Slashdot links to this story about company that has made a 'dynamic pricing model' for selling MP3s over the internet. (Amazon is hiring their services.) It's a demand-based system: the price goes up as more people buy.

This kind of dynamic, human-free system is fascinating: like Dell's method of managing component bottlenecks in laptop sales by automatically discounting, say, 80 gig drives if the 40 gig model is going to take longer to arrive.

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no intrepreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of my maps.

From E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, quoted in Miller & Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: an Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life

I've been reading Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd, a plant-science populariser in the form of a diary. He studies the fruit fly of the plant world, Arabidopsis Thaliana (common name: Thale-cress), the same plant my girlfriend Sue spent her PhD examining. In it, he introduces the reader to plant biology and genetics in a way that conveys not only the mechanisms, but the wonder he finds in telling others about it. He also takes you through his day to day life as a scientist, and his struggle to get past a rut in the work:

Science is always like this. There are peaks and troughs. I've experienced both. But the problem with being in a trough is that it is a place from which the view is limited. There is the feeling of being trapped with no way out. And always the question of how long the entrapment will last. A self-sustaining state: at the time when new vision is most needed, it is most unlikely to come.

Economics is spectacularly Platonic, I've realised. Kind of obvious, but never really grasped it fully before. There's a perfect, Platonic economy out there that the theory describes in pristine mathematical perfection - and its the job of the world to strive to touch it.

The production possibility frontier is a prime example. Imagine a simple economy that can make only cars or jam sandwiches. Picture a perfectly Platonic production possibility frontier between 'everyone makes jam sandwiches as much as possible' and 'everyone makes cars'. The Platonic economy can lie anywhere along that line (with e.g. a 50/50 car and sandwich economy) and can't get past it without some change in car or jam-sandwich technology (or maybe genetically engineering better car / jam-sandwich workers). But if it falls into the vast space behind the line, it's inefficient and should be ashamed of itself for letting everyone down.

A period of about five weeks passed between blog entries. What was I doing? Sitting right here at the laptop, arranging songs for a space-themed party. For five weeks. Obviously (he said, noting to himself that one of his supervisors reads this blog now and then) not all the time. Obviously, didn't neglect university work... entirely.

(Since Battlestar Galactica's come up recently, here's a Galactica-themed track that resulted...)

My housemate sent me a link to this song by Suburban Kids with Biblical Names -

Tonight I'm gonna stay in all by myself / I've found a reason not to go out tonight / I'm making out tonight with my computer / and there's really so many interesting effects / I wanna try them all on you / the neighbours can't complain coz I've got my headphones on...

That last line is spot on. I'd get some decent German monitor speakers, but I'd never dare use them. Someone might hear. Now, if I had a house in the country, maybe things would be different...

MySociety reported this week that Chris Lightfoot has died. I hadn't heard of him until now, but there were a few links to some of his work, and his blog. There's some amazing stuff. First off are the travel time maps - fantastic way to illustrate the cost of travel, and why building new roads may lead to more traffic as the cost of a particular route drops. It would be good to include such cost decisions in any geographical economic model. I made such a decision myself last week, paying one pound for two blank CDs from a local shop. When they told me the price, I left the shop, but on the way past going back home, the cost of waiting and of travelling to buy in bulk seemed too much: I wanted to use them that night. Less trivially would be the cost of getting food via car versus foot. (And the emergent effects of this: car travel is one of Putnam's main causes of the decline in Social Capital in the US.)

Anyway, it's Chris' version of the political compass - the political survey 2005, based on youGov data - I found most affecting. He discusses here the problems he had with the original political compass site, and here he puts the findings from the political survey in some context.

Here's my results from answering the 32 questions. Chris used principle components analysis to reduce the many dimensions of these questions to the two axes of the political compass. I'm not entirely clear if this method can account for the Iraq war question being on the economics axis, but I'm presuming so. (The comments in his blog post above have a lot of good thoughts on the pitfalls of the questionnaire and the methods used.)

