Australian Cricket mismanaged

Australia is never going to be as successful at sport as we used to be. The rest of the world is more interested and with more opportunity. Meanwhile our interests have switched to more sedentary activities. Still the current state of Australian Cricket (hitting an amazing low on the first day of the MCG test) seems to be significantly caused by mismanagement.

Ricky Ponting showed why he is such a bad and unsuccessful captain at the start of the England innings. He held a huddle to gee everyone up. Richie Benaud was immediately critical. It was essential that the bowlers stayed calm and put the ball in the right spot. Instead they tried too hard and immediately sprayed the ball around. We can well imagine that this has been a feature of Ponting's captaincy. It is also bad for the batsmen. We need them to bat a long time, and you can't do that if you are trying too hard. We need batsmen who can still focus while staying calm.

Some of the coaching staff do know what they're doing, as we saw when they took Mitchell Johnson out for one test and sorted him out for Perth. Still we need to restore calmness in the coaching department. Let's start by making Mark Taylor head coach.

The tendency of players to play on and on has destroyed the natural rhythm of the team making it too hard to bring in young players. This also involves players playing with injuries. That might work in a 1 day game, but you can't bowl long spells or bat for a long time with a crook back. Shane Warne showed what a break from the game can achieve. I'd like to see Ponting take a big break. He might bat on for many years after that.

I fancy Cameron White for Australian captain, why else would Warwick Armstrong be reincarnated? However there are a few things against it, including the fact that he is probably not good enough to make the team. I think Shane Watson could be good, though he is another one who is not as calm as he seems.

Mathematics is "Thinking clearly about problems"

Robert Krulwich's NPR blog has comment on a wonderful Vi Hart video: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/16/132050207/this-is-for-the-i-hate-math-crowd-not-after-this-you-won-t. However it (and Vi Hart) are misguided about what is needed to improve maths education. We don't need to provide more stimulation for people for whom maths is (or might be) a recreational/cultural activity. What we need to do is make teacher and student appreciate the importance of mathematics for problem solving in every field. This is my comment on their blog:

The subject matter of Mathematics is "Thinking clearly about problems" (not counting most problems related to understanding and relating to human behaviour and culture). Teachers can't teach maths well without having this focus. It isn't (mostly, and for most people) a cultural activity like music. Math tends to invent a terse language to help express itself, but teaching the language without clearly relating it to problem solving is what makes math seem weird and pointless to many students.

If we could base mathematics education on this definition then we would see many immediate benefits:

• Teachers and students would know why they were learning mathematics;
• A problem based approach would help everyone see the difference between the important and the merely conventional aspects of the language and methods of mathematics;
• It would be clear why mathematics should be compulsory, and why efficacy should be a key requirement for higher education courses (outside the Humanities);
• It would integrate mathematics with computer education to the benefit of both.

To make the definition comprehensible it is important to tell teachers and students how mathematics supports understanding data of all sorts (using probability and statistics); how the real world (and hence engineering) is only clearly understood using mathematics; how computer programming is becoming a mathematical science instead of a black art.

Update:

In John Baez's blog I appended this to a comment I made:

My New Year’s resolution is to have another go to sell the idea that “The subject matter of Mathematics is how to think clearly about problems (mostly excluding human interaction issues like culture)”. Teachers and students are hopelessly confused by an education system that treats mathematics as a collection of facts (about Platonic entities) which is sometimes useful in the real world. My definition will give Mathematics its rightful place in the core of a modern education. I’m not going to make any progress until I can find a real Mathematician to endorse the idea.

And I got an endorsement from John Baez himself. Initially his comment was (as wordpress emailed it to me): "I hereby endorse your idea. Please make progress.". But now the reply reads:

I hereby endorse your idea. 

When I go back to UC Riverside in the fall of 2012 and start teaching math again, I’m going to teach it in a new way, informed by everything we’ve been discussing on this blog. I think the kids will enjoy it. I never taught math as a collection of ‘facts’, and that’s probably why the students liked my classes, but now I’m more keen on real-world examples that illustrate the big problems facing our civilization, rather than examples of the sort that pure mathematicians (like my former self) most enjoy. 

Sometime before that, I plan to write a paper with the mild-mannered title “How Mathematicians Can Save the Planet”. I’ll put drafts here, and I’d appreciate your comments.

I'll continue this subject area in a new post soon.

critique of "Ecotechnic Dictatorship"

Difficult times always bring out the desire for dictatorship. Plato kick started it all with his vision of the philosopher king. But it never works. Instead when democracy fails then the looniest sociopath takes over. He has no concern for the future or for the environment. His obsession is always his own grip on power.

Anatoly Karlin's writing displays a nostalgia for dictatorship that infects a large minority of folk from/in the former Communist countries. As such he is more looking to justify his position than make an honest case. This is particularly clear in his treatment of nuclear power. He first says, correctly, that it is the only hope for continuing our current high level of energy use. Surely this should induce him to thoroughly investigate and understand that issue. But no. Instead he quickly dismisses it with quick comments about Uranium running out which don't reflect any honest attempt to understand that issue. [Uranium is a very common mineral, as we see from the amount that has got into the ocean. Thorium is more common and has more energy (though not soluble so not in the ocean).]

Peak Oil doesn't mean "running out of oil". It does mean rationing by price and the huge costs of changing infrastructure to an electricity based one. Difficult times are guaranteed and the push to dictatorship will be on from well meaning folk as well as the sociopaths who will win any successes in that direction. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Democratic institutions need to be improved not dismantled. People who genuinely want to save the world need to get involved with politics not acquiesce or support the destruction of politics.

on the dangers of giving humans lots of energy

Atomic Insights Blog: A video that Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor would love. More power! What can 1 pound of uranium per day do? has a video of a Russian nuclear powered ice breaker going to the North Pole through the ice at high speed. It makes Rod Adams think of all the benefits of nuclear power. It makes me think that humans with lots of energy will do lots of mindless (and sometimes deliberate) destructive things.

Before the Industrial Revolution we felt powerless in the face of nature. Actually some of our worst human environmental disasters had already happened: the destruction of the megafauna outside Africa; deforestation of Britain and many other places. With fossil fuels the potential for destruction became so great that we invented the National Park. With nuclear power we need to aim even higher: the restoration of most of the Earth to its natural condition (plus intervention to compensate for the lack of megafauna). Let's let the rivers flood as they are meant to, and the oceans and rivers be free of industrial fishing. Let's use our biological skills to get rid of introduced species in many places.

Of course it is a bit premature to worry about a world with too much energy.

Sign Language

NextBigFuture speculated that no one will learn second languages soon because of machine translation. This misses quite a lot of the way we use language that machine translation can never do (such as using esoteric or group-specific features of a language as a way of establishing membership of a group). However my posted comment concentrated on one of my pet theories:

Human brains are designed to know multiple languages and some bits of the brain don't develop properly if not (which we know because people with one language have more trouble learning a new language than people who learn more than one when very young). And there is a second language that everyone should learn early: sign language. Reasons: (a) Talk in noisy environments; (b) Easier to have a private conversation because light waves are easier to block than sound waves; (c) Babies can learn sign language earlier (and parents are very frustrated till they can communicate with their kids). Sign language was our ancestors first language: we needed a language first to justify all the voice box changes needed for language.

