[insert witty title]

The Gibbon has just become one of my favourite animals, mainly because they seem to take great delight in being absolute pricks towards other species. Check out a gibbon tormenting a dog:

I think the reason this video is so funny is that the gibbon actually looks like an ugly little human, and when he runs away with his arms flailing everywhere I can’t help but think of a mischievous little child. Second, and much more hardcore, a gibbon takes on two tigers:

Thank you Mr. Gibbon for being an absolute bastard to the other animals and really making me laugh.

It turns out there is a formula that can calculate the nth digit of pi without needing to know the previous n-1 digits!

Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the so called Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula,

Imagine for one second that you own a coffee shop (Not a Dutch coffee shop, just a shop selling cups of coffee). Assuming that after all costs have been tallied up it costs you exactly one pound to produce a cup of coffee, how much should you sell that cup for?

No matter what price you pick the result will always be suboptimal. Although a bleary eyed commuter may be willing to pay a high price, say three pounds a cup, for a morning caffeine fix on his daily stumble to work, you’ll miss out on the custom of the minimum wage employee, who may only be wiling to pay 1.10. Similarly if you price the coffee too cheaply, you’ll do a roaring trade, but all the people who would be willing to pay more end up keeping money in their pockets

In an ideal world you would find out how much an individual customer would be willing to pay and charge them exactly that much. This approach would maximise your profits, whilst keeping a maximal number of people happy. Unfortunately without a magical telepathic supercomputer at every checkout this will never happen. Coffee shops, therefore use a different way of allowing customers to self-select how much they pay, and the mechanism is choice. Take for example, Fairtrade coffee:

Cafedirect pay farmers an extra 40-55 pence per pound of coffee (enough to almost double their wages), however a typical cup requires only a quarter of an ounce of coffee beans, meaning that the additional cost to the coffee company is less than a penny per cup. For a time coffee houses were selling Fairtrade coffee at a premium of ten pence, and using the fairtrade label as a way of allowing customers who are willing to pay a bit more for a cup of coffee to do so.

Indeed none of the choices on the menu at a coffee shop have production costs that differ by more than a few pence (indeed, the actual raw ingredients are pretty cheap, it’s running a supply chain and nationwide stores that dominates the price), whereas the menu price will change by a factor of 2-3 between the cheapest and most expensive options. Choice provides a way for consumers to pay as much as they like. A spendthrift can get a black coffee for a pound or two, whereas a tourist looking to treat themselves can pay four pounds for a double mochalattechino. The cost to the actual coffee house isn’t too different.

This behaviour is pretty ubiquitous, for a time Amazon would track customer buying habits and alter book pricing accordingly (hey! he bought six harry potter books, lets stick a couple of quid on the price of the last one), but after customer complaints stopped this practice. Supermarkets sell about a billion different types of onions, from “cheep and cheerful value onions” to “deluxe, organic onions”, and on that note I have two last questions:

How much extra does it cost for a supermarket to sell organic food? How does this difference compare to the markup they charge?

Why do you never see ‘organic strawberries’ on display next to ‘normal strawberries’?

(This post inspired (i.e. stolen from) The Undercover Economist)

I have just read an awesome psychology paper, Cognitive Consequences Of Forced Compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; FG59). For the interested reader, the main results from this paper have been explained in this article and I would recommend that everybody reads it, it’s really interesting. FG59 contained details of the first experiment to show that cognitive dissonance is a real effect. Cognitive dissonance is defined to be what happens:

when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and values, and persuasive information that calls these into question. The discrepancy causes psychological discomfort, and the mind adjusts to reduce the discrepancy.

Various examples of cognitive dissonance are given in this article, titled “How and Why We Lie to Ourselves”, for example:

• When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.
• People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
• People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that “Everyone does it” so they would be losing out if they didn’t, or alternatively that “I’m underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side.”

