Timing Accuracy

As technological improves you would expect that our ability to measure things would improve. So if we take the accuracy of measurements as a crude gauge of technological progress can we graph how quickly we are progressing?

So take time. How quickly is our ability to measure time accurately improving?

I'm going to have a look at how accurately people have been able to measure time since the start of the modern world (about the time Newton got hit by an apple) till now. I take accuracy to mean how many seconds you could count before you would be out by one on average.

1656, Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens. It had an error of less than one minute a day according to here
1721, George Graham improved the pendulum clock’s accuracy to within a second a day
1761 John Harrison, half a second a day
1889 to Siegmund Riefler's clock with a nearly free pendulum, which attained an accuracy of a hundredth of a second a day
1952 Quartz clock at accuracy of 1 in 10^8 seconds.

Modern times are graphed here

For the atomic age I got the figures from here
So that gives the data

year accuracy
1650 10E+03
1721 10E+05
1889 10E+07
1952 10E+08
1955 10E+10
1970 10E+13
1989 10E+16
2008 10E+17

One problem with this line of thought is that exponential increases tend to stop. Otherwise we would be up to our ears in Fibonacci's rabbits. The problem with this exponential reasoning is described here

There are all sorts of other things whose accuracy have improved over time. Has temperature and mass measurement accuracy increased at the same rate?

Turkeys Voting for Christmas

Surely this expression should mean that things should not engage in acts they don't have the cognitive capacity needed to do. A bit like saying dogs should not do quantum theory. Taleb has a theory of turkey philosophy here.

But that is not the excepted meaning which is

like turkeys voting for (an early) Christmas (British & Australian humorous)
if people are like turkeys voting for Christmas, they choose to accept a situation which will have very bad results for them
Usage notes: Turkeys are large birds which are often eaten on Christmas Day.

Other then the obvious practical difficulties of running meleagrine elections Christmas has to be the best thing that has ever happened to turkeys. I remember a talk on the long now that the best way to ensure your species survival is to be really tasty.

Without Christmas we would have no reason to have such large numbers of turkeys. People don't keep skunks because they serve no useful purpose. Numbers would be vastly reduced. If only wild turkeys survived and they were not farmed for food their numbers would be orders of magnitude less.

Of course there is the question of whether it is a good idea for turkeys to put all their eggs in one basket Christmas wise. They have intelligently diversified in the American market into thanksgiving. Some sort of Summer festival in Asia would be where they should concentrate their marketing on next I would think.

What have a panzer tank and a Dublin taxi got in common?

You can use statistical methods to estimate their numbers boom boom

How many taxis are there in Dublin? I'm going to try guess without looking it up then see if I'm right. And I'm going to use Panzers to do it.

During WW2 the allies had to try guess how many tanks the germans had. From the Guardian
"The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced"

People are always trying to guess how many of something there is. Iphones, kindles, computer worms, all sorts of man made objects. Mainly though it is important for military reasons.

Lancasters square law says that the power of a modern military force is proportional not to the number of units it has, but to the square of the number of units. This means that relatively small changes in the number of units an enemy has can have big changes in their effectiveness. Play around with the graph of x^2-x; here if you want to see for yourself. This is also important in computer game simulations of military operations.

Anyway I'll get some data on the Dublin Taxi driver licence numbers and get back with the calculation. The estimation problem should make more sense with an example.

The Lottery of Penalties

Croatia boss Slaven Bilic: "Penalties are a lottery and the players felt confident enough to take the spot kicks."
Redknapp's post-match attitude was that penalties are a "lottery"
Max Tonetto: “We played a great game, and unfortunately we were punished by the lottery of penalties.”

There is not much research on this area. This paper implies
“The research shows that the individual goal-scoring skills do play a role in scoring goals from penalties and that the result is not exclusively a matter of luck… The belief that a penalty shootout is a lottery made players more receptive to the negative consequences of anxiety-caused stress.”

So according to Geir Jordet and Esther Hartman's research not only is a penalty kick not a lottery but saying it is hurts your team.

Submarine Collision Probability 3

Ok last time on the how often should two nuclear submarines smack into each other question. This particular sum managed to get me and Luke into the Wall Street Journal print edition here and their blog here. Which was nice.

So the sum is a mean free path calculation. Where the particles are submarines and the box they are in is the submarine patrol zone or the whole Atlantic depending.

The size of a submarines patrol area is generally set by the requirement to have a surface support vessel within 24 hours. If one of these could travel at 20 knots an hour it could cover an circle with radius of 900 kilometers. The maximum operating depth is not much more than 600m and the submarine has to operate about 100m below the seasonal thermocline. A stealth mode speed is about two meters per second. The size of a nuclear submarine is about 150m length by 12m diameter plus a conning tower of about 8m high by 12 meters long. We modeled this cylinder as a sphere, which on these scales should not be too bad.

A support ship can support up to 14 subs. So we took it that there were 14 in its particular area in the small sum. If there were 14 gas particles wandering around a box the size of the Atlantic (big) or a ships support area (small). from a depth of 100m to 600m. At a speed of 2 meters a second. How often would you expect one to hit another is what we worked out.

Nuclear submarines have to stay 100 meters below the seasonal thermocline. We took the thermocline to be zero based on this

The model "mean free path" used is derived here

Now these are big ifs, thinking of things as being random gas particles is a big IF. People thought derivatives acted like random particles (the Black–Scholes model) and they just lost a lot of money. So I think this is more "fun application" of physics rather than "rigorous analysis". Thanks to Luke and Carl who crunched the numbers and got the data (i.e who did all the work).

Malware News 2012

Turing Bots Are Coming
Autonomous IM bots with near human appearance have become an increasing source of malware infection in the last few months. Early attempt at such IM "Turing bots" first occurred in 2007. However recent improvements in the technology have lead to increased success in these infection methods. The bots attempt to appear human in instant messenger communications. This is generally to attempt to learn bank account information.

Eliezer Yedkawsky who has for years pointed out the security threat of artificial intelligence warned yesterday "Why does a dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail was smarter, it would wag the dog."

A security expert dismissed as preposterous the idea that smarter then human AI coming from IM bots represents an existential threat to humanity.

NamScan closes

In related news a Vietnamese Anti Virus company NamScan closed yesterday. The Buddhist workers at the company refused to create software that would destroy intelligent AI bots. A company spokesman said "this is a strange cult that has grown up in our company. The engineers believed that if a program a collection of bits could pass the Turing test then it was in some way "human" and destroying it would be immoral".