Liebig and the carbon price

Economics is dynamic. All my ways of trying to understand it are static, like EROEI. So I often wonder whether I really understand. We get this in the EROEI discussion. So what happens to the money the company pays to the janitor (or the CEO). They spend it, and there is energy embodied in the stuff they receive. And the people receiving the money spend it and ...

This seems to have something to do with Liebig's Law. The thing that is in short supply is what counts. For 200+ years that thing has been skilled labour. Now, maybe temporarily, it is oil. So that suggests that for our infinite regression on the janitor's salary, each step has some embodied oil. And the sum of all those bits of embodied oil limits how much value you can get out of the dollar. Well this conveniently forgets that there is some time delay between receiving and spending money: the velocity of money.

So let's take a case relevant to saving the world: our carbon tax (whether it is done with a market or not). Proponents of this mostly say that it should be revenue neutral. All the money raised is returned to the public in some wonderfully fair way. Let's assume we have a closed system: Not much point if we just move the carbon emissions to another country. So the public buy energy (directly or indirectly) and part of the price is carbon tax. Then they get that back and they buy more stuff with embodied energy. Then they get that tax back. Well its doubtful if you can buy anything that doesn't have embodied energy, but only a proportion is carbon intensive. So how does this cycle play out? Are the infinities relevant or can we normalize or zenoize them?

importance of Liebig's law of the minimum

Recently Paul Krugman showed in his blog a graph of commodity costs: Big spike in 2008 and back to normal levels. But of course commodity prices as a whole are suppressed in this ongoing financial mess. He is failing to take into account Liebig's Law.

Liebig's Law applies in its original form to plants. Let's just consider the 3 standard ingredients: NPK. A particular type of plant will need a particular ratio. The growth of a particular plant in a particular location will be constrained by whichever is in shortest supply (taking the preferred ration into account). There will then be unused amounts of the other 2. Now we can imagine that the plants of that type in that area will be evolving towards making more balanced use of the resources available there. However long before much progress is made in that direction the area is likely to be overrun by a different species that is already better adapted to the NPK ratio there.

We need to understand the corresponding situation in economics. Global production requires resources. The key resource is the one in short supply. Naturally there is an excess availability of the ones that aren't in short supply, and their price is driven down. There is only so much that society can spend on resources as a whole, so not surprisingly the total cost of resources stays steady. The key is the one in short supply. Currently, and for the next decade, that is oil.

There is pressure on us to evolve: to use oil more efficiently and to use other things where possible. However our current technology mix is the wrong "plant" for the new environment. The correct answer is to switch to an electric instead of an oil economy.

Getting back to Krugman's post. The key commodity for global production is the one in short supply, where the substitutability is almost used up. That's oil. Total/average commodity costs are not the important thing.

P.S. On previous occasions I've misspelt this Lieberg.

Comment on water allocations (in The Australian)

We need to get back to first principles. The amount of water available varies and is often zero for extended periods. So: (A) We need to have agricultural capability out there to take advantage of the water when it comes; and (B) We can't have plants, like fruit trees, that will die if they don't get a minimum allocation every year. So actually rice is a great crop to plant when there's lots of water, as long as it isn't allowed to take water when it is scarce. If you want a market mechanism to do this, I'm happy to give my "Hedging the Weather" talk to anyone who's interested, from the abstract: "Modern radar systems deployed by the Bureau of Meteorology may be able to give an unbiased and reasonably accurate report of how much rain has fallen and where, in areas covered by such radar. This can form the basis of an insurance system to allow farmers and others in those areas to hedge against the weather." This system would give farmers the averaged income they need to keep the regional towns going during droughts.

Need for a 4th arm of government

[response to Andre Joyal at nCategory Cafe]

There isn’t a problem with democracy. The problem is this: The facts are going to influence policy, and that is going to determine who makes money and who doesn’t. This always results in a morass of conflicting claims about the facts. Parliament is not a good place to debate the facts. It is the right place to debate the policy implications of the facts. Democracy needs an independent, vigorous, ongoing, open enquiry into the facts for all matters impacting public policy. That enquiry needs to have the power to acquire evidence, and the financial resources to do its own investigations. The leading investigators need to be seen to have the technical skills to do the job (in particular mathematical skills) plus the right amount of status (like a Judge), independence, and the right personality to stand up to the most powerful people and organizations. Hmm, not easy to find such people. Particularly because it is important that people and organizations who have been associated with promulgating or even condoning statements intended to be misleading need to be excluded from taking up the investigators time, and that process has to also be open. Still it doesn’t sound a lot harder than being an important Judge.

Comment on Krugman post comparing economic theories

I'd be a lot happier with theories that clearly distinguished between price increases caused by general inflation and price increases caused by the increasing scarcity of some universally used resource input. To rephrase that: if you don't think about money at all, then one expects there to be pain when transitioning a large part of society's infrastructure from one technology to a different one, particularly if it is less efficient. Indeed there have to be a lot of inefficiencies associated with running parallel technologies (like maybe cars and horses in the 30s?). So how do we expect that sort of thing to play out?

Discussion added to EROEI entry at Azimuth wiki

• Energy for workers. The janitor’s refrigerator uses energy. Actually all the money paid to all the workers will be spent in ways that cause energy to be consumed. If this is included in EROEI calculation then we can see what happens when there is declining EROEI. The EI can be reduced by reducing wages (in real terms). This can only happen if all wages in the community drop, otherwise the energy business can’t hire. So this is the last resort way of reducing the EI and improving the EROEI.
• Oil is an energy carrier. In the proposal for a Hydrogen Economy the Hydrogen is just an energy carrier. Similarly oil and its distillates are energy carriers, particularly useful for the transport industry. Recently oil’s price has decoupled from other energy sources (electricity and natural gas). The extra price represents the value of oil as an energy carrier. So it is difficult to use EROEI calculations directly on oil. Ultimately we will still be producing a lot of oil when the EROEI is less than 1, using up non-oil energy in the process.
• Energy’s reign. It is possible to view the production of goods and services as requiring energy and (skill-weighted) workers. When we spend money, then the services we get use up energy and worker time. The recipients of the money spend it and use up more energy and worker time. Ultimately the money’s circulation uses up some of both. The two have to come into balance. The industrial revolution meant that energy was plentiful and skilled workers were scarce. So energy prices were driven to the floor and wages rose creating the middle class. If energy is in short supply then energy prices will get off the floor and wages will be driven down to restore balance. All of which amounts to an argument that cost/price is the best measure of total energy in or out at any point in time. EROEI calculations that exclude pay and dividends are the way to look at the crucial limit case.

