Gallimaufry of Whits (2009)

The purpose of science is to understand all causes and all effects, so that when we know the operation of all parts of the universe, as much as possible, we will know everything to happen as a consequence. Our lack of facts is the only thing which clouds us. Newton had more than just a view of the universe; he was the first to realise that the universe is like a big music box playing a song, driven by the cogs of energy and gravity.

When we find out new facts, we may have the means thereby to create a better language. We know that language is composed of statements which are propositions of truth. When we say “I love you”, this means that we are stating that it is true that the utterer of this statement loves a person (or animal, or thing) identified by the grammatical object. When we use the word “or”, we see that it has the sense that it has in mathematical logic, so that mathematical logic is necessarily the perfection of language. The perfect language of the future will almost certainly be mathematical.

The universe is at any rate more easy to describe than we think because we're simply lacking the recognition of certain patterns that would help us to understand it. We can already see the beginnings of this in the links between particle physics and cosmology. When it was seen that the solar system is (roughly) similar to the atom in its structure, then we started to see similarity in other areas too: similarity between certain fractals, structures like coastlines and trees, from small to large, certain chemical reactions even resembling the patterns in nebulæ. The next time a subatomic particle is discovered, it may even resemble a galaxy.

Eventually, everything will be subordinate to science. What we don't know in terms of science will become scientifically understood once we know enough about it. Politics, art, economics, history, philosophy — all of these fields will eventually become thought of as science, in the same way that alchemy became chemistry and astrology became (apart from a few non-scientific people who still believe in it) astronomy.

The point is that science carries us forward, giving us things we didn't have before. Before science, we were unable to land on the moon. It simply wouldn't have been possible for Neil Armstrong to scuff up the lunar dust without the precepts of science. Whatever we have in the future will be due to the industry of our scientific method. We're finding new particles and new planets all the time, getting to the smaller and the bigger; and every time we inch closer to the goal of humanity.

Since all things will not just become science but also tend to science, we can see that domains such as fashion (the style of clothes and so on) are already making their way to this point. The fashions of today are much more practical than the ancient farthingales and corsets. The thong is a clear improvement over French knickers for the comfort of women, and presumably the tendency is towards nudity being generally accepted so that we will all be in ultimate clothing comfort — for ladies in warmer climates. Amongst men the direction is harder to discern, but appears to be trending towards some kind of body armour or spray on suit. Predicting the future is of course difficult, for we would need to invent it in order to predict it perfectly, but nobody would dare contend that fashion will not eventually become perfect nor that this perfection is already on the way.

Art, too, will become scienced, and its methods perfected. At the moment artificial intelligence experts are making programs that can beat a human at chess and even generate music which sounds like Chopin. Soon machines will be able to generate plays like Shakespeare plays, paintings like Van Gogh, and so on. Then for humans to be able to produce great masterpieces, it will simply be a matter of following the same rules that a computer followed to produce them — and following these rules is probably how the original artists managed to produce their great art in any case. There will be no new kinds of art at first, until we find the rules for creating new kinds of art, then anybody will be able to create a new style, like the Romantic style or the Art Deco style. Companies will be able to trademark entire genres, which will boost the economy.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of science is the point that either you know things or you don't, so that intelligent people are necessarily the leaders of mankind and the less intelligent people are less useful. Indeed, when we have the perfect science, it will be found that anybody who does not understand its precepts will be an obstacle to the very existence of humanity, because they will be preventing us from reaching our goal. What will be done at such a point is difficult to predict, though Mr. H. G. Wells has had some thoughts on the subject. Of course, the existence of the perfect science will mean that we can simply consult that to learn what to do — presumably in a painless and morally acceptable manner for everyone.

Another consequence of the perfect science will be that the entire universe itself can be made into paradise. Science, once it has assimilated morality and ethics, will be able to tell us how to achieve perfect happiness: at this point we can proceed to convert the whole universe into the perfect human and animal paradise. We may even call such a paradise a dream world, but this would of course be a misnomer since reality already is a dream. (You can't prove that you're not dreaming, or that anyone else exists.) Whilst this thought depresses some, you can't escape reality — that is to say, you can't escape a dream.

Perhaps the most exciting prospect is that biology too will become a science, and we'll have absolute control over the human organism. All of our currently metaphorical valves and diodes, which break down and malfunction, will be replaced with the futuristic equivalents of actual valves and diodes. This will have various effects. We'll all be able to see with the equivalent power of telescopes, seeing everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. We'll have infinite orgasms, and be able to turn them on and off at the flick of a switch. People with innie belly buttons will be able to convert them to outies, and vice versa. Hair will be redundant, replaced by holograms, and styles changable merely by the power of thought.

