Mettle Man Musings

My bid for the Wolfson prize.

2012-01-18T11:18:00.005+11:00

A few days ago was the last call for entries to the Wolfson economics Prize. I'd quite like to have entered but I didn't really find out about it in time to put together a decent offering. So here's the short version of my plan for how you can unwind the Euro.

With all the problems faced by the country and financial contraction, capital flowing out, all of those very damaging things, the Greek economy will soon be an inch from death. The way to reverse that trend is to make Greece suddenly the best place in the world to do business. Austerity will do the exact opposite of that (even the IMF, which insisted on austerity in the first place, is saying that), as will the flight of the Greek people out of Greece. If Greece simply adopts its own currency then there will be a run on that currency as every Greek moves his or her money out of the country to keep it safe from inflation. The inevitable result is hyperinflation, according to the theory I put forth in earlier blog posts. There is a way around all of this and it's going to sound really weird to most economists. You don't actually have to abolish the Euro at all. That brings me neatly to my plan of action.

Phase 1: Introduce competition
Currency competition, that is. The only reason the Euro is used at all is that it's illegal to use anything else. If you lifted that restriction without providing an alternative then the market would bring in gold and silver money. This is the reverse mode of Gresham's Law. I don't even mind if they use the exact same trimetallic system I talked about in an earlier post. This money would not require legal tender status because everyone would accept it without government fiat. The process of adoption could be greatly accelerated by waiving taxes on transactions using any currency other than the Euro, although I doubt this incentive would be needed. The market will take care of all minting, changing of coin operated machines of all kinds and so on without any need for government money. The parallel currency would soften the transition away from the Euro because of the buffer effect of the limits of the rate of flow of new money into Greece. The equipment to mint the large number of coins required for commerce would not spring up overnight, and the rate of minting is also limited by how quickly gold and silver may be transported into Greece. Due to the popularity of the new money it would greatly increase the prices of gold and silver in Greece with respect to the Euro, and thereby in the rest of the world through international trade. Euros would flow out and precious metals in, supplanting the supply of Euros in a seamless transition while commerce suffers no negative effects.

Phase 2: Bonds
The spike in gold price caused by its restoration to money status will make early adopters immensely wealthy, increasing the adoption of gold as currency and flushing the Euro out of the country. The government would know all this and should therefore start with a substantial gold position, selling it to the populace in exchange for their Euros. The rise of gold price will allow the government to sell at ever greater prices and extract enough Euros out of the Greeks to pay down the bonds. Again this will not interfere in commerce in a negative sense. The government would buy back all Euro denominated bonds issued in the market and simply cancel those held by the central bank, thus eliminating its foreign debt. The brief was to have all parties happy, but this is simply impossible. Currently banks and stock markets are living off the hard work of ordinary people, and this has to stop. It necessitates a transfer of capital from the inflated stockmarkets, bloated government balance sheets, and other bubble assets back to the average citizen - capital which rightfully belongs to those that earn it. However this will no doubt enrage those for whom the party is over and whose speculation has to find avenues in less enlightened countries. Those institutions that benefited under the debt monetisation fraud must necessarily suffer the most when such schemes are unwound. That is simply justice.
Government finance during Phase 2
The initial gold position of the Greek government is crucial for maintaining solvency throughout the most turbulent transitions of phase two. The Euros they obtain by selling gold to the Greek people will serve not only to buy more gold on foreign exchange and eliminate the bonds but to enable the continuity of certain government services, namely police and infrastructure. This period of probably half a year must be funded entirely by the appreciation in the price of gold with respect to the Euro, so the government should act shrewdly in when it chooses to start selling its gold. By the end it should have no permanent store of gold but for an emergency fund of gold currency and that required for the day to day running of government business, funded entirely by tax revenue. Its revenue must then remain neutral.

Phase 3: The Greek Euro
Phase three will happen naturally. Either the Greek government will see reason and end parity with other Euro currency or the governments of all other nations will stop accepting Greek currency at parity. The latter is more likely given the Greek government's incentive to keep the currency at parity to allow rapid debt payment. At this point the Greek Euro will experience a rapid drop in value. Hyperinflation of the Greek Euro will occur, but this time it won't hurt anyone since most people will already be using specie currency. The economy will be intact. On the same day that parity is canceled, the Greek government would start requiring taxes in the new specie currency. Its tax rate would be very low to begin with, say 5% flat income tax, in order to promote growth. Most of the non essential government staff would have left the public sector because their Greek Euro denominated salaries would have been losing value.

Phase 4: Exit the Euro
Yep, it really is that simple. Once the specie money has pretty well totally displaced the old Euro currency, all that is left is for the Greek government and central bank to say, well, we tried but the people didn't want the Euro, sorry, and stop issuing it. They can then munch up all the old currency in shredders and save a few notes to sell to collectors some years on to remind everyone of the bad old days.

Impact on other Eurozone countries

Phase 1 will lead to some substantial appreciation of the price of gold and silver as the Greek people stop accepting Euros so they don't have to pay tax. The Euro money supply of Greece will disperse into neighbouring countries if they are still accepting the Greek currency, and be absorbed by Greek banks if not. Germany, China, US, India and other countries with large gold positions would gain substantial boosts to their wealth as gold returned to its monetary use in Greece. Needless to say, this effect would be compounded multiply if many countries went a similar way.

Phase 2 would have a slight negative effect on banks but as it will be relatively gradual the effect would be time dissipated. Bond buybacks would continue throughout the initial adjustment period. Most Greek bonds are held by banks, central or otherwise, which can absorb the drop in the value of those bonds. Greece herself would be unaffected by the huge spike in yield because she would no longer be issuing any new bonds. In fact, the yield spike would make it all the easier to buy the debt. Some pension funds also hold Euro denominated Greek debt, and as a result some people would suffer loss there but it is a relatively small amount. If a country such as the US decided to return to the PM standard in this way many investors would be wiped out as US Treasuries fell in value. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable step in the move back to sound money. It cannot be guaranteed that all those that benefited from inflation will suffer in deflation, as would justly be the case.

During Phase 3 the transition will be largely complete and there will be no one left to complain of hyperinflation. Taxes would begin to flow back to a public sector composed of only very few people. With the econonmy back in balance and very likely booming hugely the government could return to the business of providing a police force and certain utilities.

Phase 4 would have minimal effects, it is merely a technical end to the Euro era for Greece.

In summary, this method of exiting a debt monetised fiat currency is most likely the only way of smoothly transitioning out of such a currency, or as smooth as a currency transition can be. There is no way of making such a massive change without short changing some people along the way, but my favoured method is to allow the market to clear, withdraw government influence from currency, and all of Austrian theory says that the result will be the most equitable transition possible. The new currency is in fact a by-product of allowing people to choose how they buy and sell, and what they use to buy and sell. This makes it the most liberal of all possible schemes, and where liberty and justice thrive, wealth is sure to follow.

Unemployment theory

2012-01-08T23:00:00.005+11:00

No, don't "turn over", you'll like it.

Recently I've been thinking about the causes of unemployment. I don't know a lot about the Austrian perspective on it, but no doubt there has been someone who has developed it. I want to come up with some ideas and see how they stack up.

The modern economists view inflation and unemployment as irreconcilable goals, since they believe that lowering inflation will increase uneployment and vice versa. Whether or not this is true under MMT I leave to other more capable minds than mine, but it does sort of make sense that if interest rates are high to keep inflation low then there is less money available for discretionary purchases and so you could see some short term unemployment shock.

Before we get into the details of what causes unemployment, however, it is enlightening to examine what situation would result in full employment. Firstly, I will consider such an economy as has a market money system, so forget about central banks and fractional reserves.
In a market economy everyone acts as an entrepreneur in every market transaction. All people are considering whether if they engage in a certain trade they will end up with more wealth than before. If the answer is yes, they trade, if not, they don't. Whether they have acted as a good entrepreneur is answered by whether they actually do end up with more wealth after the exchange than before. As I have mentioned previously, wealth is highly subjective and cannot be measured, so the only person who can know this is the one who made the trade. Money profit is easier to measure but it's only a small part of the picture. People donate money to charity not because they think they will receive something of cash value in return but because they have compassion for the needs of others and they feel better about being wealthy when others are not if they give some away.
In the same way, whenever someone is looking for work they are also acting as an entrepreneur. All people always want more goods and services, so it is impossible that there are simply no jobs available in the economy. It is simply foolish to say that jobs are "created" or "destroyed". Demand for labour flows from one region of the economy to another, but there is always infinite demand for labour and only a finite supply, and all regions of the economy always have infinite demand for it, so the prices for the labour control where it goes. When someone looks for work they are proposing to trade their labour for some price. If the utility of their labour is expected to be in some way low then they will usually get a low price for it. If it is high then they may demand high wages.

Now that we have some grip of the basics we can start to talk about unemployment. Firstly, unemployment is theoretically impossible. That is to say, there is always infinite demand for labour so how is it that anyone would ever be unemployed?

If the expected utility of someone's labour is very low then they might not be able to command wages even as low as the minimum wage, so in that case unemployment is the result of the minimum wage price control. So we have fact number one:

1. Minimum wage laws produce unemployment.

Now let us say that the Austrian view of the business cycle is broadly correct. In this case, when the economy shifts from high gear to low gear, there is a sudden drop in relative demand for labour in certain sectors of the economy, formerly booming. As a result those workers have to take a large drop in salary because the utility of their labour has become low, or there have to be layoffs. Fortunately for those driven below the breadline or the minimum wage line, there is always infinite demand for labour so they can move into other sectors of the economy. But now we have a problem, you see, because those people who were formerly skilled are now unskilled, so they have a low utility of labour and consequently low wages. Some might be only prepared to accept the same wages as before, until they capitulate, and this will also result in unemployment. Further, some jobs require years of training and this is usually chosen because of expected future demand in that sector. If someone trains as a civil engineer and an economic downturn puts construction on hold they will not be able to break into that labour market. As a result we can say that business cycles are responsible for unemployment, and since they in turn are caused by interest rate manipulation, we can say:

2. Interest rate manipulation causes unemployment.

We're not quite done with interest rates either, since there's something very few people know about them: they are a tax. Consider what the central bank in any country does if inflation is getting high: they increase interest rates. They way they do this is by decreasing availability of bank reserves by some boring way you needn't bother about. When they do this the cost of lending goes up for banks and the money creating process slows. In turn, banks increase their interest rates to encourage people to save and to make sure they stay profitable. There's one big fly in the ointment, though, and it's variable rate home loans. When interest rates go up these people's disposable income goes down, since more is needed to pay the bank because the banks costs have been increased by the central bank. As a result of this process, money is extracted from home loan payers and goes to the central bank, where the profit is sent to the government. In other words, interest rate changes are changes in a tax rate.

What has this to do with unemployment, I hear you ask? Well I am glad you asked because I now come to the third cause of unemployment. Any tax on the income of a business will cause that business to have to grow more slowly. Slower growth by definition means that it will be able to employ people only at a slower rate. This reduction in the rate of employee uptake can also cause people to stop working or move to sectors where they have little skill. Furthermore, individual income tax also reduces the rate of growth of business because it removes money available for discretionary spending that might have been spent on consumer goods. Thus we come to number three:

3. Taxes cause unemployment.

In fact, anything that distorts the economy, makes it hard to predict or extracts wealth from it will cause unemployment in some measure. And let's not forget what happens to the wealth extracted from the economy: a large part of it is given to the unemployed. This might seem like a great thing but in fact it lessens their desire to get a job again. This disincentive to work is at the heart of number four:

4. Unemployment benefits cause unemployment.

These four things - where do they come from? Are they produced by the market? Well, no. All of these are laws, functions or impositions of government, by government, for government. So we can create a new statement zero about unemployment:

0. State interference in the market causes unemployment.

Still think Obama's jobs plan might have worked?

What is wealth?

2011-12-29T22:06:00.004+11:00

I once heard Jörg Guido Hülsmann say that there is no nice, clear definition of what an economic good is. I do sort of agree with that. What is a good? Something that provides some benefit? Dictionary.com says:

a commodity or service that can be utilized to satisfy human wants and that has exchange value.

OK, so it satisfies human wants and as a result it has some value in exchange. I want to explore a broader definition: wealth. Normally we think of people who earn a lot of money as wealthy. They often buy expensive houses and cars, perhaps a nice yacht or Gulfstream jet.

Pictured above: wealth?

I think we can be a little more creative than that. Here's my definition of wealth:

Wealth is any factor that gives ease.

Short, I know, but it has some pretty important implications. First of all, there are two types of wealth: that which can be bought and that which cannot, in other words economic goods and other things that don't have a price but nevertheless give some satisfaction.

Examples of economic wealth might be a house, or manufacturing plants. Examples of non economic wealth are when things start to get interesting. Your spouse is part of your wealth. So are you children and your parents, your friends and so on. They all (hopefully) make your life better in some way, so they are included in wealth, but you can't buy love. Love you give also makes you wealthy since it increases your contentment with life and the joy you have with your friends or family. If you value these things more than all economic goods, then you are by definition more wealthy than the chairman of a bank (provided that he cares less for his family or friends). Most people would not trade their families for even extraordinary economic wealth, which proves that they value them more.

Now I want to highlight one of the most important aspects of Christianity. Anyone who has God is so wealthy that no friend, family, money or any other thing can significantly improve his wealth. That is not to say that those things have no value, but compared to God, they have insignificant value. That is one of the reasons that Jesus says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." He doesn't actually mean that we should hate those people, or our own life. What He does mean is that the value we place on following Him must always be greater than on any other thing - relationships, even life itself. Because to have Him is the greatest good of all and nothing else can compare. He's just asking us to recognise that fact and act on it.

Fallacies of the eugenicists

2011-12-28T12:22:00.003+11:00

Eugenics has a pretty bad reputation, but at the centre it's just people who want to make the world a better, more resilient place. Well, um, not, actually, that's not really true. Eugenicists take the view that modern society has a lot of substandard genetic stock floating around, making babies, and that this is a Bad Thing. It's a Bad Thing because that means that the good, strong people are having their genes diluted by the weak, feeble-minded majority, and this means that we will be more easily wiped out by some sort of plague or somesuch. The only possible conclusion is that we have to increase the "productivity" of the strong and decrease that of the weak. In practice, this has meant killing the weak, forcibly sterilising them, discouraging them from getting married, peddling contraception and abortion to them, and least distasteful of all, encouraging the "strong" to have more children. There are many fallacies bound in this view, and I want to go through a few of them because some are not so obvious.

Fallacy number 1: we're getting weaker.
Genetically speaking, this is perhaps true, in some ways. That's one of the things that makes it such a tempting thing to think about. The theory of evolution tells us that if you decrease selection pressure on a population then you will, on average, see those individuals that would not have been able to survive previously survive and have offspring. In our modern caring society many people who in the stone age would have died because of medical conditions no longer have their heads explode and thus pass on those defective genes to the next generation, making their condition more likely in the future.
Have you spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: we have become weaker because fewer people are dying. Um, what? From an evolutionary standpoint, fewer members of a species dying means that they are stronger, better adapted, fitter. Modern society and technology gives us more machines meaning less toil, better medicine meaning when we get sick we have a good chance of getting better, more wealth meaning we have more varied and interesting lives. This is not called "things getting worse", so the idea that we are worse off with all these genetic degenerates is absolute crap.

Fallacy number 2: getting rid of the weak would make us stronger.
The idea here is that we should stop the weak having babies and make the strong have lots more babies to make up the shortfall. The result would be a stronger population overall and if calamity hit then we'd be better placed to weather it.
This fallacy is harder to spot, but have you seen it yet? Here it is: decreasing our genetic diversity would make us stronger. Um, what? Statistically speaking, a large population is fitter than a small one because it has more genetic variation, so even if we were subjected to a terrible catastrophe where a large fraction of the people died, the fact that there are more of us with more variability makes us more resilient, not less.

Fallacy number 3: some people have no significant value to society.
This one is true, actually - of the eugenicists, mostly, at least in their capacity as proponents of eugenics. The idea here is that people with severe genetic handicaps are totally pointless. There's no benefit to having them live - in fact, they are a nett drain on society's precious, finite resources. We'd be much better off screening against such people before birth and investing our resources in babies with sound physical and mental abilities. This particular view is fairly common nowadays - even though when you subject it to the light of truth it is monstrous - and it results in many abortions every year.
Spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: some people are worth more dead than alive. Um, what? This comes out of a completely skewed view of the value of human life - specifically, that it is measured in economic terms. Practically this would mean that you need to earn your right to live, which means that if someone murdered you before you'd done that, it would be perfectly OK. It means that life is not a right, but a privilege which can be revoked by others. It means that you do not own your body, it is owned by others - perhaps medical experts. Since the right to life, or ownership of oneself, is the most fundamental principle of civilisation, this perspective can only make us worse-off (to put it mildly). The fact that this is a common justification for abortion shows how misguided some have become. Even if you consider abortion totally ordinary and not at all a bad thing, the view that results in abortions of babies who are deemed to be not worth raising is monstrous.