Comment on Stephanomics on Oil

 IF the world were stimulated enough to get back to full employment, then how much oil would the world need? This is not an impossible question since the close connection between total production and oil production has been visible for decades. Now suppose that the world simply can't pump that much oil at the moment. What are the economic implications of that?
To answer that you have to look at where the world is heading. The price of oil has decoupled from the general price of energy. That means that the price includes a component for the energy, and a component for the extra value of oil as a convenient energy carrier (particularly in our world with so much oil-dependent infrastructure, like trucks, cars, petrol supply chains). This means that (a) Where possible (stationary situations) everyone is moving to other energy sources; and (b) We can increasingly use energy to get oil and still make a profit (this opens up options like tar sands, heavy oil, and in the long run we can even make oil out of thin air, perhaps using algae [I'm not suggesting that algae will ever make cheap oil]).
Other energy will never be as convenient as oil that flows out of the ground under its own pressure. Lack of convenience won't matter if it's cheap enough. The Green view that the cost of energy is unimportant is completely wrong. So the required recipe is clear:
(A) Stimulus must be used to build cheap electricity, not to try to restart "business as usual".
(B) We need to actually suck up any resulting excess liquidity in private hands to prevent us smashing again into the current limit of oil production: e.g. Energy Crisis Bonds in the style of War Bonds.

comments on Azimuth wiki startup

Paul Krugman has some relevant things to say in his blog today (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/the-power-of-conventional-wisdom/):

When everyone – tout le monde, as Tom Wolfe used to put it, meaning a relative handful of people, but everyone who supposedly matters – is saying something, it takes a real effort to step outside and say, wait a minute, how do we know that? It’s especially hard if you spend most of your time hanging out with other Very Serious People; I know that I myself have a hard time saying that people I know personally are talking nonsense, even when they are. The VSP effect is one reason smart bloggers, both on economics and on politics, have generally been a better guide to what’s really happening in America than famous reporters: their distance, their lack of up close and personal insights, is actually an advantage.

Then lower down:

This is what you need to know: important people have no special monopoly on wisdom; and in times like these, when the usual rules of economics don’t apply, they’re often deeply foolish, because the power of conventional wisdom prevents them from talking sense about a deeply unconventional situation.

Hmm. On the other hand we need genuine subject-matter expertise, which Krugman provides on Economics. On the other hand it is very easy for experts to be too narrowly focussed. I keep asking questions on his blog along the lines of "If world-wide demand were raised by world-wide government action to the level necessary to get unemployment down, then how much oil production would the economy need, and can we produce that much oil at the moment?". My point is that (a) we need government stimulus directed to produce cheap energy to be an (imperfect) substitute for oil; and (b) we need to also soak up private demand (energy crisis bonds?) to prevent smashing (again) into the limit of oil production and crashing the economy. But am I right? As Krugman and others point out, things are very similar to Japan 15 years ago when there was no energy or other shortage. We are missing any way to think clearly about these things. Just different groups of people using lots of adjectives and doing lots of arm-waving (yes there are lots of numbers being thrown around, but their implications are far from clear).

Which brings us back to the question of who has a special monopoly on wisdom. I claim that the subject matter of mathematics is how to think clearly about problems. Yes mathematicians spend time thinking about unimportant problems that they just happen to be able to describe succinctly. And also trying to understand mathematics itself better. But the real problems that drive mathematics are in the real world. Inference is a universal aspect of clear thinking, and this has to involve Bayesian analysis and using maximum entropy to understand what we know before we look at the evidence and how the evidence modifies what we know [and I'm not saying these are easy tools to use]. But this doesn't get us very far in understanding real world economic and environmental problems. I'd be rash to comment but I feel that the place to look has to be flows in configuration space, and the principle of Maximum Entropy Production will be the key to understanding that.

Transport Fuel is an Energy Carrier

What’s the best fuel for interstellar travel? The answer is anti-matter. Insanely difficult and expensive to produce and manage. But the advantage is that you get 100% conversion of mass into energy as you burn it. All the costs take place in the stationary manufacturing plants. There is no shortage of stationary energy. What there is a shortage of is energy for transport.

A similar situation is energy for mobile devices (PDAs, laptops, mobile phones). Here we see that energy carriers can justify being expensive if they can be light and compact. These are exactly the requirements for energy carriers for transport.

At the moment the world depends on oil which combines the qualities of energy source and energy carrier. Once we get beyond that we can perceive a world where there is a lot of cheap energy from Nuclear Power (assuming that something turns up from all the thought that is going into manufacturing nuclear power plants that are of shippable size). For transport we will then convert that to an energy carrier. Given the massive investment a fair amount of that will be done by producing diesel, and that will mostly be done by converting inconvenient natural sources like Alberta tar sands and numerous sources of very heavy oil. Eventually, hopefully soonish, it will be possible to make fuel from thin air using algae and this will be competitive if the carbon price is high enough. However while all that is going on we’ll also be seeing a transition to other energy carriers for transport.

Conversation on Terry Tao's Buzz

Robert Smart - This is an aspect of Jevon's Paradox. We need to look at the total picture: tax on light bulbs (or electricity or carbon) means less tax on something else which provides money that will use energy when spent. Energy and production are closely linked (including embodied energy of imported goods). The core question is: Does the government want to reduce energy use or move energy use to a different source? If the latter, then renewables will not do the job. Another mathematician (Prof David MacKay) wrote a book (Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air -- free on web). I read early versions where Nuclear was classed as unsustainable, but in the final version it is one of the options and actually it is hard to get the sums to add up without it.
By the way, as I pointed out to John Baez, one of the problems we have in addressing all these questions is that there are no good models of the economy. A good model would have to understand the flows of some funny things like people and sentiment. It would have to deal with money in a sophisticated way since it is peculiar stuff (because governments can and do print it, and maybe unprint it).

Edward Mehrez - @Willie: ....deleted...

@Robert: Jevon's paradox is a great observation, much of the policies enacted by the government tend to have limited scope and thus only fix problems that arise in a partial equilibrium framework whereas Jevon's paradox extends the analysis to other markets in which the government participates through it's expenditures of its tax income and thus considers a more general equilibrium framework. However, whether or not the government will use the income to purchase or manufacture goods that expend as much, if not more, energy than the energy use that was taxed is unclear to me. In a perfect information setting where the government is perfectly informed as to the utilities of all generations and considers the welfare implications of the externalizes on all generations (perhaps discounting future generations to some extent), Jevon's paradox does not occur; but, the real world is a different story...9:00 am

Robert Smart - Edward: Consider another law, Lieberg's Law of the Minimum. That says that the currency of life is whatever is in short supply. Now consider our situation. Before the Industrial Revolution energy was in short supply and wages were driven to the floor (leading to large wealth disparity). Since then the thing in short supply has been skill-weighted workers. So we've seen the rise of the middle class and energy prices have been driven to the floor. Now we are temporarily back to energy being in short supply. Don't believe me? Look at what happens to the price of oil whenever there is a hint of economic recovery. That means that Lieberg's law applies and money is energy. Suppose that the government gives everybody free haircuts. Not much energy in that right? But the barber has money to spend then, and everyone has more money because haircuts were free. And if you follow the cycles and the epicycles and the epiepicycles of that you'll get to energy. Well we'd have more confidence in that if we had a good model of the economy.
Does Terry mind us having a private conversation under his buzz? Apologies if so.10:10 am

Rethinking Peak Oil

The concerns about Peak Oil are often exaggerated. I've been guilty myself. The reason is that oil has two important characteristics, and it is easy to get confused.