The ruling on the court case between the antivirus industry and PETAI (people for the ethical treatment of AI) is due next week. A spokesman for the antivirus industry said "without the ability to stop these programs the whole internet will collapse".

Satellite Collisions

If something is worth doing its worth overdoing. So rather then continue to explore the massive conspiracy against life that is nuclear weapons I want to look at satellites.

"In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today."



There are all sorts of worries here about the effects of shards of satellite debris hurtling round the earth. Mainly though there are incredibly cool graphics of stuff smashing together.

Now I believe thinking about nuclear submarines as wandering particles (as i did here) makes sense on the grounds they are supposed to act in a random manner. Satellites however are deliberately put into set orbits to exclude collisions. They do change path occasionally though based on fuel leaks, gravity effects or being moved for operational reasons but they do not change path often enough for this model to be anything like a good fit. But if we did think of satellites as particles in a box how often would there be hits? If you are interested in a better back of the envelope there is one here.

"The Iridium satellite spanned about 5 meters across its solar arrays. Strela-2M used gravity gradient stabilization, and probably spanned 17 meters including the gravity boom. When calculating collision probabilities, it's important to remember that booms and antennae mean that many satellites have much larger cross-sections than the size of their main body would imply."

Number of particles=300 satellites
Size of particles= 2 meterish sphere

speed: 8000 mps

size of box= 0.06370550904E+12 cubic kilometers
as in earth Mean radius is 6,371.0 km. So sphere of size (6,371.0 km + 800) - sphere of size (6,371.0 km + 700) is the total area.

total volume of satellite = 600 cubic meters
satellite per unit area= 600/0.06370550904E+12 cubic kilometers

A java program to calculate this is below

class Sat {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
   int numPart=300;//sat number
       int sizePart=2; // sat sizeg.
       int speed=8000;//sat speed
       Double below=new Double (1d);
       below=1.41421356*3.14159265*2;//sqrt(2)*pr*r is part of mean free path sum
       Double sizeBox =new Double(63705509040000000000d);//areas sats are in
       double totalSat= numPart*sizePart;//total volume of sats
       double SatPerUnit=totalSat/sizeBox;//how many sats per unit area?
       Double meanFreePath=new Double(1d);
       meanFreePath=1/(below*(1/sizeBox));//mean free path calculation
       Double often= new Double(1d);
       often=meanFreePath/speed;
       often=often/(365*24*3600);
       System.out.println("Satelites should hit every
"+often+" years");
   }
}

Satellites should hit every 1.42E7 years. Which makes me fairly sure I've gotten my zeroes wrong somewhere.

Carrying stolen money

There was a bank raid this morning where an bank employee was made carry 7 million euro out of a bank. The story is here

"The official, who is in his 20s, was then forced to drive his car to the bank. After withdrawing the money, he handed it over to the gang at Clontarf DART station."

I am ignoring the horror of the attack and just asking what would 7 million euro weigh? In 2 euro coins it would weigh 29750kg


A bank note is around 1 gram according to here.
So 7 million euro is
14000 500 euro notes (1.1g) or 14.4kg.
100 euro notes (1g) are about 5 times that 70kg which a normal man could not carry nonchalantly out of a building.
50 euro notes (.9g) would weigh 126kg which most people could not lift.

So how did the employee carry this money? You would think there would be restrictions on employees carting large bags of money around.

There is also the size issue. 500 notes are Size: 160 x 82 x 0.12 mm so 14000 would be a pile 168 cm high. So say you want to put these into a duffel bag. This is roughly 600 mm long by 300 mm wide by 300 mm high

So you can fit three pile lengthways, three sideways and 2500 notes upwards. So in a duffel bag you can have a bit more then (there is left over room at the top and sides) 3*3*2500= 22500 500 euro notes. This is 11250000 euro weighing about 25 kilos.

How many 100 note (1g) of Size: 147 x 82 x 0.12 mm, 50 note (.9g) of Size: 140 x 77 x 0.12 mm could be carried?

Nuclear war 2.0

In the latest in my increasingly unhinged worries about nuclear war I started wondering what would happen if someone accidentally spilled coffee into the wrong machine and it did all kick off. Off course there are so many back ups no such accident could happen like the way a drunken depressive could never be the one with the final say on when Armageddon comes...

Anyway if they did launch what would be the effects on your house?

Turns out some people have already made a shinny web 2.0 app that lets you see this


Its great family fun to play around with. Center the flag on the nearest location you think will be nuked and have a look at the various effects. You can go for that retro 50's bomb, the humongous 60's version, all the glamour of a modern small tactical nuke.

Playing with these toys the maps and the nuke computer and such is a really odd feeling. Part of me is impressed with the sheer Promethean hubris of the enterprise. Its hard not to admire the technocrat logic of the slide rule nuke computer the shiney mashup of the nuke map or the eery idea of subs wandering round blind in the ocean. Mainly though I wonder how I got stuck on this planet that is clearly packed full of psychotic apes.

MADness

After doing all the calculations for the chances of submarines wandering around blind filled with nuclear weapons crashing into each other i got a bit scared

There is something painfully absurd about the idea of blind mute spheres of death wandering round the oceans hoping not to bang into each other.


We like to think nuclear war was only a problem around the time of Bob Dylan's first album and was shot in kodachrome photos but the fact is it could still kick off today.

"I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home."
Diffie

So for fun why not compute like it was 1962 and see what would happen if various nukes went off in your vicinity. There is a fun print and make Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer here and some more here. They are basically versions of slide rules people used to calculate how big fire balls and such would be.

Hey get the kids involved, its crafty and its edumacational. Why not teach them about how close to a bomb they would need to be so that all that would be left is the enamel of their teeth?

Submarine Collision Probability 2

Suppose submarines were spherical particles just wandering round the ocean. Occasionally they would hit the shore its surface or its maximum depth and would bounce off and head away again. Submarines do not move randomly but they do not follow fixed ordered paths either as that makes them easy targets.

The submarine was modelled as a cylinder of length 140 meters and radius 6 meters so it has a volume of 63360 meters cubed. If this is instead seen as a sphere this volume would have a radius of 24.73 meters. Forgive the spherical cow nature of this sum. From a previous calculation you have 25 particles (submarines) of volume 63360 cubic meters each in a space the size of 300 million cubic kilometers. How often will one hit another?

A problem very similar to this is how quickly two gasses will mix. Gas particles fly around very quickly air molecules at about 400 meters per second (which is faster then the speed of sound!) and all that stops cigar smoke instantly filling a room is that the gas molecules hit off each other so much they do not just zip across the room. The calculations below are based on an explanation found here. Maxwell and a few other worked out how often particles should collide and called the distance a particle travels without colliding the Mean free path.

