth-philanthropy-status-idUSTRE67A2WB20100811">status among the wealthy</a>. The difference is that Buffet clearly understands the responsibility to use his wealth wisely and the negative consequences if it is applied frivolously.<br />
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Bill Gates is another example of someone with more brains than money. Anyone who knows what I think of his business ethics may be shocked to hear me praise Bill Gates for anything. And unlike Buffet he has certainly had his <a href="http://www.bornrich.com/bill-gates.html">wasteful indiscretions</a> in how he used his wealth, between <a href="http://en.wikicollecting.org/bill-gates-microsoft-founder">the art and cars and manuscripts</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates%27_house">ridiculously oversized house</a>. But he has also devoted not just the bulk of his fortune but also most of his time and energy to trying to figure out the most effective way to use that wealth to improve society. The sacrifices he has had to make to do this are enormous. I can't imagine what it must have felt like, after devoting all his time and energy for many years to making Microsoft what it was, to walk away from it so that he could focus full time on making the most effective use of his wealth as possible. It is clear to me that he made the right decision, but you only have to look around at the other very wealthy CEOs who are still running their companies to see that it is not a common decision for someone in that position to make.<br />
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There are, of course, <a href="http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Philanthropy-Ted-turner-and-philanthropic-competition.html">many others</a> <a href="http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/giving-while-living">who demonstrate</a> their brain's triumph over their money. But giving to charities isn't enough. There also needs to be recognition of the lost opportunity cost, and that can be an ongoing battle. Even someone as aware as Warren Buffett slips occasionally. One thing he has splurged on is his private jet. But you can tell that he recognizes it for the indulgence that it is. He named it <i>The Indefensible</i>.<br />
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What about you? Would you rather have more money than brains? Or more brains than money?<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-11203170119929523402012-05-07T17:10:00.000-07:002012-11-26T18:36:26.603-08:008th Fire - Can't miss CBC DocumentariesCBC has recently aired a truly great series called "8th Fire". Many of the comments and tweets surrounding it have shared the same sentiment: A series that every Canadian should watch. 8th Fire has finished airing on TV but you can watch the full episodes online at <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire//2011/11/tv-series-8th-fire.html">http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire//2011/11/tv-series-8th-fire.html</a>.<br />
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It is about the Aboriginal population of Canada and their relationship with the Non-aboriginal community. Creator and host of the series Wab Kinew gives a few facts, a few perspectives that many of us will not be familiar with, and a few ideas about how we can all improve the way we get along.<br />
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I know what you are going to say. You don't need to be preached at and blamed for something you had no hand in. But the 8th Fire isn't like that. It is a gentle, entertaining exploration of these ideas that is quite humorous. And you might learn something you didn't know before you're done that changes the way you think about Aboriginal and Non-aboriginal relations. I did.<br />
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If that thought scares you, ask yourself what you are afraid of? Surely you are not so insecure about your opinion being changed by exposure to a new idea that you have to run around with your hands covering your ears, calling out "LA LA LA, I'M NOT LISTENING!" If the ideas in 8th Fire are wrong, the only way to tell people how they are wrong is to listen to them first.<br />
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As for my own revelation, my high school years were spent growing up close to the <a href="http://www.musqueam.bc.ca/Home.html" target="_blank">Musqueam Reserve</a> in Vancouver. Two or three times this white boy heard other teenagers telling me, "Go back where you came from!"<br />
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It was certainly an understandable sentiment and I never took it personally. Some of my ancestors stole the land from some of their ancestors. Obviously what those people in the past did wasn't right but I didn't see what anyone could do about it now.<br />
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The demand did make me wonder, though. Where was I supposed to go? Obviously not back to where I was born since that was Vancouver. So it could only be back to the land of my ancestors. But which one? I am one half Scottish, one quarter Icelandic, and the rest English and Irish.<br />
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The largest part is Scottish. Trouble is Scotland isn't an option because my ancestors had been kicked off their land by the people who stole it from them during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances" target="_blank">Highland Clearances</a>. Where England had taken hundreds of years to convert its common land into estates owned by the lords and gentry, a ten year period saw as many as 2,000 families shown off their land a day. It is one of the reasons for the diaspora of the Scottish today. They ended up across the colonies, including Canada and beyond.<br />
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The drastic change was due to the massive loss Scotland suffered at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden" target="_blank">Battle of Culloden</a> to the English. Many of the Highland Lords lost their lands to English ones. Others were "encouraged" to send their sons to be educated in English schools so that they would understand the "correct" way to treat their tenants. This was a form of cultural absorption. Before, a clan chieftain would act in the interests of his tenants who were also his clan and shared in common ownership of the land. A process called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure" target="_blank">enclosure</a> changed all that and took away common ownership. Tenants who stayed worked the land for little pay and lived off the scraps left behind after the harvest, but there wasn't enough work or food for everyone so most left rather than starve.<br />
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Scotland is out. How else to pick where I should go? Close my eyes, and... Ireland. Hmm. Another case of conquest from England resulting in mass migration of a native population.<br />
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You are familiar with the story, of course. The potato being the major food source for Irish peasants, a potato blight causes the potato to rot resulting in mass starvation. Everyone with the means to do so heads out to one of the colonies in the hopes they can live to eat another day.<br />
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So what has that to do with the English? The English landlords used the conquered Irish land to grow cash crops. The native workers were expected to grow enough food of their own on a small patch of ground around their houses. The discovery that potatoes produced far more protein per plot of land meant it wasn't long before all the tenants relied on potatoes to survive. Unfortunately for everyone involved only one of the 4,000 types of potato was used. We know about the dangers of monoculture now but back then the idea that a single variety of plant could be wiped out by a disease was an unknown concept.<br />
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As the potatoes rotted over winter the tenants asked the landlord for some of the fruits of their labour to keep the wolf of starvation from the door. The landlord looked at the "cash" in cash crops and decided that there was something more important to him than his tenants surviving.<br />
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It is all even more complicated, actually, because the Scoti indigenous people identified with Scotland <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoti" target="_blank">originally came from Ireland</a>, just as there is evidence that some Scottish tribes invaded Ireland <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn" target="_blank">among many others</a>. Not all the tribe would go, of course, just the ones that listened to their elders advice to "Go south-west young man". Or north-east depending where you lived. The rest stayed home where I'm sure many mixed marriages caused strife among families.<br />
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England seems to be conquering everyone. Hail the conquering heroes, right? Only they've been conquered too. Heck, they've been conquered all over the place.<br />
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The most recent is William the Conqueror and the Normans. That means I have to add France to the list of places I need to go back to. Only the Normans weren't really French. They were Norse men, Vikings who had been given land in France so they wouldn't keep raping and pillaging everything.<br />
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Add Norway to the list. Actually, Norse means Norway or Sweden or Denmark. Or Iceland. Oh good, I already have that one. I really should have included the Vikings earlier because they conquered parts of Scotland, Ireland and England. Part of my Scottish roots are in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stornoway" target="_blank">Stornaway</a>, the town that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stornoway_%28residence%29" target="_blank">Stornaway House</a> is named after. It is in the Outer Hebrides which were often and frequently raided and conquered by Vikings. They even still have a slight Norse accent in that part of Scotland. Ireland saw its share of Vikings, too. Dublin was founded by Vikings which is why a Viking Ship monument is a favored meeting spot in town. As for England, Vikings controlled all of East Anglia and traces of their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw" target="_blank">Danelaw</a> can still be found in both UK and Canadian law.<br />
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East Anglia brings to mind Saxony and the Anglo-Saxon-ness of England. It isn't just a name for those good visceral words, but reflects <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England" target="_blank">another conquest</a>. The Germanic tribes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles" target="_blank">the Angles</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons" target="_blank">the Saxons</a> had a mass migration to England in the 5th century which adds Germany and the Netherlands to my list.<br />
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The reason they could conquer the land so easily leads me to my last example of conquest and theft of land, the Roman invasion of England by the Emperor Claudius. Yes that Claudius, the Derek Jacobi stutterer and twitcher. The Romans not only conquered Britain but culturally absorbed it by having three classes of citizens. Top rung were the actual Romans from Rome, second class were those Britons who were romanized, and bottom of the barrel were the Celtic tribes who clung to their indigenous roots. After the collapse of the Roman Empire there was no one organized enough to fight off the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons.<br />
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My conclusion from considering all of this was that if someone wanted to ship me back where I came from, in order to get enough pieces they would need a hand grenade. Which is, after all, basically how people have been moving other people off land they wanted since someone picked up a stick and thought maybe it could be something more.<br />
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People have been conquering other people and stealing their land for a long time and the world is as it is because of it. We can't turn back the clock. We just have to make the best of the world as we have inherited it. Our forefathers conquered the forefathers of the Aboriginal Nations and stole their land, and those guys just needed to get over it. Or so I thought.<br />
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Only it turns out I was wrong. I'm sure it was on their ToDo List but as the 8th Fire made me understand, the Non-aboriginal Canadian Forefathers never actually got around to conquering the Aboriginal Canadian Forefathers.<br />
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OK, that's not strictly true. They conquered some of them. The Beothuk, for example. Hmm. "Conquered" isn't the right word, but I'd have to use the word "successful" next to the word "genocide" and something in my hindbrain prevents me from doing that.<br />
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Then there are the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyandot_people" target="_blank">Huron aka Wyandot</a>, they of the Christmas Carol. They had the unfortunate luck to have land that other Iroquois nations wanted. Those other nations eventually became the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_people" target="_blank">Six Nations of the Mohawk</a>. The Mohawk allied with some of the white folk that were showing up and the Hurons allied with another group. The two groups of white people wanted to steal the land held by the other, and since the aboriginal groups wanted to do exactly the same thing it seemed a match made in heaven. Smallpox and measles tipped the scales against the Huron and the rest is history.<br />
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Getting back to what the 8th Fire had to say, all the other Aboriginal nations that were not conquered were dealt with in essentially two ways: either treaties were made or they were told that everything would be worked out once we all got moved in and things settled down.<br />
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Treaties are easy to understand. It is essentially a contract between governing bodies that affect all the people covered by them. One government is bound by the terms of the contract to treat the people in the other group according to the terms. In this case, the Aboriginal Nations were required to give control of the land over to either the British or Canadian government in return for which they would be guaranteed things like health care, education, and some of those things that set Non-aboriginal Canadian's teeth on edge like having a small amount of tax burden lifted in some circumstances or crossing the border without waiting in line.<br />
