Category: Science

The picture definition on Japanese camera-phones is now so high that people can stand in a shop, surreptitiously photograph the pages of a magazine and then later read their ill-gotten literature from the screens of their mobile phones.
Japan’s booksellers have risen as one to demand that the Government criminalises this practice…
…the thefts have become more ambitious. Students, for example, are finding that entire textbooks can be photographed and read later at palm-sized convenience.
The publishing industry is suffering badly from the advance of mobile phones in Japan. Where once the train carriages were full of people reading comics or newspapers, passengers now concentrate solely on the screens of their phones. Mobile phone operators say that text-message volumes correspond almost exactly with the commuter rush-hour peaks and troughs.
The latest phones come equipped with a tuner that can — fuzzily — pick up television broadcasts, and several operators have introduced phones with navigation software that shows the user as a moving red blip on an ultra-detailed street atlas of Japan.

That’s from The Times, June 5, 2004, p.2W, no link available. Here is some background information. Here is a related article. Here is a more general article on the illegal downloading of books.

To be continued…

One of my dreams is to go to Niger. In the meantime I will have to be satisfied reading the excellent Sahara: A Natural History, by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle. No student of spontaneous orders can ignore the following passage:

Obviously [sic], dunes are formed because jumping sand bounces more easily off hard surfaces than off soft ones, so that more sand can be moved over a pebbly desert surface than over a smooth or soft one. Even a slight hollow, though, or a rock, will reduce the amount of sand that the wind can carry, and a small sand patch begins. Very quickly, this patch will trap more sand. When the patch is big enough, it begins to change the wind velocity about it. The winds decrease near the surface and deposit more sand on the patch. Quickly, the dune is built up.

If the conditions are right, the dune will grow rapidly: In days it will be taller than a man, and in just a few weeksit can reach sixty-five or one hundred feet, and keep growing. Over time, the windward slope eventually adjusts itself, and the wind velocity close to the sand increases to compensate for the drag imposed by the sandy surface. The smooth leeward slope steepens until the wind can’t be deflected down sharply enough to follow it, leaving a “dead zone” into which the sand falls. When this so-called dispositional slope reaches the natural slope angel of dry sand (about thirty-two degrees), the added sand cascades down the slope, now called the “slip face.” The dune has stopped growing — there is no gain or loss of sand — though it continues to move forward as a whole, slowly, ponderously, relentlessly.

It turns out that driving on sand is an art, and no one can avoid getting stuck in the long run. Fortunately (to my surprise) most of the surface of the Sahara is rock rather than sand.

Here is a lecture on spontaneous order and sand. Here is advice on how to build a better sand castle.

Every now and then someone is inclined to think that this kind of analysis holds the key to either business cycles or stock market crashes. It has yet to come through, but in the meantime I will keep dreaming of Niger.

Soon we will have cows that are immune to mad cow disease. We’re not about to engineer cows on a large scale, and probably we don’t need to; my interest is in how this upsets the usual spectrum of ecological worries. I’ve found that people who fear mad cow disease also tend to fear genetic engineering of animals. But now, which way to turn? It reminds me of those reports saying we need not fear global warming, because we will run out of oil in the meantime!

Last week, Alex wrote about how smart people live longer. Today, we learn that smart people may be better looking too!

Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and his colleague, Jody L. Kovar, assert that beautiful people also tend to be smart people — and vice versa.

In the July issue of Intelligence, the sociologists offer a theory to explain the confluence of beauty and brains. Their argument, in a nutshell: Intelligent men achieve higher status and marry beautiful women, who pass their genes on to their disproportionately attractive and smart kids, who win mates who are good-looking or brainy, and so on. Or at least that’s what they put forth in the journal article, “Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent.”

Here is the full story. Here is a home page for one of the researchers. But wait…he’s the same guy who says that marriage ruins male productivity.

Addendum: I just stumbled upon Randall Parker’s treatment of the same study.

We just found a new one, and it has seven million digits. Here is the bottom line:

Mersenne primes are an especially rare type that take the form 2^p-1, where p is also a prime number. They are named after a 17th Century French monk who first came up with an important conjecture about which values of p would yield a prime. The new number can be represented as 2^(24,036,583)-1. It is the 41st Mersenne prime to have been found.

Here is the full story.

Note also that the number was found by a consortium of private computers, designed to exchange spare computing power:

GIMPS volunteers download a piece of software that runs in the background on their computer. A central server distributes different prime number candidates to each machine, which use spare processing power to test whether it is a genuine prime or not.

Here is more information, plus how to volunteer. Or perhaps you would prefer to search for alien lifeforms.

The universe, that is. New estimates for its size, based on measured microwave radiation, are up to 78 billion light years. And that’s a minimum. The bad news? Given this size, it is less likely that light can “wrap around” an odd-shaped universe, allowing us to see what the earth looked like four billion years ago. And here’s more evidence that the universe is dominated by “dark energy,” causing it to expand, possibly forever.

