FYI

Footnotes. Additional thoughts. Commentary. Unclassifiables.

If you are reading the top of the FYI page, you have arrived here by the wrong route. This is FYI, the place where footnotes, parenthetical remarks, tangents, distractions, trivia and the unclassifiable live. If you're looking for a huge collection of distractions, trivia and the unclassifiable, you could do worse than the Wikipedia.

[Published: 05-Mar-04 | Permalink | Category: Frontmatter]
  1. This isn't true in all universes, of course. (back)
  2. A "privileged process" is computer jargon for a program that is permitted to mess with security settings and with the running of other processes. In evolution, it is fair to say that the open access nature of all cellular processes means that every process is a privileged one. Evolution proceeds by discarding all hardware that has crashed; it never reboots. (back)
  3. For example, braille. Or (if you think about it) transnational corporations. (back)
  4. Honestly, will blogging do as much? For that matter, throwing aside our lack of perspective, will the internet? (back)
  5. OPEC has a website: http://www.opec.org/. Members are Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. (back)
  6. "What senses do we lack that we cannot perceive another world around us?" (Frank Herbert) (back)
  7. There are some things you must not claim you possess, even if you do:

    1. Humility
    2. A good sense of humour
    3. A very good imagination
    4. Good looks
    5. A radio in your head tuned to God
    6. The Scream
    (back)
  8. Toxic memes often suppress good genes. (back)
  9. As an example of how geeks love trivia, I don't think you can get much better than the fact that Tim Berners-Lee has helpfully provided his co-ordinates, presumably for those who prefer older media and who also have access to GPS-guided missiles. (back)
  10. Oh yes they do. Why shouldn't camels swim? The desert abuts the beach a lot. (back)
  11. See what company I keep! (back)
  12. This pre-installed software isn't necessarily gene-encoded - experiences in the womb, epigenetic influences and a large amount of stochasticity and chaotic contingency will be involved too. (back)
  13. From Kilimanjaro, the world's tallest--as opposed to highest--mountain, on an arbitrarily clear day, you can't quite see 0.05% of the Earth's surface. (back)
  14. Māori language lessons for you:
    hui
    A meeting, usually one convened with serious intent and attendant with formalities and protocols of representation, announcement and so on.
    pakeha
    Term for non-Maori European resident in New Zealand. I've heard some say it comes from an insult, probably pig-related (based on skin colour) but this might be a somewhat-paranoid urban legend based on the alleged etymology of "honky"
    wananga
    A place or instance of teaching. Used for a university but also for a meeting anywhere whose primary purpose is education
    (back)
  15. Don't you just love recursion and self-referentiality? Well, so do they. (back)
  16. www.dataisdata.com (back)
  17. Metaphorize. Might not even be a real world, but it certainly has currency on the internet (though curiously there are more uses with the -ize ending than the -ise ending, suggesting it is Americans and OED-lovers who use it, rather than real people). It means the practice of employing something as a metaphor, as in "Let's metaphorize a bastardized version of Darwinism and call it a new political philosophy" or, I suppose, the practice of supplying a metaphor for something, as in "Today I metaphorized one of Wittgenstein's more obscure insights and now thirteen more people on this planet can understand what the old guy was going on about". (back)
  18. I think you can say the same about Marxism ("Great theory, wrong species", as ant expert said), except that, in that case, human minds may not be equipped to sustain it even if you could get it up and running. (back)
  19. Eminent evolutionist and ardent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins's sense of humour may be observed in captivity on the Infrequently Asked Questions section of the Charles Simonyi Professorship website. (back)
  20. One of the more interesting things about this century and the last is that the heretofore predominantly one-way flow of Good Ideas is becoming two-way, or even going into reverse. It used to be predominantly one-way thanks to technological disparities and cultural arrogances that pertained. No more. (back)
  21. That's being specific. But in principle it applies to all lifeforms. (back)
  22. This isn't Chaos, although it can produce as many colourful T-shirts. It can illustrate chaos though: if you start with a pattern of dots for which you can't quite make out all the details then your predictions based on previous patterns that were apparently identical to your eyes at that resolution can be confounded. Tiny variations in starting conditions can have gross effects so complex that you can only determine them empirically i.e. by observing. That's true of the weather and of screenfuls of dots on a Game of Life simulation. But the emergent complexity of Life is only about that second half -- the need for empirical observation -- because in Life we know the rules, we know the starting pattern and yet we still cannot say how it will turn out. (back)
  23. Scientific sloganeering is usually unsuccessful. Witness how poorly scientists do on chat shows or other public events. We are forever hedging, making contingent statements, stumbling to present the complexities with the appropriate disclaimers vis-a-vis probability and falsifiability and proof. Lawyers do better; politicians do best (though neither travels in a particularly binary world they seem happier to present only the local context, or sometimes to not bother answering the question posed). There are two scientific slogans that spring to mind: "e equals m c squared", pithy and trippy and meaningless in an attractively opaque way; and "the survival of the fittest", sometimes accused by the wilfully obtuse of being a tautology, leading them to assume that natural selection is equally vacuous. back)
  24. This reeks of a failure of the imagination though, don't you think? Are we arrogant enough to believe that we can imagine all the possibilities, that no form of life could exist that could survive/avoid non-universal calamities? The question instead becomes: would such rugged aliens be interested in contacting us, and would we be able to recognize such contact? (back)
