Epstein and Axtell, in Growing Artificial Societies, get all hyperbolic about the impact agent-based modelling has on 'Explanation'.

For many, explanation and prediction are the same thing, and one can see why: to ask any more of explanation is impossible. Explain gravity! Well, here are some lovely predictive rules. Yeah, but what is it, really? Well... here are some lovely rules? Explanation also seems intuitively at home with reductionism: why are there so many different types of atom? Coz they're formed from smaller exchangeable parts - look, here's how it works.

But Epstein and Axtell reckon they have a new form of explanation in agent-based models: it's 'generative explanation'. Epstein has a whole book on this one idea, but it also appears in their much earlier stuff just mentioned:

What constitutes an explanation of an observed social phenomenon? Perhaps one day people will interpret the question, 'can you explain it?' as asking 'can you grow it?' (Epstein & Axtell 1996 p.20)

Well, I am having a fun evening! Started the day happily making some relatively coherent-sounding plans for the PhD, and reading about the jolly arguments the Austrian and Historical schools were having about 'the economic calculation problem'... but then, then, I took a look at this Three Toed Sloth post, via its Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts tag. This led onto all sorts of terrifying things, such as this little outline of a conference from five years back now. Here's a lovely chunk:

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.

The Edge has a 'third culture bookshelf' down the right margin of the website: what a fantastic list. One posthumous book, by Carl Sagan, has a nice review via amazon:

The values of certain physical constants such as the charge of the electron appear to be "fine-tuned" to produce a universe hospitable to the rise of conscious, worshipful life. But the universe is not all that hospitable - try leaving Earth without a space suit. Life took billions of years to take root on this planet, and it is an open question whether it made it anywhere else. To us carboniferous creatures, the dials may seem miraculously tweaked, but different physical laws might have led to universes harboring equally awe-filled forms of energy, cooking up anthropic arguments of their own.

Slashdot links today to a 'photo-essay' in Foreign Policy magazine: a series of pictures showing some of the tens of thousands of people in developing countries who re-claim metals from our old computers and other tech junk. Its cheaper to ship this stuff to China than deal with it here - and a lot of it contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, and 40 times more copper than copper ore. Melting it down also releases a whole heap of evil chemicals like cadmium and lead.

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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...

Well, my girlfriend Sue has gone to Oz for an eight or nine month work / travel jaunt. We've just had our first communication via Skype since she left, and I'd just like to report: Jesus Christ on a bike, in a bun. How amazing is the internet? Very, very bloody amazing. Amazing to the power of 'f*cking hell, it's amazing'. Somehow - Gawd knows how - the video was of considerably better quality than usual. Her speech and video were perfectly syncronised and - unlike the UK to UK comms that I've done - the frame rate was quick enough for it to feel like actually seeing her. And she's... on... the... OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD! YAAAAH! A-fooking-mazing. Most phone companies cannot be happy about this. I wonder whether it can last: there must be swarms of sleepless lawyers employed by great corporate behemoths convincing governments of its anti-competitive nature as we speak.

It was very, very hard not to think I was being duped and, in fact, she was in a studio somewhere with enormously bright lights simulating the warm afternoon sunshine. Viscerally, it's very much every cliche about globalisation shrinking the world. That vast distance - pretty much as distant as its possible to get without starting to get closer again - reduced to nothing. The two of us sat on different beds... oh, well, I could witter on about how amazing this is for some time, I think, but the point's made. Which was, just to re-emphasise, AAAAAAAAAA! FECKING BOLLOCKING WOW ON A STICK! YAAAAARGH!

I'll stop now.

Just a quickie: if you a) have Google Earth installed and b) do a search for EPZ Google Earth or Export Processing Zone Google Earth, you can quickly get some links to, e.g. an EPZ in Dhaka, or an Intel factory in the Philippines.

Allegedly. They may not be - and they look like any other industrial estate from the air. But there's a lot of much smaller shack-like buildings around the edge.

Interesting to note that Google has reportedly agreed to blur some Indian sites deemed to be a security risk. This is not unreasonable, from the point of view of the Indian government. But it makes me think we need more surveillance - by the right people, of the right sort, and open to all. If more of these EPZs could be Google-earthed by a bunch of unions, along with related data, that would be wonderful.

Lucky you: not only can you comment again, but also there's a bonus maths question to keep your mind agile. Things like 'what is 5 plus 4'. Hopefully enough to keep the spam-bastards at bay; if not, it'll have to be a slightly more annoying captcha text-image thing. I prefer the maths question. It's cute and makes me happy.

I haven't drank coffee for ages; today I did. Now I can't sleep. That was predictable. Ah well... now there are comments, so caffeine can't be all bad.

While I'm here, actually... apparently, it turns out scientists have proven that more pirates will ameliorate the effects of global warming. There's been a definite negative correlation between the number of pirates and the warming of the Earth. Solution: a big party where everyone gets to be pirates. Well, it just so happens...

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