Interdependent Science

The Ethereal Mind

2012-01-18T13:48:00.000-08:00

Science continues to push at its frontiers: out to the remotest galaxies, back to the origins of the universe, down into the most ephemeral fragments of subatomic particles. The genetic code underlying life is read and decoded. Even the profoundest mystery, the nature of the mind, seems to be emerging into visibility. Ever more powerful dynamic probes reveal the detailed behaviors of the brain. At a much more fundamental level, experiments with quantum mechanical systems continue to clarify the role of measurement, how observation of a system inevitably interferes with its evolution.

There is a tantalizing puzzle here. The nature of mind is at the heart of Buddhism. Buddhism uses introspection to investigate this nature, rather than fMRI machines or photomultiplier sensors. Curiously, the general structure of the Buddhist investigation is to attempt to grasp the mind through ever subtler means and to discover the futility of every such attempt. But perhaps that futility was simply a matter of inadequate technology. Now, finally, are we becoming able to reveal in stark contrast what has remained in the shadows for millennia?

It is a bit of an odd question to contemplate. Certainly methods such as fMRI reveal many intriguing regularities in neural behavior, and correlations between these and various cognitive behaviors. What sort of phenomenal pattern might justify our exclamation, "Ah, there it is, the mind!?"

Our experience of our own mind is intimate in unsurpassable degree. Looking at others, it's quite a mystery. People seem to be an unravellable tangle of sparkling insight and blind automatism. Indeed, reflecting on one's own behavior, it is often embarrassingly easy to find instances that trigger one to ask, "What was I thinking?"

At the end of the 19th Century, physicists were homing in on their goal of discovering the nature of the ether, the medium that carries electromagnetic waves such as light. Einstein's breakthrough realization, the Theory of Special Relativity, revealed that the ether was an illusion, that light is not the sort of thing that is carried by any sort of medium. One could say that light is its own medium: the changing electric and magnetic fields of one moment generate the fields of the next moment. The ether was to provide a frame of reference in which the behavior of electric and magnetic fields had a logical structure. In its place, the Theory of Special Relativity outlines the relationships among an infinite family of frames of reference, in every one of which electric and magnetic fields have the same logical structure.

I would like to propose that the scientific discovery of the nature of mind might well turn out to be surprisingly compatible with the teachings of Buddhism. The mind is what perceives and what acts, much as the ether carried electric and magnetic fields. Just as the ether provided a fixed frame of reference from which to understand electromagnetism, the mind is the locus of our confrontation with the world. Just as the realization of the non-existence of any privileged frame of reference paved the way for understanding how to work with multiple frames of reference, so might the realization of the nature of mind open us to vaster perspectives. The locus of confrontation between mind and world is not anything fixed but a frame of reference from which appears a history of experience.

Does our perceptual and active confrontation with the world actually seem to have any such sort of shiftable character?

Quantum measurement provides a first exhibit. Between some quantum phenomenon such as a photon and the ultimate act of observation, there is a whole chain of intermediary physical systems, such as a photomultiplier tube, an impulse counter, an eye, a brain; we are free in our analysis of the system to stop anywhere along this chain, treating as the quantum system as much of the world as we choose, and the remainder as the classical observer. The shiftable character of mind is very clear in this case.

Consider the puzzle of global warming as another very different exhibit. Allow me to stipulate that indeed the continued combustion of fossil fuel at the present scale will lead to ecological catastrophe and thence human catastrophe. What is to be done? The frustrating and intriguing nature of this question is that it depends on just who is the doer under discussion. As the human race, our options are straightforward enough: we must dramatically reduce our net emission of greenhouse gasses. Of course, how such coherent action might emerge out of the tangled mass of planetary humanity… that is a daunting puzzle! But the puzzle is not much less daunting however one shifts the boundary between observer/agent and world. What should the United States of America do as a nation? What should the United State Federal Government do? What should the State Department do? What should the American Association for the Advancement of Science do? What should I as an individual do? Perhaps I need most to steer somehow the thinking of the American public on this issue, and that might require me to increase my consumption of fossil fuels, flying about to various meetings etc.

A similar sort of shiftiness is apparent in the puzzle of diet, as outlined by Gary Taubes in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Clearly the simple energetic relationship must hold within rather strict bounds, between dietary consumption of calories, expenditure of calories in physical activity, and storage of excess calories in fat. The difficulties arise in examining consumption and activity. A famished person will stop at little to find and consume food, and if frustrated will succumb to lethargy. To what extent is any individual's behavior a function of clear perception and free choice, and to what extent are we driven by the physiological imperatives of blood sugar, insulin, etc.

There is not merely philosophical value to a clearer understanding of the division of experience into an observer/agent and a world, of how that division is itself not a feature of the world but logically prior to the world, of how our choices of how to make that division give rise to our options for exploring and guiding the unfolding of our experience. For example, in macroeconomics there are many institutions that participate in the economy as they try to understand and guide it. Are their regular patterns of institutional intervention part of the system which those interventions are intended to steer?

Bikesteading

2011-12-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

However dazzling the visions science gives us, of cosmology or microbiology etc., of at least equal importance is its practical value in helping us figure out how to live more comfortably, more successfully. Two questions then arise immediately. Is science tied to any particular measure of success? And, compared to what alternatives will science make us more successful?

For generations by now our cultural trajectory has blinded us to these questions. Science has enabled progress: every generation has lived more successfully compared to previous generations. Our success is obvious: just look at our amazing capabilities to build machines, to steer the wealth of the world to our purposes. Slowly though dissatisfaction with this trajectory has been growing. Also growing has been the effect of this trajectory on the world, as our growing human population meets tightening resource constraints. Ideally our thinking could lead the way to more sustainable ways of living, but it looks more and more like resource constraints will be the driving force.

Will our belief resist this change in thinking, our belief that science will put more and more resources at our disposal with every generation? Or can science help open our eyes so that reality can inform out beliefs. We can use science to live more successfully than we will if we cling to our blindness, but that is only a possibility.

The relationship between two discussions on the web highlighted this challenge for me. Dmitri Orlov talked about the ability "to abandon who you have been and to change who you are in favor of what the moment demands," while a thread on Bike Forums puzzled over a fellow who lives on his bicycle. Is Fred a bicycle tourist or a homeless person with a bike?

Orlov talks about seasteading, living on a sailboat. (I gather he walks his talk!) In honor of Fred, I would like to introduce the term "bikesteading".

A bicycle is surely a pinnacle of scientific technology. Bikesteading might not be the perfection of sustainability, but it might be one excellent response to the reality we're facing in the coming decades.

Dazzling Visions

2011-12-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

During the question and answer session of last weekend's teachings by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche atKunzang Palchen Ling, a question came up about theories of physics presented in the Nova seriesFabric of the Cosmos and how these theories relate to views expounded in Buddhism. I confess that I haven't watched the Nova episodes yet, but I expect that a general approach to such questions will likely apply. Modern science is filled with dazzling visions of the nature of reality, and certainly the Buddhadharma has similarly dazzling visions. So perhaps these might coincide somehow or perhaps some mutual adjustment is called for; it is surely a ripe field for exploration.

Buddhism and science are both magnificent traditions that present multiple visions of reality, so many visions that in either case one could never realistically expect to master but a small fraction of them. For example, in Buddhism we can see the world as composed of the six classes of beings from those trapped in hell to those soaring in the heavens, or we can see the world as composed of a network of experiential events which can be classed under five headings, from form to consciousness. In science, the notion of the selfish gene underlying Darwinian evolution gives us one grand vision of the unfolding of nature; another point of view comes from a cosmologist like Brian Greene, a view growing out of the shapes of space-time drawn by general relativity combined somehow with quantized interactions of elementary particle theory.

While Buddhism and science are similar in the way they cultivate such surfeits of dazzling visions, they differ in how they propose this surfeit should be understood. This question is not really a scientific one at all, but rather one of the philosophy of science. While science itself can boast of countless extraordinary accomplishments, the philosophical understanding of its practice has a more difficult time making similar boasts. As scientists work to harmonize their various visions, the philosophers of science seem to splinter into ever narrower factions. And this splintering has real consequences: for example, the way that biological evolution or anthropogenetic climate change are sometimes dismissed as mere "theories". If there were some consensual notion of the relationship between scientific theories and scientific facts, perhaps such debates could progress toward reasonable conclusions.

But where philosophy of science is much the down-trodden Cinderella of the scientific world, the analysis of the status of the various views of Buddhism is rather the honored Princess. The various views are understood as being structured by their boundaries, by their limitations. One can move through a progression of views, each succeeding view providing a perspective from which to analyze the limits of the preceding view. But this series of perspectives is unbounded, or rather ends at a realization or wisdom that transcends any structure or view or perspective.

The value of the various views of Buddhism lies in their tendency to lead to this wisdom that transcends views. How do views support or permit or suggest this transcendence of themselves? Might scientific views, at least sometimes, also work in such ways?

One general answer follows a medical analogy. Progress along the Buddhist path is a matter of curing diseases, of eliminating confused habits. Views are medicinal: they can enable us to overcome our various patterns of self-imprisonment. But views themselves can have self-imprisoning side-effects. The best medicines let us simply let go of the treatment once their work is done. Lesser medicines may require further stages of subtler treatment to work through those side-effects. Of course the relationship to medicine is not merely one of analogy. A healthy body certainly can help provide one with better opportunities to progress along the path. At the very least, scientific views are compatible with Buddhism to the extent that they promote health and happiness.

Grand cosmological theories, such as those of Brian Greene, are rather far from application to practical human welfare. Perhaps one valuable use they might have is as a challenge: is every view really limited, or might some such grand cosmological theory really reflect the nature of reality in an unlimited way? Perhaps we need such fresh challenges if we are really to confront that question rather than treating it as an academic exercise.

Alternatively, we might observe that as scientific theories progress to encompass vaster ranges of phenomena, they bring ever more fundamental shifts in perspective. These theories drive us to let go of ever deeper assumptions. If we see that every assumption will similarly fall at one stage or another of such theoretical progress, perhaps we can infer whither this process leads, and simply let go utterly.

Complexity and Power

2011-08-24T15:37:00.001-07:00

The world of electronic computing hasn't turned out much like originally envisioned. Thinkers like Leibniz and Hilbert realized that resolving deep questions requires subtle and precise logic. The human mind gets overwhelmed beyond a few layers of abstraction and too easily steps over some crucial gap, missing the details where whole legions of devils often hide. Machines can tirelessly apply inferential rules to logical expressions of daunting complexity. The surprise is that the movement this brings about tends to be horizontal rather than vertical. Indeed, still in the prehistory of computing, Gödel and Turing showed how mechanical application of rules cannot fathom the subtleties of the deepest truths. That lack of depth was the first surprise. But practical mechanical computing brought a second surprise. No one in the 1950s seems to have imagined that computers would become so universal that most folks in the developed world would routinely carry several around in various pockets, chatting with friends and checking on the stock market. Computing has become pervasive.

Parallel to these surprises, the breadth of computing instead of its depth, has come another surprise, the overwhelming complexity of the software that governs computation. The insights of Gödel and Turing in the 1930s already showed the way: code and data are interchangeable. The distinction is one of perspective. Each layer of code interprets data at an outer shell of a system, and itself becomes data to be interpreted by code the next inner shell of the system. The outer layers of the system merge into the vastness of modern life in the information age. Indeed, these layers evolve together, they drive each other's evolution. Computing pushes the complexity of life and life in turn pushes the complexity of computing.

When Leibniz and Hilbert dreamt of computational solutions to profound problems, they dreamt of software with the elegant simplicity and obvious universality of Platonic ideals. The standard formula of Garbage In, Garbage Out is too kind to software. Once software gets tangled enough, it is capable of producing Garbage Out no matter the quality of the input. And the explosion in breadth of computing guarantees that software will be tangled. Indeed, a further surprise is how we are constantly discovering new species, indeed whole new phyla, of tangles: viruses, worms, phish, etc.

This exploding ecology includes more than the two niches of software and user. There is also the software developer. As software complexity has exploded, a dream has lingered that at least the software development process could be managed as a clean methodical process. But slowly the realization has emerged that software and its developer are tightly coupled and evolve together, along with the user community, or not at all. How to manage this co-evolution is not so clear. But it is far more like leading a living community of farmers and artisans and their families than like arranging a flow of subassemblies in a factory. A healthy community is full of surprises, where a well run factory is devoid of them.

A common difficulty in any living community is where some small group gets into a reinforcing feedback loop which accelerates its growth at the expense of the rest of the system. Once this imbalance gets extreme enough, the feedback loop reaches its limits and the bubble collapses. This sort of dynamic happens in the world of software development. Software and its developers can push the complexity of the code and pull the user community along. At first the added complexity brings useful capability so the users incorporate the software more integrally into their business processes. The later levels of complexity serve more to bind the user community to the software ever more tightly, with less and less added utility. The developers can bleed the users to the point where a scary new start, and a shedding of the parasitic developers, happens despite all the efforts to maintain continuity. Often as not a new set of users springs up with the new developers.

