Milleage

Time to break a lance for gas guzzlers. A curse affects most oil producers and many oil consumers, and if gas guzzlers hasten the end of our "Oil Age" they are welcome. Walking is the wrong metaphor here but I walk the walk by feeding a 3.5L engine for as long as I can.

Given Sheikh Yamani's mantra "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil" does conservation delay the end of the Oil Age as I suggest?

GM folks are doing high fives since the Chevy Volt earned multiple Green Awards in 2011. Not earth shattering to have a plug-in-hybrid in 2011 when GM had a fully electric vehicle in 1996, the EV1. And really old news when Ferdinand Porsche made Lohner-Porsche mixed gasoline electric cars (aka hybrids) around 1901. The same 1901 year the Oil Age arguably started at the Spindletop oil field in Texas.

I want to witness the end of the Oil Age. Electric cars are long overdue, but I do not have another hundred years to wait for them. And it is not clear conservation is always welcome. Riding a bike and using solar energy are great, but more efficient gasoline cars can have unintended consequences.

Doubling fuel efficiency, for example, means oil supplies will last twice as long. Is that good?

Actually with double car gasoline efficiency producers could raise fuel prices with no impact to consumers. That is what I would do in their place, and cartels are smarter than me. Producers would get twice as much per unit of production, instantly making them twice as rich either on revenues or reserves. A higher sustainable oil price also adds production capacity that would not be viable at lower prices, along with the environmental impact of production, emissions, and the prolongation of the Oil Age.

Granted, one can dig deeper than my facetious plot does. Me, I find no heros in the story worth a curtains call when it ends, preferably sooner rather than later.

The Minkey

Not that we can avoid the pitfalls of neglecting the important by spending energy in minutia, but in our family we at least have a term to identify such situations. A minkey, as Inspector Clouseau's French pronunciation of the word monkey.

The metaphor is inspired in a great scene from "The Return of the Pink Panther" where distracted checking the license of a blind accordionist and his monkey, Clouseau botches a bank robbery.

It turns out that the Social Security Administration denied survivor benefits to twins artificially conceived after their father's untimely death. The case bubbled up all the way to the robes at the Supreme Court. There are about one hundred such cases in the whole country, so this case does not affect the citizen's lives in any meaningful way, and clearly the lawyers and process involved will cost much more than just paying based on pragmatic and humane common sense. That case is a minkey in my book.

I understand that justice is done one case at a time, but God knows while the nine justices deal with this minkey bigger injustices fester and grow.

And before my disappointment wanes I open the umbrella to the fallout of the Health Care Individual Mandate case just started at the Supreme Court. Three years of legislative energy hanging by the thread of the decency of a few unelected appointees in robes. Nine lucky robes that landed a job and health insurance for life are deciding for lesser ones.

I can accept any ruling, but I cannot accept a 5-4 ruling. The law may be flawed, but an outcome where it is flawed to roughly half of them and not flawed to another half means that more than law experts they are political animals.

If we ask untrained jurors to be unanimous in their findings why can't we ask from justices the same thing? Stay sequestered until you agree, or let me get my Justice from a blind accordionist and his monkey.

Elections

Close elections maximize the leverage voters have to get their singular issues addressed. That can be useful, but a 51-49% kind of result tastes of division. Division tastes bitter.

I wonder why we bother counting votes at all. If forecasts show a conclusive result, they can be used to call the winner without voting. If forecasts are very tight we should toss a coin. It is cheaper and less prone to manipulation than vote counting. A close call means we are ready to live with either outcome.

With elections decided by statistical sampling, the sampled population has a higher chance of influencing the result. High schoolers study every day in case they are called up the next day. People would likewise care to be informed about the candidates in case they are sampled.

Granted, with my scheme individual votes are not counted. But who cares about counting every vote when a single vote cannot make a difference. Take California, before the polls close the elections are generally settled by the Eastern states results, so no vote here counts. But even in perfectly synchronized elections what are the chances that my lone vote decides the outcome?

The odds of a single vote deciding an election are lower than the odds of dying in a traffic accident on the way to vote. And yes, accidents seem to be higher on Election Days according to Mark Brady. He also tackles the myth that one should vote else one cannot complain.

"Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts" Nixon era bumper stickers morph into "Don't Blame Me, I did Not Vote" but the idea remains, you can only complain if you did not vote for a deficient leader.

Personally I wish for 70-30% outcomes so we have a sense of direction and common purpose, yet without falling into the ridiculous 99% results common in some places. Places I wouldn't like to live. Places where the ruler can say he is the 99%.

