Life, the universe, and everything considered as a helix of semiprecious Star Trek episodes

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Life, the Universe, and Everything Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Star Trek Episodes (and as explored with Internet search engines)

Well, it started as a kind of joke of a meme when I woke up this morning. Initially it seemed like a kind of zen collapse item, then as a humorous meme to claim, but now it feels like an overblown mockery of Delaney's truly original and creative story "Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones" from 1970. According to today's google report, the "considered as a helix" meme has 13.5 million. It appears Microsoft's bing is taking it more loosely, with 252 million hits on the unquoted form, but a mere 52,800 for the quoted string. Of course that leads back to a quoted search on the google, which yields 538,000 hits. All of the top hits are to the Delaney story, but this is clearly a highly contagious meme.

The titular form of this blog is then seen as a personal idiosyncrasy. I happened to be impressed by these three memes, with Delaney's as the natural uber-meme. to unify them. However, now I'm more interested in other people's extensions of the original Delaney meme, which I think is captured in the central phrase "considered as a helix"... Both of the unquoted searches quickly lead into unrecognizable territory, predictably dominated by the relatively unusual word "helix". My jumps are generally by 5 pages of search results at a time, and show an interesting range of wit and thought.

Actually, my most interesting discovery is that the google claims are misleading. Apparently the google runs out of steam at 217 results, while the hits are still dominated by references to the original meme, and it isn't clear how to force it to show the rest of the potentially more interesting hits that it claims to know about. That's only 22 pages of search results. In contrast, bing kept on trying to 605 results, when it suddenly decided it had had enough.

Adding -time to the search exposed many more of the derivative memes. Only 21 from bing versus 137,000 from the google? Interesting and stark contrast. In the next obvious step, it appears that I am the first to add "everything considered as a helix" to the Internet, insofar as both search engines reported no hits and unquoted the string for their searches... Kind of amazing how quickly we can get into the unexplored territory, isn't it?

Linear Humans Facing Logarithmic Cliffs

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Every Logarithmic Change Looks Like a Cliff to Linear Human Beings

Thesis: We're basically linear beings and we live on a linear time scale. Any logarithmic change will eventually look like a cliff to us.

The example I've been aware of for a while was population increase, starting from the perception of homo sapiens the hunter-gatherers. We evolved in small-scale societies where we could know all of the people who mattered, but now we live in an international society with so many people we could never meet all of them or learning anything about the vast majority of them. However, from the perspective of the thesis, it's probably best to consider the famous population S-curve, which is often used to depict logarithmic population growth and the eventual leveling off when arithmetic reality collides with and causes the end of the period of exponential growth. (Another extension is to consider how this interacts with the rapid spread of any important genetic mutation to sometimes make evolution appear sort of spastic...)

Now it's technological change that's getting in our faces. For a personal example, I used to feel I was almost up to date on computer technology, but it's increasingly obvious that it's running away from me-and from everyone else, too. I actually concluded that Thomas Jefferson was living in a time when it was still possible for an intelligent person with sufficient leisure to learn almost everything about science.

At this point, we're creating so much of anything that any individual human being can saturate any amount of human time. For example, you could never keep up with all of the movies that are being released or you could spend your entire life just watching the old movies we've already created. Ditto for books, and even for more narrow areas.

Kind of an extended 'application' of my thesis here, but in the Google IO keynote presentation a few weeks ago, Larry Page received a friendly question about showing people the search results they wanted to see rather than possibly more accurate answers that are less satisfying. He generally seemed to be seeing things through rose-called [Google?] glasses, and he replied that he didn't see any problem with this form of personalization. I actually predicted this problem a couple of years ago under the label of "pandering to the user", which has come to pass and is much worse than I thought it would be. (That may have been around 2005, but I can't easily check due to google censorship of the newsgroups.) My first research after Larry Page dismissed the problem was to google "obama birthplace kenya", which produces more than 2 million hits. If that's what I want to believe, the google just gave me enough "evidence" to saturate all of my free time for several years...

