I was failing miserably to explain this idea to someone a while back. Partly because I didn't have it in any order in my head but mostly because the other person was getting that look in their eyes which means "Abort! Abort!". So here's a (hopefully) better attempt to explain it so that I'm ready next time.
(Andre: This is the idea in Permutation City, but I don't actually think that Greg Egan explains it terribly well there - read his short stories. And should Andre have an é at the end?)
Firstly, if you're a dualist give up now. (And if, when you read `dualist', you're thinking of two people, back to back, with pistols then you probably are 
).
Ok, if you're still with me I can create a cellular automaton in some Turing Machine with some set of rules and let it progress till I have a conscious life form in it which has deduced the existence of rice pudding and income tax. (Absolutely, this would take some time. But if you accept that it is possible then you accept that I could do it so assume that I have)
Now my Turing machine is executing this universe and I can half its speed and it makes no difference to the being in the universe; it doesn't perceive that anything is different. I can start doing lots of other calculations on the side and it still makes no difference so long as we calculate another iteration once in a while. So we can do anything in the middle and our life form is still happy, eating rice pudding.
Now we start generating sequential CA universes. Ignore the ruleset, just set each cell to a bit from a huge counter, over the whole size of the (I assume finite) universe. In the process we will, at some point, generate the next iteration of our rice pudding monster. Thus we are still generating iterations, just doing other stuff in between, thus our conscious rice pudding monster is unaffected. Right?
Now once we've generated every possible CA universe. What's left to do? You might think that the CA monster is now frozen. But what more could we do? We could calculate the `next' iteration of his universe, but it already exists in memory. Is the act of actually calculating magical? Or, in fact, is every possible conscious being `living' in our memory; their patterns finding themselves in the dust?
In fact, every possible rule of physics exists now. Any rule based progression is already there. Time is an illusion caused by the existence of memory. At each step, the entire universe (including all of the rice pudding monster's memories) exist fully formed (as does every other universe). Why should it be surprised that whatever laws of physics it believes in are precisely correct to allow it's existence? When everything exists, nothing is surprising.
(You should, of course, be putting yourself in the place of the rice pudding monster at the moment and wondering why you're so special that you're not just patterns in the dust.)
Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami, adding weight to notions they possess a sixth sense for disasters, experts said Thursday.
Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found.
We might not understand how it works, but we don't need to do so in order to be able to use it. Tag lots of animals living near the coast and track them by satellite (I'm sure such a system has already been developed for the study of migration patterns etc). When they all start to leave - do likewise.
Tor actually works pretty well. Of course, this is before it has been really hit hard by any sort of user base (people are only just starting to run BitTorrent through it) but I'm typing this over a real-time mixnet, end-to-end encrypted with bidirectional public key authentication. Maybe there's something to this crypto malarkey after all
Unfortunately this anonymity of Tor is far short of the real hard line systems as it has a central directory. Basically you trust Tor because you trust arma (Roger Dingledine). But maybe that's actually better because none of those other systems have actually taken off. Having hard line anonymity is no good if your user set is a couple of dozen people. I would hope for some improvements in the centralisation at some point but I'm happy with this as a starting point.
Fundamentally with any real-time mixnet, global traffic analysis is going to get you (esp with interactive traffic like ssh connections). Global observers are quite rare, and those with the motivation to invest in the infrastructure required are rarer still, but they do exist.
So a good article from the LA Times on nootropic drugs, which was on Slashdot.
That text mentions that most of these drugs are being developed as anti-Alzheimer's drugs because it's the only way in which to approach the regulators. There's still a very puritan streak in drugs regulation which says that drugs shouldn't seek to improve people, only to cure something that is wrong.
The word `improve' is a slippery one in the last sentence - who decides what is an improvement? Simply put; people decide themselves. Millions take caffeine (in many forms) every day as a performance booster and this is legal, mostly because of tradition. No one claims that caffeine is benign. Symptoms of overuse and withdrawal are part of the common culture but, also, no one would suggest that caffeine needs banning (at least no one worth listening to).
