Science and Technology

Book Review: Hubbert’s Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Posted by Peter on March 2, 2005
Posted in: Book Reviews, Miscellaneous.

This book provides a moderately strong argument that the production of cheap oil is peaking, although it isn’t as conclusive an argument as I’d hoped for, and is only a little bit better than the brief summaries of Hubbert’s ideas that I’d previously seen on the net.
Much of the book consists of marginally relevant stories of his career as a geologist. He occasionally slips in some valuable tidbits, such as that Texas once had an oil cartel.
He does a mediocre job of analyzing the consequences of scarcer oil. He provides a few hints of how natural gas could replace oil, but says much less about the costs of switching than I’d hoped for. His comments on how to protect yourself are misleading:

In the past, a useful way of insuring major producers and consumers against the effect of a price changes was purchasing futures contracts. However, the ordinary futures contracts extend for a year or two. The oil problem extends for 10 years or more. The oil problem extends for 10 years or more. Anyone who agrees to supply oil 10 years from now, for a price agreed on today, very likely will disappear into bankruptcy before the contract matures.

At the time the book was first published (2001), crude oil futures contracts extended about 7 years out. They weren’t liquid enough to hedge a large fraction of consumption, but if a desire to hedge had caused them to say in 2001 that crude would be at $60/barrel in 2008 rather than saying it would be in the low twenties, that would both have signaled a need to react and reduced the risks of doing so. The idea that bankruptcy would threaten such futures reflects his ignorance of the futures markets. An oil producer who sold futures as a hedge will almost certainly not sell more futures than it has oil to deliver on. Speculators might lose their shirts, but futures brokers have the experience needed to ensure that the defaults are small enough for the brokers to absorb (see, for example, what happened in the gold mania of the late 70s).

Web form inefficiency

Posted by Peter on February 21, 2005
Posted in: Miscellaneous.

Patri Friedman asks why websites often require users to deal with annoying pulldown menus such as those listing 50 states. I expect that the main reason is that users who are allowed to type in text will enter it in nonstandard forms. For example, Massachusetts will be entered as Mass or MA, or if limited to 2 characters the user might not remember the correct 2-letter code. Sites that need to calculate sales taxes differently for different state, or who think (not necessarily with good reason) that they need to analyze customers by location for marketing reasons, need either standardized input or a good deal of imagination to predict all variants they will get. Imagination isn’t cheap.
I suspect there’s also a desire by some designers to show their status over users by preventing users from entering unexpected input.
I doubt these factors are enough to explain all examples of annoying pulldown menus, but I’d guess they explain at least half.

Hunger

Posted by Peter on December 16, 2004
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health, Politics, The Flynn Effect. Tagged: , , , .

Book Review: The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 by Robert Fogel

This book presents good arguments that hunger was a major cause of health problems everywhere a century ago, and that the effects last long enough that even the richest countries are still suffering from problems caused by hunger. His arguments imply that experts persistently underestimate improvements in life expectancy, and even with little improvement in medical technology life expectancy will improve a good deal because people born today have much better nutrition than today’s elderly had as children.

This goes a long way toward explaining the Flynn effect (even though the book doesn’t mention Flynn or IQ). It correctly implies the biggest intelligence increase should be seen at the low end of the IQ range, unlike a number of other interesting theories I’ve come across.

Another peculiar fact that the book helps to explain is the high frequency with which the tallest presidential candidate wins. Fogel’s arguments that height has been one of the best indicators of health/wealth suggest that this is not an arbitrary criterion (although it is probably a selfish I-want-to-ally-with-a-winner strategy that may be obsolete).

The book is mostly non-idealogical, but occasionally has some good political arguments (page 42):

government transfers were incapable of solving the problems of beggary
and homelessness during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries,
because the root cause of the problems was chronic malnutrition. … At
the end of the eighteenth century British agriculture, even when supplemented
by imports, was simply not productive enough to provide more than 80 percent
of the potential labor force with enough calories to sustain regular manual
labor.