The most immediate characteristic is as a source of energy. However once the price of oil gets above a certain level then we stop using oil just for energy. The first step in this process was when people stopped using oil for electric power generation, which happened 40 years ago. The next step, which is happening rapidly in North America, is that people stop using heating oil to heat their houses in winter. We are not running out of energy. Indeed it seems certain that we will get Nuclear Power working and producing cheap electricity well before there is any shortage of coal or natural gas. Claims that we might run out of Uranium are silly: it is precisely because there is so much cheap Uranium that we can't get more modern reactors up and running that would use much more of the nuclear fuel and leave much less residue.

The 2nd characteristic of oil is as an energy carrier. Liquid hydrocarbons are the ideal fuel for transport. And we have an enormous infrastructure using that. But the oil price has already disengaged from the price of energy. Natural gas is cheaper, electricity is cheaper if it doesn't come from silly renewable sources.

So Peak Oil folk talk about oil's declining EROEI: Energy Return on Energy Invested. We can see that EROEI is declining markedly. But this is now irrelevant. Oil is no longer being used mainly as an energy source. It is being used mainly as an energy transporter. The Peak Oil folk are quick to rubbish "The Hydrogen Economy". Hydrogen is not an energy source at all, and it is easy to see that it is a very silly energy transporter. Time to wake up and rethink oil as energy transport, and stop worrying about its EROEI.

Once we stop worrying about its EROEI, we can see that it doesn't matter if Canadian tar sands or very heavy oil requires a lot of energy to extract. We could even make oil out of thin air, using algae for example. The EROEI no longer matters.

This is not to say that we aren't going to have a nasty decade or two. At the end the successful countries will be the ones that make Nuclear Power work. Certainly India and China agree on that point.

Response to Google/Verizon fair Internet proposal

When there is congestion there has to be some algorithm to determine whose packets get dropped. There isn't any obvious "fair" way to do this. How about: Each source (/destination?) company gets equal throughput? That could be fair. The way to build a fair Internet that innovates is to have per packet (and/or byte) charging on each transit network, paid by either source or destination or some combination. Endpoints need to specify routes and need to ensure that intermediate networks have credit for packets matching the spec. For individuals and smaller organizations ISPs would handle this for customers. This is tough but doable. (Transit networks might charge based on sampled rather than all traffic). Update: To be more explicit. The idea of fairness they are pushing is that when you can't fit packets down the output link then packets are dropped at random. This strongly favours those (like google) with a big pipe leading to/from the point of contention. Another fairness scheme is to give all streams equal weight (assuming streams can be identified at all). This encourages people to break work into multiple streams, and this has been happening for a long time. To repeat: any scheme other than per packet charging will invite contrived workarounds and hit the small honest players.

Technology Summary for cheap electricity

LFTR is a research project. There are projects with funding that are also very promising for cheap safe nuclear energy. The ones I like are: (1) accelerator based nuclear power which generates neutrons externally (with a linear accelerator) and so doesn't need refined and bomb-useful nuclear fuel; and (2) fusion using a self-organizing tight plasma beam (like gamma ray bursts come from a chaotic situation leading to a self-organized beam). But existing nuclear power is cheap enough to do the job, and we should get on with that ASAP (and obviously lots of people are trying to make that happen and a different lot are resisting). Even if we have cheap electricity all our infrastructure is wrong for that, though with cheap enough energy you can make liquid fuel. We're in for a nasty decade at the best, however most expenditure in Western countries is postponeable, and the trick is to leverage that without causing mass unemployment.

Solving a 30 Year Puzzle

I have been interested in programming languages for over 30 years. One of the first programming languages I was interested in was Algol 68. Indeed I have always been annoyed that all subsequent languages get some things wrong that Algol 68 got right. More on that later.

One thing Algol 68 gets wrong is that it conflates variables and pointers. For clarity I’ll use more modern notation, only consider variables, and restrict arrays to 1 dimension: Var<X> for the type of X variables and Vect<X> for the type of 0-based 1-dimensional arrays of X. I’ll also show explicitly where parameterless functions are called.

What I have always liked about Algol 68 (that all other languages get wrong) is that identifiers stand for some sort of constant. The core declaration syntax is just “type identifier = value”.

• Int three = 3;
• Var<Int> i = loc<Int>();
• Vect<Int> one2three = (1,2,3);

loc<Int> returns a Var<Int> entity (a box you can put an Int into) from the stack. The distinction between Int and Var<Int> is crucial for thinking clearly about programming. Note that Vect<Int> is a constant array of Int. We also note that the type denotation on the left is redundant, since it is just the type of the expression on the right, and a modern language would leave that out.

Constant arrays are undoubtedly useful, but mostly people will want traditional arrays that can be updated in place. This is where Algol 68 makes a delicate decision. The obvious decision is that an updateable array is a Vect<Var<X>>. However that seemed to imply passing around lists of addresses of variables. This seemed undesirable. So instead (actually: as well) they made special rules for Var<Vect<X>>. So if we have:

• Var<Vect<Int>> vvi = loc<Vect<Int>>(3) := (1,2,3);

The rule is that normal Algol 68 dereferencing doesn’t happen when you write, for example, vvi[2]. Instead some magic happens and vvi[2] becomes a Var<Int> that allows you to update vvi in place.

This is really sad. Without this then we can easily regard an array as a procedure, with subscripting and slicing being normal procedure calls. Then a lot of stuff could be moved out of the core language into the standard library. It is always good if stuff can be done in the standard library, because it raises the chance that authors of other libraries will be able to achieve a good result.

Indeed it would be nice to get Var out of the core language. Var itself interacts horribly with type inclusion/coercion, being neither covariant nor contravariant in the underlying type. So if every X is a Y, and every Y is a Z, and a procedure takes Var<Y> parameter then you can’t consistently pass either a Var<X> or a Var<Z> to the procedure. Also standard variable semantics are unsuitable for the modern world where concurrency is exploited at all scales. It seems that we need multiple Var-like types with different concurrency guarantees.

Getting back to the problem. First we need to understand a couple of things.

Representing values at run time

How many bits do you need to represent the number 3 in a computer? If you didn't get 0 then try this one. How many bits does it take to represent a number that might be 17 or 18? Now it is more obvious that the answer is 1 bit: 0 for 17 and 1 for 18 (or vice versa). Of course it might result in a shorter and/or faster program if the number is represented by 17 for 17 and 18 for 18, but that might not be the case.

Maybe you think that this only applies when the values are known at compile time. But JIT compilers are becoming the norm, so that distinction is disappearing. In an Algol 68 style language where every identifier stands for a constant, it may not be necessary to actually materialize the value at run time at all. Indeed that is the norm for Var values, since they are normally just a fixed offset from the frame pointer, and machines typically support that conveniently in the hardware.

Assembly Language had it right

Most of my early programming was in various assembly languages. Assembly language is just a convenience veneer on the machines underlying instruction set. In assembler identifiers are created in two ways:

• A define statement gives an identifier a fixed meaning as a bit string.
• A label statement gives an identifier a fixed meaning as a memory address of some code or of some reserved memory.

This was right. The first languages (Fortran, Algol) used identifiers for changing values. Algol 68 tried to get back on track, but slightly got it wrong. After that it was downhill all the way in the mainstream. On the side we had functional programming, but that doesn’t solve the problem of handling Var types correctly, it just tries to eliminate them.