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The cry of "treat all Canadians the same" is hard to understand given the existence of treaties. Don't you have the right to make sure the other side lives up to its side of a contract? If you sold your house by offering a mortgage and the other guy moved in and started defaulting on the payments, wouldn't you be annoyed? Maybe take him to court? And the treaties signed by the British and Canadian governments didn't include a date when the payments would be finished. Payments last in perpetuity. Were they idiots? No. As we shall see, they had a cunning plan.<br />
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If you really think the treaties were such a bad deal there is a simple solution. Dissolve the contract. Give the land back. I'm sure nobody would sue for breech of contract.<br />
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Anyway, the other Aboriginal Nations were waiting to get treaties signed but the federal government dragged its heels to buy time. The reason is that the real plan was to do an equivalent of romanization of the Aboriginal population. Culturally absorb them, what the government called <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2008/05/16/f-faqs-residential-schools.html" target="_blank">"aggressive assimilation"</a> but that we now call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system" target="_blank">"cultural genocide"</a>.<br />
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That's why the government created Residential Schools, of course. "Within a generation or two there will be no native population." Expanding on what had worked so well with the children of the clan chieftains in Scotland, all native children would be educated to act and behave as white people. Native populations would disappear, existing treaties would no longer apply and could be eliminated, and the outstanding land claims would evaporate. Poof.<br />
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Only it didn't work out that way even though the program was applied with such vigor that the government had to apologize for the abuses and deaths of children (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system#Mortality_rates" target="_blank">mortality was as high as 30 to 60%</a>) and for the human rights violations that remain some of the worst in our history. Turns out that aboriginal people are as stubborn as Jewish people in keeping their culture alive against all odds. So now the government actually has to deal with those outstanding land claims.<br />
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And that is what the 8th Fire taught me. This is not some conflict that has been settled long ago. There is some unfinished business to deal with here. And for the good of Canada and all Canadians, it would be helpful if we could all know a little bit more about what these issues are.<br />
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I recommend watching the entire series of 8th Fire, but if you are only willing to give it a chance by watching one I suggest the second episode "It's Time", which is the one that taught me I didn't know as much as I thought I did.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-52348426409673401932011-03-31T17:59:00.000-07:002012-11-26T18:36:50.285-08:00Usage Based Billing caused by an Internet Bug called BufferbloatThere has been a lot of talk about <a href="http://www.neutrality.ca/">Net Neutrality</a> (NN) and <a href="http://openmedia.ca/">Usage Based Billing</a> (UBB) recently. The issue appears to be that as more and more people transfer more and more data, the Internet is getting bogged down. <a href="http://www.bittorrent.com/">BitTorrent</a> was <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/139795/faq_comcast_vs_bittorrent.html">originally seen</a> as the biggest culprit, although services like <a href="http://www.netflix.com/">NetFlix</a> are now the <a href="http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/report_netflix_more_popular_bittorrent">front-runners</a>. The current thinking is that improving the situation is going to require <a href="http://www.circleid.com/posts/711209_bandwidth_demands_internet_infrastructure/">large investments</a> in the <a href="http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/02/07/internet-usage-debate-8b-to-keep-pace/">infrastructure</a>.<br />
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The problem with that explanation has always been that <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/gadgets-and-gear/hugh-thompson/what-is-a-fair-price-for-internet-service/article1890596/">the math</a> <a href="http://www.torontolife.com/daily/hype/the-interweb/2011/01/28/how-do-canadian-isps-stack-up-against-the-u-s-netflix-has-the-answer/">doesn't</a> work out. Although it is true that usage has been <a href="http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/060815/dq060815b-eng.htm">going up</a>, the infrastructure has <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html">also been increasing</a> at an exponential rate. Given the actual numbers, there is <a href="http://wordsbynowak.com/2011/02/22/10-myths-from-usage-based-billing-supporters/">no reason</a> for the Internet to have been slowing down. Yet it is absolutely undeniable that it has. For example, you probably have several times the bandwidth you had five years ago. Does the Internet feel faster to you? For most people, the answer is that it feels decidedly slower.<br />
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In the last couple of months, a network engineer working at Bell Labs named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys">Jim Gettys</a> has finally determined why things have been getting slower and slower. He found that there is a bug in the Internet that he has called <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/bufferbloat/">Bufferbloat</a>.<br />
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I'm going to explain <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/">Bufferbloat</a>, but Don't Panic! This is a decidedly non-technical explanation. We are going to look at Bufferbloat by using a classic "I Love Lucy" <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wp3m1vg06Q">episode</a>.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HnbNcQlzV-4" width="420"></iframe><br />
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Lucy and Ethel get a job wrapping candies at a factory. The candies come down a conveyor belt to them, Lucy picks one up and hands it to Ethel, and Ethel wraps it and puts it back onto the conveyor belt. The guy upstream from them making the candies gets the orders for candies in bursts, so sometimes there are no candies for Lucy and Ethel to wrap and sometimes there are lots of them, too many for them to handle at once.<br />
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Further along the conveyor belt is the supervisor. She is watching the candies come down the line. When she sees a lot of wrapped candies, she figures everyone is able to handle their job OK, and yells out "Speed it up a little!". If the candy guy has enough orders, he starts making the candies quicker and quicker until all the orders are filled. This rapid rate causes Ethel to miss wrapping some candies, but the supervisor sees this and yells out "Slow it down a little!".<br />
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OK so far? This is really the way the Internet is designed to work. In the candy factory the supervisor is supposed to see unwrapped candies so she knows to slow down the line. On the Internet, data is supposed to be lost so that the other end knows it should slow down sending data.<br />
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Lucy and Ethel don't want to look like they are doing a bad job, so when the candies come too quickly Lucy starts hiding them in her hat, and Ethel pulls the candies from the hat rather than directly from Lucy. The supervisor never sees any unwrapped candies, so she keeps yelling "Speed it up a little". If the hat fills up then unwrapped candies finally get past Lucy and Ethel and the supervisor slows down the line.<br />
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For a while their deception results in the line going too fast, but quite often they will catch up. The hat will be empty, Ethel will start taking candies directly from Lucy to wrap, and no one will be any the wiser. If the hat fills up, the supervisor quickly drops the speed so everything works out OK. Ethel is wrapping at full speed much more than if the supervisor were speeding up and slowing down the line all the time, so overall the hat trick is a good thing for the factory.<br />
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On the Internet, the equivalent of the hat is a bit of memory called a buffer. Devices on the Internet have buffers for sending and receiving data. As a general concept they are a good thing and keep the Internet flowing smoothly.<br />
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Now a salesperson comes around, and offers Lucy and Ethel a large bucket to replace the hat. Very cheap, only a penny. They worry that all the unwrapped candies they let slip by make them look like they are doing a bad job, so they buy one to replace the hat. Now when bursts of candies come down the line, they can keep up for a longer time before unwrapped candies get past them.<br />
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The salesperson comes around later and offers them a shelf of buckets, then a wall of shelves filled with buckets. Then he comes back and offers an entire warehouse filled with buckets, again all for only a penny. Each time they take the extra space to store candies. "Oh boy," says Lucy to Ethel. "We'll never let an unwrapped candy get past us again."<br />
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At first, she is right about that. The warehouse is so big it never fills up. But then bigger orders start to come in and the candy maker is given new equipment to make candies quicker. The warehouse starts to fill up occasionally, and as time goes on it happens more and more frequently.<br />
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There are two consequences to storing the candies in the warehouse before wrapping them. The first is that the supervisor never slows down the line unless the warehouse is completely filled with candies. By the time that happens, she has sped up the line so many times that it's speed has to be cranked down very quickly until it is running at a snails pace. Anyone watching the line could get whiplash from the speed change. And it only slows down enough to keep the warehouse filled, so the warehouse never empties unless there is a large lack of orders.<br />
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The second consequence is that the candies stored in a full warehouse are getting pretty old by the time Ethel gets around to wrapping them. If you think of the time they sit in the warehouse as if they were sitting on a moving conveyor belt the whole time, the belt would be hundreds of thousands of miles long. By the time they reach the supervisor in the shipping department, it could well be that no one wants these mold-covered candies anymore.<br />
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On the Internet, as memory has gotten cheaper and cheaper the buffers used in Internet equipment have gotten larger and larger. Our hats have been replaced by warehouses. This is Bufferbloat. At the same time, more orders for candy have started showing up in the form of data from applications like BitTorrent and NetFlix. We also have applications like VoIP that are sensitive to the time that data sits around before it is delivered, called latency.<br />
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Latency on the Internet is the amount of time it takes to send data from one place to another, and it is a very different thing from bandwidth. Consider the difference between sending a massive amount of cargo on a cargo ship (increased bandwidth) versus taking a package somewhere very quickly with a fighter jet (reduced latency). Our bandwidth has increased but our latency is getting worse, at least under some conditions.<br />
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Latency is usually considered analogous to distance, just as the candies sitting in the warehouse could be thought of as traveling on a very long conveyor belt. The latency of the Internet when it is suffering from Bufferbloat can make the web servers you are connecting to look like they are several times further away than the moon.<br />
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While it will take a year or two to <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ledbat/charter/">figure out</a> the optimal solutions for Bufferbloat, it is known that there are many things that ISPs can do right now to improve the situation. And it won't cost them all that much money, either. Now that we finally understand the problem, can we convince Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to back down on the stands they have taken on UBB and NN? I certainly <a href="http://www.thewirereport.ca/reports/content/11982-bell_to_put_thinking_cap_on_to_look_at_usage_based_billing_options">hope so</a>, but most of them are pretty <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/05/06/crtc-usage-based-billing-internet.html">invested</a> in their positions.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-133021932239732762010-12-06T13:44:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:37:14.409-08:00An open letter on Bill C-32I <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/who-owns-copyrighted-work.html">believe strongly</a> that we need balance in copyright. For the most part, I believe that Bill C-32 provides much of the balance that is needed. There is one portion of it, however, that renders all other aspects of the copyright act moot. That portion is the digital lock provisions.<br />
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These provisions are nasty. They not only allow someone issuing a copyrighted work to steal from the public all of their fair dealing rights, they also allow the theft of copyrighted works themselves. I feel so strongly about this that any party that supports Bill C-32 with the digital lock provisions in place will lose my vote not just in the next election, but for the rest of my life. These aspects of Bill C-32 are that evil.<br />
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It will no doubt come as a surprise to many that the digital lock provisions of Bill C-32 allow theft of copyright material from the copyright holders, with no recourse for them to determine that infringing is occurring. Let me explain how that comes about.<br />
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Much material that is copyrighted is user-visible. That means that once it is rendered in a form the end-user can understand, the intellectual property will be obvious. Decode a song and it will be recognizable if it is stolen from another artist. Decode a book so it can be read and anyone will recognize it if it is the work of another author. The same is true of movies.<br />
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It is not true, however, for software. The user interface of a program is often the least interesting portion of it, and the easiest to replace. The underlying code can be stolen from the copyright holder with impunity by anyone who places a trivial encryption on it, and Bill C-32 would make it illegal for the legitimate copyright holder to decrypt the runtime to prove that infringement was taking place.<br />
