Relevant History

Trip to Oxford

Last week I went to Oxford for a few days. I was giving a talk and had to be back for my daughter's school play, so it was just a quick trip. I hope to make it back for a longer trip before too long.

Fortunately, Oxford was no longer buried under the show-stopping two inches of snow that has assaulted the nation the week before. By the time I got there the place was back to normal, so I was able to get around without any trouble.

Oxford, via flickr

I arrived on Sunday afternoon, worked on my talk for most of the day, then went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner and walked around afterwards. The restaurant was great, and doubtless I'll go back there, but it has a bit of an Eastern Promises feel to it: I got the sense that there were plenty of things going on besides grilling lamb and making hummus (which was excellent, don't get me wrong).

excellent hummus, via flickr

And I was by the far the least swarthy person in the restaurant, which for me is an unusual state of affairs.

I stayed at the Royal Oxford, which was fine as always, though my room looked out at the central courtyard and the ventilation system was about two feet away from my window. But it was a pretty big room, so I guess it was an acceptable trade-off. My feelings about the bathroom design still hold, though: they fell down on the job during the renovation, made the bathtubs too tall, and made it hard to get in an out in a way that feels safe.

Monday was work, so after breakfast I spent most of the rest of the day actually doing what I went there to do. Monday night I had dinner at a rather nice French restaurant in Jericho, one of the neighborhoods of Oxford. I met up with David Orrell, the author of The Future of Everything and someone whose work I find quite interesting.

When I looked it up, it sounded like Jericho was a suburb of Oxford, and I imagined having to take a bus out there; but it turns out to be about a 5-minute walk from the center of town to the edge of the neighborhood. Apparently it started out as a working-class area (Oxford was actually a manufacturing center for a long time, in addition to being a university town), and recently has been gentrified.

Brasserie Blanc, via flickr

Orrell is a very interesting character, a physicist who did some really interesting work on model error in meteorology, and now works in synthetic biology. We spent a couple hours at dinner, talking about prediction, futures, computer and mathematical models, and economics. One of the more interesting things he talked about was how simple models often do a poorer job of explaining the past than elaborate models (that to some degree are tailored to fit historical data), but do a better job of predicting the future. I've been turning over in my mind whether it's possible to apply this to the kind of futures that I do. I'm usually sensitive to the complexity and contingency of human action and decisions, and that tends to make me assume that you can't simply model human behavior in a usefully predictive way-- that people's interactions with scientific ideas and technologies aren't quantifiable and computationally tractable.

Maybe this observation helps explain Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's success. His method does well because of its formality and relative simplicity: he claims to be able to predict the outcomes of political negotiations or corporate power struggles with a pretty limited, specific amount of information. Of course, he also succeeds because he recognizes the limits of his model, and doesn't push it into areas where it seems likely to fail. I'd like to think that there are no good models for predicting scientific and technological change because they're too complex. But maybe I'm not looking hard enough for the simplicity.

I don't know if I'm on a lucky streak, or if I tend to gravitate unconsciously to books written by pleasant and generous people instead of self-righteous jerks-- Andrew Parker was really a great person to have breakfast with-- but David maintained my streak of having interesting meals with people I basically cold call when I'm in Europe. One of the virtues of being American is that you can deploy a level of extroversion (or intrusiveness) when you travel and, so long as you don't go overboard with it, people will forgive you for it. (I suspect that one of the keys to living abroad is figuring out when you really have to fit it with the local culture, and when you can get away with things because of Where You're From.)

Oxford, via flickr

After dinner I walked around a little, as is my custom when I'm on the road; but since I had to pack and be up very early to catch the bus to Heathrow, I decided not to stop at any of the fifty or so pubs I've passed that inspired a "oh that looks good, I'll have to have a drink there sometime" reaction. Next time. And the time after that.

Oxford, via flickr

Tuesday morning I was up at a punishingly early hour to get home. I've gotten in the habit of falling asleep to movies or music when I travel, and tonight for some reason had on a playlist of Michael Mann movies; so I drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of gunfire and vague apprehension of beautifully-illuminated but sinister cityscapes. Then I got the X70 bus to Heathrow, had breakfast in the Red Carpet Club, and got on my plane.

[To the tune of Rob Dougan, "Clubbed to Death 2," from the album Furious Angels (a 4-star song, imo).]

