Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Unscrupulous climate graph

This post on A Few Things Ill Considered is a great demonstration of how graphs and statistics can be abused. Show CO2 and temperature data from a short stretch of time, with misleading axes, and you can produce the impression that they are unrelated. Present the information in a fair way, and the correlation between the two looks very plausible.

Combine that with the theoretical framework about greenhouse gases trapping energy (in the form of longwave radiation) within the planet system, and you have a hypothesis that is defensible on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Perverse effects from police statistics

An article in the Village Voice describes how police officers in one New York precinct routinely downgraded crime reports, in order to make their statistics look more favourable. A whistle-blowing police officer revealed with, with evidence from covert audio recordings.

Indeed, the whole situation is deeply reminiscent of police work as portrayed on the television show The Wire. In particular, it matches up with two quotes from that series:

  • “But the stat games? That lie? It’s what ruined this department. Shining up shit and calling it gold so majors become colonels and mayors become governors.”
  • “Robberies become larcenies oh so easily. And rapes, well they just disappear.”

It’s a tricky problem to deal with. I have defended standardizes tests as protection against grade inflation, but they can clearly create similar perverse incentives. When people start chasing a number that is intended as a proxy for a good outcome, they can begin to produce worse outcomes in ways that flatter the particular figure you are looking at.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, allowing discretion while maintaining high standards. Clearly, part of all statistics-based systems must be an audit and oversight capacity that retains a sense of the importance of the real outcomes being sought, and a level of independence that prevents it from becoming just another political tool. Of course, the same political pressures that seem capable of turning police forces into factories for dodgy statistics apply just as strongly to any such oversight bodies. They also make it highly likely that whisteblowers will be ostracized, with everything possible being done to discredit them.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.

How useful are spies?

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote a very interesting piece for The New Yorker about the extreme difficulty of interpreting information from spies properly. You can never really know whether a promising nugget information is actually that, or whether it was cleverly planted by an enemy. In the end, both intelligence agencies and those who rely on them must remain simultaneously aware of the possibility that actionable intelligence is genuine and accurate, and of the possibility that it is intentionally erroneous. As Gladwell concludes: “the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can’t be trusted.”

The funniest bit of the story describes the plot of Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet:’

a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?”

This reminds me of a short story I once read, but which I cannot remember the name of. It concerned an American spy who was undercover in the Soviet Union. He was preparing for retirement, and genuinely addled about which side he had really been working for. Each had reason to suspect he was a spy, and so each had reason to feed him misleading information for the other side (or accurate information that they wouldn’t trust, given what they thought about him). He was left in the state of being unable to remember whether his proper retirement rewards was a gold Rolex from the CIA or a dacha from the KGB.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), always around the corner

One odd thing about following climate change as a scientific, political, and ethical issue is the disparity between different sorts of relevant timelines. There is a rate at which scientific reports come out, a rate at which public opinion about climate change shifts, and a rate at which firms feel the need to change their public images. There are also much slower shifts – slower primarily because they are costly and require massive physical changes to energy systems.

Back in 2008, in a presentation at Cambridge University, the UK Environment Secretary Ed Miliband expressed his view that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was just around the corner. He says that all of the necessary technologies have been tried successfully, and the next step is a demonstration facility. He goes on to quote the European Commission’s hope of: “every new power station in Europe being carbon capture and storage ready by 2010 and using carbon capture and storage by 2020.”

We’re still waiting for that demonstration plant. This is not to say that CCS has no contribution to make to fighting climate change. Indeed, paired with power plants burning biomass, it could remove CO2 from the air in a promising way. Rather, there has been a persistent notion that CCS is just around the corner. We need a demo plant, then we can somehow magically retrofit the world’s coal stations and solve our climate problems without shutting them down or abandoning coal as a source of energy.

I can see why that is appealing, even for those not beholden to coal-dependent utilities or coal mining interests. China has lots of coal, and it is scary to think what will happen if they burn it all. That fear can give people a powerful reason to hope that CCS will mop up the whole problem without much fuss.

In the near term, CCS seems to have more potential to delay action – keeping us clinging to the belief that some wonderful technology will save the day. Meanwhile, the window in which we can take action to avoid catastrophic climate change is shrinking, and the total costs of the transition are rising as the time we have left in which to complete it diminishes.

Long-term changes in happiness

The final lecture of the psychology course I have been following focuses on the question of what makes people happy.

In addition to a lot of things that are already common knowledge – such as how winning the lottery is not all it’s cracked up to be – it includes a couple of examples of things that have a persistent effect on your happiness. This contrasts with things like the acquisition of a new gadget, which prompts a brief spike that soon falls back to normalcy.

One thing that makes people persistently happier is plastic surgery. Apparently, this is because time doesn’t desensitize us to how other people respond to our appearance. Neither does it affect how our own perception about our experience affects our mental lives. For those who don’t want to go to the extreme length of surgery, it seems plausible that improving your wardrobe could have a similar effect. Replace some shabby garment with one that you are proud to wear, and it may well make you happier for as long as you own it. I can speak to this from personal experience. Replacing my squeaky, ugly, plastic Rockport shoes with some nice leather Allen Edmonds shoes has made me feel consistently more qualified and capable at work.