I hope that I have shown that the major beliefs of eugenics are simply ideological and have no basis in real improvements in society. They therefore have no place in society and I reserve the utmost rejection of these views and I will ostracise anyone coming to me with them severely. If we really want to improve society, we can do little better than provide the most freedom and private property that can be physically possible. That is what has made us the powerful society we are today and we seem to have largely forgotten it. Beware of anyone who says that some other person's life is not worthwhile. He is attacking the foundation of civilisation itself, and that is no understatement.

Gold: some little-known factoids

2011-12-28T03:14:00.002+11:00

Nowadays, very few people have any experience with large quantities of gold. This was mostly true in years past, of course, since there has never been and will never be a "lot" of gold around. However, this lack of understanding about the yellow metal does lead to some pretty interesting assumptions and depictions.

What started all this off was when I saw the new movie Tintin, yesterday. It was a pretty ordinary movie, as these things go, but apart from all that at the centre of the plot is some sort of gold treasure. This is described as "four hundredweight of gold" which is depicted in the film as a secret hold in a wooden ship about 1 foot deep in gold coin and assorted jewels and treasures. This brings my to my first factoid:

1. Gold is much denser than is generally supposed.

Most people's experience with the density of metals comes from steel. When we pick up an aluminium object, at least, when I do, I often get "tricked" by how light it is, especially if I can't see what colour the metal is. Iron and most steels hover around the 7.8 g/cc mark, meaning that a cubic meter of them would weigh 7.8 tonnes. Put another way, a tonne would occupy 128 L of volume, or a cube 50 cm on a side. Gold is considerably denser than iron, at more than 19 g/cc. A one tonne cube of gold, should you ever be unlucky enough to be asked to move one, would be just over 37 cm on a side. This means that the amount of gold depicted in the Tintin movie is something like 10 or 20 tonnes, way more than the 200 kg or so that "four hundredweight" would represent.
This also makes gold dangerous, specifically, the types of gold bars used to store gold in vaults. The bars in the Fort Knox depository each weigh about 12.5 kg and are only an 4.5 cm wide, so you can imagine crushing a finger by dropping one just a small distance. The heaviest bar ever made weighs 250 kg and if I remember correctly, if you can pick it up you can have it.

You'd look pretty stupid with that for a hand, though

2. Gold is inert.

Most people do know this one, but it's actually pretty amazing just how reluctant gold is to do anything, chemically speaking. Not many metals could shrug off a bath of concentrated sulphuric acid or caesium hydroxide solution (dissolves glass, your dog etc), but gold can. That's all I can say without being boring about this one. This is one of the reasons we plate quite a lot of gold onto electrical connections. It doesn't help conductivity much per se but it does prevent corrosion forming that would affect the conductivity of the join.

3. Gold is soft.

Gold is by no means the softest metal around, but it is pretty limp for a metal that is often used to make objects out of. That's why in some movies about the old West you see people biting gold coins. If you bit into an iron coin plated with gold then it would not leave teeth marks but gold will flow even under this modest pressure. This also makes it lovely for making fine jewelery, since you don't need a hammer to make it do the intricate shapes.

4. Gold is malleable.

This might seem like the same thing as soft, but the two are only slightly related. Malleability is the tendency of a metal to remain soft as you work it. Copper, while quite soft is not very malleable. It will work harden into something impossibly unworkable, but gold will keep on flowing smoothly and evenly no matter how much you hammer it. This means you can hammer (or roll, these days) gold into incredibly thin sheets or wires.

5. Gold is an exceptional heat reflector.

Many times you will see gold foil in a satellite. The Lunar Module had quite a lot of gold foil on it as well, and the reason for this is that gold is the best way to stop heat radiation, or to reflect it, more precisely. This also means that it is used in some top end race cars and F1 cars around the engine bay, to prevent the heat generated by the engine from leaking out and damaging sensitive part of the car. Satellites are similarly protected from the intense heat radiation coming from the Sun.

Of course, not every satellite is made entirely of gold

6. Gold supports surface plasmons.

This is really esoteric for most people, but the practical upshot is that you can use gold to make red glass:
This is also called cranberry glass, and its rather nice colour comes not from gold ions but very small particles of gold embedded in the glass. So if you divide this yellow metal up finely enough, it begins to appear red. Silver also does something similar but most glass colouring as a result of the presence of metals invove their ions, not nanoparticles, making this type of glass fairly unique.

A new precious metal standard

2011-12-27T01:33:00.002+11:00

A lot of economists of the Austrian or "philosophical" (as I like to call them) school yearn to be back on the gold standard. This, it seems, is the gold standard of money supply options. It solves all the problems of inflation, deflation government credit expansion and private credit expansion, so it must be good, right?

Gold

Well, sort of. Most of these people would, I imagine, envision a return to gold coins and private bank notes backed up by 100% reserve requirements. Personally I think that gold is too valuable and will make small transactions tricky. The obvious answer is silver but then you can't go bimetallic with a fixed exchange rate or there will be trouble. The other problem with gold and silver, the most serious problem as I see it, is that they are quite soft and suffer wear, thus lowering their value over time. There are engineering solutions to this, and I believe I have come up with one of them.

Most coins of the last few centuries are pretty similar. Raised images and lettering on both sides, with a raised edge produced through rolling. These days the raised edge is just part of the work hardening of the piece, really, since most coins contain a large amount of copper, but in the past it was there to make coin clipping easily visible. Coin clipping is the practice of cutting pieces off a precious metal coin in order to sell the valuable metal or strike your own coins. Precious metal coins are supposed to be a particular weight and purity, which is certified by the fact that they are struck as coins. Leave most of the coin intact while removing a small piece of it, and you can spend the coin at the same value as before, plus you now have some extra gold to sell.

The fact that a substantial portion of the coin is proud gives us the chance to produce a more durable gold or silver coin. Simply replace the edge and the images with some superalloy like inconel, strike the whole thing together and you have a (mostly) gold coin with that attractive two tone finish that can really handle the ravages of everyday commerce.

Not exactly what I meant but you get the idea

Gold is so much more valuable than inconel that it will represent nearly all of the coin's value, and you may then produce coins with quite a small amount of gold set into them to make smaller denominations. Speaking of which, here comes engineering solution number two.

It is not enough to simply put vanishingly small amounts of gold into a coin. This would cause problems if nickel or any of the other major constituents of inconel were to seriously appreciate in value at some future date. You must therefore use a third, intermediate value metal. Silver fits the bill perfectly. Traditionally, it was necessary to use coins of pure silver or pure gold, to allow transactions to occur in either metal at universal equal value, with a floating exchange rate between the two to avoid the consequences of Gresham's law. I don't think that is necessary. Since by using a nickel alloy we are effectively already on a bimetallic standard with mixed coins, let's introduce the silver gradually down the value scale. Very high denomination coins would be nearly all gold, then as we go to lower denominations there would be an increasing fraction of silver until silver was the only "precious" metal in a particular denomination, and then we could increase the inconel content to get the lower denominations. This pretty much solves the exchange rate problem since we would balance the face value of the coins to be related to the historical average exchange rate (about 40:1, if you were wondering), and the gradual change over of the metals gives the exchange rate actually quite a wide variability without the relative value of denominations close to one another changing significantly. In fact my analysis shows that you can actually modify the exchange rate by a factor of 1.5 and commerce would be virtually unaffected, unless someone tries to get change in 5c pieces of a $1000 coin. Exchange rate problems could occur, in fact, if gold or silver changed significantly in value relative to the other and many people got the idea to exchange high gold for high silver content coins, or vice versa. In this case the face value would be off by enough to make the arbitrage worthwhile. But there is a very simple solution to this as well: float the exchange rate for exchanges of coins with large differences in the magnitude of their face value. It's not really that inconvenient, since such exchanges would be rare and trying to fix the face values for all time would increase the number of such exchanges, so floating that rate makes them unprofitable, unless someone were to have prior knowledge of a relative price spike in either metal which is pretty rare.

Now we come to the sticky subject of bank notes. Under the above monetary system, it would be most efficient to have each bank duly print its own notes or perhaps contract some excellent third party printer, which amounts to the same thing, but, crucially, the bank notes should have the same denomination as the precious metal currency they are standing in for. When someone presents a bank with one of its own notes, say a $5, it should give a $5 coin, or if both parties agree, $5 in other change at whatever floating exchange the two agree on. Banks should in general be willing to accept the notes of other banks, since they can then simply go to the bank in question and demand their specie for use as loans or reserves.

Loans and demand deposits are an interesting one. If all demand notes were to have a specified loan lifetime then the interest the bank earned loaning the money out could pay the storage fee. The note could then be redeemed at any time after the loan expiry but, critically, there would be an incentive to redeem the note as soon as it fell due, since banks could charge a storage fee or keep the money loaned out earning them nice interest for which the bearer could not demand a return. He would then want to redeem the note and perhaps loan the money out again at a better interest rate, save it in his own safe or just spend it. Banks could even redeem demand notes sooner than the due date, for a small fee of course.

All of that would mean that the total money supply might be about double the amount of the actual gold and silver. Now let's consider loans. In this economy, all bank loans would come out of savings in those banks of actual savers who have actually deposited the money there. They could not simply print more demand notes than there was metal, since other banks and people would certainly come to redeem them. They would, however, print loan notes. These would be interest bearing assets given to people who deposit money for a given time at a given interest rate. The loan's value, due date and interest rate would be on the loan note. If the depositor fell on hard times he could liquidate the note by selling it to a bank, or anyone really. The price paid for it would closely relate to all three essential features of a loan: interest, term and principal. These loan notes, then, would not circulate as currency but would be rapidly convertable, making them a kind of money. Their impact on the money supply would not be great, however. The borrower would be given demand notes or specie, what he preferred would make little difference to the bank. Large loans might require a fairly hefty amount of gold so it would be more convenient for someone borrowing money to build a power station, for instance, to get that money as demand notes, but in principle any form of money would be equal.

Hyperinflation 2

2011-12-26T12:11:00.004+11:00

In my previous treatment of hyperinflation I said that instead of thinking of it as a monetary phenominon, happening when a government prints a lot of currency very fast, we should think of it as a systemic rejection of the currency by everyone engaging in commerce. At that time I didn't have proof, but now with money supply figures I got out of Wikipedia, I think I can demonstrate the point.

OK the way this is done is, we take the value of the Zimbabwe dollar in terms of US dollars and multiply it by the number of Zimbabwe dollars we think might have been around at every particular time and, voila, that gives us the value of the money supply. Now, it is important to realise that all of the figures I used are subject to systemic and random error, and there are large gaps I had to fill in with numbers I guessed were intermediate. So you can forget about accuracy, but I do believe that the data will still serve to illustrate my point.

The first chart shows the relative value of the Zimbabwe dollar over 10 months of the hyperinflation. As you will see, holding on to the currency at this time is economic suicide. Your money will be essentially worthless in about half a year:
This period, beginning on 5th of January 2007, doesn't even deal with the worst hyperinflation. Under extreme hyperinflation the graph has roughly the same shape, but the time taken to lose all your money can be measured in days or even hours.

In order to chart the magnitude of inflations this high, we have to resort to logarithmic measurements. The chart below shows the growth in the amount of money you would have to give in exchange for US currency:
0 here means 1, which is the index point on 5th of January 2007. Two and a half years later you'd need $853 sextillion to buy the same thing. Such numbers are simply beyond the experience of everyone. Even physicists who regularly deal with extremely small numbers (like the size of an atom) or very large ones (like the mass of the galaxy) would have trouble getting their heads around this one. Rather conveniently, for me, it is roughly the number of atoms in a lump of aluminium weighing 38 grams. If you laid those atoms end to end in a single line, they would go from the Sun to Neptune and back 12 times. See what I mean?

Now that we have some idea of the changing value of the currency, we need to have some idea of the amount of currency in circulation. The chart below shows a very rough view of the money supply - on a logarythmic scale, of course, otherwise the fine structure of the graph would disappear and we'd just have a "hockey stick":
This chart begins in August 2006. These figures are subject to a lot of uncertainty, of course, but as a ball park this allows us to get some idea of the value of the money supply:
Bingo! Observe the money supply's value going to 0. Again, this tracks the supply from 5th of January 2007. An important point on this data is that the first 11 months is a period when the Reserve bank did not report money supply data, so it is pure interpolation. There is further interpolation later on as well, but the overall picture is not deceptive: the money supply is being rejected and the most interesting portion of the graph, around 10-14 months, has plenty of data points. Consider the logarithmic version of this chart:
The bubble towards the end there is telling us that the very large increase in the money supply that happened around the beginning of 2008 temporarily caused an uptake in the economy. People started to accept the new currency, but notice how quickly that currency bubble went south. Five months later, the currency was worse off than ever, even though the face value was rocketing upward. At this point the currency was re-indexed at a rate of 10 billion old dollars is 1 new dollar. The fresh currency has been no better accepted.

Hyperinflation

2011-12-22T00:37:00.002+11:00

Hyperinflation is usually defined as any rate of inflation above 50% per month (that is, an item that cost $1 this month will cost about $1.50 next month). Inflation itself seems to be a tricky phenominon for economists, as I mentioned in an earlier post (which turned out to be riddled with factual errors but I aim to improve), but it's usually some sort of general price rise. There are several reasons for a price rise to occur under the current monetary system, and I will deal with them very briefly so that we have a foundation for considering the implications for hyperinflation.

The first kind of inflation is what everyone thinks of: banks producing slightly more money than is offset by real goods in the economy, and as a result the prices of goods go up, because the demand of money goes down slightly. Here in Australia we are accustomed to inflation of 2-3% per year, but in many of the "backwards" countries annual rates of 10% or more are normal.

The second kind of inflation also manifests as a price increase, but is not the result of too many dollars printed. If two countries with their own free floating fiat currencies engage in trade, and there is a trade deficit then the currency of the "seller" country will strengthen (their prices will drop lower than what they would otherwise have been because imports will become cheaper) and that of the "buyer" country will weaken (causing imports to become more expensive). This is functionally equivalent to two countries using the same currency trading. Currency will drain out of the buyer country into the seller country, which will be able to buy a lot of goods and services from the buyer country in return.

The third kind of inflation is really just an increase in market price of certain goods due to shortages. For instance, during a famine food prices become extremely high, because people prefer not to starve to death and will pay whatever it takes not to.

Now, I will put it to you that hyperinflation, as I define it, may involve any of those situations but is in fact a separate phenominon altogether.

Investopedia defines hyperinflation as:

Extremely rapid or out of control inflation. There is no precise numerical definition to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a situation where the price increases are so out of control that the concept of inflation is meaningless.

It goes on to say:

When associated with depressions, hyperinflation often occurs when there is a large increase in the money supply not supported by gross domestic product (GDP) growth, resulting in an imbalance in the supply and demand for the money. Left unchecked this causes prices to increase, as the currency loses its value.

When associated with wars, hyperinflation often occurs when there is a loss of confidence in a currency's ability to maintain its value in the aftermath. Because of this, sellers demand a risk premium to accept the currency, and they do this by raising their prices.

Now I mentioned that hyperinflation is a tough nut to crack. Look at what this article on The Library of Economics and Liberty says:

What causes hyperinflations? No single shock, no matter how severe, can explain sustained, continuously rapid growth in prices.

That is because the empirical evidence is garbled. Somtimes it is triggered by this, at other times it is triggered by that. Sometimes it happens with mild monetary inflation (my first explanation of inflation) sometimes it is only triggered when that is more severe. It is the wisdom of the Austrian economists in thinking about economics as a deductive discipline rather than an empirical science that leads me to the conclusions I will shortly be mentioning.

First I want to redefine hyperinflation.

Imagine an economy where the entire money supply is $10. Now imagine that the central bank pays its board of two governers $10 each one day, and they go to spend their money. Suddenly the amount of circulating money has increased by a factor of 3, which means that once things stabilise the prices will also be about three times as high as before, in one day. But now imagine the people don't make a stink about this. Maybe they are a very cowed population. This $20 that the two governers can spend allows them to buy pretty much everything, since no one else has anything like as much cash. They buy all the food and products of the entire country. This is an extreme example of the "inflation tax". Monetary inflation results in a slow transfer of wealth from people who get the money last to people who can spend the money first, in this case from everyone else to the two governors. I do not regard this as hyperinflation. It is extremely high inflation in my example, and there are good reasons to believe that this sort of action will cause a hyperinflation episode, but in this case, because the population just allow themselves to be robbed of real goods in exchange for paper money, the "real value" of the money supply remains the same. Everyone's price now becomes three times as high, so life can go on pretty much as it had before.