Each particle has a volume of 63360 cubic meters. So 25 particles are 1,584,000 cubic meters. Instead of being in a box these submarine particles are in the atlantic with an operating range in depth of 300 meters. So the 'box' these particles are in is of size 30 000 000 000 000 000 cubic meters. Each particle has 12 million cubic kilometers to itself. so in 12 million cubic kilometers of ocean 63360 meters of it are particle. So 1 part in 190 000 000 000 of the available Atlantic is a submarine.

So how many particles per meter is that? 25*63360 submarines in 30 000 000 000 000 000 meters cubed of water.

Whats area is swept out by a particle (submarine) in a given period of time? I figure submarines wander around at 20kph so that's a sweep volume of pi*d*d*x in a distance x. travelling at 20kph that's pi*24.7*24.7*(20kph*1000m*24hr)=919994045 meters swept per day.

Now along this path how long will it on average travel before hitting another particle?

The mean free path formula is

where n is the number of particles per unit volume. And r is 24.7m. So the length you'd expect to travel between collisions is 1/2710* n.

Actually i think I've found a flaw in my reasoning here. I think the correct answer is about once ever 300 years. Which is still a bit too often isn't it? Ill post the calculations later.

Nuclear submarine collision what are the chances?

"A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision in the middle of the Atlantic, it was reported.

The crash between HMS Vanguard and French submarine Le Triomphant, which was also carrying nuclear warheads, is believed to have occurred on February 3 or 4, The Sun claimed."

A nuclear submarine seems to be about 140 meters with a radius of 12. So that's a volume of about 63360 cubic meters.

The Atlantic ocean is 354,700,000 cubic kilometers. There are 1 000 000 000 cubic metres is a cubic kilometer. Of course subs can only dive to about 400 metres. So say they stay in the top 300 meters then the volume might be more like 106.4 million km squared * 300 meters=30 million cubic km. More likely they avoid the top 20 meters where ships might hit them, so their range is estimated to be 20-2320 meters deep.

This is assuming a submarine is a cylinder which it isn't.
How many nuclear submarines are there? There seems to be about 50 in the world. Navies will keep their own submarines separate. But that still means there are in the Atlantic maybe 25 submarines that the French or UK subs could run into. This does reduce the number of subs the Russians Or Americans can hit significantly though. They have a top speed of about 40 km per hour. So I assume they are wandering around at 20kph. So assuming all the worlds submarines are in the Atlantic ocean at the same time how often would you expect one to hit another if they were traveling round at random?

facebook relationship forensics

Has anyone noticed the modern skill of divining your friends relationship status based on social networking clues? You feel a bit CSI trawling through tweets to divine if someones missus is just not going to the pub or has been red carded.

This requires powers of divination that would shame an extispicist. It would also shame the animal whose entrails he was reading if it didnt have bigger problems at the time.

Why isn't there a word for thinking today is a different day? If you could go "oh the game is on tonight Ive been daisy all day" rather then having to go into an explanation of how you think its Friday not Thursday etc.

Mind reading maths horse advances scientific method

Clever Hans was a horse. He was a horse who did maths. People held up a card with a arithmetic puzzle to him and he would clop out the correct answer. Now this is a clever trick but the really odd bit is what happened when a guy called Pfungst figured out how he did it.

Pfungst realised that when the person posing the question did not know the answer the maths horse was suddenly thicker then pig shit. When the questioner expected another clop they leaned slightly forward. When the horse had clopped out the right answer they leaned back in amazement.

From this Pfungst realised that in experiments you give off subtle clues that can be picked up and influence the experiment. This was called the "clever hans effect" and is the reason we carry out experiments where the researcher does not know the "correct" answer. This double blinding was an important advance in the scientific method. The lack of double blind is a mistake a lot of paranormal and alternative health experiments make.

Still though Mind reading maths horse, that is just a random collection of words. What non equine advances to the scientific methods have been made? Was the first journal editor was a wiley aristocratic unidexterous fox? Peer review was originally carried out by psychic chemistry goats?

And while were on weird shit, did you know bees can recognise faces? I would have thought the chief advantage of being a social insect was being immune from embarrassment. Now there going to be all "Oh whats your name, I remember I met you by the gladioli yesterday". Forget shitting sugary water maybe we should use bees as bouncers. Giant swarms of bomber jacketed fuckwits baring entry to the pubs of Dublin.

Sex, science and profits: Kealey

This book asks whether governments should fund science. It starts with a review of the history of technological advancement. This section is like a cross between an economic history of the western world and guns germs and steal. The books title seems to be tying to trade in on the popularity of Guns and Germs which might cause people to dismiss it as pop history and miss its important arguments about current science funding.

The second section is an analyse of the industrial revolution and shows how its discoveries stemmed not from government funded pure scientists providing insights that were then used by industrialists but from tradesmen making gradual improvements to the machines they used every day. These new machines then provided evidence for the theoreticians to build up scientific theories from.

The third section looks at how contemporary science is done and examines if government funding of science increases or decreases the rate of progress (and economic growth). It includes a convincing chapter on why patents serve to harm the public.

This is an entertaining well crafted book that lays out a compelling argument for free market (rather than state subsidised) science. The book seems to have been widely ignored outside libertarian circles where he is preaching to the converted.

One thing the book does not explore is the use of other methods to incentivize science. The use of betting markets and prizes are two ways that are probably underused.

Cheer up things could be worse

Chicken Licken has nothing on the news these days. Everyone is talking about "perfect storms of bad economic data" and "the worst possible recession imaginable", stuff like that. This recession is bad(pdf), much worse then most people currently believe. It is at the point where those hoarding gold are overly optimistic, they should be hoarding rice.

However you have to be really lacking in imagination to think that a complete collapse of the banking system hyperinflation of fiat currency and abandonment of all social services provisions are the worst economic event you can imagine.

Here are a collection of things that are much worse.

These sorts of inevitable disasters come round anywhere from every 100 years to 50,000 years or so
1. A Flu pandemic which killed 5% of world population.
2. Canary island volcano falling into the Atlantic.
3. Yellowstone volcano exploding
4. Rapid onset new ice age

Not inevitable but fairly likely
1. Thermonuclear war.
2. Intelligent robots that try kill us all (surely this is overdue at this point)
3. Bioterrorism of some mix of aids, smallpox, anthrax and athletes foot.

So cheer up on a geological scale this is minor. Yellowstone could explode then you’d really have problems.

