Star Simpson's Blog

University Link Light Rail from University Link on Vimeo.

This video is good until the incongruous Henry Ford quote at the end.

Internet picture of the day:

How do you make calls about new or future technology? Which ideas are worth pursuing? What frameworks can you apply for thinking about this?

I ask my friend Tim, who lays down his theory for predicting advances in technology, and whether we’ll accept or reject something new.

Tim has read a lot of classical philosophy, and also once started a company back in the 90s to make 3D printers (ZCorp), so I really enjoy asking his perspective on the philosophy of creating technology.

This blog post is largely based on an email conversation from back in 2010 that, with Tim’s permission, I am quoting here.

In short: good technology makes us more omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Bad technology detracts from those things.

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Who wrote the frameworks around omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.?

That was Thomas Aquinas, which is easiest in secondary source form (wikipedia etc.)  I probably read it in excerpts or summaries by others.

Aquinas also collected arguments “proofs” of the existence of God, some of which don’t make sense anymore and some are often recycled for “intelligent design” and other proselytizing.

Aquinas seems to have been trying to pin down “what God is” or “what qualities define God”. In this sense, good technology could also be seen as “that which makes us more godlike.” (which I’m going to call dated language, but probably the best thought framework Aquinas had access to.)

That Technology Strives Godlike thinking is useful to predict cultural trends within a worldview that doesn’t acknowledge limits.

“The Singularity” is a good example of such a striving, but a general singularity is a very long way from happening for a lot of reasons, all based in practicalities. If energy, materials, and garbage dumps were costless and infinite, the singularity would be jumping out at us everywhere.

It’s useful to think about real situations when old limits are removed by some new material or technology and physics or economics are no longer the limiting factors.

How did you know to work on 3D printers back then? What changed while you were working on them?

In the case of 3D printing, improvements in CAD and the spread of CAD set the hard market limits of 3D printing as a business, which meant for us, not a limit to early growth at all.

How much did the frameworks for foresight, or for systems thinking, consciously factor into making 3D printers?

Very much in choosing major directions/abandoning distractions. Very little in actually making it work. That was mostly close observation and a willingness to use existing/free stuff.

Nassim Taleb and “Psychology of Selling” are good on risk assessment. Take cheap risks and don’t take any with actual downside consequences.

One of the two qualities of inventorship that currently fascinate me most right now is “systems thinking”. The ability to see how whole systems work together.

I think you’ve identified our new technology “God”.

That’s very important, our new shared religion/culture of “sustainability” acknowledges limits. No one takes seriously the old plan to move to other planets after we trash this one. That’s a big change.

A few think they’ll go to heaven, but most of them want their kids to have a viable planet to live on.

What can I do to improve my abilities in thinking about systems?

The system dynamics people at MIT, Sterman especially, are good to learn from. I have an old manuscript of his that catalogs quirks of behavioral economics and does a better narrative of Easter Island than Jared Diamond. I don’t know if it was published or if that stuff stayed in.

Watch out for astrology – I’ve seen a couple of SD folks go manic with a nearly identical system mania with horoscope connections.

They’re also not so good with politics, so it’s hard for them to get their insights into policy.

Anything I should read that you’d recommend?

All of the mp3s at the Long Now and all the ones at the London School of Economics, except for the psychologists and lit/crit nuts.

I’m reading codecheck.com building code summaries which are beautiful and clear. Makes the code look like pretty reasonable building instructions. Memorize that and know exactly what’s going on in a construction site.

Dear Lazywebs,

If you have suggestions, this is one of my present-day problems:  http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/30197/placing-a-device-in-eagle

I just added a new library (the adafruit library) in EAGLE comprised of many devices and packages. I can place packages, but not devices (usually devices represent a few different specific packages).

I’m using EAGLE-6.2.0. How do I get the devices onto a board?

This really shouldn’t be as difficult an issue as it’s been proving versus my “try every button” and “googling” problem-solving techniques.  I even tried to solve it by making my own modified EAGLE library (called starfruit, obvi) out of Ada’s devices, which did not solve.  If you have any suggestions I will be pretty grateful!

In the long term, I feel like it should be within our capabilities as a humanity to make tools that are better than EAGLE.

One of the most underplayed genres of youtube video is “amazing cross-disciplinary research technology narrated in a monotone voice.”  For example this video on how you make tiny flying robots out of composites using techniques from origami and popup books.

I think this stuff is among the coolest stuff being worked on in the world — and I love slash regret that these amazing developments are generally presented in the most ho-hum way possible.  Anyway, check out this 5 min video [via Sawyer]:

Edit: I had not heard of Fareed Zakaria before coming across his talk in a London School of Economics podcast, from which the below quote is taken. I was unaware at time of posting of his positive stance toward the US-Iraq war, and I don’t mean to endorse it by quoting Mr. Zakaria. Also the quote below has some serious caveats — I posted it here in the spirit of being grateful for living in a world that is currently as peaceful as it is.

“In 1986 a very famous American historian, John Lewis Gaddis, wrote an essay called The Long Peace in which he pointed out that at that point, 1986, it had been 40 years since there had been a great power war and that that 40 year period was the longest period in modern history where you had not had a war between the great powers. Well, a generation later not only has the long peace endured, but in fact you can add to it another caveat which is, there is currently no significant military-political competition among the great powers of the world. Which is actually unique in history. You have never had a situation where there is not serious and sustained military-political competition among the great powers.”

