Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

The Roswell Confession

What would make a man sign a sworn affidavit (to be released only after his death) to the effect that he saw spacecraft debris and alien bodies at Roswell? If it’s a hoax, it’s a peculiar one. Hoaxes are generally revealed after the instigator dies. To have one commence with the hoaxer’s death would certainly be a novel twist.

One possible explanation is that, 60 years ago he did see something that made quite an impression, and what that was and what it meant grew in his mind over the years. Another is that the government was playing a very subtle game at Roswell: using debris from an experimental balloon project as a pretext for leaking a false story that the US had recovered a UFO — a head-fake at the Soviets. Let them worry about what we’re going to do what that alien technology.

If the latter is true, Jesse Marcel was a just a pawn in that little game. The authorities at Roswell may have circulated rumors of alien bodies — maybe they even had a couple of fake alien bodies floating around the place for a couple of days — exactly so stories like Marcel’s would get out and find their way back to the Russians.

Jerry Pournelle explores both of these possibilities, and gives one of the better last words on Roswell that I’ve ever read:

But most importantly I think that if the US had any hidden technology in 1964 I would have known about it. Why would they hide it from Systems Command? We were structuring the 1975 force. What would anyone in government hide it for? We were scared stiff of the USSR missile threat, hard pressed to find any war fighting strategy that made sense and would allow for the survival of the American people; we needed everything we had. We had the highest clearances because we were doing a survey of ALL RELEVANT TECHNOLOGIES so that we could evaluate force structure designs. We had an absolute need to know, and a directive to all parts of USAF to cooperate. Ye gods, why would the government hide alien technology from us? Where are these secret materials NOW?

Those a pretty good questions. And even if the government had decided that Systems Command shouldn’t know about it, somebody would have known about it. Unless you’re ready to buy into an Area 51 scenario like the one described in Independence Day where even the president doesn’t know what we have, the story just doesn’t stand up.

Nonetheless, it is a great story…

UPDATE (semi-related): Looks like the aliens are now treating us to 3-D images in their crop circles. I wasn’t sure before, but now this cinches it: those aliens are definitely using computers!

What Happened: Two Thoughts

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy gives us the run-down on Martin Bojowald’s Big Bounce Theory of how our universe came into being:

What Bojowald’s work does, as I understand it (the paper as I write this is not out yet, so I am going by my limited knowledge of LQG and other theories like it) is simplify the math enough to be able to trace some properties of the Universe backwards, right down to T=0, which he calls the Big Bounce. The previous Universe collapsed down, and “bounced” outward again, forming our Universe. No doubt the physical aspects of this previous Universe were somewhat different; the quantum uncertainties at the moment of bounce would ensure that. It may have been much like ours, or it may have been quite alien. In his equations, it’s the volume of that previous Universe that cannot be determined. How big was it? It may literally be impossible to ever know.

In the traditional model, talking about anything happening “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. Time doesn’t really start until the the Bang occurs. Not that that stops people from talking about it anyway. I know that I, for one, tend to assume that if there are multiple universes, there must be some kind of larger time that could be observed in the relationships between them — if such relationships ever could be observed! The Big Bounce is intriguing, but if not quite weird enough for you, Plait also directs us to some information on Brane Theory:

For an eternity, our universe lay dormant—a frozen, featureless netherworld. Then, about 15 billion years ago, the cosmos got an abrupt wake-up call.

A parallel universe moving along a hidden dimension smacked into ours. The collision heated our universe, creating a sea of quarks, electrons, protons, photons, and other subatomic particles. It also imparted microscopic ripples, like ocean waves crashing on a shore.

These ripples generated tiny fluctuations in temperature and density, the seeds from which all cosmic architecture—from stars to gargantuan clusters of galaxies to galactic super clusters—ultimately arose.

So in this model, if that other universe had never slammed into us, our universe would never have been anything more than a sort of potential universe. Raising the question of how long (in that larger, inter-universal time) did we have to wait before coming into existence?

Just a little something to ponder as you start your week.