Bound for Whorey

I'm so angry I could drop kick a nun.



Woodie Guthrie the raving communist hater of corporations is advertising Audi cars? Are they going to have this machine kills fascists emblazoned on the side?



And whats with the papercraft? a nice biodegradable car that is put together with loving care? The sort of thing that wont mow down people and leave them clinging to the bloody stumps that used to join to their feet?

At least Woody had the decency to die before they tried to dance around in his skin in some bizarre puppet person desecration. Iggy pop on the other hand has some sort of alien inside him that makes him advertise car insurance

Enough by John Naish

We have too much food, information, stuff, and the constant quest for more is costing us our physical and mental and even planetary well being.

The good of this book is that it is correct and entertaining. The bad is

1. This bit of the brain lights up which means.... Something like this is said every few paragraphs which as the author himself points out "is like standing outside a football ground, trying to interpret the action in the game by listening to the roars of the crowd". Brain scanning is not that accurate and basing your argument on extremely scant data like this is unwise.

2. In the stone age we did X so now we do X to much in the modern world. Evolutionary just so stories. These pop up in popular culture all the time and become accepted knowledge without any evidence. We don't really know how we lived in the stone age. Looking at Bonobo society early man may have been vastly different to how we imagine it today. So the old cliche (not from the book)
Men are better at maths because they had to have spatial abilities to chase antelope. Except when you look at it that's not the reason. People thinking men are better at maths seems to be most of the cause of them being better.

This book is full of these non falsifiable fairy tales which again is not a good foundation for an argument

3. No index

4. We cannot have more stuff unless we consume more. This is taken as an axiom but it is wrong. Ephemeralization is the process where people use technological advances to continuously do more with less.

The book is right that we need to be satisfied with enough and serves as a good motivator as to how to do this personally.

Similar but better books are Collapse by Jared Diamond on what causes societies to fail and Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller on how we can provide the needs of society and move away from over consumption.

Christmas Quiz

Name the film.

1. Onq Fnagn
2. Oenmvy
3. Qvr uneq
4. Terzyvaf
5. Genqvat Cynprf
6. Zhccrgf Puevfgznf Pneby
7. Ervaqrre Tnzrf
8. Vgf n jbaqreshy Yvsr
9. Fpebbtrq
10. Avtugzner Orsber Puevfgznf

World Vision

How do you improve the vision of poor people? Poor as in uneducated less then a dollar a day third world poor. Joshua Silver has invented adjustable glasses to cheaply do this. There are other ideas donating old glasses for example.

The rand experiment showed that one of the few useful free health care provisions are free glasses. Granted that was of fairly rich people who could buy glasses if they really needed them but it still shows a benefit.

See if you can figure out what the picture is used for?

Bonnie the whistling orangutan

Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan whistles. Now that is not a weird as a French person showering or an interesting Canadian but it is still important news. From my extensive knowledge of computer games and films I knew simians could kidnap damsels then either throw barrels or climb skyscrapers but whistling?



Bonnie being able to whistle is important because it shows these apes have control over their vocalisations and their sounds can be voluntary.
This means that voluntary vocal abilities are not purely a human ability. Bonnie learned to whistle by copying her zoo keeper rather then through being taught explicitly. This means orangutans have far more vocal abilities than previously believed and so humans vocal language skills are shared at least in part with other species.

Which leads to many questions, Should we upgrade the rights we give Orangutans? Or more likely should we downgrade the rights of wolf-whistling builders? Could we have have zoos with exhibits of brick layers who strut and preen occasionally shouting mating calls at passers bye? That does not sound much different to many building sites I have seen.

Now the comparison of human and orangutan may not be fair. I can't whistle and I'm significantly worse at hanging out of trees. On the positive side I'm nearly as house trained so I am not overly worried about getting replaced just yet.

The revelation comes from a paper published in December in Primates, an international journal of primatology. The Christmas edition of Primates is out? And I missed it? That is the one with the free 2009 calender. I hear the miss April Gibbon is a babe.

If they can whistle what else can the do? After whistling a full Christmas carol album can't be far behind. A simian soundtrack to the festive season is imminent.
How annoyed is Jane Goodall going to be when she finds out about this? She probably has her chimps working on a a full barbershop album right now.

All the articles on this keep pointing out she is 30? Bonnie is still on the market and pointing out shes a trigenarian and getting on a bit cannot help her in the dating stakes.

Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich said "This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans," Did you know animals had accents? Do Hillbilly mountain monkeys get looked down on by the urbane city slicker zoo ones?

Not only that but the orangutans are teaching each other how to whistle. Indah was a roommate of Bonnie and she learned to whistle from Bonnie. Unfortunately Indah died before they could record a Christmas duet single. They can teach other this stuff? If one ever figures out how to lay bricks builders are in trouble.

Cost of the Bailout

The bailout seems to have cost somewhere between 4 and 8 trillion dollars.

In todays money (inflation adjusted) world war two cost the US around 5 trillion. according to here, here, here and here.

Whose Flag?

Name the country

1. Oenmvy
2. Nyonavn
3. Terrpr
4. Wnznvpn
5. Ivrganz
6. Phon
7. Ehffvn
8. Svaynaq
9. Ghexrl
10. Flevn

Name that Country

Match the outline of a country to its name.

1. Cbynaq
2. Fhqna
3. Vena
4. Pebngvn
5. Svaynaq
6. Zrkvpb
7. Flevn
8. Zbebppb
9. Fbznyvn
10. Puvyr

Poodle Quiz

Poodles are Satan's Idea of a good pet. But what happens when a proper animal spawns itself with these furballs of hate. All these animals are the unholy union of a poodle and a proper dog. Match the picture of a poodle hybrid to the others side of the crossbreed.

Label these dogs whose very existence mocks god.

1. Qbkvrcbb (Qnpufuhaq)
2. Vevfu qbbqyr (Vevfu Frggre)
3. Fpuabbqyr (Fpuanhmre)
4. Furrcnqbbqyr (Byq Ratyvfu Furrcqbt)
5. Tbyqraqbbqyr (Tbyqra Ergevrire)
6. Ynoenqbbqyr (Ynoenqbe Ergevrire)
7. Fcevatreqbbqyr (Ratyvfu Fcevatre Fcnavry)
8. QbbqyrznaCvafpure (Qborezna Cvafpure)

Lets all become drug dealers

1.

A RECORD haul of cocaine worth more than €500m was dramatically seized off the south-west coast yesterday in a sweeping international 'sting' operation.

2.

