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The Google Brain Team – Looking Back on 2017

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This rock-paper-scissors science experiment is a novel use of TensorFlow. We’ve been excited by the wide variety of uses of TensorFlow we saw in 2017, including automating cucumber sorting, finding sea cows in aerial imagery, sorting diced potatoes to make safer baby food, identifying skin cancer, helping to interpret bird call recordings in a New Zealand bird sanctuary, and identifying diseased plants in the most popular root crop on Earth in Tanzania!
In November, TensorFlow celebrated its second anniversary as an open-source project. It has been incredibly rewarding to see a vibrant community of TensorFlow developers and users emerge. TensorFlow is the #1 machine learning platform on GitHub and one of the top five repositories on GitHub overall, used by many companies and organizations, big and small, with more than 24,500 distinct repositories on GitHub related to TensorFlow. Many research papers are now published with open-source TensorFlow implementations to accompany the research results, enabling the community to more easily understand the exact methods used and to reproduce or extend the work.

TensorFlow has also benefited from other Google Research teams open-sourcing related work, including TF-GAN, a lightweight library for generative adversarial models in TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lattice, a set of estimators for working with lattice models, as well as the TensorFlow Object Detection API. The TensorFlow model repository continues to grow with an ever-widening set of models.

In addition to TensorFlow, we released deeplearn.js, an open-source hardware-accelerated implementation of deep learning APIs right in the browser (with no need to download or install anything). The deeplearn.js homepage has a number of great examples, including Teachable Machine, a computer vision model you train using your webcam, and Performance RNN, a real-time neural-network based piano composition and performance demonstration. We’ll be working in 2018 to make it possible to deploy TensorFlow models directly into the deeplearn.js environment.

TPUs

Cloud TPUs deliver up to 180 teraflops of machine learning acceleration
About five years ago, we recognized that deep learning would dramatically change the kinds of hardware we would need. Deep learning computations are very computationally intensive, but they have two special properties: they are largely composed of dense linear algebra operations (matrix multiples, vector operations, etc.), and they are very tolerant of reduced precision. We realized that we could take advantage of these two properties to build specialized hardware that can run neural network computations very efficiently. We provided design input to Google’s Platforms team and they designed and produced our first generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU): a single-chip ASIC designed to accelerate inference for deep learning models (inference is the use of an already-trained neural network, and is distinct from training). This first-generation TPU has been deployed in our data centers for three years, and it has been used to power deep learning models on every Google Search query, for Google Translate, for understanding images in Google Photos, for the AlphaGo matches against Lee Sedol and Ke Jie, and for many other research and product uses. In June, we published a paper at ISCA 2017, showing that this first-generation TPU was 15X - 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU counterparts, with performance/Watt about 30X - 80X better.
Cloud TPU Pods deliver up to 11.5 petaflops of machine learning acceleration
Experiments with ResNet-50 training on ImageNet show near-perfect speed-up as the number of TPU devices used increases.
Inference is important, but accelerating the training process is an even more important problem - and also much harder. The faster researchers can try a new idea, the more breakthroughs we can make. Our second-generation TPU, announced at Google I/O in May, is a whole system (custom ASIC chips, board and interconnect) that is designed to accelerate both training and inference, and we showed a single device configuration as well as a multi-rack deep learning supercomputer configuration called a TPU Pod. We announced that these second generation devices will be offered on the Google Cloud Platform as Cloud TPUs. We also unveiled the TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC), a program to provide top ML researchers who are committed to sharing their work with the world to access a cluster of 1,000 Cloud TPUs for free. In December, we presented work showing that we can train a ResNet-50 ImageNet model to a high level of accuracy in 22 minutes on a TPU Pod as compared to days or longer on a typical workstation. We think lowering research turnaround times in this fashion will dramatically increase the productivity of machine learning teams here at Google and at all of the organizations that use Cloud TPUs. If you’re interested in Cloud TPUs, TPU Pods, or the TensorFlow Research Cloud, you can sign up to learn more at g.co/tpusignup. We’re excited to enable many more engineers and researchers to use TPUs in 2018!

Thanks for reading!

(In part 2 we’ll discuss our research in the application of machine learning to domains like healthcare, robotics, different fields of science, and creativity, as well as cover our work on fairness and inclusion.)


How Oprah Winfrey Helped Create Our Irrational, Pseudoscientific Fantasyland

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Oprah Winfrey helped create our irrational pseudoscientific American fantasyland.

Oprah Winfrey gave national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by OWN Network, Cindy Ord/Getty Images for iHeart, Jemal Countess/Getty Images, and Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.

Adapted from Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History copyright © 2017 by Kurt Andersen. With permission from the publisher, Random House. All rights reserved.

Forty-eight hours ago, after watching Oprah Winfrey give a terrific, rousing feminist speech on an awards show, millions of Americans instantly, giddily decided that the ideal 2020 Democratic nominee had appeared. An extremely rich and famous and exciting star and impresario—but one who seems intelligent and wise and kind, the non–Bizarro World version of the sitting president.

Some wet-blanketing followed immediately, among the best from the New York Times Magazine writer Thomas Chatterton Williams in an op-ed headlined “Oprah, Don’t Do It.” “It would be a devastating, self-inflicted wound for the Democrats to settle for even benevolent mimicry of Mr. Trump’s hallucinatory circus act,” he wrote. “Indeed, the magical thinking fueling the idea of Oprah in 2020 is a worrisome sign about the state of the Democratic Party.”

Despite the “magical thinking” reference, neither Williams nor other skeptics have seriously addressed the big qualm I have about the prospect of a President Winfrey: Perhaps more than any other single American, she is responsible for giving national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials, paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more. The various fantasies she has promoted on all her media platforms—her daily TV show with its 12 million devoted viewers, her magazine, her website, her cable channel—aren’t as dangerous as Donald Trump’s mainstreaming of false conspiracy theories, but for three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.

Oprah went on the air nationally in the 1980s, just as non-Christian faith healing and channeling the spirits of the dead and “harmonic convergence” and alternative medicine and all the rest of the New Age movement had scaled up. By the 1990s, there was a big, respectable, glamorous New Age counterestablishment. Marianne Williamson, one of the new superstar New Age preachers, popularized a “channeled” book of spiritual revelation, A Course in Miracles: The author, a Columbia University psychology professor who was anonymous until after her death in the 1980s, had claimed that its 1,333 pages were dictated to her by Jesus. Her basic idea was that physical existence is a collective illusion—”the dream.” Endorsed by Williamson, the book became a gigantic best-seller. Deepak Chopra had been a distinguished endocrinologist before he quit regular medicine in his 30s to become the “physician to the gods” in the Transcendental Meditation organization and in 1989 hung out his own shingle as wise man, author, lecturer, and marketer of dietary supplements.

Out of its various threads, the philosophy now had its basic doctrines in place: Rationalism is mostly wrongheaded, mystical feelings should override scientific understandings, reality is an illusion one can remake to suit oneself. The 1960s countercultural relativism out of which all that flowed originated mainly as a means of fighting the Man, unmasking the oppressive charlatans-in-charge. But now they had become mind-blowing ways to make yourself happy and successful by becoming the charlatan-in-charge of your own little piece of the universe. “It’s not just the interpretation of objective reality that is subjective,” according to Chopra. “Objective reality per se is a concept of reality we have created subjectively.”

Exactly how had Chopra and Williamson become so conspicuous and influential? They were anointed in 1992 and 1993 by Oprah Winfrey.

As I say, she is an ecumenical promoter of fantasies. Remember the satanic panic, the mass hysteria during the 1980s and early ’90s about satanists abusing and murdering children that resulted in the wrongful convictions of dozens of people who collectively spent hundreds of years incarcerated? Multiple Oprah episodes featured the celebrity “victims” who got that fantasy going.When a Christian questioner in her audience once described her as New Age, Winfrey was pissed. “I am not ‘New Age’ anything,” she said, “and I resent being called that. I don’t see spirits in the trees, and I don’t sit in the room with crystals.” Maybe not those two things specifically; she’s the respectable promoter of New Age belief and practice and nostrums, a member of the elite and friend to presidents, five of whom have appeared on her shows. New Age, Oprah-style, shares with American Christianities their special mixtures of superstition, selfishness, and a refusal to believe in the random. “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she has said. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck.”

Most of the best-known prophets and denominational leaders in the New Age realm owe their careers to Winfrey. Her man Eckhart Tolle, for instance, whose books The Power of Now and A New Earth sold millions of copies apiece, is a successful crusader against reason itself. “Thinking has become a disease,” he writes, to be supplanted by feeling “the inner energy field of your body.” The two of them conducted a series of web-based video seminars in 2008.

New Age, because it’s so American, so utterly democratic and decentralized, has multiple sacred texts. One of the most widely read and influential is Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, emphatically placed in the canon by Winfrey as soon as it was published a decade ago. “I’ve been talking about this for years on my show,” Winfrey said during one of the author’s multiple appearances on Oprah. “I just never called it The Secret.”

A generation after its emergence as a thing hippies did, alternative medicine became ubiquitous and mainstream.

The Secret takes the American fundamentals, individualism and supernaturalism and belief in belief, and strips away the middlemen and most of the pious packaging—God, Jesus, virtue, hard work rewarded, perfect bliss only in the afterlife. What’s left is a “law of attraction,” and if you just crave anything hard enough, it will become yours. Belief is all. The Secret’s extreme version of magical thinking goes far beyond its predecessors’. It is staggering. A parody would be almost impossible. It was No. 1 on the Times’s nonfiction list for three years and sold about 20 million copies.

“There isn’t a single thing that you cannot do with this knowledge,” the book promises. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, The Secret can give you whatever you want.” Because it’s a scientific fact.

The law of attraction is a law of nature. It is as impartial as the law of gravity. Nothing can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thoughts. … In the moment you ask, and believe, and know you already have it in the unseen, the entire universe shifts to bring it into the scene. You must act, speak, and think, as though you are receiving it now. Why? The universe is a mirror, and the law of attraction is mirroring back to your dominant thoughts. … It takes no time for the universe to manifest what you want. Any time delay you experience is due to your delay in getting to the place of believing.

To be clear, Byrne’s talking mainly not about spiritual contentment but things, objects, lovers, cash. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts. … It is not your job to work out ‘how’ the money will come to you. It is your job to ask. … Leave the details to the Universe on how it will bring it about.” She warns that rationalism can neutralize the magic—in fact, awareness of the real world beyond one’s individual orbit can be problematic. “When I discovered The Secret, I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good.”

Right around the time The Secret came out, habitués of its general vicinity started buzzing about the year 2012. Ancient Mesoamericans, people were saying, had predicted that in 2012—specifically, Dec. 21—humankind’s present existence would … transition, when the current 5,125-year-long period ends. New Age religion-makers, like American Protestants, now had their own ancient prophecy for their own dreams of something like a near-future Armageddon and supernaturally wonderful aftermath.

Winfrey ended the daily Oprah broadcasts in 2011, and a month before the final episode, she interviewed Shirley MacLaine for the millionth time and asked about 2012: “What’s gonna happen to us as a species?”

“We’re coming into an alignment,” MacLaine explained. “It is the first time in 26,000 years—36,000 years—26,000 years, I’m sorry, that this has occurred. … You have an alignment where this solar system is on direct alignment with the center of the galaxy. That carries with it a very profound electromagnetic frequency—”

“Vibration,” Winfrey interjected.

“… vibration,” MacLaine agreed, “and gravitational pull. Hence the weather. What does that do to consciousness? What does that do to our sense of reality?” It’s why people feel rushed and stressed, she said.

Winfrey asked her audience for an amen: “Are you all feeling that?” They were.

“So my stuff isn’t really that far out. But what’s actually happening, Oprah,” MacLaine continued, explaining how the relevant astrology proved the supernatural inflection point was exactly 620 days away. “It’s the end of that 26,000-year procession of the equinox” and “the threshold of a new beginning. And I think what this pressure, this kind of psychic, spiritual pressure we’re all feeling is about, is that your internal soul is telling you ‘Get your act together.’”

It’s one thing to try to experience more peace of mind or feel in sync with a divine order. Mixing magical thinking with medical science and physiology, however, can get problematic. A generation after its emergence as a thing hippies did, alternative medicine became ubiquitous and mainstream. As with so many of the phenomena I discuss in my book Fantasyland, it’s driven by nostalgia and anti-establishment mistrust of experts, has quasi-religious underpinnings, and comes in both happy and unhappy versions.

And has been brought to you by Oprah Winfrey.

In 2004, a very handsome heart surgeon, prominent but not famous, appeared on Oprah to promote a book about alternative medicine. His very name—Dr. Oz!—would be way too over-the-top for a character in a comic novel. After Harvard, Mehmet Oz earned both an M.D. and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, then became a top practitioner and professor of heart surgery at Columbia University and director of its Cardiovascular Institute. Timing is everything—young Dr. Oz arrived at Columbia right after it set up its Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the 1990s.

Soon he was bringing an “energy healer” into his operating room, who placed her hands on patients as he performed surgery, and inviting a reporter to watch. According to Dr. Oz, who is married to a reiki master, such healers have the power to tune in to their scientifically undetectable “energies” and redirect them as necessary while he’s cutting open their hearts. When the New Yorker’s science reporter Michael Specter told Oz he knew of no evidence that reiki works, the doctor agreed—“if you are talking purely about data.” For people in his magical-thinking sphere, purely about data is a phrase like mainstream and establishment and rational and fact, meaning elitist, narrow, and blind to the disruptive truths. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” Oz told Specter, then added a kicker directly from the relativist 1960s: “I have my religion and you have yours.”

After that first appearance on Oprah, he proceeded to come on her show 61 more times, usually wearing surgical scrubs. In 2009, Winfrey’s company launched the daily Dr. Oz show, on which he pushes miracle elixirs, homeopathy, imaginary energies, and psychics who communicate with the dead. He regularly uses the words miracle and magic. A supplement extracted from tamarind “could be the magic ingredient that lets you lose weight without diet and exercise.” Green coffee beans—even though “you may think that magic is make-believe”—are actually a “magic weight-loss cure,” a “miracle pill [that] can burn fat fast. This is very exciting. And it’s breaking news.” For a study in the British medical journal BMJ, a team of experienced evidence reviewers analyzed Dr. Oz’s on-air advice—80 randomly chosen recommendations from 2013. The investigators found legitimate supporting evidence for fewer than half. The most famous physician in the United States, the man Oprah Winfrey branded as “America’s doctor,” is a dispenser of make-believe.

Oz has encouraged viewers to believe that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses—as did Winfrey on her show before him. In 2007, long after the fraudulent 1998 paper that launched the anti-vaccine movement had been discredited, she gave an Oprah episode over to the actress Jenny McCarthy, a public face of the movement. That was where McCarthy gave the perfect defense of her credentials: “The University of Google is where I got my degree from!”

If Ronald Reagan became the first king of his magical-thinking realm in the 1980s, Oprah Winfrey became the first queen of hers in the following decade. Like Reagan, I believe she’s both sincere and a brilliant Barnumesque promoter of a dream world.

Discussing my book a couple of months ago on Sam Harris’ podcast Waking Up, I was arguing that the realm of Fantasyland is, when it comes to politics, highly asymmetrical—the American right much more than the left has given itself over to belief in the untrue and disbelief in the true, a fact of which President Donald Trump is a stark embodiment.

“Who would be, and could there be,” I asked Harris, “a Trump of the left that people on the left would, against their better judgment say ‘She’s a kook, and she’s terrible in this way, but she believes in socialized medicine, and this, and that—I’m going with her.’ To what degree and under what circumstances could that happen? It’s hard to imagine the equivalent, but I’m willing to accept that we might have to make those choices eventually.”

Such as who, Harris asked. Well, I replied, “people talk very seriously about Oprah Winfrey being a potential Democratic nominee for president. Is that my Trump moment, [like] what honest Republicans had to do with Donald Trump, and decide ‘No, I can’t abide this’ and became Never Trumpers? Would I be a Never Oprah person? That will be a test for me.”

I’ve been encouraged these past three days by the “whoa, Oprah” reactions among some liberals—as I was by the Republican resistance to Trump during the first six or nine months of his candidacy. When she starts polling ahead of all the mere politicians seeking the Democratic nomination, let alone winning primaries, we’ll see how stalwart the reality-based, anti-celebrity, naysaying faction remains.

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Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank

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Producer gas vehicle 1Wood gasification is a proces whereby organic material is converted into a combustible gas under the influence of heat - the process reaches a temperature of 1,400 °C (2,550 °F). The first use of wood gasification dates back to 1870s, when it was used as a forerunner of natural gas for street lighting and cooking.

In the 1920s, German engineer Georges Imbert developed a wood gas generator for mobile use. The gases were cleaned and dried and then fed into the vehicle's combustion engine, which barely needs to be adapted. The Imbert generator was mass produced from 1931 on. At the end of the 1930s, about 9,000 wood gas vehicles were in use, almost exclusively in Europe.

Second World War

The technology became commonplace in many European countries during the Second World War, as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. In Germany alone, around 500,000 producer gas vehicles were in operation by the end of the war.

A network of some 3,000 "petrol stations" was set up, where drivers could stock up on firewood. Not only private cars but also trucks, buses, tractors, motorcycles, ships and trains were equipped with a wood gasification unit. Some tanks were driven on wood gas, too, but for military use the Germans preferred the production of liquid synthetic fuels (made out of wood or coal).

In 1942 (when the technology had not yet reached the height of its popularity), there were about 73,000 producer gas vehicles in Sweden, 65,000 in France, 10,000 in Denmark, 9,000 in both Austria and Norway, and almost 8,000 in Switzerland. Finland had 43,000 "woodmobiles" in 1944, of which 30,000 were buses and trucks, 7,000 private vehicles, 4,000 tractors and 600 boats. (source).

Woodmobiles also appeared in the US, Asia and, particularly, Australia, which had 72,000 vehicles running on woodgas (source). Altogether, more than one million producer gas vehicles were used during World War Two.

After the war, with gasoline once again available, the technology fell into oblivion almost instantaneously. At the beginning of the 1950s, the then West-Germany only had some 20,000 woodmobiles left.

Research programme in Sweden

Vollvo amazon wood gasRising fuel prices and global warming have resulted in renewed interest in firewood as a direct fuel. Dozens of amateur engineers around the world have converted standard production cars into producer gas vehicles, with most of these  modern woodmobiles being built in Scandinavia.

In 1957, the Swedish government set up a research programme to prepare for a fast transition to wood gas cars in case of a sudden oil shortage. Sweden has no oil reserves, but it does have vast woodlands it can use for fuel. The goals of this research was to develop an improved, standardised installation that could be adapted for use in all kinds of vehicles.

This investigation, supported by car manufacturer Volvo, led to a great deal of theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience with several road vehicles (one seen above) and tractors over a total distance of more than 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles). The results are summarized in a FAO document from 1986, which also discusses some experiments in other countries. Swedish (overview) and, particularly Finnish amateur engineers have used this data to further develop the technology (overview, below a vehicle of Juha Sipilä).

A wood gas generator - which looks like a large water heater - can be placed on a trailer (although this makes the vehicle difficult to park), in the boot (trunk) of a car (although this uses up nearly all the luggage space), or on a platform at the front or the back of the vehicle (the most popular option in Europe). In the case of an American pickup, the generator is placed in the truck bed. During WWII, some vehicles were equipped with a built-in generator, entirely hidden from view.

Fuel

Dave nichols woodgas car The fuel for a wood gas car consists of wood or wood chips (see picture on the left). Charcoal can also be used, but this leads to a 50 percent loss in the available energy contained in the original biomass. On the other hand, charcoal contains more energy, so that the range of the car can be extended. In principle, any organic material can be used. During the Second World War, coal and peat were also used, but wood was the main fuel.

One of the more successful wood gas cars was built last year by Dutch John. While many recent producer gas vehicles seem to come straight out of Mad Max, the Dutchman's Volvo 240 is equipped with a very modern-looking system made of stainless steel (see the first picture and the two pictures below and then compare to this Volvo, this BMW, this Audi or this Yugo).

"Producing wood gas is not that hard", says John. "Producing clean wood gas is another thing. I have objections to some woodmobiles. Often, the produced gas is as clean as the appearance of the construction".

Dutch John strongly believes in wood gas generators, mainly for stationary uses such as heating, electricity generation or even the production of plastics. The Volvo is meant to demonstrate the possibilities of the technology. "Park an Italian sports car next to a wood gas car and the crowd gathers around the woodmobile. Nevertheless, wood gas cars are only for idealists and for times of crisis." 

Range

The Volvo reaches a maximum speed of 120 kilometres per hour (75 mph) and can maintain a cruising speed of 110 km/h (68 mph).  The "fuel tank" can contain 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of wood, good for a range of 100 kilometres (62 miles), comparable to that of an electric car.

If the back seat is loaded with sacks of wood, the range is extended to 400 kilometres (250 miles). Again, this is comparable to the range of an electric car if the passenger space is sacrificed for a larger battery, as is the case with the Tesla Roadster or the electric Mini Cooper. The difference is, of course, that John has to stop regularly to grab a sack of wood from the back seat and refill the tank.

Trailer

As is the case with other cars, the range of a wood gas car is also dependent on the vehicle itself. This is shown by the different cars that were converted by Vesa Mikkonen. The Fin places all his generators on a trailer. His most recently-converted car is a 1979 Lincoln Continental Mark V, a large, heavy American coupe. It consumes 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of wood every 100 kilometres (62 miles) and is thus considerably less efficient than John's Volvo. Mikkonen has also converted a Toyota Camry, a much more efficient car. This vehicle only consumes 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of wood over the same distance. However, the trailer is almost as large as the car itself.

The range of electric cars can be considerably improved by making them smaller and lighter. However, this is not an option with their wood gas cousins because of the weight and the volume of the machinery. The smaller cars from World War Two only had a range of 20 to 50 kilometres (12 to 31 miles), in spite of their much lower speed and acceleration.

Freedom

Enlarging the "fuel tank" is the only option to improve the range further (except for reducing one's speed, of course, but that is another story). American Dave Nichols (the man who shows the wood on one of the pictures above) can load 180 kilograms (400 pounds) of wood into the back of his 1989 Ford pickup truck. This takes him 965 kilometres (600 miles) far, a range that is comparable to a fossil fuel powered car. The merit of this is discussable, of course, as to do this Nichols has to stop regularly to refill the tank: if he loaded the back of his pickup with gasoline, then he could drive even further.

According to Nichols, one pound of wood (half a kilogram) is sufficient to drive 1 mile (1.6 kilometres), which tallies with the Volvo's 30 kilograms of wood per 100 kilometres. The American has set up a company (21st Century Motor Works) and plans to sell his technology on a larger scale. When he arrives home, he uses his truck to heat his house and generate electricity. His story has caught on in the US, and the reason can be summed up by his license plate: "Freedom".

"You can go around the world with a saw and an axe", as John Dutch puts it. His compatriot, Joost Conijn, grabbed this opportunity to take a two-month trip throughout Europe, without worrying about the proximity of the closest of gas stations (which are not always easy to find in a country like Romania). 

Woodgas car joost conijn

The locals gave him wood to continue his journey - with the supply stored on a trailer. Conijn not only used wood as a fuel, but also as a construction material for the car itself (picture above - video here). For another trip with a wood gas car, see "Around Sweden with wood in the tank".

Does the woodmobile have a future?

During the 1990s, hydrogen was seen as the alternative fuel of the future. Then, biofuels and compressed air took over its mantle role, whilst today all the attention is focused on electric cars. If this technology fails, too (and we have expressed our doubts about it several times), can we go back to the wood gas car?

Despite its industrial appearance, a wood gas car scores rather well from an ecological viewpoint when compared to other alternative fuels. Wood gasification is slightly more effiicient than wood burning, as only 25 percent of the energy content of the fuel is lost. The energy consumption of a woodmobile is around 1.5 times higher than the energy consumption of a similar car powered by gasoline (including the energy lost during the pre-heating of the system and the extra weight of the machinery). If the energy required to mine, transport and refine oil is also taken into account, however, then wood gas is at least as efficient as gasoline. And, of course, wood is a renewable fuel. Gasoline is not.

The advantages of wood gas cars

The greatest advantage of producer gas vehicles is that an accessible and renewable fuel can be used directly without any previous treatment. Converting biomass to a liquid fuel like ethanol or biodiesel can consume more energy (and CO2) than the fuel delivers. In the case of a wood gas car, no further energy is used in producing or refining the fuel, except for the felling and cutting of the wood. This means that a woodmobile is practically carbon neutral, especially when the felling and cutting is done by hand.

Moreover, a wood gas car does not require a chemical battery, and this is an important advantage over an electric car. All too often, the embodied energy of the latter's enormous battery is forgotten. In fact, in the case of a producer gas vehicle, the wood behaves like a natural battery. There is no need for high-tech recycling: the ash that remains, can be used as a fertilizer.

A properly-operating wood gas generator also produces less air pollution than a gasoline or diesel powered car. Wood gasification is considerably cleaner than wood burning: emissions are comparable to those of burning natural gas. An electric car has the potential to do better, but then the energy it uses should be generated by renewable sources, which is not a realistic scenario.

The drawbacks of wood gas cars

In spite of all these advantages, it takes just one look at a woodmobile to realize that it is anything but an ideal solution.  The mobile gas factory takes up a lot of space and can easily weigh a few hundred kilograms - empty. The size of the equipment is due to the fact that wood gas has a low energy content. The energetic value of of wood gas is around 5.7 MJ per kg, compared to 44 MJ/kg for gasoline and 56 MJ/kg for natural gas (source).

Furthermore, the use of wood gas limits the output of the combustion engine, which means that the speed and acceleration of the converted car are cut. Wood gas consists roughly of 50 percent  nitrogen, 20 percent carbon monoxide, 18 percent hydrogen, 8 percent carbon dioxide and 4 percent methane. Nitrogen does not contribute to the combustion, while coal monoxide is a slow burning gas. Because of this high nitrogen content, the engine receives less fuel, which leads to a 35 to 50 percent lower output. Because the gas burns slowly, a high number of revolutions is not possible.  A producer gas vehicle is no sports car.

Even though some smaller cars have been equipped with wood gas generators (see for instance this Opel Kadett), the technology is better suited to a larger, heavier car with a powerful engine. If not, engine output and range might not be sufficient. Even though the installation can be made smaller for a smaller vehicle, its size and weight do not decrease proportionately with the decreasing size and weight of the car. Some have built wood gas-powered motorcycles, but their range is limited (a motorcycle with sidecar does better, though). Of course, the weight and size of the mobile gas factory is less an issue with buses, trucks, trains or ships.

Ease of use

Another problem of wood gas cars is that they are not particularly user-friendly, although this has improved compared to the technology used in the Second World War. See the second part of this pdf document (page 17 and further) for a description of what it was like to drive a wood gas car back then:

"...experience at the Wurlitzer organ could be a distinct advantage".

Still, in spite of the improvements, even a modern woodmobile requires up to 10 minutes to get up to working temperature, so you cannot jump in your car and drive away immediately. Furthermore, before every refill, the ashes of the last gasification process have to be shovelled out. The forming of tar in the installation is less problematic than it was 70 years ago, but the filters still have to be cleaned regularly. And then there is the limited range of the vehicle. All in all, it is a far cry from the familiar ease of use of a gasoline car.

The large amount of (deadly) carbon monoxide produced calls for some precautions, too, since a leak in the piping is not impossible. If the machinery is placed in the trunk, the instalment of a CO-detector in the passenger compartment is by no means a luxury. Moreover, a wood gas car must not be parked in an enclosed space unless the gas is flared first (picture above).

Mass-produced woodmobiles

VW beetle woodgas Of course, all the vehicles described above are built by amateur engineers. If we built cars especially designed to be powered by wood, and produce them in factories, chances are that the drawbacks would become somewhat less significant and the advantages would become even greater. Such woodmobiles would also look more elegant.

The Volkswagen Beetles that rolled off the assembly line during World War Two had the whole wood gasification mechanism built in (sources: 1 / 2 / 3). From the outside, the wood gas generator and the rest of the installation was invisible. Refilling was done through a hole in the bonnet (hood).

The same is true for this Mercedes-Benz, in which the installation is completely hidden in the trunk (source).

Deforestation

Woodgas station Unfortunately, wood gas shares an important disadvantage with other biofuels. Mass producing woodmobiles would not solve this. Quite the contrary, in fact: if we were to convert every vehicle, or even just a significant number, to wood gas, all the trees in the world would be gone and we would die of hunger because all agricultural land would be sacrificed for energy crops. Indeed, the woodmobile caused severe deforestation in France during the Second World War (source). Just as with many other biofuels, the technology is not scalable.

Yet, while biofuel-powered car is as user-friendly as a gasoline rival, wood gas has to be the most user-unfriendly alternative fuel that exists. This can be an advantage:  a switch to wood gas cars can only mean that we would drive less, and that would of course be a good thing from an environmental viewpoint. If you need to preheat your car for 10 minutes, chances are you will decide not to use it to drive a few miles to pick up some groceries.  A bicycle would do the job faster. If you had to cut wood for three hours just to make a trip to the beach, you would probably decide to take the train.

In any case, the woodmobile demonstrates (again) that the modern car is a product of fossil fuels. Whatever alternative fuel you believe in, none of them comes even close to the convenience of gasoline or diesel. If, one day, the availability of (cheap) oil comes to an end, the omnipresence of the automobile will be history. But the individual vehicle will never die.

© Kris De Decker (Thank you, R.O.)

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“When people are engaging with people they’re close to, it’s more meaningful, more fulfilling,” said David Ginsberg, director of research at Facebook. “It’s good for your well-being.”

Facebook has been under fire for months over what it shows people and whether its site has negatively influenced millions of its users. The company has been dogged by questions about how its algorithms may have prioritized misleading news and misinformation in News Feeds, influencing the 2016 American presidential election as well as political discourse in many countries. Last year, Facebook disclosed that Russian agents had used the social network to spread divisive and inflammatory posts and ads to polarize the American electorate.

Those issues have landed Facebook in front of lawmakers, who have grilled the company about its influence last year. Next Wednesday, Facebook is set to appear at another hearing on Capitol Hill, along with Twitter and YouTube, about the online spread of extremist propaganda.

The repercussions from Facebook’s new News Feed changes will almost certainly be far-reaching. Publishers, nonprofits, small business and many other groups rely on the social network to reach people, so de-emphasizing their posts will most likely hurt them. Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management at Facebook, who is responsible for running the News Feed, acknowledged that “there will be anxiety” from partners and publishers who often complain about the constant changes in what will be shown across the network.

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Facebook said it would prioritize what users’ friends and family share and comment on in the News Feed while de-emphasizing content from publishers and brands.

The change may also work against Facebook’s immediate business interests. The company has long pushed users to spend more time on the social network. With different, less viral types of content surfacing more often, people could end up spending their time elsewhere. Mr. Zuckerberg said that was in fact Facebook’s expectation, but that if people end up feeling better about using the social network, the business will ultimately benefit.

Changes to Facebook’s News Feed are not new. The Silicon Valley company constantly experiments with what shows up in the News Feed, and in the past it has also said it would prioritize posts from users’ friends and family. But Thursday’s shift goes beyond previous changes by prioritizing posts that have generated substantive interactions. A long comment on a family member’s photo, for instance, might be highlighted in the News Feed above a video that has fewer comments or interactions between people.

Facebook has conducted research and worked with outside academics for months to examine the effects that its service has on people. The work was spurred by criticism from politicians, academics, the media and others that Facebook had not adequately considered its responsibility for what it shows its users.

After the 2016 election, for instance, Mr. Zuckerberg initially shrugged off qualms about Facebook’s effect on the outcome, even as outsiders pointed to the proliferation of fake news stories on the site that had attacked Hillary Clinton. Mr. Zuckerberg later said he had been too hasty and dismissive of the concerns. More recently, he began signaling that Facebook was rethinking what it shows people on the site.

Last week, he posted on Facebook about his goals for 2018, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent” and adding that “this will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together.”

On Thursday, he said many of the discussions about Facebook’s responsibilities had prompted the company “to get a better handle on some of the negative things that could happen in the system.”

“Just because a tool can be used for good and bad, that doesn’t make the tool bad — it just means you need to understand what the negative is so that you can mitigate it,” he said.

Facebook and other researchers have particularly homed in on passive content. In surveys of Facebook users, people said they felt the site had shifted too far away from friends and family-related content, especially amid a swell of outside posts from brands, publishers and media companies.

“This big wave of public content has really made us reflect: What are we really here to do?” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “If what we’re here to do is help people build relationships, then we need to adjust.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said he was now focusing his company around the new approach. Product managers are being asked to “facilitate the most meaningful interactions between people,” rather than the previous mandate of helping people find the most meaningful content, he said.

Mr. Zuckerberg added that his way of running Facebook has shifted since the birth of his two daughters, Maxima and August, in recent years. He said he had rethought the way he views his and Facebook’s legacy, even if it will cost the company in the short term.

“It’s important to me that when Max and August grow up that they feel like what their father built was good for the world,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

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Intel Security Issue Update: Addressing Reboot Issues

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Navin_Shenoy_photoBy Navin Shenoy

As Intel CEO Brian Krzanich emphasized in his Security-First Pledge, Intel is committed to transparency in reporting progress in handling the Google Project Zero exploits.

We have received reports from a few customers of higher system reboots after applying firmware updates. Specifically, these systems are running Intel Broadwell and Haswell CPUs for both client and data center. We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue. If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels.  We are also working directly with data center customers to directly discuss the issue.

End-users should continue to apply updates recommended by their system and operating system providers.

More:  Security Exploits and Intel Products (Press Kit) | Security Research Findings (Intel.com)

Navin Shenoy is executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation.

Intel Security Issue Update: Initial Performance Data Results for Client Systems

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Navin ShenoyBy Navin Shenoy

To best ensure the security of our customers’ data, Intel is working hard with the industry to develop and distribute software and firmware mitigations for the exploit methods disclosed by Google Project Zero (also known as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”). As of today, we still have not received any information that these exploits have been used to obtain customer data. We know our customers are eager for updates, and via this blog, I will personally communicate with you the information that we have to share today and in the future.

More: Security Exploits and Intel Products (Press Kit) | Security Research Findings (Intel.com)

We shared some initial assessments of performance impact yesterday.  We now have additional data on some of our client platforms, and we are sharing that with you today. This is part of our ongoing effort to keep you apprised through frequent updates. We plan to share initial data on some of our server platforms in the next few days. Please know we are working around the clock to generate the data that you want to see as fast as possible. As we endeavor to continue our pace, please understand that – as is common in testing of this type – our results may change as we conduct additional testing.

Jan. 10 Performance Data Results

Today we are sharing data on several 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel® Core™ processor platforms using Windows* 10. We previously said that we expected our performance impact should not be significant for average computer users, and the data we are sharing today support that expectation on these platforms.

The performance impact of the mitigation on 8th generation platforms (Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake) with SSDs is small. Across a variety of workloads, including office productivity and media creation as represented in the SYSMark2014SE benchmark, the expected impact is less than 6 percent. In certain cases, some users may see a more noticeable impact. For instance, users who use web applications that involve complex JavaScript operations may see a somewhat higher impact (up to 10 percent based on our initial measurements). Workloads that are graphics-intensive like gaming or compute-intensive like financial analysis see minimal impact.

Our measurements of the impact on the 7th Gen Kaby Lake-H performance mobile platform are similar to the 8th generation platforms (approximately 7 percent on the SYSMark2014SE benchmark).

For the 6th generation Skylake-S platform, our measurements show the performance impact is slightly higher, but generally in line with the observations on 8th and 7th generation platforms (approximately 8 percent on the SYSMark2014SE benchmark). We have also measured performance on the same platform with Windows 7, a common configuration in the installed base, especially in office environments. The observed impact is small (approximately 6 percent on the SYSMark2014SE benchmark). Observed impact is even lower on systems with HDDs.

As we collect more information across the broad range of usages and Intel platforms, we will make it available. Within the next week, we intend to offer a representative set of data for mobile and desktop platforms that were launched within the past five years. For those Intel customers who are worried about performance impacts, you should know that we will work on creative solutions with our industry partners to reduce those performance impacts wherever possible.

In addition to all the work we’re doing for products in the hands of our customers, we’re hard at work upgrading the technology in our future products to maximize security and performance.

To be clear, we do not want to see the performance of our products impacted in any way, and we know our customers feel the same way. However, the security of our products and our customers’ data is our number one priority. We are passionate about continuing to work with our partners in the industry to provide the best possible experience for our customers.

The benchmarks, platforms and results available are summarized in the table below.

» View at full size

Blog Benchmark Table

» View at full size

Navin Shenoy is executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation.

Software Systems Engineer at Iris Automation – Computer Vision and AI for Drones

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Description

Iris Automation engineers are at the center of our core mission: building state of the art technologies that enable drones and autonomous vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate the world we live in. As a meaningful member of a motivated, creative, and talented team, you implement the backbone of the Iris Collision Avoidance system. If working on wicked problems with passion, versatility, and an interdisciplinary mindset excites you, our team could be the next step in your career.

How You'll Make an Impact

  • Leading hardware integrations and embedded systems development
  • Building and improving internal tools for handling test and customer flight data
  • Participating in broad design review, helping to select and develop key components and assets

Required Skills

  • Proficiency in writing clean, well organized C++ code with appropriate abstraction boundaries
  • Prior experience with embedded systems, Linux, and hardware interfaces
  • Ability to work independently and as part of a team
  • Understanding of system-level design choices and trade-offs
  • Minimum of a Bachelor's Degree from an accredited institution in a related field (computer engineering/science) or 4+ years of professional experience

Useful Skills

  • Prior experience with ROS, GPU programming/CUDA, and/or QT or GTK
  • Prior experience working with cameras and other sensing modalities in embedded environments
  • Prior experience with automated test environments
  • Working understanding of Python, Bash scripting

 

About Iris Automation Inc

Collision avoidance systems for industrial drones, unlocking a $100B industry.

Iris Automation Inc is a venture-backed high tech computer vision company that is working to build groundbreaking new ways for drones and unmanned systems to perceive and navigate the world. Currently, industrial drone systems are not trusted to fly beyond-line-of-sight or be completely autonomous; we are changing that by giving them the ability to intelligently see and react to the physical world. Our product is a sophisticated computer vision algorithm packaged into a physical, plug-and-play perception unit that adds tremendous value to unmanned systems operators as it enables them to overcome regulatory, insurance, trust and safety concerns. The team includes PhDs in Computer Vision, has worked together in the drone industry for the last three years, and combines experience from NASA, Boeing, Airbus, NVIDIA, and leading tech startups.

We are an equal opportunity employer who values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Fifty Years of Shannon Theory – Information Theory (1998) [pdf]


With ‘Downsized’ DNA, Flowering Plants Took Over the World

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When people consider evolutionary events related to the origin and diversification of new species and groups, they tend to emphasize novel adaptations — specific genes giving rise to new, beneficial traits. But a growing body of research suggests that in some cases, that deciding factor may be something much more fundamental: size. In a paper published today in PLOS Biology, a pair of researchers studying the angiosperms, or flowering plants, has named genome size as the limiting constraint in their evolution.

The success of flowering plants, a group that includes everything from orchids and tulips to grasses and wheat, represents a long-standing puzzle for biologists. (In an 1879 letter to the renowned botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin called it an “abominable mystery.”) Terrestrial plants first appeared nearly half a billion years ago, but flowering plants arose only in the past 100 million years, beginning in the Cretaceous period. Yet, once angiosperms emerged, their structural and functional diversity exploded — far outpacing the diversification and spread of the other major plant groups, the gymnosperms (including conifers) and ferns.

Today, the 350,000 flowering-plant species, which have flourished in the vast majority of environments on Earth, constitute 90 percent of all plants on land. Since Darwin’s time, biologists pursuing the answer to that abominable mystery have sought to explain how the flowering plants could possibly have achieved this level of dominance in such a relatively short time.

Perhaps the answer has been so elusive because those scientists have usually focused on the physiological traits that set the angiosperms apart from their relatives. In the PLOS Biology paper, however, Kevin Simonin, a plant biologist at San Francisco State University, and Adam Roddy, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, argue that it’s the genome sizes underlying those individual adaptations that really matter.

Species diverge hugely in genome size, without respect to the organisms’ complexity; in an oft-cited example, the onion has five times as much DNA as humans do. In the new study, Simonin and Roddy demonstrated what that variability in genome size means for large-scale biodiversity. They compiled vast amounts of data on genome size, cell size, cell density and photosynthetic rate for hundreds of angiosperms, ferns and gymnosperms, then traced the correlations among those traits back through time to weave a cohesive evolutionary narrative.

The emergence of angiosperms was marked by many events in which lineages of plants duplicated their whole genome. This process opened a door for greater diversification because the extra copies of genes could evolve and take on new functions. But because carrying so much genetic material can also be physiologically taxing, natural selection typically followed up these duplication events by aggressively pruning unneeded sequences. This “genome downsizing” often left flowering plants with less DNA than their parent species had. In fact, by following the family trees of the flowering plants back to their base, researchers have determined that the very first angiosperms had small genomes. “We now know that this not only contributed to their diversity, but may have given angiosperms the metabolic advantage to outcompete the other plant groups,” Simonin said.

He and Roddy posited that angiosperms’ small genomes set off a cascade of effects that over time flowed from their physiology into their structure and ultimately into their ecological role. Less DNA made it possible for the flowering plants to build their leaves from smaller cells, which in turn allowed them to pack more of certain cell types into the same volume. They could therefore have a higher density of stomata — the pores that facilitate the intake of carbon dioxide from the air and the release of water vapor — and a higher density of veins to provide enough water to keep those pores open. And the flowering plants did not have to sacrifice a high density of photosynthetic cells to achieve these benefits.

As a result, flowering plants could turn sunlight into sugars through photosynthesis much more efficiently. The rise of their superior capacity for hydration and gas exchange also coincided with falling levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Cretaceous period, which contributed further to the angiosperms’ competitive edge over their green-plant peers. According to Simonin and Roddy, phylogenetic evidence shows that changes in genome size and the relevant physiological traits occurred together.

Neurology in Ancient Faces (2001) [pdf]

McCarthy Math

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"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." ~ John McCarthy

by Harry Prevor

In early 1959, John McCarthy wrote a little paper that defined one of the first ever programming languages, LISP. In just nine simple functions (QUOTE, ATOM, EQ, CAR, CDR, CONS, COND, LAMBDA, LABEL), he created the basis from which all LISP-like languages are still founded upon today, including Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, and (debatably) even JavaScript. The language was so succinct that modern-day programmer orlp was able to fully implement an interpreter for it in Python in just 770 bytes.

xkcd 297
Credit to xkcd 297

That being said, the man was still not without his critics. Though the language takes pride in its simplicity, the bare-bones version of LISP presented in the original paper lacks every type that isn't a list or an atom— meaning, by default, you don't get numbers. In this article, I'll try to show that with some clever compositions of the above functions, you can re-create the basic arithmetic functions from scratch without too much difficulty, and even display the results in the base-10 format we all know and love, all without a primitive "number" type.

In McCarthy's LISP, every expression must be either evaluate to be an atom which can consist of capital letters, numbers, and spaces:

HI I AM AN ATOM

Or, it may be a list of atoms, delimited by commas and terminated by the special NIL form which is both an atom and a list (not shown because it is implied):

(HI I AM AN ATOM, I AM AN ATOM TOO)

As Paul Graham points out, the most intuitive way to go about representing numbers then, is to disregard the identifiers of the atoms themselves, and instead count how many items are in a given list:

(I, REPRESENT, THE, NUMBER, FIVE)

Then, our first operator addition can be constructed by the simple "list append" function:

(LABEL, ADD, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (COND, ((ATOM, A), B), ((QUOTE, T), (CONS, (CAR, A), (ADD, (CDR, A), B))))))

Or, in Pythonic psuedocode:

def add(a,b): if len(a) == 0: return b elif True: return [a[0]] + add(a[1:],b)

Using orlp's interpreter, we can verify this works by manually counting the length of the result:

> (ADD, (QUOTE, (THIS, IS, THREE)), (QUOTE, (PLUS, TWO))) (THIS, IS, THREE, PLUS, TWO)

Now, counting out the length of every result can be tedious, and there is no primitive LENGTH function in McCarthy's LISP. But using the powerful COND operator, we can assign symbols to various different lengths, symbols like, say, the Arabic numerals:

(LABEL, LEN, (LAMBDA, (L), (COND, ((ATOM, L), (QUOTE, 0)), ((ATOM, (CDR, L)), (QUOTE, 1)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, L))), (QUOTE, 2)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L)))), (QUOTE, 3)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L))))), (QUOTE, 4)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L)))))), (QUOTE, 5)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L))))))), (QUOTE, 6)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L)))))))), (QUOTE, 7)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L))))))))), (QUOTE, 8)), ((ATOM, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, (CDR, L)))))))))), (QUOTE, 9)), ((QUOTE, T), (QUOTE, TEN OR MORE)))))

(The function can be shortened somewhat by making helper routines that repeatedly apply CDR, but in the interest of education I'll use the verbose version here.) We can confirm it works for our above example:

> (LEN, (ADD, (QUOTE, (THIS, IS, THREE)), (QUOTE, (PLUS, TWO)))) 5

With some help from our friend recursion, we can go in the reverse direction as well, creating lists of "I" atoms of a given single-digit length (we'll call it DIG, short for digit):

(LABEL, DIG, (LAMBDA, (D), (COND, ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 1)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (QUOTE, NIL))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 2)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 1)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 3)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 2)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 4)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 3)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 5)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 4)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 6)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 5)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 7)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 6)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 8)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 7)))), ((EQ, D, (QUOTE, 9)), (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 8)))), ((QUOTE, T), (QUOTE, NIL)))))

Now our addition example is even more straightforward to write:

> (LEN, (ADD, (DIG, (QUOTE, 3)), (DIG, (QUOTE, 2)))) 5

While our addition function theoretically has no bounds, it still only 'works' (as in, displays itself correctly) on single-digit numbers. Our number system right now is "base infinity" if you will, but we've only written out the first ten symbols. We'll get to fixing that in a minute, but in the mean time let's go about implementing the other arithmetic functions, like, say, multiplication:

(LABEL, MUL HELPER, (LAMBDA, (A, B, R), (COND, ((ATOM, A), R), ((QUOTE, T), (MUL HELPER, (CDR, A), B, (ADD, B, R))))))
(LABEL, MUL, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (MUL HELPER, A, B, (QUOTE, NIL))))

In Python-like psuedocode, that would be the following:

def mul_helper(a,b,r): if len(a) == 0: return r elif True: return mul_helper(a[1:],b,add(b,r)) def mul(a,b): return mul_helper(a,b,[])

Aaand the verification:

> (LEN, (MUL, (DIG, (QUOTE, 3)), (DIG, (QUOTE, 2)))) 6

Then subtraction is easy enough with the corresponding Python code to ease understanding:

(LABEL, SUB, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (COND, ((ATOM, B), A), ((QUOTE, T), (SUB, (CDR, A), (CDR, B))))))
def sub(a,b): if len(b) == 0: return a elif True: return sub(a[1:],b[1:])

Truncating integer division is a bit harder, but not that hard once you have a "less than" predicate function which we'll make first:

(LABEL, LESS, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (COND, ((ATOM, B), (QUOTE, NIL)), ((ATOM, A), (QUOTE, T)), ((QUOTE, T), (LESS, (CDR, A), (CDR, B))))))
(LABEL, DIV HELPER, (LAMBDA, (A, B, R), (COND, ((LESS, A, B), R), ((QUOTE, T), (DIV HELPER, (SUB, A, B), B, (CONS, (QUOTE, I), R))))))
(LABEL, DIV, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (DIV HELPER, A, B, (QUOTE, NIL))))
def less(a,b): if len(b) == 0: return False elif len(a) == 0: return True elif True: return less(a[1:],b[1:]) def div_helper(a,b,r): if less(a,b): return r elif True: return div_helper(sub(a,b),b,['I']+r) def div(a,b): return div_helper(a,b,[])

Cool, now that we have the four basic arithmetic functions down, we have a basic one-digit (not reverse) Polish notation calculator that can solve most problems in a 3rd-grade math book! Like, say, (((9 + 4) ÷ (7 − (1 + 1))) × 3) − (2 + (1 + 1)):

> (LEN, (SUB, (MUL, (DIV, (ADD, (DIG, (QUOTE, 9)), (DIG, (QUOTE, 6))), (SUB, (DIG, (QUOTE, 7)), (ADD, (DIG, (QUOTE, 1)), (DIG, (QUOTE, 1))))), (DIG, (QUOTE, 3))), (ADD, (DIG, (QUOTE, 2)), (ADD, (DIG, (QUOTE, 1)), (DIG, (QUOTE, 1)))))) 5

While we have all this calculating power, we might as well make the modulo and exponent operations which have simple enough formulae:

(LABEL, MOD, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (SUB, A, (MUL, B, (DIV, A, B)))))
(LABEL, EXP HELPER, (LAMBDA, (A, B, C), (COND, ((ATOM, (CDR, B)), A), ((QUOTE, T), (EXP HELPER, (MUL, A, C), (CDR, B), C)))))
(LABEL, EXP, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (COND, ((ATOM, B), (DIG, (QUOTE, 1))), ((QUOTE, T), (EXP HELPER, A, B, A)))))

Now back to what I promised we'd get back to earlier: Infinite-length base-10 representation. In fact, we'll even extend that to infinite-length representation in any base, by representing a multi-digit number as an ordered list of digits in that number:

(LABEL, BASE, (LAMBDA, (N, B), (COND, ((ATOM, (DIV, N, B)), (CONS, (LEN, N), (QUOTE, NIL))), ((QUOTE, T), (ADD, (BASE, (DIV, N, B), B), (CONS, (LEN, (MOD, N, B)), (QUOTE, NIL)))))))
def base(n,b): if len(div(n,b)) == 0: return [len(n)] elif True: return add(base(div(n,b),b),[len(mod(n,b))])

To make things easier on the poor programmer, let's add a wrapper to our EXP function to take care of most of the calls to DIG and LEN and BASE for us now, call it POW:

(LABEL, TEN, (CONS, (QUOTE, I), (DIG, (QUOTE, 9))))
(LABEL, POW, (LAMBDA, (A, B), (BASE, (EXP, (DIG, A), (DIG, B)), TEN)))

And violà, look at that: Base 10 exponentiation!

> (POW, (QUOTE, 2), (QUOTE, 8)) (2, 5, 6)

(Be wary that if you go much higher than 256 with orlp's interpreter you might need to increase python's recursion limit with sys.setrecursionlimit to avoid crashes.)


In sum, we've shown that using only nine primitive operations and John McCarthy's original 1959 LISP syntax, it's possible to do all of the basic arithmetic functions by using list length to represent a "number" type. Some good excercises to do if I don't get around to them first would be implementing a base-10 list length generator function, and exploring the possibility of decimal representation (by having a '.' atom to separate the integer and decimal parts). McCarthy's LISP actually goes beyond what is required for turing completeness, so in theory the limits are endless. If you make something cool, I'd love to see it and put it on this page to show!

I've uploaded all the code used in this article on my web server here: math.lisp. If you want to run it on the orlp interpreter, just save his code to a .py file, like mclisp.py, and then do python mclisp.py < math.lisp from the command line. And if you have any questions, of course feel free to contact me any time.

How to Think Like a Medieval Monk (2017)

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They may have been founded in 1098, but the Cistercian order in France still managed to anticipate one of the most exciting discoveries of modern science. Known as the “white monks” because of their habits of undyed sheep’s wool, the Cistercians envisaged religious life as a process of cultivation. Pioneers of hydraulic engineering and large-scale agriculture, the white monks described their spiritual transformation in just the same way, creating fertile fields in the garden of their souls, plucking out vices like weeds and watering their flowering virtues with tears of grace.

When they practiced inducing emotions through meditation, the monks were in fact drawing on the brain’s property of neuroplasticity—its ability to learn, adapt, and change itself based on its environment. Although doubtless they would have other philosophical disagreements, a medieval Cistercian and a modern neuroscientist would agree on the principle that certain feelings and emotions can be changed through meditative exercises. The following are four techniques Cistercian monks used to reshape their own mental states—and the science behind them.