Another thing that affects happiness persistently, though in a negative way, is noise. I know plenty about this personally, since I live right beside a busy street, on the ground floor, with my bedroom window right beside a speed bump that people often damage their cars on. This has bothered me every single day since I moved in, particularly when cars wake me up in the morning. I recall being annoyed by similar circumstances in the past, such as the noisy birds outside the Totem Park residence at UBC, or the booming clock beside my house in North Oxford.

The practical message of all of this seems to be: don’t spend your money on electronic gadgets, photo gear, or other expensive trinkets. Definitely don’t spend it on lottery tickets, which are likely to leave you less happy in the very unlikely situation where you win. Spend it on quiet housing and improving your appearance. Another good investment might be Professor Paul Bloom’s forthcoming book: How Pleasure Works. The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

James Bond is a psychopath

Another interesting observation from the Paul Bloom psychology course I have been following concerns this fictional character, as well as real-life individuals who share some of his features:

They’re typically male. They are defined as selfish, callous, impulsive, they’re sexually promiscuous. They seem to lack love, loyalty, normal feelings of affiliation and compassion, and they get into all sorts of trouble because they’re easily bored and they seek out stimulation. Now, when you hear this, you’ve got to realize that this sort of person is not necessarily an unattractive person to imagine or think about or even under some circumstances to encounter. You have to avoid the temptation when you think about psychopath to think about a guy like this, to think about Hannibal Lecter. The most famous psychopath, of course, is James Bond who is a perfect psychopath in every regard as played… by Sean Connery.

Bloom elaborates in talking about real-life individuals, and whether psychopathy is an illness:

[P]sychologists study psychopaths but the psychopaths that they study are by definition unsuccessful psychopaths. And what some people have argued is the real psychopaths, the successful ones, are the ones that run the world, that excel in every field because they are successful enough that they don’t look like psychopaths. They have no conscience, no compassion, love, loyalty. They are cold-blooded and ambitious but they don’t go around making this so obvious that we throw them in prison. And so, it’s an interesting and subtle and complicated case.

It does seem inherently plausible that the kind of people who can attain positions of great power have these tendencies, and also have the ability to conceal them from others. This is where the wisdom behind Douglas Adams’ insightful perspective on politicians: “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

What lessons can we draw from this? Perhaps it tells us something about the nature of authority and power dynamics in human societies. Perhaps it should inform us to some extent about what to expect from elected officials, as well as those who attain power by other means (such as leaders of coups). It may be even more applicable to the world of business or the military than to democratic politics. In those cases, the number of people who you need to impress with your competence is smaller, and the people who you are impressing are likely to be more tolerant of ruthlessness and a lack of empathy.

Timing an Ignite presentation

I am in the process of preparing an Ignite presentation on climate change, expressing the basic point that the amount of climate change we experience will depend primarily on what proportion of the world’s fossil fuels we burn.

The Ignite format is an odd and challenging one. Each person speaks for five minutes. At the same time, each has a set of 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds. These factors make it challenging to express yourself clearly and effectively.

The earliest drafts of my presentation suffered from my natural tendency towards digression. I am moving forward now more confidently, having timed myself reading four examples of text for five minutes each. Two were written by me, two were speeches written by others.

I found that I read text similar to that in my presentation at a rate just over 180 words per minute. That translates to about 45 words per slide. To compensate for any issues with shuffling notes or distractions, I will write 40 words of pre-prepared comments to accompany each slide, reducing the risk that the unusual Ignite format will leave me unable to express my point fully.

[Update: 5 May 2010] You can see my final presentation on BuryCoal.com.

Alcohol as fuel and drug

I occasionally encounter people who are surprised to learn that alcohol itself contains many of the calories contained in alcoholic drinks. In some sense, the surprise is understandable; after all, we think of alcohol as a drug and a poison more than as a food. That being said, when ethanol enters the human body, it “is converted into acetaldehyde by alcohol dehydrogenase and then into acetic acid by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.” Both of these reactions produce energy that your body can use.

In another sense, it is a bit obvious that ethanol is full of energy. Remember, alcohol has been used before as a fuel for vehicles, and even for rockets. Gasoline contains about 32 megajoules of energy per litre. By comparison, pure ethanol contains 23.5 megajoules: 73% of what is in the gasoline.

As a consequence, vodka (40% ethanol) contains 9.4 megajoules per litre: about 30% of what is in gasoline. So, to get a sense of the energy content of your drink, multiply the quantity of pure ethanol it contains by 0.73. Then, think about the energy that volume of gasoline would release, when burned. A six pack of beer (two litres at 5% alcohol) contains about as much energy as as two shotglasses (70mL) full of gasoline. A bottle of wine (750mL at 12% alcohol), is about the same.

Expressed another way, a bottle of wine contains enough energy (2.1 megajoules) to lift a small apple 2.1 million metres. It also represents the same amount of energy as a 2.1 tonne vehicle going 160km/h. A drop of beer contains 100 joules.