In summary, then, humanity is succeeding at its common sense task. There is more money in circulation now than ever before. There are more people than ever before, so we are also fulfilling the aims of our biological function, even though we're beginning to be able to transcend them. Of course, by transcend here I mean literally rise above them: that our human chosen values will exceed those set for us by the cogs of nature, so that we will be able to enter our new paradise, our new metropolis of humanity, where instead of bludgeoning one another with sticks and stones we will bludgeon only with the power of words.

Should a promising young scholar happen to read this whilst undecided what to work on next, I would gently suggest a commentary on the thirteen (of nine hundred) theses by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola which were condemned by Pope Innocent VIII. To get a taste for the theses, here are the first three of those which were condemned, along with the summary of the condemnations:

“1. Christ did not truly and in respect to his real presence descend into hell as Thomas and the common way propose, but only in effect. / *Wrong, erroneous, heretical.* / 2. The second is: that for a mortal sin of a finite time an infinite temporal penalty is not due, but only a finite penalty. / *Wrong, erroneous, heretical.* / 3. Neither the Cross of Christ, nor any image, should be adored with the adoration of veneration, even in the way that Thomas proposes. / *Outrageous, offensive to pious ears, and unaccustomed in the universal Church.*”

This quote is from Dougherty, M. V. (2008). Pico Della Mirandola. p.40. Note that the next pope, Alexander VI, “absolved the protégé from any suspicion of heresy.” (p.38) The sort of commentary I have in mind for the points would address them in terms as temporally unprovincial as possible; this is a challenge. One possible starting point, which I've not consulted myself, is Chapter 3 of Craven, William G. (1981). Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Symbol of His Age.

The main mistake I think commentators have made regarding Lowes's Road to Xanadu is that Lowes was not as divergent from esemplastic theory as may first appear. That he goes to such great lengths to gather all the subconscious materials, from the “well” as he calls it, that went into producing Coleridge's great poems tends to obscure the fact that he appears to recognise them as materials, materials for shaping in the esemplastic sense. That is to say, that the poems that result from them aren't a mere matter of cobbling together the right things, or even the right things in the right way.

On the other hand it is true that Lowes introduces this strange distinction between the hotter furnace and the cooler furnace, and says that they are both still part of the same process. This seems to fly in the face of Coleridge's categories of fancy and the imagination, but it also seems to me that he might mean the metaphor in the sense of illustrating two different strengths of imagination, not that he is trying to connect fancy and imagination.

If I were to direct perhaps not criticism but at least attention to things which Lowes did not himself cover, it would be the quality of Coleridge's base work. Lowes seems to have considered notebooks in the rôle of the great breeding grounds of great beasts, when he could also have considered them great beasts themselves. Moreover, there is a certain tendency to snipe about such projected works as the Hymns to the Elements and say it's a good thing that they were not written. This seems an odd thing to say, because even if the Hymns may projectedly have been deficient in many respects, the pastel brushstrokes within them that do stand out as highlights would not stand alone but contribute to the overall vigour of Coleridge's works from that period.

Chesterton once objected to suffrage for women on the grounds that most women did not seem to want suffrage, and that therefore on the very principle of democracy which some women seemed to want, they ought not to have suffrage.

There are several obvious objections to this attempt at reasoning. The first is that a straw poll of public opinion conducted, presumably, by asking friends and reading newspaper reports is not actually a democratic vote. And insofar as one could even begin to consider it so, even then, that such a thing was conducted at all must presumably be disregarded once the results are known. When someone says, “You shouldn't have done that!”, you take it back if you can. If the women of the period were saying by majority opinion that their views do not matter, well then you should obviously disregard their idea that their views do not matter; and so on ad nauseum in the manner of Epimenides.

But the second, stronger, objection makes the first one moot. The second objection is that democracy is not something which one can vote on. Democracy is a primitive, like being allowed to love, or being allowed to speak your mind. These days we call such primitives human rights. One can debate which things are human rights and which aren't; one can debate the extent of their remits. But it would be very difficult to debate the obvious fact that if democracy is to exist at all, it must be regarded as a right and not as an option.

Of course we all know the commonplace that democracy is a terrible system. As Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But there you go: we have tried those other forms, and they have proven worse, though democracy is, on the face of it, the worst. If we are to experiment with different forms of governance, we should have to do so with the utmost care, because such experimentation cannot be conducted in a laboratory.