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This is not a theoretical issue. Router manufacturers have been forced in recent years to comply with licenses for copyrighted operating systems they have used, and the only way it was proven that they were using the operating systems in question was to show that the machine code they were operating was the same as the machine code generated from the copyrighted OS. Had the code been encrypted, and had the encryption been illegal to bypass, the theft of the OS would have been impossible to prove.<br />
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To see some of the other evil outcomes of the digital lock provisions of Bill C-32, we only have to look at some of the more outrageous activities south of the border where the DMCA holds:<br />
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- It would be illegal for blind users to try to read eBooks they have already paid for by using screen readers. A programmer in Russia developed just such an application and was <a href="http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/Sklyarov.htm">arrested on a visit</a> to the U.S. and spent <a href="http://www.freesklyarov.org/">several weeks in jail</a>. Charges were eventually dropped through a deal where he turned against his employer.<br />
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- It would be illegal for parents to control restriction of the material watched by their children. A Harvard professor who attempted to analyze the list of sites being blocked by one parental control program to figure out whether it was doing an adequate job was <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/edelman/edelman-v-n2h2/">threatened with prosecution</a> under the DMCA digital lock provisions.<br />
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- It would be illegal to unlock cell phones so that they could be used with a different carrier once the contract was up. Although in the U.S. they have recently introduced a special exception to the DMCA that in theory is supposed to allow this behaviour, the digital lock provisions of the DMCA make the exception <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/ten-years-later/">null and void</a>. The same is true of Bill C-32.<br />
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Let me give a demonstration of just how pernicious the digital lock provisions are in Bill C-32. Consider this sentence:<br />
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IgitalDay ocklay rovisionspay ustmay otnay rumptay allway otherway aspectsway ofway opyrightcay awlay.<br />
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Under the copyright law as described by Bill C-32, if you are reading that sentence online or in some other digital form and you decoded it without using my official pig latin decoder program (just $29.95), then I get to sue you for copyright violation.<br />
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Now that is one bad law.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-45220243169489344582010-11-06T18:36:00.000-07:002013-04-26T09:36:09.878-07:00Directly Downwind Faster Than The WindA <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/downwind_faster_than_the_wind_black.html">recent article</a> in <a href="http://www.makezine.com/">Make:Online</a> and soon to appear in <a href="http://makezine.com/magazine/">Make Magazine</a> discusses the successful attempt by <a href="http://www.fasterthanthewind.org/2009/10/rick-cavallaro.html">Rick Cavallaro</a> to create a wind-powered vehicle that can go faster than the wind. This "land yacht", called the Greenbird, has been verified by the <a href="http://www.nalsa.org/">North American Land Sailing Association</a> to have run at 2.8 times the speed of the wind. They have done this with various sensors, the data for which <a href="http://www.nalsa.org/MeasuremantReport/MeasuremantReport.html">can be found</a> on their website.<br />
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Rick was continuing the work of Jack Goodman who released a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJpdWHFqHm0">video</a> of his toy DDFTTW cart in 2006 and created a huge internet buzz. Unfortunately for Jack, it also created huge controversy. People issued cries of "Perpetual Motion", "fraud", "its all done with string". Physicists claimed if this video were true it would break the basic laws of physics so it is clearly a hoax. One contributor to Make Magazine tried to reproduce the results and couldn't, and therefore concluded that Jack Goodman was a fraud.<br />
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You would think that Rick's full-scale reproduction of Jack's work verified by an independent body would be enough to silence the critics, but people continue to lose their minds over the impossibility of using the wind to travel faster than the wind. The cries of perpetual motion and breaking fundamental laws of physics continue. I find the hysteria just a little bit baffling.<br />
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Understanding how DDFTTW is possible is actually fairly straightforward. Once you understand what is going on, it is clear that what is causing all the naysaying is simply a failure of imagination.<br />
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Ordinarily, harnessing power from the wind is straightforward and it is something that has been done for millenia. You can use a sail or a turbine, but either way you have the wind push against it and get energy as a result. Connect the sail or turbine to a boat or sled or cart and you get the vehicle being pushed by the wind.<br />
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The trouble is that the energy harnessed comes from the relative speed of the air compared to the vehicle. As the vehicle speeds up the push from the air drops, until the vehicle reaches the speed of the wind (a little less due to friction, actually) and no longer gets energy from the air.<br />
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The first thing that is different in Rick's land yacht is that it does not get energy from the difference in speed between the air and the vehicle. Instead it gets energy from the difference in speed between the cart and the ground. As long as the wind continues to blow, the cart can continue to roll. As soon as the wind dies down it comes to a halt. So you can see there is no free energy of the perpetual motion kind here, just well understood harnessing of energy based on the difference in speed between two mediums, the cart and the ground. No matter what speed the car is going (other than when it is halted), there is still a difference in speed that yields energy.<br />
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But now the question comes as to how you harness that energy in order to provide thrust. The answer is that you connect the wheels of the cart to a propeller. The wheels of the cart are in contact with the ground, the propeller is in contact with the air. The wheels provide the energy, and the propeller provides the thrust by moving air.<br />
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The real brilliance of Jack Goodman and Rick Cavallaro is that they not only connected the air to the ground, they also inverted the source of the energy and the thrust. In a typical air-powered design, you get your maximum thrust when the cart is stopped. In this design, you get the least amount of thrust when the cart is stopped. But as the wheels turn faster they power the propeller to provide more and more thrust. As the propeller provides more thrust, the wheels turn faster and generate more energy. Rather than having less energy as the cart approaches the speed of the wind, it has more.<br />
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Does that mean that the cart will go faster and faster until it approaches the speed of light? Of course not, that is just silly. It is only harnessing the energy in the speed difference between the air and the ground, and that is limited.<br />
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You might be thinking that it isn't possible to design the cart to harness more of the energy from the air/ground speed differential than would be required to accelerate the cart to the speed of the wind, but that is easily disprovable. Imagine a more traditional design where you use a sail. Can you imagine the sail pushing a cart that is significantly heavier than the Greenbird? If you can imagine that then you can see that more energy is available with the right design.<br />
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So the problem is not having a vehicle that goes directly downwind faster than the wind. You only need a design to extract enough energy from the relative speeds of the air and the ground to accelerate your cart that fast. The one thing I can't figure out is that there are claims that the vehicle can start itself. Although the cart provides some surface area for the wind to push against, it would be surprising if it were sufficient to overcome the friction of the wheels, especially since the wheels are turning a big propeller. You might think (as I originally did) that the propeller initially acts as a sail just to get things going, but the comments on the article from Make:Online specifically state that there is a ratchet in place to prevent the propeller from ever driving the wheels. The video clearly shows that Jack Goodman's design needed a push to get going, so I have to admit I'm flummoxed on that score.<br />
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As far as a wind-powered cart running faster than the wind, it is a fine bit of out-of-the-box thinking combined with excellent engineering. Kudos to all concerned, but it is hardly going to revolutionize physics.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-60407114567440296412010-02-21T13:04:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:38:24.506-08:00Time Travel and CausationI've talked about my disappointment with many time travel stories because they don't address basic questions about <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.ca/2010/01/lack-of-science-in-time-travel-fiction.html">momentum</a> and try to claim that people can "get away" with time travelling so long as they don't change anything, when quantum mechanics requires them to <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.ca/2010/01/quantum-mechanics-and-time-travel.html">change everything</a> (at least on the scale of the very small). Here is my last objection to the way people <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_in_fiction#Time_travel_themes_and_ideological_function">write time travel stories</a>, and also how they read them. I have read a number of essays and blog entries where people dismiss a time travel story as ridiculous because of the way that they "know" causation works, when in fact we are all ignorant of how causation would work in the presence of time travel. There may be good reasons to doubt time travel is possible, but this certainly isn't one of them.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Objection 3: Considering Causation </span><br />
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Before Einstein developed the theory of relativity, there were some things people believed that no one with any sense would doubt. Things like if something was 10 metres long, it would be 10 metres long no matter how fast you travelled. Or that if two actions occurred at the same instant, they would occur at the same instant for everyone observing the actions no matter how fast they were travelling. Or that if twins were born 2 minutes apart, they would remain 2 minutes apart in age no matter how fast one of them travelled.<br />
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We now know that those viewpoints were wrong. The people who held that they were true were not stupid. It is just that they had not been exposed to living in a world where accurate measurements could be made of things travelling at or a significant fraction of the speed of light.<br />
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The same is true when you consider causation in the context of a universe with time travel. All of our experience with causation has been done while travelling through time in only one direction. Our notion of what is and is not possible with cause and effect is fundamentally determined by this perspective. In fact, the assumptions we make about causation are so fundamental to our view of the universe that we are sometimes not even aware we are making them. Consider Descarte's famous "Cogito ergo sum", or in English "I think, therefore I am". That is often considered a statement that relies on no assumptions at all, but of course it relies on one that is the very foundation of the statement: the existence of causation. In order to have the effect of thinking, you must have a cause, the thinker. When we don't recognize our ignorance about how causation works in a world with time travel, it leads to inflexible thinking and the creation of apparent paradoxes.<br />
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Consider the grandfather paradox. What if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather? Well, what if you did? The universe that would unfold from there would no longer include your birth. In our limited view of causation, we assume that is a problem because if the universe didn't have a version of you that could go back and kill your grandfather, your grandfather would have to be alive. But that is only true in one-way causation. In two-way causation, there is no reason to think that the cause of an event might not be from a time-line that no longer exists.<br />
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Here is a thought experiment to help visualize two-way causation. Consider a wind tunnel with various baffles inside it. You can think of this as the flow of time. As smoke flows through the tunnel, it gets bounced around by the baffles into currents and eddies. Eventually the flow of smoke reaches a steady state that doesn't change. Let's call that State A.<br />
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Now at the very end of the wind tunnel, introduce a new baffle that causes a current of smoke to flow back along the inside top of the tunnel. You can think of this as our time traveller. Eventually, the smoke drops back down into the main flow and introduces turbulence. For a while the smoke is chaotic, but eventually it settles into a new steady state which we'll call State B.<br />
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If State B does not result in smoke hitting the new baffle we introduced, and as a result there is no longer a backwards tendril of smoke as there was in State A (our time traveller, remember), does that mean that State B of the wind tunnel is a paradox? Of course not. It just means that it required an earlier influence from State A that is no longer present in order to reach State B.<br />