Drugs companies recognise that people do want to improve themselves and they would be very happy to make money by letting people do it. But since they aren't allowed to improve people, they have to create new diseases. So I confidently predict that Senile Brain-Disfunction (or something like it) will appear very soon as be the disease which nootropics can cure.
The products will almost certainly be prescription only. Otherwise, it would mean admitting that people can take responsibility for their own lives and from there you start wondering why non-addictive psycotropics are illegal - and we can't have that. Yet, despite them being prescription only, I assume that people will get they just as easily as all the other prescription `only' drugs. As far as I'm concerned this is a good thing.
I'm under no illusion that humans were created perfect and thus need no improvement. Caution is called for as we're playing with a very complex system which we don't really know much about, but not too much.
So the theatre mentioned in my previous post has had to cancel the run of the play due to health and safety concerns. What that actually means is that the police are unable to protect them from a mob of sick freaks.
Welcome to the UK, where little free speech has little progressed since 1700.
Can I suggest that anyone in Birmingham heads over to the Repertory tonight and makes sure that tonight's performance is packed out?
For those outside the UK, a number of Sikhs in Birmingham has decided that they can censor a play which they feel is `insulting' by physically attacking the theatre. The police were there in some force, but obviously not enough to do their job.
This play is exactly what Blunkett was targeting with his offense of Inciting Religious Hatred. A Sikh on Radio4's Today this morning said that he thought as much, though thankfully realised that it would look bad if he said so. The BBC found an excellent corespondent to argue the opposite case in Dr Evan Harris (Lib Dem MP) which makes that Today clip very enjoyable.
And today I understand that the police are having a meeting with both sides about it. I think they should be apologising for failing to defend the theatre (since the theatre isn't allowed to defend itself) and for not arresting anyone for criminal damage despite many officers being present at the time.
I await tomorrow morning's news.
(On the same topic, Channel 4 is supposed to have a good programme on Christmas Day called Who Wrote the Bible.)
Well, the project which I was working on at Google has hit Slashdot. I hope that was planned
(better link about it [1]. And one from BBC News)
Lots of good patent stuff today. The Becker-Posner blog has a couple of long texts on the state of patents in medicine. I'm not a big fan of patents in many spheres of the economy, but drug research patents are sensible. Of course, there are flaws, but I don't think the correct balance here is as far away from the current position as it is in, say, software patents.
Which brings me neatly to the EU trying to get software patents in via the back door. The headline says it all: EU Council Presidency Schedules Software Patent Directive for Adoption at Fishery Meeting. MEPs have a tough enough time as it is trying to convince people (British people esp) that they matter. Tricks like this certainly don't help.
And now, if your blood pressure is a little high after that, Jason Schultz has a nice text in Salon. Although comparing patents to ex-USSR nuclear weapons is possibly a little bit strong.
Hmm. Maybe this paragraph would have been better placed before that Salon link. But if you use Firefox (and if you don't, what the hell are you thinking?) then you should try AdBlock. With some minimal configuration it works really well. Just right click the adverts on a few of your common pages (The Register is a good one) and they are a lot less mentally glaring.
Google, very nicely, sent me a 20GB iPod for my birthday so I thought I had better do something useful with it.
I have a fairly nice system at home for music so I spend the, otherwise wasted, walk to and from Imperial listening to Radio 4.
You can select the `Listen' link on the website and get their web-based player. Right click and view source. Find ".ram" to pickout the filename URL. Then run lynx -source URL to get the rstp:// link.
Here's the trick...
% mplayer --version MPlayer 1.0pre5-3.4.2 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team % mplayer -aofile showname-ddmmyy.wav -ao pcm -cache 320 rstp://... . . . % lame -h showname-ddmmyy.wav showname-ddmmyy.mp3
Then use gtkpod to upload to the iPod.
Submitted to Felix in reply to this, which appeared last Thursday.
