Psybertron Asks

Just finished two quite different books recently. Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, and first, Empire of the Clouds – When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World, by James Hamilton-Paterson.

The latter is a memoir of British aviation since the second world war, constructed mainly from anecdotes and memoirs of test pilots involved. Partly it’s a litany of risks and bad management of government funded aircraft projects and piecemeal rationalization of the many independent post-war names – Gloster, Bristol, Fairey, Avro, Handley-Page, etc – and the many dead (crew and bystanders) on whom modern safe civilian air travel depend. Nostaligic for me for 50 years of air-show display aircraft stories – Hunters, Javelins, V-Bombers, Lightnings, all of which I saw in the sixties at Middleton-St-George (Teesside), right up to Harriers. And of course quaint British industrial and management “class” practices. It’s also of interest because I actually left working on Harriers the UK Aero-industry in 1978, due to constant Heath-Wilson government swings in project decisions. The engineering was secondary to the partisan politics. Little did I know then that now, all these anecdotes are part of my sociology and evolutionary-psychology of decision-making agenda. Some great anecdotes that will mean even more when seeing remaining museum examples of some of the marques – the Lightning at Duxford for example – and the story of Alan Pollock – politically invalided out of the RAF in April 1968, after a protest flight without a flight-plan, that took in buzzing Parliament three times before saluting the RAF memorial on the embankment and flying off through Tower Bridge in his Hunter. The book covers right up the 2010 UK Strategic Defence Review. (I have a draft post somewhere on aircraft nostalgia …. the Lightning is still my favourite.)

Beatrice and Virgil on the other hand has a similar feel to Yann Martel’s prize-winning Life of Pi. Although based on a much darker underlying history than the simple(!) youthful journey in Pi, B&V’s agenda is still very much on pushing the limits on what might actually be true in writing a conventional first-person narrative story. In B&V’s case, it’s the play being written within the story, apparently fictional (clearly fictional, since it involves talking animals) but which is an allegory for a darker reality, linked with a twist to its taxidermist-author. Very clever and satisfying to read. (BTW It helps to know that Beatrice and Virgil were originally characters from Dante’s Divine Comedy. PS I also have Martel’s 1996 “Self” to read, which predates LoP.)

Adversarial binary arguments are always motivated.

With all the buzz around Google+ vs Facebook, etc (see previous post) thanks to David Gurteen for this Bill Ives link to a paper / book chapter from Forrester Research. Nothing new under the sun, but paying 500 bucks for the privilege of reading the results does focus the mind. Shock horror – it’s not possible to leapfrog the need for evolution, but indeed the “learning curve” is part of the process of getting there, to solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity, using social media or any other tool.

You can debate the significance of the specific 5 levels – you may prefer to identify 3 or 7 (*) – BUT you can’t jump to the benefits of a final implementation without the learning benefits of preliminary attempts, unless you are very lucky. Think monkeys and typewriters, think stairway to heaven, think making your own luck.

(*) I prefer 3 layers, because even the layers come in 3 layers …. and two 3’s make 5, three 3’s make 7 etc … just a question of granularity / fractality of the issues you address …. and 80/20 view on what you value most in each given distinction …. a longer story.

PS – another good link from David Gurteen to a “Lost in Translation” piece by Nick Milton – also linked earlier.

PPS – and Branson too – no alternative to evolution. Plans most likely mess things up.

Doug Hofstadter’s 6 word autobiography, according to XKCD.

I’m so META,
even this acronym.

aka “The reference implementation of the self-referential joke.”

Thanks to Psybertron Jr for spotting it. Even as recently as two of the last three posts, the word has been meta and the reference has been Hofstadter.

Meta has been the word since 1999/2000 when most other people were distracted by the impending millennium bug, but The Economist no less predicted that “Meta will be the word of the noughties”. We were almost right, maybe in the teenies we’ll get there. No-one in the dot.com-boom spotted the impending explosion in media opportunities to spread memetically the lowest common denominator of obvious “old knowledge” and that this would be a drag on advancing attention on new “meta” knowledge, recognizing the underlying reality of [meta(meta)^n]-knowledge. The Religion vs Science debate has been just as distracting in creating an artificial binary opposition of old knowledge – attention grabbing in the media spotlight.

Thanks to Quine, Hofstadter (and Dennett) got there before most of the rest of us. Attention is the valuable commodity.

Prompted by an F-something-or-other (*1) screaming overhead and out into the North Sea, I was reminded of recent Norwegian and Dutch colleagues mentioning that Russian “reconnaissance” intrusions into northern NATO controlled airspace were happening again – just like the old cold-war days. Fylingdales isn’t what it used to be, but we didn’t have Google then.