It's a New Phil, Week 76

My Fifth Day of Exercise

At 127 hours for the year, I am well into my fifth consecutive day of exercise for the year. I’m still working towards a goal of doing 500 of all moves in one workout — at which point I think I can claim some baseline level of fitness. However, I came across this article the other day which has got me now mixing up the longer and shorter workouts The relevant advice (Tip 31 of 16):

1. Limit your workouts to 30-40 minutes. Though the tendency of some people who really want to get a lot out of their workouts is to spend a lot of time at the gym, the truth is that after 30 or 40 minutes, the benefit isn’t as great. To go that long, you’d have to lower the intensity of the workout, and that means that you’re spending too much time working out. It’s better to work out at a higher intensity for a shorter amount of time.

I can see that, and I like the idea. Although I must say that the middle part of my longer workouts — where I do the sets with the highest number of repetitions — tend to be pretty intense. But they have an extended warm-up and cool-down before and after. I’m going to keep doing that variety at least one a week while working on doing some more high high-intensity work. I also might go ahead and move up to a heavier hammer now for the intensity workouts — instead of waiting until I complete the 500, which was the original plan. That will give me the chance to try out tip number 8: Heavier Weight.

The 16 ideas strike me as mostly pretty good (although the list is a bit repetitious). I’m doing several of those things now and, as noted above, thinking about trying out a couple more.

It’s a New Phil, Week 76

My Fifth Day of Exercise

At 127 hours for the year, I am well into my fifth consecutive day of exercise for the year. I’m still working towards a goal of doing 500 of all moves in one workout — at which point I think I can claim some baseline level of fitness. However, I came across this article the other day which has got me now mixing up the longer and shorter workouts The relevant advice (Tip 31 of 16):

1. Limit your workouts to 30-40 minutes. Though the tendency of some people who really want to get a lot out of their workouts is to spend a lot of time at the gym, the truth is that after 30 or 40 minutes, the benefit isn’t as great. To go that long, you’d have to lower the intensity of the workout, and that means that you’re spending too much time working out. It’s better to work out at a higher intensity for a shorter amount of time.

I can see that, and I like the idea. Although I must say that the middle part of my longer workouts — where I do the sets with the highest number of repetitions — tend to be pretty intense. But they have an extended warm-up and cool-down before and after. I’m going to keep doing that variety at least one a week while working on doing some more high high-intensity work. I also might go ahead and move up to a heavier hammer now for the intensity workouts — instead of waiting until I complete the 500, which was the original plan. That will give me the chance to try out tip number 8: Heavier Weight.

The 16 ideas strike me as mostly pretty good (although the list is a bit repetitious). I’m doing several of those things now and, as noted above, thinking about trying out a couple more.

I Wonder if Orbitz Could Offer a Better Deal

Contrary to what you might expect from reading this site, I’ve never been much of an earlier adopter. There’s all this buzz about the iPhone launching this week; personally, I just got a video-capable iPod. It is so much better than my previous iPod (and even that wasn’t first-generation), it makes me think I should have just skipped the first one altogether. iPods have matured nicely over the past couple of years; I expect the iPhone — if it succeeds — will do the same.

That’s why I’m not signing up for one of these lunar vacation packages. Well, okay, that and I don’t think I could quite handle the $100,000,000 price tag. here’s what that money gets you:

A Space Adventures team has blueprinted a circumlunar mission using a unique blend of existing and flight-tested Russian technology. At the heart of the lunar leap is Russia’s venerable Soyuz spacecraft. A pilot and two passengers would depart Earth in their Soyuz, linking up in orbit with an unpiloted kick stage for a boost outward to the Moon.

“The Soyuz was originally designed as a circumlunar spacecraft. It hasn’t flown with people around the Moon, of course. But the Soyuz would fly a free-return trajectory – a boomerang course – around the Moon. So there’s not a lot that needs to be done to the Soyuz to accommodate for that…it could probably fly around the Moon right now,” Anderson told SPACE.com. “There will be some upgrades to the communications systems…and we would make the window bigger too.”

Anderson said that the Soyuz pilot and two passengers would not go into lunar orbit. “That comes later,” he added, as a follow-on public space travel trek.

I wouldn’t want to pay more than 1% of what they’re currently asking for a trip to the moon. (Not that I could afford that, either.) And I would want that trip to include orbiting and landing on the moon. No doubt we’ll need to cycle through several successive models for lunar tourism — using newer technology and probably with competition thrown into the mix — before we get anywhere near that. But I’m okay with waiting for a while.

