Why You Should Bother About 2°

26. January, 2008

So the long term prediction for the climate is that it’ll become 2°C hotter worldwide – on average. “Big deal”, I hear the sceptics say, “between January and Juli, we get 30°C difference. How much is 2°C is going to add to that? A mere 6%!”

Wrong.

If the climate was a linear system, the 6% would be correct. But the climate is not a car which accelerates smoothly. It’s a complex system. Let’s look at a really simple complex system, called the Lorentz attractor:

Example of the Lorentz attractor
This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons which I got from the Wikipedia article mentioned above.

The Lorentz attractor is not a perfect example because it’s not actually a system that flips rarely (if you follow the curves, you’ll see that they go back and forth between the two points all the time instead of staying with one side for some time as our climate does).

Still, it’s a good way to visualize what is going on. Imagine that the lower disc with the fat red circle in the middle is the current weather. Temperature is pretty stable around one spot. Now the system gets jolt and starts to move out of the current equilibrum.

Instead of just dropping into the next equilibrum 2°C away, it starts to move in strange patterns. Instead of the temperature simply raising until it’s 2°C hotter, it’s sometimes much colder, sometimes much hotter. And the change is also not a smooth one. The farther the curve is from the two stable points, the faster it travels. Which means that within a few days, the temperature can drop and raise sharply.

Last week, we had temperatures at 900 in the morning between -1°C and 7°C, a delta of 8°C withing a week. And that’s not the lowest and highest overall temperature, it’s the temperature measured at the same time in the morning.

You should start to worry about the 2°C because they mean we’ll see natural disasters like man has never known before while the climate adjusts to the new average.

Or to put it another way: 2°C means that the earth becomes more hot. It means, if the earth was on a stove, someone is adding more heat or energy to the stovetop. If the earth was a pot with water, that energy would amount to 10.471 zettajoules (one zettajoule is 1 times 10 to the power of 21J) which is roughly the same as the energy the whole earth receives from the sun every day. As a number:

10’471’032’000’000’000’000’000J

The energy released by an average hurricane in one second is a meager 6 terajoule which is a billion times less. Imagine what power a hurricane could get from an athmosphere which has so much more energy to lay waste to our civilization?

Links:

Orders of magnitude (energy)
Thermal energy
Global warming
A Java applet where you can play with the Lorentz attractor

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Telepods of Doom 2

19. October, 2007

On Telepods of Doom, Mike P. argues:

We can only assume that a machine can reconstruct experience, consciousness and the human soul.

First of all, the machine maybe doesn’t have to reconstruct the soul of the being transported. Our everyday experience shows that the soul moves along with the body. There doesn’t seem to be a limitation on how fast the body can move (at least not up to the speed we can achieve) without losing contact to its soul. In fact, looking at the problem from a quantum physics view, there is no reason to believe that the soul has to care about the actual location of the body. This means that if the wave form which represents our body is teleported across the universe, the soul might just stick to it.

Of course, I might be wrong and the soul might loose contact the moment the body is teleported. On the positive side, this would be a final proof that a soul exists (or at least something beyond the sub-atomic level). On the negative side, this would open a whole new world of tools to people who are not prepared for such power.

When someone manages to prove the existence of the soul, people will start to work on way to measure it. To access it. To modify it. Area Denial Systems already offer convenient new ways of torturing anyone you happen to dislike without leaving traces. For the victims, this makes it impossible to prove the act in court, making their situation twice as bad.

Imagine machines which can access the soul.

Luckily, nature has laws which will make sure we become extinct unless we are able to handle the powers which we seize.

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Telepods of Doom

26. September, 2007

On BeContrary is a discussion about Telepods of Doom. The question goes like this:

It is the year 2112. Telepods have been in use for a decade to instantly transport matter from one part of the universe to another. You are waiting in line with your family at a telepod station to go to Tau Ceti. In front of you in the queue you meet the inventor of the telepods. He tells you that the telepods only appear to move matter, what they actualy do is create an exact duplicate at the destination and destroy the original in the process.