In our information age, complex information processing technology is not developed solely by the software industry. Every institution involved in our lives of accelerating complexity is built around such technology. Medicine, automobiles and aerospace, agriculture, and finance all build devices and models of daunting complexity. Each of them are prone to the dynamic of exploiting users by binding them with chains of escalating complexity.

The recent film Inside Job poses the question: how is it that the very architects of the financial crisis of 2008 continue to hold positions of leadership in government and academia? Shouldn't the crisis they engineered disqualify them from those positions?

One good answer to this paradox may be the dynamic of binding users with escalating complexity. The financial system is vastly complex but also pervasively entangled with the rest of the economy. The developers of this system gain their awesome power through this entangled complexity.

Supporting Debate

2011-04-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Democracy, rule by the people, is a challenging goal. It's not practical above the village level to have an entire population gather to discuss a topic. Even at the village level… even at the individual level, gathering and analyzing evidence and tracing out the most likely consequences can push one's resources to the limits. Group dynamics tends to overwhelm any attempt at rational dispassionate consideration. Nowadays on the various internet discussion groups it has become all too obvious how quickly noise can swamp information.

Over the centuries, societies have worked out methods to filter out noise and bring information to the surface, to enable better decision making. Various forms of representative democracy and rules to structure debate yield decisions that surely remain imperfect but still in general vastly superior to mob or dictatorial rule. Representatives can be chosen by popular vote, as is usual for legislatures, or chosen more randomly, as with jury selection. I've read that some ancient Greek cities chose their legislators at random.

What interests me here are the new possibilities opened up by the internet. Certainly the internet already supports group decision making in many ways. Many retail sites give customers the space to offer and read ratings and opinions about products. Political discussion boards are of course filled with debates. The discussion behind Wikipedia articles is also fascinating: somehow that discussion needs to come to a conclusion, at least for the moment. I would like to sketch out here a rough idea for a system to support on-going debate on the internet.

The skeleton of the system is a set of propositions. These propositions should be statements about community affairs that might plausibly be true or false. The propositions themselves should be kept separate from the various arguments for or against them. However, a proposition might assert something about an argument or about a relationship between arguments, or about other propositions. A proposition should not, however, merely assert the truth of another proposition or the validity of some argument: such propositions would be redundant.

The flesh of the system is then the set of arguments. Each argument must support or oppose a proposition. Arguments can refer to various other proposition, some of which might be used as support, while others might be dismissed as invalid or irrelevant.

Users can then vote on propositions, supporting them or opposing them. These votes can be retracted or reversed at any time. Users can also maintain lists of the arguments for and against a proposition that they find most persuasive. A user can maintain such lists even without a current vote on the proposition.

Along with tallying votes, the system can track changes and inconsistencies in the relationship between propositions. For example, a popular argument in support of one proposition might rely on a second proposition as support. If the popularity of that second proposition declines significantly, then users could be alerted to review their support of the first proposition.

Similarly, if a widely accepted proposition asserts a logical relationship amongst the truth values of a set of other propositions, and the voting for those propositions is becoming less consistent with that logical relationship, then users could be alerted to that inconsistency.

The system would also maintain relationships between users. Users might frequently be found on the same side of the same propositions, or on opposite sides. They might find similar arguments convincing, even if they ultimately reach different conclusions on the propositions themselves. These relationships between users can then be used to cluster users along various dimensions, using methods such as principal component analysis.

Once users have been classified, then the voting on various propositions can be analyzed on the basis of that classification. More primitive analysis is also possible; for example, users who vote for this proposition tend also to vote against that proposition, etc.

The group decision making mechanisms supported by the system could also be used to maintain the system. For example, redundant propositions could be combined, complex propositions could be split into simpler components, and frivolous or abusive propositions could be deleted. Each of these operations could be suggested as a proposition which then could be argued. Judgment would generally be required to move from voting results to action: for example, users with a long record of involvement should generally be given more consideration than a flood of new users who have yet to establish trustworthiness. The goal of this system is not to automate judgment, but to support it.

The idea here is to establish a system something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia attempts to present a consensus picture of the way things are. This system, in contrast, has the goal of presenting the best arguments for and against the various alternative descriptions of how things are. The goal here is not to settle debates, but to filter out the noise and to highlight the key issues.

Networks of Correspondence

2011-04-11T19:33:00.000-07:00

My friend David sent me this link to a video on the Transition Town movement. How communities can prepare for a radical decline in energy availability is surely a question that deserves great attention. There are many types of communities, though: not all are constrained to a small geographical region.

Advances in communications technology have been at the core of the transformation of community during the industrial revolution, from the telegraph through radio and telephone to the internet. But long distance communication goes back to ancient times: the famous post office motto is a description of ancient Persian letter carriers by the ancient Greek, Herodotus. It is quite conceivable that our modern person-to-person media of telephones and internet could well collapse as the resources required to maintain their infrastructure become increasingly scarce. A worthy challenge and opportunity is to find a way to use our present infrastructure as a scaffold to reconstruct the more robust system where ideas are exchanged via the physical exchange of ink on paper, via the post office, via snail mail.

There are many reasons to exchange letters and many general types of relationships with the people whom one might write to. The primary sort of exchange relationship is with people one knows primarily face to face. Perhaps a family member has moved away, or perhaps one maintains communication with people one has met while traveling. At the other extreme, one might exchange letters with representatives of various widely known institutions such as departments of the national government.

Between these extremes are networks of people with some common interest. e.g. scientific or artistic. Modern science was born with the rise of published printed journals that could broadcast ideas across large international communities. These journals grew out of networks of exchanged letters, which continued to thrive alongside and as a foundation for the printed journals up until the era of email. A beautiful vestige of this practice is the archive of Edsger Dijkstra.

Another recent technology that may well not long survive the resource peak is the photocopier. Nowadays there is a quite smooth spectrum of printing technologies, tailored for print runs of every size. Simple printing technology is good for large numbers of copies where the large set-up time can be effectively amortized, so that may well continue, as it has, for centuries. The real ferment of fresh thinking doesn't happen at that large scale, though. Vital culture can happen on a limited budget, but only with effective structures in place to make the best use of those resources.

Three practices necessary to an effective percolation of ideas through a network of correspondents are: a distributed set of address books, sufficiently cross-linked; a regular practice of letters being forwarded so that a single letter has multiple readers; and a regular practice of copying letters or extensive parts of them.

Keeping track of the locations of people has some challenges. People move from place to place at various time scales and it is not efficient to broadcast each move to every possible correspondent. There are also safety issues with broadcasting addresses too widely. To send a letter will generally involve several steps of forwarding, each step facilitated by a correspondent incrementally more intimate with the addressee. Some system is needed whereby copied and forwarded letters include enough network tracking data so responses can be sent back to the original author.

In the best of worlds, such a network of ideas being exchanged would already be up and running as internet and telephone systems crumple. Bits and pieces of such older systems still exist, e.g. telephone trees as an earlier form of an email distribution list. While our advanced technologies continue to function, these more primitive and resilient systems will have the form of a Creative Anachronism or some similar entertainment. But, like amateur radio or backyard gardening or bicycling, snail mail networks could very well take over as a core cultural practice, and on an almost unforeseeable time table, as resource constraints make it difficult or impossible to recover from the various inevitable failures of the more advanced technologies. Resilient technologies have failures too, but recovery is less expensive.

The Human Factor

2011-03-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

I was out on my bike yesterday, out to Boiceville and back, delivering a small package to the high school. On my way back, I was having trouble getting my right foot off my pedal. I use Time ATAC pedals which usually work perfectly. Most often my foot is off the pedal because I am on a hill too steep for me to climb without taking a break or two. So on one of my little breaks, I looked at the bottom of my shoe. These pedals couple to cleats that are bolted to the bottoms of my shoes. There should be two bolts on each shoe, but my right shoe only had one bolt remaining, and the cleat had rotated around that one bolt. I reoriented the cleat and tightened the remaining bolt and managed to get back home - with more trouble from the hills than the pedals! I stopped at my Local Bicycle Shop and sure enough they had a spare bolt of the right size and shape, so that got my shoes back in business. I still have a lot of work to do to get strong enough for our local ups and downs!

The effectiveness of my bicycle really depends on a network of spare parts, maintenance supplies, and people with the expertise to use them. This is true of most any technology. On a much grander scale, this dependence is being made clear in Japan, with the problems at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Indeed, it is an interdependence. The nuclear plant requires some power source to pump cooling water, while the plant is itself a major power source. The plant's functioning is tied to its environment in many ways. Its geological environment was the immediate source of the present catastrophe, so that relationship is all too clear. But the human environment, the social context, is perhaps the most crucial facet upon which a nuclear plant depends.

I must say, I am thinking of the current pared down staff of fifty at the Fukushima plant, and thinking of their families. This staff is putting their own lives at grave risk in order to prevent this crisis from further escalation. These people are true heroes. I am praying that they can maintain clear thinking under such extraordinary stress, and that they get the support they need to succeed in their mission, to cool those reactors down, and the used fuel. I pray also for their families, that they can soon be reunited with their loved ones, with all in good health.

In weighing our options for future use of nuclear power, we need to consider what sort of arrangement could provide the greatest safety, or at least understand clearly and weigh accurately the risks involved. Since the earthquake was the primary cause of the Fukushima catastrophe, it's easy to put as a top priority: don't put nuclear reactors on geological faults. But it is very dangerous to get too focussed on the most recent failures of some technology, becoming blind to other key factors that simply haven't made themselves so obvious so recently.

The human side of nuclear technology is an essential factor to consider when weighing the risks in such systems. How might the society using a reactor fail to manage that reactor safely? War or plague or famine could weaken the society so they just don't have the capability to maintain regular servicing or to respond to some minor emergency. Technology for manufacturing spare parts might have been commonplace when the reactor was built, but could become obsolete and therefore prohibitively expensive. Various types of financial and political collapse could eradicate the engineering and managerial expertise required for such a complex system.

Nuclear Guardianship recognizes that while we have a choice whether to build new reactors, we have already committed ourselves, for many generations to come, to maintain the nuclear materials we have already generated. How can we be sure that future generations will be able to manage the nuclear wastes we leave behind? Some of this waste will remain highly toxic for tens of thousands of years, i.e. longer than recorded human history. This is already a daunting task.

The most likely way that buried waste might resurface is through human intervention. People fail to do good not merely through incapacity. Violence has been part of the human condition as long as there have been humans - that is at least a plausible hypothesis. There is a lot of trouble one can create or threaten with nuclear materials. Part of the challenge with nuclear technology is how to make sure the material and the expertise don't get into the wrong hands, the hands of people that might misuse it. Of course, misuse is a curious concept. One might classify any military use as misuse. Or perhaps military use is proper use if that use is by friendly agents, and only constitutes misuses if it is by enemy agents. Who can actually decide whether and how to use nuclear technology in the future?

Geology is a difficult science - earthquakes and tsunamis are impossible to forecast with any precision. But human behavior is so much more complex and unpredictable. If we don't want to build reactors near geological fault lines, shouldn't we also avoid building them near human fault lines?

Designing Complex Systems

2011-01-26T07:12:00.000-08:00

What kind of world and nation do we want? What are the realistic possibilities from which we are constrained to choose? Already these are enormously difficult questions. Perhaps foreign relations are the trickiest questions. Our present way of living is deeply intertwined with people all around the world. One simple measure of this is that we import about two trillion dollars of goods, while our total GDP is about fifteen trillion dollars. The more our vital interests are involved with other nations, the more we will find ourselves driven to protect those interests. This activity powerfully shapes our government. On the other hand, it's not as if utter isolation is a real option.

A similar spectrum appears at the national level. Perhaps the Tea Party is a revival of the Confederate ideas that sparked the nineteenth century Civil War. Our public and private institutions are so international that the boundaries between the fifty states are almost invisible. To what extent it could be possible to reconnect institutions to smaller regions, to states or even to cities... it is not clear how this could be done and what the consequences would be. The economic principle of comparative advantage is one demonstration of the more general maxim, "United stand, divided we fall." Yet surely that maxim must have its limits.

What we have now is a way of living that is dominated by global institutions, public and private. It surely makes good sense to avoid concentration of power in any institution, but the protection of our vital interests and the regulation of interactions among such huge players surely requires government at a similar scale. In a different world a small scale government might be effective. In today's world, the only possible government is a large and complex government. The challenge is to find a way to make such a government efficient and effective.

In this project, we don't have to start with a blank sheet of paper. There are many global scale institutions and other systems of great complexity. The pragmatic approach is to study what works elsewhere and what doesn't work.

There are two aspects to building complex systems. The system itself will have some structure, e.g. incorporating hierarchy and repetition. The other aspect is the process of design. Just like there is no single system structure that can serve all purposes, similarly the design process needs to fit the specific problem at hand. Still, there are some generally useful design methods that can be combined and adapted to fit most any problem.