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So what would two-way causation actually look like? I have no idea. If things as fundamental to our view of the universe as an object's length or the nature of simultaneous events can be brought into question, who knows what basic assumptions two-way causation would challenge. Of course, some things seem more likely than others. Slowly fading from a photograph strikes me as one of the less-likely outcomes. But ultimately we should admit our ignorance and acknowledge that we have no idea what causation would look like in a universe that has time travel. As long as they are consistent, stories about time travel should feel free to do whatever they like. As an aid to the reader who is stuck with a worldview that has only allowed one-way causation, though, it would be considerate if authors made the way causation works clear in there stories. <a href="http://1632.org/">Some</a> <a href="http://www.nesfa.org/reviews/Leeper/lestdark.html">do</a>. <br />
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Anyway, those are my thoughts on time travel stories. If there are any stories that qualify as science fiction by my three criteria of <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/lack-of-science-in-time-travel-fiction.html">considering momentum</a>, dealing with the implications of <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/quantum-mechanics-and-time-travel.html">always changing history</a>, and identifying a set of assumptions about causation, let me know. So far I haven't seen one.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-30541752820079699112010-01-19T17:18:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:38:50.103-08:00Quantum Mechanics and Time TravelI have issues with how many time travel stories hand wave away a lot of science. My first objection was about<a href="http://callenish.blogspot.ca/2010/01/lack-of-science-in-time-travel-fiction.html"> how momentum was dealt with</a> (or rather, not dealt with) in these stories. Now I'd like to focus on what Quantum Mechanics says about changes to the universe when time travel is present. <br />
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Often in time travel stories the author will try to get around the possibility of a paradox by claiming that the characters are only allowed to remain in the past so long as they don't change anything. Stories where the timestream would just spit out anyone that made a change in human history are an example in a seemingly never ending line of examples of humanity's hubris. Why on earth would the universe care whether humans noticed a change? The only things that the universe can be said to care about are the fundamental laws that it follows. And one of these laws appears to demand that if time travel is possible, the universe must be changed by it every time.<br />
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Just to be clear here, I am talking about fictional universes that allow time travel. <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/lack-of-science-in-time-travel-fiction.html">My complaint</a> is that time travel stories often don't support enough science to be called science fiction. Determining how the actual universe would work with time travel is left as an exercise for the reader.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Objection 2: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle</span><br />
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Einstein is famous for having made a statement that is paraphrased as, "<a href="http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/64">God does not play dice with the universe.</a>" I am disappointed that the reputed reply of Niels Bohr is not as famous, because I think it is just as good. "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."<br />
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So far, a vast amount of experimental data <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments">has shown</a> that God does in fact play dice with the universe, by which I mean that the underlying mechanism of the universe for determining <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_state">things</a> like particle position and momentum is probabilistic in nature. A particle can be thought of as smeared out across <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition">many positions</a> until it is measured, at which point it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse">jumps randomly</a> (based on probability) to one of the positions it was smeared across.<br />
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At the risk of Bohr's shade telling me to also stop telling God what to do, I will make my own claim. "God does not let us cheat at the dice of the universe." In the presence of time travel, the randomness that is at the heart of quantum mechanics cannot disappear.<br />
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Suppose you watch a physicist collapse the probability wave on a particle to measure the exact position of that particle. Now go back in time and watch the exact same experiment performed again. Does the physicist get exactly the same result? If so, then you have just cheated God at dice because you knew the outcome before it happened.<br />
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You have also created a situation where you can violate the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-uncertainty/">Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle</a>. It says that certain pairs of properties can never be known simultaneously with precision. The most commonly cited properties are the position and momentum of a particle. The more precisely you know one quantity, the less precisely you can know the other.<br />
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But suppose the physicist in our previous example sets up the experiment to measure either the exact position or the exact momentum. They don't actually know which one they will measure, they let you determine it. You set a switch to measure the exact position, then time travel back and set the switch to measure the exact momentum. Suddenly, both position and momentum are known beyond the boundaries of the uncertainty principle, and we have just cheated the universe out of obeying its own principles.<br />
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The only way I can think of to get around these issues is to assume that each and every time that time travel occurs, the outcome of the wave function collapse becomes completely unknown. The physicist measuring the position of the particle has to get different answers on each time travel trip. Just because the time traveller knew what the position was before, the act of time travelling has invalidated that result and they have no more idea than they did the first time around as to what its position might be this time.<br />
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So at the quantum level, time travel must automatically change the universe no matter what the time traveller does, or at least that portion of the universe within the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone">light cone</a> originating at the point the time traveller travelled back to.<br />
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What does that mean for human history? Would we see changes to history every time someone travels back in time? Not necessarily. <a href="http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html">Chaos theory</a> is helpful to consider here. <a href="http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/21.shtml">Strange attractors</a> could allow for the overall shape of history to snap toward particular ranges of outcomes, keeping things fairly constant. Unfortunately, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect">butterfly effect</a> suggests that relatively small changes (like differences in outcome from wave function collapse perhaps?) could cause history to jump to other attractors. So good luck to time travellers hoping not to substantially alter history. The outcome seems to be completely out of your hands no matter what you do. <br />
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Then there is the tendency for quantum effects at a macroscopic scale to disappear. Even if all the air molecules in a room suddenly went in different directions, would anyone notice or care? Still, recent experiments have shown that quantum effects can <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=living-in-a-quantum-world">persist at the macro level</a>. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnHM-PyN0gg" target="_blank">Plants extraction of energy</a> from sunlight seems like a good example.<br />
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The resetting of probability waves by time travel does not suggest that the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/">Many Worlds Interpretation</a> of quantum mechanics must be correct in a time travelling universe, by the way. There could still be just one universe realized at any time out of many potential ones, just as in a world without time travel.<br />
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You can think about the set of states the universe can reach as a tree where travelling up the tree is moving forward in time. Each branching of the tree describes the states a particle could assume after a wave collapse. The Many Worlds Interpretation would say that each branch tip represents a universe that exists, but you could instead think of it as a universe that could potentially exist. Perhaps at any time there is a single actualized universe. Picture a caterpillar climbing up the tree. At each branching, it can choose any of the branches to follow based on the probability for that branch to be actualized (perhaps represented by the thickness of the branch). At any one time, the caterpillar is only on one path, representing the state of the current universe. If the caterpillar falls back down the tree (travelling backward in time) and has to start climbing again it may take a different route up the tree, but the universe would still have a single state, albeit not the one it reached before.<br />
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For those who think that causation would not allow that (since the cause of the new probability wave collapse would be the time traveller from the old collapse who would no longer exist), tune in next time for my essay on <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.ca/2010/02/time-travel-and-causation.html">Time Travel and Causation</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-25641751036358841512010-01-14T01:02:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:39:24.829-08:00The Lack of Science in Time Travel FictionI am a sucker for time travel stories. I love thinking about ways in which the past could be altered and considering ways in which that might be better or worse.<br />
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For example, if Hitler had not risen to power and started World War II, would we have had the civil rights movement in the 60s? Did it take the extremely negative example of the holocaust to convince a new generation growing up in the 50s that racism and prejudice of any kind are abhorrent? And what about surviving the nuclear arms race? Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would mutually assured destruction have worked as a strategy to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war? Would the human race have survived a period of nuclear proliferation without a negative example to draw on?<br />
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It is reminiscent of Leibniz's "Best of all possible worlds". I am not referring to the mockery that Voltaire made of that phrase in <i>Candide </i>when he suggested that the phrase meant there was no unhappiness in the world. I mean it as Leibniz meant it, that for all the unhappiness in the world, things would be even worse if we did not go through that unhappiness.<br />
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To me, that gives us two great types of time travel stories that I seem to see far too few of: ones where people try to change the world for the better only to have it get much worse, and those where people change the world for the worse knowing that the overall effect will be better.<br />
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But for all these time travel stories that I love, I find that there are few that I can call Science Fiction despite the fact that there are at least some reasons in science to think that time travel of some sort may be possible. I am not a physicist and if anybody is reading this and wishes to correct me on any of these points then feel free. I think that they are all rudimentary enough to pass muster, though, and it surprises me that no one ever seems to deal with them in any time travel stories that I have read.<br />
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I have a number of issues with the science in time travel stories although suspension of disbelief allows me to treat them as entertaining fantasy. This is my first objection. Others will follow in later posts.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Objection 1: Position and Momentum</span><br />
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Whenever someone travels in time, they always end up standing on the ground, usually in exactly the same place they left from. There are so many ways this is a troublesome concept.<br />
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<b>a) Ground level changes.</b> Moving any significant distance in time while maintaining the exact same place makes it likely you'd be buried in the ground or floating in the air. Thanks to plate tectonics, you may even be over or under the sea. If you were on a boat, a short trip of a few hours would put sea level at a different location thanks to tides, so make sure your time machine is a submarine that can drop from heights. Of course, none of this really matters because of the other positional problems that follow.<br />
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<b>b) Choose a different time of day?</b> The earth has just moved under you. If you stay in exactly the same place, you could be anywhere else on the same latitude. Assuming some kind of location displacement built into your time machine to account for this, you have to deal with momentum changes. Unless you are at the north or south pole, this will be problematic.<br />
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Assume a non-flying Delorean is time-travelling for a 12 hour displacement and is maintaining its position on the earth. In order to account just for the vector of the earth's rotation (and you can see from the length of this post that there are many other vectors) you would have to go from travelling in one direction to the complete opposite direction. Eric Idle tells us that the earth revolves at 900 miles an hour (this depends on where you are on the earth, but works for approximations), so to flip your direction of travel you would have to change your speed 1800 miles an hour. That is mach 2.4. Assuming the Delorean did not get ripped apart (a ridiculously big if), at this speed the air would start to lift the car into the air without massive stabilizers to keep you on the ground. Assuming your tires were in good shape, your coefficient of friction with the ground would be about 0.8. That means you would require 41km of road to break on, less if the stabilizers introduced a lot of drag. But you would have to worry about creating too much G-force if deceleration was too fast. A flying Delorean has to deal with similar speed issues, but fortunately doesn't need roads.<br />