Meanwhile, maybe I can find something good to watch on my video iPod.

moon-19day-2831.jpg

Why the Future Is so Hard to Predict

There are a lot of reasons why trying to predict the future is no easy task: the complexity of the variables involved; the sheer number of those variables; the tendency of human fears, hopes, ambitions, and expectations to branch out in new and unexpected directions.

All of this adds up to give us the Law of Unintended Consequences, or maybe what I’m getting at here is a corollary to that law — the Law of Completely Unexpected Results.

For example: how is that Sushi has become a huge culinary favorite all over the world? There are complex answers to that question, and one could draw several lines through time from the non-Sushi past to the very Sushi-centric present. But how did it all start? Where did it come from? Would you believe empty cargo holds on trans-pacific passenger flights?

In the early 1970s, executives at Japan Airlines fretted that the cargo holds on their Vancouver-to-Tokyo flights were often empty. So the airline asked its Canadian freight coordinator, a man named Wayne MacAlpine, to look into whether these planes could be crammed with bluefin tuna from Prince Edward Island. McAlpine was somewhat baffled by the request, since fishermen on the island, some 2,800 miles to the east of Vancouver, didn’t much care for the bluefin’s taste—as he Teletyped back to his bosses in Japan, “What [the fishermen] did after they caught them is they had their picture taken with the fish and dug a hole with a small bulldozer and buried them.”

The airline executives were stunned: each buried bluefin could garner hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in Japan, a country already suffering the ravages of overfishing. The company took the unprecedented step of importing five Canadian bluefins for a 1972 auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The giant tunas proved a hit, selling for the then-steep price of $4 per kilogram. The race to satiate the world’s toro jones was on. “Sushi was nearly two millennia old,” writes Issenberg, “but it was that morning at Tsukiji that the current experience of eating it was born.”

So, some thrifty executives need to cash in on unused cargo space, and poof! Three and a half decades later there is a sushi bar in virtually every shopping mall in the US. That’s not the only reason, but it’s a huge one. And one has to wonder whether most of us would have ever even heard of sushi had those JAL execs decided to put something else in those cargo holds.

So, what’s the life going to be like three and a half decades from now? Who knows? But one thing’s for sure — dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of future-shaping decisions such as the one that those airline executives made way back then are being made every day.

Via GeekPress.

Go Ahead and Jump

Free Geekery presents the DIY Guide to Becoming a Real Cyborg. It all boils down to 10 easy steps:

1. RFID Implants

2. Watch the Future

3. Become One with Your Computer

4. Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound

5. Become a Human Transformer

6. Talk to the Wired Hand

7. Become a Vehicle for Change

8. Dress Accordingly

9. Refuse to Live with Your Genes

10. Get a Futuristic Life

Well, I feel that I’ve got 2 and 3 covered (although not in the sense described in the article.) But the one that really intrigues me is number 4 — I don’t think even 10 years of sledge hammer workouts will get me in that good of shape. I’m going to need bionic enhancement. Fortunately, it’s available:

Now that you’ve purchased the watch and the head monitor, you might want to add a little bounce to your walk with Powerizers. If you’re an adult and somewhat athletically inclined, you can lay claim to the ability to jump up to 6 feet in the air and to take running strides up to 9 feet in length. You’ll pay for this ability, however, as a pair of Powerizers currently costs $329.99 plus shipping and handling if you order them online. A physically fit bill collector who owns a pair of these shoes might fall under the “evil” category.

What if They're Hungry?

Here’s an interesting piece of commentary in The Independent arguing that wantonly announcing our presence to (possible) alien civilizations may not be such a smart move:

This is not just a matter for astronomical research involving distant worlds and academic questions. Could it be that, from across the gulf of space, as HG Wells put it, there may emerge an alien threat? That only happens in lurid science fiction films, doesn’t it? Well, the threat is real enough to worry many scientists, who make a simple but increasingly urgent point: if we don’t know what’s out there, why on Earth are we deliberately beaming messages into space, to try and contact these civilisations about whom we know precisely nothing?

It’s interesting to note some of the names of those who are raising these questions:

Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

[S]cientist and science-fiction author David Brin thinks those in charge of drafting policy about transmissions from Earth – ostensibly a body called the International Astronomical Union, which would make recommendations to the United Nations – are being complacent, if not irresponsible. Whatever has happened in the past, he doesn’t want any new deliberate transmissions adding to the risk. “In a fait accompli of staggering potential consequence,” he says, “we will soon see a dramatic change of state. One in which Earth civilisation may suddenly become many orders of magnitude brighter across the Milky Way – without any of our vaunted deliberative processes having ever been called into play.”