TD warns vaccine cut will result in 80 deaths
calculating the cost of the programme was half the €14m claimed by the Government — €7m

Does anyone else think 1 could solve 2? Why not let the government sell cocaine to people? You don't hear of pharmacists shooting each other.
But we cannot profit from drug dealers? We already do through CAB (criminal assets bureau).
But what about the lives that would be lost? Id rather coked up assholes died at their own hand than condemn women to a preventable death.

We are now short of cash. That is the reason prohibition ended.

Puzzle

A bunch of my friends were trying to find a route round this graph at the weekend. Yeah it was a crazy party.

A quick search showed the problem was one of finding the Eulerian path. And that the puzzle had no solution

"Eulerian path is a path in a graph which visits each edge exactly once. Similarly, an Eulerian circuit is an Eulerian path which starts and ends on the same vertex"

If there is to be an Eulerian path for a given graph the graph must have lesser than three nodes with odd number of edges."

Code to check for these paths is found here

The code to test this puzzle is
print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2,3,3,4], 2:[1,1,3,4,4], 3:[1,1,2,4,4], 4:[1,2,2,3,3]})
print "test run to make sure code works "
print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2], 2:[1,1]})

Name The Film

1. Npr va gur Ubyr
2. Vaqvnan Wbarf: Envqref bs gur ybfg nex
3. Gur Ubyr
4. Gur Tbbavrf
5. Gur Qrfprag
6. Gur Pnir
7. Gur Pber
8. Ynolevagu
9. Svtug Pyho
10.PyvssUnatre

use this to unobscure

Harrison Ford Quiz Round

Name the film Harrison is looking mildly perturbed in.


1. Nve Sbepr bar
2. Ncbpnylcfr Abj
3. Jung yvrf orarngu
4. Oynqr ehaare
5. Gur shtvgvir
6. Fgne Jnef
7. Vaqvnan Wbarf
8. Fnoevan
9. Jbexvat Tvey
10. Fvk qnlf frira avtugf
11. Cngevbg Tnzrf
I accepted any film where the character is played a few times (6,7,11). Use this to unscramble. You can reuse the image for whatever use.

Predicting rain has been banned

Annoyed at the constant bad weather the government today banned the met office predicting rain. Shares in Irish sun holidays and solar power soared on the new “ostrich” rules designed to stop meteorologists talking us into barometric depressions.

In the past weathermen who predicted the weather accurately were rewarded and those who had all the precognition of Icarus on the devils dandruff were shunned. Now with the fantastic rules that ban any depressing weather forecasts nothing but sunny skies will follow.

In a related story “emperors” clothing has released a new line of minimalist clothing. Anyone disparaging this clothes range or suggesting it may be too minimalist will be thrown to the wolves.

I am going to write a film called “A weekend at Bernankes” where the federal reserve chairman has amazing adventures with the bloated corpses or banking institutions. Of course no one dare anyone suggesting he’s engaging in necrophilia.

When you want to know if someone believes what they claim you ask them to bet. If they won’t bet it’s a very good sign they are spoofing you. Some people want to short stocks, where they are betting the market value of the bank will decrease. They have been banned from predicting the price of banks will decrease. When the government bans predicting the future you have to wonder how bad it must be going to be.

Neolithic Mancala

There is a game played in most of the world called Mancala. It is a “count and capture” game that involves moving stones around a board made up of holes. You can see an explanation of various forms of rules of the game here.



Ireland has some of the best preserved ancient tombs and building sin the world. This means we have some of the oldest known versions of games in the world. Boards of a game called “windmill” have been cut into the temple at Kurna, Egypt (~1440 BC). A version of this game called “Nine Man Morris” is still played. Tic Tac Toe can be considered a very basic version of it also. The earliest known depiction of this game is a bronze age cemetery in Ballinderry Ireland.

Boards of nine man morris have also been found in roman age sites.




Irish 5000 years old Mancala boards should look like this. On a flat surface. Two rows of holes, probably six holes (possibly more) long with slightly larger holes at either end. Possibly you would see a few together as mancala is currently a social game and tends to be played in groups.





We tend to view megalithic carvings as having a religious purpose. It is quite possible that megaliths were gathering points and as such social games took place there. So next time your at a megalith have a look for a game board.

Old Joke

Geometic Affair

Thoughts on Cuba

1. You can graph a countries poverty versus its populations niceness based on the number of hats people wear when they return.



2. The Chinese are coming. My hotel was full of Chinese business people. They spoke fluent Spanish. Chinese people are investing in Cuba and are serious about the country. All the hotel staff came out to bid goodbye to a visiting Chinese MP. Cuban security were present, hawkish men with identical cream shirts. I saw no Chinese security. This shows how comfortable/safe the Chinese politician felt in Cuba.



3. Cubans are the only people on earth who clap when their plane takes off. Other people clap when the plane lands safely but they are just glad to get out.

Delta Airlines needs a Splashscreen

Delta have a little linux computer for each seat that shows films and plays games and such. These go tits up often. When they do you get to see the Linux boot process for a few minutes. On my last flight you got to watch it over and over again all flight.
Instead of showing the boot process Delta should show a splashscreen with some sort of image/ad.

It is fairly easy to do this . Of course they should actually stop linux from freezing and such but this is a simple change.

Guinness and Red Bull

The bubonic plague wiped out 1/3 of Europe's population but the depopulated continent meant that peasants had more bargaining power and this hastened the end of the feudal system. So in spite of nearly destroying civilisation and killing millions in crippling pain the black death had some beneficial effects.

I cannot say this about the cocktail of Guinness and red bull.



This is now pretty much the national drink of Jamaica. The barman did not bat an eyelid, or try drive a stake through my pitch black heart, when I ordered it. There are even songs about it



I am not going to even describe what this tastes like. I think if I had gone up and grave robbed an Indian burial ground I would have caused less desecration.

Gardner's constant

Gardner's constant is the transcendental number e^{\pi \sqrt{163}}. It is given as the integer 262,537,412,640,768,744 in his April 1975 Scientific American Column. So Lets see what programming langugaes have the accuracy to give this result?