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Of course, if you only moved in 24 hour increments you could more or less ignore this factor.<br />
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<b>c) Choose a different time of month?</b> The moon does not just orbit around the earth, the earth makes small movements toward and away from the moon as well. They each orbit a point between them called the barycenter point. The earth only shifts about 4700km which is just 3/4s of the width of the earth itself, but it still would be a shock to a time traveller to suddenly find themselves buried deep within the earth or thousands of miles above it. The speed of movement is only 41km per hour and even doubling it does not give a number anywhere near the others, so the momentum issue in this case can be ignored.<br />
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Again, if you choose the same time of the lunar month you can do away with this as a consideration.<br />
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<b>d) Choose a different time of the year?</b> The earth is no longer anywhere near you as it has travelled around the sun. This is not usually a problem for us because gravity emits a long, enduring pull to keep us travelling along with the earth. Since we skipped that part with our time travel, we are now either on the far side of the sun from the earth floating in space, or miraculously transported to the earth but now having to deal with the momentum change. <br />
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The earth travels at about 107,500 km/hour or 30 km/second. Every second of time travel, the earth gets 30 km away from us. Assuming we want to stick with the earth, making a 6 month time travel journey requires a momentum change of 215,000 km/hour, or Mach 200. There is no point to incorporating motion displacement into your time machine because you can't slow down quickly enough to make "maintaining your position" mean anything.<br />
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Again, we can eliminate this issue by only time travelling in 1 year increments. Since a year is not an even number of days or lunar months, though, the previous two issues come into play when we do that.<br />
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<b>e) The sun revolves around the galactic centre of the milky way once every 250 Million years.</b> Estimates of how fast vary, but a conservative estimate is about 200km per second. That means for every second we travel back in time, the sun and earth and everything we know is being dragged back the way we came by 200 kilometres. That amounts to over 700,000 kilometres per hour time-travelled. <br />
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The good news is that for trips of less than 500,000 years back in time, the vectors of motion will be similar enough that there is not much worry about momentum. The bad news is that your time machine still needs to be a spaceship so that you can try to catch up with the earth.<br />
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<b>f) The milky way is moving at about 300 km/sec within the local group of galaxies.</b> Reverse the direction when travelling backwards in time as the milky way will occupy its former position, but no forces are acting on your time machine to make that true for you. Again, there won't be much difference in momentum between you and the earth, it will just be much further away.<br />
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<b>g) The local group of galaxies is moving toward something called the great attractor at 1000 kilometres per second.</b> Same details as other categories.<br />
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<b>h) The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.</b> That sounds like we'd have to move faster still to catch up to the earth, but in fact the reverse may be true, although the speed boost would be small. Since both we and the earth would be farther back in time, that means that the space between us would be smaller. It amounts to <a href="http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575">0.007% smaller per million years</a>. In any case, this does not seem to be a big enough effect to worry about.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">The Net Result</span></b><br />
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So can we add up all these speeds and come up with an answer as to how fast our time machine would have to travel to catch up with the earth? Unfortunately, no. Many of the vectors for these speeds are at angles, sometimes turning back on each other which means that to some degree they may cancel each other out.<br />
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Most articles that discuss the speeds at which the earth and sun move through the universe talk about how you have to <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-fast-is-the-earth-mov">calculate the speed relative to something else</a>. What we want to use is the position of the earth sometime in the past. This seems a singular request, so I have looked for something more neutral. The best answer seems to be to measure the <a href="http://calgary.rasc.ca/howfast.htm">earth's redshift against the cosmic background radiation</a>, which is the most distant and stable source we can look at. The net result is that the earth is moving at 600 kilometres per second in the direction of the constellations Leo and Virgo. Moving back in time, the earth would recede in the opposite direction.<br />
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This means that a way to launch a spaceship out of the earth's gravity well, if time travel were possible, would be to wait until Leo and Virgo were overhead and then move a fraction of a second into the past. It would also mean that time travel could provide a way to cover interstellar distances provided we weren't picky about direction. Perhaps it could get us close to the star Virgilis 61, which has a Super Earth planet around it.<br />
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But 600 kilometres per second is awfully fast if we wanted to stick with the earth. It is over 2 million kilometres an hour, or 0.2% of the speed of light. The fastest spacecraft we have ever created, the twin Helios probes, reached only about a <a href="http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/F/fastest_spacecraft.html">10th this speed</a>. The situation becomes even worse if you don't want to spend as many years in space travelling as your time jump. If you wanted to travel back just 5 years, the earth would be 95,000,000,000 kilometres away. Travelling at 600 kilometres a second would take you the same amount of time, 5 years, to reach it. Speed up to 150,000 kilometres a second, half the speed of light, you would still take more than a week to reach earth although time dilation would make it seem about a day shorter.<br />
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So perhaps some sort of warp drive would still be required for a functioning time machine, if only to keep it in the same general vicinity as earth. Changes in momentum with the earth and sun could all be dealt with during decelerating from half the speed of light.<br />
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Next up - Objection 2: <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.ca/2010/01/quantum-mechanics-and-time-travel.html">Quantum Mechanics and Time Travel</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-85258447716451774152010-01-09T13:10:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:40:32.594-08:00The Cure for Binary WorldviewsSome people reading my <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/binary-truth-in-western-culture.html">post</a> on the limitations imposed on our thinking by the bimodal nature of our view of truth may have found themselves frustrated by it. "Something is either true or it is not. That is undeniable", they may have said. Well, I deny it. So does a significant portion of the population of the world.<br />
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Let me give you a simple example to expand your view of the problem. The checkout time of a particular bed and breakfast is 11:00AM. True or false: you will be charged for an extra day if you leave after 11:00AM.<br />
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That depends on how long after 11:00AM you leave, doesn't it. The truth or nontruth of that statement is not covered with a simple binary true or false. If you checkout at 11:05AM it is probably not a problem. What about 11:15AM? Now you may be getting some looks but you probably won't have to pay. 11:30AM? By now, the owner may be coming around asking why you are still there. It is even possible they will demand you pay for another day, but in all likelihood if you left right away they would drop the demand that you pay. 12:00PM? They may no longer be willing to drop the demand. 2:00PM? It is getting to be probable you will have to pay for an extra day. 8:00AM the next morning and you will definitely have to pay.<br />
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I think it helps to understand how people in other parts of the world view the concept of truth to understand the ways in which our own is lacking. This TEDIndia talk discusses the difference in how the west sees the world as opposed to how people in India see it, starting with the cultures' founding myths. It is well worth watching.<br />
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To give another example from India, consider the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syadvada"><b>Syādvāda</b></a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism">Jainism</a>. It has truth states such as "In some ways it is", and "In some ways it is indescribable". Add to this the truth states mentioned by Devdutt Pattanaik in the TED talk (and any other states that we may find useful), and we can re-evaluate the problematic examples from both my <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/binary-truth-in-western-culture.html">earlier post</a> and this one: <br />
<ul>
<li>America's consumption is responsible for the price of oil? Some-but-not-all.</li>
<li>Bisphenol A causes cancer in humans? Likely-but-perhaps-not.</li>
<li>Bone marrow transplants don't help breast cancer patients? Not-now-but-maybe-later.</li>
<li>Human-caused climate change is real? Almost-certainly-but-still-a-remote-chance-not. <br />
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<li>Checking out after checkout time means paying for another day? Mostly-but-not-always. <br />
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</ul>
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Try thinking about the day-to-day issues that confront you with these added truth-states in your repertoire. The results may just surprise you.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-36648311040150869382010-01-06T18:07:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:41:12.363-08:00Binary Truth In Western CultureA <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation.html">recent TED talk</a> mentions that one of the great things that happened during the enlightenment was that we shook off much of the legacy from the ancient Greeks that was stifling our ability to think for ourselves. Since they were wrong about a lot of things, treating their pronouncements as eternal wisdom held us back from making progress in our understanding of the world. But there is one area of thought where ancient thinking has become so insidious that we are not even aware of its influence. It is an area where we think we are being more rational in our thinking whereas in fact we are straying further from reality. I am talking about true/false logic and how it affects our worldview.<br />
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Let me be clear that I am not talking about formal logic. I am talking about how individuals throughout our society view the issues of the world as belonging to only two states: true and false.<br />
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I started giving this serious study during the skyrocketing oil prices of 2008. An intelligent person said to me, "I was glad to find out that the high price of oil was due to China's increased consumption. I was worried that it was our[America's] fault."<br />
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I was surprised though I shouldn't have been. This is just an artifact of the worldview of our culture. China's growth caused an increase in the price of oil, therefore America's consumption of oil has no effect on the price? The world is a complicated place, and almost everything in it has more than one cause. But the way our culture applies a true/false logical view on everything has obscured that fact from many people's view of many issues.<br />
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This attitude is endemic throughout all western nations. We can't just blame Fox News for this (although they are a particularly egregious example), it is everywhere within our culture. It is implicit in the views expressed throughout the blogosphere as well.<br />
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Where did this bimodal view of the world originate? I believe it came from science. In science, something is either proven or it is not. There are different standards for what constitutes proof (the gold standard being the randomized double blind trial) but once the evidence for an hypothesis passes a given level, it is considered proved. The conceit is that we pass instantly from no knowledge to knowing something in an instant.<br />
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This approach to truth is of course nonsense. What actually happens is that we build up evidence that something is true. The probability that something will ultimately cross our proof threshold increases over time. To claim that we suddenly go from knowing nothing to knowing something is an artificial construct that both comes from and reinforces our notion that truth only has two states: true and false.<br />
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This notion of what is true actually hurts us. An obvious example is the way the tobacco industry abused the scientific notion of truth by setting an artificially high the level of proof required to show that smoking caused cancer. Because of this true/false distinction never quite crossing their artificial finish line for proof, they were able to win a seemingly never-ending series of court cases despite the fact that anyone with good sense knew their product did indeed cause cancer in the population.<br />