Tall Order

I just heard that Gratitude Healing is remarkably effective. A week of deliberate focus on things one is grateful for yields six months of measurable benefit to one's mind. A 24 to 1 return is remarkable, especially when I did not even know about gratitude healing until last week.

When wishful wishes had us try raw food as the panacea du jour, we ended up at Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco. The apex of raw vegan foods along with a spiritual holistic approach to nutrition. Strange decor and personnel. The waitress surprised us with her: What are you grateful for today? Followed by my quick facetious answer.

I am not bothered by the formulaic waiter line: How are you doing today? I like it and defend it when questioned as insincere. But my answer about gratitude was cynical. I forgot what I thought I learned from a very wise person, cynicism is not wisdom.

Turns out Cafe Gratitude is closing most locations and laying off most workers. Looks like one ungrateful server sued the place over pooling server tips across locations, and the owners don't feel like defending against the suit. Strange and ungrateful reasoning.

Gratitude is a tall order. The best time to exercise it is precisely the least likely, when things are going well. I flunked gratitude at the Cafe even when things were not going well.

And if it is not gratitude another spiritual boost in the news comes from psilocybin. In the John's Hopkins study 30% of the participants reported the most spiritually significant moment of their lives was under the influence of psilocybin. The medical possibilities are intriguing I hear.

Maybe pharma will rediscover and repackage the Magic Mushroom the Aztecs knew as teonanacatl and used until suppressed by the Spanish. They replaced the Aztec ritualistic use of the teonanacatl with the sacrament of the Eucharist, which in a roundabout way has the following interesting definition in Greek:

"εὐχαριστία" (transliterated as "eucharistia"), which means thankfulness, gratitude, giving of thanks.

Game

Here is the extensive form of the game just played between Saif Gaddafi and the tribesman desert guide hired to drive him across the border to freedom in Niger.

This newspiece confirms that the players do not need to have studied game theory for the theory to apply. Betrayal, as the subgame perfect equilibrium, was the obvious outcome. Or in his own words:

"Tribesman Yussef Saleh al-Hotmani yesterday claimed he forsook a million euros to betray Saif. He says he was offered the cash to guide a ‘VIP’ across the remote border into Niger.

Guessing who his secret client was, and fearing he would be shot rather than paid, he led Saif straight to the Zintan Brigade."

The plans of both players were kind of confirmed when only 5.000 Euros were found in the vehicle...

Sadly Saif himself defined the structure of this game, where the more Euros he offered the stronger the case was for betrayal. So much for the Ph.D. he got from the London School of Economics...

To be fair, Saif's degree was presumably obtained in exchange for a 1.5 Milion Pound donation to LSE, so he may have not attended Game Theory 101. I have not drawn the extended form game that LSE is playing in conferring bogus degrees to affluent ruling families, but at least LSE charged more than a tribal desert guide, and got the money in advance.

We can think about alternate payoffs he could have created instead of the failed game, or step back and realize that the game is not over. The captors have not turned the LSE doctor in, they are demanding a government role in exchange. I am not smart enough to predict the outcome of this game, but somehow I can visualize a Libyan rebel wearing an LSE toga in five years tops.

In The Zone

Obsessing about ancient travel vs. jet age travel possibly started on a trip to Greece we took. The thought that being at the destination matters, but also how one gets there. Travel logistics were surely a big deal in the past. In addition the journey duration say between Athens and Jerusalem, gave the mind plenty of time to get ready for the destination. And plenty of time to disconnect.

Now the speed of travel surpasses the speed of thought. My flight was so short that the body arrived in Athens with the mind still in Tel Aviv. Faster minds would help deal with faster travel and faster lifestyles. If the speed of thought could somehow accelerate.

For an intuition about faster minds think vending machines.  Gravity has not changed, yet it feels like the time between pressing a key and an item falling out has only slowed down with time.  One explanation is thought has accelerated. At least impatience type thought.

Useful thought is not just a short fuse. If we can disconnect, analyze and reach conclusions faster that would be useful. Faster motor skills control is useful for sports, where I claim the state of being "in the zone" is nothing else than our mind accelerating so the actual physical world appears to move slower, and we beat adversaries who seem to plan and react in slow motion.

Psychological theories seem to call this "Flow", and it is indeed described as capable of distorting the internal sense of time.  This research says we can only attend to a disappointingly low amount of information, about 126 bits per second. We may be better than computers for some stuff but we are slower than really old modems. 