So with these figures what will your programming languages will give Gardner's constant?

e=2.7182818284590452353602874713526624977572470936999595749669676277240766303535475945713821785251664274274663919320030599218174135966290435729003342952605956307381323286279434907632338298807531952510190115738341879307021540891499348841675092447614606680822648001684774118537423454424371075390777449920695517027618386062613313845830007520449338265602976067371132007093287091274437470472306969772093101416928368190255151086574637721112523897844250569536967707854499699679468644549059879316368892300987931277361782154249992295763514822082698951936680331825288693984964651058209392398294887933203625094431173012381970684161403970198376793206832823764648042953118023287825098194558153017567173613320698112509961818815930416903515988885193458072738667385894228792284998920868058257492796104841984443634632449684875602336248270419786232090021609902353043699418491463140934317381436405462531520961836908887070167683964243781405927145635490613031072085103837505101157477041718986106873969655212671546889570350354021234078498193343210681701210056278802351930332247450158539047304199577770935036604169973297250886876966403555707162268447162560798826517871341951246652010305921236677194325278675398558944896970964097545918569563802363701621120477427228364896134225164450781824423529486363721417402388934412479635743702637552944483379980161254922785092577825620926226483262779333865664816277251640191059004916449982893150566047258027786318641551956532442586982946959308019152987211725563475463964479101459040905862984967912874068705048958586717479854667757573205681288459205413340539220001137863009455606881667400169842055804033637953764520304024322566135278369511778838638744396625322498506549958862342818997077332761717839280349465014345588970719425863987727547109629537415211151368350627526023264847287039207643100595841166120545297030236472549296669381151373227536450988890313602057248176585118063036442812314965507047510254465011727211555194866850800368532281831521960037356252794495158284188294787610852639
pi=3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885752724891227938183011949129833673362440656643086021394946395224737190702179860943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132000568127145263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585371050792279689258923542019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960518707211349999998372978049951059731732816096318595024459455346908302642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303598253490428755468731159562863882353787593751957781857780532171226806613001927876611195909216420198938095257201065485863278865936153381827968230301952035301852968995773622599413891249721775283479131515574857242454150695950829533116861727855889075098381754637464939319255060400927701671139009848824012858361603563707660104710181942955596198946767837449448255379774726847104047534646208046684259069491293313677028989152104752162056966024058038150193511253382430035587640247496473263914199272604269922796782354781636009341721641219924586315030286182974555706749838505494588586926995690927210797509302955321165344987202755960236480665499119881834797753566369807426542527862551818417574672890977772793800081647060016145249192173217214772350141441973568548161361157352552133475741849468438523323907394143334547762416862518983569485562099219222184272550254256887671790494601653466804988627232791786085784383827967976681454100953883786360950680064225125205117392984896084128488626945604241965285022210661186306744278622039194945047123713786960956364371917287467764657573962413890865832645995813390478027590099465764078951269468398352595709825822620522489407726719478268482601476990902640136394437455305068203496252451749399651431429809190659250937221696461515709858387410597885959772975498930161753928468138268683868942774155991855925245953959431049972524680845987273644695848653836736222626099124608051243884390451244136549762780797715691435997700129616089441694868555848406353422072225828488648158456028506016842739452267467678895252138522549954666727823986456596116354886230577456498035593634568174324112515076069479451096596094025228879710893145669136867228748940560101503308617928680920874760917824938589009714909675985261365549781893129784821682998948722658804857564014270477555132379641451523746234364542858444795265867821051141354735739523113427166102135969536231442952484937187110145765403590279934403742007310578539062198387447808478489683321445713868751943506430218453191048481005370614680674919278191197939952061419663428754440643745123718192179998391015919561814675142691239748940907186494231961567945208095146550225231603881930142093762137855956638937787083039069792077346722182562599661501421503068038447734549202605414665925201497442850732518666002132434088190710486331734649651453905796268561005508106658796998163574736384052571459102897064140110971206280439039759515677157700420337869936007230558763176359421873125147120532928191826186125867321579198414848829164470609575270695722091756711672291098169091528017350671274858322287183520935396572512108357915136988209144421006751033467110314126711136990865851639831501970165151168517143765761835155650884909989859982387345528331635507647918535
sqrt163=Math.sqrt(163)
gard=262537412640768744

guess=e**(pi*sqrt163)

puts "Gardiners constant is 262537412640768744 \n guess #{guess}\n"

Ruby does not give this result by a fair margin.

Obviously Haskell, matlab, mathematica and such are the proper languages for these problems. The Haskell compiler for OS X seems to require you to blow Satan to get it to work though*.

Your language may give a give some weird answers but are you going to believ someone called Hermite?

*Don Stewart pointed out you don't have to felate beelzbub to get Haskell. So if you don't want to get his scaley member down your gullet try here

Apéry's constant using monte Carlo methods

Apéry's Constant (1.20205690315...) "arises naturally in a number of physical problems, including in the second- and third-order terms of the electron's gyromagnetic ratio using quantum electrodynamics."

I described how to use monte carlo methods to estimate mathematical constants here and here. A passion for mathematics select three positive integers at random the odds of them having no common divisor are 1 in 1.202056....

So her is a ruby program that does not work for calculating this

def findCD(num1, num2, num3, cd)
 if num1 % cd==0 && num2 % cd==0  && num3 % cd==0
 return cd
 elsif cd < ([num1,num2,num3].max)/2
 findCD(num1, num2, num3, cd+1)
 else
 return 0
 end
end

i=1 
factor =0
N=1000

while (i < N)
 x=rand(1000)
 y=rand(1000)
 z=rand(1000)

 ans=findCD(x,y,z,2)
 if ans >0
 factor=factor+1
 end
end

ans=(factor).quo(N)

puts "Apéry's Constant estimated as #{ans}" ; 

The first problem is that my find common divisor algorithm is idiotic. There are all sorts of clever ways of doing this.

The second one is that computers have trouble creating random integers. The integers go up forever but a computers numbers don't. How do you ask a computer to give you one of any infinite one of the integers? rand(1,000,000) will not do it.

Using a Random Number Generator to estimate e

After this post I started to wonder what other constants can be estimated using probabalistic methods.

You can estimate e = 2.7182818 using
monte carlo methods. The sum S = X1 + X2 + ... + Xn > 1 averages as the eth element. So if you rand(0,1)+rand(0,1)+... until they are greater then 1. If you average the number of elements needed it approximates e.


This code is dog ugly and probably bug riddled but it might give you some idea how the calculation is done.

i=0
N=1000000
number=0
total=0  
p=0
k=1
   while k < N
    
    i=i+rand
    p=p+1
  if i>1
     total=total+p
     number=number+1
     p=0
     i=0
  end
  
    k=k+1
   end
   total=total.quo(number)
   puts "e is #{total}"

If you know of a better way to use iterators to carry out this calculation please comment.

