Links that have been sitting in my drafts folder for varying lengths of time, but don’t warrant posts of their own.
Daniel Ellsberg on the effects of getting access to top secret information:
Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. (…) In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.
The Saint Petersburg Paradox is a bet with an infinite expected value. Therefore, you should take it at any price. But I wouldn’t take it for twenty dollars.
Kim Jong-il dropping the bass.
An anonymous mathematician answers: what’s it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? Also: what’s it like to be a drug dealer? There is, of course, no way to verify that anonymous responders really possess the experience they claim, but then again, that’s the internet for you.
Alfred North Whitehead: “The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
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A “stone’s throw from” means in reach of a powerful catapult: the Economist on euphemisms from around the world. Also from the Economist, a story about the failure of Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy today. (Kodak has obtained a loan allowing them to operate normally during bankruptcy, but the writing’s on the wall.)
Edge.org’s annual question for 2012: What’s your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?
The adjacent possible, on innovation as tinkering and recombination of existing parts:
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.
The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields.
A more rigourous attack on patents and copyright from an economic standpoint can be found in Against Intellectual Monopoly, by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin. They’re not piracy-luvin’ hippies, but PhD-holding academic economists. The book is available for free (as expected), but also in dead-tree form. I may write more about this book later, but I’ve only gotten as far as the first chapter. It has an interesting case study, showing that while James Watt’s steam engine patent lasted, there weren’t many steam engines actually produced. Once the patent expired, production and innovation of steam engines exploded. While he had the patent, Watt and his business partner spent more time squeezing money out of his patent than actually producing or improving on steam engines. Thus Watt’s patent set back the industrial revolution by several decades.
Finally: Bryan Formhals, of La Pura Vida, now LPV Magazine, one of my favorite places to find new photography, has started a weekly digest of photo-related stuff. It looks excellent so far, and I wish him the best of luck. I know how hard that can be to keep up. Also, Richard’s new blog, The Syllabi, which attempts to contextualize and summarize links to interesting stuff. Much like LPV’s digest, or my weeklies. I enjoyed the one on culture-bound syndromes, which I’ve written about before.
Jan 20, 2012