Yesterday one of my friends (I think it was Stuart) suggested the Wikipedia version: the smallest integer without a page in Wikipedia. A quick check suggests the smallest integer without its own page (at the point of writing) is 217. Given this important property, clearly it deserves its own page (and if it got it does not deserve it, and so on).

Of course, Wikipedia has an easy way out: declare that the whole issue is not notable. This is similar to declaring that all numbers and their properties are uninteresting. Declaring it not notable works unless it becomes a big debate like malamanteau (214,000 hits according to Google right now). Overall, XKCD has amply demonstrated that like complex formal systems powerful enough to allow self-reference Wikipedia has Gödel-like topics it cannot cover according to its own rules. Of course, not being a formal system and run by intelligent agents the attempts of getting out of such states are pretty inventive.

• Design elements and principles
• Anatomy of visual messages
• Visual rhetoric
• Typography
• Colors

Very clear presentation, very worth reading through to improve one's visual literacy.

1, infinity, 5, 6, 3, 3, 3, 3, ...

An extra challenge (below the fold) is of course to tell what generates it.

In our discussion several views came forth: Infinity is the unusual term, since it is not even a number. 5 and 6 are unusual, since they are non-trivial numbers - 1 and infinity are just a "transient" at the start (it usually takes more bits of information to specify a number "somewhere in the middle" than 1 or infinity). 3 is the unusual number, because it is repeated indefinitely - everything else is just a transient (my position).

If we allow nonconvex regular polytopes, we get the sequence
1, infinity, 9, 16, 3, 3, 3, 3, ...
There are no nonconvex regular polytopes in five dimensions or more. The nonconvex polytope sequence seems to support me - three again!

Of course, the whole question is ill-defined and somewhat pointless, but all the best Oxford postprandial debates are like that. I love starting arguments about
what the river passing the town "really" is named (and of course what kind of object a river name signifies - are rivers physical things, locations, processes, social constructs or something else?)

Overall, it seems to me that what is going on here is that low-dimensional spaces have pretty trivial symmetries only allowing zero, one or an infinity of some class of objects. 3 and 4 dimensions are unusual in that the extra degrees of freedom makes a non-trivial number of objects possible yet do not allow the infinite sets of 2 dimensions - sometimes more is less! In the higher dimensions things tend to smooth out, but I find it odd that the symmetries of space do not end up allowing an infinite number, zero or a single object in this case.

I just finished making the first version of my own website for Eclipse Phase texts.

Tarte Tatin is hard to beat as a dessert.

Rebecca Roache rechecked my survey for the truth of Nick Bostrom's claim "there are more papers on the reproduction on dung beetles than about the risk of human extinction". Looking at ISI, Scopus and Google Scholar this seems to hold true- Due to the nature of search, this kind of survey will tend to overestimate human extinction papers ("human extinction learning" etc will cause overcounting) and underestimate the dung beetles by not using their correct taxonomic names).

Another glaring comparison: scholarly papers on Star Trek and human extinction.

Not that Star Trek or Scarabaeinae are uninteresting or unimportant research topics. But it is a bit embarrassing we are spending so little effort on ensuring our own survival.

I wonder how much of people preference for curtailment rather than efficiency increases is due to anti-modernity sentiments and propaganda? It could be, as I argue in the other post, that it is just because curtailment has immediacy that people go for it as the better choice, but I suspect at least some thinks it is more virtuous to go without. Which doesn't help the environment, but does stroke their own self esteem.

Those pentapods do get around.

In other graphics news I put some renderings on Flickr of a Bernal sphere habitat, Mathias Chikawe Station, from my Eclipse Phase campaign. Here is an exterior and interior shot. By no means the most exciting outside, but the interior is pretty fun. I am just worried that most of the mass you can get in the ring system is going to be ice: while there are a bit of tholins to build from, you will need to important heavier materials from the outer moons.