Testing Random Number Generators with π

"Imagine that you have a dart board that is 2 units square. It inscribes a circle of unit radius. The center of the circle coincides with the center of the square. Now imagine that you throw darts at that dart board randomly. Then the ratio of the number of darts that fall within the circle to the total number of darts thrown is the same as the ratio of the area of the circle to the area of the square dart board. The area of a circle with unit radius is just π square unit. The area of the dart board is 4 square units. The ratio of the area of the circle to the area of the square is π / 4."

I got the book Digital dice the other day

It is about using monte carlo methods to solve probability problems that are hard to solve analytically. The first example given is how to estimate pi based on the % of darts that fall inside a cirle that is inside a square with the side length of twice the circles radius.

I decided to try out some languages to see how they got on with this problem. The aim is to test
1. Accuracy for mante carlo simulations
2. Ease of writing
3. Speed
in order of importance

If a language cannot accurately estimate π using this method then it indicates its random number generator (RNG) might not be very good. To test the RNG propery you need to do chi square tests and such as described in Seminumerical Algorithms by Knuth but i think its funny you can use π to test a RNG.

Perl

$N=10000000;

   $p=0;
   $k=1;
   while ($k<$N){
    $x=rand();
    $y=rand();
    if (($x*$x)+($y*$y)<1){
    $p=$p+1;
    }
      $k=$k+1;
   }
   $ans=((4*$p)/$N);
   print "ans".$ans;

Ruby

N=10000000

   p=0
   k=1
   while k < N
    x=rand
    y=rand
     if (x*x)+(y*y)<1
     p=p+1
     end
    k=k+1
   end
   ans=(4*p).quo(N)
   puts "pi is #{ans}"

Scheme
I cannot figure out how to get random numbers with scheme. There is code to do it here but I am not going to write my own rand function.

C

int main(void)
{
long N=10000000;
double x=0;
double y=0;
double p=0;
int k=1;

   while (k < N){
    x=(   (double)rand() / ((double)(RAND_MAX)+(double)(1)) );
    y=(   (double)rand() / ((double)(RAND_MAX)+(double)(1)) );
     if ((x*x)+(y*y)<1){
     p=p+1;
     }
    k=k+1;
   }
   
   double mypi=((4*p)/N);
   
   printf ("my pi  %f \n",mypi);
   return 0;
}

(less then sign) is < (thanks Helium).
I should use srand here to make it reproducible. Or more to be really fair run the test a few times and collect the average error. This is how the Digital dice runs the test with matlab. Anyway I wont tell you what language worked out the best. If you have any suggestions or code please comment.

Sign Language

If you want to speak to someone you need to share a language. Because languages have different phonemes it can be difficult to pronounce a foreign language.
So how about if we all had a base of sign language that we could communicate with? The advantage is simple movements do not have a local accent that localises them.
So how many words do you need to know?

Language word usage follows zipfs law. Which means a suprisingly low number of words cover a high percentage of our speech.

There are 850 words in basic english which implies you can communicate basic information with about this many words.

Newspeak the artificial language in the novel 1984 was simplified to the extent to make coherent political thought impossible. The point of here is to search for a simple universal language is for emergency situations or for providing an anchor for language learning so such a Newspeak nightmare is not a worry.

One way of looking for a basic subset of language is to find the common subset of all languages. This has been studied as the semantic metalanguage. There follows a list of the words (in english) that occur in all known languages and their international sign language equivalant.

Semantic primitives

The English exponents of the 61 Semantic Primitives (addition of LONG is proposed)

substantives
I,
YOU
SOMEONE
PEOPLE
SOMETHING/THING
BODY

mental predicates
THINK
KNOW
WANT
FEEL
SEE
HEAR
BE
speech
SAY
WORD
TRUE
actions, events and movement
DO
HAPPEN
MOVE
PUT
GO
existence and possession
THERE
IS
HAVE
life
TIME
WHEN/TIME
BEFORE
A LONG TIME
A SHORT TIME
FOR SOME TIME
MOMENT
space
WHERE/PLACE
HERE
ABOVE
BELOW
FAR
NEAR
SIDE
INSIDE
TOUCHING

"logical" concepts
NOT
Maybe
CAN
BECAUSE
IF
intensifier
VERY
augmentor
MORE
quantifiers
ONE
TWO
SOME
ALL
MANY/MUCH
evaluators
GOOD
BAD
descriptors
BIG, SMALL, (LONG)
taxonomy, partonomy
KIND OF, PART OF;
similarity
LIKE
determiners
THIS
SAME
OTHER

Spot the Difference

Irish Foreign Aid

Ireland has said it will give .7% of gdp to foreign aid by 2012. This will be about 1.4 billion dollars

So what can you do with 1.4 billion a year that will help the worlds poor the most? I believe Ireland should fight worms. Intestinal worms are a big easily fixed problem.
“Thirty percent of children in developing countries are moderately or severely undernourished, and nutritional supplements or treatments for intestinal parasites can be an inexpensive way to raise school attendance and increase physical and mental capacity.
Children who are better nourished in their first years of life stay in school longer and learn more each year they are there. In areas where malnutrition or worm infestations are common, nutritional supplements or treatments for intestinal parasites offer an inexpensive way to raise attendance and physical and mental capacity.
…
A school-based de-worming program in Kenya had even more remarkable results with benefits at least 450 times higher than the costs.
Most opportunities will not be as rewarding, but it is safe to assume the benefits are around 25 times higher than the costs in many cases. “

So the 1.4 billion a year spent of eradicating intestinal worms in third world children would be worth at least 35 billion to these countries.

Leishmaniasis, Trypanosomiasis and Malaria are other serious parasitic infections that are easily prevented. There is a description here on the effects of intestinal worms on children in the third world.

Worms are not sexy, you look up intestinal worms on google and the first site deals with pets. But if we give ourselves on achievable goal with our money, one that has proven huge benefits to people I think our money will be better spent then on many vague diffuse projects. Ireland got its snakes removed for us, why not become the country that removes the worms from everyone else?

Logic attack

Reasoning with First order logic can be hard
“Unfortunately, a more complex algorithm can get caught in infinite loops that are known to be impossible to guard against completely. (to be more precise, it is NP complete)”

This means that is someone creates a new web app. “Do I really think this?” where you input your beliefs. “Grass is green” “cows eat grass”->output “Cows eat something that is green” you can attack it.
“Denial of Service via Algorithmic Complexity describes Attacks“. Where by sending data that they know has worst case analysis time (eg. a sort in exactly the wrong order, entries that hash to the same bucket) an attacker can massively slow down your system.