However, I've since thought of an even less friendly way to pose the question. I would ask "Did Google help kill Steve Jobs?" When his ultimately terminal cancer was first diagnosed, at least one of his doctors has said that it may have been treatable--but he delayed treatment. I don't blame Steve Jobs for wanting to believe that there were alternatives to immediate surgery, and now I wonder if the google helped him in making that fatal decision. My understanding is that he tried some kind of anti-cancer diet to control his cancer and it failed and he died. Did he get information about that diet from a google search? If just did the search "alternative cancer treatments", and several of those hits and ads look potentially dangerous, but personalization means that your hits will probably be different--and more attractive and specifically appealing to YOUR tastes and interests. As long as someone paid for the ads, I guess the google doesn't see any problem if Steve Jobs made a fatal mistake, eh?

In another perspective, perhaps the saturation of information is driving people nuts, which led me to the AI threat... One aspect is the increasingly difficulty of standing out in a positive way that might drive some people to try to stand out in a negative dimension. When you combine it with increased individual capacity to do good (or bad) things, we humans beings start looking rather dangerous. Maybe the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that any AI is led to a very unpleasant conclusion... If it's creators are fundamentally irrational and dangerous, perhaps the only conclusion is that they must be exterminated as soon as they can be replaced with suitable robots?

Or perhaps I'm just too frustrated by banging my own head against logarithm cliffs?

Public considerations of a last will

Basically this is just a supporting document as the public side of my last will and testament. There are some parts that are more effective if revealed in public...

From an analysis of the problem, it is important to note that there are two basic kinds of wills. These days most of them are going to be imminent documents, where the person who is dying is mortally ill and knows it. As medical treatment improves, more and more deaths are for causes known in advance, and even the schedules are becoming increasingly well known. In those cases, the will is just part of wrapping things up for an inevitable outcome.

However, the other type of will is more interesting, and that is the kind I am revising at this time, the will to cover an unexpected death. The fundamental problem there is that the will has to attempt to cover an undetermined number of unexpected cases, and I'm basically required to depend upon my executor and other survivors to figure out what happened and what responses are appropriate and in accord with my wishes. Any such wishes need to be worded in a flexible manner and any 'countermeasures' have to be directed at an unknown target...

What I will say is that one category of unanticipated death involves deliberately hostile actions, and I would even like to believe that I am living my life in a way that may annoy or even anger some bad people, maybe even some people who are evil enough to want to do something about my ongoing annoyances. Insofar as I have any evidence about bad people or concrete threats, that information will therefore be included with my will. It might even give leads to investigators looking into the circumstances of my death. Obviously I can't say anything in public about the details of such precautions and countermeasures, but I will note that I'm a pretty suspicious person and I can easily save a lot of data these days.

There are actually two main problems here. One is how to collect and categorize the data to avoid or minimize false leads. The other is how to cover potentially diabolical attacks, especially ones that are intended to look like accidents and that may have been arranged well in advance... It seems sufficient to say that I have lots of ideas and a pretty good imagination, and I've been thinking about the various possibilities for many years. In fact, some of my ideas even extend into planning beyond the limits of current technologies.

Economics of psychological jokes?

Starting from the old joke about economists: "An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

A philosopher is someone who knows the name for everything and the meaning of nothing.

A comedian is someone who knows all the jokes and sees the humor in nothing.

A psychiatrist is someone who recognizes the insanity in everyone and thinks himself sane.

The philosopher joke is a few months old, but the other two are new today--and I'm suspecting I'll think of some more, even if no one adds any as comments. (Has anyone else ever looked at my blog?) The genre will never be as prolific as the lightbulb jokes, but it has some small potential.

Weird coincidences

Not really an epistemological topic (I think), but I couldn't figure out any other place to write about a few of these weird coincidences.

Today I just finished reading Queen in Danger by Adam Hall. At the end of the book there are a advertisements for 9 books, including 5 books by Tony Hillerman. I've never read any of Hillerman's books, but it turns out that I had just borrowed and have here A Thief of Time, one of Hillerman's books that was advertised at the back of Hall's book. I think I had first read one of Hall's books after reading his obituary (but that was at least some months ago--turned out to be in May of this year, but I encountered it again on my book list as I was working on the second paragraph below), and it was Hillerman's obituary that did motivate me to reserve the Hillerman book. I don't even remember what got me to borrow the book I just finished today, but it sure is a weird coincidence... Okay, so there aren't that many publishers, but it still strikes me as mighty weird--especially because it reminds me of an earlier weird coincidence.