That is one of the best opening lines of a novel I have ever read. Dan Simmons' Illium and Olympos (the line is from the later) are very well written novels, which is fitting since they on a deep level are about stories and their power. They are also dense, crammed with references and sometimes infuriatingly more interested in literary details than making sense.

Just as our civilization would leave amazing piles of comics, computer games, bizarre art pieces and radiated television shows behind if it disappeared, so have the posthumans of the novels littered the solar system with strange things: a mysteriously rapidly terraformed Mars, double rings of paradisical orbital cities around Earth, a chasm across the Atlantic, continent-spanning steampunk transport systems, Shakespearean protagonists with near-divine powers, an ongoing Trojan War and, indeed, quarrelsome Greek gods living on Mount Olympus and shooting down passing spacecraft. Resurrected scholars monitor the progress of the Trojan War, bourgeois eloi spend their time on Earth flitting around parties and in the outer system the moravec cyborgs debate literature. It is a total mess, and would in lesser hands likely make a very silly setting. Simmons manages to pull it off, but just barely: this is an extremely epic story (the *Illiad* is just one of the subplots!), but so epic and literary that it is nearly absurd.

Being an avid hard sf reader I found the moravecs the most appealing characters. Literature- and engineering-minded by design, they have a thriving civilization in the outer system but little contact with whatever is going in the inner system. As they get concerned about the weirdness and start investigate they act as the classic outside view, helping the reader (at least the reader based in hard sf) figure out what is going on. They are rational without being dogmatic: if a Greek god flies by in a chariot they will accept it and try to make some measurements. In many ways they are far more like us the readers than the "normal" people living on Earth, who have a culture and lifestyle supported by unseen technologies to the degree that many human universals seem to have broken down.

The novels can be seen as ambitious mashups: Homer meets Shakespeare meets Nabokov meets Proust meets Shelly. Many characters speak and act based on things in other works of literature: just as there exist parallel worlds in the in-story physics, the literary parallel worlds interact with the Illium/Olympus world. Which makes it somewhat confusing if you haven't read the originals (and who, honestly, has read Shelly's Prometheus Unbound?) On the other hand, this is after all what many people reading "real literature" enjoys - just as I enjoy noticing hard sf authors having done their physics homework and maybe run a few simulations to test their models. This kind of densely intertextual and referenced story might be just what posthumans would be telling each other: every strange turn of phrase or quote can be instantly googled and maybe also directly contextualized.

In the end, I think the key insight I got from these novels was that a healthy future posthuman futures are likely to be baroque rather than sleekly modernist. There will be more culture around, easier ways of accessing it, easier ways of expressing culture materially. Even if a small fraction of the civilization cares, that will still produce enormous amounts of very strange artefacts. Homer would likely find these novels prime examples.

She is a spry former gymnastics teacher, she is one of the constants of the family. She was one of the first women in Sweden to get a drivers licence, participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, outlived the Soviet union and seems to have been teacher to everybody in Vadstena. She taught me table manners, never to complain and to stand straight.

In Sweden there are about 1600 centenarians, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the congratulatory telegram from the king is pretty short and impersonal. Just in her little town there are three other centenarians (about 7 times the average density). Given the exponential growth of centenarians I expect this was just the first such birthday party I will attend.

Her life demonstrates quite impressively how we are outliving institutions, nations and cultural mores - as we get better life extension we are going to get even more cultural diversity among the elderly.

Asteroid risks are among the "nicest" global catastrophic risks. They follow fairly predictable orbits that can be extrapolated far in advance, and the only kind of uncertainty is parameter uncertainty of exactly the orbit, the size of perturbations like the Yarkovsky effect and of course being aware that a risky asteroid is there - there doesn't seem to be any unknown laws of nature happening here. Even better, asteroid sizes follow a pretty steep power law and the danger from an impact becomes significant just for fairly large impacts. While we might be suffering from an anthropic shadow if we look at impact craters we have astronomical observations on other bodies and of free space NEOs to callibrate our risk estimates.