Putting this all together we sketch one future where we match the real world pace with an ability to get deliberately and often in the zone. I read there is no prescriptive method for getting in the zone, or even worse, the approaches of spiritual meditation, workspace arrangements, video games, and web surfing, seems at loggerheads with each other.

It seems easier to get to the future than to get in the zone, and judging by the time it took me to write this post, the zone can be as far away from me as Athens, by foot.

Kaos

Fate aside, in the noisy confusion of our lives we all are sensitive to "initial conditions". Small things can radically alter the course of events. We meet people by chance, we get in or out of danger through minor delays in our routine. In the most comedic examples agents like Inspector Clouseau or Maxwell Smart rely on exquisite "accidental good luck" to survive and thrive.

From Kaos agents to the broad Chaos Theory: the study of systems that can be unpredictable as small differences yield diverging outcomes, even for deterministic systems. The most popular visualization of the sensitivity of an outcome to initial conditions is The Butterfly Effect, by Edward Lorenz from his 1972 paper Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

Kaos East European lineage invites a neat case of Chaos in world affairs:

The Soviet Coup d'Etat attempt in 1991, whose failure arguably led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We remember how the conspirators confined Gorbachev to his dacha in the Crimea while the KGB cut his communications lines, and the images of Yeltsin climbing on one of the tanks guarding Moscow's White House to address the crowd. Yeltsin's role against the coup, and in particular the failure to arrest him proved decisive to the outcome.

The conspirators allegedly awaited for Yeltsin's return from Kazakhstan to demand he join the coup against Gorbachev. Yeltsin would be arrested if he declined, and the coup would just proceed without him.

Yet a chronicle just aired on NPR says that Yeltsin neither accepted nor declined. The conspirators didn't plan for an excluded middle. Yeltsin landed so drunk that the conspirators were not able to wake him up. He sobered up the following day, but by then Yeltsin was surrounded by his advisors and had caught up with their intentions.

Little does it matter if our lives or tomorrow's weather are ruled by chaos. But when a glass of Vodka in Kazakhstan affects the fate of the Soviet empire, that is Kaos.

Cor Angle

The English invented many of the sports we play, including Football FIFA. Gratitude aside, filling the idle time of their imperial class might be why they did it, or they had to invent new sports as other nations beat them at the prior sports, as my British teammates say.

But the English did not invent the English Horn; my performer and composer friend Ruben argues that a poor translation of Cor Angle (french for "Angled Horn") morphed into Cor Anglais.

In any case today's English Horn is a close relative of the Oboe, so while other folks were still doing their summer soccer camps Ben went to an English Horn Seminar in Hidden Valley.

Listening to Ben play is remarkable as I can barely play a vuvuzela, it is also remarkable that we started guitar with Ruben under the same teacher and Ruben is now world class and I can barely play a vuvuzela.

A Simple Experiment

People quit smoking but do not give up cell phones. They are more addictive than nicotine, period. Scientists once focused on tobacco smoke impact have now graduated to electromagnetic radiation research. Most studies suggest no harm, but some large ones are essentially retrospective studies comparing the habits of control groups vs. brain tumor groups. Somehow decade long recollections of folks with brain tumors may be a shaky foundation to build on.

I say a simple way of settling the issue is a massive experiment where all cell phone users use the phone on the same side of the head. The answer will pop out by just looking at tumor location distribution in the future. A cognitive study correlated radiation exposure to one side of the head with longer average response times for the corresponding (i.e. opposite) hand than exposure on the other side. I have no bias for what the answer is, but I like such differential measurements more than interviews.

The massive experiment can be differential: in some countries people will use the phone on the right and in others on the left side of the head, according to the driving convention, for example. Countries with right side of the road driving will use the phone on the left side and keep the right hand free for shifting gears.

Agreement to do anything is hard. We have advertising, market forces, and coercion. None of these forces is welcome. Forget about people, let the phones run this experiment. What we need next is phones smart enough to only work on one side of our head.

Secret Weapon

The soccer withdrawal symptoms left by the end of the 2010 World Cup should be alleviated when the Copa America begins next month in Argentina . We may get some high level competition or just placebo. Who knows.

Rumor has it the best placed South American team in South Africa 2010 has an ace up their sleeves. A mistery player training in Norcal, away from the prying eyes of rivals. Car prototypes are coarsely camouflaged for road tests. Players are coarsely disguised with confusing number schemes, and roam across positions for extra deception.

Facts we can glean are: 200 lbs. mass, and a clenched fist in the old tradition. Redefines balance as the ratio between goals and red cards obtained.