The right answer

Putting it together we see that we can implement a normal updateable array in the natural way as a Vect<Var<X>>. It can normally be a sequence of consecutive Var<X> boxes. The compiler can remember this and doesn’t need to materialize the addresses of the Var<X> boxes. We still want to write:

• Vect<Var<Int>> vvi = loc<Vect<Var<Int>>>(3) := (1,2,3);

but now we need to enhance the := assignment operator to do parallel assignment.

But what happens when we want to pass a Vect<Var<X>> as a parameter to a procedure? Mostly we want to send that as a start memory address and a length, and perhaps a stride. But we don’t want to abandon the option to send a fully general list of Var<X>, i.e. of pointers to Xs in memory. Both these representations are valid and don’t change the semantics of Vect<Var<X>>.

We need to embrace this. Each type can have multiple representations defined in terms of other more low level types. At the bottom things have to be defined in terms of the capabilities of the raw machine, or some abstract machine. So for a given procedure there are a finite number of implementations covering the possible input representations, and indeed the possible output representations. There is no reason for this to get out of control in the era of JIT compilation. It is hard to believe that duplicated implementations of procedures can work out worse than the technique commonly used for traits/interfaces of passing a pointer to the object and a pointer to a list of implemented methods.

Well anyway it will be interesting to investigate. My concept of a nice programming language seems within reach for the first time. The name will be COPL, for Closure Oriented Programming Language.

Negative numbers for Finance

Negative numbers have been around for hundreds of years. It’s about time the world of finance got with this new development.

We are told that interest rates can’t go below zero in nominal terms. Why not? We’ve often had negative real interest rates, and that seems more significant. In periods of deflation, negative nominal interest rates might be positive in real terms anyway.

Consider the stock market. Currently people who expect inflation are buying stocks of companies with debt, expecting inflation to get rid of the debt. People who expect economic weakness and deflation are buying bonds at near 0 interest. Having this split market seems bad. It would be better if the people buying stocks also shorted bonds and people buying bonds were also shorting stocks. One way to do this would be to allow people to hold a negative amount of bonds. This would allow other people to hold more of positive amounts. Of course if you own a negative amount of a bond then every time there is a dividend then you have to pay that. This money then goes as normal dividend to the extra people with positive amounts of the bond. Negative holdings of stocks would be tricky because of the additional problems with voting and stock splits.

Unleashed submission

Necessary Inflation

[Note that this is a based on earlier posts. The last two paragraphs have some new stuff.]

Paul Krugman keeps telling us that we need to keep stimulating the economy in America and Europe. What he rarely says too loudly is that there is a limit to how much this can be done by borrowing. The only possible source of money for that stimulation is to print it. Of course it isn't literally printed: it is all just numbers in computers.

When GFC/I hit, then central banks did start printing money. They called it "Quantitative Easing". They used the printed money to buy bonds, and they promised that they would later unprint the money by selling the bonds. Printing money is criticized for causing inflation. Commentators seem to have no trouble saying this with a straight face when the reality in America and Europe is damaging deflation. We can certainly agree that unprinting money at this time will add to deflation.

So why is everyone so hysterical about inflation? We are usually pointed at Germany's bout of hyperinflation in the early 1920s as a lesson in the bad things that can happen. But hang on: After their burst of hyperinflation sorted out their economy, Germany got its act together, and only 15 years later they nearly conquered the whole of Europe. Meanwhile their victorious opponents who were also basket cases in the early 1920s didn't have inflation, and they were still basket cases 15 years later. So we need to understand what inflation does that is helpful. But first a foray into politics.

Listen to the debate between the stimulators, led by Paul Krugman, and the deficit-reducers, led by right-wing parties everywhere, with the left too nervous to criticize. You would think that this was a purely technical debate about how best to run the economy in the national interest. Maybe not. When governments act they produce winners and losers. This has the unfailing effect of bringing out the engines of disinformation on both sides. And inflation makes losers of the most powerful people on the planet: lenders and people with cash in the bank.

Inflation makes it easy for borrowers to pay back their loans. This means that borrowers come to fully own the real physical assets that were the collatoral for the loan. They then lavish care and attention on those assets and make them as productive as they can be. Consider on the other hand what happens when the economy is weak and there is also deflation. The borrowers know that they can never repay that loan. They squeeze as much value as they can out of the assets without the ability or incentive to properly maintain them. The employees who know how to operate the equipment leave. Eventually the lenders get the assets but the value of those assets is substantially reduced.

So who wins from deflation and loses from a bit of inflation? Hardly anyone. Except that this misses some important human traits. One is that we hate seeing other people get something for nothing, and there is no doubt that debtors get that with inflation. Also humans see gains and losses in relative terms: we like to do better than others, particularly our neighbors. That's why increasing standards of living don't increase happiness. So the lenders rightly see inflation as transferring real wealth from them to debtors.

How much inflation do we need? Our main experience since WWII is that economies run well with about 3% growth and 2% inflation. This means about 5% growth in the nominal economy (the size of the economy in dollars, without taking into account the decline in the value of the dollar). It seems likely that this applies whatever the growth rate. If the real growth rate is 10% then a 5% deflation rate won't cause any problem. On the other side of the ledger, if the real economy is declining at 2% for some reason, then you need 7% inflation to keep the wheels of commerce moving. (Note that we should be taking population change into account, so that the required growth in the nominal economy is probably 3% per head of population, assuming the added people are statistically similar to the existing population. But I'll ignore this subtlety.)

Why do we need this nominal growth? Without it then people who just sit on their money, and don't try to use it to generate wealth, do nearly as well as, or perhaps better than, the people who are trying to move the economy along.

To understand why money isn't, and can't be, a store of value, it is important to understand that you can't move wealth into the future through money. This seems like a strange statement when we do it every day. We put money in the money box and much later we get it out and spend it. But what really happens is this. When we put money in our money box we reduce the amount of money circulating. There is less money chasing the same amount of goods and services. So each bit of circulating money can get a bit more than it could before. There is a very small amount of deflation. When you get the money out of the money box to spend, then there is more money chasing the same amount of real stuff. So this reduces the value of all the other money circulating at that time. That's how the value gets back into the money that you kept in the money box. We need to understand how our economy might work if it is declining instead of growing, and to do that we need to think clearly about how money works. The important point here is that individuals can move wealth into the future through money, but society as a whole cannot. Society as a whole needs to move wealth into the future to prepare for difficult times, but it does this by storing non-perishable commodities and by building productive infrastructure.

If, as I and many others now believe, oil production rates have reached a plateau and will tend to decline from now on, then we need to change the fundamental infrastructure of society. This will lead to economic decline while we switch infrastructure. We need to understand how to run a declining economy to be as productive as possible. And we need to direct that production as much as possible to the infrastructure switch: electrification of transport, heating, farming and everything else, and the production of cheap electricity. Yes we need stimulus, but not random stimulus. Let's use the stimulus to make capital investments now, like electrified rail, that will protect us from the economic decline in the future.