I’m trying right now to think of episodes of cognitive dissonance in my own life and am struggling very much. The obvious thing should be that I *ahem* ‘infringe copyright’ occasionally. I have heard all sorts of justifications from people who want to download free things (”It doesn’t hurt anybody”, “Information wants to be free, man”), but inside have never been able to shake the feelings of guilt. I also try in my professional life to remain as impartial and unbiased as possible, and to give every idea a hearing. Who knows, perhaps I succeed, perhaps I fail.

late edit: i fail

When I was little we had a tropical fish tank, with a little black film thermometer. They look a bit like this:

As the temperature increases a gradually larger array of coloured squares begin to appear on the thermometer (only the bottom three are visible on this one). An occasional childhood game was to try and use friction from my thumb to light all of the squares. I’m sure it’s something I’d also like to try today, but sadly I’m too lazy to go to the pet shop and get one.

Well, it turns out I’m not the only person who likes these things and somebody had the idea of putting the same chemicals into wall tiles. It makes for one badass (if somewhat cheesy) shower:

I’d seriously like to know how much this costs.

Recently I was reading a Guardian article about how murder rates are changing in Britain. If you listen to the daily news or read tabloid newspapers it becomes very easy to believe that “Britain is burning and we’re getting swept under a tidal wave of gun crime.”. The reality is (as usual) a bit more nuanced, and would benefit from an indepth analysis. Fortunately I stumbled over a paper (Shaw, Tunstall & Dorling (pdf)) in which this analysis is carried out in some detail. In many ways the results are unsurprising, but it still makes for interesting reading so I’ll summarise a few points here.

The most obvious question to ask is “Have murder rates actually increased over time?”. The answer is a resounding yes. Here we see the total murder rate as a function of year (and that the authors of a scientific paper don’t know how to label axes, grrr)

The bar chart and left hand scale represent the total number of murders, and the blue line and right hand scale represent the number of murders per million people. There has been a steady increase in the murder rate for as long as the numbers have been analysed. However, it is useful to break these numbers down into smaller populations.

To look at the effect of social class on murder rate we need to define a measure of poverty and in this case we use the breadline index, a measure of poverty defined on a region by region basis using six variables: unemployment, lack of owner occupied accommodation and lack of car ownership, as well as three ‘at risk’ variables: limiting long term illness, lone parent households, and low social class.

Using this we can see how murder rates changed as a function of social class:

OK so murder rates have stayed approximately constant or even decreased amongst the well off, but have absolutely exploded in the more deprived regions of the country, which gives us our first handy hint:

Ways to avoid being murdered #1: Do not be poor

The authors of the study also look at the ages of murder victims (label your axes, people!):

The barchart to the left represents males, the one on the right represents females. The vertical axis is ‘Age’ and the horizonal one is ‘Number of murders’. This leads us immediately to our second hint:

Ways to avoid being murdered #2: Do not be male or of working age

Finally the authors break down murders by method:

Amongst the poor knife crime is overwhelmingly popular, whereas the rich (for some reason) are partial to a good old strangling or shooting.

Ways to avoid being murdered #3: Wear a stabproof jacket if you’re poor, and perhaps a steel gorget if you’re rich

In summary: There has been a substantial increase in the British murder rate over the past few decades (although compared to other countries it is still very low). This increase has been almost completely confined to poor areas and young men, and was on the rise long before all this hysteria about a ‘gun epidemic’ started up in the press. The poor have always been more likely to be victims of crime than others in society. This implies that the increase in crime is most likely to be a reflection of an increase in the number of poor people in the community, addressing that is the best way to address crime.

I’ll give the final words to the authors of the study:

NEWSFLASH! Men prefer attractive women!

That, folks, is the sort of groundbreaking, cutting edge, novel, and unexpected result that wins Nobel prizes.

OK this is awesome, I think everybody by now has been exposed to the internet’s quintissential crank, Gene Ray and his timecube theory. The site is an absolute masterpiece of multicoloured fonts and schitzo ramblings, if you haven’t seen the timecube yet you should definitely check out the link above.

