Monthly Archives: October 2004

Magic Numbers

You learn something new every day. It seems that some strings of random numbers
are more
random than others. That’s kind of interesting, but not really a surprise
when you think about it. Whenever we look at the characterisitcs of a string
of random digits occuring in Pi or e or some other irrational number, we are
looking at only a tiny fraction of the digits. Actually, it may not even be
accurate to describe it as a fraction.

The linked article describes how mathematician Steven Pincus made some interesting
discoveries when looking at the randomness of the first 280,000 digits of Pi,
the square root of 2, and several other irrational numbers. However, even 280,000
isn’ t really a fraction of an infinite number, now is it? How many digits
would it take before you had a representative sample of an infinite string?
I’m not a mathematician, but I’m guessing it would take an infinite string.

But before you wrap your head too tightly around that, consider what Pincus
observed when he started comparing these strings of digits: some have higher
levels of entropy (randomness), some lower. Then he started looking for the
same characteristic of entropy in real-world strings of numbers, such as you
might get from tracking, say, the stock market. He discovered that the stock
market hits its highest level of entropy right before a crash.

Pincus observes that entropy

appears to be a potentially useful marker of system stability, with rapid
increases possibly foreshadowing significant changes in a financial variable.

He goes on to conclude:

Independent of whether one chooses technical analysis, fundamental analysis,
or model building, a technology to directly quantify subtle changes in serial
structure has considerable real-world utility, allowing an edge to be gained…
And this applies whether the market is driven by earnings or by perceptions,
for both sort- and long-term investments.

Expect to hear a lot more about entropy and financial markets in the near future.
The movie Pi,
which I thought was well-made and entertaining, but suffered from a silly premise,
may just turn out to be prescient.


via GeekPress

Encyclopedia Galactica

Via Kurzweil
AI, check out this modest proposal made at the Web
2.0 conference in San Franciso:

Universal access to all human knowledge could be had for around $260m, a
conference about the web’s future has been told.

The idea of access for all was put forward by visionary Brewster Kahle, who
suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library
of Congress.

In his speech, Mr Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most
of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves.

He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space
and cost about $60,000 (£33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge
building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf.

This is a tremendous idea; and the cost of doing it is only going to go down.
The initial scanning work is the only part of the plan that’s likely to present
much of an expense factor. According to Moore’s
Law, that $60,000 price tag for storage should be somewhere around $2,000
eight years from now. If the estimate for the robot scanner is accurate, and
it follows a less robust drop in price — say halving once every four years
— we would be looking at a price tag of around $65 million in the same
period of time. Pretty doable, I’d say.

Unfortunately, the legal concept of public domain is rapidly
diminishing, while copyright terms are lengthened and controls are made
more expansive. As John Bloom observed
a while back in The New Republic:

In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened
that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years,
then scaled back to 75 years, then — in one of the most anti-American
acts of the last century — suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no
copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between
1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they’ll
take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies,
or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.

So Kahle’s observation that few of these books are still on the shelf will
be beside the point. A scanned-in Library of Congress could conceivably serve
as a back-up to the print archive, providing an excellent disaster recover resourse,
but it would probably not be possible to distribute the whole archive. Only
those parts created before 1923.

Of course, there’s hope that, when the copyright issue is reviewed again by
Congress (presumably in 2018) the public will be more aware of what’s going
on and will not stand for any more expansions of copyright controls. Failing
that, maybe we could get an exception to copyright law into place. Perhaps we
could make this backup of the Library of Congress exempt from all copyright
restrictions as long as it’s used by schools and public libraries.

By 2018, the storage for a copy of the entire Library of Congress
online should cost less than $1000; even the cost of creating the archive
would be $15 million or less. We could put the entire Library of Congress
in every school in America.

Better All The Time #19


Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving
world
#19
10/07/04

Welcome to a new and improved Better All The Time. We’ve got the same same
upbeat philosophy, a snappy new look, and more good news than ever. So what
are we waiting for? Let’s get started.

Stillness Part V, Chapter 48

It was a shabby little diner. And it was the wrong part of town for four kids to be in at this time of night. Or any time, really. But it seemed that I was the only one aware of these kinds of details, the others having lived their whole lives in the home.

I, of all people, was the only one with any experience living in the outside world.

We sat in a booth near the back door. The seats were shiny fake red leather; the table top was speckled Formica. There was a juke box in the corner flashing orange and red and green lights. Next to it was a pinball machine, with flashing red and yellow lights of its own. The two sets of flashing lights were slightly out of sync with each other. If I had been so inclined, I could have watched them both for hours, and drawn out some intricate analysis of the relationships between the different colors. Actually, we had been there long enough for me to make a good start: almost three hours.

In that time, Todd and Grace had ordered and eaten twice. After the pancakes that morning and the greasy French fries I had with my initial order at the diner, I couldn’t stand the thought of another bite. And based on her horrified expression when the other two announced that they had decided to order more food, I could tell that Judy felt the same.

The waitress, a bedraggled dirty blonde of indeterminate age, had lost whatever patience she might have once had with us. I don’t think groups of kids were a common demographic for that diner. And I wasn’t sure whether Judy was causing some other kind of problem for her, more along racial lines. Todd waved her over to the table after a prolonged battle for her attention. She flipped her little notepad open with a snap and glared at us.

“Something else?” she said curtly.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Todd. “We’d like another cheeseburger please, with French fries…”

“They come with fries,” she said with deadpan impatience.

“Yes, of course. And we’d also like some ice cream, please.”

She looked at him.

“What kind?” she said after a moment. “I don’t have all day.”

Todd turned to Grace, who was studying the menu. Which of course she could not read.

“What will it be, Grace?” Judy prompted.

“I wonder…” she said.

