Category Archives: Tech

The Illusion of Knowledge

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Over at Backreaction

Current illusions such as the idea that if it’s on the internet, and especially if it’s in an oft-visited location, then it must be true (argument from popularity), if it can’t be explained in a short presentation, it must be false (argument from incredulity), if it’s not on the internet then it must be false, newer information is always better, and others.

I think some of this is a remnant of the idea that if something appears in print, it must be true — print used to be instant credibility in part because print was relatively expensive. The cost aspect was especially true in the earliest days, and you wouldn’t bother to commit something to writing unless it was very important, but before mass-printing, that was often spiritual truth rather than scientific truth. But with the advent of printing, thanks to Gutenberg, more information could be shared at less cost, so knowledge was put down on paper and distributed.

But it’s still largely driven by economics, and the illusion was present even back in the day. As long as a lie is profitable, and this could mean power and control, as well as money, putting it in print has a payoff. And as the cost of print goes down, the wider the illusion spreads. Today, of course, electronic print is dirt cheap. There is almost no threshold at all to making misinformation available, and even sending it to you — hey, you’ve got spam! Every crank and their inbred cousin can have a web site that “teaches” us how relativity is a conspiracy, quantum mechanics has a connection to the mind and body, the earth is 6000 years old, etc.

One danger, to which Bee alludes, is that if you’ve been hoodwinked into thinking a solution has been achieved, you aren’t as likely to support further investigation — legitimate, scientific investigation — into the problem.

The problem is not lack of knowledge. The problem is the Illusion of Knowledge that comes with an overabundance of unstructured information. It fosters the public manifestation of unfounded believes, stalls scientific arguments, and hinders progress.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can

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Babbage’s difference engine #2 has been built and has “just gone on display in Silicon Valley” (Where? Not sure. Make sure you make a left turn at Albuquerque. Then ask.)

Despite Babbage’s reputation and government backing, the machine was never manufactured.

The plans were consigned to the dustbin of history until they were fished out by Mr Swade when he was working at the Science Museum in London. While there he went on to create the world’s first Difference Engine No 2. which was completed in 1991.

And, of course, one is reminded of Babbage’s excellent quote about GIGO:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Hat tip to Caroline.

Oh, Really?

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From one of those “tell us what you do” info dropdown menus, so I can get more targeted spam.

good2know1.png

Good to know that Research/Development/Scientific isn’t technology-related. Do you think maybe, just maybe, they sold computer stuff?

Googling: What the?

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google-planck.png

Come to think of it, I meant option C: “Planck’s constant”

(the actual issue was that this was a copy-and-paste of a longer expression, and there is an almost indistinguishable fraction of an extra space after the apostrophe)

What Goes Around, Comes Around

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Make Ethanol in Your Own Backyard

A Silicon Valley start-up called E-Fuel is showing exactly how ethanol can live up to its name as “the people´s fuel.” The company recently announced that it will soon start selling a home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicoFueler, which will allow anyone to make ethanol from sugar, water, yeast, and electricity in their own backyard.

Still, they didn’t claim this was a new idea.

“What, you can run a car on that, too?”

(Reminds me of the story about someone who sold bricks of dehydrated grapes during prohibition, which included step-by-step of instructions of what not to do, lest you end up making some illegal alcohol)

Oh, Now They Tell Me

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A while back I bought a radio-controlled helicopter to fly around the apartment — it isn’t something designed to withstand much more than the gentlest of breezes — and broke it in almost record time. A harsh learning curve. I strayed into enemy airspace smashed into the lights above the dining-area table and snapped one of the rotor spokes. Oh, well. I suppose it’s fixable, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Add it to the list.

Now arXiv tells me why tiny helicopters are so hard to fly

[M]oments of inertia drop in proportion to the fifth power of vehicle size. This gives small helicopters quicker response times, making them more agile. But the real killer is that the main rotor tip speed in a small helicopter is the about the same as it is for a large helicopter. So the ratio of the rotor moments to the moments of inertia can become huge and unmanageable.

So it’s all because of scaling. Curse you, scaling laws! A disproportionately large curse!

Continue reading →

Scary Nonphysics Geek Stuff: Animal Robo-Porn

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Mechanical squirrels, robot lizards jump into research

In Indiana, for instance, a fake lizard shows off its machismo as researchers assess which actions intimidate and which attract real lizards. Pheromone-soaked cockroach counterfeits in Brussels, meanwhile, exert peer pressure on real roaches to move out of protective darkness. In California, a tiny video camera inside a fake female sage grouse records close-up details as it’s wooed – and more – by the breed’s unusually promiscuous males.

And here’s a short video of said sage grouse, deemed the fembot (oh, behave!). It’s a preview that’s G-rated (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) though check out the soundtrack. I fully expected Mrs. Krabappel to pop up and proclaim, “She’s faking it.”

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

In Business, There are Five Forces

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Or so I gather from The Five Forces Circles of Hell

A discussion of some of those “five forces” (Supplier Power, Customer Power, Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitute Products, Industry Rivalry) with a couple of examples of exploiting them, offensively (good) and defensively (bad). i.e. pleasing the customer is an aggressive and good exploitation of some of these forces, while defensive implementation to protect your business model often ignores the satisfaction of the customer (which is, for sake of argument, a bad thing™).

All Blockbuster does today is provide, at great expense, an elaborate distribution channel to deliver very cheap plastic discs with expensive data on them to every neighborhood in every major city and town in the country. As soon as DVDs became the predominant data format, Blockbuster became nothing more than a highly expensive, slow, ultra-high latency internet with a data warehouse limited by inventory practicalities. Of course, DVDs did eliminate the hated “rewind charge,” but that’s another story. All Blockbuster is really doing is delivering digital data. Poorly.

Which is, of course, followed by “Enter Netflix, stage left,” followed by “Enter high-speed, high bandwidth internet, stage right.”

and

The success of the iPod and iTunes is based more on breaking arbitrary restrictions on consumers than anything else. Jobs has almost done for music what Netflix did for video rental. The process is simple. Admit that commodity pricing is on the horizon and, rather than cling to old models, simply implement it. We aren’t quite at the point where iTunes is a flat-fee per month for unlimited downloads, but a fixed per-song price is an amazing advance considering the artificial technical restrictions the music industry has imposed. And at least here we are paying for content, not for distribution.

via Daring Fireball