Complex system design generally takes place in a series of phases. Design can be thought of as a series of decisions. The idea behind the phases is to order the decisions as well as possible. The main principle is that a decision is best made when the consequences of the alternatives are as clearly known as possible. For a trivial example, the size and shape of a container is generally best decided upon after the sizes and shapes of the contents are already known, otherwise the contents might well not fit in the container, or it could be unnecessarily large. The usual first phase of designing a complex system is determining what it will be required to do and the constraints put on it by whatever external factors.

Another methodological principle is to identify and resolve risks early. The failure of a crucial component can prevent the system from performing its intended function. The less experience designers have in working with such components, the higher the risk of a design error. In such cases it may be worth while to build prototypes as a way to gain experience before scaling up to the full system.

Complex systems are generally designed by large teams with diverse expertise. Transparency and accountability are necessary in the design process in order for this diversity to remain a strength. For the designed system to cohere, effective communication must be maintained between the various design teams. Hidden decisions become hidden problems that can trigger catastrophic failures.

Any complex system will involve risk and novelty: each unique arrangement of components creates fresh opportunities for unforeseen interactions. To work effectively, a complex system must incorporate ways for its design to be changed as problems are detected, or as system requirements shift. The processes of design, implementation, and deployment cannot be kept completely distinct.

Separation of concerns is a principle that can apply both to system structure and to the design process. If every component of the system is tightly coupled to every other component, the system will be extremely brittle. Most likely some interactions will not be handled correctly and the system won't even work from the start. In any case, any small change in requirements will lead to updates rippling through the whole system, at prohibitive expense. The notion with separation of concerns is to reduce the degree to which system components constrain each other, to reduce the level of coupling between them. The detailed operation of each component can be largely independent of the details of other components, as long as a few basic requirements are met. Changes in the design details of one component can have very little or no impact on the requirements of other components. This lets design teams work more independently with many fewer iterations of rippling changes, and then during implementation and deployment problems can also be identified and fixed with minimal impact.

I starting thinking about government as a complex system when I started hearing about the problems with earmarks in legislation. It seems many such clauses are introduced into bills at the last minute. Legislators vote on bills whose contents they cannot effectively track. This is very much like computer software when configuration management tools are not used. Last minute changes are notoriously buggy but developers always want to get the latest fixes and features into the next product release. The software industry has worked out some effective methods to manage this problem. Perhaps the government can learn something!

Solar Fruit Dryer

2011-01-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

The current process by which food is provided to most folks in the United States is one that uses large amounts of petroleum, from the farm through the distribution network to the home. As petroleum and other sources of energy get more scarce, we will need to find new ways - and return to old ways - that are less energy-intensive. These changes will be required through all the stages of growing, preserving, and distributing food.

Here is a simple design for a solar fruit dryer. The lower part is a trapezoidal solar collector. The top surface of the collector is clear glass. This covers a space for air to flow, in from the bottom, up through the collector as it is heated, then into the drying chamber above the collector. The bottom surface of this air space is a metal surface painted black, to absorb sunlight and turn it into heat. Below the metal surface is a layer of insulation, so the heat from the metal surface goes into the flowing air above it rather than the outside air below it.

The heated air rises and flows from the solar collector into the drying chamber. This air passes over several trays of drying fruit. The air is dryest as it enters the chamber, so the first tray it encounters is that with the dryest fruit, i.e. the fruit closest to the end of drying process. As the air rises, it passes over successively less dry fruit. Finally the air rise out through the top of the drying chamber and into the chimney.

The chimney is simply a vertical tube that helps the rising air accumulate lifting power to keep the steady movement of air in at the bottom of the solar collector, through the dryer, and out at the top of the chimney.

The drying chamber has a door allowing new trays of fresh fruit to be added at the top and trays of dried fruit to be removed from the bottom. As trays are removed from the bottom, the remaining trays should be shuffled down, creating space at the top for the fresh trays to be added.

The next stage of development of this idea will be to tune the relative sizes of the components, to allow maximum throughput of fruit with the least expense. A moderately sized unit ought to be inexpensive enough to build that this tuning can effectively be done experimentally.

The grand vision is that the dried fruit can be taken by bicycle to local farmstands to be sold, and then fresh fruit to be dried can be brought from the farmstand on the return bike trip. Mix in canoes as needed!

Twisted Arpeggios

2011-01-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

I took some piano lessons in 7th grade and a few guitar lessons in 8th grade, but never attained any real competence in performance. I still have no understanding of music theory at all: counterpoint, harmony, etc. It was sophomore year in college when I learned about the overtone series in a physics class that my fascination with music opened to a deeper dimension. I got out my old guitar - I think I spend a year just tuning that guitar. I also started exploring the mathematics of tuning.

In the spring of junior year I wrote a computer program to search for scales made of equal sized steps. The conventional musical scale has equal steps whose size is a twelfth of an octave. Perhaps some other step size could give a better scale. What would be a good measure for the quality of a scale, or of the step size that generates that scale. With the overtone sequence as the foundation of musical intervals, the answer must be that the scale contains pitches that are close approximations to the just-tuned intervals. In my program I just used the overtone series itself: the scale should contain pitches that closely approximate the pitches in the overtone series. Clearly the lower overtones are more important. So I formed a weighted sum of differences. Each difference was the gap between an overtone pitch and the closest pitch in the scale. The weights decreased as one ascended in the overtone series, in such a way that the sum would converge as one extended the sum to include all of the infinite pitches of the overtone series.

Any fixed step size will generate a scale for which this quality metric can be computed. In my program, I computed this metric for a range of step sizes, e.g. 1.050, 1.051, 1.052,… 1.067, 1.068, 1.069, 1,070. I checked the quality metric for each step size against those of the neighboring step sizes. At the optimum step size, the quality metric will be better than those for both slightly smaller and slightly larger step sizes. I expected to see just one or two step sizes singled out as those with the best quality metric, i.e. those that would generate the best musical scales.

This was 1976, so my program was punched into cards and read into the job queue of the campus mainframe. Half an hour or so later the resulting print-out was tossed into my slot. I was totally surprised - practically a third of the step sizes were the best in their little region. A graph of quality metric against step size would not show any kind of smooth approach to a few optima, but rather be very bumpy. I decreased the step size, so now I would explore step sizes like 1.0500, 1.0501, 1.0502, etc. Another half hour wait in the ready room for my result print-out to get dropped in my slot, and an even bigger surprise - zooming in to finer detail revealed even more local optima! This was one very bumpy curve!

I had the idea of going over to the math department to see if someone could explain to me what was going on. Such a bumpy curve didn't fit the picture I had in my head from basic calculus! But the school year was over. The summer of 1976 took me out to Grand Junction, Colorado, where I was working on historical uranium data with a couple geology professors, Ken Deffeyes and Ian MacGregor. For a little summer reading I brought along Functional Analysis by Riesz and Sz.-Nagy. Amazing! On page 3, there was my musical quality metric, or at least an infinite sum very much like it - given as a classical example of a function that is continuous everywhere but differential nowhere. A very bumpy curve!

It's nice to stumble onto classical results but unfortunately that put an end to strategy number one for discovering new and improved musical scales. Basic calculus can't analyze such functions! Strategy number two then emerged, probably still in undergraduate years. Another way to understand how a good musical scale arises is by looking a commas, rational fractions very close to 1 that are constructed by multiplying and dividing small primes.

One fundamental comma, the syntonic comma 81/80, comes up in tuning a guitar. A guitar can be tuned using harmonics, plucking the strings while touching their nodal points which causes the overtones to sound clearly. Playing the fourth harmonic of the low E string along with the third harmonic of the next A string, one can adjust the string tension to bring these to the same pitch, so the E and A strings will be separated by a just tuned interval of a fourth, i.e. a frequency ratio of 4/3. Of the five intervals separating the six strings of a guitar, four are fourths. The fifth interval, from G to B, is a major third. Here the fourth and fifth harmonics can be used to bring those strings into the corresponding just tuned frequency ratio of 5/4.

This approach to tuning a guitar doesn't quite work, though. There should be two octaves from the low E string to the high E string. But when the five just tuned intervals are stacked, the four fourths and the one major third, the top of the stack doesn't end up quite two octaves above the bottom of the stack. Numerically, (4/3)(4/3)(4/3)(5/4)(4/3) = 320/81, where two octaves should be 324/81. This gap, 324/320 = 81/80, the syntonic comma, is one of the most basic differences between just tuning and equal temperament. Is just tuning right and equal temperament wrong, or what difference does this difference really make? That is a nice question to explore!

Strategy number two involved looking for commas. I wrote a program to explore numbers whose factors were all small primes - as I recall, I limited the primes to 2, 3, 5, and 7. My program constructed these composite numbers in ascending order, and looked for pairs that were especially close. Perhaps those results from 30 years ago are still saved in some box of papers in my storage unit, but the details are long gone from my memory. The one result that I remember is that I became fascinated by an scale with equal steps that divided the interval from the fundamental to the tenth harmonic into 90 equal parts. Curiously, this scale would not have exact octaves. Still, it contained enough good approximations to important just intervals that it should support music.

Inventing musical scales is not much fun until two further problems are solved: one needs a way to play notes from any proposed scale, and one needs a way to arrange those notes into musical patterns. So my next idea was a way to lay out keys on some kind of keyboard instrument to allow performance of music that uses small step sizes. If the keys of such an instrument are laid out in a line in ascending order, there can easily be so many steps in an octave that either the keys will be too narrow to play or the octave will be too wide to reach. So I came up with a two dimensional arrangement, with hexagonal keys covering a flat surface. The pitch of the keys increases to the north and decreases to the south. To the east and west are arrayed keys that have very similar pitch. The fundamental idea is that a very narrow interval is actually quite distant harmonically. The keyboard I proposed arranges the keys according to harmonic relationships. Keys very close in pitch can be quite far apart on the keyboard.

The next problem is then how to compose music in one of these proposed scales. The easiest approach to start with is just to transpose or translate existing music into the new scale. If the new scale is based on the same fundamental intervals, such as perfect fifths and major thirds, as the old music, then the transposition should be simple enough… or so I thought! I took a couple of Bach's Harmonized Chorales and attempted the transposition. For any given note in Bach's score, I needed to select which of several closely spaced microtonal notes should be played. With the harmonic relationships available on my keyboard design, the range of choices was essentially a spectrum of notes separated by syntonic commas. I decided simply to use the color spectrum to add this detail to Bach's score. All notes of a given color would be related by Pythogorean intervals, ratios built from the primes 2 and 3. Each factor of 5 in an interval would shift one color in the spectrum, from blue to green etc. The interval of a syntonic comma is denoted by a simple shift in color with no change of position of the note on the staff. The transposition of Bach's score was simply a matter of copying the score and adding the appropriate colors.

I was amazed, not just because I found the task to be impossible, but also because the attempt seemed to reveal the structure of the music. Right up to near the end, I found it easy to see which colors to use for the notes. But the right near the end, I found conflicting harmonic relationships. It wasn't so much that I couldn't decide which was the right color, but more that the notes seemed to demand two colors at once. This conflict or ambiguity seemed to create a harmonic tension that was fundamental to the structure of Bach's music. Sure enough, the final notes of the compositions were again easy to color - the tension was resolved. That was my music lesson for the year!

About a decade after this, in 1991, I had the good fortune to be able to spend some time working at MIT as a visiting scientist - which also got me a library card! I found in MIT's music library a copy of Easley Blackwood's The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings. I was amazed to see in this book an exhaustive demonstration of the lesson I had learned from Bach. Blackwood attempts to transpose into just tuning a whole series of classical compositions from Bach to Mahler. He didn't use colors but simply little "+" marks to pick out of that spectrum of alternatives separated by syntonic commas. Blackwood shows that this transposition simply doesn't work. Music in this classical Western tradition creates a sense of tension and movement using the ambiguity introduced by temperament. The ambiguity cannot be removed without destroying the music.

I figured the book must have been the PhD dissertation of some obscure graduate student who then disappeared back into the woodwork. Another surprise! In the late 1990s I was in a CD store, probably looking for Beethoven - but right alongside, a section for Easley Blackwood's music! He is a distinguished composer as well as a theorist. His book on tunings marked a shift in his career, closing a phase of experimentation with tunings and returning to music very much in the classical tradition.

There are surely many different approaches to the construction of musical scales and no doubt many of them can provide foundations for musical making. If one wants to play in the space created by the ambiguities of temperament, the possibilities of alternative scales does not disappear. Thinking of ambiguity as a resource does, though, shift how one evaluates a scale.

My fascination for the last decade or so has been with the scale that divides an octave into 53 equal intervals. I've already outlined the logic behind 53 at http://www.interdependentscience.com/music/calliopist.html so I won't repeat that discussion here. This tuning gives very good approximations to just tuned thirds and fifths. But what if we want to play the ambiguity game? What new opportunities does this tuning open up?

The syntonic comma is the fundamental interval tempered by the conventional 12 step scale. Each step of the 53 step scale is just about the size of a syntonic comma, i.e. the 53 step scale accurately expresses exactly what the conventional 12 step scale blurs. The music of the 53 step tuning will be something quite different.