YOU ARE EDUCATED STUPID BY YOUR GOVERNMENT AND SCHOOLS TO BELIEVE THAT THERE IS ONE DAY, WHEN IT IS CLEAR TO ALL ENTITIES THAT THERE ARE 4 SIMULTANEOUS CUBED DAYS GOING ON AT THE SAME TIME, THANKS TO THE UNITED STATES AND THE JEWS. EVIL ACADEMIC BASTARDS WHO PREACH THE ONE TIME THEORY ARE KEEPING YOU STUPID AND SHOULD BE KILLED. GOVERNMENT, RELIGION AND CORPORATE MONEYMOGULS ARE ALSO EVIL FOR SUPPRESSING TIME CUBE, AND NEED TO BE HANGED AT GALLOWS IF THEY DO NOT CHANGE THEIR WAYS.

What I did not know is that Gene Ray has been interviewed on television, and then he uploaded the results to Youtube. Is he espousing a new type of physics, or is he just batshit insane? I REPORT YOU DECIDE

I just found these pictures from a moon landing on my hard drive, they are fascinating:

After a bit of digging around I discovered that these were the Apollo 17 astronauts: Eugene Cernan, Ronald E. Evans and Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt. It is really striking how different these pictures are than their professionally shot publicity photos:

We should note that the astronauts aren’t crying, their eyes are red because moon dust is incredibly fine, gets inside of spacesuits and irritates the eyes.

Walking through waterstones the other day I saw a copy of The Long Tail, an economics book I have long wanted to read. The long tail is all about the power of power laws and the shifting patterns of supply and demand in society. The book was inspired by an article in Wired magazine, which has been mentioned multiple times on this blog and can be read in full here

So what about power laws? Well, they’re ubiquitous. The sales figures for books? Power law. Number of rentals of DVDs? Power law? Names given to children? Power law. Box office takings? Power law. TV ratings? Power law. Citations per scientist? Power law. Length of encyclopedia entries? Yep. Colours people choose for their kettle? You guessed it. The popularity of blogs? Power law. Youtube video watches? Power. Law.

The central theme of the book is summed up really well by this graph:

Here we see how the popularity of titles is distributed. There are relatively few hit products that sell in an incredibly large volume, whereas there are millions of less popular products. This is a pretty typical power law shape.

“Bricks and Mortar” shops can only stock a few items, given the limitations of shelf space. Retailers naturally choose to sell the most popular items and as such can only carry items from the “head” of the curve, i.e. blockbuster movies and hit singles. However, there are many hundreds of thousands of less popular products that shops cannot afford to stock and together their sales add up to rival those of the traditional hits. Online retailers aren’t so constrained by having to maintain a network of shops and so can afford to offer a much larger range, their catalogues stretch further down the long tail, offering an amount of choice that would have been unimaginable only a couple of decades ago. The extreme case of this phenomenon is something such as iTunes, where the goods are purely digital. The cost of adding a product to the iTunes library is negligible (upload it to a server) and as the popular ‘hits’ and more common ‘misses’ are on an equal economic footing. iTunes can quite happily sell them all. It is interesting to note that every single song on iTunes has now sold at least once showing there is demand, however small, for pretty much anything you can imagine. To further underline this point: 57% of Amazon’s revenue now comes from products far enough down the curve that they are not even sold in brick and mortar shops. This is an absolutely incredible shift in the way we consume things. Chris Anderson describes it as follows:

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

So what does this mean for us? A massive amount of choice is useless on its own, how do we know what we want to see? There is a lot of crap down amongst the unpopular items of music and literature. This is where the second half of the theory of the long tail comes in: filters. Think Amazon’s “Other people who bought this item…”, think specialized blogs, think Google’s pagerank algorithm think specialised search and recommendation engines, think user reviews. The collective wisdom of the people (along with some clever coding) allows us to navigate the sea of niches, tracking down obscure things that we like in a way that is completely impossible in a brick and mortar shop.