Inasmuch as democracy can be considered a human right, therefore, perhaps we should consider it a fluid right. It is a right which may be replaced with a better right, but only if we can be sure that such a better right—that a better form of governance—really is better. Chesterton knew this, and he was as much of a real democrat in his days as Tony Benn is in ours. I do not know why Chesterton came to the strange conclusion that he did, and perhaps I simply have a lot to learn about suffrage or about Chesterton; or, more than likely, about both. But he did make the mistake, and he was wrong. One wonders whether his suffragette friends were able to forgive him. I hope so!

Each version of the Gallimaufry of Whits code is named after the Asteroids. The first was Ceres, the second Pallas, and so on, and now I've just written the sixth version, Hebe. This one has an IRC bot interface, a bit like the old noets code, but you can also create entries from the command line.

Hebe works using a little Python stream editor, which edits input directly into the index.html and feed.atom files, which are the only ones managed by the system.

There's also a generic IRC bot that it uses, whose main feature of interest is that it's written in Python 3.1, so it has to manage data vs. text strictly. The IRC bot is more robust than the stream editor.

There's an interesting quote on the Wikipedia entry about Francis Galton, the Victorian anthropologist and generally smart chap:

“In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go and, not surprisingly, not one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the mean of those 800 guesses came close — very close indeed. It was 1,197 pounds.”

Apparently this quote has caused some controversy. Richard Feynman was apparently of the opinion that averaging guesses was rubbish. He gives a slightly different example, that of measuring the length of the Emperor of China's nose whom most people hadn't seen:

“To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very ‘accurate’ because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.”

Of course the best way to determine whether crowd opinions are worth getting would be to run a big series of well controlled experiments. The conditions would have to be looked at carefully: in the ox scenario, for example, people saw the ox and were trying to be accurate, whereas in Feynman's example you're doing little more than averaging wild guesses. And there are questions of shared bias and so on.

One thing that's especially interesting about this is that it seems to show that people derive general conclusions from vivid examples easily. It would be an interesting test to take two control groups, and teach them Galton's example and Feynman's example each in a different order. Would they be more inclined to align themselves towards the views that they heard of first?

Somebody wrote that the oblique function in phenny has gone too far, so I added a configuration option to specify which services to use:

29:e7f963f6b307 Added config option for specifying services to use.
30:759a17787ead Slightly cleaner oblique.py

Amazon have a system where you can put a label in the URI before the ID of the book or whatever, in order to make it easier to figure out what the link is for. You can put in any label you like, so for example these URIs both refer to the same thing:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/STC-Early-Visions/dp/0007204574
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Holmes/dp/0007204574

Of course it's also possible to use a bogus or misleading label. To get around this problem, you could set a canonical label to redirect to. So if I have an article about how far fireflies are visible from at night, say, then this might have an ID of “123”, but the label that I'd use could be something like “visibility”:

GET /123/ → (302 to /123/visibility)
GET /123/article → (302 to /123/visibility)
GET /123/visibility → (200 OK)

Now, if I change the canonical label, all that happens is that the redirects now go to that new label instead. So if the article is now primarily about fireflies, and I use that as the label instead, then the old /123/visibility label will still work but it'll redirect:

GET /123/visibility → (302 to /123/fireflies)
GET /123/article → (302 to /123/fireflies)
GET /123/fireflies → (200 OK)

The only problem is that Apache can't be configured to do this easily in an .htaccess with mod_rewrite. I thought it might be possible with a variant of some rules that I'd been working on, but the more I looked at it the less less likely it seemed to be. I asked in #apache and they had the same suspicion.

In datatype terms, the field tree is similar in that it gives you a permanent ID for each label that you use in what is otherwise just a kind of ordered hashtable. But it also lets you use the label by itself to address something and so of course there can't be any canonicalisation. In the Amazon system, you can do canonicalisation in the way that I've described, but the ID has to be part of the link.

Ennis Aitch was reading about invisible arguments, and as we discussed this we both simultaneously went to use a programming language analogy to explain impersonal verbs.

When I was playing Kalusa, a game where you invent a new language by voting anonymously on translation pairs, I was also learning perl6, and it was interesting how much overlap there was between the two. Programming languages have a very strange relationship to natural languages.

Ennis suggested making a competitive language game with “some kind of way to foster competitive creativity, to iterate the fractal of semantic expressability.” I suggested my old Nomilang game, a language nomic, as the basis. The competitive element could be something like rewarding people for coining words that have the widest currency.

To keep the game active, Ennis suggests a “systemic incentive to utilise new words, e.g old words decay through use like food getting eaten in an ecology” and comments that “perhaps there'd be various semantic cycles analogous to nutrient and gas cycles.” Quite mebs, I should say. But fluidity could also come in creating a large pool of useful suffixes and idioms and so forth, and developing style early on.