What is a comma that the 53 step scale blurs? The kleisma, 15625:15552, is one fundamental such comma. A minor third is 14 steps in this tuning, while a perfect fifth is 31 steps. If six minor thirds are stacked, that makes 84 steps - exactly a octave above a perfect fifth. Curiously, this comma is not tempered in the conventional 12 step scale, where a minor third is 3 steps and a perfect fifth is 7 steps. The stack of six minor thirds is thus 18 conventional steps, one step short of an octave above a perfect fifth. This again shows that music in the 53 step tuning will be quite different than that of the conventional 12 step tuning.

So my project has become a kind of parallel construction: to build up compositional methods for the 53 step tuning that mimic those in the classical western tradition using the 12 step tuning. Another fundamental compositional structure in classical western music is the key signature. For the most part, a segment of music will not use all twelve notes of the full scale, but instead be centered on a subset of seven. There are different ways to think about the way these seven are selected: perhaps there is a starting note and then a stack of six perfect fifths. Or the seven can be seen as three major triads stacked. These two ways to see the structure of the key signature differ by just the syntonic comma that is blurred by the temperament. If we see the white notes of the piano as a stack of perfect fifths F-C-G-D-A-E-B, then the A is four perfect fifths from the F. Alternatively, the white notes could be the three major triads FAC-CEG-GBD, in which case the A is a major third from the F. The just tuned difference between a major third and a stack of four perfect fifths is just the syntonic comma.

Can I construct some subset of the 53 steps of the octave, with a structure based on the kleisma that parallels that of the role of the syntonic comma in the conventional 12 step scale? Here is one attempt. The syntonic comma is four perfect fifths next to a single major third. The kleisma is six minor thirds next to a perfect fourth. Why not construct a key signature based on minor thirds? Take a stack of twelve notes, with a minor third between each neighboring pair. Then each note in the bottom six can be paired with a note in the top six, with the interval of a tempered fourth between each pair. This way, the roles of fifths and thirds is just reversed relative to the convention seven out of twelve key signature. Can a person make music out of this structure?

As a first step, here is a sequence of arpeggios:

http://www.interdependentscience.com/music/arpeggios.mp3

This parallels a conventional sequence like CEG DFA EGB FAC GBD ACE BDF CEG. In the conventional sequence, almost every triad includes a perfect fifth. Only the triad based on B has a flat fifth, because B is at the end of the stack of fifths. In a twisted sort of parallel way, almost every triad in this new sequence includes a minor third. There is just one triad that has a flatter third. I confess, I am just feeling around in the dark here for what might work!

In the conventional sequence, roughly half the triads have a major third from the root while the other half have minor thirds. In a twisted parallel way, this new sequence has about half the triads with fifths from the root and half with fourths.

Does this subset support music? That's not an easy question! Even more importantly, does is support making music that has something to say that couldn't be said in the conventional twelve step scale? That's an even harder question! My main hope is that I can help open up some possibilities enough that others with more compositional talent can explore more deeply.

Here, though, is my first attempt to create some music using this structure:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=784761&songID=7607461

I should note here that very likely none of these ideas at all were first proposed by me. The scale with 53 steps per octave has a very long history - centuries and likely millennia. Decades ago Shohé Tanaka named the kleisma and noted its importance in the 53 step scale. Fewer decades ago Larry Hanson selected a subset of the 53 notes that was very similar to the set of twelve that I proposed. See:

http://anaphoria.com/hanson.PDF

I learned a lot of this history from the microtuning group on yahoo:

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/MakeMicroMusic/

A Few Decades of Bicycles

2010-10-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

When I told my friend David that I have my eye on a new bicycle, he asked if this fascination with bikes was a new thing. That got me thinking about my bikes and biking over the years, so I thought I'd put some of that into words.

I lived in England with my parents and siblings in 1965 and 1966. That was a major watershed. My childhood memories are clearly divided into before, during, and after. I was nine years old when we moved to England, so I was already a bit of a big kid and enjoying bike riding. I still have my bike license plate from 1964. I must have had a coaster brake single speed bike, but I remember nothing about it. I do remember riding down Elmwood Ave. to the other end, which must have been all of twenty blocks! But that freedom to explore is a memory I still cherish.

We got two bikes in England; they must have been for my sisters. I remember my older sister's bike especially, because it had a front hub dynamo. They've been around a long time! And both bikes had hand brakes. Those were really nice bicycles! I spent most of my time in a boarding school there and didn't ride much at all. I do remember a bit of riding on the left side of the road, borrowing my older sister's bike.

When we moved from England back to Ohio, to Bath, somehow I caught the trend and begged my Dad for a Schwinn Sting-Ray. He was generous enough to indulge me - a five speed derailleur with a monster shifter on the top tube. But soon after that I met my best friend of those days, Mark Laessig. Mark died tragically young, at maybe 27. I was in contact with him shortly before cancer took him, when he was designing supersonic jet engines at NASA. But even in 8th grade he was obviously brilliant. Somehow in 1969 he had some kind of real racing bike, with drop bars, toe clips, and Campagnolo shifters front and rear. I only had that Sting-Ray a few months before I pulled off the banana seat and replaced it with something much more conventional. The high rise bars got pushed far forward to get me into a conventional posture.

Oh, I rode that bike a lot! Just to ride to Mark's house was a good ride - up Bath Hill, to start with! The biggest ride I remember was Mark and I riding to Nelson Ledges State Park. Looking on a map now - wow, that was over 40 miles! I bonked on the return trip and Mark's Mom rescued us, so it was probably only a 60 mile day. With some hiking and bouldering in the park, too!

Over Spring Break, 1969, we moved to Lake Forest, Illinois. Kiddle's was the bike shop there. I am proud to say that my first W-2 was from Kiddle's. I didn't work there more than a few months. The owner even offered to send me to the Schwinn Repair School in Chicago! But, sad to say, we were already planning our move away from Lake Forest by then.

Soon after our arrival in Lake Forest, I got the Raleigh catalog from Kiddle's and studied it thoroughly. I decided the Super Course was the bike for me and somehow saved up the money to buy one - surely with help from my parents, though I sure don't remember the specifics anymore! I know I rode that bike to summer school and over to Lake Forest college all the time. A side note - that was at the beginning of my computing experience - I was a regular on the IBM 1130 at Lake Forest college. I was fascinated by the closed solutions for cubic and quartic equations and had those written up in Fortran. I don't think I ever bothered to check my solutions, though! I try to do better nowadays!

The really big ride I remember from those days was a three day camping trip. I think there were four of us: John Gwynn, John Evers, Mark Recktenwald, and myself. We rode from Lake Forest up into Wisconsin, somewhere around Lake Geneva. We all would have liked to visit the Yerkes Observatory there but we just didn't have time. We must have been a sight, our tents and sleeping bags crudely strapped on our bike racks! I remember pulling into a Wisconsin State Campground in the dark, and the ranger's office was closed. We were all top students, but I think Mark was deputized to write the note: "We, a group of campers..." We found the picnic area and set up our tents well away from the RVs with their blaring radios or whatever people used in 1970. I also remember riding with a stomach ache from eating under-cooked pancakes from our campground breakfast. Were we cooking with Sterno?

In 1971 we moved to Fort Wayne. My main riding partner there was Mike Short. Ah, I remember attempting a century then. I bonked at about mile 85 and took the sag wagon the rest of the way. I had the patch from that ride on the knee of my blue jeans for a few years after: "I rode to Hell and back!". I hear there's another town not too far away, also in Michigan, that's called Nirvana. We didn't get there, though! I remember too riding many times from our house in the southwest suburbs, down US 24 past the intersection with I-69, into the center of Fort Wayne, to hang out at the library. I got some good use out of my Super Course!

In 1973 I left home to go to college at Princeton in New Jersey. I locked my bike up in the cloisters of Holder Hall with a cheap cable lock and didn't really ride at all or pay attention to the bike. I guess it was early spring before I noticed that the bike was gone. It was a nice bike but I hadn't been riding it so it wasn't a huge tragedy.

I think it was at the end of first semester sophomore year - my physics lab partner told me he was selling his racing bike. He was upgrading to a Masi, as I recall. Wow, the bikes that were appearing in those days! So I bought his Legnano. Campagnolo Nuevo Record derailleurs, center-pull brakes - probably Weinberg - and sew-up tires! I think I bought that bike immediately after Christmas break. I took it out on a ride... all the way out, a freezing rain began. I remember coming back toward Princeton on Route 206 and slipping and falling and landing sprawled out on the highway. It was busy enough with tractor-trailors and every kind of traffic, but somehow right that moment an angel must have been watching. I got back up and tried to walk with the bike but the road was so slippery I couldn't even walk on it!

Probably my longest ride in Princeton was out to the ocean, to Asbury Park. I remember riding over through Lambertville and down along the Delaware River, too.

Ah, the summer of 1976, I worked out in Grand Junction, Colorado. I was doing some programming work for Ken Deffeyes and Ian MacGregor, two geology professors. Mostly we'd commute by car, from the Mesa College dormitories where we stayed, to the ERDA labs where we worked. But for a week or two I was on my own. I recall that I borrowed a bike from one of the ERDA administrators for my commuting in that interval. I remember riding a bit on the back roads around the edges of Grand Junction.

I moved to Philadelphia in 1977 for graduate school. I remember taking the Legnano out for longer rides - sometimes for laps of the classic East and West River Drives, other times out to West Chester or Paoli. The Legnano isn't any kind of urban utility bike, though! I know I used a variety of old coaster brake bikes that seemed to appear out with people's trash from time to time. I remember riding no-hands in the middle of the night on one such bike, from 3rd and South St., after seeing some jazz, back to home in West Philadephia. Riding no hands up over the South St. bridge was the biggest challenge but not so difficult. I really pooled my pennies at one point and bought a new Panasonic five-speed urban bike. This bike was a bit of a technology experiment - the freewheel mechanism was in the bottom bracket, so you could shift the derailleur while you were coasting! But this bike got stolen after less than a year. Better to use a junk bike for running errands!

In 1982 I moved up to Poughkeepsie, NY, to work for IBM. My Dad loaned me his Schwinn Collegiate 5-speed bike to get around until I could afford a car. I remember riding that bike from downtown Poughkeepsie, where I lived, to the IBM education building south of the main site. I remember holding a duffle bag with my laundry across the handlebars, riding to the laundromat. How long did it take me to get that Schwinn back to my Dad? I still had the Legnano then, too. I remember riding up to Rosendale and then around the back side of the Shawangonks and then up and over, by Mohonk Mountain House. That Legnano did not have low gears! I remember riding up to Rhinebeck, too.

I spent a year or so in Cambridge, MA, in 1991. Already I had some kind of mountain bike. I remember riding that in Dutchess County a bit and how much more work it was to ride than the Legnano. But for the potholes and trolley tracks of the Boston area, the mountain bike worked great. I doubt that I even brought the Legnano to Boston - it must have stayed in Poughkeepsie.

I was on a long meditation retreat from late 1992 through early 1996. I stored a lot of my stuff but I sold a lot too - both the mountain bike and the Legnano moved on. My sister worked for a while at Bicycling magazine in Emmaus, PA. I think that's where the Legnano went.

I headed to the Portland, OR, area after retreat. I was low enough on funds and Portland looked like a good bike riding town, so my plan was to do without a car. I stayed a month or so beforehand with my sister in California. I found a Trek 520 there and had it shipped up to Oregon. I wish I had waited and bought my 520 up in Oregon, but I wasn't sure what would be in stock etc. and I didn't want to risk being without wheels.

The 520 served me quite well in Portland. I could ride over the West Hills from Hillsboro, where I lived, into downtown Portland, load up with books at Powell's, and haul them home. Usually coming home I would take Terwilliger and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. Up and over Cornell going west with panniers full of books - too much for me! I remember too some rides into the countryside. I especially remember my one ride up Laurelwood Hill. I had no idea what I was getting myself into! But it was a clear day, and at the top I was rewarded with a spectular view of five peaks - Ranier, St. Helens, Adams, Hood, Jefferson. Wow!

Somehow in Portland - well, I had a good job and so I could afford it - but I worked my way up to three bikes: a folding bike and a bombproof Amsterdam city bike along with the 520.

In 2007 I moved back east, into the Catskills Mountains. Lots of busy narrow twisty roads here! But slowly I am working out routes to get places while avoiding the most dangerous roads. This past spring I was delivering census questionnaires. My sweetheart's teenage son has a mountain bike which I used for a decent fraction of the work. Those fat tires and low gears are really handy for the private roads that snake up the valleys here! So that has got me thinking about a bike I can use for grocery shopping, for hauling real cargo up the mountain slopes - up Dug Hill Road!

