WeirdScience - Graphs, a ball of string and Winos

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That is the standard model of sub-atomic particles. Thanks to Wiki for the pics in this article. The thing that I like about science is how easily something as abstract as the above, possibly the most abstract thing known to man, can be represented on a simple two dimensional grid.

I have to wonder if the trick is not inherent in nature, that these are not so nice and organised but merely in our perceptions of it are able to organise it. The above data could be represented on a multidimensional shape, such as on a sphere, in a line, an irregular solid or a rotating model.

You could make a much less tidy graph by linking it up like this

A human can easily manage a three dimensional graph. A four or five dimensional graph, involving a colour and time variable, would be pretty easy to follow in certain circumstances.

Any multidimensional graph is merely a human representation of a tiny data set and of course is incredibly limited compared to the information that the universe holds.

The universe would seem to be a huge data set of multi dimensional information. A graph is a tiny representation of it. One would assume that there is an infinite amount of information in the universe as information is being copied all of the time and all previous information would be preserved.

However three things suggest that there is not an infinite amount of information in the universe. Firstly copied information is not new information but reorganised information. Secondly if we believe that there are about a google of electrons in the universe then there can only be a limited amount of information stored in them. Thirdly there is no reason to think that things that have occurred in the past are preserved as information. Brownian motion suggests that they are not and memory is really just a feature of biology rather than physics. Therefore without information about past events there can be no choices and the universe would be best modelled as a piece of string with information on it, rather like DNA. Unless it has an end the string would be a loop.
The apparent alternative to a string universe would look a lot like Wikipedia. Information linked to other information in a giant cloud, all interlinking. By definition a universe made up of interlinked information would be a cloud as the only links could be back into the cloud. If we could only follow one path of this interlinked information then we could never know if it was an interlinked web of information or a single string. Anything else, to a bio-aware organism, would simply be a theory.

A string model leaves us with a huge question. Is their only one piece of string, one set of possibilities that we can travel down or is it some bit of fluff with junctures everywhere? I like Stephen Hawking's model of the universe as something more like the inside surface of a balloon. I can't answer this of course but if memory is only a biological phenomena rather than a physical one then their is no reason for choices or memories to be physically real anyway; very Vanilla Sky.

For the one person or so who as read to the end, a Winos are the superpartners of the SU(2)_L gauge fields. The theoretical Anti-W particle and a prime candidate to be anti-matter.

Brave new world...so what is techno-anarchism and what is web 3.0?

I have had a lot interest in my comment made about my belief in techno-anarchism which I mentioned in passing on Facebook today.

So what is it? It is a belief that technology will give humans not only the power but the imperative to organise themselves from peer to peer without any real need for central organisation.

Web 2.0 is the starting point for this. It is possible to follow the news from peer to peer, for medical expertise can be shared between peers and turned into a volume of knowledge with only limited input from medical professionals and for music can be published from bedroom to bedroom with basic household technology.

WEB 3.0

I am on the look out for Web 3.0 - A much closer interaction between cyberspace and real world and real space. Virtual reality, both for games and other uses has made huge advances yet its potential is almost unimagined.

Non-conventional banking is a key area a for web 3.0. We can already lend money consumer to consumer and, while far from perfect, pay virtually anything online. The interesting thing is that there has been growing speculation about the benefits of virtual world currencies (second life dollars or whatever they are called). At the moment these currencies and all web transactions are generally transferred to the bank clearing system rather than remaining as credits flowing around the web. We have a situation where the private BACS network predates the public WWW network but innovation must mean that soon your clearing is more likely to be done by Google than Bank of New York. In a world where anyone could log into the bank clearing system the concept of money may become redundant, replaced by privately issued credits. Of course modern money isn't back by anything at all anyway. You have more rights claiming credit from EBay than you do the US federal reserve.

The biggest 3.0 link of technology and the real world is likely to be human labour. The software and hardware to allow any knowledge worker to work from home and have video conferencing, monitored work telephone etc etc is basically all in place. It will take an enormous culture change and for technical lock in problems to become sorted for this to become common place however its effect of the make up of our societies could be inestimatable. Knowledge Jobs will be able to be sent to rural India as more effectively than they can export garments.

Robotics as an application to allow us to interact with world while sitting at home. I'll send my robot to the shops with a bag of web credits to pick up a diet coke. Weird, of course but technically completely feasible. In fact it is already happening everyday in mining and the military.

Of course fixed line telephones, stand alone television and physical media such as DVDs are likely to go the way of the typewriter and the 56k modem as more and more integrates into web based applications and technology integrates into our physical lives. The key to this integration is appliances that can talk to each other. Fridges that can recognise RFID barcodes and send the information via a short distance radio system to your laptop and ask Sainsburys for a top up? Device which logs on the the electricity company to see how expensive power is at the moment before switching your laundry on? Not tricky at all.

Techno Anarchism

So how does this aid an anarchistic future. The web is a giant tool of co-operation. Its functionality has been virtually conflict free unlike real world economic and political systems. I believe that the web can be beyond the effective control of governments. They could cut of wires but we can use mobiles, they can jam mobiles and we can use satellite phones. Data the government wants to stop can already be easily hidden inside data that the government desperately needs to keep moving.