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A more recent example of an industry abusing this notion of truth is seen in the recent handling of Bisphenol A. A <a href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/34469.php">study a few years ago</a> found that Bisphenol A caused cancer in rats. The industry that produces plastics made with Bisphenol A was <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/28/f-health-bisphenol.html">quick to point out</a> that no studies had shown any effects on humans. This was true at the time, although <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Studies_on_humans">studies published</a> in 2008 and 2009 did show that there were health risks to humans with high levels of Bisphenol A in their bodies.<br />
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But when products made with it were first produced, we really did know nothing about the effects of Bisphenol A on humans. Were we as ignorant by the time the rat studies started showing up? No, <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/its-time-to-pan/">we were not</a>. The rat studies each contributed one more piece in the growing evidence that Bisphenol A affects humans in a negative way. Each was evidence, but not proof. Each piece of evidence made it more likely that we would eventually find out (meaning cross the proof threshold) that Bisphenol A causes cancer in humans. To act like we are no closer to knowing something when we have evidence to support it is just stupid, and it is a stupidity that has infected the way our society views the world.<br />
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This is especially obvious when you consider the the difference in perspective between terminally ill patients and doctors with a scientific view of the world. The doctor will say, "I can only prescribe treatments that I know will work", meaning treatments that have reached the proof level that the doctor considers appropriate. The patient will say, "I don't have time for you to prove these things. I'll be dead by the time that you do and that does me no good. Give me the treatment you think most likely to work even if in the end it turns out you were wrong."<br />
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I remember when the studies came out that showed that bone marrow transplants did not result in women with breast cancer living longer. All of the media coverage talked about <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/False-Hope-Marrow-Transplantation-Breast/dp/0195187768">how terrible it was</a> that those women received unnecessary transplants. That coverage made me angry. Sure it turned out that the transplants didn't end up having a net effect on extending lives, but the <a href="http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/101A2A.htm">early results</a> gave evidence that in fact lives were extended. Those transplants weren't unnecessary, they were the best guess at the time as to what would work. I applaud both the doctors and patients who decided to take that chance. It was the right thing to do.<br />
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The fact that we think we know that bone marrow transplants don't help women with breast cancer is dangerous in another way. The transplants are inherently dangerous and many people die of the treatment earlier than they would without it. Given that the net effect for breast cancer patients was no change in overall survival times, that means that some women did live longer as a result of receiving the transplants. Imagine if we could identify that group and give transplants <a href="http://www.locateadoc.com/articles/don39t-write-off-highdose-chemotherapy-with-bone-marrow-transplant-for-breast-cancer-experts-say-129.html">only to them</a>. Or consider that bone marrow transplants are getting safer all the time. Is it true that there would be no survival advantage after 5 years of improvements? <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20091229wrentham_senator_pushes_to_ax_some_health-care_benefits/">It doesn't matter</a>. We now <i>know</i> that <b>bone marrow transplants help breast cancer == false</b>. You can't argue with logic.<br />
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Given the influence science has had on creating this attitude within our culture, it is ironic that one of its biggest scandals to hit science in recent years was caused by the frustrations that a group of scientists experienced because of it. I'm referring to the climate change emails scandal, aka <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident">ClimateGate</a>.<br />
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You probably heard about this scandal. It was very big news among all the climate change denial people and that leaked over into the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102186.html">mainstream press</a>. You probably don't know what it was about (although you may <a href="http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/413976_climategate08.html?source=mypi">think you do</a>). Some scientists wrote emails about falsifying climate change data. That part became common knowledge. But why did they want to falsify the data? That part of the affair was not publicized. The reason that their motivation was not part of the story is that sharing that information didn't suit the agenda of the climate change deniers. They hoped that people would assume it was because climate change wasn't real but that the scientists wanted to claim that it was. That answer is incorrect.<br />
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The scientists wanted to falsify the data because they were frustrated that the public wanted climate change to either be true or false. The trouble is, the world is a complicated place. In most places the temperature is going up. In some places it is going down. That is why the phrase "global warming" is being replaced with the phrase "climate change". It is more accurate, even though the overall trend is warmer.<br />
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The tricky part for the scientists, however, is that in a few places there is no change at all. And the frustration for them is that even though there are 10,000 places where the climate is changing for every one that is staying the same, "equal time" is being given to the reports about those few even in some supposedly academic journals.<br />
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The press is trying to claim that climate change is "big business", which is just plain silly. When is the last time you saw a fat-cat scientist? Even if you don't believe in climate change, it is hardly controversial to point out that big business pollutes. Nor is it controversial to say that scientists are claiming that pollution is one of the causes of climate change. Thus, no one should be upset if I make the claim that big business would be negatively affected by government policies that seriously addressed climate change (whether you agree that it exists or not). As far as big business goes, I think it is fairly obvious to any but the worst apologist that they do not want climate change to be real. This results in the same manipulation that we have seen in the plastics industry and the tobacco industry as far as whether climate change is <i>true</i>.<br />
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If you have ever been in the situation where you know a lot about a topic, and people who don't know anything about it keep insisting something that is not true, then you can appreciate the scientists' frustration. I certainly can, even though I don't condone for a second them carrying out the actions they described in the emails. Perhaps they wouldn't condone it either, and were just blowing off steam in their emails.<br />
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The trouble is that it is easy to lie with data by being selective about the data you choose. The public is easily confused by this. After all, none of them are experts in the field of climate change. How do they know how much emphasis to give any particular piece of data? And no one, not even the experts, is able to say that climate change has been proved, that we have passed an arbitrary line from knowing nothing to knowing something. All they can say is that there is a huge amount of evidence to support it.<br />
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If only we had more ways of viewing the world that true and false, we might be able to cope better with the real state of climate change science. Stay tuned, and I'll give you <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/01/cure-for-binary-worldviews.html">what I consider</a> a solution.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-18618236257391715492010-01-03T15:39:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:41:30.762-08:00I Invented GoogleOne reason people have given me for resisting the free sharing of their ideas has to due with regret. It seems to be an almost universal experience to feel resentment when you have an idea and then later see someone take the same idea and make a lot of money or get a lot of credit from it. In most cases you know that the idea was developed completely independently and that the person who succeeded did so solely on their own merit, but if you've broadcast the idea beforehand then the thought that you might have given them your idea and then seen them succeed with it seems too much to bear. For this reason, people still want to hoard their ideas.<br />
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I thought I'd share an example from my own life of giving away an idea that ended up being the foundation for a hugely successful company. I hope it may help give a sense of perspective on this.<br />
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Back in the mid-90s, I came up with the basic idea that Larry Page and Sergey Brin later developed into PageRank. They used it as the basis of their search algorithm and founded the company Google as a result. I even mentioned the concept in a published paper. I don't know whether either of them ever read that paper, but they might have because we worked in the same field at the time, Information Retrieval.<br />
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If anyone should feel resentment I should, shouldn't I? That could have been me running a billion dollar company.<br />
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What nonsense. I have never felt anything but happy for their success. They deserve everything they have. In the unlikely event that they even read that paper, in the even more unlikely event that it unconsciously inspired them to invent the Page Rank algorithm, then I am nothing but proud to have given a tiny amount of inspiration to a technology that has improved peoples' lives to such a degree. But I didn't start up Google the company. I didn't make the millions of decisions that made it become the company that it is or that caused it to impact peoples' lives the way it has. I didn't even write a search engine for web pages.<br />
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Now, my statement that I came up with the basic idea behind PageRank is a bit overstated, so I need to give some context to show how little importance there is in having previously thought of an idea that leads to someone else's success.<br />
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During the 90s I worked on a research project that looked for ways to write artificial intelligence programs that worked with the law. One of these programs was a search engine for court decisions. Among the things that lawyers need when working on a case is something called a "leading case". This is a legal decision that is the first to decide a new principle in law. In trying to adjust the search results to bring the leading cases to the top, I realized that I could do it by looking at how often the case was cited by other cases. Anyone working in the same area of law was going to use the same leading cases so it would be cited more often than any others. By adjusting the search results to take into account how often other cases cited that one, the leading cases popped to the top of the results.<br />
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There are three big leaps from that idea that Larry and Sergey made that I didn't. The first is to apply this not just to academic papers (which is the equivalent to legal text that they started with) but to all web pages. Because I was thinking about the problem in terms of leading cases, I don't know that it would ever have occured to me to apply it to the web. What is a "leading" web page?<br />
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The second big leap was to realize that the importance of the web page/academic paper/legal case that cites another should be used in calculating the importance of the cited one. Since judges decisions need to be treated as equally important (at least within a certain level of the court) it is doubtful that would have benefited the search results in my program. In any case, using the citation score of a citing case did not occur to me (although using the matching score of the citing case to a particular search result did).<br />
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The last big leap they made was to start up a search engine company for the web using that algorithm as the foundation. I would never have done that. In fact, I thought it was a really bad idea not just because of all the competition already out there but also because I thought crawling the web for a search engine wouldn't scale as the web grew in size. I had a friend working on the OpenText search engine at the time, and I had many conversations with him about why I thought it was the wrong approach for indexing the web. I'll write another post sometime about what I thought would work and what I did about it. I'll post it just for historical purposes, though, because it turns out that thanks to <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html">MapReduce</a>, <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html">BigTable</a>, and the <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html">Google File System</a> I was dead wrong.<br />
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In any case, the point I am making here is that you should get over the feeling that sharing your idea will make you feel like a fool later on if someone else is successful with it. As I said in a <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2009/12/creative-urge.html">previous post</a> the idea is the least important part in someone becoming successful. If I can realize the silliness of the notion that I invented something as big as Google, you should be able to do it to.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-11993610936169217662010-01-01T11:19:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:41:54.000-08:00Who Owns a Copyrighted Work?In honour of European <a href="http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday">Public Domain Day</a> (North America won't get a Public Domain Day until 2019) I thought I'd post some thoughts on copyright.<br />
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First, a disclaimer. For my whole career I have made a living from copyright. As a software developer, I rely on the existence of copyright to make the work I do worth being paid a salary. Some might think my opinions would be biased by that. But I have a second disclaimer. I am a consumer of copyrighted works. As a consumer, I recognize the value in keeping copyright limited. What I would like to see is a copyright law where there is a balance between the rights of the copyright holder and the rights of the consumer.<br />