Is this something we should be worried about? I note that “alien invasion” isn’t even listed as a serious existential risk for humanity on the Wikipedia list linked by the Lifeboat Foundation, although technically I suppose such a threat would fall under the general heading of War and Genocide. Of course, there are some schools of thought that argue that we needn’t worry about alien civilizations because they simply aren’t there. Stephen and I took a stab at a couple of those a while back.

Generally, I’m inclined to think that those arguments are on the right track. If there are aliens, there should be at least one so far ahead of us that its presence in the universe would have announced itself to us by now. Or there may be several advanced civilizations, but once a civilization reaches a certain level of advancement, it just “drops out” of the universe — or at least the universe as we understand it. Either way, not much of a threat.

Still, there could be other options. Maybe technological development slows down after a while. Maybe colonizing the galaxy doesn’t appeal to some civilizations, but they don’t mind going out and eliminating the occasional upstart threat whenever they find out about them. What about a civilization where some extreme ideology — political or religious fundamentalism — accompanied by advanced technology freezes development at a certain threatening level?

It’s all just guesswork, of course. But then that’s the thing about alien civilizations. We really don’t know anything about them. It’s guesswork, with different guesses informed by different assumptions and biases. Right now, we’re discovering new planets right and left and our own technological prowess is growing exponentially. We’ll no doubt understand the situation a lot better a few years down the road.

Meanwhile, we keep guessing. As we do, I don’t see how adding a little caution to the mix could possibly hurt.

What if They’re Hungry?

Here’s an interesting piece of commentary in The Independent arguing that wantonly announcing our presence to (possible) alien civilizations may not be such a smart move:

This is not just a matter for astronomical research involving distant worlds and academic questions. Could it be that, from across the gulf of space, as HG Wells put it, there may emerge an alien threat? That only happens in lurid science fiction films, doesn’t it? Well, the threat is real enough to worry many scientists, who make a simple but increasingly urgent point: if we don’t know what’s out there, why on Earth are we deliberately beaming messages into space, to try and contact these civilisations about whom we know precisely nothing?

It’s interesting to note some of the names of those who are raising these questions:

Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

[S]cientist and science-fiction author David Brin thinks those in charge of drafting policy about transmissions from Earth – ostensibly a body called the International Astronomical Union, which would make recommendations to the United Nations – are being complacent, if not irresponsible. Whatever has happened in the past, he doesn’t want any new deliberate transmissions adding to the risk. “In a fait accompli of staggering potential consequence,” he says, “we will soon see a dramatic change of state. One in which Earth civilisation may suddenly become many orders of magnitude brighter across the Milky Way – without any of our vaunted deliberative processes having ever been called into play.”

Is this something we should be worried about? I note that “alien invasion” isn’t even listed as a serious existential risk for humanity on the Wikipedia list linked by the Lifeboat Foundation, although technically I suppose such a threat would fall under the general heading of War and Genocide. Of course, there are some schools of thought that argue that we needn’t worry about alien civilizations because they simply aren’t there. Stephen and I took a stab at a couple of those a while back.

Generally, I’m inclined to think that those arguments are on the right track. If there are aliens, there should be at least one so far ahead of us that its presence in the universe would have announced itself to us by now. Or there may be several advanced civilizations, but once a civilization reaches a certain level of advancement, it just “drops out” of the universe — or at least the universe as we understand it. Either way, not much of a threat.

Still, there could be other options. Maybe technological development slows down after a while. Maybe colonizing the galaxy doesn’t appeal to some civilizations, but they don’t mind going out and eliminating the occasional upstart threat whenever they find out about them. What about a civilization where some extreme ideology — political or religious fundamentalism — accompanied by advanced technology freezes development at a certain threatening level?

It’s all just guesswork, of course. But then that’s the thing about alien civilizations. We really don’t know anything about them. It’s guesswork, with different guesses informed by different assumptions and biases. Right now, we’re discovering new planets right and left and our own technological prowess is growing exponentially. We’ll no doubt understand the situation a lot better a few years down the road.

Meanwhile, we keep guessing. As we do, I don’t see how adding a little caution to the mix could possibly hurt.