Do you get in the telepod?

As my math teacher would say: You’re mixing up two frames of reference. In quantum physics, objects exist only once. There can be similar objects but these can never be exactly the same (they must differ in at least one attribute, for example in spin). Don’t use that argument when the MPAA comes after you. (“That music isn’t what was on CD! It must be different! Quantum theory says so!”)

One way to make exact copies is to destroy the original and transfer all attributes onto another object (thus destroying the other object and creating a new “original”). In the real (macro) world, this can lead to all kinds of problems: If the destroy happens before the “apply attributes”, you lose the object. If the destroy doesn’t happen at all, you suddenly have two copies. If only a part of the attributes are copied, you have an imperfect copy.

In the quantum world, none of these effects can happen. It’s either all or nothing because there is no state in between. Quantum particles can move through “solid” walls because they never spend any time inside the wall. In one moment, they are on one side, the next, they are on the other. The theory doesn’t ask for continuous movement. It just says “when you look several times, there is a certain chance that you’ll see the particle.” There is no explanation how it gets from one place to the other and how it spends the time when you don’t see it.

Since no one has found a flaw in the theory so far, it seems to be an accurate description of reality. That it contradicts our view of reality means that our view of reality is imperfect, not that quantum theory is wrong. Or as Douglas Adams put it:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
— Douglas Adams

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Myself – My Self – Who?

9. September, 2007

All my life, I’ve been fascinated by the mystery we call “self”. Who is that person within my body who sits now in front of this computer and formulates this text? And why does this “me” feel so helpless in my own life? Why do I often feel that my life is in control of me instead of the other way around?

Of course, I’m not the first person to ask these questions. Psychologists and, in the recent years, neuro-scientists did the same and on a much more professional level. Freud explained this paradox with the Ego, super-ego and the id. Today, we can watch ourselves think and Benjamin Libet did. In very compact form, he found that the decision to do something is already made the time we (our “self”) makes the decision (If you strongly object to this because it feels obscene, please read up on this elsewhere. It’s true and it makes sense, however disturbing this may sound when you hear this for the first time).

So there is no free will? I can go around and kill anyone and say: “Oh, that wasn’t me, that was my unconscious!”? Not at all! All I’m saying is that there is no free will right now. Let me give you some examples. Yesterday, I played with my cat. He was on the carpet and I was dangling the toy on the fringe of the carpet. He desperately wanted the toy and wriggled his muscles into the perfect position for the pounce but there was a threat: Beyond the carpet is a slippery floor on which he can’t maintain his grip.

What happened was that he pounced and then immediately braked with all four paws to stop on the fringe of the carpet even if that reduced his chances to catch the toy. Obviously, he had noticed the danger and made a decision how to avoid it.


On a more complex scale, there is an experiment with monkeys and an upside-down u-shape. In the middle of the upper horizontal part of that u-shape is an apple and the monkey wants it. There is a cut in the u-shape, so it can prod the apple with a stick and move it in either direction. Unfortunately for the ape, one of the openings of the u-shape is closed with a mesh.

When conducting the experiment, the scientists found three types of apes. One type would move the apple into the “right” direction, it would fall out on the ground and they would eat it. The second type would move the apple into the “wrong” direction where it would fall onto the mesh. After a lot of effort, they would bring it up again and out of the other end.

The really interesting type is the third. They would move the apple into the wrong direction at first and, just before it would fall down the tube onto the mesh, they would stop. Next, they would start to move the apple into the other direction. Why?

The explanation is that these monkeys probably have created an internal representation of what will happen if they move the apple further, decided that this might not be so cool and changed their strategy. Just like the cat, they thought ahead. My theory is that my “self” is this “thinking ahead” thingy. Obviously, this is a very important part. Is it safe to cross the street, now, or will that car hit me? Maybe it will stop in time? Or is it too fast? Has the driver seen me? How about the car behind it?

