Hopefully Interesting

I don't know if I've mentioned it on this blog but a while ago I took the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of my pre-tax income every year to efficient charities. In general I'd recommend following Givewell's recommendations fairly closely.  In past years I've strayed beyond them a bit, in particular giving a bit extra to charities that provide micronutrients in poor countries on the theory that allowing kids to grow up healthier is investing in the future and maybe I ought to prioritize that over saving as many lives as I can right now. On the other hand, Givewell's top charity is the Against Malaria Foundation and we, that is humanity in general, have been making huge strides against Malaria recently.   It isn't an impossible project to eliminate it in the wild.  I'm too young to have helped with the elimination of Smallpox but this would be another ancient enemy laid to rest.  The Against Malaria Foundation is a finite entity and might no...

People trying to justify the recent Republican tax plan often talk about the importance of long run economic growth.  And you can see how, if that were true, it could be a really important argument.  The difference between 2% and 3% annual growth over a hundred years would be a factor of two and a half.  If that sort of change were really possible it would justify quite a bit.  Even if all that extra growth went to rich people then even at the new, lower, tax rates that would be much more tax money available for social programs. Sadly there's no way cutting taxes could have such a large effect in the US. The theory behind the cuts is that people become more productive when they've got more or better machines.  Machines cost money, so leaving businesses more money to buy machines will make them more productive.  More machines leads to more money leads to more machines in a virtuous cycle.  Except that in a developed economy it's often very hard to f...

Back in 2010 some researchers at the University of Berkley started work on an instruction set architecture (ISA) that was going to be both open for anybody to use and incorporating modern ideas.  All computers run by performing a series of operations, like loading a 16 bit value from memory, adding two 32 bit numbers together and returning the highest possible 32 bit value if the result can't be represented in 32 bits, or taking the cosine of a 32 bit number.  An ISA defines which operations are basic to the computer and which have to be assembled out of other instructions.  It also tells you how you represent your instructions as sequences of 1s and 0s in memory.  And it specifies various other things such as how memory accesses from different cores interact. You might have heard of the great RISC versus CISC wars of the 1980s.  For a long time it was very expensive to move data from memory to the computer core (it was only every one back then) and back....

Since writing a post way back about the way complexity is a problem for Congress I've been happy to discover that the ideas in those aren't at all original and that these are the sort of things people write papers on.  Here's a good article on one recent paper.  I suppose I should have seen that coming.  Possibly I got the idea from somewhere initially then forgot about reading it. But anyways, figuring out what you need to know to write legislation is hard.  It would be cool if Congress had a big budget to hire outside experts but they have to make do listening to what lobbyists tell them and trying to decide which to believe.  Of course there is on part of government that has a huge budget to hire people with specialist knowledge and which has tons of them on staff.  That is, the executive branch. That's an angle on this whole situation I'd completely overlooked.  A president proposing legislation can use the Department of Education to draft sc...

See also parts  I ,   II ,  III ,  IV ,  V , and  VI . Space is sort of hard to get to.  You've got one of the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), which are really efficient rockets which'll give you a v e  of 4.4 km/s in vacuum.  That's pretty efficient for burning stuff and about as well as we can do for a rocket that can take off from Earth.  But lets say we do want to take off from Earth.  Well, plugging that into the rocket equation we see that you need a mass ratio of  8.5 to 1 to get the 9.4 km/s you need to reach orbit.  Especially when the big tank you need to hold the hydrogen for your rocket probably has a mass ratio of 10 to 1 before you add in the engines or the shuttle and payload.  Thankfully the shuttle also had its boosters which finished burning early then the big casings that contained all that solid fuel were dropped into the ocean where they couldn't slow the rest of the shuttle down. Being ab...

When I was younger there were a lot of wondrous devices that were predicted in some science fiction books I read that I thought I might never get to use.  For instance when I was reading some Tom Clancy book or other in high school some government servant pulled out his pocket device that combined a cell phone, a GPS, and a PDA.  This was of course a super expensive device that was only available to top government officials and the very wealthy.  It was, of course, basically an iPhone but with less features.  There was another novel I read in college, Snow Crash , where the protagonist managed to get access to a piece of software normally reserved for the rich and powerful.  It was a 3D model of the Earth overlaid with satellite imagery that you could manipulate and zoom in on any location smoothly plus a lot of extra information.  It was basically Google Earth except with a few more features. Every technology has an adoption curve.  Once indoor plum...