This whacky right-wing US site has a collation of reported sightings. Ironically, the Chamorro Bible site is also a plane-spotter’s dream. (Chamorro is hard to navigate, everything is by date, and the links don’t convey the wealth of images they contain – Example Feb 2007 contains some excellent F14 sunset shots, including the “Green Sunset” …. you just have to browse the massive hi-quality collection – every subject under the sun – weather, wildlife, geography, geo-physical events, natural-disasters, relief-aid, hardware – photographed from US military and Nasa platforms.)

Same old TU95 Bear’s but this interceptor here is an F22 Raptor.

(More arty shots as well as this one
– with sunsets and moon backdrops –
in the linked Chamorro collection.)

(*1) At one time my visual acuity and general plane-spotting-geekiness meant I could spot just about any model at any altitude, but sadly the eyesight and knowledge of post-80’s aircraft ain’t what they used to be. (This one was twin-tail-fin, twin-engine, low-fuselage-side-intakes, high-swept / tapered wing, high-forward-fuselage and bubble-canopy, didn’t notice whether tail-planes or forward-canard / extensions, didn’t sound all that heavy – say like an F15 Eagle, or even more like an F18 Hornet, MiG29 Fulcrum or Su27 Flanker 😉 – can’t imagine what any are doing serving over North Yorks – maybe an air-show display visit, or a newer model I don’t recognise ? Not an F14 Tomcat or an F35 JSF / Lightning III(*2) or an F22 Raptor so far as I could tell, none have that “hunched” forward fuselage look.)

(*2) refuse to call it Lightning II since there have already been (at least) two. P38 Lightning and BAC F1/F3/F6/F53 Lightning. BTW this on-line Flight International archive, Flight Global has a great collection of those cutaways – some poster sized with amazing detail – right from 1903 to 2006 (!)

[Post Note June 2013 – Seems the only the active USAF bases in the UK are Mildenhall (Tankers, EWACS and Transports) and Lakenheath (F15’s) – no F22’s or F35’s – so in fact F15 is the reasonable conclusion, seen a few more since.]

Thanks to Dave Gurteen for Tweeting to his LinkedIn stream a link to a Michael Sampson post reviewing a Rajesh Setty post on why “Smart People” sometimes appear bad at sharing knowledge.

It’s because what passes for knowledge becomes removed from current activities. Computation as compression – efficiency in the evolutionary arms race. The more expert / experienced one becomes in a subject the more the “obvious” stuff becomes buried beneath the more interesting / exceptional / creative variations – the more conscious effort is required to go back and unpick the “process” by which the current knowledge was arrived at in terms of its more primitive components (see the linked graphic). This is part “every picture paints a thousand words” – where the picture replaces / stands-for a thousand knowledge-items learned, but it can never “convey” that knowledge to anyone not really already knowing them. It is also part Hofstadter’s tit-for-tat-tabletop – the next move (or the pattern of moves) is ALWAYS a (more) creative metaphor away from the current world situation – away from the table-top or theatre-of-operations in front of you – in a layer of metaphorical abstraction.

Apart from sharing what is already known, any metaphor / abstraction should be original / creative, or it is simply a cliche, a meme. Progress always happens at the meta-level. Only accounting / stubbed-toes / dragged-knuckles occur in the world of here-and-now beans / rocks.

PS just listening to Bertrand Russell’s original 6-part Reeth Lectures archive from 1948. He has that “of course it’s all too obvious to the likes of me” tone of condescention – which also comes across in his cock-sure position on logic, so lampooned by Wittgenstein – BUT, so much of what he said is in fact  too true, nothing new under the sun, plus ca change, etc … ’twas ever thus. Just like the tone I’m now using, What goes around, comes around. Great section in the first lecture on the balance of social authority vs individual freedom. I see MoQ-Discuss is on another endless loop on “free” will vs determinism. Oh for a Hofstadterian strange-loop.

Of course that Seth Godin link from David includes such a loop. Rule 6 says if in doubt ignore rules 1 to 5. That’s normal. Rules are primarily for their exceptions (*). The only reason to learn rules 1 to 6 is to understand why it’s rule 6 that matters. Learning rules 1 to 5 is simply part of the learning process in practice.

(*) That’s not quite what I mean. The interesting aspect of rules are primarily their exceptions, conflicts and harder interpretations, the rules themselves are primarily to record the obvious / background knowledge …. to link back to the original piece.