XKCD movie

June 17th, 2008

I love the comic XKCD. I have a dream that one day an epic movie based on it will be made. I suspect that to be true to the original, it would have to consist of a series of short vignettes, only some of which have continuity.

As well as the overarching themes of "romance, sarcasm, math and language" it would have to have sudden adventure, geeks, physics, love, dreams, surreal imagery, raptors, red spiders, lisp, dadaism, algorithms, tin apples, meat cereals, wikipedia, "your mom" jokes, references to Richards Feynman and Stallman, and quite possibly the the map of all ideas that anyone has ever had.

It would be truly awesome. But it's probably even more awesome in my imagination than it would be in reality.

Posted in random | No Comments »

Magic inflation-linked currency

June 16th, 2008

Imagine if one measured the amount of money one had as a fraction of the total amount of money in the world rather than in arbitrary units. That way, when inflation happens, the number representing the amount of money you have goes down rather than prices going up.

Obviously that would be rather difficult to do with old-fashioned coins and notes but it would be trivial for a Cryptonomicon-style completely electronic currency. We'd probably use units of trillionths or thereabouts (or maybe "year 2000 dollars") to avoid having to write too many zeroes (and avoid accidents miscounting them).

One advantage of such a way of measuring money would be that the effects of inflation would be rather more obvious to people (at least, those of us who keep a more careful eye on our bank accounts than we do on the consumer price indexes) and might therefore discourage inflation somewhat. It would feel more like a tax (which, of course, is what it really is when it comes down to it - a very fair tax, I think, since the people with large reserves of cash seem to be the people who can best afford to pay taxes).

Another advantage is that it becomes easier to compare prices over time (since you don't have to adjust for inflation). A third is that things that tend not to be index linked (but which really should be, like salaries) would be more likely to.

A side effect would be that the velocity of money would greatly increase - cash would be a hot potato.

Posted in economics | 2 Comments »

Use derivatives for SOI

June 15th, 2008

This is an elaboration on a point from an earlier blog post.

Synchronous orbit iteration is a way of speeding up the calculation of fractals. The idea comes from the observation that the orbits of nearby points follow similar trajectories for a while. So one can take a rectangular array of points and subdivide them once a rectangular array no longer approximates them
well.

It seems to me that a better way to do this might be to compute some the derivatives of the iteration function and iterate them instead of a grid of points, for the same reason that the accuracy of numerical integration is usually better improved by switching to a higher-order method than by decreasing the step size.

This method simplifies the algorithm which determines whether to subdivide or not (just see if the magnitude of the highest derivative exceeds some limit, rather than looking for rectangularity - which amounts to the same thing for the second derivative).

It's also even easier to subdivide - instead of interpolating to find the intermediate iteration points, just evaluate the Taylor series.

Of course, I'll need to do some experiments to determine if this is truly a better method (at the moment there are some more fundamental changes that my fractal plotter needs before I can play with this sort of thing). As far as I can tell nobody's ever tried it before, though. Classical SOI is difficult enough to get right.

Posted in fractals | No Comments »

Everything I needed to know about life, I learned from "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

June 14th, 2008
  • When you are hungry, eat.
  • Fruit is good for you.
  • Eating too much junk food will give you a stomach ache.
  • Green leaves can cure all ills.
  • When you are not hungry anymore, stop eating.
  • When you want to change yourself, hide away while you do it.
  • Anyone can become something beautiful.

Posted in books, fatherhood, humour | No Comments »

Genetic engineering - a danger to roads?

June 13th, 2008

A common argument against genetic engineering seems to be a perceived danger that a genetically engineered organism will escape into the wild and run rampant, smothering forests and other natural habitats.

However, this seems to be very unlikely to me. If such a successful organism were possible, evolution would have found it already.

If some species is going to spread rapidly, it is going to have to be in a niche that hasn't existed on evolutionary timescales. For example, suppose it is possible to have an organism which lives on road asphalt (extracting its energy from that material and in the process breaking it down) or concrete. If such an organism is possible it would likely take evolution tens or hundreds of thousands of years to find it (by which time, hopefully we will not be so reliant on it for our transportation needs).

But when genetic engineering is thrown into the mix (even if no organism is deliberately designed to eat roads) it is as if we are creating a whole new way of evolving (essentially genetic mutations that change many things at once and don't destroy the viability of the organism). The consequences seem likely to be a drastic increase in evolutionary speed, and consequently the more rapid filling of niches by genetically engineered organisms and their descendants.

It seems to me that it isn't the forests that we should be worried about with genetic engineering - it's the roads.

Posted in science | No Comments »

Background music for books

June 12th, 2008

Normally when I read books I don't have music playing in the background as it's too distracting. But there have been occasions when (for one reason or another) I found myself reading a book and listening to music at the same time, and actually being able to concentrate on and enjoy both, particularly when the mood of the music seemed to fit the mood of the book.