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion  by Jonathan Haidt is a book about morality.  It's about the ways in which people form moral opinions and the underlying basis for human morality. The book begins with a description of how the author's views have changed over time and how the conventional view of how children develop morality has changed over time.  To oversimplify, at one point people viewed children as inherently immoral and needing to be taught about morality.  Then children were viewed as being inherently moral and only needing to be protected from forces that would stunt there inherent goodness.  Then Lawrence Kohlberg re-invented morality as a rational way of rationally reconciling one's own desires with the desires of others.  And finally he came to the conclusion that people have inborn moral intuitions that we use to construct our theories of morality.  That won't be any surprise to readers of...

An interregnum is a gap in governance, most commonly when a monarch dies without a child old enough to take over.  For decades the world has grown used to the idea that computers would get better and better year by year as engineers were able to fit more and more transistors onto a piece of silicon economically in a process described by Moore's Law.  Sadly, that law looks to be running out of steam.  So we're going to have to go through an interregnum while people discover some other substrate for computation that can be pushed further than silicon transistors could. Transistors have come a long way since they were invented in 1926.  They couldn't be built by the people who conceived them but in 1947 Shockley et al figured out how to make a practical transistor for use various electronics such as radios and then in 1954 the first transistorized computer was developed: TRADIC.  It was an amazing device at the time because computers were usually room sized where...

There's a very real sense in which any sort of free market you could have can only exist when it is created by a government.  Without government there might be no third party to prevent me from selling my goods to the person over the hill but at the same time there's nothing preventing that person from just taking my goods and not paying me if he feels that he has a greater capacity for violence.  A world without government doesn't look like the "war of all against all" that Hobbes described in Leviathan  since people still have their senses of friendship and kinship but those only extend so far.  Trading without the arm of the state to preclude violence takes trust that has to be built up over long periods of time and tends to occur in very stereotyped forms.  You can't run a modern supply multi-stage supply chain or anything like it without the umbrella of a state unless, against all odds, Nozick's ideas about  capitalist anarchy  actually work out i...

Recently I finished reading, well, starting three books in a row that were about consciousness.  Which, of course, it quite enough to do a blog post. The first was  Consciousness and the Brain  by Stanislas Dehaene.  It was excellent.  Often when we talk about consciousness philosophically we get lost in depths of abstraction.  This was about consciousness as a scientifically observable phenomenon.  How to tell if someone is conscious of something?  Ask them if they saw it.  People are conscious of things when they notice them but not when they're asleep or not paying attention to them or in various other circumstances.  Insects can't report what they see so we'll get back to the problem of insect consciousness later. It turns out there's a lot of investigation you can do within that framework that's still very interesting.  And all the philosophical debate about whether qualia are separable from observations is neatly side...

This is an exciting time to be someone interested in spaceflight.  Not as exciting as the original space race, of course, but hopefully we'll get close within the coming decade.  SpaceX has been making a lot of news with its landings of the first stages of its rockets after using them and its big plans for future Mars missions h and sending people around the moon . The United Launch Alliance, which handles most of the government's launches and has a very good reliability record , also has some fairly ambitions plans it's announced involving the development of the space near Earth and it's next generation upper stage .  But probably the most exciting competitor to SpaceX right now (besides NASA) is Blue Origin. SpaceX has its Falcon 9 which is launching satellites now and its more ambitious and out there ITS.  Blue Origin has until now had its New Shepard rocket for shuttling tourists up to space briefly but recently its been talking more about the New Glenn, a v...

For a long time people have talked about the idea of using hydrogen to fuel our transportation systems.  There are some obvious advantages to this.  When you burn hydrogen you don't release any CO2, the hydrogen combines with oxygen to form simple water.  Batteries like you'd find in an electric car also store and release energy without emitting CO2 but those don't hold as much energy as the equivalent weight of hydrogen.  Hydrogen theoretically stores 40,000 Wh/kg whereas even a good battery like the one used in a Tesla only stores   100 Wh/kg.  The theoretical values aren't the whole story since converting hydrogen to motive force is less efficient than converting charge in a battery.  And also you need tanks to store the hydrogen which I'll come back to later.  But those don't overcome the magnitude of the difference and long range hydrogen cars are feasible in a way that long range electric cars aren't. On the other hand hydrogen has some bi...

At Bill Gates's recommendation I recently read   The Grid  by Gretchen Bakke.  There's been a lot of talk recently about the US having an infrastructure problem but mostly it's in the context of our roads and bridges.  But really our electrical grid is also very important for modern life and impending changes to electricity generation look to increase the strain on the grid.  The cost of solar electricity on average has been plunging but the demand for electricity doesn't go down when a cloud passes over a solar farm.  We really want to be spreading out fluctuations generation between further flung power plants but to do that we need to build new, better, power lines.  There's also a good history of early electrical innovation though I was already familiar with much of it. Donald Trump's election finally prompted me to get around to reading The Revolt of the Public  by Martin Gurri.  He wrote about how social media has made the failu...