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With that out of the way, I would like to ask all of you to think about a question. Before you go on reading, see if you can figure out who owns a copyrighted work. If you think the answer is obvious, I will point out that it is a trick question. You might want to look at the question again and make sure you fully understand what it is asking.<br />
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Have you got an answer? If you thought that a copyrighted work is owned by the copyright holder, I am afraid you get the wrong answer buzzer. The copyright holder owns the copyright on the work but not the work itself. A copyright is not the same as ownership rights. It is a <a href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/the-statute-of-queen-anne/">limited</a> monopoly on control and exploitation of the work. It is limited in terms of time and it is limited in terms of application through exceptions like fair-use rights. None of these restrictions are possible with ownership rights.<br />
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Now, IANAL but I have made a serious study of the subject. I believe I have an answer to the question of who owns a copyrighted work even while it is under copyright. To understand the answer, and to clearly understand the difference between owning the work and owning a copyight on the work, we have to take a journey through the world of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-private_partnership">Public-Private Partnerships</a>, or P3s.<br />
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A P3 is an arrangement between a governing body and a private company whereby the private company gets to exploit some limited monopoly right in return for which they finance the creation of some public infrastructure. That description may seem a bit confusing, so here is an example.<br />
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Suppose a city wanted to build a bridge and they didn't want to raise the money through taxes to pay for it. They might approach a bridge-building company and suggest that the company arrange to finance building the bridge themselves. In return for paying for the bridge, the company would not only get the contract to build the bridge but it would also get the right to charge tolls on the bridge for some fixed period of time, say 30 years. The city might arrange for some exceptions in the contract. Perhaps emergency vehicles and buses get to pass through without paying a toll. If the bridge-building company decides that it will make enough money under those terms then a deal can be struck and the bridge can be built without affecting existing taxes.<br />
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The parallels with copyright should be obvious: a limited monopoly to make money that is limited both by time and by exceptions. In a sense, copyright is an early form of P3 done with a social contract between the government and those who create new works rather than with individually negotiated private contracts. The public gets all these new works, and the creators get to try to make enough money to make the effort to create a new work worthwhile.<br />
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So who owns the copyrighted work? Well, who owns the bridge? Certainly not the company collecting tolls on it. The answer is obvious: the public owns the bridge. To know this, you only have to look at who gets control of the bridge once the limited monopoly runs out. The same is true with copyright. Who gets control of a copyrighted work once the copyright runs out? The public. The public owned the work all along.<br />
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This logic may make you worry that people will use their ownership of a work to pirate during the copyright period, thus undermining any benefits derived from copyright laws. Think about the toll collection on the bridge, though. No one doubts that the bridge belongs to the public rather than the company collecting the tolls. That doesn't reduce the moral obligation to pay tolls when you cross the bridge.<br />
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Let's follow the analogy between the bridge and copyright a little further. Let's imagine that the city announced to the public that they were going to extend the period that the company could collect tolls by another 30 years. The toll money would still flow into the company coffers rather than being available to the city. Can you imagine the public outcry that would follow this announcement?<br />
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And yet the same thing has happened with copyright. The government has increased the time limit for copyright several times and the public remained all but silent. Why? I think it is because people are not clear about the fact that they in fact own the copyrighted work. If people realized that every time the government increased the rights of copyright holders they did so by thieving from the rights of the public, people would be up in arms about it.<br />
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So spread this meme about the difference between copyright and ownership right, and about the public's ultimate ownership of copyrighted works. If enough people change the way they think about their ownership rights of those works, it may be a way to return balance to copyright law.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-51377055044705181372009-12-30T11:11:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:42:28.950-08:00Novelizations of the Icelandic SagasTo demonstrate how easy it is to share your a-ha <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2009/12/share-your-world-changing-ideas.html">ideas</a>, I thought I'd share one of mine.<br />
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When the first Peter Jackson <i>Lord of the Rings</i> movie came out, I realized that I hadn't read the trilogy since I was a teenager. I wondered whether I would still enjoy the novels as much now that I was middle-aged. The answer, incidentally, is that I did enjoy them but in a completely different way than I did back then, and I am glad I took the time to revisit them.<br />
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Since I enjoyed the trilogy, I thought I`d try reading <i>The Simarillion</i> again as well. I had hated this as a teenager. It was not written in a style I had any experience with, and I just found the narrative terse and lacking in any characters I felt I could care about because they had so little detail. Dialogue was offered only when necessary, and inner thoughts and emotions virtually missing in action.<br />
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In the ensuing years, however, I became an avid student of the Icelandic Sagas and that made all the difference in my ability to appreciate the story. On rereading <i>The Simarillion</i> I saw at once that it is written in the same style as the sagas, which I'm sure Tolkien did <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/myth.html">on purpose</a>. Here is <a href="http://www.simnet.is/gardarj/folk/sagas.htm">one description</a> of the saga style:<br />
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The literary style of the Sagas was unique until this century when it was re-invented by modern authors. The Icelandic Sagas only contain straight conversation and descriptions of events, people and places. Nowhere is there added what any person in them is thinking, the acts or the words speak for themselves. Usually the Icelandic Sagas are terse and their sparse use of prose makes them an unique cultural heritage.</blockquote>
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Some people may not be aware of this, but the entire story of the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy is contained within <i>The Simarillion</i>. That version is written in saga style and occupies just 3 pages of the book. Think about that. You can take stories written in the saga style and translate them from 3 pages into the modern novel style and end up with three large novels. As I was reading this section of the book, I looked over at my bookshelf that has dozens of books filled with sagas and suddenly had an a-ha moment.<br />
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Has anyone novelized the Icelandic Sagas? I've never found any evidence of it. Why haven't they? Some of the most beautiful and enduring stories ever written are in the sagas. There is a reason they are still read today, almost a millenium after being written and despite our lack of familiarity with the style.<br />
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Just as an example, consider <a href="http://www.northvegr.org/lore/njal/001.php">Njal's Saga</a>. This saga has at least <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%A1ls_saga#Plot">three major story arcs</a> that pass through some of the most important events in Icelandic history. It covers the conversion of the entire country to Christianity as well as establishing the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Court">Fifth Court of Iceland</a>, describes what the Allthing (the first European parliament) was like, and describes how the rule of law was imposed in a land of seemingly-anarchic Vikings. It has real characters with extremely different ways of living life, some of which support each other and some of which come into stark and deadly conflict in a wild land. Each of the three story arcs is good for at least a novel and more likely a trilogy. That means between 3 and 9 books just from a single saga.<br />
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I think that to really exploit the novelization of the sagas would require a publisher willing to hire a whole cadre of writers to take up the challenge and to produce it as a series. But even if you are just one writer who likes the concept and thinks that you would really like to write a novel that was based on one of the sagas, feel free to take this idea and run with it. If you do, perhaps you can remember to list me on your thank you page if you have one. If not, no big deal. Good luck to you.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-1182288281230433902009-12-29T15:16:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:43:20.693-08:00Share Your World Changing IdeasEvery once in a while I get an idea that really knocks my socks off. It is an idea that sweeps my imagination and gets me passionate about seeing the idea through to completion. I will usually spend at least 100 hours of my own personal time doing research and coming up with a plan to ensure its execution. These are the <a href="http://men.webmd.com/news/20040413/scientists-explain-aha-moments">a-ha moments</a>, the ideas you just have to act on.<br />
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As for actually seeing them through to completion, I have a dismal record. After all that effort on all those projects, there are only a few successes that I can point to. When I consider the difference between the ones that make it and the ones that don't, though, it has nothing to do with how excited I am about an idea. It is whether I worked on it with someone else.<br />
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I've been relatively isolated throughout my career from coders who also get passionate about writing code in their spare time, the kind of hackers I referred to in a <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2009/12/creative-urge.html">previous post</a>. I have lots of friends who love to code and who do it all day at work but very few who head home to create their own masterpieces for the sheer joy of it.<br />
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Even when I do find people like that, I've been surprised by how many hoard their ideas. I've been told more than once during a casual conversation discussing ideas that more details can only be provided if I am willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They don't actually have one written up, yet, of course, but if I'd be willing to collaborate with them they'll get one drawn up and we can proceed. <br />
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People seem to have an overblown sense of the value of ideas. In our capitalist society, there is actually a very good test to see what value there is to an idea: How much are people willing to pay for it: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html">Paul Graham</a> has written an <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html">excellent essay</a> on exactly this question. The answer is that people are willing to pay nothing at all for an idea. Nothing. This is true even for an idea that you think is your million dollar idea that will make you richer than Croesus. To the market, it is worthless. <br />
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The reaction of the rest of the world to someone's really great idea is so counter to the way the person thinks and feels about it that it can be hard for them to understand. But no matter how passionately you feel that your idea will change the world, the simple fact is that the idea alone can do nothing. It is only potential. Before it can have any effect, before it can be worth anything at all, it has to move at least partly from being pure potential to actually being executed upon.<br />
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Execution is the hard part, and the rare part. As Paul's essay explains, when investors put money into a startup, it has very little to do with the idea they are starting from because it is unlikely the idea will survive in its original form anyway. They are investing in people who can execute. That is where the market value is. And to be someone who can execute you need more than the world's greatest idea. You need talent, perseverance, and as <a href="http://www.gladwell.com/bio.html">Malcolm Gladwell's</a> book <a href="http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html">Outliers</a> makes clear, a whole lot of luck.<br />
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It turns out that the perseverance element in this equation is not static, at least not for me and I suspect not for most other people. When I look at which projects I completed from idea to shipping and which stagnated, I see a compelling pattern. About 1 in 10 of my a-ha ideas ended up being executed when I worked on then alone. When I worked on them with other people, the percentage approaches 100%. That is an order of magnitude increase.<br />
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When I first made that realization it surprised me. After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised at all. Working on your ideas with someone else has all the advantages of something called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming">pair programming</a>. Don't worry, I won't let this get too geeky.<br />