(for any Americans reading this; you probably don't know what a student Union is - don't worry.)
Jamie Brothwell seems very keen that we should all buy fair trade products, to that point of creating a bureaucracy to check that we do. I'm perfectly happy for him to pay any price that the suppliers and growers agree to, including one which is above the market value. But before there is a "campaign for increased consumption of Fairtrade goods" (funded by our infinitely-bounteous Union I suppose) people should be aware of the problems of Fairtrade.
When buying Fairtrade coffee you are charitably giving to certain selected groups of producers. Selected, that is, by the Fair Labeling Organisation which charges $2431 + $607/year + $1 per 110 pounds of coffee sold to be certified as a Fair Trade producer. And if you're a small producer (that is, less than 44,000 pounds of coffee per year - $55,440 per year, by FairTrade base prices) then I'm afraid that the FLO "seldom" certifies groups so small [Simen Sandberg, quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, April 13th]
The problem with the primary FairTrade produce, coffee, is that too much of it is being produced worldwide. In Brazil and Columbia, producers were encouraged to switch from cocaine to coffee. In an effect to rebuild Vietnam, aid went into setting up coffee plantations so that the farmers could be self-sufficient. This lead to over-supply of coffee.
The average coffee production per year increased 28% from 1990 to 2002 [ICO figures], but the values jump wildly - not the sign of a stable market. All this over-supply, of course, caused the price to drop and the less efficient producers to suffer. The inefficient producers in this case were the small, primitive farmers which Fair Trade is supposed to help.
This gives the efficient producers less incentive to cut costs and keeps those farmers forever at the mercy of the charity of those who buy FairTrade and of the FLO, which soon gains the power to select who will and who won't survive.
Instead of this perhaps Jamie should we lobbying for the elimination of EU subsidies such as the Common Agricultural Policy. (Though not through the Union of course, because everyone agree that the Union should limit itself to those issues which affect students as students, don't they?)
The idiotitic effects of the CAP have entered into common usage; "butter mountains", "wine lakes" etc. In 2001, 7m tonnes of sugar was exported [Oxfam, 2002] from the EU, and the EU taxpayer paid a total of $2.1 billion to subsidise this dumping on the world markets.
The development of internal trade (esp within Africa) and the cessation of dumping under-priced goods on the world market is the way to help these farmers. Hitching them to our charity, which is supported only by the publics' wondering attention, is not.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Greg Egan is the best sci-fi writer on the planet: Axoimatic
Currently reading: System of the World.
Next up after that: Obedience to Authority.
Heading home of the coach to Cheltenham last Friday (something that I do when I'm in need of a decent meal for a few days) I was stuck in a traffic jam for about 30 minutes. Annoying, but it's fairly small fry on a 3 hour journey. The time passed quickly enough with my special Google branded iPod .
But it turned out that the accident happened on one lane of the carriageway running in the opposite direction. The tailback which I was caught in was just the product of people slowing down to take a look. That tendency in the cellular automata of most traffic flows caused a huge tail back. Now there's a tendency to ignore such effects because they're somehow `stupid' but they are perfectly real. So can I suggest that the highway police carry large, self-standing black banners to hide the site of an accident to avoid traffic jams in future please.
And so it begins on the day of the Queen's Speech:
Daily Mail: Al Qaeda attack on Canary Wharf foiled. And it seems that ITV copied the story, but didn't mention the Mail.
The bits of Whitehall which weren't involved with leaking the story are confused and are denying it. But the bits which were are over the moon.
Well, only a few months late but I finally have my Yosemite photos up.
I swear that "Yosemite" should have an accent - Yosemité maybe? (It's pronounced 'Yo-sam-i-tee')
We have the Queen's Speech on Tuesday. For the non-British; this is where the government announces the legislation that they propose for the next session of parliament. The the next session will be the last before the general election.