If that part is so important, why is the decision made elsewhere?

Because it takes too much time. Making a decision takes time. If your life is at risk (and even today, it is at risk all the time), you don’t want to waste time pondering all the possibilities. So, from a safety standpoint, it makes sense to cut some corners to be able to move those physical muscles while Mr. Brain still wonders what might be going on.

Of course, Mr. Brain would be genuinely unhappy if it felt that someone else is making all the important decisions while it, obviously so much more smart and important, still is working to assess the situation. Therefore, the decision making part of ourselves cleverly pulls some strings to create the illusion “Oh, you and you alone made that decision. Don’t worry, everything is alright. Oh, look at that … is that dangerous?”

From an evolutionary point of view, it makes less and less sense to allow a big and complicated brain to make decisions at short notice. It will reduce your chances of survival, slow you down to a crawl. Just imagine how you would walk if you had to move every muscle consciously. Try it and you’ll be even more disappointed. There are martial artists who can touch you before you notice that they even moved. That kind of speed is impossible with a human brain.

Things change considerably when we look at the long term. Looking at cats and monkeys, they don’t seem to plan ahead at all. The cat doesn’t think about the dangers outside when you leave a door open. All it will see is a new opening which it hasn’t explored yet and it will dash for it. Monkeys don’t build shelters. They do use tools but there is a distinct limit how far they can look ahead. Not so with us humans. We can look ahead as far as we want (or at least we believe we can). We can plan for days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. We can plan and build big cities and they don’t fall apart with the first woodpecker.

For example, building the famous World Trade Center took seven years (1966-73) or even twelve years (1961-73) if you start with when the initial plans were made public. The dream of building it started even before that.

My favorite story is the roof of New College, Oxford. When the large oak beams of the roof in the New College in Oxford were yielding to the teeth of time, the owners of the place were at a loss how to replace them. Can you imagine the price of oak beams spanning a great hall? They considered replacing them with steel but that was also way beyond their budget. By chance, one of the foresters of the college heard about this and mentioned that, 500 years ago, the builders of the place had planted oak trees just for this occasion. So in the end, they got the new roof for free. Of course, this is just an urban myth but a nice one. The cynical version adds that they sold the forest for profit afterwards without regard for what will happen in 500 years from now.

So, while someone might not be responsible for killing a guy in that brawl last night, he is fully responsible for getting into that brawl in the first place. His self is fully capable of looking that far into the future and preparing to avoid such a situation, for example by not drowning his ability to plan ahead in alcohol, by looking for a nicer place to get drunk or by just walking away when that guy started to make trouble.

“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.” – Kosh, Babylon 5

That is why understanding how our own brain works is so important: In the heat of the moment, the conscious part (the “I”) of ourselves has no chance to vote anymore, so it must make the decisions before that moment. This will influence the options our unconscious has when it must move in an instant.

Because it does listen to us but only when it can afford the time. That is why we can change our lives and why it always takes so long.

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What’s Wrong With … Surveillance

5. July, 2007

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from ubiquitous surveillance.” Uhm, really?

Well, I have something to hide. It’s nothing illegal. I just want to hide from a lot of people: Sales and marketing people, for example, who want to get my mon*cough*attention. People, who hate the company I work for (for whatever good or bad reason). People, who dislike my religion, my taste in clothes, politics or sex.

Imagine a male working for the London police. He’s been dumped by his girlfriend, he’s jealous or just seeking revenge. He sits in his little office and tracks her moving around the city with the some of the 500’000 cameras in the city. Eventually, he sees her meeting with her new flame. What will he do?

Maybe he will not use the face recognition software (which was pretty useless a few years ago). But there are other way. The new boyfriend of “his” girl will probably walk to his car (identification by license plate is a standard tool for the police and you wouldn’t believe the zoom levels the surveillance cameras can get if you don’t limit them artificially) or he will go home. Guess who is having a surprise visit tonight? In 2003, the LA Times brought an article “LA Police Officer Uses Database to Snoop on the Stars“. Apparently, this fellow was looking for a way to even out his income by selling juicy details to tabloids.