The interesting aspect of 1999 RQ36 is the relatively high total impact probability of 1 in 1000 given current data, and the far data of highest collision risk, 2182. In this kind of long-term prediction getting accurate data in the near future might not reduce far future uncertainty: even if the current orbit is perfectly determined, the uncertain Yarkovsky effect will make the 2182 prediction uncertain.

Another aspect is that deflecting the asteroid away from the "keyholes" it needs to pass through during a series of passes 2060-2080 is relatively easy (it needs to be moved about one kilometer to the side, within the technology we have today), but afterwards deflection becomes much harder. This suggests that there is a (soft) time limit to fixing a potential problem. The authors note:

The current impact monitoring covers a time span of about a century. If this were to continue, and the asteroid 1999 RQ36 were indeed on a collision course for 2182, then the warning about this would be issued only in 2082, that is at a time when the opportunity to deflect with requirements compatible with current technology would already be expired. To extend the predictability horizon of impact monitoring seems to us to be a better solution, at least economically, than waiting for future and hypothetical technological advances.

But extending the predictability horizon may be very hard for some asteroids; this one probably is well-behaved enough that knowing its thermal properties would be enough to tell whether it ought to be deflected, but it is not impossible that there are others that are too chaotic to be predicted far in advance yet end up with hard-to-shift orbits.

Of course, as a technological optimist I have full confidence in that we as a species could develop good asteroid pushing technology if we felt we had to. It is just that this motivation probably declines exponentially with time distance. If 1999 RQ36 was going to hit in ten years the effort would likely be massive, but if we can delay any effort (and costs) to 2070 or so we will likely do it. I expect technological capability to grow exponentially over this time so maybe this is for the best. But the logic of procrastination may well be strong enough to avoid doing anything by 2080 - after all, there is a century of time left. Then a decade, then a year and then nothing at all.

However, delaying can be smart if the necessary technology becomes cheaper and more groups have access. It only takes one group to jostle the asteroid out of the dangerous orbit to fix the problem. The more groups who can act, the more likely that one might do it (unless there is a very strong dilution of responsibility effect). If lifespans increase we should also expect a lower discounting of the far future, although this might still not be enough. We might even become better at avoiding collective procrastination, although so far we have no historical data to base this hope on. And of course, we are likely to be richer and hence better able to handle sudden costs or the need for building resiliency.

Global catastrophic risks with a very long fuse might be predictable but hard to fix even when the cost of doing it is low. It would be embarrassing if we suffered from such an event that had been predicted more than a century before.

The whole thing is of course in the concept phase. Where it will remain forever.

The reason is that there is only about 5 kg of plastic per square kilometre in the gyre. To make anything sizeable a ridiculous amount of seawater needs to be filtered, at a noticeable economic and ecological cost (filtering out all the plastic is going to filter out all the plankton too). To make a 2 ton boat of recycled plastic (a more sensible and real idea) 400 square kilometres need to be *completely* cleaned. The patch might have enough material for a few thousand such boats, but it seems doubtful that it would be plentiful enough for building an eco-utopia.

But this doesn't matter much to the proposer, since the main point seems to be to make a cool, green project rather than solving the problem. I have earlier ranted a bit about how many designers love to come up with green designs that will never have the least environmental impact but provide them with social gratification. But this project got me one notch more annoyed.

Note the initial picture used by Io9, showing the boy boating through a garbage filled lake. That contributes to the idea that the garbage patch is a near-solid near-island, and makes the idea that it could all be piled together into a colourful island seem plausible. The pictures on the site are equally suggestive of an ocean clogged with a thick soup of confetti. The reality is utterly different and much harder to deal with - tiny neutrally buoyant fragments involved with complex ecological changes. The site also brings in climate refugees, a notion most migration experts find somewhat problematic, apparently hinting that they could be resettled on the recycled island (or maybe suggesting that getting rid of the plastic will somehow help fix the climate). The whole project promotes an oversimplified view that doesn't address the real problems.

