Psybertron Asks

I relegated my manifesto from the blog header to a subsidiary page just last weekend; it includes that phrase “seemingly irrational”, which this letter also uses ….

Your article (How did no-win, no-fee change things?, 7 May) bears out the fact that the “rise” of no-win, no-fee is more of a perception than a reality. But it’s a powerful perception, and one that is often the root cause of seemingly irrational decisions to require schoolchildren to wear goggles to play conkers, but not to wear them in the swimming pool when the chlorinated water irritates their eyes! My profession, health and safety, then gets saddled with the blame. But the reality is that it’s not a result of advice given by health and safety professionals – rather officials seeking an easy way out of a difficult decision or racked with unrealistic fears that they might be sued should something go wrong. Modern health and safety practice is about striking a sensible balance. Unfortunately, it’s a powerful and believable excuse for some in positions of authority. Health and safety professionals are not interested in preventing people from doing activities that have gone ahead without serious harm for generations. We want people to have good fun – in a safe and healthy way.
Ray Hurst, IOSH President, Wigston, Leicestershire.

Healthy balance being destroyed by “enforced” choices … enforced by the decision-making psychology, not by any reality or necessity to do so.  Perception is the root cause.

Let that be a lesson to anyone thinking of converting to Catholicism. Should have stuck to his day job, and worked for mid-east peace as he suggested he would do when he stepped down. The power-crazed ego-trip backfires.

Hate to blog about the knowledge angle of this, but it was interesting at the Christmas 2004 Tsunami that wreaked havoc in Thailand and Aceh / Indonesia, that hundreds were also killed in Myanmar, but the closed-to-media environment meant that this barely registered in international news for some time.

This cyclone seems to have killed thousands (three days ago) 4,000 some said, more than 10,000 now according to official statements. A real tragedy. At least Myanmar is prepared to share it with us.

[Post Note – Wow – what a disaster – now 22,000 dead and further 41,000 missing. And by the by, I notice we’ve reverted to “Burma” again – same word phoenetically of course as “Myanmar” – but the BBC is usually pretty pernicketty about such things. Nay a catastrophe 100,000 dead estimate by US diplomat. I notice the US press are using “Myanmar”.]

Yesterday I noticed yet another web 15th birthday story.

The usual Tim Berners-Lee / CERN story proposing and then releasing URL / HTML / HTTP freely. The precise birth of that “web” depends on which point in that process you consider significant – the proposal to do it (1989), the agreement to do it, the doing of it, or the agreement to let it go free (1993).

The point that always confuses me is the DARPA TCP/IP story – I’m guessing that’s the invention of the internet – network of interconnected communications – (as opposed to the web of information on the internet).

From memory that packet-based redundant / multi-route connectivity was invented for reasons of secure (US) military communications so that messages broken into packets on multiple, random network routes could never be (easily) intercepted, and a receiver could always know if a packet had been lost, since the message could not be rebuilt without it – secure as in reliable.

Let me check. Yep, that’s it – ARPANet in 1967/68. I guess the perspective that agitates W3C people is the “free” collaborative standard aspect as opposed to the earlier military need aspect of ISoc. 20 years between the internet and the web, but it “took off” when the web information standards were set free, since the important internet comms standards were already free to use.

[Post Note : Even spam pre-dates the web; almost as old as the Arpanet itself, 30 years.]

A poll of the top 100 public intellectuals, in Prospect Magazine, with an interesting take on not just voting but also suggesting an alternative; plus a blog-meme that I picked-up from Sam, to list:

(1) those with whom you could carry on a conversation.
(2) those with whom you’ve actually had any contact.
(3) those who are must-read and those who are unworthy of the listing.
(4) those you have read some, and intend to read more before confirming an opinion.
(5) those you would add to the list.

As Sam says, the number unread or unrecognized just adds to your reading list. I see Zizek appearing again – not read yet. Anyway, coming soon … my lists:

Died yesterday aged 102. Blogged twice about his 100th Birthday.

Also this interesting story today on the effects of LSD too … change that is, created by people who were affected by it.

Or if you prefer; the “Three Body Language”.

Something that has cropped-up several times in recent quite separate correspondences are analogies to the Newtonian “Three-Body-Problem” and I realised these linked to some earlier things I’d blogged about.

The three-body-problem is insoluble analytically – take three or more bodies (physical objects) apply Newtons laws of motion (inlcuding gravitation) to each of them, and you find you can’t solve the resultant set of equations. Not directly anyway; numerical methods and simulation processes can take each object / object-pair progressively and iterate to an overall solution in small time-slices that ultimately predicts their motions. Of course heavenly bodies didn’t have to wait for someone to find that solution – they just got on with orbitting each other, they’re not analytical objects.

And neither are human subjects – analytical objects. Real human car drivers can cope with three or more cars on the road at once, without bumping into each other too often, they can predict and manage their motions giving and reacting to body-language. They don’t stop to solve equations of motion in order to do it. (And of course there is evidence of this from the opposite case. The Dutch road-traffic experiments, repeated & elsewhere, that show that if you take away road-traffic control signs, people have fewer accidents and drive more safely in general – because they have to use body language to negotiate interactions and passing / crossing manoevres. Conversely in places where every intersection has lights and stop signs the humans forget to use body language, trust the signs, and use their freedom from involvement in the process to make better use of their valuable time dealing with their cell-phones, offspring and breakfast, and their cars have more accidents as a result.)

The correspondences were …

One of them, in a private colleague correspondence, was a three-piece band (Drums, bass, guitar say) and how the real rhythms, attack and timings were never as objectively perfect as just two people or one / two people with a drum-machine / click-track – but were less sterile and all the better for it. A rhythm section may be “tight” but music needs that soul and emotion of humans bouncing their body language off one another. Tight like an elastic rubber-band, not tight as in bolted down.

Another, on the Inclusionality Forum, was Ted Lumley talking about “harmony seeking” fluid dynamic behaviour – in response to my “faith in love” – used a freeway driving example (!) and the Newtonian three-body-problem analogy.

And another I can’t pin down at the moment,
Not Zen driving … anyway …

More related to the earlier boiled frog, but sparked by this line of thought, is the idea that a metaphor in a parallel domain is better than an explicit statement in the real one. If a team is performing well, it’s making music, not following a plan; If musicians are playing well, they’re cooking on gas, not following a score; If you can’t stand the heat (Mr Frog), you can get out of the kitchen (boiling pot); You hum it, I’ll play it; Thereof which we cannot speak, we can’t whistle it either; If you can think of any more, you can let me know …

Post Note … Tom offered this one:

In the days of the Greeks it was thought all could be know about the behaviour of all the particles in the universe.
Then Newton Came along and three bodies was too many.
Then with Einstein relativity made two bodies too complicated a system to understand.
With quantum uncertainty it turns out that even knowing what one thing is doing is impossible.
That is progress.

Made references to the thoughful words of Dr Rowan Williams before, and this is no exception. A link provided by Sam.

Only scanned it so far, and capturing the link for now – but some interesting stuff I’m going to have to come back to. As usual, I find myself agreeing with both sides, Bono and Rowan in this instance.

PS – Also some good current postings & linkage on sustainable food economy from Sam – this is just one example (go browse) – developing from his Peak Oil interests and his aversion to supermarkets (like Tesco, which is specifically a red-herring to the underlying sustainabilty issue.)

Research shows …. etc …. people think better when they’re not working under a low office ceiling, so as Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence says … work under the sky.

(You should see the office I work in ….)