The problem with surveillance is not that I have nothing to hide, it’s that I don’t trust all the people who operate the system. In order to “increase” the safety of the system, little is known about which directly leads to a sense of untouchability by the people who run them. We have seen where this leads. Power doesn’t corrupt, unaccountability does.

But there are other problems as well. In Germany, a camera was installed to protect a museum but it also watched the private flat of Angela Merkel (German only). Don’t worry, it watched her only for eight years.

This could be fixed by operating the cameras automatically by a computer. A judge could grant access to the files when authorities receive a complaint. Unfortunately, this just shifts the problem. For most people, computers are still magical boxes. They know that it’s just a bunch of cleverly arranged silicon atoms but the real problem is that they can’t tell when a computer lies. Of course, that never happens. Right?

Well, computers don’t lie in the sense that they can know fact A and tell you B. That’s a human skill. But a human can delete fact A and replace it with fact B and the computer will happily present fact B as The Truth(TM). Since security systems are by default accessible by a select few only, it becomes increasingly hard to know if someone has tampered with a system. Worse, someone can accidentally break something. Your name might suddenly appear on the persona non grata list of the USA because someone mistyped the last name of an evil doer who has the same birthday as you (a chance of 1:366 or less). Luckily, you will notice the next time you pass through customs. Enjoy your strip-search if they don’t arrest or shoot you on sight.

“But the computer said …” Several billion will find this funny, one person won’t. Of course, this is an exaggerated example. But quite a few people do find themselves at the special attention of customs and they don’t know why. That is because the victims aren’t informed about the mistake (the culprit already knows, the guy who made the mistake is sure he didn’t and the person who eventually finds out is too embarrassed to talk about it). Even when they eventually find out, it is insanely hard for to get the mistake fixed everywhere. So when you have finally made sure the guys at airport A know you’re cool, the computer at airport B might not know or might not trust that new information. After all, you might be a very clever cracker, trying to clear your slate! Can’t trust nobody!

Any system that is supposed to be secure, must allow for error, especially human error. When I was taught engineering, the rule was to make each piece twice as strong as it needed to be if a human life was in some way connected to it. That meant you could hang a small car to a swing and it wouldn’t break (don’t try; they have optimized the process since then). The security systems that are being sold to us today are sold as “infallible”. Like the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Bank computers, “automatic” invoice systems. They can’t make mistakes, so when one happens, no one will ask any questions. Somehow, everyone seems to forget that there are still very few computers that can read (and none who can understand what they just read; just ask Google … and they get the data in a computer readable format). Most data that you can find in any computer on this planet has been planted there by humans! Especially the data about other humans! Or as Thomas R. Fasulo said in his infamous IH8PCs blog: “You should never believe anything you read or hear. Especially if you read it here. “

Furthermore, the wide spread surveillance is sold under the flag of “safety”. We are supposed to be more safe. How so? The number of crimes doesn’t change. A few more crimes can be resolved because of the surveillance but the idea that they prevent them is foolish. People commit crimes because they believe they won’t be caught. If there is a camera, they will just adjust their strategy, not change their lives. Many of them believe that the reasons for their behavior is outside of their own control, so they really can’t do anything. On the other hand, imagine the torture of a rape victim that is being filmed in the act and the criminal doesn’t get caught.

Unfortunately, the surveillance systems are sold as a cheap solution for the underlying problems. If a kid has no perspective in life and only gang members as role models, what choice does it have? You would be astonished. Take the Bronx, turned into the sin pit of the world by the media. In 2000, there lived roughly 400’000 people between 10 and 25. In that year, a total of 48,070 crimes were recorded. If each was committed by a different individual, that means that 88% of the people followed the law (remember, even if they were not caught, the crime is still recorded). Sadly, spending millions of dollars for CCTV cameras is more cheap (as in simple) than trying to solve the real problems.

More safety by more surveillance? I don’t buy it.