To help us understand the issue, consider what Paul Krugman has recently written in his blog (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/more-on-deficit-limits/) "there’s also no question that right now, the proposition that the government can 'create wealth by printing money', which some other commenters call absurd, is the simple truth: deficit-financed government spending, paid for with either debt or newly created cash, will put resources that would otherwise be idle to work." By "right now" he means the American situation with high unemployment and zero interest rate. What he writes would be true in the situation that existed through most of the 20th Century where workers and working infrastructure were the only constraints and energy was cheap. But now we have infrastructure that is geared to oil use, and oil production can not be raised significantly at any affordable price. So when we stimulate we create activity that needs oil. This raises the price of oil, which negatively impacts other activities. So the Right's claim that government activity, particularly stimulus, steals from the real economy is correct in our oil-constrained world. However the Right's assumption that the free market will get us where we need to go will only be correct in the long run. We can't afford to be trying to electrify transport when oil production is actually declining, which will be happening in 10 years. Government needs to steal from the rest of the economy to force the transition to an electric economy as soon as possible. That's why stimulus should be used for energy use change and energy production infrastructure, and not for anything else.

Another recent blog post by Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/nobody-understands-the-liquidity-trap-wonkish/) explains why the America and Europe can't easily prevent deflation by just printing money to buy bonds. Governments need to print money and spend it. They could alternatively send it to the voters to try to restart Business As Usual, but that would be a mistake in our current oil production constrained situation.

Response to Pettis on Real Economics

Response to Pettis: http://mpettis.com/2010/07/what-do-banking-crises-have-to-do-with-consumption/.

Reading this excellent analysis one would hardly guess that money isn’t real wealth, and that the banks and other financial entities are merely facilitating the real economy. So what is going on in the real economy. Spending is a mix of people with the money (ex-savers) and people who intend to earn (who will be in debt after the spending). Also production is a mix of production for immediate consumption and creation of infrastructure for future production. The job of the financial system is to keep the balance between these things optimal. The situation today is that oil is getting harder, otherwise we wouldn’t be drilling at unmanageable depths. So we are perforce changing infrastructure (which started long ago when we stopped using oil for large electric power plants). So the optimal balance of activity needs to be skewed away from immediate consumption and towards creation of new infrastructure. It rather seems that our current financial system’s (unconscious) plan is to completely destroy the economy then rebuild it. Is this really necessary, or desirable?
 

Dear Julia (again)

The discussion of the GFC has 2 orthogonal threads. The main one we hear is between those favouring more stimulation (led by Paul Krugman) and those favouring deficit reduction and to hell with the consequences. The other thread is whether the problem is just about finance (how the money goes round in circles) or is there some real physical problem that is causing economic problems. If you don’t look at both these questions together correctly then there is no chance of getting the right answer.

There is a real physical problem. The world’s economy is heavily dependent on oil. High oil prices have been unable to raise production over the last 5 years. We have started looking for oil in insanely expensive places. You only have to watch the markets. Whenever there is growth then the price of oil goes up. Whenever the price of oil goes up then growth stalls.

So Julia, please wander down the corridor and ask the Treasurer to get you a report on what will happen if world oil production starts declining at 2% a year. Don’t ask whether that is possible: they’ll just tell you “If the price of eggs is high enough then roosters will lay”. You need to talk to non-economists to figure out if it is possible. However economists should be able to tell you the economic effect of such a decline. I hope so. Oil production has been closely coupled to growth for 60 years. The question we need to understand is how quickly we can decouple.

The other issue is that without more stimulation then we will drift, or more likely plunge, into the Third Depression (recently so named by Paul Krugman: the first 2 started in 1873 and 1930).
We cannot stimulate economies back to “Business as Usual”. Until we decouple from oil, BAU is over. Nor do we need to look for shovel-ready stimulation. Things are going to be bad for a long time and we need to do the right thing, not any thing.

And the right thing is clear. We need to put all possible effort into decoupling from oil. To a large extent that means changing the driving engine of the economy from oil to electricity. Prof David MacKay (Chief Scientific Advisor to Britain’s Ministry of Energy) has worked out that getting of oil and natural gas means we will need 3 times as much electricity production as we have now. We also have to electrify a huge amount of infrastructure, particularly transport.

I hope that soon after your election victory you tell the Australian people: “I have just received a report from the Treasurer on the expected impact of the end of the era of cheap oil. It makes sobering reading.” And then you tell us what the government is going to do about it. I advise you to be very skeptical if your advice suggests that renewables can do a large part of the job, and seek independent verification of that. Oil works because it is cheap (still). Electricity is not as convenient for many purposes and needs to be even cheaper to maintain our current level of prosperity.

Dear Julia

What a pleasure it is to have a secular leader who is never likely to be influenced by loyalty to a higher power than the Australian people.

Let me make a point on climate change. A warmer world will almost certainly be wetter rather than drier. Warmer oceans evaporate more. Models suggest that Australia might be drier south of a line from Sydney to Perth, but this is really irrelevant. Addressing climate change has to be done by all countries, not just those that lose out. The results of climate change remain "uncertain and possibly very serious", as Prof MacKay, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Ministry of Energy and Climate, always says. So we can't build the public consensus on the basis of the negative effect on Australia, because that just invites the countries that expect to gain (such as Russia and Canada) to refuse to cooperate. It also opens the way for those opposed to action to say "Global warming is the reason Lake Ayre has filled two years in a row and the outback is blooming" and then the whole thing can become a battle between Northern and Southern parts of Australia. It is important to focus on the effect on the world.

Unfortunately it is tough to adopt a consistent position on climate change. If you run the climate models under various scenarios you find that there is only one variable that makes much difference over 50 years, and that is: the amount of coal that gets left in the ground. However the coal industry is very important for Australia domestically and for exports. And the coal industry unions are very powerful. The sensible place for a tax on carbon is: as it comes out of the ground.

But let's be realistic. It will be politically nearly impossible to raise the price of electricity in Australia, despite our prosperity. Our energy importing friends in the Western world are going to have far worse political issues with this. Realistically the one way to stop coal consumption is to find a cheaper source of electricity. And indeed there is. The German government has imposed a super profits tax on the companies that can produce carbon-free electricity very cheaply: the Nuclear Power industry. I urge you to conduct a thorough impartial investigation into Australia's energy future. Even if it is politically impossible to introduce Nuclear Power now, can we please at least enhance our engineering education and our R&D capability in the area.

There is no more easy oil to find on the world, and soon there will only be hard oil. We will never run out of oil, but that hard to get oil will be expensive. That is going to keep depressing the world economy for many years until we move to alternatives. There are also significant energy security concerns with oil. The world needs to move to electricity for transport, heating and a whole lot more. Let me assure you that this will work very badly if the electricity isn't cheap and reliable. The world is being seriously misled about the effectiveness of renewable energy. If anybody talks about generating "capacity" then they are trying to mislead, because wind and solar only operate at a fraction of their capacity (apart from their impact on the countryside). The key number to determine and keep in mind is how much extra electricity we need if we are to use electricity for transport and everything else. The answer determined by Prof MacKay is that Britain will need 3 times as much electricity as it currently produces. Our figure will be lower but still very big.

So the world as a whole has to move to nuclear power, and it will, and it is doing so. Maybe Australia can survive on renewables. But would that be wise? Here is a point that all Australians can understand: Even if it is possible to build an economy on renewable energy, there are inherent limitations that will eventually put a cap on prosperity. Once that limit is reached the countries running on nuclear power will become ever stronger than us. But actually, we can see, this will happen long before we get anywhere near that limit.