Pythagorean Shifts

2010-08-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

I see that the Yamaha CP1 electronic piano can be switched to play in Pythagorean tuning. This means that fifths are true, i.e. a frequency ratio of 3/2. This is about 2 cents sharper than an equal tempered fifth - a cent is 1% of a half step. Of course, if you follow the circle of fifths and every fifth is 2 cents sharper than equal tempered, the circle will not actually close. The last fifth must be 22 cents flat! Thus, the Pythagorean tuning can be diagrammed with:

I don't see in the CP1 manual which fifth they chose to be flat, so I just took a guess.

This choice of the flat fifth might be something a performer would like to vary, even during a performance. How should the tuning of the piano best change when the performer shifts the flat fifth up or down a fifth?

One approach would just be to shift the whole diagram over a fifth - to keep the same set of differences from equal temperament, but just to shift the assignment of those differences a fifth. This can be diagrammed with:

This is clearly not very satisfactory. Every note on the piano gets adjusted - most notes a flattened two cents, but then one note is sharpened by twenty two cents. This global shuffling could be disruptive in the middle of a performance.

Another approach is simply to sharpen a single note by twenty four cents:

The great advantage of this approach is that, when shifting the flattened fifth one step around the circle of fifths, only one note is changed: the eleven others are left unaltered. This should eliminate any sense of disruption during a performance.

However, with this approach, the whole set of differences from equal temperament drifts sharp by two cents. Shifting again and again in the same direction would just keep sharpening the tuning of the piano. But that is the nature of real Pythagorean tuning: the circle of fifths just doesn't close!

Of course the performer would also have the inverse option, to move the flattened fifth back in the circle of fifths. Again eleven note are unaltered, and then one note would be flattened by twenty four cents.

It looks like this approach to dynamically shifts for Pythagorean tuning could be implemented naturally on the Yamaha Motif XS synthesizer, using the stock tuning controls.

Step one is just to work with Pythagorean tuning, to explore the musical value of the just tuned perfect fifths, and then to see how that awkward very flat fifth gets in the way. Then one can start to explore how dynamically shifted tuning allows one to push the piano past its usual limits - it's as if the piano actually has more keys than twelve per octave!

Dynamically Tuned Piano

2010-08-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

Tuning a keyboard instrument such as a piano so that each half step has exactly the same frequency ratio is the tuning system known as equal temperament. In equal temperament, a sequence of notes can be shifted up or down the keyboard by any number of steps, and the harmonic relationships between the notes will not be changed. This symmetry is a big advantage for equal temperament.

As discussed by Kyle Gann, there are subtly different tunings that have some other advantages. The fundamental problem with equal temperament, or really with any tuning system, is that the mathematical ratios underlying harmony can be combined in an infinite variety which would require densely packed notes infinitesimally spaced, if the mathematical ratios were to be represented precisely by the tuning system. For a tuning system to provide only a manageable set of notes to a performer, some or all of the intervals will have to be adjusted, or tempered.

Any tuning system that is not equal tempered will not be symmetrical, by that very inequality. A sequence of notes will sound somewhat different if it is shifted up or down the keyboard. For example, the fifth from C to G might be slightly different than the fifth from E to B. A musical piece will have a slightly different character when transposed to a different key.

This variety of character opens up an interesting musical possibility. Given modern keyboard technology, the pitch of any note on a keyboard can be shifted slightly in an instant. To change the character of a piece of music, one could leave the music in the same key, but just tweak the tuning of the instrument on the fly, during a performance.

This is analogous to an orchestral harp. A harp has only seven strings. One can use the pedals of the harp to sharpen or flatten strings, one pitch class at a time, so the harp can be played in the different keys. My proposal here is to take a keyboard that can has twelve pitch classes available, and to use a pedal, or perhaps hand operated controls, to shift one or more of those twelve pitch classes slightly sharper or flatter, to make available multiple non-equal temperaments during a performance.

Here is one concrete proposal for a set of operations to shift tunings. Studying Kyle Gann's presentation of Young's Well Temperament from 1799, one can see that the deviation of the pitches of the various notes from equal temperament follows a simple pattern when plotted along the sequence of fifths:

Typically one will want to shift the meanings of the notes, the harmonic structure, by a fifth. One could just shift the tuning pattern directly:

This shift leaves four pitch classes unaltered, sharpens four, and flattens four. One problem with this shift is that the four unaltered pitch classes are in two separate pairs. Musically, probably only two are significant at any time.

One can also provide two alternatives: shifting up

and shifting down

These two shifts also leave four pitch classes unaltered, but the four pitch classes are all together in the circle of fifths, and so would generally work better as a tonal center during a shift.

A complete system could provide these three alternative shifts when moving up a fifth, and the corresponding three when moving down a fifth, for a total of six single step possibilities. Each step could be repeated indefinitely. Shifting over repeatedly would bring one back to the same tuning after twelve shifts. Shifting up or down repeatedly would keep sharpening or flattening notes, so the whole tuning would be drifting up or down in pitch. Of course, a more typical usage would likely be to shift up when moving a fifth in one direction, then to shift down when moving a fifth in the other direction, which would return the keyboard to the starting tuning.

Who Shall We Blame?

2010-05-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

It's anybody's guess at this point, what damage the on-going Deepwater Horizon oil spill will cause. Even long after the flow has stopped and the oil has dissipated and settled, much of the damage will be deep underwater, and much of the damage will be blended in with the side effects of so many other industrial processes, that we will never be able to assess the impact with much precision. But it's clear that the damage will be severe. Surely, someone must pay the price. Surely we have the right and duty to insure justice is served.

I don't know much about the theory or practice of law. It certainly seems valuable to have some social mechanisms to discourage harmful behavior, along with those to encourage helpful behavior. But any such mechanisms will inevitably be very crude. The realities of harmful and helpful behaviors get exquisitely subtle, while the political and bureaucratic mechanisms of the law are dreadfully gross. The situation is the same with charity. It's good that we have charitable institutions, but a cornerstone of society is built of the charitable actions of individuals at the personal level. Another cornerstone is formed by our personal actions of encouragement and discouragement, and our personal evaluation of the helpful and harmful character of actions.

There will surely be plenty of blame passed around for this oil spill. Any operation of this scale and complexity will include many mistakes and oversights. Usually there isn't such a catastrophe to provoke their being brought to light. Now we have a catastrophe. We will hear about the mistakes. However the legal system decides to assign the blame, though, we would be wise to look carefully at the deeper patterns underlying the situation.

The real situation is not properly characterized as a single blown-out well spewing thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico. The real situation is that such catastrophes have become a daily routine in our world. Do the tar sand operations in Alberta, operating as planned, do much less damage than this accidentally blown out well? Or look at the damage from the strip mining of coal, or... anyone with their eyes open can extend this list indefinitely.

We can blame corporations, or the financiers, or the government. But Pogo really hit the point: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." It's not just how each of us damages the planet through our individual actions of driving a car, etc. It's not even just how our demand for goods and services drives others to meet our demands through damaging actions. We are all members of the global community, participants in a grand shared imagination of the facts and values that constitute our world, our reality. We are all responsible for bringing into reality the kind of world we have, of daily ecological catastrophe. We all have the responsibility to change, to cultivate a new vision.

It might be that, in a world where risking such catastrophes is unacceptable, the price of gasoline is more like ten dollars per gallon rather than three, and due to that we all experience many constraints on our travels and on the availability of goods and services. Perhaps we can see that by paying such a price we will have purchased a planet that can provide our great grandchildren with an environment in which they can thrive. We might think that we have stumbled upon a remarkable bargain, and celebrate.

Just as the tone and character of our individual life is built up of moments of experience and response that flow from one to the next, so our society and culture are constituted by nothing other than our momentary celebrations and condemnations flowing from individual to individual and recycling through the networks of our communities. We each have the power and responsibility to steer not only our individual responses but those at every scale in the world in which we live.

This is our catastrophe. It is up to each of us to create a world where such catastrophes are vanishingly rare, instead of the daily routine.

Buddhism in a Nutshell

2010-03-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Richard Gombrich's What the Buddha Thought (Equinox 2009), and just came upon this wonderful nugget (p. 74):

You cannot see things straight because you are blinded by passion, and you allow your emotions to control you because you do not see things as they are.

Automotive Black Boxes

2010-03-10T05:28:00.000-08:00

The problems that Toyota is having with stuck accelerators needn't be chalked up entirely to shoddy engineering or corporate greed. Modern cars are very complicated systems which are very difficult to design flawlessly or to diagnose when failures occur. And it's not just cars that are getting more and more complicated!

This rise in complexity is in part due to the pull of rapidly advancing digital electronic technology. Compute power is so cheap, it becomes the optimum way to provide what the customer demands: performance and economy. And customers do demand ever more performance and economy, whether it's due to constraints or worries about the environment, or just because it's what they're conditioned to expect by automotive advertising.

Improvements in safety and efficiency seem entirely positive, but if the cost in complexity brings new risks from rare but catastrophic failures, the gain is not so entire. If 95% of customers have an improved experience, but 0.1% suffer dreadful consequences, the trade-off is not obviously worth pursuing.

But if manufacturers of such complex but safety-critical products could more effectively address the risks of rare but catastrophic failure, so the failure rate could be reduced dramatically, the gains in routine safety and efficiency could be enjoyed with much less risk.

One important such mechanism is already in widespread use in the airplane industry: the black box. It may now be time for the introduction of black boxes into automobiles. Something like a flash drive could record perhaps a half hour's worth of data - the movements of the steering wheel and the pedals, together with engine and wheel speeds, at the very least. Key data from various subsystems should also be included - whatever information could best help engineers diagnose the cause of whatever catastrophic failure might occur.

There are also tools available to help designers find and fix rare design flaws, so they never escape to the field to cause failures. But it is unreasonable to expect activities like driving cars and flying airplanes to be perfectly safe. Reality always has more tricks in reserve than any design team can anticipate.

While engineers certainly must work diligently to eliminate flaws, the real key to progress is to learn from whatever failures occur despite one's best efforts. Modern cars have become so complex that the gross evidence of tire skid marks and observers' memories are insufficient to enable diagnosis of rare failures. Black boxes in automobiles could provide an economical and effective way to learn from those failures so the problems can be fixed before more lives are risked.

Luck

2010-01-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

Where are these spikes coming from?

A quick review: I am simulating the evolution of strategies for playing Prisoner's Dilemma. I have a parameterized version of the classic strategy TIT FOR TAT. At each generation, I have 100 strategies, i.e. 100 different combinations of values of the four parameters that define a strategy. Each strategy is played against every other strategy for 100 or 300 iterations. Each strategy accumulates a total score across all these iterations and opponents. After all the play of one generation, the lowest scoring half the the strategies are eliminated. The remaining strategies, that scored in the top half, are then combined in a randomized way to generate enough new strategies to bring the total back to 100, and a new round of play is begun.

The graph above is a plot of the numbers of defect-defect, defect-cooperate, and cooperate-cooperate moves for each generation. For this experiment I let each pair of strategies play each other for a run of 300 iterations, instead of 100. The frequency of spikes is thereby reduced.

The most interesting parameter seems to be - given that the opponent has been defecting recently, with what probability should the current strategy cooperate? This probability appears to settle slowly down to around 0.05, then jump rapidly at irregular intervals to around 0.2.

I ran a strategy with this "unwarranted cooperation" parameter set to 0.1, against the classical TIT FOR TAT, for 100 runs, each of which was 100 iterations long. TIT FOR TAT never won a run of 100 iterations - at best it tied. The 20th through 80th percentile runs had the 0.1 strategy winning by 5 points. The best the 0.1 strategy did against TIT FOR TAT was to win by 15 points.

I then played a 0.2 strategy against the 0.1 strategy. the 0.1 strategy generally won - the best it did was to win by 110 points. The median margin was 45 points. 80 percent of the time it won by at least 25 point. But the 0.2 strategy did win at least once, by 25 points.

I think this explains the spikes, or at least starts to. The results of the playing at each generation are not well determined - the distribution of results has some significant range. There is a general drift toward defection, but now and again there is enough lucky cooperation that the cooperating strategies can survive and reproduce.

Another source of randomness is the creation of the new strategies to be added to play in the next generation. Each new strategy is constructed from two randomly chosen surviving strategies from the current generation. If by chance two relatively cooperative strategies are chosen, their child is sure also to be cooperative. The more strategies there are that are cooperative, the more they have the opportunity to increase their scores through mutual cooperation.

backwards

2010-01-18T11:47:00.000-08:00

Oops! Reviewing my code... I see that I had the logic backwards. The probability that keeps spiking is actually that of an unwarranted cooperation! Here is a plot with the total numbers of defect-defect, defect-cooperate, and cooperate-cooperate rounds of the game. There are 100 strategies, so that is 4950 pairs, and each pair is run for 100 iterations. Thus the total across all three categories should be 495, 000. Whew! Looks like a match!

Elimination Rate

2010-01-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

Each generation, I am saving the best strategies to run again in the next generation. There is no limit to how long a strategy can be kept - as long as it doesn't get eliminated, it will be kept.

However many strategies are eliminated, I will create the same number of new strategies, so that in each round of play there are the same number of strategies, 100, competing. Each new strategy is created by combining two existing strategies. These two strategies are picked at random from the strategies that scored well enough to be kept for the next generation.