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Managing Your Manager

3. April, 2006

I’m a nerd. I have no social life, nothing besides my computers and my love for complex problems. In former times, I would have been called a monk. Now, I’m a highly payed (but still somewhat strange) specialist.

There was a time, when Suits were a kind of enemy for me. They didn’t understand. They didn’t care. They made decisions which made me weep.

Then, one of them handed me an article.

“Managing Your Manager”.

What could be a recipe to manipulate your superior was in fact a short text about decision making and what can go wrong and why.

What’s a specialist?

A specialist is someone who knows.

He lives inside the problem.

But as we all know, living inside makes it hard to look at it from the outside.

A manager is the opposite: He looks at the problem from the outside.

Several of them, usually.

So, by my definition, a manager cannot make good decisions because he or she doesn’t understand the problem. If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you know that something is wrong. But that doesn’t make the problem go away.

The key here is to bridge the gap. When a manager has to make a decision, she has to. It’s not like she has much choice. So there will be a decision.

And since she’s no fool, she’ll try to get some facts so the decision is not quite as random as it might seem afterwards.

This is where the tech guys come in.

“Hey Bob, we’re behind scedule. Why is that?” asks the manager.

Bob thinks: Hey, now I can tell her about all the insane problems we have with broken computers, paranoid security, insane deadlines, bug-ridden software.

But that doesn’t help the manager to make a decision: How to get things done in time.

So Bob drones on until the manager leaves.

Bob feels better but the manager still has no clue what to do.

So she’ll make a decision and Bob will be very upset because he can’t understand how anyone with a brain could be so stupid. Especially after he explained it!

The problem here is that when Bob talks about buggy software, he probably has some ideas how to solve the problem. Maybe using a different software might help. Or a different version. There might be patches available. Giving the sales guy a hint that the annual license might be canceled if they don’t get some important fixes really soon might yield unexpected improvements.

For Bob, this is obvious. For the manager, it might not be.

Things get worse when it comes to deep technical problems. Most nerds will just nod when I say that a problem is exponential.

Most managers will nod, too, because they’re as uncomfortable to display the fool like everybody else.

But they won’t understand. Not really.

For a manager, a presentation is the way to communicate.

Such a presentation should have four to five pages. Maybe six. No more.

On the first page, you should explain the problem.

If the problem doesn’t fit on a single page, you’re probably talking about two different problems. Split them and create a second presentation for the other one.

On each of the following pages, put one line with a proposed solution and two lists below: Pros and cons.

Give at least three different solutions. If you can’t think of any besides the obviously best solution, have a short chat with your boss to see what he or she thinks.

That should give you something to work with because his or her view at the problem will be a completely different one than yours.

Don’t try to prefer one of the solutions, if you can. You will find that when you can keep your mind open, after finishing the last page of the presentation, you often get another idea.

One that is much better than the other three ones.

But even if you have only three solutions, you will quickly see that one of them is much better than the other ones.

Sort your presentation in such a way that the inferior ones come first. Keep the best for last.

If you can’t decide one over the other, then that’s okay, too: If they are equally good, then they must be equally bad as well, so it doesn’t matter which one gets chosen.

When I do such a presentation (which usually goes 10-15 minutes), something happens.

The managers will get the facts for their decision making in small, digestible bits.

They will have several possible solutions to chose from which they like. Nobody likes the feeling being pushed into a certain direction.

Furthermore, they will think that you care. You created a small presentation (thus not wasting their time), you give them control (they make the decision).

And, oh wonder, most of the time, the will chose your prefered solution.

You’re the specialist, after all! Who knows better than you?

The net result is that everyone gets what he wants: You get your prefered solution (and probably even a better one than you’d got if you hadn’t given the presentation) and the managers get to decide (so it’s not your fault when something goes wrong).

So good luck with your next presentation.

And one last piece of advice with animations: Don’t. They just distract from the content. The more animations in a presentation, the less meat is in there. Every manager knows that.

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