Now consider a second economy with some amount of fiat money. Again it doesn't matter exactly how much there is, it is all serving to enable trade between people. Let us say that their reserve bank's computers and printing presses are broken and they cannot print any new money for a long time. The supply of the money remains totally constant. Now one day for no specific reason, people begin to question the value of their currency. They start to spend it and buy real goods with it so they won't suffer loss if the currency tanks. As a result of lots of people doing this, the velocity of money is increasing rapidly, leading to rapid inflation. The more prices inflate, the more the money velocity goes up. Pretty soon money is spent as soon as it is earned, and prices are still climbing fast. Not long after this people simply stop accepting the currency. It has become totally worthless. They prefer to look for someone to barter with than to take the currency, because it can only be used as money and now it doesn't even serve that purpose. Now life cannot go on as before, because the "real value" of the entire money stock is now 0. Nothing. No one will accept it as payment for goods or services rendered. This is what I consider hyperinflation. It represents not a rise in prices due to an increase in the money supply but an accelerating and, if not checked, complete loss of confidence in a fiat currency. This causes prices to approach infinity. This grows out of the fourth type of inflation: an increase in money velocity.

Thus: Hyperinflation is a period in which the value of the money stock decreases significantly as people turn to foreign currencies, commodity money and barter to clear transactions.

In the first scenario prices increased extremely rapidly but the value of the entire money stock remained constant. In the second case the money stock remained constant but confidence in it waned and winked out. Since the real value of the money stock goes to 0, it doesn't matter if the central bank prints money. This will keep things going for perhaps a little while longer, but if the note's real value, as seen by everyone, is 0, then it doesn't matter if its denomination is 10 or a googolplex, it just won't be accepted as payment. At this point inflation is effectively infinite, since you can write an arbitrarily large number on the note and it won't be enough to buy a paperclip.

That is not to say that people don't find some use for all the worthless notes:

Wallpaper

Firewood

Civil engineering projects

The chart below shows the official (red) and unofficial (blue) exchange rate of the Zimbabwe dollar with the US dollar during their period of hyperinflation:
This chart has several interesting features. Firstly, the official value of the currency is consistently reported as less than its actual market value. Second, the inflation accelerates insanely fast: look at the vertical axis. The logarithmic scale makes it hard to appreciate just how vertical the line is on the right hand side. It actually bears a remarkable resemblance to another graph I posted on this very blog just a few months back:

To create the above chart I exponentially increased the dependent variable while exponentially decreasing the increments of the independent variable it was plotted against. So my pairs were (0,1), (24,2), (36,4), (42,8), (45,16) ... If we turn this situation around and consider the inflation as a simple loss of the real value of the money stock, this later curve becomes a straight line going down from 100% to 0% over the 48 months.

So, to recap: I define hyperinflation as those circumstances where the value of the money stock decreases sharply. This is a psychological phenominon, not a monetary one. If allowed to continue the value of the money stock will go to 0. Typically governments engage in spectacular monetary inflation to try to prop up the ailing currency but this never works, for the reasons I have outlined above. It does result in some pretty interesting banknotes though:

Seems legit

Because hyperinflation is a psychological phenominon its trigger can be hard to pin down. Basically it's anything that causes people to lose faith in the currency, often careless monetary inflation such as Weimar Germany. The trigger for the collapse of the currency rather depends. On a million things. Each situation is unique because all people are unique and the dynamics of the society will affect how the distrust spreads. So in one case it might be so many percent per month inflation that tips the balance, and somewhere else another percentage. Any way you cut it, though, it happens because the currency doesn't have intrinsic worth, and because the currency's production is controlled by a central bank whence the notes must be accepted by the people under pain of fine and or imprisonment.

Hyperinflation can never occur with a commodity money, because if it loses value as a medium of exchange you can use it for other things. Even gold, one of the most useless metals, can serve as pretty nice jewelery and these days we plate quite a lot of it on to electrical connectors to prevent corrosion. Printed paper, on the other hand, is good for nothing but to be pulped and made into toilet paper or charcoal briquettes. It's a pretty slow way of wallpapering your house - though I think it would be worth it just for the conversations you could have - and it doesn't burn that well. Thus if we want to make a currency that is really hyperinflation proof, it has to be on a commodity standard or just be a commodity.

So to answer the question that everyone always asks: can it happen to us. The answer is yes, it can happen to any fiat currency, and because the probability is there, there's every chance that one day it actually will happen, even if we in the Anglophone countries have been spared this pain thus far. Will it happen soon? That's a tough one. I don't think anyone can make that call. It's a divergent condition based on chaotic factors. Impossible to predict. You should be wary if our inflation gets about 10%, though. We're used to 3% and 10% would be a bit of a shocker. Perhaps enough to start driving people away from AUD and into whatever looks juicy at the time. If the reserve bank did insane amounts of quantitative easing that could potentially result in inflation if the banks were to actually lend that money out. Under the current low inflation most people will keep AUD, so providing there's no significant change in the status quo, AUD is safe for now. And because our notes are plastic, if they do lose value you can bung them in the oven and in a few minutes you have some rather fetching earrings, pendants, or mosaic tiles.

How to make driving safer.

2011-12-17T16:18:00.003+11:00

A lot of road safety messages these days focuses on speeding. This always rubs me the wrong way, because while there is a kernel of truth it is smothered in a giant pile of lies.
When we get a new TAC ad about speeding, the message is invariably that speeding is what kills people on the road. We have had this drilled into us for so long now that people are in real danger of thinking that speeding is the only thing killing people on the road. This couldn't be further from the truth.
Most people think speeding is travelling at any speed greater than the limit on the road. It's what the TAC lead drivers to believe speeding is. This is a simple lie: speeding is actually "travelling at any speed greater than the safe speed for given conditions". Almost no drivers know this, even though the road safety campaigns actually assume it. That is, they say "speeding", meaning "travelling too fast for conditions regardless of limit" and drivers think "travelling faster than the limit". This dissociation between the message and its perception is actually causing a lot of accidents. People are dying because of speeding ads.
There are a number of reasons for this and I really don't want to bore people so I'll go through them fairly quickly.
First, false sense of security. On a road where the posted limit is 60, 60 may well be a safe speed in the dry, with little traffic and plenty of ambient light. It is unlikely to be a safe speed when the road is wet during a dark rush hour. Because drivers are constantly told that 1 km/h over the limit makes you a dangerous criminal, they increasingly tend to drive at the posted limits even if it is hazardous to do so.
Second, rigid speed adherence diverts driver attention. The less time you spend looking ahead for possible hazards, the more likely you are to have a crash. If a child walks into the road from behind a tree while you are looking at your speedo for 0.5 seconds, it will take you nearly a full second to respond to the hazard. The need to maintain exactly the speed limit makes you look at the speedo a lot more than normal, diverting attention that should be used to assess road conditions, forecast other drivers' behaviour, and thinking about possible hazards.
Third, reluctance to brake. If people are restrained under good conditions from travelling at a safe speed that is higher than the posted limit, this causes reluctance to waste time driving at any speed below the limit even if conditions demand it. This may sound the same as number 1, but it's quite different. Holding people back in this way makes them slightly tense, and to save time they will travel at the posted limit if at all possible. It also causes more aggression on the roads because these drivers are often held back by slower moving traffic. This aggression causes more reckless use of speed, more tailgating, more red light runs. An angry driver is a bad driver.

Speed is a factor in all accidents. Think about it: you cannot have a crash if you and everyone else are stationary. Faster crashes are more deadly than slower ones. These are facts and I really don't mean to talk them down, but the primary cause of accidents is not speed itself. It is driver error and driver inattention (which is really in the set of all things that can be described as "driver error"). Thus the main way to reduce fatalities is to improve driver behaviour, not slow everyone down by force. I really want to talk about driver attention because this is the one that is hit hard by rigid speed enforcement measures, and is causing a lot of accidents that are actually put down to other things like texting, using a mobile phone and the like.
When a driver is forced by speed enforcement to travel slower than the speed he knows he can safely drive at under the conditions, something amazing happens: he gets worse. The attention needed to keep the car going in a safe way is reduced, so the driver will feel as if he has some brain power to spare. The mobile phone, the stereo, daydreaming, all of these things will start to appeal because it feels safe. We all know, because we have been told over and over, that using a mobile phone while driving is extremely dangerous. So why do people still do it? The reason is because it feels safe. And if something feels safe, who are the police to tell us not to do it, eh? Now, it may be safe to use a mobile phone from the perspective of brain power at the moment, but in the next moment there might be a hazard, where the driver's workload will increase dramatically, sometimes beyond his capacity, and a crash will occur. It'll be put down to him using a mobile, but the real cause is excessive driver workload. The second problem of all this is that to use the phone, radio, etc. the driver's eyes are directed away from the road, further decreasing the time to respond to any hazard.

All of that was by way of exploding the myths surrounding road safety. If you've read this far, congratulations, you're a star. Now I want to start talking about how real drivers in the real world can improve the safety of their own driving. We know it's not about the number your speedo's needle is pointing to, so what is it?

The attentive reader will have guesed by now that increasing driver attention is the fastest, most effective way to increase road safety. However, we cannot increase the attentiveness of every driver, more's the pity, so we need some other strategies that, once our own attention is at its peak, will allow us to stay safe even if other drivers are not.
To help with this analysis, let's have a look at the most common types of accidents. I got all of these from the ADTA's website.
1. Same direction, AKA rear end collision. Cause: inadequate following distance. Solution: increase following distance. Monitor the following distance of cars behind you. If they are too close, do what you need to to let them pass or move to another lane.
2. Adjacent direction, that is, failure to give way to traffic at a crossing or T-junction. Cause: oncoming cars obscured, carelessness. Solution: Do not assume that a driver waiting to turn into your direction has seen you. Prepare to brake if you see cars waiting to enter your traffic stream.
3. Opposite direction. Usually people turning across traffic misjudging the distance to the oncoming car. Cause: same as 2. Solution: same as 2. Stay alert and be prepared to brake.
4. Off path in a curve. Cause: understeer (due to excessive speed), object fixation (more on that later). Solution: approach unknown bends with a large speed safety margin. Keep eyes to the road ahead, not objects on the roadside.
5. Off path on a straight. Cause: inattention, failure to respond to hazards. Solution: use speed consistent with roadside visibility.

It should come as no surprise that the first 3 most common kinds of accidents result from the assumption that all drivers will drive perfectly at all times. When someone does something unexpected on the road this results in an accident if there is a nearby car that doesn't anticipate or see the action. This is why "anticipation" is one of the key safe driver skills. Most drivers will assume that a green light is 100% safe. This is not the case, since red lights are sometimes run even quite far into the cycle, and since no driver anticipates a green light to be unsafe, this often results in a very severe accident.

The other two accidents are harder to analyse.
My theory on 4 is that people will try to take a turn a little too fast, and either panic when the understeer comes, or panic that it "feels too fast", fixate on an object at the side of the road like a tree or power pole that they are trying to avoid, and as a result, hit it. This is called target fixation and it is extremely dangerous. Some bends have a very bumpy surface and this will dramatically decrease the safe cornering speed. Be alert for such changes in surface.
5 is most likely some sort of swerving incident from a perceived hazard, or simply driver inattention for such a long time that the car leaves the road partially and the situation becomes unrecoverable. It is well known that straight roads lead to driver inattention accidents, so arm yourself with this knowledge and stay alert on the boring stretches.

Now that we have some background on the types of accidents that are likely to happen to you and the sorts of thins that can be done to avoid them, we are in a position to put the skill set forward. This motorcycling website has done just that. Obviously some of the techniques are rider-specific because a car is dynamically not the same as a 2 wheel motorbike, but a lot of it translates.
I'm tired of typing so I'm going to quote en bloc. Here's what they have to say:

Emergency Braking.

Emergency Braking is an obvious survival skill. In a crash situation one needs to be able to scrub off speed fast to either avoid crashing into something or to reduce the severity of the impact.

A less obvious fact about emergency braking on a motorcycle is that poorly implemented emergency braking can itself cause a crash. In a crash situation in a car, locked wheels simply reduce the extent of speed reduction. On a motorcycle, locking a wheel (and especially the front wheel) is likely to cause the bike to go out of control and the rider to crash.

In cars of course we often have ABS which despite its reputation is not primarily to allow you to stop shorter, but to allow you to maintain steering control under emergency braking. The fact that it stops you a bit shorter is nice but the main accident problem is skidding into the obstacle.

Direction Perspective

The eyes play a major role in the control of a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, where you look is where you go and, to establish your direction perspective, the motorcyclist must use his eyes correctly. The way the rider uses his eyes also plays an important part in anticipating the actions of other vehicles around him and in the messages he sends to other motorists in conflict situations. Target fixation is also part of this. The rider who looks at the roadside furniture s/he is trying to avoid is sure to hit it!

I've kind of mentioned this one already. You drive where your eyes tell you to. This is below the level of the concious, so be aware of it.

Manoeuvre Anticipation

Anticipating what a vehicle is likely to do in a conflict situation involves a number of skills, many of them quite complex. Yet, looking at the most common motorcycle/car crash situations, the NZMSC discovered that there were a small number of anticipatory skills which, when carried out in a specific order, enable the rider to anticipate the likely actions of the driver, the movement, and speed etc of the car. Knowing this skill and implementing it enables the rider to get early warning of the actions of errant motorist and thus avoid impact with the offending vehicle.

No comment required.

Crash Survival

Sometimes, no matter how good the rider is, he will be invited to join someone else's crash and will be unable to decline the invitation. Where a rider crashes, there is a specific set of actions and reactions the rider can make that will greatly reduce the chances of being seriously hurt in the crash. A simple example is where the bike slides out from under the rider. In this situation the rider should always try to slide rather than tumble. This way he can see where he’s going, he can use his hands and feet to steer away from danger, and his body will not tumble with the extremities at risk of snapping as they impact with the ground or parked cars etc.

Some comment required. Obviously a crash in a car is very different from a motorcycle crash. Before the crash, try to steer into something soft or an area of open ground. It is better to drive into some field than stay on the road but hit someone who pulled out without looking. When the crash is over your lower legs will probably be broken, if it's a forward crash. Try to leave the car to avoid dying in a fire.

Risk Management.

A modern management tool in big business, risk management is the skill of identifying risks, calculating their severity, deciding whether one wishes to carry that risk and, if one doesn’t, how to counter that risk. Risk-taking is, to a certain degree, part of the motorcyclists' psyche, be it when riding a bike or having fun at the casino. But most motorcyclists are still interested in managing that risk. They do this by identifying the risks in riding (for example, the risks of riding fast in a specific location) and deciding whether that risk is one they are willing to take. Most riders, until taught this skill, do not even consider the risks involved in riding in any logical way. Either the risk is considered as a whole (the risk of riding a motorcycle) and, as a whole is too large to make an informed decision upon (and is thus filed in the Too Hard basket of the rider's brain), or is unfocused, in that riding in one particular location at an excessive speed is not considered as a speed pertinent to that location but as the speed "I normally ride at". When given some basic pointers on the ways to use risk management in one’s riding, the rider is, for example, more likely to be selective in his speeding and to take a sensible and considered approach to risk.

The advantage of risk management is that it is a process which is perceived by riders to be a professional process and a process that allows the rider to make his own value judgements in its implementation, such as the judgement of the extent of risk the rider is willing to expose himself too. Personal value judgements like these are amenable to change through social and peer pressure and, with the psychological make-up of the motorcyclist, the best safety improvements are achieved if the rider moves to a safer riding style voluntarily rather than through a legislatively-imposed system.

The same website has a whole article on risk management and I do urge you to go read it.

To finish up, all road travel invloves risk. Whenever you get into a car, you accept that risk consciously or unconsciously. Governmental campaigns to decrease "speeding" do nothing about the risk, just the severity of the accident. If we follow that to its logical conclusion, we should ban everyone from the roads to avoid road deaths. But we get in cars, and take risks, every day, because driving makes our lives better. We have a way to make it safer as well: increase driver skill. If we increase our own proficiency, and counsel our friends and family to do the same, we can dramatically reduce the risks to us and our loved ones, all while using speed safely as 99.9% of drivers do, every day of the week.

A little something about fuel economy.

2011-12-17T13:40:00.004+11:00

Here's a simple question: which of the three pedals you see above is responsible for the most wasted fuel?

If you answered "accelerator", I have some bad news. It's not the accelerator, it's the brake pedal.

To find out why, we need to consider what goes on when you're driving along, and what the purpose of the accelerator and the brake are. The clutch pedal can be safely left out of the discussion for now, although it does have its own uses and misuses.
Most cars weigh something between 1000 kg (a tiny hatchback) and 2700 kg (an enormous 4x4). For the purpose of this illustration I'll deal with a 1700kg car. At 60 km/h this car will have about 470 kJ of kinetic energy. When accelerating to 60 km/h all of that energy has to come from the engine, and when you stop it has to go back in to the engine (engine braking), into the brake pads and discs, and to friction losses (drag, tyre rolling resistance, drive train losses). As it turns out, which of those three mechanisms you predominantly use to dispose of the energy is extremely important with regards to fuel economy.