“Yeah?” the waitress pressed.

“I wonder if you have any…pink ice cream.”


A Ride on the Escalator

I had a lively debate with my 15-year-old daughter this morning while driving her to the orthodontist. Initially, we were on the subject of the presidential race. She expressed a certain disdain for both candidates, complaining that Bush is “such a Republican” and Kerry “such a Democrat.” As a registered Independent, I can sympathize with that reaction (even if I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant.)

When I asked her to clarify what it was about President Bush that made him “such a Republican,” she complained about his tax cuts for the rich and reliance on “trickle down” economics to help out those in need. In response, I opined that tax cuts are a good idea for everyone, rich and poor alike, because they free up money for spending and investing — which in turn creates jobs. I explained that the image that her Democrat friends have of rich people filling their basements with gold coins and swimming around in them like Uncle Scrooge McDuck is pretty inaccurate. Their money goes into purchases, which support manufacuring and service jobs, or investments, which support business growth in general, or straight into the bank, which lends it to would be home- or business owners.

In the end, she conceded that maybe it’s no better or worse to tax the rich than it is to tax anyone else. (Which I considered to be a major concession from a young liberal. She was adamant that the rich shouldn’t be punished for being successful, and she seemed distinctly uncomfortable with any explicit redistributionist ideas.) However, in the end, she argued that I had to “admit that Bush’s trickle-down policies weren’t working.”

Of course, I could admit no such thing. Unfortunately, we arrived at the orthodontist’s office at exactly this point in the debate, so I am forced to offer up my concluding arguments here. So, Hannah, if you’re reading this — no tax could ever create economic opportunity (that is, jobs) as quickly and efficiently as the market can on its own.

I have argued that economic growth appears to go hand in hand with technological growth. In America, a poor family of today is at least as well off as a middle class family of 30 years ago. No one is seriously arguing that this change has anything to do with taxing the rich or with government programs. Robin Hood himself, given legions of Merry Men to steal from the rich and give to the poor 24/7 for the past 30 years, would not have been able to achieve such a result.

We’re better off today than we were 30 years ago because there is more wealth to go around. Where did it come from? Certainly not from the government. It came from increases in production and in productivity. As a group, we produce more now than we did then. So now we have more, too.

Those who picture the economy as a pie to be shared, who think that a bigger piece for some necessarily represents a smaller piece for others, have got it exactly wrong. Arnold Kling explains as follows:

The often-used phrase “distribution of income” suggests the metaphor of a pie. I believe that a more accurate metaphor would be an escalator. The pie metaphor treats income as static, thereby ignoring one of the most important facts about the standard of living, which is its rise over time.

If you want to address the real challenges of poverty in this country, use the metaphor of an escalator. Target government intervention at people who are unable to get onto the escalator, due to impediments that may be medical, behavioral, or social. But don’t try to “fix” the escalator by carving it up like a pie.

Maybe it’s his fixation with the pie vs. the escalator image that makes Kerry “such a Democrat.” I’m not sure; we never got that far in our discussion. One thing is certain: neither candidate really “gets” the escalator idea. (Although I would venture to say that President Bush comes a lot closer to it.)

We are likely a generation or two away from politicians who will seriously grapple with the kinds of fundamental changes that are taking place today, and that are coming ever faster. Most of the domestic issues that are on the table this year are firmly grounded in the increasingly irrelevant 20th century. Much, though not all, of the debate surrounding the War on Terrorism is really a clash of ideas and strategies that originated in World War II or in Viet Nam vs. the Bush Doctrine, which started taking shape after September 11, 2001.

It seems strange, doesn’t it, that the progressive, futuristic arguments should come from the middle-aged Dad, while the tired and archaic views are spouted by the teenager. I think this has to do in part with the company she keeps (public school teachers and the like.) But there may be more to it than that. I am, after all, “such a Speculist.”

This Day in History

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent observation on the significance of the X Prize being won on this particular date:

The launch — coming, as Boyle notes, on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — represented in many ways the final triumph of capitalism over communism.

It’s not widely remembered today, but when Sputnik was launched Americans took it as a serious blow to their self-esteem. Those backward Russians, beating us into space? Did this mean that communism was (literally) ascendant, and capitalism in decline? Many feared (or hoped) so.

Of course, we won the space race a long time ago. It was July 20, 1969 to be precise — the day a manned US spacecraft landed on the moon. But even that glorious accomplishment was the triumph of one government over another. Today, free enterprise has won. Free markets have one. The individual has triumphed over government.

Space now belongs to all of us. Not our governments. Us.

Glenn concludes:

I heard someone on one of the cable channels (it might even have been MSNBC!) predicting that more people will travel into space in the next decade than in all of human history to date. That’s probably right — and if it is, it will be because the forces of capitalism have done what they always do, making things cheaper, better, and more widely available.

Is it possible that the long-awaited Space Age really is about to begin?

SpaceShipOne Wins X Prize

…that’s the way it appears. It hasn’t been certified yet.

UPDATE: CNN is reporting that the X prize was won.

UPDATE: This flight to 368,000 feet appears to have broken the X-15′s unofficial altitude record of 354,200.

The X-15 served as inspiration for SpaceShipOne.

The World's Fastest Again

A Model of Blue Gene

What a comeback! Last May we reported that the United States was poised to regain the title of “World’s Fastest Supercomputer.”

It’s happened. On Tuesday IBM announced that it’s Blue Gene/L system beat the Earth Simulator’s maximum sustained speed of 35.86 teraflops with a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops.

That’s a speed differential of less than one-half of one percent. But how IBM did this is more impressive:

BlueGene/ L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, IBM said…

“It’s again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who ranks the 500 fastest computers. “For some computational scientists, it’s like a Hubble telescope.”