More on Avatar

The New York Times weighed in a few days ago on the Avatar Interpretation Complex (something I wrote a bit about), and I'm just now getting around to reading it:

["Avatar" has] found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

Over the last month, it has been criticized by social and political conservatives who bristle at its depictions of religion and the use of military force; feminists who feel that the male avatar bodies are stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts; antismoking advocates who object to a character who lights up cigarettes; not to mention fans of Soviet-era Russian science fiction; the Chinese; and the Vatican. This week the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of the film would be pulled from most theaters there to make way for a biography of Confucius.

That so many groups have projected their issues onto “Avatar” suggests that it has burrowed into the cultural consciousness in a way that even its immodest director could not have anticipated. Its detractors agree that it is more than a humans-in-space odyssey — even if they do not agree on why that is so.

"Some of the ways people are reading it are significant of Cameron’s intent, and some are just by-products of what people are thinking about," said Rebecca Keegan, the author of "The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron." "It’s really become this Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties."

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, "I've Got To Sing My Song," from the album Circle Of One (a 2-star song, imo).]

Slime mold, efficiency expert

Jim Nash reports on a new study that... well, you've got to just read about it yourself.

Researchers have turned to a slime mold for tips on work efficiency.... Physarum polycephalum built a replica of the Tokyo train system in 26 hours that’s just about as efficient, reliable and “expensive” to run as the real thing....

[A team of British and Japanese scientists] created a map of the Tokyo metro area using oat flakes for the major cities. Then they put a gelatinous blob (technically, a plasmodium) of Physarum on “Tokyo,” and sat back to see what would happen.

Within about 12 hours, the mold had covered the area with a thin and wet veined sheath of itself. By the 26th hour, the sheath was gone, replaced by mushy tunnels connecting the flakes. The tunnels mimicked Tokyo’s transit system.

An article in Science offers some more detail:

The trick has to do with how slime molds eat. When Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold often found inside decaying logs, discovers bacteria or spores, it grows over them and begins to digest them through its body. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear.

Researchers have harnessed this behavior to amusing effect in the past. In 2000, for example, a team led by mathematical biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University in Japan, showed that P. polycephalum could find the shortest path through a maze to connect two food resources. (The work won an Ig Nobel prize.)

But that was a puzzle with a single correct solution. In the new work, the team wanted to know how the mold would perform in a real-world situation in which several competing objectives had to be balanced at once. Designing a railway network that connects many cities presents just such a problem. "The planning is very difficult because of the tradeoffs," says cell biologist Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who was also involved in the research. For example, connecting all cities by the shortest possible length of track often compels travelers to take highly indirect routes between any two points and can mean that a single failure isolates a large part of the network. Building in more redundancy makes the network more convenient and more resilient, but at a higher cost.

While it seems like a bit of a lark, I think there's something pretty interesting here. You can see it as an example of the application of natural-world expertise (or to use an even more fraught term, animal intelligence) to engineering problems, a kind of biomimicry: you don't need to know how the slime mold figures out how to optimize routes, but can trust that over millions of years it has figured out the shortest paths to food. This would be one of its core competencies.

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, "Rhythm Of Life," from the album Circle Of One (a 3-star song, imo).]

Hello SFO-- Oxford here I come!

I'm in San Francisco International Airport, on my way to London. A lamentably quick trip, but always exciting to get across the pond.

For some reason the check-in line is REALLY slow. Fortunately I'm here with plenty of time.

What I have to look forward to next week

From torrential downpours to this. Great.

[To the tune of Jimmy Page & Robert Plant, "Most High," from the album Walking Into Clarksdale (a 3-star song, imo).]

Quote of the day

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. (Samuel Johnson)

h/t to Jessica Goodman's Feeling Elephants

Huge rain this morning

The rain today is pretty amazing. So is the thunder.

via flickr

At Peninsula School, I'm told by my informants (aka my kids) that the kids have stopped calling the Big Puddle the Big Puddle, and are now calling it the Little Lake.

via flickr

They have a point.

[To the tune of Patti Smith, "Changing Of The Guards," from the album Twelve (a 3-star song, imo).]

Daily Show on "The Year in Preview"

Jason Jones' "What-Ifstitute" is a great name.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Year in Preview
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Actually, I wonder if it's trademarked.