How you accelerate does have some importance, of course. If you are willing to accelerate more slowly you can save fuel by changing up earlier. This reduces energy losses innate to all piston engines, that is, the back-and-forth motion gets faster and this constant change in direction causes some power to be lost. So even though two people might both end up at 60 km/h, with identical cars, the one that accelerated more slowly would have used less fuel over all, simply because less was wasted in gaining the speed. If both had perfectly efficient engines the slow accelerator would still be slightly ahead (on economy) because he had a lower average velocity, but of course the redneck would get home first.
At constant speed, all other factors being equal, they use the same amount of fuel because they have the same drag to overcome. At constant speed this is the only factor directly related to speed that chews through your fuel. This particular consumption is proportional to the square of velocity, so going a little bit faster actually adds quite a lot of wind resistance (double your speed, say from 30 to 60, and you quadruple the air resistance).

Now we come to the brake pedal.

When you apply the brakes, some of your kinetic energy is converted into heat, and is lost to the atmosphere. Heavy cars need to have big brakes, because these have both more friction to slow the car, and lose heat more quickly so they don't get too hot. It is possible to overheat most types of brakes if you use them a lot in a short space of time, such as slowing from high speed on a steep downhill, or driving around a track. This will cause their friction to decrease and they won't be able to slow the car as efficiently, leading, sometimes, to a crash. That aside, the important point here is that two people, one a redneck thrashing his car, and one a gentle old granny accelerating to 60 km/h in 30 seconds, have identical kinetic energy, all things being equal. So if they both push the brake pedal to come to a stop, both are wasting all the energy they used to get up to speed. All of that energy came out of the fuel in one way or another, so effectively they have both wasted all of that fuel.

Having realised this, what can be done? How can we waste less energy, or even better, recover some of it? The first part, wasting less energy, is possible in any type of car, and it has little to do with how hard you pushed the accelerator 4km ago. The main thing is to take some of the energy that might have been going into the brakes and place it somewhere where it can do something useful, sich as keeping you going along a little way. Most obviously, this means coasting. In gear or out, coasting will be converting some of the kinetic energy into that which is overcoming the drag of the car. You still lose the energy irrevocably, but it is at least keeping you going rather than being converted straight to useless heat. If you are in gear, you also have engine braking going on. This means that the energy the engine would normally need to turn over at the given revs is coming not from fuel but from the kinetic energy of the car or, on a downhill, from the gravitational potential energy as well or instead.
Recovering the energy completely is impossible, but partly, yes, that can be done. If you watch Formula 1 you may know of a system that was used a few years ago: KERS (kinetic energy recovery system). This is a system that uses an electric motor/generator to save some energy when the car slows and spend it out again for a quick burst when the driver wants to overtake another competitor. This type of system is perfectly feasible in a normal car providing that it has an electric motor and battery/capacitor to store the energy. As such, pure electric cars almost always have a system like this, and so do hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, usually called regenerative braking. In an ordinary car (that is, not F1) such a system is very helpful in stop/start traffic, because you can save some of the energy you used to brake and put it to use accelerating again. Slow moving traffic is notoriously wasteful purely because you have to stop and start again so much and hybrid/electric technology helps reduce this energy loss.

Ultimately, the most efficient way to travel will always be at constant speed in top gear, which is why you get much better economy in the country and on freeways than in traffic, even though the drag losses are much greater, but you can get close to that by being gentler in acceleration and braking, and as a result, you'll be safer too. Start slowing down a fair way before a junction or red light. Give the car in front a bit more room, especially if a car behind you is on your bumper. Use both brake pedal and accelerator gently. All of these things will make you a safer driver, and in all likelihood will get you home faster too, since arriving at a light when it is green at 20km/h will put you ahead of anyone who races up to it, stops, and then has to get going again. Hopefully you will have fewer accidents too, which means lower insurance premiums and less hassle. You may also arrive at your destination more relaxed. What's not to like?

Someone took my advice ... before I gave it.

2011-12-09T18:50:00.001+11:00

Perhaps if I'd had the presence of mind to do a little more research before penning my post on what we need in cars, I'd have seen this example of a company thinking ahead:

We simply took a standard BMW Mini One, discarded the engine, the disc brakes, the wheels, and the gearbox. These components were replaced by four of our electric wheels, a lithium polymer battery, a large ultra capacitor, a very small ICE with generator (so small it almost fits alongside the spare wheel), an energy management system and a sexy in-car display module.

As you may remember my conception was that there should be one electric motor per wheel, no mechanical drivetrain, with power reservoir in the form of a battery. I did not consider the importance of supercapacitors in acting as a very short term rapid power sink and source.

Perhaps this is the time to mention a few things about the piston engine used in most cars and trucks. Its problem is that it isn't a very good machine for driving cars and trucks. That's why there are clutches and gearboxes, so that we can maintain driving conditions within the power band and not stray too near the 0 torque of 0 RPM. Furthermore, to provide the acceleration we desire they have to have a lot of power left in reserve, rarely used, and this makes them large and heavy. Electric motors have none of these drawbacks. They have plenty of torque from 0 RPM and can rev much faster than is usual for petrol engines. As such they can drive a car from stationary right up to a very reasonable top speed usually governed only by the rev limit. The only problem with them is that, obviously, the electricity has to come from somewhere. Trains and trams can receive power directly from the grid, but cars trucks and motorbikes will not be fettered by centralised power distribution. Therefore they must store electricity in some sort of battery or have on board electrical generation. Hydrogen fuel cell technology creates electrical power directly from the fuel, but it is also possible to use the old fashioned piston engine to generate power via a typical magnet and coil generator. Given the difficulty of storing hydrogen, and the expense of its componentry, and the fact that the petrol engine is here now and has the benefit of a hundred years of research and development and the monumental pile of research cash flow it has experienced due to the sheer number of cars produced, I believe it is the right tool for the job. Turbine engines would be more efficient in every way, but they are significantly more costly and given the expense already represented by the necessary electronics it seems to me that turbine powered consumer vehicles are perhaps beyond the reach of the average man.

The Mini mentioned in the story has a 250cc two-stroke engine, which seems odd since they're trying to prove that you can use this technology to save the environment and two-stroke engines have very dirty emissions. This does follow the principle, though, that you use a classical internal combustion engine to extend the range of an electric car, given that batteries do not yet provide the range of a petrol tank. I firmly believe that they never will. It will always take longer to recharge a battery than fill up a tank of petrol or diesel or, perhaps, one day hydrogen. We will never be able to store enough energy in them to consider pure battery power as an energy store for consumer vehicles, especially those that drive all the time, like trucks and vans. Some form of fuel will always be necessary; to think otherwise is silly. Removing and replacing batteries at some sort of battery swap station is also silly. That's going backward in techonological terms. When horses were all we had you had to change them when they were worn out, now they are talking of doing the same with batteries? How stupid. The average man will never go for it, so it will fail, no doubt in my mind about that.

So until the fuel cell becomes a cheap enough power source, we will be left with some sort of petrol- or diesel-electric system, and that is fine with me.

Indonesian Bridge Collapse

2011-11-30T11:49:00.002+11:00

I'm sure some of my readers will have heard of the recent collapse of an Indonesian suspension bridge called Kutai Kartanegara. As an armchair civil engineer I wanted to see if I could work out something about why and how the collapse occurred. What failure of engineering could have caused the deaths of 18 people (and counting)?

First, let's take a look at the bridge when it was intact.

Seems to be pretty standard

We can see that it is a fairly standard suspension bridge design, with two towers taking the weight of the roadway in compression (probably made of mild steel), and cables attached to a pair of long catenaries forming the connections with the roadway itself. These would all be high tensile steel cable. To prevent the towers falling over, they have tension on both sides. A large box truss comprised of I-beams encloses the roadway. My guess is that it is there to stop the roadway from buckling in high winds, like what happened to the Tacoma Narrows bridge. A similar box truss runs under the roadway of the Golden Gate.

Close-up of the box truss that provides torsional rigidity for the roadway.

Close up, we can see that instead of more expensive braided cables they have elected to use single strand steel bars connected to the catenary via some sort of clamp. This is quite unlike the Golden Gate, which uses braided cables looped over the catenary.

The use of bolts and brackets to make the connection with the catenary seems to have proved fateful, since photos of the collapsed bridge show these connections are where the failure occurred:

Normally in suspension bridges of this type, the connecting cables, in this case rods, are meant to be redundant; in other words, if one fails completely, there should be enough strength in those around it to take the load while that member is repaired. In fact, the rods may well have been strong enough, but their connections with the catenary evidently were not. Because there was no redundancy in the structure, it was, sadly, a collapse waiting to happen.

On the day it happened there was maintenance going on. Without knowing exactly what they were doing it's hard to guess what the initial cause of the collapse was, but I think it would be something like this: judging by the way one of the towers has been bent, it experienced significant lateral force from the middle span. This is consistent with connections failing either on the main span on the side opposite the bend, or on the ramp side on the same side as the bend. Either way, failed connections overloaded the tower and caused it to lean, destabilising the remaining over-stressed connections and ultimately unzipping the entire bridge span.

So, seeing that the connections were the point of failure, how did they work and how, then, did they fail? From photos it is clear that some snapped right off while most seem to have snapped off one of the hinge plates. They seem to be constructed of two hinge plates held on by bolts to brackets at the top and bottom. these brackets engage with a plate at the bottom, which has a hole through which the connecting rod is bolted into it. At the top there is some sort of clamp that grips the catenary. The most common point of failure seems to be the hinge at the top of one of the plates. These types of plates are made of high tensile steel and cannot sustain much of a crack without failing. I thought we had learned from eyebar bridges not to make things like this on bridges, but apparently not. Without an insanely rigorous inspection and maintenance program these parts fail. Corrosion gets into the steel right next to the bolt and prizes open the part right at the weakest point in the structure. Add a bit of load cycling and one day it just snaps right off. The cracks that can be sustained by these parts are on the order of a few mm, and they are invisible from the outside, so inspection is just about impossible.

Media reports cite poor construction materials as one of the factors. Possibly - this is certainly a bridge built to a tight budget - but ordinarily the safety factor is so high that even rubbish materials will still stand the test of time. This didn't and as a result I find the accountant that selected the connectors at fault. You have to design and build for things like poor maintenance and substandard materials, especially in a place like Indonesia. Failing to take account of those things is as negligent as playing Russian Roulette with someone else's life.

We need a new type of car.

2011-11-21T23:07:00.004+11:00

The title says it all, really. I've identified a gap in the motoring psyche that no manufacturer has successfully filled, at least here in Australia. Briefly, there is a problem with most cars on the market today. This is not about CO2, at least not directly - you see, modern cars are far too big and heavy.

Now I do admit, there are some seriously good advantages to this. Big, heavy cars these days are very well built, making them as comfortable to crash into a concrete pylon as laying down on a feather mattress. They also have a lot of space for passengers and luggage, and there's plenty of gadgets to entertain both driver and passenger. There is a place for these cars, yes. I like big, comfortable cars. But I also like small, nimble cars and it's here that manufacters have been forced, by consumers mind you, to be conservative. Even the tiniest hatchback has four seats (for mice, if you want actual humans you really do need a normally sized car, like a Focus). This obsession with seats got me thinking, why do we need them all?

Most of the time, you see, people are only driving themselves. Granted this is probably not the case with families and mum driving the kids to school and various extracurricular goodness, but by and large the commute is conducted solitary. So why do you need four seats? Much of the extra weight that cars carry these days is due to the size of the passenger cabin. If you could trim it down to one seat, with maybe a bit of a shelf for your briefcase, you lose nothing in the usefulness of the car for that particular purpose, and gain in many ways - lower cost of pruduction and of course less fuel are the obvious ones. The economics are fairly sound. You do lose some safety factors of course, but then on the commute you are not travelling at high speed most of the time, and if lots of people did this then collisions would be almost as safe as if everyone drove tanks. Why is the market not cryinge oute for this?

Well, with the theory in hand, let's have a look at some attempts over the last few years to create my vision of the perfect commuter's car.

This yellow electric car gets the concept just fine: a small car only for commutes, usually short distance. But where to begin. Today's car has to look good, and I'm afraid it's total failure for this one. Moreover, I really don't think three wheels is the way of the future. Stability is compromised.

Mmm, this looks nice, but I think that cabin would feel rather a lot like a coffin. Plus we're back to three wheels again. What was the allure of that to begin with? And of course there are any number of similar concepts.

Ah, now that's more like it. The Carver solves the stability issues of 3 wheels by tilting, which is very cool, but the complex engineering involved also makes it quite expensive. Why not just add a fourth wheel? Just a thought ...

VW developed the idea quite a ways in a 2002 concept car (right), and it really showed some of the advantages: 290kg weight would have made it insanely efficient. Unfortunately it was given a 1 cylinder diesel engine with no power so it was never going to go mainstream, and of course it was extremely ugly. I say again, for mass market appeal it has to look good and have a decent engine. 50 kW would get a 500 kg car going quite nicely, potentially as fast as 0-100 in 8 seconds which is right in the sweet spot for a nicely powered family car.

Fortunately for this piece, VW have recently had another go, and I like the look of this version a lot better. Firstly the looks are much improved. They haven't gone for a noisy, rough, stinking pollutin' diesel engine either: this is an electric car as you might have guessed. This makes it short range only but you can't have everything I suppose. At the moment it's just a concept but VW is working hard to get something like it into production in th near future. It probably won't be as nice as the concept, purely for price point reasons of course, but they will be putting something small and electric on the market in the next few years. I do believe there is a market for something this size with a small petrol engine though.

Ah, now, you see, three wheels doesn't cut it. Got that? Doesn't matter if they do tilt in a cool way. The centre of gravity is just too high. Build a proper chassis please, and put away the childish tilting. This is 2011, flying cars are only 4 years away and we have barely got the car safe and efficient for road travel, never mind flying. Go design a new hatchback or something.

Now that we've seen some of the ideas the motoring world has produced, here's my idea:
4 wheels, each driven by its own electric motor. A small petrol engine or gas turbine at the back for range extension, with a good sized fuel tank; this drives an alternator which feeds power to a small bank of batteries and the wheels. The batteries are kept at a constant charge of no less than 50%, thus extending the lifespan of these expensive components. When braking and hill descending the batteries are allowed to charge to maximum extent. All electrical motors and alternator and batteries are water cooled to make them lighter and more efficient. Chassis should be an aluminium monocoque or aluminium/composite. Finally the passenger cabin should have one chair, for larger versions perhaps two. All of this would mave for an efficient, light, relatively fast little car. Only one obstacle remains: cost. I suggest that road tax for single seater or dual seater vehivles be lowered. That would help with the barriers of entry and get more people into them in the first place.

Just another charity. Not (a charity).

2011-10-22T01:36:00.000+11:00

Got a call today from someone on behalf of Bowel Cancer Australia. Now I am a great fan of charitable donations, but I have recently become more aware of the sorts of things that go on in the world, so I approached this with some skepticism. Firstly I suspect that "on behalf of" means he doesn't actually work or volunteer for BCA, but I forgot to ask. At least he did say that it was not a solicited call and they were calling everyone in my area, so I decided to hear him out. Got the usual spiel that you get from all of these charity calls. The good work they do, the terrible nature of the things they're working against, and then please select which amount you would like to contribute. Ah. So no question about whether I'd like to contribute, only options that involve me giving them money.

I ignored the question and asked if they have some sort of income statement so I can inspect their finances and so on. Meanwhile I navigated to their website to see if I could find such a document. My search came up empty. He said they used to send that stuff out but not any more, to save money. He again gave me all the different donation options, none of which were "$0". They receive no ongoing government funding. OK so, apparently they have received some money from the government. And they lobby the government to send out more free bowel cancer testing kits to everyone over 50. At this time I again asked about the finances so I was bounced up to the supervisor, because the guy I'd been talking to was on his first day.

The supervisor informed me that they fund research into bowel cancer, lobby the government for more free testing kits to be sent out, and provide support services for people with bowel cancer. How much do these testing kits cost, which are available in pharmacies? $36. Now the question on my mind was, why not simply get GPs to get their patients to buy these kits if they are over 50? $36 really isn't a huge expense, and it's only once a year. I didn't voice that particular opinion, though. I next asked where the government gets these kits they say should be distributed free. He didn't know. I was suspecting that they might be the manufacturer and so getting the government to send out more kits would make them money. Cynical, I know, but you have to be sure. "Don't they just get them from the manufacturer?" Again, he didn't know, but he did offer to send the information out to me.

That was the most I could get from them at that time. I look forward to reading the email to find out if they would be a worthy recipient of my money, but given that they are lobbying the government to spend tax money providing free kits, I strongly suspect I will not be moved by their cause. Perhaps if they instead used their income to buy kits and send them free of charge to people over 50 who are on very low incomes or in some other way would not be able to buy the kits themselves, and sending letters to GPs informing them of the benefits to their patients and getting the patients to buy the kits themselves, then I might consider sending them a few bucks. But the fact that they consider it a good use of their donors' money to lobby the government to spend other people's money makes me ... er ... not like them very much. At all. Sort of the opposite, really.

The answer is more tax. What was the question again?

2011-10-07T17:22:00.003+11:00

Two recent stories reported through various media no doubt, but read by me on the Conversation's website, have made me near apoplectic. The first is a report on the recent tax forum and the second concerns some ideas on a junk food tax for Australia. The latter is of course at least partly catalysed by Denmark's new "fat tax".