This is already beginning to have an effect on society. As more and more avenues for consumption open up, more and more people get interested in (well… they already were interested, but it’s now possible to pursue) niche pursuits. Be it ambient dub music, the history of lace making or ceramic crocodiles, it is now possible to track down communities, blogs, product recommendations, and out of print books incredibly easily. Monoculture is fragmenting as people begin to follow their own interests. Just look at the numbers for television: In the 1970’s over 70% of American households watched the most populat TV show, ‘I Love Lucy’, on a Sunday night. Today the TV shows with the highest ratings (CSI) attract only 15% of the population. The total amount of TV consumption certainly hasn’t decreased since the 70’s, so the explanation we’re left with is that when offered choice people actually do have different tastes and those steep power laws are suddenly beginning to flatten off…

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
–David Foster Wallace

It’s a fantastic book and I would heartily recommend that everybody reads it. The author additionally keeps a long tail blog here, which itself makes for a fantastic read.

Earlier this evening I was feeling a bit guilty and catching up with a bit of reading at arXiv. For those of you who aren’t familiar with arXiv, wikipedia comes to the rescue:

arXiv is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology which can be accessed via the Internet. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are placed on the arXiv. As of June 2007, arXiv.org contains over 423,000 e-prints, with roughly four thousand new e-prints added every month.

arXiv is broken down by subject area, and I usually confine my reading to astro-ph, where pretty much every single scientific paper in astronomy is released, for free, to the community. Today, for some reason I took a look through the category list and found physics.pop-ph, the repository of articles about popular physics. One title in particular stood out, and I couldn’t resist having a read:

Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy

I’m really not sure what to make of the article, it is all very po faced and hyper-serious, but I just can’t help laughing at the indepth analysis given to some films. For example, there is a scene in The Core where the heroes go deep underground and get out of their vehicle.

We could discuss many questionable issues with this scene: (a) Could a cave exist at such depths? (b) Could the crew afford to open and close the door of the vehicle in such a depth? This would mean the loss of breathable air from the vehicle and changes in the air pressure and temperature of the vehicle. (c) Could the flexible suits that the crew is wearing really protect them at that depth? Many more questions could be added in this list. The reader can reflect on these issues on his own. We will only discuss the sinking of a human body in lava

I can’t even tell if the authors are being serious, or wrote this whole thing for a laugh in the pub. Don’t even get them started on why time would probably not go backwards when superman flew around the earth, or why in X-Men: The Last Stand the bit where Magneto moves the golden gate bridge is not feasable (unless Magneto is powered, like the sun, by fusion).

The relocation of the bridge gave to the director an opportunity for great special effects. However, even with the acceptance of Magneto’s special powers, it is an unrealistic scene given the physical laws in our universe

The whole paper is absolutely brilliant and I urge everybody to read it.

I really like the idea of doing some movie reviews focused entirely on movie physics, think Angry Nintendo Nerd but with graphs and equations and foul language.

Finally, as a single word of advice. If you’re ever in a situation where either of the authors of this paper ask you to watch a movie with them you should respectfully decline.

…I have great faith that every single person who takes the time to read this blog is not functionally retarded, and as such I believe everybody will react in the same way as I did to the following challenge.

To win all you need to do is go to the following self-help ‘guru’ site and watch this entire video without wanting to smash your own face through the computer screen in order to attack the woman on the other side.

Here is your challenge. Are you man enough?

I tried to take some choice quotes from the video so that I could make snide comments about them here, but it just felt too easy, like a heavyweight boxer demolishing a toddler, so I’ll just let the quotes speak from themselves:

“Electromagnetic energy is actually stored in the microtubules of our cells”

“anything you have ever seen [...] is actually stored as thought forms that are stored in the the microtubules of ourselves. The microtubules have little water molecules where the im-a-ges are stored, and actually every single perception we have is stored as an image in our microtubules”

“[...] that nation of images - otherwise known as the imagination”

“[...] water molecules can transform given certain shifts and actually all he does is use a piece of paper,and puts a label on his water and he freezes the water. And the water transforms, the crystals of the water transform and takes a new shape, based on the word he has put on the water.”