A huge number of cooperative and profitable systems will be able to run without the interference of governments. As more generations of cables are laid or the technology developed to send messages down electricity cables across the world to avoid political hot spots and cope with a billion home workers teleconferencing it will become imperative that governments make it even more unstoppable. Rather like DNA, the information needed to make it work is on the web, inherent to the its existence rather than stored externally.

Very very briefly

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• sane - 13.2m hits

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going to try and get another post up tonight

All purpose Daily Mail Comment

Every been outraged by a Daily Mail article but too busy to write your own comment. Simply cut and paste this (underlining the relevant sections)...


This is disgusting. It is political correctness gone mad. This is all the fault of the EU/24 hour licensing/Greed. This country used to be great but there are too many jobsworths/immigrants/welfare abusers.

My grandfather fought in WW2/Afghanistan/100 years war for this country that used to be great.

I am so glad that I emigrated to Canada/France/Zimbabwe. I hope Peter Mandelson/Harriet Harman/Charles Dickens is proud of him/herself. I am going to vote for the BNP.

WeirdScience - A disorder coming to a school near you?

I should stat making a note of who writes and publishes these articles I read. It would make me feel like a proper blogger and not just a bloke eating mackerel on toast for lunch while staring at the autumn rain out of the window.

Anyway the article I read was a very interesting one on dyslexia. It makes a few fundamental points about the disorder

• Reading is an invented/accidental process developed by humans. It bounces information off a number of different parts of the brain which were not designed for it.
  
• A small delay in any of these parts of the brain will cause a log jam of information known as dyslexia.

Reading a language takes a huge amount of brain power. This is especially true of phonetic languages (ie with charachters that represent sounds). A pictorial language with five characters can have five different words. A phonetic language with five characters and a maximum word length of five characters could have 3905 words. (This is the factorial of 5 I think). Obviously this is limited by pronunciation of the local dialect and the availability of verbal sounds etc but their are a huge number of possibilities.

The first phonetic language known to man, invented in Greece around 1100BC and known as linear B, was derived from Egyptian and Phoenician hieroglyphics. The advantages of a phonetic language are enormous, it is easier to learn, usable at a moderate degree of learning and almost infinitely flexible and powerful. The trade off is that it takes an phenominal amount of brainpower to use and this is where dyslexia comes from. Try doing some basic exponential equations in your head and you will get an idea of the type of thinking involved.

Something very similar to Linear B is happening to technology. We now have multi dimensional controls on mini-Ipods and think nothing of integrating web pages into each other. Many of latest inovations in the control of IT involve very similar mathematical models to the development of phonetic languages.

My view is that it will be very hard for some people to use this technology becuase they struggle to process these multi-dimensional controls. We all know someone who can't work the DVD player no matter how hard they try. It probably says something about the human brain that it is the elderly who struggle most.

I will invent the word "Distechula". While we face huge barriers in diagnoses due to professional inertia, differing systems and differing access levels I predict that within twelve years it will be a scientifically recognised syndrome that some people are not able to operate modern information technolgy effectively. You heard it here first.

"Welcome to Life Extension"

I was reading an article about the growth in life expectancy the other day. For wealthy westerners it is growing at an astonishing rate. The mathematics is a bit tricky because it talks about life expectancy at birth which is growing at about 2 months every year. A logical extrapolation means that something similar applies to those who are already alive. Therefore every year you live you loose one year off the grand total but add 2 months on due to improved health care nd wellbeing

This two months increase in life expectancy a year however, is not a static rate, but is growing by itself. For instance in a few years time it will be growing at the rate of 3 months per year. The article said this cannot keep growing for ever but I can see no reason why the increase in life expectancy will not grow at more than one year per year, which would mean that we were all getting further away from the end of our lives.

The article is correct to say that the rate of increase could not keep going for ever. They are correct, if only for one reason, we would all being living so long that it would be impossible to measure. The denominator would go to infinity.

It perhaps isn't beyond the realms of medical science to create a generation who will live forever.








*Thanks to Cameron Crowe for the title quote





Note
Here is the sort of stuff that I am talking about

Top Ten Authors

Hoping not to make too much effort I thought could take a lead from the David Letterman's lazy writers and rattle of a top ten list.

1. Haruki Murakami
   
2. George Orwell
3. Franz Kafka.
   
4. Jack Kerouac
5. Kurt Vonnegut
   
6. Aldous Huxley
   
7. Oscar Wilde
   
8. JG Ballard
   
9. Patrick Hamilton
10. Voltaire

As a bonus Leonard Cohen possibly not really an author so in at number 11 but loved Beautiful Losers.

9 things about me

1. I am a practising Karma Kagyu Buddhist. I will only blog about this incidentally as I am not qualified to teach people.
   
2. I suffer from severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to the extent that it often makes organising new information impossible and I am sometimes very sensitive to crowds. Stimulant drugs on their way soon.
3. I believe in total responsibility and free expression for the individual, including sexual and pharmacological freedom. I believe that drug liberalisation is inevitable.
   
4. My favourite music is opera and trance. Both of these are types of music that are incredibly intense live. I struggle to pick a favourite composer.
   
5. My interests include freakonomics, bio-centric theory, weird science, anarchism and self organising systems.
6. My first novel is currently at 17,385 words.
7. You will be able to guess my favourite philosopher from the title of the blog.
   
8. I read constantly. I also play hockey, go to circuit training and kickboxing when I can. I also love travelling.
9. My favourite colour is yellow.