It's disconcerting how fast the tone in this country has changed recently for the worse. We've had a lot of it on simmer for a while now I guess, but it's been kept down. Now the Linda Snells have really boiled over.
As a final act, parliament passed the bill outlawing fox hunting - a bunch of deluded authoritarian crap dreamt up by people who probably drive out to the country and full expect to bump into the Famous Five. With a bit of luck it will kill the governments support in rural areas. With a lot more luck they won't switch to Tory.
Now MPs have decided to turn their attention to overeating, smoking and drinking. All pleasures that MPs have famously overindulged in. Drinking will be linked with a large number of `law and order' bills no doubt. Overeating will probably come in the guise of a ban on advertising (some) foods.
Nothing stirs people up like fear and Labour are running short on it. That's what the Queens speech is going to do. Fear of crime, fear of terror, a little fear for everybody and One Government to save them all. I expect Blunkett will be jerking off listening to it. (And that's something else that will probably be in - ID cards).
And, frankly, there's no chance of stopping any of it. The Conservatives are hopeless and couldn't put up an opposition even if they disagreed with it. The Lib Dems aren't strong enough to even slow it down.
Ah, crap.
Writing on Wikipedia for a change, because it will probably be more helpful to the world at large there.
Wikipedia is missing a big chunk of CS stuff around the page that I wrote. If you know about Tornado codes or Digital Fountains etc, go fill it in! (and save me the trouble )
US version of free speech; Fearful TV fails Private Ryan.
So now one cannot show Saving Private Ryan on US TV because of fear of the FCC? A film which won five Oscars and one which my GCSE history teacher made sure that we saw the first ten minutes of because he thought that it was such a great depiction of WWII.
Stations are free to broadcast what they choose and guess what? If you don't want to watch it you don't have to. You could get a book (I recommend The Confusion, which is much better than the first one). But your government is now dictating what you can watch with vague threats:
After the FCC refused to guarantee stations they could broadcast the film without fear of repercussion, network executives said they were taking no chances.
"We're just coming off an election where moral issues were cited as a reason by people voting one way or another and, in my opinion, the commissioners are fearful of the new congress," he said.
I can understand why the covers of books for UK and US versions differ. You have to mess up the spelling for the US version at least. But why does the US get such poor cover art?
Terry Pratchett covers are famous here (UK). But the US version is just poor.
Again, the US version of The Confusion is trash compared to the UK one. Though the US version does have miscut pages to make the book seem old - that's kind of neat.
Those of us who like arguments and actually seek to get somewhere with them (as opposed to those who like them for their own sake) generally pay attention to lists of logically falacies. Like those 'proofs' that 1=0, fallacies seem reasonably correct but are actually fundamentally flawed and cause one to end up somewhere stupid.
Take, for example, this page, which says the following:
Now, I don't disagree with any of that. But here's a meta fallacy - a fallacy which those who quote fallacies fall into:
As an example, on that same page, they give this: "We've got to stop them from banning pornography. Once they start banning one form of literature, they will never stop. Next thing you know, they will be burning all the books!"
There's hyperbola for effect in that, but it's not completly daft. I see this pattern popping up a number of times. Take today's great post on BoingBoing about brands. Cory speaks about how trademark law was introduced for all manner of good reasons, but people have forgetten about them and now trademark law is an axiom in of itself and it getting abused.
Copyright law was introduced as a very limited trade between the public (represented by the state) and private enties to introduce a government subsiby for the arts which was distributed by a pseudo-market. But that has been been the victim of bait-and-forget. People don't remember why copyright law exists, so we have the very counterproductive system which we have now, within which "copyright must be enforced" is all the reasoning that is required from its benifactors. This is also, soon, going to lead to the extension of copyright of music in the EU because noone in power can remember why, exactly, copyright was ever for a limited time in the first place.
So, the meta-fallacy can roughly be put: "It's not slippery slope - but if we do this thing, X, which is reasonable at the moment then everyone will forget why we did it and it will lead to bad things."
Thanks flatmates
The front of my flat
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