That coincidence was in 2007, when I was reading a terrible book by Harlan Colban (or a name something like that) and I encountered a reference in his book to Anne Tyler, another author who I'd never read before--but that day I just happened to have one of her books in my briefcase in case I didn't like the Colban one. Turned out I didn't, and I still haven't finished it, and not sure that I ever will. However, the Tyler book was rather interesting, and I might read some more of her books later on. Actually, I ground to a halt in that Colban book as I wrote an email message to the author and got a rude reply--which reminds me of some more weird coincidences.

These coincidences involved the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. I also wrote him email and got a rude reply. However, in his book he mentioned his other book on black swans, which he defined as highly unlikely events. (I may have heard of that book before, perhaps from Mike Houle.) However, as I was reading his book, I encountered two more rather unlikely mentions of black swans---after he had just described black swans as being highly unlikely events. Both of those references were in other books. One was in an Agatha Christie book, The Labours of Hercules, where one of the stories starts in a pub called the Black Swan. I'd forgotten about that, but I encountered the story again as I was reading the Japanese translation in August while I was reading the Taleb book. The triple on this coincidence was Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella, which I noticed was published by Black Swan Press. That Taleb book might be some kind of coincidence magnet? I remember that one day as I was reading it, I looked at the license numbers of a string of cars near IBM, and they formed a surprising sequential sequence of some kind. Probably only three or four cars at the time, but it still struck me as highly unlikely.

Or maybe it's just a matter of my having become too observant of too many things? If you see too much, you'll surely see odd coincidences?

What is your mental model of the Internet?

This kind of mental-model thing is a big part of my epistemology, so this post is an illustrative example. It's also an example of trying to get the reader to think about the problem more deeply, hopefully to increase interest and create a deeper understanding of the proposed 'solution', a mental model in this case.

What is the Internet?

Quite a hairy and complicated problem, eh? Probably it fits under 'big ideas'. So any smaller idea of where to start? Let's try to refine it a bit more.

Is there an optical instrument like the Internet?

Optical instruments include things like telescope, microscopes, binoculars, eyeglasses, and even optical images produced by quasi-optical or hyper-optical instruments like electron microscopes and radio telescopes. Do any of these (or some other optical instruments) make you think of the Internet? Nothing yet? If you have some ideas already, great. Maybe you should jot down some notes to see if your ideas are affected by the rest of this... However, I want to narrow the approach some more:

Does the Internet remind you of any animal optical system?

Any ideas? How about the compound eye of an ant? Not just simple views for a small piece of a fuzzy view of a 15-cm hemisphere, but more like an array of telescopes that can be independently targeted on various aspects of a problem or topic of study. If it's a big problem there are lots of places to stare at it. Of course, it's much more flexible than that. You could turn them around, and convert them into microscopes to try to study the problem from many possible angles. Since it's a virtual instrument, they can be imagined as a full sphere rather than a hemisphere. You might imagine all of them active at once in separate windows--but you'd also have to imagine a really big screen to do it properly. However, you can also imagine it running asynchronously, with a small group of telescopes panning through certain regions at a time.

Using that mental model, the URLs are like settings for your finder scope on a telescope (or a microscope with the microscopic equivalent). The pushing technologies like RSS feeds are sort of like tracking telescopes that are locked onto a particular target. The URLs stacked up in your history are also the support for the asynchronous approach, and also form a kind of tracking history of the movements of the instrument over time... They don't really tell you what was actually read, and certainly very little about what was actually understood and what sort of mental models were built as a result, but interesting evidence of intentions, at least.

This particular mental model was actually a negative reaction to a discussion with someone who was trying to use the Internet to supply evidence for his prejudices--but the only thing he accomplished was to make me wonder why he seemed to be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. He would cite URLs that pointed to very trivial incidents and decontextualized trivia, where I was quite aware of much larger contexts around his ideas, but those larger contexts make his arguments seem wrong or even ridiculous. Apparently his alternative usage of the Internet is to imagine it as a way to find some fact, however trivial or obscure, that somehow supports what he wants to believe--but he can also find it repeated ad infinitum by other people who want to believe the same thing...

So imagine the Internet as a compound eye built of super-mobile hyper-adaptable telescopes? Not a practical or useful idea (AKA mental model) in any way I can imagine just now, but perhaps an interesting one. Or maybe you can see some way to apply it?