Let me deal with the fat tax first. The suggestion he makes is for a rather broader junk food tax:

If we want a tax that’s going to be effective in reducing obesity in the longer term, we need a broader approach to taxing unhealthy foods rather than just measuring the fat content.

We need to consider the salt, sugar and fat content, along with an assessment of the benefits of nutrients such as fibre, and fruit and vegetable content.

Put all of this information together and you’ll get an assessment of the overall healthiness of the food. A tax should be applied on this basis, not just the saturated fat content.

In other words, Denmark's tax does not go far enough. Well I'm glad we sorted that out. I was beginning to think you might only say that it was going too far by also taxing butter and oil. Silly me.

As usual no one is asking whether it is wise to give the government more central control of the food supply, or whether it is democratic to interfere in the market, or whether it is the government's responsibility to change people's lifestyles. In other words, no one is even considering whether liberty might be more important than the obesity epidemic. It's not even on their minds. A poll from two years ago showed that 64% or so of Australians would support such a tax, while apparently only 16% would strongly oppose it. At root this seems to be at least in part due to the transfer of responsibility away from the individual. By extension the responsibility is transferred to society, especially the government. Thus if there is a problem in society, it is because the government is not doing enough. No one ever considers whether the government should do anything at all, or whether it is doing too much.

So you tax the foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt, and you use the revenue that’s generated to subsidise fruit and vegetables and some other healthy foods.

This would create more of an incentive for people to not only stop eating the unhealthy food but also choose the healthier foods.

You only incentivise the poor, because the middle class and above have so much money that only rediculous tax hikes will deter them from buying anything they really want and could otherwise afford. Unfortunately, junk foods are not as elastic as they think because they are highly preferred, so people will give up other things in order to buy them, rather than decreasing consumption to save money. The nett effect of such a scheme, then, as I see it, would be to siphon money from the poor, who may have few pleasures in life apart from food, and give it to the rich - who could have afforded the vegetables anyway and would buy them anyway because they can compensate for a boring diet (not that they necessarily have one) by buying more expensive things that give them pleasure instead. So once again the star economists have proven that they have no idea how people work. They think you just have to nudge them in the right direction by giving them a little hit to the wallet, but this will have no effect if people value the item more than you're taxing it. People drink coke because it is nice, not because it is cheap. The fact that it's cheap just means that the marginal fans might buy it. The hard-core fans will still buy it in nearly the same quantities if you treble the price. Everyone else will switch to an alternative they prefer, but that alternative will still be a sweet cold drink.

There is also a lot of evidence from other public health measures, such as tobacco and alcohol, which shows when you increase the price of goods through a tax, consumption clearly decreases.

As I was saying, the hard-core don't stop buying it, only people who could take it or leave it.

We also need to consider other interventions such as restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods, improving food labelling (with a simple traffic light labelling system), and implementing public education campaigns, among other things.

Tobacco, 40 years ago. We need to restrict advertising, especially to children. We need health warnings. We need education campaigns. Well actually due to the "education" campaign that has already been waged for so long, everyone already knows junk foods are bad for you and contribute to obesity. Some people haven't responded by stopping consumption of them, so instead of telling them how bad it is we now have to coerce them to stop consumption. The assumption here is that the poor bastards still eating this stuff are so stupid, ignorant or hedonistic that the only thing they'll respond to is a price signal. The sheer paternalistic, condescending smugness of it makes me sick.

Won’t consumers always buy junk food, even if it’s more costly and clearly unhealthy?

The focus of all of these measures is to make it easier for people to make healthy choices.

These interventions aren’t about saying to people, “you can’t eat this and you have to eat that”. They’re about creating incentives and making the environment just that little bit easier for people to make the healthier choices.

Our modelling clearly shows that putting a tax on unhealthy foods and subsidising fruit and vegetables would end up making the population a lot healthier in the long term.

Importantly, it would have higher benefits for people in lower socioeconomic groups who are disproportionately affected by obesity and many other health issues.

Or conversely, to make it harder for them to make unhealthy choices, right? Unless all the tax revenue is spent making healthier food cheaper, all this will do is raise the general price level of food and make life for the poor just that little bit worse. And we know from experience that governments are incapable of earmarking funds. All your taxes just go into a general pool of money whose sole purpose is to buy more low income voters (because they're the most common type, thanks to the huge tax burden) by increasing welfare payments or other subsidies. GST is not earmarked for economic incentives, income tax is not earmarked for income protection, petroleum excise is not earmarked for transport infrastructure. Junk food tax would not be spent only on making healthy food cheaper, it would give the government an excuse to increase their anti-junk food education campaigns in order to enable them to raise the tax some more, and the rest would just go to the treasury.

He admits that poor people buy this stuff more. Isn't anyone but me going to join the dots and see that this tax is logically going to be mostly on poor people? Is it going to make the population healthier in the long term by enabling more rich people to eat veggies for cheap and forcing the poor to eat rice instead? How can you increase someone's quality of life by taking more of their money? How about if we acknowledge that poor people buy this stuff because they don't have money for more genteel pleasures? How about if we increased the tax free threshold so they could afford some more harmless fun?

The commenters are no more enlightened than this egregious proponent of misappropriation.
Says Yolanda Newman:

Personally I want a government which has an interest in me as a whole person. I don't want the government to do everything for me but I do want it to provide things I can't do for myself - like roads and hospitals and then I also want it to be creative about helping me to manage difficult situations - like dealing with food choices.

I really don't think she knows what it means for a government to "take an interest" in a person. Hint: it starts with an arrest.
Damien Gildea has never heard of mission creep:

If government is to have a role in guiding personal nutrition, I would prefer it to be in the form of better education in the basics (calories, additives, basic physiology) so that people are better informed and can indeed make 'healthy choices' rather than having choice diminished through pricing.

Once you start making it the government's responsibility to tell people about a hazard, they will eventually attempt more authoritarian controls of the perceived hazard, including taxing it or banning it. Examples abound.

This is turning out to be one long post. We now turn to the second story: that of the tax forum.

Fortunately I have a lot less to say about this one. Some suggested actions were:

Increased capital gains tax
Broad land tax
More wealth redistribution
Eliminating GST exemptions
Financial transactions tax (global)
No tax exemption for rich women who employ nannies

In other words, we need more of what the government is already doing. Is anyone suggesting that some taxes should be lowered? That maybe the way to help the poor is to tax them less? That maybe we could have more employment if we decreased business income tax? That maybe we'd have more businesses if we didn't punish entrepreneurs for making money? Anyone? It seems all of these academics are just liberal mouthpieces, toeing the government line because that's all they know or because they want more university grants. What about wide ranging debate? What about academic creativity? What about variety of opinion? Can none of these intellectuals outhink me? I seriously doubt that last one. So what does that say about the freedom of thought in academic circles?

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

2011-09-28T18:46:00.001+10:00

The Americans love a good conspiracy theory. It's been their major export for some decades now, so when the 9/11 attacks occurred the cynical could have placed safe bets on the emergence of a fresh series of conspiracy theories about the events of that terrible day. I'm not going to try to answer all the hair-brained stuff that's come to light from dark corners of the internet - that has been done much more comprehensively and expertly than I could do, but I do want to talk about some of the things the conspiracy theorists have right and wrong.

The origin of conspiracy
I think the conspiracy theories are very significantly influenced by the convenience that the attacks afforded the US government, particularly Dick Chainey. In all times of great tragedy there are those that abuse it for gains in power or status or money, or all of the above. Those that capitalise on the events for personal gain are perfect fodder for the conspiracy theorists' delusions - after all, the gains are great, so they had motive to cause these events. In the case of 9/11 the invasion of Iraq is particularly glaring. To this day I don't know the motivation for doing it. By comparison, invading Afghanistan was perfectly logical (Bin Laden was a Saudi) and a measured response (more than 8000 civilians dead and counting) to the 9/11 attacks. I can only assume that it was galling that in 1991 they couldn't actually invade and they wanted to make up for it, combined with a perceived need for the oil security. If so, it's just about the most expensive oil ever bought, since it has cost at least $3 trillion, which is short to write but it's a truly catastrophic amount of money, and if anything it's a gross underestimate since many fine young men have suffered severe and permanent physical and mental trauma, and of course a fair number have been killed in action.

Leaving aside the legitimacy and pointfullness of the war, though, it's a great "motive" for the 9/11 theorists to cite. Apparently the desire by some to go to war was so extreme that they would go to enormous lengths to make it happen, even orchestrating a terrorist attack. Here follows some conspiracy theories and my generalised rebuttal.

Controlled demolition
For me, this one pretty much takes the cake in terms of implausibility. The American government secretly wired a building in the middle of their greatest city with explosives? The explosives were not set off by the massive shock of a heavy jet hitting them and the resultant jet-fuel fireball? And they worked perfectly, just at the moment the towers were starting to fall?
and someone was watching, waiting for the perfect moment to set them off even though the buildings might easily have collapsed anyway? This gets a full 5/5 flying saucers. There are some outstanding facts that are hard to explain for the "conventional" school (i.e., the buildings came down because they were hit by heavy jets and exposed to extensive, raging fires) but 9/11 is a unique event, so there are bound to be some facts that are hard to understand. A mysterious fountain of sparks that looks suspiciously like thermite is one example. Unfortunately quite a few "experts" have gone on record as saying that it was controlled demolition. I'm all for academic freedom, but these guys are missing a trick: THE BUILDINGS WERE HIT BY HEAVY JETS. Stress concentration is one thing I see not mentioned by any structural or materials engineer who goes for the controlled demolition theory. When combined with fire, it's obvious to me why these buildings failed while no other steel structure has ever collapsed due to fire. A significant amount of the supporting structure had been wiped out asymmetrically. This would seem to cause a torque on the whole building around where the plane hit, and combined with the effect of heat lowering the yield stress of steel ... like I said, obvious.

Aircraft autopiloted into WTC
This is as daft possibly even dafter than the one above. The terrorists were in the cockpit. They had taken flying lessons. We have lots of documentary evidence for both of those facts. So why is it that someone would insist the planes were guided into the WTC by their autopilots which had been remote programmed? I'm not saying this is impossible, but on a scale of 1 to 5 UFOs it gets 4.5 for sheer brain shutdown.

United 93 was quickly removed/shot down by missile
This is one the conspiracy theorists have right. The wreckage from United 93 was removed very fast - at the moment of impact, in fact. By an enormous jet fuel fireball. The circumstances of its crash were unlike most aircraft crashes. Most aircraft crashes that happen on land are what you might call a severely botched landing. The pilots try to land or mitigate the crash so lose altitude slowly if possible and come in parallel to the ground. Tragically, the evident struggle in the cockpit of that plane caused the controls to be manipulated in such a way that the plane made a hard right bank - I'm guessing a rudder hard-over, which would be consistent with someone kicking indescriminately if they were struggling - and then went nose first into the ground. Such an impact is unusual in that there is a lot of force acting directly on the airframe, causing it to shatter into much smaller pieces than normal. The concomitant fireball would send these pieces right out of the park. The sheer number of witness accounts make this one a fairly watertight case so I give it 4.5 crop circles out of five.

In a sense all of these conspiracy theories are the same. It's always the government or "they" - forces within the government - that is doing it to its own people. And in a sense they have it right - all governments do terrible things to their own people, especially in this current age of unprecedented power over their people. But conspiracy theorists also miss the point. Airing conspiracies with house of cards levels of documentation is not going to convince people en masse - indeed, a lot of sites propound a whole swathe of conspiracy theories, some legitimate concerns, and others complete bunkum, and in doing this play into the hands of any forces that genuinley want to keep certain information out of public eye. The best place for a true conspiracy is among half a dosen fakes. That way no one with an ounce of common sense is going to believe any of it. In that way there is conspiracy hegemony: either you believe all the conspiracies (if you have taken leave of your senses) or you believe none. To give serious thought to any conspiracy automatically moves you in to the conspiracy camp and gives your word the same weight as someone who still believes in aliens, so few people would do it.

Conspiracy theorists' credibility problem derives from their ignorance of Ockham's razor and Hanlon's razor. Combine this with sources that themselves are not credible (some have reasonably scientific methods but also point to other conspiracy sites or known conspiracists) and cherry-picking of evidence, and you have total loss of credibility. The only difference between an investigative journalist and a conspiracist is that one is a lot more rigorous. In short, conspiracists suffer from insufficient skepticism and rigor. Until and unless they get their act together there's little chance that any genuinely concerning things they report will ever become known before it's too late to do anything about them.

The other major problem with all of these conspiracy theories is they fail to draw attention to the civil liberties that were considered basic human rights before the attacks but have since been eroded or destroyed. New powers were granted the government, just as new powers were granted Hitler during crises, and these powers were mostly used to repress ordinary citizens, although the rhetoric was about protecting the public from sleeper terrorists and the like.

I always cringed when Bush said something like, "They hate us for our freedoms." From day one I knew that couldn't possibly be true. No one attacks someone else just because they have more liberty. The reasons for the attack are complicated no doubt, but they tend to boil down to a reaction to American imperialism. Speaking of liberty in this way debases it by making it a pretext for treading on the liberties of foreigners in the middle east and the people at home. Governments around the world have proved that Bush's retoric has a place: we the free people can say of most governments that, "They hate us for our freedoms."

When you're tired of learning to drive, you're tired of life

2011-09-07T01:34:00.002+10:00

After eight years of study in any particular field, it is assumed that you will pretty much be an expert. Even an amateur spending one to two hours a day on something will become extremely knowledgeable in short order. So why is it that most people's driving is so bad? The obvious explanation is that practice does not make perfect unless you have a coach. People drive all the time but since they have no goal for improving their driving it does not significantly improve after they've learned more or less what all the levers do. I see no reason to flatline (haha) my probability of accident so I look into this now and again to refresh myself. One of my favourite sites is Safe Speed which, apart from having a lot of information about why speed cameras are bad, also gives really solid tips for advancing in your driving generally.

The reason I feel called to write upon this most vexing subject is a recent reminder of what happened to a hapless motorist in 2009 when on the motorway his cruise control got stuck on. The police were eventually called in to clear a lane for him while he battled to regain control. What a way to catch a plane if you're running late! Joking aside, I immediately became suspicious of the whole affair because I can think of at least three ways to stop a car with the cruise jammed on. So, in the interests of public safety I will deal with the cruise-jammed-on scenario and then the brakes-have-failed scenario which, let's face it, could actually happen to you. The cruise control episode was pretty much a once off for civilisation as a whole.

Cruise stuck on

1. The brake pedal. Yeah I know it's obvious but would you believe it, he tried the brake pedal and nothing happened! Could this have been because the cruise control will increase throttle to maintain speed? Yeah it's that obvious. So nothing appeared to happen even when vigorously braking. Only when the brake pedal was pressed hard enough to overcome the engine's torque did the car slow down, and in fact this is what ultimately brought the episode to an end.

. The clutch pedal. OK I know most people drive automatics these days, but there are manuals with cruise and it would be easy to just declutch to prevent drive from going to the wheels. And speaking of which ...

3. Neutral/park. Most automatic gearboxes are still in control of the driver. You can change down or perhaps even to neutral. Worst case scenario is the engine revs a little too high but that's what you have a limiter for.

4. Ignition. Turn it off. The report says he tried this but it wouldn't work. It is clear, however, that he was so incoherent with panic that the obvious things I've mentioned didn't occur to him, or when he tried them they appeared not to work. Still, a really easy solution to cruise getting away from you.

5. Handbrake. Won't work, not by itself. The main brakes on a car are easily capable of countering the engine, especially in top gear, but the handbrake cannot. Don't try it unless there is literally no other option but to die.

No brakes

1. Most important thing here is not to panic. I don't mean to be confronting, but in emergencies panickers die.

2. You'll want to remove drive, so let off the accelerator, duh. Further steps you can take to slow down faster are to gear down as much as physically possible. This is particularly essential if the failure happens on a downhill slope. Do not put the car in neutral, that will perevent engine braking.

3. Brake failures are various. Try pumping the pedal, applying both feet. Sometimes the brakes will be cooked, meaning they are less effective because they've overheated. Worst is if the brakes have failed completely, leaving your only stopping power with the engine and handbrake. Speaking of which ...

4. Do not yank the handbrake. You will lock up the rear tyres and spin right into a fireball. There won't even be anything left to bury. Gradually apply pressure and if you feel the rear of the car letting go, release the handbrake. Hence, keep your thumb on the button or you may panic and just let go, leaving it ratcheted up.

5. If none of the above will stop you, hard cornering can also slow you down but again you have to limit yourself to the handling envelope.

6. Drive up a hill. Simple and obvious. Don't make the mistake of getting to a stop then rolling back down again. As you come to a stop, turn across the hill so your car is no longer on a slope in the direction of roll.

7. Run off the road. In rural areas this one will be obvious, but then maybe you'd have enough road to coast to a gentle stop, whatever. A handy field full of soggy grass will slow you down a treat, as would sand for those times when your brakes fail next to the beach.