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Pair programming is a seemingly counter-intuitive idea that some software developers have found greatly increases their productivity. Two people working on the same problem at the same time are far more productive than each of them working on their own problem. <a href="http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/Kent%20Beck.htm">Kent Beck</a>, one of the principle advocates of this technique, likens it to training basketball players. You can have two players practicing shooting hoops, each going and retrieving their ball after each shot, or you can have one player shoot and the other retrieve and then trade off. The latter method is the one where the players get the most amount of practice shots in, even though each spends half their time not practicising.<br />
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Pair programming, or pair idea-implementing as I would have it, works similarly. By having another person working with you it keeps you focused working on the issue. If you start wandering down the wrong path, the other person is likely to notice and bring you back to the right one. There is also a sense of obgligation to make sure you do your part if someone else is doing theirs.<br />
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Paul Graham's essay mentions that you should always startup a company with at least one other person. I think that needs to be expanded. Whether you plan on creating a startup or not, if you think of an idea that gets you passionate enough that you want to spend a significant amount of time on it, broadcast it and try to find someone else who gets passionate about it too. It increases the chance of success immeasurably.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-85464235824552771972009-12-28T13:31:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:43:53.124-08:00The Creative UrgeI sometimes get funny looks from people when I refer to computer software as "elegant". For most people, I think, the notion that creating software is something creative goes against all their preconceived ideas about what a programmer's working life must be like. After all, people just sit in cubicles and tell a machine what to do day in and day out, don't they? What could be creative about that?<br />
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For these people, the existence of open source software is a complete mystery (when they bother to take notice of it at all). It seems like some kind of socialist conspiracy. Why are all these people doing this boring work in their spare time and then giving it away? Orders from their communist overlords? Are they trying to undermine the capitalist system?<br />
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With this in mind, I thought I'd offer a gentle introduction for the general populace about why geeks work all day writing code and then go home and write more for free. There have been many excellent analyses of this phenomenon written for those within the geek culture (see particularly <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=yGFNKDloXq0C&dq=cathedral+and+the+bazaar&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=AiQ5S7PTB4SsswPP_fi8BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false">The Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>) but I'm not aware of one that takes the time to explain to people who are outside the hacker tribe exactly what is going on.<br />
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If there is one analogy I can think of that bests explains to others the hacker urge to create software in their off-hours, it is this: Think of someone who is a writer. Writing is his passion. He has to pay the bills, though, so he takes a job as a copywriter at an ad agency coming up with slogans for products. It is writing and it is creative, but somehow it is not intrinsically satisfying. So at night he goes home and works on writing a novel. Hopefully the novel will be published, but even if it is not at least he is writing what he wants to write. This is the feeling that causes geeks to write free software.<br />
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But wait, you may be saying. The writer plans to make money on the novel by publishing it. The geeks are writing software for free. No analogy is perfect, so perhaps this is a place where it breaks down. Or perhaps not. Think about that writer indulging in his passion to write. If he knew when he started his novel that the only way it was going to be published was by putting it up for free on his web site, would he still write it?<br />
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Even if you don't accept that, there is something that separates the hacker from the writer in this analogy: his audience. Anyone who can read has the potential to appreciate the great artistry with which the novelist did his work. The same is not true for the coder. Users of the software are not the audience that can appreciate the elegance in the creation; to them it is just something functional they can run on their computer. The only ones who can truly appreciate the artistry that went into creating the software are other programmers. That is why open source software is in fact open source - the beauty lies in the source code, and in order to appreciate that elegance in another person's program, you have to be able to read the source.<br />
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In order to capture that idea, perhaps we can switch the analogy to aircraft designers. Anyone can look at a plane and appreciate how sleek it looks. They can also recognize that they meet their design criteria. But how many people can truly appreciate the artistry that an aircraft designer brings to a particular design. Really, only other aircraft designers. Do aircraft designers go home and create designs in their spare time? If their day jobs involve cookie cutter designs that they don't care about, I'm willing to bet that at least some do.<br />
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I should mention that there can also be great elegance in designing how programs are used by regular users. This is an exceedingly rare skill, though, and is not an esteemed part of hacker culture generally. This lack undoubtedly plays a large part in the public perception that creating software is drudgery and not creative in the slightest. The inability to promote great user interface design is one of the biggest failures of hacker culture in my opinion. I will probably write more about this subject later.<br />
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Anyway, I hope that is helpful for anyone who may have wondered why all this free software was showing up, as well as to anyone worried that open source might be undermining the capitalist system. It is more like a painter in Paris creating paintings and giving them away to friends after making caricatures of tourists all day. The world of commercial art is still safe.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-53842181329099440582009-12-26T18:11:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:44:17.052-08:00What to Expect - Yet Another Blogger's ManifestoBefore starting on this blog, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on what I expect from these posts. My intention is to make this blog an eclectic one, not focused on any particular topic or even a consistent way of presenting ideas. Sometimes I plan to write a long essay, other times I'll just mention ideas that strike me as <a href="http://www.qi.com/">Quite Interesting</a>.<br />
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As you may have realized from my <a href="http://callenish.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-write-blog.html">last post</a>, though, I have strong opinions about what constitutes a worthwhile blog post and a sensitivity to the needs of someone reading them. If I am just spouting off about my own opinions then I am just wasting my time and I shouldn't even bother making the effort.<br />
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With that in mind, I thought I'd try to discover a set of guidelines that reflected the patterns in the posts of other blog writers that I appreciated.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold;">My Blogger Manifesto</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">1. I will not post about a topic unless I have spent at least 3 months thinking about it.</span><br />
Elements of a post may be more recent, but the basic concept must be one I have spent a significant amount of time thinking about. The universe does not need any more unconsidered opinions published.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">2. Writing a second post on same topic must say something original.</span><br />
It will often be the case that a topic can't be covered in a single post. But if there are multiple posts on the same topic, each post must say something new and original about the topic that is not covered in any other post.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">3. The post must be to the point and not ramble over unrelated terrain.</span><br />
By this, I do not mean that the post is terse. As you can see, that is not my style. What I mean is that each post must be on a particular subject, and although there may seem to be a rambling nature to the prose, all of it must be relevant to the subject at hand.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">4. The post must deal with perspectives and ideas that are not currently mainstream.</span><br />
There is no point is saying something that everyone is aware of. If something is controversial and some have chosen to reject one side or another after hearing the standard points, there is no benefit in me adding my voice to the chorus. Posts must say something new or at least unconventional.<br />
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So far, that is my simple list that I intend to keep to. If I think of others as I go along, I'll mention them and update the guidelines here.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-53725661276011075552009-12-25T15:55:00.000-08:002012-11-26T18:44:42.291-08:00Why Write a Blog?I wrote my initial blog post here two years ago, but I knew at the time that it was unlikely that a second post would follow it. No one is more surprised than I am that there will now be more. The reason I was so sure back then that I wouldn't use this site for actually blogging is that, at the time, I hated the whole notion of blogs.<br />
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This might seem an odd attitude given that I ran a blog long before the word had been adopted. Originally, I ran a site based on <a href="http://www.squishdot.org/">Squishdot</a>. This was an add-on for the <a href="http://www.zope.org/">Zope</a> web publishing framework which at the time I was quite impressed with. Squishdot was a clone of <a href="http://slashdot.org/">Slashdot</a> whose user interface I thought to be perfect for a news site. Hence, I ran a Squishdot site that aggregated news on a subject that was important to a community I belonged to. The site ran collected news items and also my own take on the import of some of those items. It was a blog before the notion of blogs existed. Eventually, when its purpose had been served, it was retired.<br />
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So if I am an early adopter who saw my blog benefit a community of people, why did I bear such a grudge against the whole concept for all these years? The simple answer is signal-to-noise ratio.<br />
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Anyone who remembers the early days of Usenet will remember how quickly once great newsgroups can be destroyed by a sudden drop in signal (interesting posts) versus noise (ones where you want back the portion of your life taken to read them). When every single person has a printing press, which is what the Internet gives us all, the amount of worthwhile information drops to a very low ratio and the noise becomes very loud indeed. Most of the people who choose to express opinions on their blogs, in my experience, express uninformed, unconsidered opinions which do little for anyone that doesn't already hold exactly the same point of view.<br />
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This is not to suggest I would want to stop them from publishing. I think that everyone having the ability to publish whatever they want to publish is one of the great cultural changes that the Internet has bestowed on the human race, and I have great hopes for what it will accomplish in the long run.<br />
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Up until now, I have personally chosen not to join in the fray. I have always loved the quote, "He read everything and, to his credit, published nothing." When people give you their attention, they are giving you a gift and you have a responsibility not to squander that gift lest they choose to bestow it elsewhere. I always took that responsibility seriously enough that I chose not to try imposing my views on others.<br />
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Even the so-called blogger "thought leaders" in a subject seem to lose sight of this in the process of churning out a blog regularly. They start repeating themselves. They start remarking on topics that they haven't adequately thought out. They start raising the noise against their signal.<br />
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Given the preceding, you may be wondering what caused me to have a change of heart. The simple answer is that I want to give back.<br />
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In the past several months I've had the luxury of being able to take time to do some research on topics of interest to me, and one of the surprises that has come out of that is the huge value I've discovered in the more thoughtful blog posts and how readily I found them. Thanks to the nature of the web, seeking out the signals among the noise is easier than with Usenet of old. One particularly wise commentator is likely to link to another wise commentator within the same subject area, and so by reputation (and willingness on the part of the reader to recognize when the commentator starts straying from relevancy) you can be quite productive in acquiring new and interesting points of view.<br />
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Since I have found this value from the contributions of others, it only seems fair to at least try to give back in the same way. If people find it of value, then hopefully it will rise above the noise. If they don't, it will sink below the waves where it belongs, no harm done.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3827577989989398298.post-72050707562763758872007-09-17T13:54:00.000-07:002012-11-26T18:45:36.159-08:00Welcome to Callenish!This is a blog I've created for playing around with the <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">blogger</a> offering. I'm hoping I can understand how to make it integrate with various <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29">mashups</a>, even though it is nowhere near as sophisticated as <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, for example. I'm also uncertain about the social networking side of things with Blogger.
Still, the only way to find out about these things is to play with them, so here goes...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11545606701103655019noreply@blogger.com0