Now I am sorting the scores on each round of play, so I can control the fraction of strategies I eliminate. Here is the graph of evolution of the probability of unprovoked defection, when I eliminate the bottom scoring half of the strategies in each generation:

I have added a couple new lines to this graph - now I am plotting the smallest and the largest values across the 100 strategies, along with the 20th and 80th percentiles, and the median.

If instead I only eliminate the bottom scoring 20% of the strategies, here is how things evolve:

Details, Details

2010-01-17T10:24:00.001-08:00

Here's the evolution of the probability of unprovoked defection, when I reduce the level of mutation allowed to 3% instead of 5%. The spikes are certainly much less prominent and their onset is less abrupt.

There is another factor that I am not controlling very carefully - the fraction of strategies that is eliminated in each generation. What I am currently doing is just taking the midpoint between the highest score and the lowest score. The strategies that score below the midpoint are eliminated. Sometimes that might eliminated 40% of the strategies, sometimes 60%. I need to control that fraction more carefully, and to investigate how the pattern of evolution varies and the fraction changes.

The Literature

2010-01-16T19:37:00.000-08:00

OK, I do need to see what others have discovered - this game is quite classical by now, so there must be a considerable literature.

Robert Hoffmann's paper "The Ecology of Cooperation" looks really good for a starting point:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~lizrh2/papers.html

First Plot

2010-01-16T17:07:00.000-08:00

I ran the simulation for 4000 generations. This is a plot of the probability that evolves, the probability of defecting when the opponent has been cooperating recently. I am actually using a moving average of recent opponent behavior, rather than just the most recent move. My population size is 100. I have plotted here the 20th percentile, median, and 80th percentile values for the probability of an unprovoked defection.

This sure looks more like some kind of chaos, rather than anything periodic! The relaxation back to polite behavior looks nicely exponential. But that indulgence in nastiness seems to come out of nowhere.

Right now I am allowing a child's parameter to run beyond the range of its parents' values by 5 percent. It must be the case that these nasty suprises come out of these mutations. For a next experiment, I will reduce the allowable range of mutation. This should reduce the frequency of nasty surprises - so I hypothesize!

Prisoner's Dilemma

2010-01-16T11:48:00.001-08:00

I am having great fun reading William Poundstone's book on John Von Neumann, Game Theory, the RAND Corporation, etc. So much so, I have to try some of this myself! So I bring up a fresh project space in Linux KDE, and away I go.

How about a parameterized TIT FOR TAT. For example, there can be a couple of probabilities - depending on what the opponent did on the last move, cooperate or defect, this new strategy can use one probability or the other to decide whether to cooperate or defect this turn.

Next, suppose we have a whole population of TIT FOR TAT players, each with its own parameter values. We can play every one against the other and accumulate scores. Then we can pick the parameter values with the best scores, maybe the top half or whatever fraction we like.

The idea is to use this as a model for evolution. I will have to read Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, but sometimes it's just more fun to jump in and try it before getting too bogged down reading about all the approaches everybody else has tried!

Now that I have selected the fittest strategies, I will reproduce them with a bit of variation to create a new generation of strategies. My current idea is to mimic biology: I will create a new strategy from a pair of existing strategies. For each parameter, the pair of existing strategies defines a range of values. I will pick the corresponding parameter value for the new strategy by picking randomly from that range, plus allowing a little extra mutation, a little running outside that range.

So, select the fittest in each generation, then reproduce with variation to create each next generation, repeat for many generations... what will happen?

My first experiment gives a curious result: there seems to be a kind of cycle, where gradually the strategies evolve into a polite TIT FOR TAT with little cheating, then there is a sudden burst of cheating, which again settles slowly back into politeness.

Is this a real property of this kind of system or just a bug? More investigation is needed! What fun!

Us Versus Them

2009-12-21T14:24:00.000-08:00

I left my full-time job a few years ago and for 18 months I sent in monthly checks to have my medical insurance continued under the COBRA plan. As I reached that time limit, I started to investigate individual medical insurance plans. Imagine my surprise - I found none at all! I found one provider that allowed me to fill in an application on-line - don't call us, we'll call you! Two years later, that application is still in process!

I wonder, if the new Federal reform of health insurance is enacted, is my situation going to improve at all? I gather that I will be required to make monthly payments again. Do I have any basis to hope to be better served?

I don't know what is in the bill that the House passed, or what the Senate is considering, nevermind what any joint committee is likely to come up with. I'm not encouraged by the snippets I hear on the radio and see on the internet. The main thing I hear is that insurance companies will stop rejecting people's claims because of prior conditions, if everyone, no matter how healthy, is required to enroll.

From an insurance perspective, this makes good sense. As the insurance companies point out, why should they be required to issue a fire insurance policy on a burning house? But somehow medical insurance is not fire insurance. A medical policy with a high deductible is much closer - a policy that would pay the typical holder only once in twenty years or thereabouts. I wonder how our system has evolved to its present state, with very low deductibles, so that insurance companies paying medical costs is common for many people. Most likely this is coupled to another peculiarity, that most medical policies are part of an employer's group plan, and largely paid for by the employer without being subject to income taxes.

From the snippets I've seen and heard, the focus of the proposed legislation is on the relationship between insurance companies and those they insure. Of course, every one of us is a potential customer of medical services. But the health care crisis is so much vaster than that one relationship.

Another crucial player is the physician, and in general the providers of medical services. This expands the network into a triangle. With the insurance company routinely managing all payments for services, the physician is stuck negotiating with the insurance company over which medical services are sufficiently cost-effective. This profoundly disempowers the patient.

Disempowerment of the patient - this may be at the core of the health care crisis. Of course, many of us find it convenient to disempower ourselves. It is easier to remain ignorant and to demand that somebody else take care of our problems, medical or otherwise. But an effective system will resist the temptation to prey on such weakness.

Behind the front line of physicians, nurses, etc., there is a whole army of suppliers, lead by the pharmaceutical industry. It is far more profitable to sell cures to the sick than to provide the simple tools necessary to maintain health. Of course, preventative medicine is not a 100% solution. But one major symptom of the present crisis is that even the most basic foundations of diet and exercise are much too seldom maintained.

That a healthy lifestyle seems so difficult to achieve - this opens up the pattern to the full world of our experience. Our culture has come to honor self-indulgence rather than self-discipline. We are surrounded by images, distortions held up as ideals. These distorted images include criminals held up as heroes, or exaggerated body proportions as healthy, or lavish living as smart economics.

Somehow it seems that many of the struggles around these issues present an illusion of a zero-sum game with distinct players - insurance companies versus policy holders, etc. But in the end we are just one society - one planet. A healthy system requires harmonious relationships among healthy components. Mutual exploitation, us versus them, is the path spiraling to collapse. Can we pull ourselves out of that pattern?

Process or Result?

2009-12-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

I haven't read any of the climate research emails that were stolen and published, that reveal some of the ugly details at the sausage factory of science. I don't know whether the researchers were really massaging their data irresponsibly, or to what extent the emails represent good evidence of such goings-on.

As John Michael Greer discusses in his most recent post, the debate around the emails is serving to amplify the polarization of views about climate change. This polarization does not help us reach the best scientific or political decisions.

There is another polarization involved here beyond the issue of whether the weather is affected by fossil fuel combustion. Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms, discussed in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, comes to mind. Salatin advocated slaughter houses with glass walls. He goes so far as to invite his customers to slaughter their own chickens.

All too often, scientists want to present results to the public. It seems to enhance the prestige of the scientific community to keep the messy process of science hidden behind a curtain, and to present results as settled facts, laws, etc. But this wall between scientists and non-scientists is unstable and unhealthy. It is far too easy for a walled-off mess to fester. Eventually the general public will demand to know the source of the smell. Perhaps nothing is really rotten, but the public may well lose confidence either way.

The real answer may well be to invite the customer to slaughter a few of their own chickens, or at least let the wall of the slaughter house be transparent. This already happens quite wonderfully in astronomy - amateur astronomers regularly make important scientific contributions. The truth is, climate is one messy business. It might seem that the risks of climate change are so serious that climate scientists need to emphasize their certainty in their results, and to hide the inevitable uncertainties and caveats to do that. But the truth is, the risks are so serious that we cannot afford to have those uncertainties hidden.

Here's one idea. NASA has often invited the public to suggest experiments to be performed in outer space. Climate science often involves similarly expensive apparatus, e.g. supercomputers. Invite the public to suggest various experiments, then pick a few most promising suggestions for actual implementation. Invite the public to see and to participate in the messy process of doing climate science.

The Illusion of Peak Petroleum Production

2009-10-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

The United States produces considerably less petroleum per year nowadays that it did back around 1970. Similarly, production is in decline in the North Sea oil fields of Great Britain and Norway. Still, though, global production is holding reasonable steady. What does the future hold? Can we expect new technology to continue to open up new resources - or perhaps it's just some yet hazily perceived geological process that will continue to bubble up new oil fields as fast as we can burn through them.

Speculation on this topic generally focuses on some supposed "peak" in production, a point where petroleum is getting harder to extract at a rate faster than our extraction technology is improving. The peak is the point where petroleum production reaches its maximum, after which production will forever be less than that peak. Knowing when that peak is to occur - or has it already occurred? - should help us plan ahead, or so one common brand of thinking goes.

It seems obvious from a mathematical perspective that petroleum production must have a peak at some point. If one accepts that the time interval over which production occurs is bounded both in the past and in the future, at the very least by the emergence of the planet earth from the debris left by the last local supernova and its disappearance in the thermonuclear fire of the next local supernova, and if we represent production as a series of numbers, perhaps the daily tallies, then some number from that finite set must be the largest. Perhaps that maximum occurs multiple times, but if the tallies are given with sufficient precision the likelihood of a repeated number diminishes to insignificance.

What we're interested in, though, is not the mere existence of that peak, but its timing. That, I want to argue here, is chimeric. At a very practical level, the time of the peak may very easily jump across decades, depending on accounting details buried deep in the footnotes. Once you start to play along, the game is so easy that you will surely be able to generate many more accounting tricks than I will suggest here and you will be able to cause the peak to jump across decades all by yourself. But let me make the first few moves, in case they're not immediately obvious.

First, the tally intervals need to be established. This involves setting both their duration and their exact start points. For example, a yearly tally might start on January 1 but perhaps some other date is preferable. Given that production is spread across the globe and undertaken by diverse organizations, the exact start and stop points of the intervals might vary by time zone or by fiscal years in use. The final tally for e.g. 2008 might be the sum of production by all the producing organization, each in their individual fiscal 2008, many of which might be mostly in calendar year 2007.

In any year, the production rates day by day will surely not be constant. One year could have a total production less than some later year, but the first year might easily have a day whose production total exceeds that of any day in the later year.

The sequence of production tallies using one rule for intervals might have several similarly large numbers but only one true maximum. By changing the accounting rules, the numbers will all change a bit, easily by several percent. There won't be an exact correspondence between the two sequences of numbers, because they are defined over different intervals. But if there are two numbers very close in size but quite far apart in timing, a small adjustment can bring the smaller number up a few percent and the larger number down a few percent, so the maximum production tally can be shifted to a very different timing in the sequence.

Petroleum product has ramped up to current levels over almost 200 years. It seems likely enough that production rates are not likely to double yet again from current levels. Nor does it seem likely that production will plummet in just a few years. We are almost certainly faced with decades of fluctuating production, a bumpy plateau, before a slow decline sets in. There isn't a clear line between the plateau and the decline - such a distinction can only be made precise by arbitrary choices of accounting rules and curve fitting parameters. The exact intervals over which production is tallied, that is a first such accounting rule by which such neat distinctions as peaks and plateaus can be manipulated.

Another crucial facet of production accounting is gross flow versus net flow. What is most interesting to society at large is the net output of useful petroleum products such as gasoline, kerozene, etc. that the petroleum industry makes available for end uses such as transportation, heating, etc. Gross production would be the total volume of material extracted from oil fields etc. There can be a lot of variation in the amount of end product made available from whatever fixed amount of gross production. Some crude petroleum may be lost in transportation - more will be lost, generally, from remote fields. Crude petroleum is a class of material which covers a lot of variation - not every barrel will yield the same amount of refined product.

Some really difficult accounting comes into play when considering internal use by the petroleum industry of refined product. However much gasoline etc. is used by the petroleum industry in exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining operations, that much gasoline was not provided for end use by society at large. But how can one really draw a line where the petroleum industry starts and stops? What about the refined product consumed by e.g. the steel industry in producing the tools and structures it provides to the petroleum industry? Should we deduct that petroleum to determine net petroleum production?

As petroleum gets more and more difficult to extract, the petroleum industry will consume more and more resources per barrel of oil. However the exact accounting is performed, a steady gross production will be yielding a declining net production. But the details of the accounting will generate significantly different sequences of net production tallies, which will likely give peaks at very different times.