First order logic decisions are NP-complete. In the same way as hash tables can be attacked if a system reasons about first order logic maliciously crafted inputs could be used to tie up the systems resources.

Everything Tube

Youtube takes in videos, allows you to easily add them to your blog. There is some searching and idiotic comments on the site but the big deal is

1. Take in data
2. Store it forever
3. Make it easy to embed in another website

What other kinds of data can this be done with?
1. Chess viewer
2. Chemicals viewer
3. Music
4. Other games draughts, dice games etc
5. Sound
6. Knitting patterns
7. Aresti aerobatic symbols
8. Dances
9. Motion/gesture
10. CAD
11. Electronic design
12. Crystallography
13. Knot diagrams
14. All sorts of physics notations. None of which I understand
15. weather data
16. Molecular biology
17. Biomedical data, ecg’s stuff like that
18. Astronomy
19. Astrology, tarot cards, homeopath recipes, crap like that
20. Surveys. Caves, mountain routes etc
21. Graphs. Google Chart kind of does this already.
22. Maths functions
23. Knowledge representation. Take in a decision tree in Yaml format and turn it into a visual tree graph.
24. Seismology

The idea is to make a "tube" website that takes in some data and makes it easy to add visualisations of it to your website. The data is already online, or at least easily placed online what youtube did was make it easily viewable. Searching on your tube website is important but the first thing to do is get it so people can show their data on their website. So what other "tubes" would be interesting/useful? Please comment your thoughts

Bizzarre fruit

I bought a dragonfruit the other week. The next day I bought another weird fruit and the next...Nature, capitalism and immigration have brought in loads of these weird fruits into Ireland. Things you could not have bought 5 years ago. The same has happened with beer and loads of other foods. There is something very simple about fruits though, you just cut them open and eat no preparation is needed. You also realise that this is just how nature produced it with almost all other products are massively processed. So I have started a weird fruit odyessey, it is a small quest but it is fun.

Here is what I have tried so far
Sapodilla is like a sweet dry pear
Cherimoya is like a creamy melon
Sharon fruit- really nice
Dragon fruit
kumquat
bananito
plantane
passion fruit
figs- Fig rolls really do a lot with their core ingredient
Giant Chinese pear
Chow chow -I have no idea what this is but it tassted like it needed to be cooked
sour mango
prickly pear- First cactus I have eaten
Guava-Melon like not that guava tasting
papaya

Ulysses Pact 2

The medical definition for this is

Ulysses Contract
Declarations by patients, made in advance of a situation in which they may be incompetent to decide about their own care, stating their treatment preferences or authorizing a third party to make decisions for them. (Bioethics Thesaurus)

This paper discusses the issue in relation to mental health.

How bound are you to your past self? Could you shoot the 50 year old conservative who as a tied dyed in the wool hippy 30 years previously wrote “If I ever vote republican please kill me”? If you are not bound to a contract by yourself of many years ago then how come there are 30 year mortgages?

There is a website here. Where people put quantifiable ambitions out in public. Keep wight below X, Make Y steps every day things like that. Are there common usages for Ulysses Contracts (not just the current cognitive health ones) that you could provide on another website? Is there a measurable way people change their thinking in response to an event that they could agree before the event to avoid?

Ulysses Pact

Some time in the future you might be crazy. You might decide to scupper your boat on some rocks because some moistened bint persuades you to. Now if you tell people to ignore you when you go crazy you have entered a Ulysses pact.
An example of this is someone making a living will in case they get dementia or car crashed into a coma where they won’t really be able to make decisions for themselves anymore. But what other events lead to known changes in cognition?

“How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues "Parenting an additional female child increases the propensity of a member of Congress to vote liberally on women's issues, particularly reproductive rights."”
Could conservative voters enter into a Ulysses pact with a politician that if he has a female child he cannot alter his votes on reproductive rights? I am not saying here that liberalising your opinion on this topic is a bad idea just that it may not match the preferences of those who voted you into office.

Kuhn was of the belief that old scientists never really accepted new theories and in fact delayed the acceptance of new ideas. A Ulysses pact of “ignore the old people who invented the last theory” is probably too vague.

In what other areas do people bias their decision making in response to certain events?

The return of smoking

“Tobacco Farming
Projected employment decline: -18.6%
Projected revenue decline: -16.9%
Projected output decline: -11.7%
Pity America's tobacco farmers. First they weather the decline in smoking among U.S. consumers, now they face lower prices from foreign competitors. The Feds dropped tobacco-price supports in 2005, forcing farmers to diversify or find another line of work.
The economic projections continue on an abysmal trend: From 2000 to 2007, tobacco farming revenue fell by more than 50% as output declined by 41.6%. If only tobacco farmers could find a way to convert their crop to ethanol ... “

What if smoking was not bad for you? Or at least not as bad.

“For example, a 1998 Lantz, et al. study in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 3,600 adults over 7.5 years found large and significant lifespan effects: a three year loss for smoking”

Three years is less then I would have thought, what if this was reduced further. Say three reasonably unlikely things happen

1. Smoking + Virus causes cancer. HPV and measles are linked to lung cancer. “While the specific viruses at issue -- human papillomavirus (HPV) and measles -- may not directly cause lung cancer, they seem to aggravate the negative impact of tobacco, American and Israeli researchers say” Then if we prevent measles and HPV infection this might reduce lung cancer rates.

2. Radiation
“In a person smoking 1 1/2 packs of cigarettes per day, the radiation dose to the bronchial epithelium in areas of bifurcation is 8000 mrem per year -- the equivalent of the dose to the skin from 300 x-ray films of the chest per year. This figure is comparable to total-body exposure to natural background radiation containing 80 mrem per year in someone living in the Boston area.”

This mp3 talks about how much radiation you get from smoking in comparison to eating bananas and other dangerous activities

The theory is that the phosphorus fertilizer used on tobacco is radioactive and breathing this in is bad. Maybe organic tobacco will be less unhealthy?

4. Genes
“First-degree relatives of lung cancer patients have a 2 to 3.5 times greater risk of developing lung cancer than the general population, and tobacco smoke plays a major role, even among those with a genetic predisposition” Genetic testing is halving in costs each year. So testing to see if someone is susceptible to lung cancer should get quite cheap quite soon. You could probably get an accurate test by asking “has any of your blood relatives died of lung cancer before the age of 70?” If the answer is yes make it more difficult for this person to smoke. This would reduce the amount smoking takes off the average lifespan.

I do not smoke and I always assumed less and less people will smoke in future. I could be wrong though. If smoking is made less dangerous it could become more popular again.