Understanding Inflation

Paul Krugman keeps telling us that we need to keep stimulating the economy in America and Europe. What he rarely says too loudly is that there is a limit to how much this can be done by borrowing. The only possible source of money for that stimulation is to print it. [Of course it isn't literally printed: it is all just numbers in computers.]

When GFC/I hit, then banks did start printing money. They called it "Quantitative Easing". They used the printed money to buy bonds, and they promised that they would later unprint the money by selling the bonds. Printing money is criticized for causing inflation. Commentators seem to have no trouble saying this with a straight face when the reality in America and Europe is damaging deflation. We can certainly agree that unprinting money at this time will add to deflation.

So why is everyone so hysterical about inflation? We are usually pointed at Germany's bout of hyperinflation in the early 1920s as a lesson in the bad things that can happen. But hang on: After their burst of hyperinflation sorted out their economy, Germany got its act together, and only 15 years later they nearly conquered the whole of Europe. Meanwhile their victorious opponents who were also basket cases in the early 1920s didn't have inflation and they were still basket cases 15 years later. So we need to understand what inflation does that is helpful. But first a foray into politics.

Listen to the debate between the stimulators (led by Paul Krugman) and the deficit-reducers (led by right-wing parties everywhere, with the left too nervous to criticize). You would think that this was a purely technical debate about how best to run the economy in the national interest. Nothing could be further from the truth. When governments act they produce winners and losers. This has the unfailing effect of bringing out the engines of disinformation on both sides. And inflation makes losers of the most powerful people on the planet: lenders and people with cash in the bank.

Inflation makes it easy for borrowers to pay back their loans. This means that borrowers come to fully own the real physical assets that were the collatoral for the loan. They then lavish care and attention on those assets and make them as productive as they can be. Consider on the other hand what happens when the economy is weak and there is also deflation. The borrowers know that they can never repay that loan. They squeeze as much value as they can out of the assets without the ability or incentive to properly maintain them. The employees who know how to operate the equipment leave. Eventually the lenders get the assets but the value of those assets is substantially reduced.

So who wins from deflation and loses from a bit of inflation? Hardly anyone. Except that this misses some important human traits. One is that we hate seeing other people get something for nothing, and there is no doubt that debtors get that with inflation. Also humans see gains and losses in relative terms: we like to do better than others, particularly our neighbors. That's why increasing standards of living don't increase happiness. So the lenders rightly see inflation as transferring real wealth from them to debtors. And the lenders are the most powerful people on the planet.

So how much inflation do we need? Our main experience since WWII is that economies run well with about 3% growth and 2% inflation. This means about 5% growth in the nominal economy (the size of the economy in dollars, without taking into account the decline in the value of the dollar). It seems likely that this applies whatever the growth rate. If the real growth rate is 10% then a 5% deflation rate won't cause any problem. On the other side of the ledger, if the economy is declining at 2% for some reason, then you need 7% inflation to keep the wheels of commerce moving. [Note that we should be taking population change into account, so that the required growth in the nominal economy is probably 3% per head of population, assuming the added people are statistically similar to the existing population. But I'll ignore this subtlety.].

Why do we need this nominal growth? Without it then people who just sit on their money, and don't try to use it to generate wealth, do nearly as well as, or perhaps better than, the people who are trying to move the economy along.

Many people think the world would work better if money was a store of value as well as being a medium of exchange. That wouldn't work. Still there is merit in society storing valuable commodities to prepare for difficult times ahead. The government could sell certificates representing a basket of stored commodities. This would act as an additional sort of money that was a store of real world value. It would be similar to the gold standard back when you really could change your notes for gold, but it would not be based on a single commodity. Certificates would be cashable for money at any time for the current market value of the commodities. When the government has less certificates than stored commodities it would sell the commodities to restore balance.

The basket of commodities would be chosen (and adapted over time) to reflect the manufacturing and direct consumption needs of society. As such it would not be a distortion of production. Compare this with people that want to restore the gold standard. This would take monetary policy out of the hands of people trying to make the economy work, and place it back into the hands of miners, alchemists and conquistadors. 

MacKay video

Prof David MacKay has been touring America giving a tak based on his book "Sustainable Energy: without the hot air". A recording of his talk at UC Berkeley is available from the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/2010_04_08_David_MacKay. This is well worth watching. The lack of brightness in the projected slides is fixed fairly early in the talk.

Prof MacKay provides the numbers and leaves it to us to reach our own conclusions. Mine are: (1) Renewables will damage the environment and never work; (2) Even nuclear will not work without improving the current technology for nuclear power; (3) There's going to be a tough decade before necessary changes can counteract the decline in oil production that I expect to start soon.

Meanwhile the British election is likely to end with 3 parties and no majority for any one. The Lib-Dems will block nuclear power if they are included in a coalition. So the only way for Britain to advance sensibly will be a Labour-Conservative coalition. Will politicians put their own interests ahead of their bitter personal animosities? Don't count on it. This is where the Head of State has a legitimate role in looking for a coalition that makes sense. They don't have to listen to party leaders if those leaders don't command a majority in the House.

Money for Energy

Here's my response to BNC on RAE report:

If we don't expand electricity to adequately cover declining use of fossil fuels, then we will have an energy disaster. To understand what that means you have to look at the key consequence of the Industrial revolution. When energy became cheap then (skill-weighted) labour became the scarce resource and wages rose to give our current prosperity, while energy prices were driven to the floor. Once there is a shortage of energy you go back to (or at least towards) the normal condition of mankind, where wages are driven to the floor because labour is not the scarce resource. Of course once labour costs go down then so do a lot of your costs of building and running energy production. So you get to a balance point, similar to a supply-demand balance point. We don't want to go there, and with nuclear power we don't need to. However it does mean that you can't be simplistic when talking about costs: they will be driven down if they have to be.

Interglacial Crash

In the last Interglacial the sea level rose steadily, and other indicators confirm that it kept getting warmer. Then at the end there was a relatively quick change. Sea level started falling at 1cm per year: which is a lot of ice building up somewhere. I've never heard of a climate simulation that demonstrated this crash. Well here's a picture of the current heat anomaly that I've nicked (the link to) from John Baez's Diary:

If the sea gets warm (and big) leading to lots of moisture [notwithstanding the silly predictions of warming leading to drought] then you get a lot of snow. Then maybe at some point the CO2 negative feedback starts to kick in [and they must exist: to claim otherwise is to claim that the previously stable CO2 level was an unstable equilibrium], CO2 drops but the water remains warm. Then maybe the sun goes quiet or there are a few big volcanoes in a row ["year without a summer"]. The snow persists and reflects. All seems too easy...

Direct impact of CO₂ on flora?

Plants survive with difficulty in low rainfall areas. Without thinking much one would assume that the plants that are there would do better if there was a bit more rainfall. Nothing could be further from the truth. The plants that are there are adapted to the harsh conditions. If the conditions got wetter they would be out-competed by plants suited to the new conditions.

Which suggests the question: What is the direct impact of rising CO₂ on plant communities? Presumably those best specialized for the normal 280ppm are finding those genes less useful, and are being outcompeted by plants which have other advantages but which had been held back by less effective adaptation to the previously prevailing low levels of CO2.