“The images stored in ourselves are stored in the quantum field”

“Electromagnetic energy is beyond space and time”

“Well, as a brilliant doctor by the name of Dr. Bruce Lipton, a microbiologist, has been sharing across the world, giving this tour presenting some really incredible information about his research where he’s actually taken the genes out of cells, and noticed that the cells behaved exactly the same - as if the genes were still in the cells. [...] it was being run by a force outside the body”

Oh, what do you win by completing this challenge?

Scorn. I will fucking hate you if you can enjoy watching this in a non-ironic way. Actually if you fail at the challenge and are interested in learning more about this bullshit then you are going to lose to the tune of $2,400 for a ten phonecall session.

Recently the Guardian asked three writers, three scientists and two broadcasters to answer six basic scientific questions. Their results do seem to indicate that the writers and broadcasters aren’t exactly scientifically literate. Here are the six questions they asked, see how many you can get right:

Q: Why does salt dissolve in water?
Q: Roughly how old is the earth?
Q: What happens when you turn on a light?
Q: Is a clone the same as a twin?
Q: Why is the sky blue?
Q: What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

You can check you answers (and read other people’s) at the article Here.

I’m happy enough with my attempts (I didn’t quite get the saltwater question correct, but was very close. Also the clone/twin question was more of an educated guess than knowledge).

This is probably my favourite answer in the whole article, by Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark on why the sky is blue:

Because it’s a reflection of the oceans on the planet. No idea apart from that. I think the sky is blue because… the rain clouds obscure the blue, and the blue is a reflection… because of the sunshine. Fuck! I don’t know! Why is the sky blue?

I have recently been reading about some research carried out on where people’s eyes go when asked to look at different things. Here is the average distribution of gazes when people are confronted with webpages (orange = spent a lot of time looking there)

It’s a bit disheartening in that most people only read the first paragraph in a page, although it’s good to know it’s therefore important to get all of the information in quickly. Secondly I saw this:

This compares what the eyes do between an artist (right) and a ‘normal person’ (left). It’s quite neat that the eyes of the artist take in the whole scene, whereas the the eye that hasn’t been trained to do so fixates on the ‘interesting’ bit of the scene. Finally, I’ll leave you with this. The distribution of male and female gazes when asked to identify a sportsman:

I’m going to have nightmares now about walking into rooms full of men and knowing that they’re all staring at my crotch.

Yesterday I saw this presentation on two amazing new technologies to come out of Microsoft Live Labs. I’ll summarise them here and then you can play with them yourself at the bottom of this post:

Seadragon

Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.

Seadragon really boils down to being able to seamlessly interact with gigabytes of image data. The Microsoft guy makes a very good point that when you’re looking at images the only thing that limits how fast you can zoom in and out should be the number of pixels on your monitor, and by organizing data in an intelligent way (I bet there is some sort of hierarchical tree in there) it is possible to make it so that you can look at hundreds of gigabytes of image data simultaneously, and zoom in and out flawlessly.

Anyway, I’m not doing this justice, so check out the video demonstration above. The Guardian newspaper example is particularly nice

Photosynth

The second technology (and second half of the video) deals with Photosynth. This software marries Seadragon with a clever code that can go through photographs of some space and place them in relation to one another. What I mean by this is that if you had, say, thousands of photographs of the leaning tower of Pisa then the code could calculate the position and field of view of each photograph and combine them into a three dimensional environment that you can then explore

The highlight of the video here is the three-dimensional map of Notre Dame cathedral created entirely computationally from photographs on Flickr.

Anyway, again I’m not doing it enough justice. Try it for yourself here, it works in your browser and is really, really incredible.