a thaumaturgical compendium

I just googled a mis-spelling of my name. No, this isn’t something I do every day. Google seems to have done away with many of their spelling corrections. It used to be, if you Googled the word “colour,” it asked if you meant color—something I pointed out in the draft of my search engines book. Unfortunately, Google has fixed this (bastards!). I haven’t decided whether to leave the reference and note that it was historically true (probably), or if I’ll yank the whole discussion.

Anyway, in this process, I was trying to trigger the spellchecker to come in, so I used “Halavis” which, in the past, has led to a suggestion of the correct spelling: a pretty nifty thing for someone who gets his name messed up often. Unfortunately, it does not make that suggestion any more. Despite “Halavis” being the name of an Argentinian textile manufacturer, and a rare surname, most of the links in the first few pages of Google results are references to me. So, I tried another common mis-spelling—Havalais—with the same result.

Now, on the one hand, I am not one of those people who gets overly upset when people can’t say my name, or spell it. Frankly, I am just happy that most of the time they have something nice to say about me. Heck, I’m even happy when they have something not-so-nice to say, since I’m glad to have people disagree with me. When my former chair, after five years in the same department, still introduced me as “Havalais,” I may have inwardly winced slightly, but it really wasn’t a big deal, I thought.

But as I look over the list of “Halavis,” I wonder whether he is better known than I am. And more importantly, I wonder whether so many references to my mis-spelled name encourages its continued growth. If you think to yourself “I read this article by Lackaff and whats-his-name” and a Google search yields “Halavis,” not once, but multiple times. When the journal Serials Librarian spells it that way, as does a recent co-author on her vita, and any number of my students, does it mean I should be more vigilant in defending (the spelling of) my name? Should I be “that guy” who gets huffy when people mangle his name? Or better yet, should I just go the “Sting” route and start going by just “Alex” or maybe “Alex H” or “Alex the Amorphous”?

Newegg demonstrates that even in OS-land, market demand drives pricing.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the long tail, and its effect on online retailing. Basically, the idea is that as the cost of inventory, advertising, and delivery come down, there is an incentive for online retailers to have very large inventories. This means that they can mine niche products, rather than only carrying the most popular items. In fact, for a store like Amazon, or like iTunes, a substantial proportion of their sales may come not from the items that are most popular, but from the deeper stock. Sure, they still sell U2 and Radiohead, but you can easily find slightly less popular acts, like Metric or SoKo. I was a bit surprised in my Christmas shopping to find that tail cut off.

The mastiff we live with likes a particular dog toy, manufactured by Fat Cat, Inc. It’s a large and fairly expensive stuffed kitty toy that flops around nicely when a dog shakes it. You’ve probably seen a version of these if you have been in a pet shop: either in the smallest size, or the larger 14 inch size. You may not have seen the giant size that measures over 22 inches, and is our dog’s favorite. Although they are expensive, in the long run they make sense for us because even though the dog is fairly gentle with them most of the time, he would generally destroy the smaller size in a couple of days, and the larger ones tend to stick around much longer. When we went to order them, we found that pretty much every retailer has them listed as “discontinued.” It’s possible we were the only ones buying these toys, but I doubt it. Had we known they would stop making them, we probably would have stockpiled some. As it is, I guess it’s time to start watching eBay. I’m sure we can find an alternative he’ll be happy with for Christmas, but he does love a new “baby.”

My partner asked for a trackball like the one I use on my computer so that she could use it for work. She’s impossible to shop for, and so I was relieved to have such an easy shopping task. She is talking about the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best pointing device I have ever used with a computer. Microsoft really got it right with this thing. Anyone who uses it for more than five minutes covets it. When I bought mine, I think I paid something like $40 for it, so—given how the hardware market works—I hoped I might be able to find a discount on it. Despite wide adoration, Microsoft no longer makes it, and no one has stepped in to clone it. As a result, scratched and abused used versions of the trackball routinely sell for $150 on eBay, and that price is likely to continue to rise. I have bid on some of the lower-priced used versions, but I don’t hold out much hope for actually winning one of these auctions.