  25. I only found one thing wrong (though I wasn't looking; too busy enjoying the book). Bryson repeats the tour-guide fallacy that glass flows at normal temperatures, albeit amazingly slowly, because it is a supercooled liquid. His implication is that the effect is detectable. This isn't true: glass inhabits that region where solid and liquid (everyday concepts) break down and you could call it either and argue forever. Moreover, you can calculate that, no matter how 'liquid' you consider it, none of the glass humans have made has done any flowing due to gravity; glass's viscosity is such that it would take millions of years to detect the flow. (back)
  26. This website in the early days was going to be a little less professional (how successful that turned out is for you to judge). Here is a list of domain names I considered registering before settling on ortholog.com. Last time I checked they remained available; I hereby waive all claims to them so you can take them if you want. (back)
    • oxterlift.com
    • arborealrabbits.com
    • yourbanana.com
    • brokenboomerang.com
    • antipropinquity.com
    • id-ten-t.com
    • tricerabottom.com
    • possibilitiesramify.com
    • yesterfortnight.com
    • lagan.com
    • calenture.com
    • faffle.com
    • extrinsicity.com
    • cruddle.com
    • triflebazaar.com
    • flammableandphotosynthetic.com
    • crevice.com
    • thorts.com
    • gaseousphase.com
    • eptify.com
    • sortofthing.com
    • uneptified.com
    • unhanced.com
    • salientcassowarry.com
    • metadoxy.com
    • tbloomingmesis.com
    • frittering.com
    • stultissimus.com
    • merchantsoflight.com
    • doxastichungers.com
    • prostateonthefloor.com
    • largeworld.com
    • indefatigablezenith.com
    • flockofseagulls.com
    • flurryofvegetables.com
    • streetmanship.com
    • mucousmembrane.com
    • notrocketsurgery.com
    • sandinthehead.com
    • outofthismind.com
    • outoftheseminds.com
    • explodingmustelids.com
    • mulligatawneyvoice.com
    • middlehemisphere.com
    • rhinorocemus.com
    • bridge-edge.com
    • norealhobbies.com
    • doesnotvalidate.com
    • snakesleeves.com
    • outsidecontextproblem.com
    • criminalcomplacency.com
    • theknowingfield.com
    • brightorangekettle.com
    • hobbiesnone.com
    • onelessthantwenty.com
    • snoove.com
    • snoovecity.com
    • athomewritingessays.com
    • flirtswithebadgers.com
    (back)
  27. This is a phrase I like that was part of a review by Dave Langford of The Songs Of Distant Earth by Arthur C.Clarke. The review itself is probably to be found in Langford's collection of Critical Mass columns, Critical Assembly (column 43). (back)
  28. Grok. To understand at an intimate, perhaps intuitive level. Greater than mere understanding. While it comes from a sixties sf book (Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land) and has a certain hippie cachet, it's a deeply geeky word that I first saw used without irony in New Scientist when someone recalled his epiphany when he "first grokked relational databases". (back)
  29. Greg Egan's Permutation City uses these rule-plus-pattern combinations in several cool ways. In one, he has an entire Matrix-like reality that is based on a complex, multi-dimensional cellular automation, the inhabitants of which are at one point engaged in figuring out what the basic governing rules of their universe are (one of the few occasions where we, the reader, knows the answer to an existential question). Which raises the obvious question: what, if any, are the important differences, if any, between this and us in our universe? (back)
  30. An Einsteinian haircut is either one which looks like this or one that is more complicated than Newton's, but only in ways that become apparent at huge velocities (back)
  31. You can test yourself for Asperger's- or autism-related traits using Baron-Cohen et al.'s Autism Spectrum Quotient test. Afterwards, you could test your friends. If you don't have any, don't bother taking the test.(back)
  32. This kind of nameless feeling is proof that we don't think anything like the way we speak. English is not a dialect of mentalese (though I suppose it could be a sort of pidgin). (back)
  33. The context of Einstein's famous "God does not play dice with the universe" quote is interesting. He isn't being quite so emphatic as some people portray him. The friendliness or otherwise of the universe is, to him, a question of individual choice and personal faith. He is expressing hope that each of us will conclude that it is friendly. (back)
  34. This is creativity. Call it jiggery-pokery or nodes of inspiration (as opposed to rip-off, whether innocent or just witless). Some say there is nothing new under the sun, that the only way to create is to synthesize, that inspiration is fusion. I don't know about "only" (trivial counterexample: buttons) but taking a bit here and a bit there and, through novelty or ineptitude, bringing them together in a new way is a creative act. (back)
  35. I like using the serial comma too, a very un-English spelling trait. (back)
  36. The first of Clarke's Laws is relevant here. There are plenty of instances where those who have settled down (and become vested) who clearly shown how they have lost their sense of play, their occasional lapses of judgement, their desirable inconsistencies, their failures of method. That's why "distinguished and elderly scientists" sometimes get it wrong. There are other reasons. (back)
  37. Not true really. A quote from Martin Amis's The Information: "The universe may be thirty billion light years across and every inch of it if we went there would kill us". A recent update on the size (now at least 156 billion light years across) if anything emphasizes his point (but reduces the poetry). (back)
  38. We're interested in humans, right? (back)
  39. (back)
  40. Back-of-the-envelope calculation (or, in the modern age, scribbled on a Post-It with calculations done mentally or with help from Google, necessary basic facts from Wikipedia (back)
  41. This isn't chemistry-chauvinism (I'm a biologist!) or arch-reductionism (I'm a biologist!); the periodic table is totemic, emblematic, and fundamental in science. It's necessarily ubiquitous, though never sufficient (e.g. particle physicists don't need it much, but they work under constraints that underlie it). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution; sans the periodic table, I'd say not much else in science makes sense either. (back)
  42. [This footnote reserved as a mark of respect for Douglas Adams] (back)
  43. I have my suspicions about the orcas. (back)