Avatar redux

Today I took my son and his aunt to see Avatar in 3D. I saw Avatar a few weeks ago, and wanted to see how it looked in 3D. To be honest, while there are some terrific things that the it offers-- the night scenes on Pandora are really cool, and some of the flying is terrific-- it's hard to notice the 3D in the big battles-- i.e., the entire last hour of the film.

Which is really hardly a criticism. And in other respects, it holds up really well, or is even better the second time. (For all the hype about it transforming cinema, I think it's just a really good movie, which is good news: when I think of a film that's not a movie but an "event," I think of something like Matrix Revolutions.) Cameron is a genius at his craft: as everyone knows by now the film's cast of characters includes some people we've seen before-- the Yuppie scum played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, the tough Latina soldier played this time my Michelle Rodriguez-- and some of his favorite technology-- snub-nosed, mean-looking landing craft, and utilitarian robots that turn out to play a pivotal role in the action. And of course there's Sigourney Weaver, who does a nice turn as a character who would have probably hated Ripley. I was also impressed again at how many science fiction and fantasy references the movie manages to pack into even three hours: Pandora owes a huge debt to the work of Roger Dean, and the influence of the Dragonrider series is more evident.

I think the film also stands up against the cultural criticism lobbed against it. Some contend that the film is a condemnation of imperialist adventure and displays contempt for white people; others, that it's an imperialist adventure in face paint, a retread of tired SF tropes, and racist to boot. The right has tied itself in knots. Some of it stretches the bounds of stupidity: Nile Gardiner seems to have completely missed the fact that the military forces on Pandora are mercenaries, not servicemen (a fact that Cameron doesn't stress enough in my view, but still-- if I could catch it, Gardiner should have too-- unless we really want to equate mercenary armies and armed services). But commercial reality aside-- this is a film rather than a dissertation, and you shouldn't be surprised when a $300 million film hedges its bets with some familiar elements-- the appearance of the trope of the noble savage shouldn't be any more surprising than the fact that there's a romantic thread in the movie. That Cameron was trying something as complex as creating a new species pretty much guaranteed that he would end up falling back on some familiar package of metaphors, much as the artists on James Cook's voyages reflected Enlightenment ideas about non-Western peoples and academic ideas about landscape-- even as they tried hard to faithfully represent the scenes and peoples before them. (And arguably there have been far more damaging representations of the Other than one that emphasizes their inherent goodness and capacity for living simply.)

Then there's the question of how powerful Jake really is. Annalee Newitz's argument that the movie is an extended essay on white guilt and escapist fantasies privileges race over class: it ignores that Jake is in the situation he's in because he's disabled and poor, and that he doesn't have a lot of power among his own people. He's useful to the company, but that's not the same thing as having any influence. And for all of his determination, you get the sense that his disability is always going to leave him on the margins of his own people, the mercenaries whose worth is defined by their ruthless skill and capacity for violence.

Likewise, in movie-world logic, his leading the Na'vi during the war makes sense because he knows the enemy from the inside, even if it stretches the bounds of real-world credulity. (Imagine a high-ranking German defector leading an Allied division at Normandy. Can't do it? Neither can I. That's what I mean by movie-world versus real-world logic.) Just as Wikus in District 9 is able to help save aliens because his humanness gets them into places they can't go alone, Jake isn't superior in any absolute sense, but useful because he understands humans. And for better or worse, people aren't as likely to watch a movie in which the main character becomes a bit player when he joins the other side.

Cameron could easily have made the film subtler and more interesting with a couple tweaks. Jake's relationship with his dead brother kind of disappears 10 minutes into the movie, even though Jake is literally taking over Tom's body (or avatar) and life. Driving home from the theatre, I imagined what the film would have been like if his video journal had been an imaginary conversation with Tom: it would have opened up some chance for Jake to talk about that relationship, and ultimately to say goodbye in a way he never does in the film. Jake's relationship to his own damaged human body doesn't change over time, and by playing up the adventure element of becoming an avatar, Cameron skips over what could have been another motive driving Jake to throw in his lot with the Na'vi. And this time I realized that we never see the Na'vi without Jake, and it would have been interesting to have a couple scenes where Jake's not a presence: it might have allowed us to see the Na'vi the way they see themselves, and get a sense of them trying to figure him out, just as he's trying to figure out them. He's taken in because the tribe's leader decides they need to understand humans; but we don't get a sense later on of the Na'vi still thinking about how to deal with humans, until it's too late.