Now, these are both probably niche products. The big dog toy is probably a novelty unless you have a dog the size of ours, and there aren’t very many of those in the world. Likewise, although it turns out my trackball is nearly a fetish item for some geeks, the vast majority of computer users will continue to be happy with their mice, and wouldn’t even consider trying a trackball. (Like I once did, they probably associate it with Missile Command and Atari Football.) So these two products are both residents of that long tail—a tail that may have reached online retailing, but doesn’t stand up well to the scaling needed for Chinese electronics manufacturing.

We can probably try to replicate the dog toy. We do have a sewing machine, and I guess we can try to draw faces on with a permanent marker or something. I don’t know when we’ll find the time to make dog toys, but at least it is in the realm of possibilities. The same cannot be said of the trackball. The obvious way to do this would be to track down the factory that made the device in China and get them to do a short run. Even though there are people willing to exorbitantly for the devices, however, I suspect that the market is actually pretty small and deep. Unlike a short run for a T-shirt design or a book, I suspect there must still be a mass market before a complex gadget like the one I am using at this moment can be reproduced efficiently.

In the meantime, if you see a Microsoft Trackball Explorer on the back shelf of a computer retailer somewhere, and it’s priced at retail or below, snap it up—eBay is waiting.

The “other” ABC is reporting on a study showing that taking up the Didgeridoo leads to better sleep, and less snoring. The clinical test was performed after instructors noted that students “spontaneously” reported better sleep. After 4 months, didgeridoo learners who practiced 20 minutes a day had better sleep, and less daytime sleepiness.

It’s an interesting result. The article suggests it is the result of learning to “circle breath” but I suspect it has as much to do with the meditative nature of playing any instrument, but especially one that requires attention to the breath.

What does good powerpoint look like? It looks like this.

Also a great intro to sxip, of course. I first heard about sxip about a year and a half ago? When is it going to blow up?

I now desperately want one of these: the ecomobile, a kevlar coated BMW motorcycle. Even Jamie is almost sold. (I’ve been banned from owning or riding a motocycle since my accident a decade ago.)

Unfortunately, I grossly underestimated how much it costs to acquire one of these beauties. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I had to choose between an ecomobile and two of these, the choice is not a difficult one to make.

I gave an oral exam in my graduate theory seminar yesterday, which included a very simple question (that most of the class, shockingly, got wrong) asking students to figure out how many bits were required to represent a particular piece of information. At lunch today, I asked my wife (the law student) what the answer was, and she got it immediately, which got us talking about encoding information.

How is it that when you “zip” a file, it gets smaller? Assuming that you are smooshing something in such a way that you get back the exact original (lossless compression), you look for regularities, and represent them in some way that eats up less space. If, for example, I have ten spaces in a row, it takes up less room if I store “ten spaces” than if I try to store “space space space space space space space space space space.” In other words, although there may be an absolute minimum needed to transmit a certain amount of information, there are ways to compress regularities.

Those regularities may be inherent to the content of the message being sent. The “space” example is a good one. Spaces are encoded as a particular binary pattern, and if this pattern repeats ten times in a row, there is a way to represent this. The same can be said of blocks of color in an image, for example. Or, if you notice that the word “the” shows up a lot in English text—even if you have no idea of what “the” means—- you might choose to give it its own code. This can be worked up to several levels.

But this hints at the second type of compression: compression that relies upon a history of communication. Rather than repeating everything you need to know, I can rely upon earlier information sharing, and say “what I said last week” or “let’s go to plan B.” Or, famously, I can just decide to hang up a single lantern or two, to show whether an attack is by land or sea. In this case, the world of possible messages is pretty much contained (no chance of an air attack), and so there really is just 1 bit of information (or, arguably, 1.58 bits) needed to transmit the message. One could imagine that after numbering all of the words in English, as well as some short phrases, it would be possible to compress English even further, due to redundancies and pattern regularities. On the assumption that we rarely say much that is new, we could even do word pairs or word triples, encoded by their probability of occurring, and easily store these on our large hard drives to reduce the size of communicated texts. This might begin to make sense if you are talking about storing, for example, the Library of Congress. Citation of earlier work is, in some strange sense, compression. So is a hyperlink. So are words.