(page 106):

Readers may be surprised that I have not emphasized the extension of health insurance policies to the 15 percent of the population not currently insured. The flap over insurance has more to do with taxation than with health services. … Most proposals for extending health insurance involve taxing their wages for services they already receive.

See also Mike Linksvayer’s comments.

What is Thought?

Posted by Peter on December 15, 2004
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book Review: What is Thought? by Eric Baum

The first half of this book is an overview of the field of artificial intelligence that might be one of the best available introductions for people who are new to the subject, but which seemed fairly slow and only mildly interesting to me.

The parts of the book that are excellent for both amateurs and experts are chapters 11 through 13, dealing with how human intelligence evolved.

He presents strong, although not conclusive, arguments that the evolution of language did not involve dramatic new modes of thought except to the extent that improved communication improved learning, and that small catalysts created by humans might well be enough to spark the evolution of human-like language in other apes.

His recasting of the nature versus nurture debate in terms of biases that guide learning is likely to prove more valuable at resisting the distortions of ideologues than more conventional versions (e.g. Pinker’s).

His arguments have important implications for how AI will progress. He convinced me that it will be less sudden than I previously thought, by convincing me that truly general-purpose learning machines won’t work, and that much of intelligence involves using large quantities of data about the real world to choose good biases with which to guide our learning.

Report from the Foresight Conference, part 2

Posted by Peter on November 29, 2004
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech).

(Catching up on month-old news…)

The most important technical news from the Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology was the presentation by Christian Schafmeister, who is working on building molecules with a wide variety of shapes out of bis-amino acids. He is able to build protein-like molecules that are rigid, and whose shape is easy to predict from the sequence. If there are no hidden catches, this may be an innovation as valuable (for the purposes of creating new objects to atomic precision) as solving the protein folding problem. The biggest drawback that he mentioned was the time it takes to synthesize a medium-sized molecule (up to a week), but he says that could be automated.

I’m unsure whether there was anything important in the other talks about nanotech research. Ned Seeman mentioned something about a ribosome-like device – I suppose that might be something important and new that he has done, but he didn’t say enough about it for me to tell.

Rob Freitas made some vaguely impressive claims about the feasibility of building a diamondoid assembler using the tools available today, but he went through some critical issues such as error rates in placing individual atoms where we want them to quickly for me to evaluate the plausibility of his answers. I’ll try to read the papers he has on his web site real soon now to see if he presents those arguments more convincingly there.

Accelerating Change Conference

Posted by Peter on November 11, 2004
Posted in: Freedom, Investing, Virtual Worlds. Tagged: , .

The 2004 Accelerating Change Conference focused much more on current changes than last year’s attempts at providing long-term visions led me to expect.

The one topic that excited me was a virtual world called Second Life. While it might sound superficially like just a virtual Burning Man, the designers are serious enough about their nationbuilding to encourage commerce, both within the system and via currency exchanges such as The Gaming Open Market with other worlds. Their VP of Product Development Cory Ondrejka described Hernando de Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital as "must reading". They have been careful to insure that people have few incentives to take disputes arising in the virtual world to meatspace courts. For instance, they once banned a vandal from the game who owned a fair amount of land; they auctioned off the land and sent him a check for most of the proceeds – $1600.

Some of their customers are doing well enough in the virtual world that the company that runs Second Life has trouble offering them a salary good enough to compete with what they’re making in virtual life.

They don’t seem as concerned about the highly deflationary effects of their monetary policy as I expect they ought to be. Why will people buy their land (the sale of which seems to be their main source of income) if they can earn a safe and sure return by just holding the local currency?

The responsiveness of the company to citizen complaints (e.g. simplifying and later abolishing taxes in response to tax revolts) is fairly strong evidence that a non-monopolistic dictator is better than a democracy with monopoly power.

Report from the Foresight Conference, part 1

Posted by Peter on October 26, 2004
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech).

The best sound bite from the Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology was Chris Phoenix’s description of how mature versions of nanotechnology will deal with most forms of pollution:

No Atom Left Behind

He was responsible enough to point out one form of pollution that can’t be solved that way: a scarcity of heat pollution credits is likely to be an important feature of the nanotech economy.