Anab Jain's keynote speech on LIFT10 about the evolving role designer suggested that the designer could be a facilitator rather than just a form creator. Design interaction may be able to get around ludic fallacies and other biases, to entice people to explore scenarios and actually reveal their desires. I think this is true. But if a good interaction with a speculative design scenario might help us solve or understand problems, then bad interactions might actually make us *less* able to solve and understand.

Consider a well-crafted design concept for how to fight the explosive rise of street crime by elegant, organic street lamps doubling as violence detectors that spray soothing pheromones over troublemakers. The site is well crafted, making these fictional street lamps look utterly plausible. There are interview clips with people from this scenario discussing the pros and cons of the "peacelights". It get coverage in a lot of media. Is this a good use of design? I would argue it is the opposite. Street crime is, despite popular perceptions, falling in most developed countries. The peacelights are fictional, but people encountering the believable design might think they are indeed a realistic product. The practice of chemically controlling the public for social ends is presented as desirable (since otherwise the whole project would be pointless), with dissenting voices only suitably dissenting. As time goes, the project will be recounted in other media and between people with no reference to the real origin, turning into a story that is taken at face value (consider how many places the BT "soulcatcher chip" crops up in as a real story these days, despite being a joke remark at the end of a seminar). There is no real interactivity since the core of the project was set up to produce the nice website, and this has already set a strong bias towards the views of the creators.

The above fictional example would be a case where design contributes to making problems less solvable, blurring fact and fiction in a way that detracts rather than helps finding solutions. Insofar design can help solve problems, it must also - at least among conscientious designers - be used in an ethical manner so that it does not promote oversimplified, irrelevant or erroneous solutions. No matter how appealing they look - or rather, the more appealing the design is, the higher the ethical standards it need to aim for.

Drexler sketches a program that really ought to be promoted:

1. Obligate science funding agencies to establish institutional mechanisms that are responsible for registering (allegedly) open scientific questions, and from diverse, external sources.

2. Make it embarrassing for the responsible parties to ignore questions that obviously shouldn’t be ignored.

3. For each question worth attention, require that they state an explicit estimate of the importance and difficulty of answering it.

4. Obligate the agency to either fund research on the most important and answerable questions, or to explicitly state reasons for neglecting them.

Easier said that done, devils in the details, but it looks like a very sane thing to do. What sensible agency claiming to want to solve important problems wouldn't want to identify the most important ones and try to get them solved? Given that differences in importance appear to be power-law distributed or something similar (the most effective/important problem is often an order of magnitude bigger than the second) getting priorities right is really crucial.

A key task would be to make signalling effects work in favour of solving important problems rather than in favour of solving apparently important problems. There are also principal agent problems between the public and the research agencies and between the agencies and researchers: they can each have different views on what constitutes the most important problem and which is most rewarding to solve. Hence we need to develop better ways of making it very clear how and why people arrive at their own priority estimates and make sure these transparent estimates are made public.

A few weeks back I walked along Rawlinson Road in northern Oxford while listening to techno music in the sunshine. I had an experience very much like the cartoon:

The red bricks were selectively reflecting and diffusing different wavelengths. The moss on the trees and walls was evolving, filled with tardigrades. My feet were held up by elastic forces due to van der Waals and other electrostatic interactions between the molecules, in turn sustained by overlapping orbitals described by quantum mechanics. Insects were flying thanks to tricky continuum dynamics involving vortices. The air was moving by Navier-Stokes equations. The sky was blue due to Rayleigh scattering, lit by a sun shining through nuclear fusion, with photons diffusing for many years through a complex hydrostatic equilibrium until they finally after an 8 minute trip, got refracted and hit my retina - yet within their own reference frame the trip was instantaneous.

People who claim science has a barren, non-magical world-view don't know what they themselves are blind to.

"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times."