When you remove internal regularities, to the greatest degree possible, the resulting output should contain no regularities at all. It should be random. After all, if there is a regularity, it is redundant. Now, there are very good reasons to be redundant. Redundancy allows you better chances to overcome a noisy channel. Although “F” is easier and quicker to say over a noisy radio than “foxtrot,” it is also much easier to confuse “F” with “S”, or even potentially “M”, “N”, or “X”. Computer communications often throw in a bit or two to make sure that everything “adds up” at the other end. Heck, even DNA may have error correcting codes. So, there may be an internal regularity that is added specifically to overcome noise.

Which brings us to SETI. Now, let me begin by saying that I have no idea what SETI really does, I have zero background in signal processing, and I am in this area (as in many) an ignoramus. That’s why I’m blogging about it! But I think that many people casually assume that SETI is aiming to “eavesdrop” on alien TV programs, Kang and Kodos style. SETI is pretty clear that’s not really what they are about. They are, instead, looking for an alien transmission that is intended for us, or other aliens like us.

So do we (or they) create a message that is the least random as possible? This would be a message that says little more than “we exist as an intelligent being.” What sort of a message might that be? Well, a really obvious one, because it is redundant, is something like “space space space space space” or maybe a binary equivalent of “11111111111”. Depending on what pattern you assign to that 1, it may be better to do something like “1010101010101010”. But the trick is, we aren’t sure what pattern they might generate. It could be just about anything. So we are forced to look for any redundant message.

Only, redundancy is in the eye of the beholder. Is the rotation of a star (on-off-on-off) an intelligent sort of thing? Well, no. It’s not complex enough to be thought of as intelligent. So what will aliens think if we just shoot off a rotating laser beacon, a flashing “Eat at Earth” sign? No, we want something both complex and redundant. Like Mozart. Or fancypants math.

Mozart has a lot of redundancy, or at least his music does. It tends to restrict itself to a handful of frequencies, and return to pasterns of those frequencies regularly. It keeps to a particular period, or some multiple of that period. So maybe Mozart—in a raw and uncompressed form—is a good test for intelligent life. Ah, nice work: no bird-brained alien can come up with that melody!

But what if that level of redundancy just doesn’t resonate with an alien intelligence? What if it is so regularized that they assume that it is a natural phenomenon? The idea, of course, is not to come up with a “supernatural” signal. No such thing. We are natural. We’re just smarter than whales. And we want to find other creatures in the universe that are smarter than whales, but hopefully not much smarter than us, because otherwise they will think us dreadfully boring creatures that might be fun to eat. You know, like whales. But the trick is, we don’t really know what we mean by “intelligent.”

I have a feeling one thing we mean by intelligent is able to converse with us. That is, if we suddenly got a signal from space that, when placed on a 1000×1000 grid was a very clear representation of a circle, well, we would be set. Whales don’t digitize circles. That’s a “higher order thinking” sort of thing; a pure math thing. It’s also something we would expect to be extremely unlikely to occur naturally. The trick is, would people 150 years ago have realized what to do with that information? And if we can’t even prove our intelligence two ourselves, six generations removed, then we have some real problems demonstrating our “intelligence” to creatures from another world. We have a shot at recognizing socialized humans, maybe, but why are we so convinced that other intelligent creatures will think like we do, when our thought has ontogenetically and phylogenetically been shaped by a very particular environment? And what if they are mathematically illiterate? Are they no longer worth talking to?

The real proof of intelligence remains the Turing test. I have a feeling that a one-way Turing test is what these folks have in mind. When we play them Mozart, they are intelligent if they recognize it as intelligent. We are on, to some extent, the same wavelength. There are computer programs that generate symphonies—symphonies that may well register as “intelligent” to many listeners—but in any event, these are far more complex (perhaps) than the simple calls of animals or naturally occurring songs. We made the symphony, even if we employed complex tools to create it.

What we really need, to determine whether a message is intelligent, is to see both an input and an output; a processing that suggests learning. No single message, no matter how complex will self-encode enough information to be meaningful on its own. Instead, we need the back and forth of conversation. And I am guessing that by the time we can converse, we will no longer be in a position of guessing whether we have found alien life. We’ll know it when we see it.