We do know one effect of rising CO2. Plants open pores to let in CO2, which lets out moisture. As CO2 levels rise plants can open their pores less, and thus survive in drier conditions than previously.

Are the facts neutral?

Responding to John Baez's latest, March 13, Diary entry (March 2010 diary):

It would be nice if the facts as presented were neutral and spoke for themselves. We would then have quite enough trouble understanding the implications of the facts and making correct, or at least reasonable, policy responses. The trouble is that once the facts have impact on public policy then we find lots of people who want to influence public policy for good and bad reasons. The engines of disinformation start running flat out on both sides of the debate. When people start looking for facts to support an argument, rather than to discover the truth, then they quickly do so.

Democracy needs an extra arm. It needs an open, vigorous, well-funded investigation of the facts on matters that relate to important public policy. It needs to evaluate the people giving evidence as well as the evidence itself, so that those who have made fraudulent or disingenuous claims about the facts are not allowed to waste everyone's time. It needs to have the powers of a Royal Commission (not sure what the American equivalent is), to acquire evidence and interrogate witnesses, and particularly to overcome the tendency of the sides in a debate to ignore each other's points. Most particularly the lead investigators need to be good mathematicians. They also need to have a good track record of being able to change their mind. They should be people whose prior recorded opinions on public policy have been measured rather than strident, and once they get the job they should keep those opinions to themselves.

To help the public understand why we need mathematical expertise just to understand the facts, it would be nice if Mathematicians would stop arguing about what Mathematics is about, and get behind this simple definition:

The subject matter of Mathematics is: how to think clearly about problems.

This would also encourage everyone to get as much maths as they can. It would also act as a good guide to educators about what should be taught [In particular Mathematics does not have facts the way other subjects do, though one does have to learn its language].

On the small difference between big n...

On the small difference between big numbers

A comment on BraveNewClimate:

Well if we have trouble talking sensibly about the small difference between two very big numbers then we’re not alone. We get it all the time in discussion of company and national accounts. If you say that revenue doubled then that means a lot, but may not tell you anything about net profit. On the other hand it is meaningless to say “profit doubled” since profit is often close to zero in a bad year (indeed often negative in a bad year: and then doubling would have no meaning that ordinary folk would understand). [A change from 10% profit to 20% profit is best seen as a change from 110 to 120, rather than a doubling.]

This came from a Hansen comment that was (apparently) meant to mean that ice loss from Antarctica had doubled in 5 years. Even if Antartic Ice is constant over a longer term it is likely to go up and down. Get close to the beginning of a down period and get a small number. Then further into the period get a bigger number. Then make an announcement that sounds like we're in an exponential explosion.

Krugman on Oil

Krugman now says that resource constraints (particularly oil) will be a problem when we get a recovery. So I commented:

If oil resource constraint is a problem: how will that play out in the financial market? If it looks exactly the same as the GFC then how come all the economists maintain so strongly that the GFC was not about the oil resource constraint? All the semi-fraudulent financial activity moves the money around, but what brings the problem to light is when there is less total real wealth. How do we handle that? [Part of the answer is that the inflation rate has to be about 5% higher than the decline rate. This is also true when the decline rate is negative!]

Well this is another area where we need an open, vigorous, well-funded investigation of the facts. I commented on this in response to an Unleashed by a lawyer commenting on AGW. Here's my comment:

What we need to take out of this schmozzle is this: Any time you have facts dictating public policy, with winners and losers, then the engines of disinformation will run flat out on BOTH sides. It is crucial for public confidence that there be an open, vigorous, well-funded investigation of the facts led by people with mathematical skills who have no axe to grind. This is a core thing we need to add to the democratic process in the 21st century. And let us, with due respect to Ms Tranter, keep the lawyers out of it. [Why mathematical skills? The subject matter of mathematics is: thinking clearly about problems. We need more of it.]

Natural is orthogonal to Good

The wonderful "Australian Story" program (referenced here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/22/2826160.htm) emphasized that natural toxins are just as bad as unnatural ones. Maybe worse since they are intended to be toxic (plants are toxic to avoid being eaten). The Tassie government produced the traditional "natural so OK" response of the modern city dweller. Time's up on that. We expect the government to address natural problems as well as unnatural ones. Indeed we need to understand natural climate change as well as human induced climate change, since we can less afford a change to cold and dry than we can to warm and wet.

I declined to watch "4 Corners" since the subject matter sounded too depressing. But let us note that abuse of children is one of the evil parts of human nature. It is not true that human nature is innately good, with all evil being a malfunction. There is natural human evil, and it needs to be addressed by human means: Community-based resistance in various forms (such as education and punishment).

GP changing clientele not significant

GP's changing clientele not significant

A Tasmanian GP saw an increase in cancer patients and investigated. The Tas government declared that there wasn't a significant increase in cancer in her area. What's going on?

Certainly it is a good thing that she is investigating this and other correlated things (like oyster problems in the bay). However it is easy to imagine why a GP might see a changing client base.

When they first get to the town they have a short waiting list or no waiting list. This attracts people who have an immediate minor problem. As they become better known, particularly if they are good and are a native speaker of English, then they attract more customers. This makes the waiting list longer. People who want a quick fix or prescription go to the imported doctor with the shorter waiting list. People with more complex problems that have developed over time and not immediately perceived as urgent, will put up with the longer waiting list to see the doctor with a good commend of English and/or other perceived virtues. So that GP will naturally see an increasing number of cancer patients.

Facts impacting Policy need vigorous ...

Facts impacting Policy need vigorous review

Doesn't anybody else feel that the process linking scientific, engineering and technical investigation to the policy making process is bad. I mean really bad. Yes, scientists are often people who are not intrinsically suited to participating directly in the public debate. Still when the stakes are huge, as they are, then it is time to hold investigations where people are pushed outside their comfort zone. We need a vigorous, open, well-funded investigation into the facts, led by the best minds with a clear understanding of mathematics, and complete with substantial investigative powers. We need to identify people who are trying to deliberately mislead on both sides and get them out of the discussion. We need to make sure that the two sides address each others key points, even if they are not comfortable doing so. And in the end there is going to be uncertainty and we need to make decisions in that context, not invent fake certainty linked to various people's egos that becomes an obstacle to incorporating changing facts.

How big are the stakes? In many ways PO and AGW point the same way: electrification, nuclear [if only we could get on with those]. However surviving PO without massive depopulation may require using all the cheap energy we've got left. So the two issues need to be addressed together.

[Another TOD comment]

What money isn't good for

Money does two things well: It allows us to exchange goods efficiently, and to compare the price of goods at one point in time. However it is used for other things that it does less well, particularly in times of economic turbulence. Specifically:

You can't move wealth into the future through money.

As a corollary, you can't effectively compare prices across time. This universal assumption of money as a store of wealth and as a way of talking about future prices is one of the "thinking" things that gets us into trouble.
[Of course we all do move wealth into the future through money. When you put $1000 in a suitcase under the bed then you reduce the money supply which makes everybody else's dollars worth more. When you take it out of the suitcase to spend it later then you get your wealth back by making everybody elses dollars worth less. This process works fine on short time frames relative to the economic volatility.]

To take the EROEI idea to its logical conclusion, perhaps the trick is to create an imaginary effective-energy "currency" for talking about future costs.