The strange thing is that proto languages and folklore and mythology seem to actually be interwoven not just because people studying them tend to be in the same department at universities. Language is naturally tied to cultural identity, and when you create a new language, there is a kind of cultural vacuum that people naturally seek to fill as they create the language.

Indeed, the biggest challenge in creating a language is just getting people to do it. We don't tend to learn more language than we have to (so I read in some linguistics article), so making the activity into a game as Kalusa did and Nomilang described might be an interesting avenue. But making the game itself is quite an interesting game too.

Summer Evening Lights is an account of some strange lights that I saw last night. I'd been photographing some wildlife at dusk, and happened to have my camera in a high ISO setting, so I was able to take photos of a strange light and even a short video clip.

Today I contacted my MP, or rather my MP's Westminster office, for the first time, regarding the Speaker's election.

I told the secretary that I'm a constituent in the relevant area; that I'm concerned that my MP may vote for a partisan candidate, especially Margaret Beckett; and that I'd rather my MP voted for an experienced and balanced candidate such as Sir Alan Beith or Sir Patrick Cormack.

I explained that, of course, I'd been following recent events and that as a constituent I'd like for Parliament to be handled fairly, and that I'd been especially impressed by Sir Patrick Cormack in the debates about the speaker, with his reference to the Norway debate and so on.

Though I said that of course I understood that it was up to the conscience of my MP to vote for the right person in an anyway secret ballot, and that I'm only one constituent amongst many, I hoped that my concern would be noted especially since it's the first time that I've contacted my MP.

The secretary said that he appreciates my call, and was sure that my MP would be grateful for my input too, and that he will let her know before the vote this afternoon.

Now that John Bercow has been Speaker for a few days, it seems that he's settling in very well to his new position. I'm glad that the members seem to have mainly avoided forming their opinions along party lines in the secret ballot.

One Labour MP, whose name I don't recall, was told by a journalist it was good that there was no whip candidate. The MP responded that actually there quite obviously was a whip candidate. So even amongst Labour MPs there was at least some who tacitly accepted the contention that Margaret Beckett was the party line choice.

Beckett fared very badly in the voting, and I'm glad because that reflected what I'd hoped to achieve in my own small contribution to the process. Party politics should not determine who sit in a neutral chair. In retrospect, I should not have noted my own choices. I'd chosen one Lib Dem and one Con candidate as examples of whom I hoped might be a solid neutral choice, but they didn't really turn out that way.

Sir Alan Beith (Lib Dem) gave an excellent speech, but not a house pleasing one. Sir Patrick Cormack (Con) on the other hand, usually a stalwart of quiet common sense in the house as far as I can tell, gave a surprisingly generic and yet heated speech which did nothing to garner him votes. It did at least provide moments of good comedy:

“Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): [...] There is obviously a limitation to what any Speaker can do. I never forget the most immortal words that ever issued from the Chamber of the House of Commons, by Mr. Speaker Lenthall on that January day in 1642—
Mr. Paul Keetch (Hereford) (LD): You were there.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Yes, I was there.”

There were concerns that Bercow was a polarising candidate, constrasting with a unifying Sir George Young. Indeed, Sir George was even said by one (Labour?) MP to be more of a reformist than Bercow. But worse than this, Bercow's speech was, to me, though entertaining and pleasing to the house, in places contradictory and confused. On that basis I would have voted for Sir George, and yet I think that in a sense the two main party leaders did hit on this kind of confusion being an asset as well as a drawback.

Gordon Brown told Bercow, “You said that you had now cast aside all your past political views; some of us thought you had done that some time ago.” This was a reference to Bercow's continually changing political position. David Cameron told him that “I also noted, as all colleagues did, what you said about casting away your past political views, and I think that on the Conservative Benches we would say, ‘Let’s hope that includes all of them.’” This was a reference to the fact that he was becoming increasingly Labour aligned.

So we have a Speaker who is perhaps best qualified to be above party politics because when he was involved in it, he was involved in so many of its sides. Maybe he wouldn't be as reformist as Sir George Young, but Sir George was one of the leading candidates in the last election, so how much of a step would voting for the same widely liked candidate have been?

But the underlying point is that reform seems to be coming from circumstantial necessity, and as long as a Speaker is willing to do what is necessary then that's reasonable. As one MP put it, the house weren't faced with division over Young vs. Bercow, but choice. It was a hard choice, but the members made it.

One footnote, though. The Father of the House, Alan Williams, was required to chair the proceedings for the interim whilst choosing a new speaker. He was widely and genuinely thanked for how well he'd managed, and I was impressed too. Bercow's speech had been founded on a joke about Speakers, and the regressive notion that they ought to be exceptionally old; and yet Alan Williams chaired the house to universal plaudits — unlike Speakers Martin and Bercow.