8. Depending on the situation, you may be forced to crash into something. If that is the case, after having done all the above to slow as much as possible, select a hedge, a stand of saplings, perhaps even another car, to rapidly wash off the rest of your speed. You can even select quite solid obstacles as long as you're doing less than 40 km/h. If a tree is the only thing suitable, use the tree, but try not to hit it head on unless you have passengers. You can slow the impact by striking it with the far corner of the car, thus converting some of your forward momentum into angular momentum. Obiously don't do that if you would then career off a cliff.

9. You thought crashing was the last ditch, right? Actually if you have enough space you can try something even more dangerous - a spin. This is also the only remaining option if you're going too fast to crash safely. Use the handbrake to lock the rear wheels, then violently turn the wheel to induce a spin. This will be similar to attempting a fully locked up stop. Keep the steering wheel at full lock until you've slowed down enough, otherwise you may end up going backwards into whatever you were trying to avoid. The reason this is more dangerous than crashing is because you cannot control it - you may crash into something driver door first.

So there you have it. What to do if your brakes one day decide to give up the ghost when you need them most. Once again there is an obvious point on which to close: an ounce of prevention is worth The Monster Bomb of cures. Proper maintenance is the first part of safety. Other than that, don't overheat your brakes on a long downhill - use pulsed braking (also known as not riding the brakes) and engine braking. Got that?

In reply to the Angry Exile

2011-09-03T18:31:00.002+10:00

The recent proposals of one Nadine Dorries is causing some action on the blogosphere and naturally because the issue is abortion it is quite a divisive one. It seems the general libertarian thought on abortion leans towards pro-choice rather than pro-life. I commented on the Angry Exile's blog that I found this incongruous because it is promoting the liberty of one at the expense of another's life. In response he wrote a fairly epic post about his thoughts on the matter and I thought I might as well reply here rather than post a really long comment. This is naturally a very emotional topic, but I'm going to try to be objective and dispassionate because although passion is important and useful in persuasion, the abortion debate has had been rich in passion but not as rich in objective criticism.

Imagining for the moment that there were no abortion laws and assuming that the woman’s own life was not in danger and that it was simply a lifestyle choice to abort very late – say 35 weeks or so – it’d be hard to see it as anything other than murder for one's own gain, arguably the most severe and permanent infringement of an individual's liberty that there is. However, at the other end of the process – around the time a morning after pill is used, for instance – it may be no more preventing a small number of undifferentiated cells from plugging themselves into the uterine wall in about a week's time.

This is the point where my views begin to diverge from his. I agree that late stage abortion has no real difference from killing a newborn, but I seriously question the assertion that the fertilised ovum is anything other than a unique human being with their own life that cannot be justly brought to an end.

At one end there is definitely a someone, and like any other someone objectively his or her life has value. At the other end is a something, and while it’s something I’d value almost as much I can’t deny that that’s subjective. In between those two extremes is a large area that's increasingly grey around the middle.

This grey area is almost at the heart of the matter. The real problem here is continuity. Where is the point between embryo and baby where you can definitely say that is where the transition occurred? Is it when the first brain cell develops? The first heartbeat? Something that is "looking human"? I have come to the conclusion that this question has no meaning. There is no definable point between embryo and baby where you can say, right, from this moment forward we have a human being. Do you want a simple and categorical change in the nature of the being? Well, I can point to one: conception. At conception we go from being two haploid cells with no innate ability to divide and live to a single diploid cell with utterly unique DNA and, assuming conception did not occur in vitro and notwithstanding unlucky circumstance, the potential to grow into an adult human.

And here we run into another problem - most become nothing at all. Though I first learned this at school I’m not sure it’s widely known, but the majority of pregnancies fail and the majority of those that fail will fail early, i.e. in the first trimester. ... So it seems hard to assume that very early embryos/pre-embryos have rights to the uterus because of what they may become when sadly it's quite likely that they'll become a slightly heavier than normal menstrual flow and perhaps worse than usual cramps.

This is informative but it doesn't really affect the issue. Percentage chance of continuing life is no measure of the value of a life. In earlier centruries it was common for more than 50% of your children to die before adulthood. I don't think any sane person would venture to suggest that gave the parents decisional right to whether to raise them or not.

We can go further still and consider that those cells are almost entirely the woman’s own material except for the tiny component which is the single sperm that got into the ovum, and anyone who’s ever finished off a round of horizontal tango and found that the condom broke will know that that sperm cell may not necessarily have had an invite.

Once again, I have to say this does not fundamentally affect the issue. Any human is home to far more bacteria than their own cells, as is every full grown foetus no match for the number of cells of the woman carrying it. For these reasons I don't consider the situation of the newly fertilised egg to have any bearing on its uniqueness or life.

... do those cells get rights because the woman willingly took part in an enjoyable activity which admitted other cells into her body, one of which resulted in her becoming pregnant? It's tempting to think active participation makes it so ...

Very tempting - in fact I believe it does. Any sexual encounter is associated with a probability of pregnancy occurring as a result, except of course for those who are infertile for any reason. No matter how many measures of contraception are used they may all fail. Everyone who consents to intercourse knows this, and therefore accepts that pregnancy is a possible outcome. I'm not sure many people know this but that is the fundamental reason for laws regarding consent. I don't mean to discount the psychological damage that can happen when there is no consent (rape, in case you missed it), but at their heart the laws of consent recognise that both parties have a responsibility for the results of their actions, and one possible result is pregnancy. To accept the possibility of pregnancy at first and then turn and claim that the pregnancy is unwanted is foolhardy. If pregnancy is to be avoided, sex must be avoided.

Libertarianism, at least the way I see it, is both freedom and responsibility. The choice to end a pregnancy, whatever my personal feelings on the matter, is about a woman’s freedom and ownership of her own body to begin with and, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant, about her responsibility to exercise her choice long before the stage at which she’s also responsible for a human life within her.

Libertarians are fond of returning responsibility to the individual. I am taking that to its logical end - if two people consent to having sex they must both be willing to accept and care for a child that may result. That means abortion is not an option, at the very least not as after-the-fact contraception.

That's all I want to say for now about the reasons why I believe that in general abortion is not to be considered as after-the-fact contraception. I am going to venture from the sure foundation of logic and reason into the trecherous territory of morality and ethics.

Consider a hypothetical situation: let's say a woman has a loving husband, has the means to support a child, and wants to have a child. Would she get an abortion? I ask because it seems obvious but I don't know whether people recognise that if all women who were "sexually active" were in that situation, abortion would not be necessary. From what I've gathered over the years most women who resort to abortion are not just ice queens who have no regard for the life of their own children. It is typically the type of action to which one is driven by circumstance - like stealing food if you are about to starve. Shame, avoiding an "honour killing", the will of the father, these things are real and serious social issues and I can well understand the mind of someone who is driven to abort a child because they would suffer great persecution, even death, if people found out.

So I am not saying that I don't have sympathy for women who have ended up in these very difficult situations. In nearly all cases though, if abortion is the cure, the disease is preferable.

Not that I am calling pregnancy a disease, you understand. In fact, the acceptance of abortion in our culture is, I strongly believe, in part resultant from the change in how children are seen. In the past children were seen as a blessing, a gift. In modern times it seems a lot of people view them as a financial burden that restricts your own freedom to travel or do whatever. The very concept of an unwanted pregnancy is partially resultant from this view which is tremendously damaging to society. Think of my hypothetical situation before: the woman wants a child and has the means to bring one into the world, so why would she even consider aborting?

Another reason for the prevalence of abortion in our society is the prevalence of those conditions that will put women in these very difficult situations. "Casual" sex, particularly, can be blamed here, but so can all sex that happens outside marriage generally. Would a woman have shame for getting pregnant when she's married to the father? Would her male partner demand an abortion if they are financially stable and they both want a child?

Those extremely difficult situations that lead a woman to consider abortion are nearly all avoidable. You cannot get pregnant if you do not have sex (don't comment about IVF - I know and so do you, and you know I know). Abstinence is simple and obvious, but it's not easy. I may write further on that topic in the future.

The Fallacy of the Technological Singularity

2011-08-20T15:01:00.003+10:00

The Technological Singularity, or usually just "The Singularity" is a concept unfamiliar to most, I think, except technologists and futurologists, people who study computer science and artificial intelligence, and a few random others - actually quite a few people, probably. Sigularity is a term that has various meanings in physics, geometry, calculus, common speech and of course futurology. In all of them, however, it means something along the lines of "a discontinuous point". Generally this tends to be a point at which the tools we can use to help us understand the rest of the continuum no longer work. The Technological Singularity is a predicted point somewhere in the near future at which technological progress will become so accelerated that it will look "discontinuous".

Many people are familiar with Moore's Law. I have mentioned it in a previous blog entry. I may have waxed boring but I'm blogging to improve my writing skills, so do give me a break. Essentially the law (more like a forecast, really) states that processing power doubles every 2 years. This forecast also helps the technology companies decide how much R&D they need to do if they want to keep up. In that way it is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the trend was already there to find before it was found, so one can guess that even if the trend had never been identified we'd still have roughly the computing power we do. Now, the futurist would say, let us assume that Moore's Law will hold for the coming decades. Soon we will have a computer so powerful that it will be able to emulate the human brain. And suppose that intelligent computer were used to design a computer more powerful and intelligent than itself. Then we build its design and use the result to design an even more powerful and intelligent computer. The rate of progress is now no longer exponential, since we used human intelligence to achieve exponential progress - if we have a computer four times better than the human mind then we can have a computer twice as powerful as it in six months, rather than two years. Then we use that computer we got six months later, which is eight times more powerful than the human brain, to develop another computer in three months that is sixteen times more powerful than the human brain. The result of this is the Singularity - an escalating spike of many-times exponential technological progress. Before four years had passed the mathematical trend I just mentioned would mean that computer power was practically infinite.

The chart below illustrates this:

Here we see the singularity forming based on the scenario above

If we take the base 2 logarithm of this period we get the following result:

Normal technological growth would show up as a straight line. The scenario of the Singularity results in a perverse acceleration of technological development.

Of course there are limiting factors. It will take time to construct every iteration. There is a limited supply of resources and energy. The computer intelligences may well increase these supplies by inventing new technologies but they do have ultimate limits which cannot be exceeded.

The scenario I have outlined above is fairly simplistic but it is essentially what people expect from the events leading up to the Singularity. There are many doomsday or utopian predictions for what the fate of the human race will be in all this. It is these concerns that I wish to address. Futurists believe that the Singularity is inevitable - not in the same way that you might believe a minor accident is inevitable if you drive around for long enough - in the genuine no-possible-way-of-avoiding-it imperative super inevitable. They do not believe that it is even conceivable that the Singularity will not occur. In the words of John J. Xenakis, "No. No way. It's impossible. The Singularity cannot be stopped. It's as inevitable as sunrise."* I believe I can prove that the Singularity cannot occur.

There seem to be two general schools of thought on how the singularity will come about. One school believes that there will be computer or "robot" intelligences, the other, which I shall call the Singularity Cult, believes that the first hyper-intelligences will be human intelligences augmented by machines. The Singularity Cult hopes that it will be them.

I do not belive that either of these scenarios will result in a singularity. This is because I question the assumptions that go into the scenarios and result in the Singularity. Namely, the assumptions are these:
1. Computers can become genuinely aware.
2. Machine-mind neural interface is possible.
3. Production of new intelligences will accelerate.

If assumption one is incorrect, the Singularity can never occur. Let us assume for the moment that intelligence is an emergent property of the type of architecture that the human brain uses. We can create computers with similar architecture - in fact IBM have recently done so (they say) - and they may be able to solve problems in an intelligent way. But everything that chip does will be directed by human intervention. It will not by itself decide to create anything apart from the networks and programs it needs to do what we ask it to do. It is not self-directing, and I do not see any evidence that we will ever be able to create a computer that is self-directing. It will always and only take those directives and inputs we give it.

If only assumption two is incorrect, we are all in le merde. The machines will not care about us and they will use up all the energy in the world, returning us to the stone age overnight. We would destroy the machines before they could take control of the power supply, so the Singularity would not occur.
This is another thing technologists are sure of. My view is that the human brain is so complex that a reliable interface cannot be produced, no matter how many millenia of research are poured into it. The brain constantly changes its structure and the locations of various functions. It is - in a word - organic, it adapts to circumstance and every brain is unique in the particular way it processes, stores and retrieves information. We so far understand only the most basic aspects of how the most "basic" functions such as vision and other senses and regulatory systems work, we not much closer to understanding true intelligence than when we first used a sharpened bit of wood to kill a deer.

If assumption three is incorrect the Singularity cannot occur, and technological process will go back to being regularly exponential, albeit at a much higher multiplier.
My beef with this particular assumption is on much more solid ground than the other two. There is a finite rate at which resources can flow - both power and those resources required to build the intelligences. It also takes time to develop and construct the tools necessary to build the intelligences. All of these things put a limiter on the speed with which new intelligences may be created. Let's say the shortest time required to make a new one is one month. In my earlier example, that would cause the rate of progress to return to being regularly exponential, because the time axis is linear but the computing power axis is exponential. No matter how steep this new computer power/time line is, it will not result in a singularity. Technological progress will be extremely rapid, but it won't "fall up a cliff" as in the Singularity.

The following chart illustrates what might happen in this case:

Technological progress continues on in a single exponential trend - on this log base 2 normalised graph it is a straight line.

Much computing research is now in the field of neural network architecture and adaptive evolutionary code. It seems clear that this will eventually result in machines that far exceed the limitations of today's computers. They may see and hear and speak. They will certainly produce new inventions and new science - in fact they already have - but ultimately, they will be built by humans, for humans, and work produced by them will belong to humans. We will never be mastered by intelligent machines, because such machines are not truly intelligent. They simulate intelligence because we design them to. They speak, hear and see because we want them to. They may even kill, if we design them to. They will never be able to decide not to follow an instruction that is built in. They are tools - very sophisticated tools - but nevertheless have no moral superiority to a hammer or a crane. They are not capable of functions we do not build in to them, and never will be. So whatever the future of technology is, we should not fear it.

Almost anyone will believe almost anything ... because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.
- Terry Goodkind

*I have to say that I find many of his other conclusions highly questionable, although he does have some points that are worthy of consideration.

Boom and Bust

2011-08-07T17:37:00.005+10:00

Anyone unfortunate enough to stumble across my blog may be led to believe that I have no time or inclination for writing - after all, if I did there would be more posts, wouldn't there? The truth is rather different - I find it hard to choose what to write about, because it seems there are so many topics that urgently require my inspection. As a result I may make extensive notes about an idea and then never use it. It is a fact that I have fairly recently returned my appetite for knowledge so I must be a nett consumer of information if I am to get anywhere with anything. Hopefully I can return the fruits of my investigations to whoever is willing to read.

Lately I've been bending my will towards understanding economics. It seems that he field is muddy even to the experts, and assumptions and pitfalls abound. The 2008 crash showed that the banks didn't really know what they were doing, and before the crisis everyone thought the world was hunky-dory, so no-one else knew either, except a few like this guy. In fact I would hazard a guess that no one really knows what causes things like inflation, bubbles, deflation, crashes and the like. All we know is that generally if we put pressure on point x we get a response y. Thus when a country's official interest rate is lowered, inflation increases, and vice versa.

Most of today's economy seems to revolve around investors, in one way or another. The thinking is that no investor will willingly throw money away by buying into a bad deal, but the crash of 2008 showed this belief to be a fantasy. Governments can borrow money because investors are willing to give it to them - if they expect a return. Currencies are strengthen or weaken depending on how much faith investors have that the currency will stay strong or will weaken further. Companies can borrow money if banks think they will get a nett return, same for individuals. Investors bank money if they think the bank's practices are lucrative.

It does not take long to realise that this whole thing is a positive feedback loop. It all works if people are confident, but it rapidly goes down the toilet if people lose confidence. Granted this is a simplification but let's work with it for a moment. What are the checks? Where is the point where investment confidence is lost? Where is it gained? This article lists some of the causes and effects of four major crashes over the last century or so. They all have in common the formation of a "bubble" leading up to the crash. The first three have new rules associated with them that were intended to prevent future crashes. All of them failed. The Economists apparently ran out of talent, too, because no additional rules or institutions have resulted from the most recent crash, in order to prevent such a thing happening again. Instead we had costly bailouts, humiliatingly paid for by countries we might consider backward - China and the oil nations of the Middle East. In fact China is now the US's biggest creditor. The crashes we have suffered were either necessary, or they should direct us to restructure our finance. No one is claiming they were necessary and the Arab world laughed at us, saying their financial structures were more robust. So have we changed the way we do business? I should coco.

You may think I am having a downer on investors - after all, they are the link in the chain that has the most influence on the positive feedback - but I'm not, really. They are part of the problem but they are not the problem. The real problem is the way we do business. This article and the comments it sparked have some very interesting views, and suggest some solutions that are presently beyond me. It suggests that financial engineers are to blame for the crash, and to an extent they may be, but what is it about the system that makes financial engineering a tempting prospect in the first place? Why do bubbles form at all?