Still, it's always easy to wish that the director had made a different movie than the one you saw (I really felt that way about Star Wars: Episode III, and having also watched that again with my son recently, still do.) Nonetheless, I love Avatar. Maybe I'll see if the IMAX version is any better.

Climate scientists collaborating with intelligence community

The CIA is sharing data with climatologists:

The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

Of course, some people on both sides of the political spectrum are critical of the collaboration, but I've been involved in a couple projects or workshops that involved people from the intelligence community, and this doesn't surprise me at all. There's plenty of interest in the longer-term strategic implications of climate change (will the shrinking of the Himalayan ice-pack, which provides water to some two billion people, raise the odds of water conflict in South Asia?), and if for no other reason, having easy access to climate scientists would make the program worthwhile to the CIA.

Further, climate scientists are wrestling with some of the most interesting problems in forecasting and scenario work these days, and are asking some very sophisticated and difficult questions about how we use scenarios to think about the future. So both communities have plenty to learn from each other, and clear incentives to share.

[To the tune of Yuya Uchida and The Flowers, "Hidariashi No Otoko," from the album Love, Peace & Poetry: Japanese Psychedelic Music (a 3-star song, imo).]

Dog walkers as public characters

Via Ezra Klein, I noticed this piece on the civic benefits of dog ownership:

[D]og owners are some of the only regularly walking people in a community -- many neighborhoods outside of the inner core of Washington are dominated by automobiles and there is relatively little positive pedestrian activity on often empty sidewalks.

Dog walkers contribute positive activity not just to streets and sidewalks but to parks. It's very easy for a park to devolve into a dangerous place. One technique for people committed to disorder to keep people (especially families and children generally) out of parks is to break a lot of bottles -- broken glass keeps a park free of children, making it easier to conduct illicit business and activities.

The piece reminds me of Jane Jacobs' argument about the value of "public characters"-- or as they were called on Sesame Street, the people that you meet when you're walking down the street each day.

Should we also think of dogs (or other animals) as public characters as well? Are there certain kinds of animal ownership that you see more of in well-functioning neighborhoods?

[To the tune of The Mops, "Asamade Matenai," from the album Love, Peace & Poetry: Japanese Psychedelic Music (a 1-star song, imo).]

He's ba-a-a-ck

The dude from the ineffective mortgage ad is back.

[To the tune of John Lee Hooker, "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," from the album Chess Blues 1947-1967 (a 1-star song, imo).]

Best Going Galt put-down

From Balloon Juice, naturally:

It’s simplistic to say this, but a real world Galt’s Gulch would likely be an insane asylum or a prison.

And this comment:

Please – Galt’s Gulch would be a strip-joint without the strippers, basically. Either that or a usenet rec.sci.* forum IRL.

[To the tune of John Brim, "Ice Cream Man," from the album Chess Blues 1947-1967 (a 1-star song, imo).]

"After this 60-year feeding frenzy, Earth itself has become disposable"

From George Monbiot's impassioned by depressing latest column in The Guardian (which has the world's greatest op-ed lineup, I think):

in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the "I'm not a plastic bag", which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley's nightmare has come closer to realisation.

[To the tune of Little Walter, "Don't Need No Horse," from the album Chess Blues 1947-1967 (a 2-star song, imo).]

New blog: Future 2.0

I've started a new blog on the future of futures, called Future 2.0. Essentially the blog covers the territory I explored in my Futures 2.0 article (which is due out any day in the next issue of Foresight, by the way) and am still very interested in-- basically, how we can use Web 2.0 technologies, ubiquitous computing, and science to make futures more perceptive and persuasive. It's also the nucleus of a new enterprise I'm starting to realize some of the projects I suggested in the article.

The blog includes material I previously posted here and on IFTF's Future Now (and its Typepad predecessor), but from here on will be the main place I post about futures-related subjects. Given that Signtific seems to be on indefinite hiatus, I didn't want the stuff I wrote for Future Now to disappear down the memory hole and be lost (most of all to me!).

[To the tune of Howlin' Wolf, "Moanin' At Midnight," from the album Chess Blues 1947-1967 (a 3-star song, imo).]