The exact timing of peak petroleum production is an artifact of arbitrary details of statistical analysis and accounting. The exact timing of the peak is useless for any kind of planning purpose. What is much more useful is a rough forecast of production, something like average production rate decade by decade for the next century. Today we are producing around 85 million barrels per day of crude. In the decade 2030-2040, is this likely to increase to 90 or 95 million or more, will it hold roughly steady, or might we see a decrease to 75 million barrels per day or even less? These are meaningful questions, however difficult to answer. Guessing the timing of peak production is a waste of time.

A Thousand Words

2009-08-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

A picture might help help clarify the idea about random walks in multidimensional spaces. Here A is some state of affairs in the past, and B is the present state of affairs. There is a region around B that represents the possible states of affairs some relatively short time in the future. In two (or more) dimensions, most of these next states are further from A than is B. If the direction of the next steps we actually take is purely random, we will most likely end up moving further away from A. I.e. a tendency to move further and further from the way things were in the past does not imply any consistent direction of movement.

Branching Possibilities

2009-08-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

Science and technology seem to be the paradigms of progress. Whether other institutions will advance to ever greater levels of excellence and accomplishment, by whatever measure, doubt seems not to be out of place. But how can science and technology ever go backwards?

The trajectory we've traced through past time does have a directed one dimensional appearance. Surely there is just one set of events that actually happened in e.g. 1752 and some other actual events in 1753 and all the events of 1753 happened after those in 1752. Time advances forward inevitably, therefore progress is inevitable - temporal progress, at the least. The twentieth century did a good enough job teaching us that society in general needn't progress with time. But it also brought us from light bulbs to cell phones - and advances in the nineteenth century were similarly dramatic. How can the twenty first not continue the trend?

This apparent trend is an illusion. Looking back from the great accomplishments of our day, one can find tiny seeds fifty and one hundred years ago from which they have grown. But many other seeds from those past times failed to grow. Many technologies that were thriving at that time have since disappeared. For the most part, these are technologies that would serve little purpose in our time, so their disappearance is small loss. But this kind of pattern starts to look more like a random walk, rather than movement in any consistent direction. One can look further and further back in time and see that we have moved ever greater distances from those earlier states of affairs. But... just because we are moving further and further from the past, doesn't imply that there is any correlation between the direction of the next step and the directions of any past step.

Consider the way distance works in a multidimensional space. Let A be one point, representing a past state of affairs. Let B be another point, the present state of affairs, some considerable distance from A. Now look at a small sphere or ball around B, representing possible states some relatively short time in the future. Most of that sphere or ball will be further from A than B is. The higher the dimensionality, the greater the fraction of the sphere that is further from A. That is, purely random movement will most often lead to states more and more different than past states. This appearance of a trend of increasing difference does not imply movement in any consistent direction.

Of course, movement in science and technology is hardly random. Nor is it predetermined and inevitable. How social institutions such as these steer themselves or are steered, somehow through the collective actions of large numbers of persons along with happy and sad accidents of equipment behavior etc., that is a huge tangle, surely beyond any ultimate resolution. But to realize that multiple paths are possible and that our actions are crucially consequential in determining which path we actually take, this is the central purpose of my exploration here.

The range of possibilities has a hierarchical structure. At a small scale, any individual researcher is confronted daily with choices about how to proceed - which tests to perform to diagnose some equipment malfunction, etc. At a larger scale, a research team needs to choose which research projects to pursue. At a very large scale, society needs to decide what kind of scientific and technological institutions to permit and support. In all these cases, the menu of options that presents itself is not likely to be the menu one would most like to see. There are practical steps that one can take at any given time, but they generally will bring surprising results - pleasant and unpleasant.

We seem to be caught in a trend of increasing financial constraints. Maybe this will turn itself around soon, but maybe not. What kind of science might work best on a tight budget? Maybe we need to constrain ourselves to funding the least risky projects? Or maybe this is exactly the time to be planting many small seeds. Risk evaluation is itself inherently risky! We may not want to run the risk of putting all our eggs in a basket that we think we know is safe!

Connected Crises

2009-07-31T18:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of the automobile, but still I put on my share of miles, ferrying our teenager to the pool and back, buying groceries, participating in group Dharma events, etc. It's hard to find time to get out for a walk, with all the driving I do! But it really wouldn't be practical to walk to many of the places I go, or even to ride a bike. The pool is five miles away - sometimes we ride there, but there are some narrow busy twisty roads along the way, which are even more treacherous in the rain.

In my bachelor days I lived for years without a car, relying on walking, biking, and public transportation. But that was also in the Portland, Oregon area, where the roads and the rails and the weather make that easier than almost anywhere else in the USA. Now, trying to support the expanding horizons of a teenager etc., in a much less hospitable environment - certainly it would still be possible to live without a car, but at a much greater cost.

The automobile can stand as the common denominator between two of our major long term crises, health care and climate change.

The health care crisis is extremely complex, of course. It is clearly not sustainable to have health care costs as a growing fraction of the GDP. And the services provided don't seem to be optimally distributed - certainly many people are under served. It may seem harsh to suggest that some people might be over served, but it does seem that we need to look carefully at what we expect from the health care system. Old age, sickness, and death can be managed to some extent, but not utterly evaded. A desperate grasping at some ideal of physical health, is not healthy at a more meaningful level.

Another difficult component of the health care crisis is preventative medicine, or really just healthy living practices - diet and exercise being the cornerstones. The simplest way to manage these is to incorporate healthy eating and movement as an integral dimension of one's life, rather than as some separate health care activities. A great way to get exercise is to walk to the grocery store and then carry one's groceries back home. But there needs to be a grocery store within walking distance!

One can always choose where to live with grocery store proximity as a highly ranked criterion. But there are many other important criteria, such as proximity of one's job and family, cost and availability of housing, etc.

In a way it seems so simple - if we just rearranged our culture so that all the facilities one needed in regular daily life were accessible by foot or bike, we could make huge dents in both the health care crisis and the climate crisis. But our culture is such a complex system, with so many interlocking components each holding the others in place, so that nothing can change very much without everything else changing too - the problem seems insurmountable.

Of course this is always the nature of things - liberation has always been right in the palm of our hand, yet how many of us manage to find our way clear of this vicious cycle of suffering and confusion. And yet, if we just tap our courage, keep our goal in mind and boldly take the steps at our feet, miracles do happen!

Harsh Tactics

2009-07-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

Bureaucracy has been around since the rise of civilization, when agricultural surplus made cities and armies possible and necessary. A special feature of our modern industrial age is that fossil fuels and mechanization have moved the great majority of people off the farm and into cities. Now most of our lives are played out in the context of large organizations.

We all face difficult decisions that will carry significant consequences. How we make those decisions will have impact beyond the results of the actions involved in whichever alternative we choose. The decision process itself constitutes action. We are habit-driven organisms - any action creates a propensity for a future repetition of some similar action. Our ways of making decisions are also structured by habitual patterns, reinforced by our continuing decision processes. If we want the healthiest results of our actions, we need to practice making decisions in healthy ways, along with making healthy decisions.

Bryce Lefever has defended the use of harsh interrogation practices as part of the war on terrorism. His work as a military psychologist convinced him that torture can yield valuable information. To focus on the ethical questions, let's allow him this hypothesis for the moment. Is that sufficient reason to decide to go ahead and apply torture?

It does seem clear that sometimes the best or only way to prevent someone from doing great harms to themselves is to subject to some lesser present harm. The notion that one should never subject anyone else to the slightest inconvenience - surely this is just too naive. But then we face a question of degree, as slight inconvenience turns to distinct unpleasantness and to serious harm. Whatever degree of harm is involved though, one could be rescuing a person from some yet greater future harm. Of course, present consequences are generally more certain than future consequences, so any kind of trade-off like this is a dangerous gamble.

The trade-offs get much more treacherous, though, when multiple people are involved. When ought it be preferred for one person to inconvenience or harm another in order to gain some greater benefit to a third party, or to many others? Perhaps such contemplated action is a response to some prior action, so some kind of justice may be looked for. It seems right that the burden of correcting some painful situation should fall principally on those who created that situation.

Lefever's ethical principle of "the most good for the most people" is clearly too simplistic. It doesn't distinguish between people based on their involvement in the historical background of whatever situation. And it doesn't give an effective rule for selecting one distribution of harm and benefit versus another. Perhaps the median benefit is implied? But this would permit unlimited harm to 49% of the population!

His further principle of "America is my client" is clearly shortsighted. The consequences of the kinds of actions he is discussing run over many generations. The great-grandchildren of an American may not be American, and the great-grandchildren of a non-American may well be American. The brothers and sisters of Americans may often be non-American. The world is much too fluid and interrelated to make such distinctions very useful, except in the most narrow short-term contexts.

While his ethical principles may be slippery, if we admit that sometimes torture provides valuable information, one can imagine situations where torture may be justifiable. But there is a more profound problem - what kind of procedure should be used to decide when to apply torture? Perhaps if some practically omniscient oracle could be consulted, an oracle with a vast historical perspective that could compute consequences and their probabilities, perhaps torture would occasionally make sense. But in a bureaucratic culture of blind routine... once a practice is admitted as legimate, it will be applied indiscriminately.

As individuals, we need rules to live by - we need to cultivate habits that will, for the most part, guide us in a positive direction. Organizations are vastly more habit-bound than individuals. However difficult it is for an individual to develop clear awareness and discriminating wisdom, it is a hundred times more difficult for an organization. The rules that an organization lives by must be designed for blind routine application. History has taught us again and again that torture can all too easily become a blind routine, and it has never been worthwhile to fall into that pit. Leadership fails when it feels specially empowered to break the rules, and the community is thereby guided into despair. Military psychologists need to understand that they are teaching the enemy, too, how to behave.

Collapse of the Quantum Wave Function

2009-07-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

It's a curious question, whether Buddhism is a religion or not, or whether it's a spiritual tradition. Religion and spirituality deal with God and the Soul. These are rather elusive in Buddhism. Buddhism does cultivate the realization of the ultimate nature of the universe and the self. But it's our habitual grasping at fixed concepts of these ultimates that is the root of our misery. Faith in Buddhism is the faith to let go.

Modern science is devoted to the quest for the ultimate nature of the universe, while it has discarded as meaningless the quest for the ultimate nature of the self. Given the overwhelmingly powerful role of science and technology in today's world, many who still find meaning in the self look for suitable roles for such an entity within the framework of science. The collapse of the wave function provides one popular such role.

While quantum mechanics has given scientists remarkable powerful methods to understand phenomena at the scale of molecules, atoms, and nuclei, it raises many difficult questions about the nature of the measurement process, and the nature of the phenomena being measured. When not being measured, physical systems seem to be able to explore many trajectories simultaneously through their spaces of possible configurations. But a measurement will trap the system in just one configuration, from which it will then evolve further after the measurement.

The fundamental paradox is that any measurement apparatus is itself just another physical system. The physical system being measured and the physical system performing the measurement, together form just a single larger physical system. Quantum mechanically, this larger system is just as capable of exploring multiple trajectories through its richer space of configurations. The collapse of the wave function, the pruning of possibilities down to a single actuality, is not apparently a consequence of the fundamental equations by which quantum mechanics describes the evolution of phenomena. The collapse seems to require some outside agent - which seems like a perfect role for a soul or spirit or self or consciousness.

Doubt and Certainty, by Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan, discusses various examples of the asymmetry of the direction of time - i.e. the world looks quite different when a movie is run backwards. One classic asymmetry is thermodynamic, e.g. a heat flows from a hot cup of tea out into the surrounding room, until the tea and the room reach the same temperature. It never happens that a cool cup of tea in a room gradually absorbs heat from the room until the tea is much hotter than the room. Another key asymmetry is the collapse of the wave function. There is no way to unmeasure a system! Rothman and Sudarshan suggest that maybe these two asymmetries are really just one, that the collapse of the wave function is actually some kind of thermodynamic affair. The pruning of possibilities might be more like an entropic scrambling. It could be a bit like erasing a chalk board. The chalk that formed the letters is still there, but the letters disappear because the chalk is so uniformly spread around.

Where does this entropic scrambling happen? Could it be buried in some deep perceptual mechanism, some homuncular observer at the foundation of the mind? Christine Skarda has proposed an intriguing perspective on perception, where the function of perception is to chop up what is originally interconnected into discrete objects. She also proposes that much of the chopping happens right at the surface, at the sense organs themselves, rather than at any fundamental homuncular level.

The collapse of the wave function will generally occur well before even the sense organs get involved - at whatever point the isolated microsystem interacts with coarse macroscopic systems like cameras, transistors, etc. One can imagine an experimental arrangement though where that first thermodynamic interaction is with the retina of the observer's eye, with the sense organ.

Walter Willett

2009-07-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

Hypoglycemia had its icy fingers around my neck, back when I was starting graduate school. I was trying to eat well, with a breakfast of oatmeal. But somehow by lunch I could barely crawl out to the row of lunch trucks along 33rd St. Desperate, I called my Mom, who recommended Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit by Adele Davis. Thanks, Mom! I switched to wheat germ - now that's a substantial breakfast!