The answers to those questions are by no means obvious, and there is debate among economists on the answers. There are some things we can say with a reasonable degree of conviction, though. Firstly both the bubble and the crash are in principle based on investor psychology. It doesn't seem possible to identify one particular cause, instead a range of factors come into play.

A bubble is a type of inflation, except that in the real world if inflation causes a rise in the cost of, say, electricity, each kWh still has a genuine worth based on the production and distribution cost. Its worth is anchored in the work required to create it and get it into your house, or factory, or whatever. Of course demand can increase its price, but ultimately its worth can never go much above the economic benefit it gives to the buyer. Stocks, too, are subject to supply and demand. When a company is goes public its apparent worth is divided among stocks or shares, giving each of those shares a value that is defined by the total value of the company. The money raised from this partial sale is used to further the business. Over time the stocks of the company increase or decrease in value as investors buy or sell depending on whether they believe the company is growing or shrinking. Bad news, such as under-target profits, tend to depress the value of stock, and vice versa. But ultimately the real-terms value of stock is not known, it is only inferred from the company's past performance, market conditions and the company's current performance. So if investors suddenly believed that a company was going down the tubes they might sell all the public stock back to the company, resulting in a price drop that might make going down the tubes inevitable. A self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no anchor for the value of stocks, they are worth exactly what investors think they are worth. This becomes a problem when investors' beliefs are based on the beliefs of other investors. This was illustrated nicely when the dotcom bubble ocurred. Investors were so confident in the new business model that they thought such companies were worth more than their real value, resulting in a runaway investment boom that ended when everybody realised it was chaff. Some people legally made shed loads of cash by taking advantage of the investors' credulity. There is a word for such people. It is "conman". More can be found here. Similarly the bubble bursts when investors realise the bubble can no longer be sustained and opt out. A "correction" results, which, if the number of investors in the bubble is large enough, can become a crash, as investors with no exit strategy panic and sell as fast as possible to avoid heavy losses.

The model allows for rapid increases in stock prices, thus growing a company very fast, which can be a good thing, for sure, but this very volatility also gives rise to the possibility of a massive crash, resulting in a company losing value, likely ending up being undervalued. Instability is inherent in the system, so we either have to accept that crashes will occur and hope that the times of plenty make up for them, or we have to design a new system where stock valuations are not so volatile.

Solving Zeno's Paradox

2011-06-12T17:58:00.002+10:00

For those of you unfamiliar with Zeno of Elea, he was a Greek philosopher in the 5th century BC who proposed a series of paradoxes, mostly about motion, and how in the logic of the paradox it was impossible. I'm going to deal with just one of them, Achilles and the tortoise.

Imagine this scene: the Aegean sun is blazing on the white marble courtyards of Athens and Achilles has decided to race a toroise in it. Despite having rather fragile heels he is a sporting man and will thus allow the tortoise a significant head start on him. As the start of the race is signalled, by Socrates perhaps, asking the race organizer what a contest is, Achilles and the tortoise both set off, the tortoise with blazing fire and cracked cobblestones accompanying its supersonic progress ... oh wait, that's not right is it. Achilles runs, but half way to the tortoise's starting point he has a problem. He's traveled some distance but in that time the tortoise has moved away from him. He keeps on running despite this energy-sapping cogitation and ends up once again covering half the distance between where he was before and where the tortoise was before. Now he is starting to get confused. He's only a grunt after all, not a brain surgeon, and can't quite understand why the tortoise is still twice as far as Zenowill allow him to run. Before long his brain overheats and explodes, sending shrapnel into his heel and thus causing his demise, and the tortoise is declared the winner.

In the lucid prose of Aristotle: "In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead."

So how are we to solve this paradox? You may have seen solutions involving calculus or algorithms courtesy of Cauchy or Leibniz or other brilliant mathematicians but these are solutions of the problem, not solutions of the paradox. They only show that the paradox can be resolved, not what is wrong with it in the first place.

To make my solution more obvious, I will reword the paradox slightly: "Achilles can never pass the tortoise because he must first travel half the distance between them, then half the remaining distance, and so on for ever."
Now to solve it. Firstly we must examine all the time terms in this statement. Zeno says that Achilles can never reach the tortoise, by which I take it to mean that no matter how much time he is given, he can not pass the tortoise. Secondly, assuming that Achilles's speed is constant, the time of each successive "step" is half that of the previous step. The paradox lies in assuming that it takes an infinite amount of time to do an infinite number of steps. The mathematical solutions will tell you this is not the case. If we only allow finite steps, as specified in the paradox, then yes, Achilles really can't cover the distance. After all, finite steps do not furnish him the required time to close the gap. And then even if we allow the number of steps to go to infinity, the infinite sum of xi = t/(2^i) is t, the time taken for Achilles to reach the tortoise but not to get past. To get past he actually needs more time than the paradox has allowed him. To draw level he needs exactly the time allowed him, but this is far from obvious and it took the genius of Archimedes to work it out.

So it is not really a paradox at all. First Zeno says he has all the time in the world, then he implicitly says that he only has less time than it takes to complete the task in the first place. This is a contradiction, not a paradox, but it's really hard to spot.

Forgive me if I get a little technical ...

2011-05-31T23:05:00.004+10:00

As a bit of a technophile it's a fairly constant pleasure to see what can be done with consumer electronics these days. Advances apppear particularly dramatic in the field of computing, since most types of progress are exponential. This does have the side effect of making the whole thing seem a little pointless because if you buy your stuff this year then next year's processor will be twice as fast and use less power to boot. And that's not all, not by a long shot.

The expansion slots in your motherboard double in bandwidth every two years, seven months. The connectors feeding your hard drive double in bandwidth every two years, five months. External connections like USB and their ilk are a little more erratic but conservatively they double in bandwidth every two and a half years as well. I haven't done the sums but it'd be smart money to bet that RAM and CPU bandwidth are following a similar trend. If we project these trends to 2020 which, let's face it, is only nine years away, we can expect a colossal 2 Tbps over whatever graphics bus we're using then. Engineers are working to that goal now, you may depend on it. You can also expect a good 10 Gbps over the cable going to your external device, though, as today, whether you acheive the theoretical maximum may be a matter of "never". To put that into perspective, that's the kind of data rate the very latest graphics cards need to push those trillions of numbers around so the pretty lights happen on your screen in CoD.

It all seems rather excessive. And speaking of excess - yes, newer technology does take less power to do the same tasks as the silicon of yesteryear but don't forget that our ability to write code has ever been ahead of our ability to run that code. The best example to come from the game programmers is Crysis. When it was released in 2007 it had the singular distinction of being so catastrophically demanding at full setting that it was totally unplayable even if you had the best there was. My computer is three years younger than it and by any average person's standards it is a desktop sup ercomputer (the graphics cards can do about 4.1 TFLOPS), but wouldn't you know it I can't turn everything up to maximum either, not if I want to actually kill those Koreans. And as a result of all this, the total power consumption at maximum load is also going up quite a lot. I've just seen a 1.5 kW power supply. That could comfortably supply four PCs like mine at full chat, or in all likelyhood about seven of yours.

I do wonder, though, whether we will actually get to those kinds of speeds in consumer stuff. After decades of development we are reaching the point where the desktop computer can run photorealistic games at playable framerates. The trend is less towards more power from each chip as it is towards more chips. That's why the new AMD Phenom and the Intel i7 each have six processor cores. It's also why for some time now you could plug in two graphics cards, and now three or even four. And there's nothing stopping you from using those cards with two GPUs so in theory you could have eight GPUs in the one computer. If you are clinically insane.

Of course it is easy to imagine things that need ever more code and ever more processing as a result, but the returns are deminishing. In other words, there's not that much difference between "nearly photorealistic" and actually photorealistic, but there's a huge difference in terms of the processing required. If you don't believe me, consider that I can actually run Crysis quite nicely, but it took a 40,000 processor supercomputer some months to stitch together the complex physics and visuals of Avatar.

I guess the real question is whether gamers of the future will demand things like proper fluid dynamics and fully realistic destructible environments. Hardware tesselation is the showpiece of DX11 so perhaps the notoriously computationally intensive simulations like hair, fluids, cloth and refraction will be in the revisions to come. If they are, though, I really do hope we don't end up with something like an extremely furry wookie wearing Jedi clothes and swimming to Otoh Gunga. 'Cos if we do, we'll have gone backwards. Let's not fall into the trap of too eagerly computing things just because we can.

The Biblical basis for ... blogging?

2011-05-06T18:23:00.002+10:00

In returning to blogging after a long absence (see the posts in 2008-10 as an example) I have sometimes considered a rather fundamental question: "why bother?" There are many successful blogs out there, no doubt influencing the thoughts of thousands of people each, but do I really believe that mine would reach that kind of influence? And if it did, what'd be the point anyway? Why do people need to know what I think at all?

Answering a question about a specific case is often difficult unless you have some concept of the bigger picture. A simple way of getting to the big picture is to generalise your own question first, then see if it becomes easier to answer. So if I ask, why do people need to know what I think at all? I can generalise by saying, why do people need to know what anyone thinks or has ever thought? In other words, what is the basis for pedagogy? In today's news there are few articles about the subject of education that don't implicitly or explicitly assume that education is important. I don't think anyone really stops to think of why this is, and why not? Is it so obvious that it doesn't require answering? In some ways it is - it is fairly clear that education has been a large influence in the advancement of Western society to the technological state we experience today. But then once you assert that it's good for building civilisation you have to ask, what is the basis for the desirability of civilisation?

As a Christian I try to take my guidance from what the Bible says about such things. It has plenty of words advising parents to teach their children God's Law, and about the history of God's people. Those things are important but they don't obviously illustrate the basis for general teaching of accumulated knowledge that is not directly about God, by which I mean all we have learned through science, logic, mathematics, philosophy and history. To find the basis for trying to understand nature and ourselves we need look no further than Genesis 1 where God said to the freshly minted mankind: "Fill the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion." To prepare us for the special duty of having dominion over the Earth and being faithful stewards of it, he provided us with curiosity about Himself. This curiosity spills over into curiosity about nature so that we ask the following two questions: how can we be better stewards of the people and land over which God has given us authority? what can we learn about God's nature from His creation?

Taken together, those questions ensure pedagogy, because as much as we have learned about how to do the first and what we have found out through the second, we have to teach our children and fellows so that whatever we have found that improves our ability to live in creation continues to influence future generations without them having to rediscover it, and whatever we have marvelled at in creation, if we pass on that knowledge our descendants can improve and expand on it.

To think that we have achieved all we see only in the last hundred years is a mistake. The 20th century was preceded by the 19th, and they weren't exactly living in caves. We think we are so advanced and enlightened, and we are, but we stand on the shoulders of thousands of generations of enquirers who, through their persistance, and by passing their knowledge on, have blessed every generation that has come after them. The cumulative effect of all this skill is the modern information age in which we live, and we are charged to be equally diligent in asking those two fundamental questions so that future generations can be blessed by us.

So that's the long answer as to why I should blog: I think of things other people might not, and if I don't pass them on, then what is the good of me ever having thought of them at all?

Farewell Oceanus, and we thank you.

2011-04-29T19:47:00.002+10:00

I'm going to continue the previous post's theme of consumer products because I'd like to talk about Oceanus.

Consider this list: the Bugatti Veyron; Concorde; the SR-71; the Hubble Space Telescope; the Saturn V. Each a shining example of daring, engineering excellence, and a combination of money and a certain amount of fiscal irresponsibility. That is the reason why literally none of them are mass-market consumer goods. They peerless in every way.

Fortunately the Japanese have other ideas. They thought that more such peerless pieces of technology should grace the marketplace, at least this seems to have been the reasoning Casio took when they decided to launch Oceanus.

For those who don't know, Casio is an electronics company from Japan. Their presence in many countries is decidedly downmarket, but they have their eye on excellence as well. Many people will be familiar with their cheap digital watches, so favoured by schoolboys and terrorists, but what you might not know is that the cheap watches are only the tip of the iceberg. In Japan there is nothing downmarket about Casio and one could easily spend a thousand dollars or more on one of their watches. To try to market to this bracket abroad (particularly the US and Europe) they took a leaf out of Toyota's book and created a new prestige brand called Oceanus.

The brief was simple: all the functionality of the digital watch with the elegance of an analogue appearance, wrapped up in the best materials available and topped up with all the best features from Casio's extensive experience.

The result of this confluence of technology was the original oceanus: the first atomic solar chronograph watch. For practicality there was a small LCD screen to address the various changes in mode. It had solar power and a titanium case and bracelet - for me the #2 and #3 most important things in a watch (#1 is telling the time ... duh). It was also very good looking and despite the analogue appearance it still packed a high resolution stopwatch, some alarms, atomic time calibration, and world time.
Their next effort took things up a notch: they threw away the digital display entirely and replaced it with another hand to create the five motor.
Next they replaced the world time dial with one that showed the day of the week, a tide graph, and various other functions to create the 700 series, and to my eyes the best-looking Oceanus ever made. They also took some of the lessons learned from the Oceanus to their MT-G lineup, resulting in the 1000 series (my personal favourite).

Now it seems that the mid-level Oceanus are all but gone. Some of the high-end watches remain, but who can say if this is only because they are slower to sell? It seems like Concorde and some of the other technological showpieces I mentioned it is destined to rot in the back of a drawer after one of its motors fail or the battery finally wears out. And to me, this seems sad. In many ways we see to be going backward. We create something wonderful and because it's not made in Geneve, it's not quite good enough for us.

Time for a Tricorder

2011-03-21T00:35:00.006+11:00

I believe it's time to start turning our mobile phones into the Tricorders they will eventually become. Here follows a rundown of the features I'd like to see on future handheld communications devices.

Modern mobile phones are pretty amazing devices. For an outlay of a thousand dollars or so you can get a large, efficient touch screen, a powerful CPU (and we are just starting to see the advent of mobile dual-core - clearly the industry is casting around for something to add in to make us all upgrade), accelerometers, GPS radio, GSM and HSDPA radio, bluetooth radio, FM receiver, magnetic digital compass, digital cameras and LED lights. This is undeniably an impressive list, and nearly all of it is thanks to the magic of semiconductors. However I believe that there are a number of items that could be added to this list in the near future, with a little innovation, that would turn the location, communication and calculation swiss army knife that is the modern phone into a true multi-talented mobile masterpiece.

1. Near IR night camera (with IR floodlight). Really, why haven't they done this already? It allows night time videography, so your friends' drunken antics will be even more clearly visible. Also good for spotting wildlife.

2. UV detector. Good for a day at the beach. Combined with the SPF rating of your sunscreen this could tell you how long you can stay in the sun before you start to burn.

3. Barometer. I have one of these in my watch so there's no reason you couldn't put it in a phone. You could use it to find your altitude indoors perhaps, or measure changes in altitude for a small amount of power (GPS uses a lot).

4. Electrical multi-meter. OK I know there are prefectly good multi-meters out there today but think of all the everyday items that have been absorbed by the mobile monster mash - clocks (have you noticed not many people wear watches these days?), calculators, Walkmans, handheld GPS and so on. Why not make the electrical fiddler proud of his new phone? You could even use the headphone socket for the probes.

5. Laser range-finder. Again this may not have mass-market appeal but maybe that's because no one has ever had access to such a thing before. People didn't know they needed accelerometers until those spirit level apps became available, after all, and now they use them all the time.

6. Laser temperature probe. Great for avoidance of a hot engine. Maybe you want to know if that saucepan has cooled down now.

7. Thermocouple. Again this could easily plug into the headphone or USB port, and allows you to find out how hot your coffee is, whether it's time to take out that cake, if your iced drink has cooled to 5 degrees yet, whatever.

8. Thermometer. This is a slightly dubious one since after your phone has been in your pocket all day it's only going to tell you how warm and snug a mouse would be were you to keep one in there. There are situations where it could be useful, though I suspect it would most commonly be used to complain to the building manager that the AC needs to be turned down.

9. Thermal camera. For me this is the holy grail. If a phone came out with a thermal camera I would sell my car for the privilege of owning one. This could help you find leaks in your house's insulation, look for computer components to cool, check out how well your cold weather clothing is working, the possibilities are endless. I'd use it for finding wildlife at night. Obviously with one of these the laser probe would be obsolete.

10. Light sensor. Yes, I know they already use those, but how about calibrating them and using them to tell us the luminous flux of light bulbs, the sun, whatever? That could be useful for photographers.

11. Geiger-counter. This is a bit of a niche application but I remember several occasions in physics lab at uni when I wanted for one of these. Also considering the amount of worry over radiation released by the nuclear industry these could help put people at their ease about fallout.

12. Solar cell. Unlike the others this isn't a sensor, but you could easily make part of the back of the phone into a solar cell that would help with battery life, possibly quite a lot. You could even arrange matters such that it charges the phone even if it is switched off, thereby giving you a full charge with no cables necessery.