Wisdom of Crowds – why it works/why it doesn't

Why does Wisdom of Crowds work in the first Place?
When it doesn’t work, what went wrong?

In 2004 James Suroweiki wrote Wisdom of Crowds which contained some wonderful examples of how amazingly accurate answers could be gained to questions by asking lots of complete strangers things like “where should we look for a sunken submarine when we have very sketchy available info”. After reading the book, I was convinced, but was bothered that there was no “why this works” chapter..and then thought about all the times it didn’t seem to work. For instance, we’ve all heard the saw that a camel is a horse designed by a comittee. So, here’s my theory on how and why it works and when it doesn’t, why it doesn’t. So, here’s my theory. Wisdom of Crowds generates accurate answers as Multiple Mirror Telescopes focus and magnify light from distant and obscure objects.

Each individual’s knowledge overlaps another’s.
The first observation is that we all collect facts, which leads to knowledge and its derivative wisdom. Now some people collect lots of facts but don’t convert that to knowledge and others have fewer facts but by linking these points together in network fashion are able to have surprising wisdom. If you think of each person’s knowledge as if it were the circle of light created by a flashlight in a dark room, then more people’s knowledge should equal more light…but this light would be all over the place and overlapping – not sharp and “point bright”.

The question (and its quality) serves as the aiming and focusing agent.
So how do we “get to the point”? The question is the focusing and aiming device. By means of a well phrased question the various knowledge sets of the individuals will be focused to draw up the particular info desired from their well of knowledge. This knowledge will then be constrained to the realm of the question, creating focused answers, where the wrong answers are dramatically overcome by more correct answers – so that the average of the answers generates that point in the focus where the collective knowledge yields an answer that is usually better than a best individual answer. So that,

Addressing the question to multiple uncorrellated parties creates the equivalent of a multi mirror telescope where each respondent’s knowledge and judgement are collectively brought to bear on answering the question adding greater and greater light/knowledge.
The better the quality of the crowd’s wisdom, the better the results. If you want really great results about the sea floor, ask oceanographers. If you want to know the behaviour of the rich and famous, ask butlers and concierges. But…

Correllation among those questioned (market gaming/corruption, politicised debate, ideological posturing, peer pressure driven responses) generate “optical” distortion and destroy or disfigure the results.
Once the parties being asked to answer the question know earlier answers, or who among them might be asked and worst of all, they all are required to answer in public and on the record, then the collimation and focus are lost and you are then getting answers to unspoke questions that nobody asked – introducing uncorrectable distortion into the responses. What are these unasked questions? “Will I still have a job tomorrow if I say what I think?”, “If I say what I think, I’ll be the outlier and can lose my reputation”…so, reputation, ego, peer pressure – all militate against accuracy and truth – leading to camel/committee like results. In regard to markets, one of the great things they can provide is “price discovery” – which means that a company’s shares can be prices in real time by the actions of an uncorrellated – wisdom of crowds based market where all the information known, knowable and anticipated can be “boiled down” into a current share price. The problem with this model is that money creates the motivation to bring the price discovery activity to the market…and as we all know, people will try to game the market in order to maximize their money by corrupt behavior and other activities which distort the price discovery mechanism. So, the paradox is that price discovery only happens because people “care” about the money – the incentive…and without the incentive, you can’t get the discovery.

This says to me that new kinds of incentives are needed that minimize distorting influences but still provide strong incentives to participate in the knowledge discovery process. What sorts of incentives? FUN – as in serious games (see:Luis Von Ahn of CMU and others), Ego, Performanc prizes and such.

Like any good theory it needs to be falsifiable. So, if the above theory is true then it predicts that:

peer pressure driven answers will be suboptimal/inaccurate and misleading as the knowledge will be distorted by these effects
large numbers of participants who know little to nothing regarding the question will not generate remarkable results
small numbers of uncorrellated experts on the topic will beat large numbers of pressured or naive persons no matter their expertise
large numbers of uncorrellated experts on a topic will beat small numbers of same
markets provide an incentive mechanism for larger numbers of experts to participate
markets attract participants that “steal the signal” for uses other than the simple answer – gaming away much of its predictive power
wikipedia and Nasdaq are excellent examples of both the wisdom and corruption of crowds

In a future entry we’ll talk a bit about the focusing apparatus – the question