It seems to me that this (with a bit of high tech magic) could be an entirely new multimedia experience - a system that plays appropriate music while you read.

It would be kind of difficult to implement, though, because everyone reads at different speeds and the speed isn't even consistent for a given person. So you'd need a computer program which can "recompose" music so that certain musical events can happen on demand. This isn't completely unheard of - I remember hearing about a roller coaster which had synchronized music which had to solve a similar problem (a roller coaster runs at different speeds depending on the mass of its payload.

Then you'd just need a system that could track your eyes to find out which bit of the book you were reading at any given moment.

Probably not possible yet but maybe in a few years.

Posted in books, music | 1 Comment »

Dreamland

June 11th, 2008

As I child I used to like to imagine that when I went to sleep, I would meet up with friends in dreamland and go on adventures with them. Only the friends I would meet up with wouldn't be my friends from my waking life, they would be different people from around the world (though consistent from night to night). I wonder if I got the idea from a book or a TV show?

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Unified theory story

June 10th, 2008

The first clue was that the two fundamental theories of physics so far were incompatible. The maths just didn't work out. It wasn't practical to perform a direct experiment to find out what happened in a situation where the two theories disagreed (it would have required a tame black hole, or a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy) but it was what should have tipped us off that something was very very wrong with our understanding of the way things worked, fundamentally.

The second clue came when efforts to build a useful quantum computer failed. All the theories predicted it should work, but the outputs were random - it was as if the wavefunctions decohered above a certain number of qubits - once the system reached a critical level of complexity it seemed to just fall apart. But nobody could figure out what the source of the interference was. Physicists were excited at first - the discovery seemed to open up avenues to new physics. But whatever experiments were conceived, the results just didn't seem to make sense - almost as if the very complexity that caused these effects was obscuring what was really going on.

The breakthrough came, of all places, in the attempts to simulate the human brain. Despite the protests of those who claimed it was cruel or unethical to create a simulation of human brain, it didn't take long for people to start trying, once computers because powerful enough to simulate the activities of 100 billion neurons and 600 trillion synapses.

However, none of these experiments created anything that ever seemed to be conscious in the same way that humans are. The sim-brains had the same kinds of rhythms and unconscious functions as a real brain, they could respond to stimuli and even learn, but not matter what stimuli were applied or what initial connections were made, these brains never displayed any hint of sentience, consciousness, creativity or free will.

Eventually all other factors were ruled out and it was determined that some kind of quantum gravity effects must be influencing the human brain - effects that we did not know how to simulate.

And then finally it was figured out. Quantum gravity means that time itself is curved and intertwined with space on very small scales much as it is on very large scales. Events in the future can influence events in their own past to some extent, and this happens in the human brain. Consciousness can only manifest in the presence of these closed timelike curves, solving fantastically complicated systems of equations instantaneously by feeding the answer back in time. Essentially, collections of neurons were accessing some kind of consciousness oracle that our deterministic computers did not have access to.

The next problem, then, was to build something that manipulated quantum causality the same way that the human brain did. Nature achieved this so it only made sense to suppose that we could do. And we succeeded, but what we found made us realize that things were even more mysterious than we had imagined.

To be continued...

Posted in fiction | 2 Comments »

SpaceTime Algebra gravity

June 9th, 2008

The STA gauge theory of gravity substitues STA-multivector-valued linear functions of STA-multivectors for the rank 4 tensors of the usual treatment of GR. That is a quantity of (24×24=)256 real degrees of freedom.

I wonder if these quantities could be replaced by single multivectors in a geometric algebra with 8 basis vectors. These also have (28=)256 degrees of freedom, but they might make the equations simpler.

This would mean having a second set of 4 basis vectors in addition to the normal 4 (North, West, Up and Stopped). I wonder what the physical interpretation of these vectors would be? (Some sort of dual vectors perhaps?) Would they obey the normal rules of geometric algebra or would some generalization be required (perhaps to non-associativity like in the octonions or sedenions).

Posted in physics | No Comments »

Weather for computers

June 8th, 2008

I think some people who use computers daily find that there is something kind of monotonous about them. They're always the same, day in day out. Once you've got used to the quirks of your machine (which you need to do to be productive) there are no surprises anymore.

People who work in the big blue-ceilinged room however (in many places) have weather and seasons to deal with. I suspect the variation helps their job satisfaction.

Suppose one wrote an application for giving computers some equivalent of weather. It would subtly modify the desktop theme on a day-to-day basis (sometimes even more often), changing colours slightly, modifying the screen brightness, perhaps adding rain or snow effects in the background. Nothing that gets in the way of what you're doing too much, it just adds a little unpredictability and variation to ones day. I suspect such an application could be quite popular if done well.

Posted in computer | No Comments »

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