Obviously no one is going to fit all of these to the one phone, but if manufacturers are really that desperate to sell, there are a few in that list that could be implemented today and would really set theirs apart from the others, perhaps even garnering them a reputation of catering for professionals. The resulting arms-race could be spectacular. And nearly all of these are present as semiconductor technologies today.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking no one in their right mind would buy such a thing unless they needed all those features. Ever heard of a Swiss Army Knife? Yeah.

A Tax on the Innumerate

2007-11-04T13:22:00.000+11:00

Couple of days ago I was sitting in the lounge deleting old recordings from the hard drive of our PVR when The Mint was on. There was a word find puzzle on there, from which you were meant to find words beginning with A. I found aegis and I was sure that that would be one of their six special words that allowed you to win money, so I called them up. Call cost: 55c. Didn't get in. Tried again. Again, didn't get in. Tried again. Can you guess what happened? That's right, I didn't get in. I watched some more, not intending to make any more phone calls. A lady got in a guessed one of the six words. I thought, great, she'll get a thousand dollars! Nope. She was introduced to "The Vault" which needs a three digit combination to open. Ah.

With this information, I turned the TV off. Even if you got through every single time and guessed right, that still only means an expected earning of 45c per call.
Let's work this out. I tried calling three times, and didn't get in. Let's say very generously then that the probability of getting on to win some money is 1/4. Now let's further say that since there were about 12 words and only half were the ones they wanted, the probability of guessing right is 1/2. Now let us say that the vault has been reached by two previous people and you know that those numbers are invalid. So the probability of getting into the vault is 1/998.
Finally the expected value of earning for each call is given by the product of all the probabilities multiplied by the prize money, minus the cost.

Expected earnings:
1/4 * 1/2 * 1/998 * 1000
= $0.0000313

Subtract the cost:
Expected balance per call = -$0.5499687

Yeah.

Little Annoyances

2007-10-09T21:57:00.000+10:00

t

That's right, people, here in Australia we keep left.
Speaking of which, here are a few common courtesy rules that help everyone:

1. Keep left on footpaths.

2. Allow passengers to disembark from a train before you get on.

3. Leave a bus from the rear entrance and enter through the front entrance.

4. Keep train doorways clear.

5. Old ladies and pregnant women first!

6. Allow people space to pass on on the escalator/travelator.

7. Lower the volume on your music player so other people don't have to hear your thrash metal.

8. Avoid shouting across carriages, laughing loudly and continuously, etc, anything that disturbs other passengers.

Darkness, be my friend ...

2007-10-03T17:21:00.000+10:00

Darkness, be my friend

When light goes out, all friends long gone,
Darkness cloaks where no light is shone.
But when light is there in your heart,
Of it darkness can have not part.

Do not fear the gloom, embrace it,
For when alone in the dark you sit,
No friend there is but gloom within,
Then shadow itself will be your kin.

Say only, "Darkness, be my friend."
And darkness will not be your end.
For shadow cannot pierce the light.
Does not the day strike out the night?

If shadow shunned is shadow feared,
So surely loved is shadow neared.
Presently light may darkness rend.
'Till that time, Darkness, be my friend.

First Poem

2007-07-24T20:50:00.000+10:00

No, this isn't my first poem ever, just the first poem on this blog. Also it's not mine - it was written by a friend of mine.

I wish I could live it again
But this time without the pain
I wish I could make a new beginning
This time a life worth living

I'm stuck in this life
One I didn’t want
Theres no way out
I wish I knew what it was all about

I wanna crawl into my bed
And forget the thoughts running through my head
Forget about this life I’ve led..

I sit alone
And I wonder why its gotta be this way
I was born to try
But I wonder why when all I find is pain
Is there more or did I lose it all before?

Remember when I said I'd had enough?
And I couldn’t go on?
But you made a promise
One you didn’t break
You said you'd be here
When I thought the end was near

The Worst Show in the Entire World

2007-07-19T16:26:00.000+10:00

No, I'm not referring to Big Brother. I'm not referring to Home and Away. I'm not even talking about Pokémon. I am, of course, talking about Family Guy. Now I want to make it clear that I never watch American cartoon comedy, apart from the Simpsons. So I had never seen Family guy until long after it became seriously popular. The first episode I watched had me gagging after just a few minutes. I was at my friend's place with a bunch of other people and we were going to go to my house, so I implored them all to get going. But anyway, I sat through that one show. The only two things I can remember are little "imagined" snippets that the show is well-known for. The first one approached the German persecution of the Jews in a humorous way, with a group of hiding Jews being revealed to the SA because of the dad's unwillingness to stop eating potato crisps. The second involved a humorous depiction of incest. Anyway, after seeing that, and deciding that never again in my entire life did I want to see another second of it, many months passed and recently I was on a Christian camp, with the boys. One night we watched it, and it wasn't that bad, until it got about two thirds of the way finished. There was a little sketch involving Jesus Christ which was most irreverent, defaming, ridiculing. I almost couldn't believe my eyes.
I'm telling you now that show is the work of Satan and no conscientious Christian should watch it for a moment. I have rarely seen the like of it in terms of making the most grievous of sins the subject of humour. If you have any regard for God, I implore you DON'T WATCH IT.

Extra Terrestrial Life

2007-07-16T00:13:00.000+10:00

So, aliens then. Lots of people are obsessed with the search for extra terrestrial life, and whenever a new molecule of water is discovered on an interstellar planet they do a press release so people think progress is being made. I for one do not see any reason why there should be extraterrestrial life, but I can think of a very good reason for finding earth-like xenoplanets. But, first things first.

The idea of life arising on other planets because it clearly has done so on this planet is a bit of a conundrum. No one really knows how life began on this planet in the first place, so no one can attest the the probability of it arriving spontaneously on other planets as well. Personally I don't think it's probable enough to expect any form of life other than earthlife in any part of the universe. However I do expect some earthlife on other planets in the solar system, and perhaps beyond.
Life on this planet has been going on for a fair few billion years, and any large meteorites hitting would result in a sort of ejecta cloud of bacteria and rock heading out of earth's gravity well. To reach Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbour, in two billion years, a rock need only travel at about half a meter per second (on average). Which is possible. So I do expect that we might find some earthlife on moons and planets in this solar system, perhaps even others.
We will not, however, find intelligent, moral beings on other planets. There are several reasons why. The first is God. The creation account states that we are the only creatures made in God's Image, and if there are other moral beings this would be a rather glaring omission. Also, we were given the creation to "fill and subdue". If they are moral creatures too they would have the same mandate which would thus clash and would prove that the Bible was not the word of God. However it is the word of God, so we may be confident that no such first contact will ever be made.
And now we're getting to the second reason why there are no other civilised life forms. For any civilisation even slightly more advanced than us, colonising the Universe would be so easy that the fact we see no evidence of them is very strong evidence that we are the most advanced, if not only, civilisation currently in the Universe.

Now we come to the reason why it's good we're looking for planets that can sustain our kind of life: we can use them. When we learn to manipulate spacetime we will be able to travel anywhere in the Universe, so those planets are bound to come in handy some time.

Low-Level Stressors

2007-07-06T20:11:00.000+10:00

Low level stressors are slight stresses to one or more of your body's systems or organs. These stresses can be caused by anything that would be harmful to your health in a large dose, for example X-rays, sunburn, carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals), other toxins, high temperatures, heavy excercise and the like. Virtually everyone will tell you that these things are bad for your health, and they are right - a large dose of X-rays can kill within a few weeks, prolonged heavy excercise will dramatically shorten your lifespan and so on. But research has shown that for some of these, the exposure/risk relationship is not linear. In other words, exposure at high levels is harmful, but at low levels it may not be, or may even be beneficial.

The effect is called hormesis, and it is well known in the drug industry. Research has shown that some drugs which stimulate at low doses suppress at high doses (paracetamol, asperin), and vice versa. Some scientists now think that other stresses can act in much the same way, by stimulating your natural repair and defense systems and so increasing their effectiveness. You may have heard that people whose immune systems are not stressed are often sickly, whereas country dwellers who are exposed to a range of bacteria enjoy enviable health and freedom from allergies. It is now thought that other body systems work in the same way - a "use it or lose it" idea. A simple analogy is callousing. If your hand's skin is not stressed, it remains soft and pliable, and relatively easy for a thorn to enter. If you rub that spot on and off for a couple of weeks with a rock, the skin will thicken in response and sharp objects will have a much harder time getting through it. You may not want callouses on your hands, but people who play guitars without a pick need them to prevent their skin wearing through. Other organs and systems respond in the same way. Using your mind a lot will sharpen your perception, excercise strengthens your muscles and stimulates your heart and lungs to work more efficiently. So small doses of toxins, radiation and other stressors can build up the repair systems to be more robust and even reduce the effects of aging. Animals have shown important increases in longevity as a result of caloric restriction, which is now thought to operate as a low level stressor.

But there's no need to go on a near-starvation diet if you want to live longer. Just enjoy life a little closer to the edge.

Time travel?

2007-06-24T17:45:00.000+10:00

We're all traveling through time, sort of. It's not that great though because we all travel through time at the same rate, at one second per second. The trick then is to travel at more than one second per second, or less, or even travel at negative one second per second. Fortunately, help is at hand because time travel is in fact possible, according to the laws of General Relativity anyway. Unfortunately, it doesn't involve a simple and cheap flux capacitor dissipating 1.21 GW. You need gravity, because you have to severely distort spacetime. In essence, there are two ways of making a time machine and both of them involve a singularity. A singularity is the sort of thing you get in the center of a black hole. It is a point, line or sheet of infinite density. When very massive stars die they sometimes collapse into a singularity, which is almost always obscured by the event horizon of a black hole. However there is no law that says they have to be hidden from view. But I digress.
When some matter collapses into a singularity it forms, for a very brief instant, a wormhole to another region of spacetime, in this universe or, more controversially, another universe entirely. The wormhole immediately pinches off though, but there is a way around that. What you need is some exotic matter, which is predicted to be left over from the big bang. No such matter has ever been found but in time with space exploration perhaps we might find some. What we need is cosmic string. Cosmic string possesses a peculiar property called negative pressure, which we can use to keep the wormhole open. Once we have created a wormhole, and located the other end, we must then move one mouth of the wormhole around at very high speed (I think you can see how difficult this is going to be) so that time slows down for it. Moving clocks run slow, so time slows down for moving wormhole mouths. We need to move it around fast enough for long enough to create and appreciable time difference between the two mouths. Then all we have to do is bring the two mouths together. If you travel from the mouth that moved to the mouth that remained stationary you will effectively travel into the future, whereas if you travel in the other direction, you will travel backwards in time. You can never travel backwards in time earlier than the creation of the wormhole though.
The second way to make a time machine is to take some neutron stars, ten will do, and spin them up really really fast. So fast that at the surface the instantaneous velocity is about half the speed of light. Then you need to align them all so they're pole to pole and they will collapse into a spindle singularity. At this point you may travel through time using the spinning singularity. It works because a rotating mass drags spacetime around with it, in theory. The earth does this too but you don't notice the effect because the earth is rotating very very slowly, and it is extremely light. But it's real, according to Einstein, and data is now available to confirm or refute it. The data is still being analysed, but it's assumed that it will be right. Anyway, in the region around a very quickly spinning, very heavy singularity, the effect is so strong that time and space start to interchange, so you can travel in a closed orbit around the equator of the singularity to travel forwards in time, or in the reverse direction to travel backwards in time. Again, you can only travel back to the moment is was created, but hey, it's time travel, and there's nothing that says you can't do it.

Greatness

2007-06-23T16:32:00.000+10:00

What is greatness? Is it a quality with which one is born, or must it be earned? Is it merely the possession of great power, as in a great ruler, or is it something more? Is it mastery of your chosen path, or is it nothing to do with knowledge and power?

I think greatness is a quality of all who are truly good, who truly seek to serve and sacrifice themselves for others. Evil can never have greatness; it is a quality belonging only to those who are good and who act upon it. Evil can of course be great - some evils are worse than others, and more powerful than others, but that is largeness, not greatness. To be truly great one must serve.

At lest, that is how I see it.

Helium

2007-06-06T12:53:00.000+10:00

Helium. On the face of it, rather a boring element. Doesn't really react chemically with anything. Most people's only contact with helium is in the form of helium balloons. Actually, though, helium is a very valuable resource. You might think that because it's very light, and all elements apart from hydrogen are the result of nuclear reactions, that it is common. And you'd be right - it makes up about 10-20% of all mass in the universe. The rest is hydrogen - all the other elements combined are insignificant. Down here on earth things are different, though. Here we have gravity to worry about. When helium reaches the upper atmosphere, some of it escapes into space. The reason for this is that at any given temperature, a volume of gas will contain some particles that are traveling faster and some that are traveling slower. The average of all these velocities gives the temperature. In the upper atmosphere some helium particles travel so fast that they escape the earth's gravity well. Escape velocity: Ve = sqrt(2Gm/r) where G is the universal gravitational constant, m is the mass of the body and r is the distance from the center of mass. Escape velocity from the earth's surface is about 11.2 km/s, which is of course VERY fast, faster than anything. It's about three hundred times the speed of sound. In the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, at an altitude of 10,000 km the escape velocity is only 8.9 km/s. Now, of course, heavier gases will have lower RMS velocities because RMS kinetic energy is the same for all gases at a given temperature. Radon, one of the heaviest gases, is about fifty times heavier than helium. Kinetic energy: Ek = 1/2mv^2 where m is the mass of the body and v is its velocity. So radon's RMS velocity is just 13% that of helium. Heavy gases are not buoyant enough to reach the upper atmosphere though. Helium and hydrogen are and a lot of both of these gases is lost each year. Luckily we have plenty of hydrogen, locked away in water and other compounds. But helium doesn't form any compounds, because its electrons are very tightly bound, so it just migrates to the upper atmosphere and escapes. Jupiter doesn't have this problem so severely - it has such a powerful gravitational field that not even hydrogen can escape in any great amount. The same is true of Saturn and the other gas planets.
So our helium is escaping, slowly. So what. Well, there are a few natural processes that produce more helium, chief among which is radioactive decay. When Uranium decays eventually to lead it releases a few atoms of 4He on the way there, and these get trapped underground in oil wells and natural gas, which is where we get most of our helium from. Some 3He is formed by interactions in the upper atmosphere as well - when cosmic radiation starts frying nitrogen that's up there. These are the only sources of helium on earth, so we would be wise not to be so cavalier about the way we use it - balloons for instance.
So what is helium good for? Well, if you want to go SCUBA diving really far down, you're going to have to deal with the problem of the bends, eventually. At depth, the air you're breathing has to be higher pressure, to match the pressure of the water, and at high pressure the solubility of nitrogen in your blood increases dramatically. When you return to the surface too quickly the nitrogen becomes less soluble, and can't be breathed out fast enough, so it forms bubbles in your blood, same way a carbonated drink forms bubbles when it's opened. Helium has such a high RMS velocity that it doesn't dissolve in your blood very much at all, so if you breathe oxygen mixed with helium, you can go down to much greater depths and pressures without worrying too much about decompression.
Helium is also very useful for low temperature physics. Helium has no nett dipole moment, so helium atoms don't attract one another very well at all. It's also very light which means that it's fast, and quantum mechanical juggling due to uncertainty is very big. All this means that helium has to be at a very low temperature before it will liquefy. Helium doesn't freeze at all. Ever. So you can use it as a refrigerant gas for making things very cold because it's still a gas at 5K. It also behaves very strangely at these temperatures. It becomes a superfluid at around 2K - it's a sharp changeover, much like a change from liquid to solid. This means that it stops behaving like a regular fluid and starts behaving like a quantum mechanical fluid. This means, for one thing, that it can only have integer values of turbulence and rotation. Practically, this means that you can spin a bucket of liquid helium and the fluid will stay still until you spin the bucket fast enough for the first rotational quantum value. So it has stepwise rotation. It also flows with zero friction though fine tubes because it cannot become turbulent. It can only allow eddies of a certain size and angular momentum, and below this size no eddies can form, so no energy can be dissipated. An experiment has been conducted where a hollow torus was filled with fine powder and then liquid helium. The helium was set flowing around the ring, and it never stops. Water molecules would bash into the fine powder and stop flowing very quickly, but helium can't become turbulent at that scale so it just keeps on flowing.
It's interesting stuff, helium. Think about that next time you let a balloon float up into the sky.

Here we go again

2007-06-05T20:59:00.000+10:00

My last few attempts to create a blog were beset by difficulties, chief among which was the fact that I didn't have the determination to continue. So lets see how it turns out this time around.

I think it's probably fitting to start with an update on where things are in relation to me.

Currently I'm a student at Monash University in Clayton, and have been for the last two and a half years, roughly, which means right about now is the Monash exam period. Oh joy. I have about nine days to study for my exams, then I'm traveling to Adelaide to see my girlfriend of two months, before returning here to Melbourne with her. Then it's crunch time. After that there's a rather different kind of crunch time when I have my 21st birthday party. Sooo many things stressing me. And so much time to be stressed in. Basically the whole of June can be written off as a total loss. But at least I'll have Karina with me.