Take small sips, and spread them out across the day. Don’t start your morning with too much coffee, yeah that means you too. Here is the full analysis, from the ever-insightful Randall Parker. This result reminds me slightly of the Barro-Gordon model of monetary policy. Don’t take your inflation all at once. If you haven’t had some inflation in a while, a mild dose of inflation can provide a nice stimulus.

Read here, to learn why many women prefer prominent cheekbones.

A table purporting to show IQ by state swept through the blogosphere last week mostly because liberal bloggers enjoyed trumpeting the high correlation it showed between high-IQ and voting for Gore in 2000. Turns out that the table was a hoax. Steve Sailer has the whole story including some real data on education by state and IQ by nation.

Yes, but only if the dogs are purebreds.

The researchers photographed 45 dogs and their owners at three dog parks and gathered information about the breeds and how long owners and pets had been together. They then asked 28 students to try to match the people to the pooches.

The students were able to match dogs to their owners, but only when the dogs were purebred.

“The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and when they get a purebred, they get what they want,” the researchers wrote. “A nonpurebred puppy’s final appearance is unpredictable, and so the resemblance . . . should be confined to the much more predictable purebreds.”

There was no relationship between how long owners had lived with their dogs and the chance that their appearances would match.

“These results were consistent with the notion that the ability to match is due to selection rather than convergence,” they wrote. “However, it does appear that, as in the case of selecting a spouse, people want a creature like themselves.”

Here is more statistical information.

Not surprisingly, many commentators believe that we select Presidents on the same basis.

Control your pain through biofeedback:

People can learn to suppress pain when they are shown the activity of a pain-control region of their brain, a small new study suggests. The new biofeedback technique might also turn out to be useful for treating other conditions.

Biofeedback techniques based on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of brainwave patterns, in which electrodes are placed on the scalp, are used with some success to treat epilepsy and attention problems such as ADHD.

…Fumiko Maeda, Christopher deCharms and their colleagues at Stanford University in California have tried showing people real-time feedback from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The eight volunteers saw the activity of a pain-control region called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex represented on a screen either as a flame that varied in size, or as a simple scrolling bar graph. This brain region is known to modulate both the intensity and the emotional impact of pain.

During the scans the volunteers had to endure painful heat on the palm of their hand. They were asked to try to increase or decrease the signal from the brain scanner and to periodically rate their pain sensations.

It took just three 13-minute sessions in the scanner for the eight volunteers to learn to vary the brain activity level, and thus to develop some control over their pain sensations, the researchers reported at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco last week.

Interestingly, none of the participants could explain how they managed some control. But it seemed to work, albeit on a small number sample.

Why stop here? Why not carry around an advanced biofeedback monitor and console to control your emotions more generally?

The bottom line: I can’t imagine how welfare economics will look two hundred years from now.

When you are driving to a new place, it feels longer to get there than to return. No, you are not crazy, this is a confirmed perceptual bias. When taking the route for the first time, you are engaged in an act of problem solving. Subjective time passes more slowly (this has been validated by various experiments). On the way back, you know the route (you hope). Subjective time then passes more quickly. Jay Ingram puts it this way: “When your mind is focused on something other than the passage of time, you are fooled into thinking that less time has passed.”

Similarly, if you do two identical tasks, and they take the same time, you will judge your first attempt as having taken longer. But if you change the background context, such as by putting the people in a different room, this illusion tends to vanish.

There is also strong evidence that time seems to go faster as you get older. (Do we leave the problem-solving mode as we age?) Say you are forty and you will live to eighty. According to one set of calculations, your life, as subjectively perceived, is already seventy-one percent over. This is the most disturbing scientific fact I have heard in a long time. Your last twenty years will feel like no more than thirteen percent of your life. Another set of equations, harder to confirm, puts the age of seventeen and a half (!) as the midpoint of your subjectively experienced life. Occasionally patients with extreme brain damage will experience time as passing very very rapidly; the internal clock of one man seemed to be set at about four times regular speed.

For more information on these experiments, see Jay Ingram’s The Velocity of Honey.

Many scientists are hard at work trying to overcome aging; others are more pessimistic about how long we can live. But perhaps markets will look to another solution altogether. Why not also slow down subjectively perceived time? Might this be easier than stopping aging itself? Would it be nearly as good? In the meantime, what can you do to make your life feel longer?

OK, so here is the economists’ question: what is your marginal rate of substitution for real time vs. perceived time? Would you rather have one year that felt like two, or two years that felt like one?

My personal preferences tend toward objective time. Put aside family issues and matching what one’s partner or family does. I am curious about how history will run its course, how music will evolve, and which movies will come out. And what about the theory of quantum gravity? For this you need objective time more than subjectively perceived time. It’s worth a great deal to me just to get this information injected into my brain, even if I only receive a short extension of my life.