Month: April 2014

US luddites

We have one hell of a luddite problem to contend with. The silly nonsense in San Francisco is just a first taste of widespread future shock. There’s an interesting essay on these shocks that I come back to again and again.

66% think it would be a change for the worse if prospective parents could alter the DNA of their children to produce smarter, healthier, or more athletic offspring.
65% think it would be a change for the worse if lifelike robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly and people in poor health.
63% think it would be a change for the worse if personal and commercial drones are given permission to fly through most US airspace.
53% of Americans think it would be a change for the worse if most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them. Women are especially wary of a future in which these devices are widespread.

Extreme cavers

this is really fascinating.

On his 13th day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. He’d travelled more than 5km through the earth by then, over stalagmites and boulder fields, cave-ins and vaulting galleries. He’d spidered down waterfalls, inched along crumbling ledges, and bellied through tunnels so tight that his back touched the roof with every breath. Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone. He felt the weight of the mountain above him—1600m of solid rock—and wondered if he’d ever find his way back again. It was his last chance to hear his wife and daughter’s voices before the cave swallowed him up.

Fixed wrestling match

Written in 267 in the ancient city of Antinopolis, the contract stipulates the outcome of the final match of the boys’ wrestling division of the 138th Great Antinoeia games. The contract stipulates that Demetrius “when competing in the competition for the boy [wrestlers], to fall 3 times and yield,” and in return would receive 3800 drachmas of silver of old coinage

First cellular automaton?

But given that the Vigenčre cipher was viewed as uncrackable, was there a perceived need for anything else? I suspect that the urge to invent new encryption methods has always been strong: if you have a cool idea based on your own field of expertise, you will suggest it (after all, if you cannot break it, it must be unbreakable!). In fact, the use of a transformation of the previous column seems to be like an autokey cipher. The first real autokey cipher was suggested ion 1556 by Cardano in De Subtilitate, but the first useful on was invented in 1564 by Giovan Battista Bellaso. Vigenčre published one in 1586. Liber Soyga was mentioned by Dee in 1583. Could the Soyga automaton be the result of somebody working on an autokey method, perhaps getting the bright idea of applying it again and again to itself? It would seem to fit into the time. Of course, the border between cryptography and angelic communication might have been blurry. Maybe the tables were seen as both. Sufficiently advanced cryptography is indistinguishable from magic.

VC for the people

usually basic income proposals stop at the feasibility analysis. not here:

the state could provide venture capital to the people. If ordinary citizens had a small but reliable annuity, too modest to live comfortably but enough to prevent destitution, then at the margin, we’d expect people who currently seek or accept unfulfilling, underpaid work to opt for entrepreneurship, or education, or art, or child-rearing, or just hold out for a better gig. “VC for the people” would combine a reduction in labor supply with a lot of new labor demand, forcing employers to increase wages and encouraging substitution of capital for the least desirable jobs. Both the wage effect and the annuity itself would increase the share of national income available to those without direct claims on capital, reducing inequality.