Nick Gall's Weblog

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. A colleague just sent me Bill Joy's dystopian vision of technology, The Future Doesn't Need Us, I assume because of his recently announced departure from Sun. I must say I wasn't that impressed by it. I find dystopian visions as unconvincing as utopian visions. Typically, such visions paint technology as a general good or evil: Completely embrace technology X or absolutely denounce it. Fortunately, the future is not a utopia or dystopia, which are both nowhere. (Utopia is a Greek neologism meaning nowhere, suggesting that Utopias are nowhere to be found.) The future is to be found elsewhere, in between these two extremes. Let's call it allotopia: allos (other) + topos (place).  Allotopia is not better than the present or worse, just different (other). I find that the devil and god are in the details. At any given moment, I believe we should pursue particular uses of technology X into the future and not pursue other uses. If all Bill is saying is "let's be careful out there," then I am in complete agreement. If he is saying that exploration of a given technology should never be pursued, then I respectfully disagree. By the way Bill, allotopia doesn't need us; anymore than it needed the dinosaurs. The sooner humanity gives up its ethnocentric view of existence, the better off we will be. But I find this the most difficult Copernican revolution for people to accept. 6:18:39 AM

Friday, September 19, 2003

The Lifespan of a Company. From The Living Company by Arie De Geus The average life expectancy of a multinational corporation-Fortune 500 or its equivalent-is between 40 and 50 years. This figure is based on most surveys of corporate births and deaths. A full one-third of the companies listed in the 1970 Fortune 500, for instance, had vanished by 1983-acquired, merged, or broken to pieces.1 Human beings have learned to survive, on aver-age, for 75 years or more, but there are very few companies that are that old and flourishing. I'll bet the lifespans of companies forms a power curve, not a normal distribution. 2:15:58 AM

Thursday, September 18, 2003

The Evolution of Music. The New York Times reports: [T]he ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed." The courting and social cohesion theories of music's origins assume that there are structures in the human brain that have evolved specifically to handle music. If no such structures exist, then Dr. Pinker's theory or something like it is correct. 11:21:59 PM

Comfort Foods Switch Off Stress. The New York Times reports: Until now, no one has known how chronic stress gets turned off. A year ago, researchers in Dr. Mary Dallman's laboratory at U.C. San Francisco removed the adrenal glands from rats and exposed them to chronic stress. When they added stress hormones to rats' brains, the animals remained stressed. But when they fed them sugar, the animals calmed down. This is the first time it has been shown that the tendency to overeat in the face of chronic stress is biologically driven, said Dr. Norman Pecoraro, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco who helped carry out the research in rats. What is true for stressed-out rats, he said, is also true for humans. Now I know why so many analysts (myself included) are overweight. 11:10:29 PM

Clues to the Evolution of Cooperation: Genetic Basis to Fairness. The New York Times reports: Two researchers at Emory University, Dr. Sarah F. Brosnan and Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, report today in the journal Nature that they taught female capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for pieces of food. The capuchins were caged in pairs, so that each member of a pair could see the other. If one monkey got a grape in return for her pebble but the other only a less desired piece of cucumber, the shortchanged monkey would often refuse to hand over the pebble in exchange or might decline to eat the cucumber — both very unusual behaviors. These refusals were often accompanied by emphatic body language, like dashing the pebble or the cucumber on the floor, Dr. Brosnan said. The expressions of exasperation were twice as common if the monkey offered a cucumber saw her companion being given a grape without even having to hand over a pebble. I suspect that such a genetic sense of fairness also includes an aversion to others' freeriding. 10:29:21 PM

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch... It appears that an interesting hoax/meme is spreading rapidly across the Web: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. Seems that there was indeed a dissertation on the subject back in 1976: The significance of letter position in word recognition. See a discussion of this dissertation and the meme at Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey. 12:16:17 AM