Fareed Zakaria’s London School of Economics talk “The Post-American World and the Rise of the Rest” 7/1/09

Update: Check out Benford’s Law on R-Bloggers (via @BenfordsLaw) for lots, lots more.

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Back in spring of 2011 I ran a little data/stats experiment through Mechanical Turk, asking as many people as I could afford to list a random number between 1-100.  I wanted to see if there was a characteristic “human” aspect to picking random numbers generated by a crowd.

Unfortunately that test was made useless by a single spammer in India who figured out how to submit “7″ over and over and collect all $15 I’d allocated for the project (“I’d pay $15 to find that out”) and so I ended up observing something else I already knew about humans that day instead.

But, today, I discovered that I may have just been trying to get to what wikipedia calls Benford’s Law.  Somehow I’ve only ever properly studied statistics through high school biology class, and given that Benford’s project happened in 1938 I can only say of my hunch about such a pattern’s existence, “not bad for an amateur!”

Still, Benford’s law and findings remain fascinating to me.  What did he find?

A popular example:

 a list of the heights of the 60 tallest structures in the world by category shows that 1 is by far the most common leading digit, irrespective of the unit of measurement

Isn’t that amazing?

Further,

For numbers drawn from certain distributions, for example IQ scores, human heights or other variables following normal distributions, the law is not valid. However, if one “mixes” numbers from those distributions, for example by taking numbers from newspaper articles, Benford’s law reappears.

Two more cases:

This result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature).

Some well-known infinite integer sequences provably satisfy Benford’s law exactly (in the asymptotic limit as more and more terms of the sequence are included). Among these are the Fibonacci numbers, the factorials, the powers of 2, and the powers of almost any other number.

There are even uses in practice Benford’s Law is borne out well enough that the IRS has used it as a basic check to determine whether tax forms contain inconsistencies — if the distribution of first digits doesn’t follow Benford’s Law, something may be amiss — and apparently it can sometimes also be used to test for election fraud. I can’t off-the-cuff conceive of a reason why this should be so, but I’m fascinated.

Via Mathworld, here’s the graph:

thanks Jevgenij!

A big thanks go out to everyone who encouraged me to document the creation of the Etherwiki — our in-house combination of Etherpad-lite and Dokuwiki! I wrote up a quick how-to tonight. Please send comments if anything needs fixing:

Link is here: https://canidu.com/etherwiki-howto.html

This may be a low-brow metaphor, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that the way one uses one’s time is like getting a tattoo: The effects are completely indelible; also they tend to reflect who you’ve been spending your time with.

Your choices about time spent also stick with you and affect all the future versions of you in turn, and you wear them forever, no turning back — because you can’t escape time. Every little thing — the music you listened to, what you ate — adds a little detail to the mark. Nothing is irrelevant.

I find I really like the imperative consideration I feel when I ask — What kind of tattoo did I get from my day? If today were marked on my skin, what would it look like? Am I happy with it?

(Note: I currently have no physical tattoos nor current inclinations to get any, so it may be that I overestimate the weight and gravity of such a choice, and it’s possible that I think it’s more serious a decision than it actually would be for someone who does go on to get one. Or maybe it’s just as serious as I imagine. I don’t really know.)

Some of my favorite poetry on this subject follows after the jump..

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

- from Flander’s Fields by John McCrae

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and DaysWhere Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;
And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,
He knows about it all — He knows — HE knows!

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

For let Philosopher and Doctor preach
Of what they will, and what they will not — each
Is but one Link in an eternal Chain
That none can slip, nor break, nor over-reach.

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to it for help — for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

– from The Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayyam

While in Shenzhen, I’ve seen some cool human-powered manufacturing processes that I wouldn’t otherwise have stumbled across. These are short youtube videos of some interesting and noteworthy new insight on how stuff gets made:

This is how rhinestone appliqués get made — if you’ve ever seen a bag, tshirt, or hoodie with shiny plastic gemstones on it, it probably started like this. Later someone will press the sheet onto some fabric with a heat sealer, and bam! it’s bedazzled. What’s noteworthy about this is the tool he’s using, which looks like a sponge covered in corduroy — I think the shape of the grooves somehow corrals the rhinestones so that they’re always the same-way-down. Everyone at the fabric market on the whole floor of rhinestone appliqué makers was using something similar.

We bought some grocery store knives and they were super dull. Fortunately, there’s a local knife sharpener on every block. This guy was particularly awesome. I’d say he was in his seventies or eighties, and smiled a bright smile while he was talking to us. He had this cool rig — a hand-cranked knife sharpening grinding wheel built into a bench that he could heft on his own. We met him in the park but came back later, to his house (where he usually does business) and filmed this.

This is me getting my boots repaired. In addition to a local knife sharpener, there’s a cobbler on nearly every block. The waterproof military surplus leather boots I picked up in Seattle had started to develop a hole, so I brought them to this guy who had them fixed up in a jiffy. Check out the awesome hand-cranked cast iron sewing machine he uses!

Another shot of the machine. This thing is probably as efficient as it can get, and you could set it up just anywhere.

Finally the finishing steps of boot repair — wire-like thread used to sew the new leather patch down. He first cut a slit in the sole for the stitches to hug deep into, without getting exposed to the pavement I now walk on, then went to town with the awl.