Andart

Where is the tube?

Live map of London Underground trains - a beautiful hack that shows the approximate positions of all trains in the London Underground. A nice demonstration of what a real mashup means. Now I just want to see it as a phone app too.

Solving the right problems

Needless Megadeaths: A Suggestion for Science in the Public Interest - Eric Drexler points out that very important questions like "which diet improves overall health the most?" (on which not just the health of billion hinges, but also billions of dollars of advice, public policy and attention) that could be investigated scientifically actually aren't investigated efficiently or comprehensively. While one can defend nutritional epidemiology on the grounds that the problem is really hard and maybe a bit undefined, there are clearly many important issues that are enormously under-investigated despite being relatively simple to check (consider running the lifespan effects of *all* the basic micro-nutrients on fruit flies, for example - this has apparently not been done).

Drexler sketches a program that really ought to be promoted:

1. Obligate science funding agencies to establish institutional mechanisms that are responsible for registering (allegedly) open scientific questions, and from diverse, external sources.

2. Make it embarrassing for the responsible parties to ignore questions that obviously shouldn’t be ignored.

3. For each question worth attention, require that they state an explicit estimate of the importance and difficulty of answering it.

4. Obligate the agency to either fund research on the most important and answerable questions, or to explicitly state reasons for neglecting them.

Easier said that done, devils in the details, but it looks like a very sane thing to do. What sensible agency claiming to want to solve important problems wouldn't want to identify the most important ones and try to get them solved? Given that differences in importance appear to be power-law distributed or something similar (the most effective/important problem is often an order of magnitude bigger than the second) getting priorities right is really crucial.

A key task would be to make signalling effects work in favour of solving important problems rather than in favour of solving apparently important problems. There are also principal agent problems between the public and the research agencies and between the agencies and researchers: they can each have different views on what constitutes the most important problem and which is most rewarding to solve. Hence we need to develop better ways of making it very clear how and why people arrive at their own priority estimates and make sure these transparent estimates are made public.

Seeing the world

Today I saw a cartoon on http://abstrusegoose.com/ that perfectly expresses how I see the world.

A few weeks back I walked along Rawlinson Road in northern Oxford while listening to techno music in the sunshine. I had an experience very much like the cartoon:

The red bricks were selectively reflecting and diffusing different wavelengths. The moss on the trees and walls was evolving, filled with tardigrades. My feet were held up by elastic forces due to van der Waals and other electrostatic interactions between the molecules, in turn sustained by overlapping orbitals described by quantum mechanics. Insects were flying thanks to tricky continuum dynamics involving vortices. The air was moving by Navier-Stokes equations. The sky was blue due to Rayleigh scattering, lit by a sun shining through nuclear fusion, with photons diffusing for many years through a complex hydrostatic equilibrium until they finally after an 8 minute trip, got refracted and hit my retina - yet within their own reference frame the trip was instantaneous.

People who claim science has a barren, non-magical world-view don't know what they themselves are blind to.

Freud on enhancement

Great Freud quote from Civilization and Its Discontents:

"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times."

Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?

I haven't been updating for a while, due to a California trip. Here is one result, a talk I held at Google about brain emulation: