Archive for the ‘Weird science’ Category
Humanity 2.0 on slideshare homepage
Nice one slideshare!
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Your presentation Complexity & Humanity 2.0 has been selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’ on the SlideShare homepage.
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More complexity theory & humanity 2.0
Our world might be a giant hologram
Craig Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, reckons “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
For the past seven years, a team in Germany has been searching for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 hasn’t detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
Check this out.
Investment in science
On Monday Obama delivered this speech, stating that “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before.”
He said his administration would double the budgets of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and pursue the goal of cutting carbon pollution by 80% by 2050.
“Energy is our big project,” he said. “My recovery plan provides the incentives to double our nation’s capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years.”
The word ’science’ comes from the Latin ’scientia’, meaning “knowledge”. Science is the effort to discover and increase human understanding of how reality works.
Sad that the percentages are so low…. Obama’s goal is 3% of GDP by 2010. Meanwhile Japan spends almost 4.0%; Korea more than 3.2%; and China over 1.4% of its GDP on R&D. Heading in the right direction, but not exactly Rargian.
Sympathetic resonance
Sympathetic resonance is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. In other words, if you have two similar tuning forks, whack one and the other will sing, despite the fact they’re not touching.
In communication terms, brands are attempting to create sympathetic resonance… emanating vibrations in the hope that they’ll affect people. In fact the frequency of the vibrations is so high, it threatens to shatter everything: trust, auditory range (we won’t listen / can’t hear it any more) and effectiveness. Any cool new underground vibes emanating from the bottom up – from parkour to capoeira – are leapt upon by trend-spotting brands and thrust it into the mainstream.
But brands are missing a trick. To emanate vibrations that’ll make people respond in sympathetic resonance, they must have a harmonic likeness to those they’re trying to affect. The only way to achieve this is to stop pumping out deafening fake-folksy vibrations and start enabling the people of the world to create their own. Then you can be sure others in their social clusters will respond, start vibrating and cause a ripple affect to yet more social clusters; and eventually millions will sing in harmony. Mass marketing via facilitation – as enabler, not doer.
Equilibrium and fractal business models
A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.
Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.
Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’
Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.
Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.
Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.
The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.
Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).
Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.
Things don’t resonate coz they’re dense, innit.
According to general advertising industry relativity, black hole budgets are entirely compressed into a region with zero meaningful volume and near-zero relevance, which means their density and gravitational pull towards the 30 second TV ad and print campaign are infinite; and so is the curvature of space-time and agency-time that they cause.
These infinite values cause most physical equations – common sense, general relativity and good manners (i.e. not interrupting), to stop working at the centre of a broadcast industry black hole. So physicists, Resonance Jedis and every single one of us call the zero-volume, near-zero-relevance, infinitely dense region at the centre of the broadcast industry black hole a singularity.
A gravitational media agency singularity is a location where the quantities which are used to measure effectiveness (eyeballs, click-throughs etc) and the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on real life or the co-ordinate system. These quantities (with lots of zeros on the end which must mean brands should pay us loads for stacking them up) are the scalar invariant curvatures of agency metrics and ad-space-time, some of which are a measure of (the) density (of matter).
Plonkerisation
“As for intelligent life I’m putting my money on the fact that in the whole universe, we are pretty much unique.” [Dr Michael Perryman, European Space Agency]
Duuuuhhh! You’d think if we’d learned anything in the 470-ish years since the scientific revolution kicked in, it would be that we should hold our own knowledge in greatest suspicion.
I’m sure those 16th century dudes would’ve put their money on the fact the Earth was at the centre of the solar system.
A few words from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) are in order:
“The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realise;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organised in history books than in empirical reality); and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories”
Out of the Silent Planet
Here’s a pertinent passage from C.S. Lewi’s ‘Out of the Silent Planet’…
‘Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.’
So often what we see en masse / as mass (’above the line’) is only 0.00000001% of what’s actually going on in reality. The long tail enables us to realise significant profits from selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, so it’s worth remembering all the resonance taking place in the ’space’ between mass (marketing). The combined sales of less-popular products can now surpass the total sales of top-level, big hit products. The real opportunity for serious growth lies in the niches.
We thought the earth was flat. Then we thought the earth was at the centre of our solar system (with everything revolving around us… funny that!). We thought there was ‘nothing’ in space, when our limited senses didn’t allow us to see anything there. Then we noticed the effect, while we still couldn’t see the force causing the effect (e.g. gravity, spin, dark matter).
Let’s keep thinking (not necessarily just looking) beyond the obvious and tangible.
Supermassive black hole jets
The frequency of fear
In the early 80s, engineer Vic Tandy was working in a supposedly haunted lab when he broke into a cold sweat, hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed an ominous grey shape drifting slowly into view. Terrified, he went straight home.
Tandy discovered that source of his discomfort was a 19hz standing wave, caused by an extractor fan. 19hz is in the range known as infrasound, below the range of human hearing (20hz). Low frequencies in this region can affect humans and animals in several ways, causing discomfort, dizziness, blurred vision (by vibrating your eyeballs), hyperventilation and fear, possibly leading to panic attacks. 19hz standing waves have since been discovered in many a ‘haunted’ building.
Prior to an attack, a tiger’s roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyse their intended victim. Is this the sound of fear itself?
Read the full Guardian article here.
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