Some years later, my pleasant Saturday routine was breakfast in New Paltz followed by a hike along the Millbrook Ridge trail. That regular repetition provided a good laboratory, a way to isolate which causes led to which effects. A plain cheese omelet would have me rooting through my backpack for the rice cakes, out around mile four. A cheese omelet with broccoli and the rice cakes made it home untouched. But there's practically no nutrition in broccoli! Vitamins and minerals, sure, but that's not going to influence digestion or blood sugar, not over the course of an hour or two. Ah, fiber!

Another experiment - explore the oat spectrum, from quick oats to rolled oats, steel cut oats, whole oat groats. Groats take forever to cook, but I have never found a more solid nutritional foundation for a day. The key, at least for my system, is to eat food that digests slowly, so it keeps generating energy over hours instead of mere minutes. There are some people for whom the challenge seems to be to speed the process up so things don't sit for days. One size doesn't fit all!

My current diet bible is Walter Willett's Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. He corrects two major over-simplifications to the standard food pyramid. Fats and oils need to be divided - trans fats should be avoided altogether, saturated fats limited, but mono- and poly-unsaturated fats can be eaten in practically unlimited quantity. Similarly, refined carbohydrates need to be limited, while whole grains are a good foundation for a diet. Willett mentions a spectrum of whole wheat flours, from finely ground to coarsely ground. This is like rolled oats versus steel cut oats. It's not just the balance of chemical constituents that matters, but the larger scale structures into which the molecules are organized.

What puts Willett's book into a class of its own is not its discussion of the properties of various foods, but its description of the scientific methods used to discover those properties. He describes laboratory studies with animal subjects and clinical trials with human subjects. But he also discusses the lifecycle of scientfic knowledge, the unreliability of the latest research reports and how further study of a subject slowly sifts out the various erroneous hypotheses. It usually takes decades to work out the kinks. By the time a topic gets to the college textbooks, it's usually reliable enough for routine application - but then it is long out of the news. Nutritional science in the news and nutritional science to eat by are two very different beasts!

The Paradox of Logic

2009-07-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

Somebody has been launching cyber-attacks against government websites in South Korea and the United States, the newspapers report, and North Korea is the prime suspect. I can't think of any other nation versus nation cyber-attack in the past. We seem to have crossed a new frontier.

In the late 1980s, somebody in IBM sent out a clever email Christmas card. When the recipient opened the email, a little script inside the card would be activated. The script would read the recipient's list of contacts and forward the Christmas card, script and all, to all those contacts. It was only a matter of hours before the whole corporate network was flooded beyond capacity. Unintended consequences can be expensive!

Around that same time, I helped a young programmer get a phone call directly from the Rochester, Minnesota IBM site manager. The Rochester site had a large mainframe cluster that was used both for design tasks and to run a large factory. Many of the folks who pioneered the VHDL circuit design language were also from Rochester. I was part of the team in Poughkeepsie, NY, that was helping to develop a simulator for VHDL. It was a prototype simulator. where practically every line of code in the VHDL circuit design would get translated into its own little program to be compiled. We had the clever idea of farming the resulting thousands of compile jobs out to the Rochester cluster - after all, it was their language! We got a little help from a guy in San Jose who'd written a very powerful language that gave programmers control over all sorts of esoteric disk drive functions. We wanted all the thousand little separate simulation programs to get linked together when the last compile job finished. So we put a counter in a file on the cluster scratch disk. We needed to serialize access to the counter, so that each decrement would be a integral transaction. The San Jose guy showed us how the lock the whole drive - fast and simple! Yup, that's right, we were locking the scratch disk on one of the biggest mainframe clusters in IBM, thousands of times, like an attack of a swarm of hornets. The site manager was not happy about that at all! We probably shut down the site for no more than half an hour or so. That was probably the most expensive bug in my career! Unintended consequences - at least they didn't fire me!

When I was in high school, around 1970, you could still see the idea around that somehow computers could be so smart that we could delegate crucial decisions to them, on questions like whether to launch a nuclear attack NOW! So many little bits of evidence need to be weighed to determine whether potential enemy nation X has already launched an attack on us - but we need to decide whether to launch a counterattack very promptly, before their missiles land and destroy our counterattack capability. It's hard to see how humans can be relied upon to make such decisions, but why can't the perfect reasoning power of a well oiled machine be employed?

This dream, of using reliable mechanical reasoning to circumvent the strife and corruption of human decision-making processes, goes back at least to Leibniz. Isn't it our deviation from pure logic that brings us all this misery?

The power and reliability of today's logical inference machines is stunning. Yet what we have created with that power is every bit as chaotic and corrupt as any other human institution. By now, computers have become so integrated into every facet of modern industrial living that human and machine chaos and corruption are seamlessly integrated. Somehow mechanical reasoning hasn't quite lived up to the dream of Leibniz.

Machine Intelligence

2009-07-08T04:11:00.000-07:00

It's a nice puzzle to try to figure out whether dolphins or chimpanzees are actually intelligent or just clever enough to fake it. Isn't it the same thing, being intelligent or being clever enough to fake it? We might choose to use different terms for different species, like we say horses gallop but humans run, but if we want to dig below the surface to some internal reasoning mechanism - if there is a consistent pattern of logical consequences following the appearance of suitable premises... what else is required?

In the 1930, people like Kurt Goedel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing had sketched out mechanisms that could automatically synthesize logical formulas that were implied by existing formulas. Such machinery is the ultimate fake - there is no mystery in it at all. Already in the 1930s these pioneers of mathematical logic had explored both the power of such automated inference mechanisms and discovered some limitations. But even human intelligence is evidently limited! Could a machine be clever enough to deserve to be called "intelligent?"

It could be a bit like asking whether synthetic diamonds are really diamonds - maybe they're just too perfect! We might want to distinguish between natural and artificial intelligence, but still accept that they share the essence of intelligence, at least if we can find a way to detect it.

Turing proposed his famous test to answer this question. Nowadays "teletype" conversation has become pervasive - text messaging by email, cell phone, or whatever other channel. What if one enagaged in a text dialogue with someone, only to discover that they were in fact a machine? That's the Turing test - if a machine could carry on a text dialog in a fashion indistinguishable from a human, then the machine deserves to be called "intelligent".

One curious feature of our world today is that much of our text dialog is in fact carried on by machines - spambots, etc. The need for an effective way to distinguish between real people and machines has driven the construction of automated tests that require users to recognize squiggly letters. Turing's test involved a human judge, rather than an automated test.

But is simulated intelligence really the same as the genuine article? John Searle argued against this. The central processing unit, or CPU, inside a computer performs complex computations by reading a sequence of instructions from the computer's memory and executing the operations specified by those instructions, one by one. Each individual computation is very simple. The results of each operation become the inputs to other operations, and can also cause the reading of the instruction sequence to jump to a different place in memory - it's this pattern of interaction between operations that lets computers perform such sophisticated computations.

The CPU itself, though, is really blind to all that sophistication - it just keeps reading, interpreting, and performing simple operations one by one. A human being could just as easily perform those operations, albeit much more slowly. A human could simulate a computer! The simulated computer could be carrying on a text dialogue in the Chinese language, but the person who is simulating the CPU might well not know any Chinese at all. If a human can simulate intelligence with no comprehension at all of what is being simulated, Searle argues that simulated intelligence must therefore be different than the real thing.

Is Searle right? The question is in large part semantic. Useful distinctions make important difference. What difference might it make whether something is intelligent or not? Suppose someone destroys that possibly intelligent something - what sorts of legal penalties might be appropriate? Destruction of a mere machine, that would qualify as a misdemeanor like vandalism and call for a fine or maybe a night or two in jail. Destruction of an intelligent being, that would be murder and require severe penalities.

Suppose someone destroys the CPU in my computer. Generally a CPU in a computer can easily be replaced. These are generic components. Destruction of a CPU is not a serious matter.

Suppose instead someone destroys the hard disk in my computer! That's a whole different affair! With luck, maybe I have my most crucial data backed up to CD-ROM or some such media. Disks are so big, practically nobody can afford to maintain up-to-date full disk image back-ups. Loss of a hard disk is really a major catastrophe.

Whatever intelligence is in a computer is clearly not in the CPU. Searle's argument fails, because he is simulating the wrong component. He should be simulating the hard drive - as if such a thing were possible! It's a bit like saying there might be intelligence in a large library filled with rare and unique books. Not so strange, after all!

Stem Cell Research

2009-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Regulation of stem cell research is again in the news: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/science/07stem.html. The question of the day is how a stem cell line can properly be started if research that uses it is to be federally funded. The details, of who needs to sign what forms when, are mind numbing.

But the broader topic of stem cell research involves up a number of difficult issues.

Any sort of decision generally requires an evaluation of alternatives. Stem cell research brings up several dimensions of values, that seem to sort themselves into a hierarchy. At the top of the value hierarchy are ethical questions, of right and wrong. Scientific research should not involve criminal activity. But in drafting legislation and regulation the question becomes, which sorts of activities should be marked off as being criminal? Perhaps where these lines have been poorly drawn, there may in fact be a moral imperative to engage in illegal activities - or at least a moral imperative to avoid some activities that are wrong despite being legally permissible.

At the bottom of the value hierarchy lie issues of cost. All other things being equal, it makes good sense to pursue any activity, including scientific research, in a cost-effective fashion.

The value of knowledge gained, of new scientific laws discovered, of cures finally established for diseases etc., the value of such scientific progress seems to fall at an intermediate level, between moral imperatives and cost considerations.

Values don't really arrange themselves into such a neat hierarchy, though, at least not in any way obvious enough to insure consensus. In general it is wrong to shorten people's lives with untested medical procedures - but for every procedure, someone has to take the risk of being the first test subject. In general it is wrong to raise animals just to kill them, but if there is enough economic value or reseach value gained, killing animals is considered acceptable by many people and by U.S. law.

The debate over whether stem cells constitute human beings or not is not an isolated question, but deeply entangled with the debate over abortion. That's another aspect of the interdependency involved in such issues. Whether or not stem cells are human beings or not is already a complex question when limited to matters of petri dishes and microscopes. But a decision one way or another will enhance the political power of the winning party, and provide a precedent for decisions on related issues.

Bureaucracy

2009-07-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

A dominant feature of modern life is that actions and consequences get channelled through extensive networks. It becomes very difficult to observe the effects of one's actions. For example, an engineer might be given the task of designing some small component of a complex system. That one engineer likely did not participate in defining the system objectives, or even the function to be performed by the component they're designing.

While most of the people in a large manufactuing enterprise may never see their products in use, they do get powerful signals back from the enterprise that steer their behavior - wages, raises, promotions, status, power. In a simple world, a farmer who wanted to drain a field might build a pump and observe directly how well the pump works. In our complex modern world, a pumping system is assembled from purchased manufactured components, each of which is in turn similarly assembled. The person repairing a valve at the chemical plant that produced the plastic from which the pump intake gasket was made - that person has no communication with the farmer. The repair person is likely working to meet corporate objectives for cost control, valve reliability, etc. The stock holders of the corporation have even less communication with the farmer and are just looking for a good return on their investment.

Science and Buddhism share the basic system control paradigm, where system parameters are tuned by observing the system outputs, to the system can be steering to optimum behavior. The crucial issue is system scope. The modern bureaucratic system tends to narrow the scope of any individual's concern. The approach in Buddhism is to broaden one's scope. Tune your behavior not just to fatten your next pay check, not even just to make your family more comfortable next year, but to benefit all beings for countless generations into the future.

We can choose how we interpret our experience as a gradient, steering our behavior one way or another. In fact we are always choosing an interpretation, however unconsciously or driven by habits. The path to freedom is to bring those choices to awareness and courageously to risk interpretations that at least stretch the molds of habit and convention.

Actions and Consequences

2009-07-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems as though science and technology evolve autonomously, in a way that is disconnected from individual human actions. The purpose of this blog is to explore the ways our actions and their consequences really do make crucial differences, not just in our individual personal lives, but also in the broader patterns, networks, and institutions that constitute science and technology.

There are two extreme perspectives on science and human action, either of which seem to relieve us of responsibility for the results of our actions. One perspective, which we can call nihilism, portrays humans as complex biochemical systems, the evolutionary product of random genetic mutations and the struggle for survival and reproductive success. From this perspective, action and responsibility are illusory.

From the other extreme, the eternalist perspective, the structure of natural processes is an objective truth, which science and technology reflect ever more accurately. Individual actions may speed up or slow down the processes of discovery and exploitation, but progress is inevitable. Individual action is ultimately powerless.

The Dharma taught by the Buddha, and long cultivated by the Sangha, shows a middle way between these extremes of nihilism and eternalism. The foundation of the Buddhist path is the realization of our responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

The purpose of this blog is to look at science and technology as human activities, and to explore how the way we act shapes the world we experience. We can pursue a path into dark dungeons of misery and despair, or we can follow a way that opens up ever greater freedom and awareness. The goal here is to develop a Buddhist perspective on our modern institutions of science and technology.