The most striking thing is seeing oneself in relation to others. There's a little dot: 'you are here'. Eek.

At the very least, we have a desperate future. Our children may never believe that we had surplus food. It is mainly because of utterly ridiculous things. The entire output of atomic power in the United States is exactly equivalent to the requirements of the clothes-drying machines.

I literally can’t stand being on the American highway. To me it is almost like being in a prison of madness. I can stand the background; but I can’t stand the highways in Canada or here. Driving like crazy people. Where are they going? And why are so many of them going in that direction? They are all fleeing something. I would like to inquire what is in those trucks that are tearing down the road. Is it something of no use at all? Or something which is present where it is going? And often I have seen trucks, apparently carrying identical cargo, going in opposite directions, carting it here and there. The drivers tell me that they are carrying widgets.

Now all of this, including the energy problem, is what we have to tackle at once. It can be done. It is possible. It is possible to make restitution. We might as well be trying to do something about it as not. We will never get anywhere if we don’t do anything. The great temptation, and one in which the academic takes total refuge, is to gather more evidence. I mean, do we need any more evidence? Or is it time to cease taking evidence and to start remedial action on the evidence already in? In 1950, it was time to stop taking evidence and start remedial action. But the temptation is always to gather more evidence. Too many people waste their lives gathering evidence. Moreover, as we get more evidence, we see that things are worse than they had appeared to be.

From An Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison.

Just asked, as a slightly sarcastic aside, on the Simsoc list:

Why exactly do we build models? What's the actual purpose?

(Not that I do yet, but...)

Someone responded:"Why do we build models? I have a quote. I have substituted theorist for artist."

The [theorist] will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question; it would require at least a volume for each day to enumerate the endless insignificant incidents which crowd our existence. A choice must be made—and this is the first blow to the theory of ‘the whole truth’.

-Guy de Maupassant

Slashdot links to a keynote speech by Eben Moglen, a lawyer who works with the Free Software Foundation.

This is a great speech - possibly because of the content, but mostly because it's inspiring and wonderfully hyperbolic. Coming to a sensible opinion on anything is often greatly aided by having some hearty hyperbole to bounce off. (Francis Fukuyama is great for that.)

It has some lovely phrases - and some kind soul has transcribed the whole thing.

He gets straight to the over-egging: the 20th century was about steel - "and from steel it made the rest of what the twentieth century possessed for the exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit."

Can you guess what the 21st Century is about? Why, of course...

Some scary robot stuff for Tuesday.

Slashdot reports that Israel would like to have tiny little hornet-size droids to film and/or kill terrorists. Perez mentioned something similar in a recent Guardian article, post-Lebanon-flattening. It started quite promising: there's too much death, too much risk. Yay! Therefore, we need tiny flying robots to do the dirty work for us. Doh.

Quite Perez believes this is a realistic goal, I don't know. Though we didn't know we could build atom bombs or fly to the moon but, my Jove, we all pulled together, showed a bit of spirit and jolly well did it.

This is, one might speculate, not unconnected to the US Manhattan-project push for a new robotics era in the military. Notwithstanding that the people who write about it in docs like this are angling for Congressional money, it's still scary. They even have a little diagram showing how they'd like to get from people operating robots, to an autonomous robot force able to deploy and communicate over land, sea and air and into cities and buildings, under strategic control.

We already have unmanned aerial drones killing via US-based CIA operative control; such drones were also used by Israel this summer. The gap here between the 'thousands of [unmanned] flight hours' and military strikes is already almost instant:

Other air force investments of recent years intended to shorten the sensor-to-shooter time during joint operations between its UAVs and attack helicopters also proved their worth during missions in southern Lebanon, the service says. Tadiran Spectralink's Givolit datalink system allowed the service to react quickly against targets such as rocket launchers by relaying images from a UAV directly into the cockpit of a Boeing AH-64 Apache, enabling its pilots to immediately launch missiles.