Author: Michael Nielsen

Another interesting bit from the Stewart Brand interview of Freeman Dyson that I quoted from earlier. (Hat tip to Danielle Fong).

Brand: One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions – it was a delight to me, and I’ve been quoting it ever since – is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.

Dyson: It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get Nobel Prizes.

Brand: Is it the scientists who are putting them down?

Dyson: Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.

Brand: Are there other kinds?

Dyson: There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.

Brand: Is that a weird British hangover?

Dyson: It’s even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.

Brand: How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?

Dyson: I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs.

The class lines drawn between people who create new ideas (intellectuals), new things-for-a-purpose (engineers and designers), and things-without-a-purpose (artists) are perpetually fascinating. At some level the three activities are hard to tell apart, yet in practice the three groups can act as thought they are quite distinct. One thing I find striking is that each group has standard stories, endorsed by many but not all members, for why that group’s activities are more inherently worthwhile than the other two groups.

I get to sit in my office, which happens to overlook a lake and park, watching the Canada Geese troop their ever-so-cute goslings around. And I get to see unsuspecting walkers in the park run like the dickens when they’re suddenly attacked by extremely angry and vicious goose parents.

What are the pleasures of a non workday? I get to walk around the lake and park, admiring the ever-so-cute goslings, and running like the dickens when I’m attacked by the extremely angry and vicious goose parents.

Both have a peculiar charm, although the workday version involves much less heart-pounding and adrenalin.

• illuminating science » What is a “human”?
  • Our definition of a species has legal implications: “interesting story about a group of animal rights activists attempting to get a chimpanzee declared a human in an Austrian court of law.”
• Uncertain Principles: Science Festivals, Science Books, and Science Funding
  • “Scientists are rewarded for producing technical publications aimed at the narrowest possible audience…the result… is a culture that looks down on people who attempt to do anything other than produce narrow technical publications.”
• ROARMAP – Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies
  • A very useful record of who’s doing what.
• Government Data and the Invisible Hand by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, Edward Felten
  • Open data and good government: “It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility. “
• Emergent Democracy – Joi Ito
• Too much time on his hands – Boing Boing
  • “”That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

It’s not always easy to do repeatable experiments in economics. But a few economists have been exploring the idea that virtual worlds might offer a good laboratory for doing such experiments. A recent article in the magazine of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond describes some of the work that’s going on.

The existence of such clear economic behavior has convinced Castronova [an ecoomist at Indiana University] that virtual worlds may — but don’t always — provide venues for economists to learn things about economic activity that they otherwise couldn’t. Traditionally, economists have relied on 1) theoretical models that require perhaps imprecise abstractions and assumptions about human behavior 2) statistical regressions of past economic activity, which may fall short because changing the rules of the game will probably mean changes in future behavior, rendering the lessons from the past moot, and 3) experiments with groups of people in random and control groups, which tend to suffer because of the small sample sizes and unrealistic environments.

[…]

“Given this level of control [in virtual worlds], an easy yet breathtakingly powerful research strategy almost immediately leaps to mind,” Castronova wrote in a 2005 paper. “Build several synthetic worlds in exactly the same way, except for some difference in a variable of interest … attract people into the worlds, sit back, and watch what happens.”

Jim Thomas has written a terrific article that captures the flavour of SciBarCamp. Here’s the opening paragraphs:

If you are the sort of person who values a list of speakers, a pre-scheduled agenda and a few printed abstracts, this might not be your idea of a scientific conference either. SciBarCamp bills itself as a ‘user-generated’ gathering of scientists, artists and technologists. On the opening night, world-renowned quantum theorists are lined up alongside local artists to propose workshop topics for the weekend. Quirky titles such as ‘Open Source Drug Development’ and ‘Science Stuff in Second Life’ are scrawled down, pinned up, democratically voted on and assembled into an ad-hoc agenda. Long powerpoint presentations are banned. Interactivity is highly encouraged.

The result has a jamboree feel. One participant brought along a couple of Mars-rover robots for show and tell. Another has parked his solar racing car outside. An ad-hoc citizens’ jury about synthetic biology is followed by a percussive performance of Richard Feynman’s speeches. Physicists and jazz singers lead discussions on whether technology makes us happy. Sci Fi writers seek help on plot details. At the ‘Quantum Mechanics For Ten Year Olds’ session [led by Daniel Gottesman – ed], all questions from the audience receive an appropriately quantum answer of ‘Yes AND no’. Any remaining barrier between speaker and audience dissolves into laughter.

‘It’s a huge improvement on the regular science conference format – those usually suck the life and joy out of these things,’ says SciBarCamper Paul Bloore, a local software entrepreuner. His friend Melina Strathopoulos concurs. ‘Its a literal “confer-ence” where people are actually conferring,’ she points out, ‘rather than just an “attend-ance” .’

[…]

(Via Eva)

RepRap is a project to build a machine that can replicate itself. They’ve just claimed success! Here’s the obligatory parent and child shot:

Update: Closer examination reveals some significant caveats. What RepRap makes is its unique pieces. There are other commodity items that need to be added by hand. It looks like there’s a fair bit of both in the finished product. Still, it’s pretty cool.

There’s an avalanche of superdelegates declaring for Obama. You can see it nicely on Obama’s friendfeed.

StartupCamp Waterloo is on again, tomorrow (Tuesday) night, from 6-9pm at the Waterloo Accelerator Centre, 295 Hagey Blvd, Waterloo. If you have any interest in tech then it’s a great event, and a lot of fun!

Almost everything any member of the human race has ever discovered has been forgotten. Over time, especially the past few hundred years, we’ve gradually learnt to remember some tiny fraction of what is discovered. But we do so selectively. One interesting aspect of the age of Google and the Internet Archive is that we may start to get a lot better at remembering things.