Meditate on Death

A common practice for a monk upon waking was to picture his reanimated body rising from the grave on the day of Resurrection. As he rose to his feet, he might have imagined himself standing before Christ’s Judgment seat, surrounded by all humanity, both the damned and the saved, and wondered to himself if he had done enough to win redemption. Such meditations on death and the afterlife were often recommended in Cistercian texts, and modern psychology demonstrates why they were so effective. Building on the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski have developed what they call Terror Management Theory (TMT), which proposes that humans cope with the terrifying awareness of their own mortality by investing in a “cultural worldview.” This worldview allows us to distance ourselves from our awareness of death, protecting us from existential anxiety. In order for a worldview to shelter us effectively, it must offer immortality in some form, whether it be symbolic (children, artistic achievements, good works) or literal (bodily resurrection, the afterlife). In the parlance of TMT, the term self-esteem refers to people’s sense of whether they are meeting the requirements set by their worldview to obtain immortality (the “immortality standard”).

Within a Cistercian worldview, a monk could be said to have sufficient self-esteem if he believed that, at the Last Judgment, he would be granted eternal life in heaven. Cistercian Judgment meditations can be understood as scripts available for individual monks to probe and destabilize their own self-esteem. They require the meditant to call to mind the ways in which he has not met the immortality standard: good deeds undone, sins, abuses of God’s patience. Researchers studying TMT have repeatedly found that presenting people with a reminder of their own mortality also makes them more defensive of their worldview and, crucially, more committed to abiding by its standards. By inducing fear of judgment—challenging their own self-esteem, relentlessly questioning their ability to achieve an immortality standard—Cistercian monks were also generating motivation to meet that standard.

Read in a Contemplative Manner

Monk, c. 1400. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917.

Central to the monks’ emotional training was the thrice-daily practice of lectio divina, which involved reading the Bible slowly, savoring each word and allowing its full spiritual meaning to unfold without haste or anxiety. The monks sometimes described it as ruminatio: ruminating on the text’s literal and symbolic meaning, chewing the cud of the words like a ruminant animal. The purpose of reading in this way was not for pleasure or to attain information but to cultivate certain desired emotions. Though all reading shapes a reader's interior world to some extent, this approach was a deliberate effort to use the act of reading to construct a spiritually significant internal space in service of a religious goal. The technique was also used for books other than the Bible. In his Rule for a Recluse, a monastic guide written around 1160, the Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx calls on the reader to

let the misery of the poor, the orphans’ sighs, the widows’ desolation, the sorrows of the downcast, the wants of pilgrims, the dangers of those at sea…suggest themselves to your mind. Let the heart of your love open to all these; expend your tears for these.

Emotional imperatives—instructions to “congratulate,” “mourn,” “suffer with”—recur throughout the Rule. Monks would have dwelled on each image—orphans, widows, pilgrims, etc.—summoning the appropriate emotional response for each (in this case caritas, a highly valued emotion best translated as compassion) before moving on.

In a 2011 neuroscientific experiment at UCLA, participants were asked to read descriptions of sad situations said to be drawn from real events. Some participants were then instructed to consciously invoke feelings of empathy, while others were given no additional instructions. The result was that such “effortful cognition” produced greater feelings of compassion and increased neural response. In addition, a 2015 study at the University of Sheffield indicates that, over time and with repeated practice, feelings and emotions that were initially produced through “effortful cognition” become automatic and nonconscious as the neural pathways that support them are strengthened. Emotional imperatives are a feature of all Cistercian meditations, so monks would have been using them to reshape neural pathways over time.

Attribute Boredom to a Malevolent Spirit

The monastery, with its endlessly repetitive routine of prayers and psalms, was a perfect environment for boredom to flourish. During Divine Office, the monk Gosbert of Villers was said to chew peppercorns to stay alert. Another monk, to maintain concentration, resorted to playing chords on an imaginary harp with his hands under his cowl. What they were trying to prevent was acedia—roughly equivalent to what we call boredom—a state to which monks were thought particularly vulnerable. Like boredom, acedia could involve either hyperarousal (restlessness, active procrastination, novelty seeking) or hypoarousal (listlessness, loss of motivation, fatigue). In the twelfth century, the theologian and poet Alan of Lille described its effects:

It is acedia that makes a monk’s vows grow cool, through which he becomes disgusted with the rigor of cloistered life; acedia that wants to be served more delicate food at meals, to lie on softer beds; to spend less time at vigils; to be silent less, or not at all. It is acedia that fears to begin a great work, and dislikes the work it has begun. To acedia, everything is a burden, everything is difficult, nothing is light and easy.

An acedic monk might be reluctant to rise from bed in the mornings, or fall asleep in church, but have plenty of energy for gossiping and hurrying to the refectory. Because it was often thought to strike most acutely around midday, it was sometimes referred to as the “noonday demon.” At one monastery, a demon was seen prowling the choir, gathering up misspoken syllables that fell from the monk’s mouths into a sack. He claimed to be collecting evidence that would be brought forth to accuse lazy Cistercians on Judgment Day. Eventually, this devil came to be known as Tutivillus, the demon of distraction.

“The Artist's Uncle, as a Monk,” by Paul Cézanne, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1993, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

As studies have recently shown, attributing boredom or acedia to an external force, like demonic temptation, served an important psychological function. In an often-cited experiment published in 1989, participants were given a straightforward cognitive task and then divided into three groups: the first, the control, performed the task in silence; the second performed it while a low-volume TV was playing in the next room; the third, while the TV played at high volume. Though the first group found the task engaging, the second and third groups had more trouble focusing, their minds wandered, and they often became restless. Those in the second group, however, described feeling “bored,” while those in the third claimed to be “distracted.” The reason seemed to be that, while few in the second group reported being distracted by the sound of the TV, a majority in the third group did. “Lacking any other explanation for their inattention,” the study concluded, those in the second group “had no alternative except to believe that they were bored.” In the same way, blaming acedia on a demon transformed it from boredom (resulting from oneself) to distraction (caused by an outside force). Because Cistercians believed in this attribution, it offered a useful coping strategy.

Perform a Living Funeral

Just as they had done upon waking, at the end of each day Cistercian monks would meditate on death, measuring themselves against their culture’s immortality standards. This time, though, instead of picturing their bodies rising at the Resurrection, the monks, as they lay down to sleep, would imagine themselves at the moment of death. “Be sure to remember this when you go to bed,” one monastic guide instructs. “Look at your rough woolen blanket and bedclothes, and compare your bed to the grave, as if you were entering it for burial.” Cistercians were taught to meditate on the inevitability of their own deaths, the fact that death could not be postponed, and that the hour and manner of death remained uncertain. In some ways, this ritual resembled so-called living funerals—ceremonies held for living people—that have become increasingly popular in the last few decades, especially among Japan’s rising elderly population. Like living funerals, these bedtime meditations allowed monks to consider their past. Were they to die at this moment, would they wish they had acted differently? Had they left any sins unconfessed? Had they been negligent in any way—eaten a little more than they should, or idled when they should have labored? Each night Cistercians held their souls to account, in order that one day—that day when they would truly lie down to die, not to wake—they could rest peacefully, awaiting Resurrection and the Last Judgment.

Read more on the mind in our Winter 2018 issue, States of Mind.

New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices

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US Customs and Border Protection, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, today posted a revised policy on Border Searches of Electronic Devices and a Privacy Impact Assessment of some of the changes made by the new policy.

CBP has received (and largely ignored) numerous complaints by travelers who have been detained and told they wouldn’t be allowed to go unless they told CBP the passwords to their smartphones, laptop computers, or other electronic devices. Electronic devices have been seized and copied, and in some cases returned only long afterward and/or in altered or damaged condition. A lawsuit challenging suspicionless searches and seizures of data stored on travelers’ electronic devices, brought by EFF and the ACLU, is pending in Boston.

Federal courts have generally been overly deferential to government claims to the existence of a general exception to the Fourth Amendment making it per se“reasonable” to search or seize anything at or “near” a border or at an international airport, regardless of whether there is any basis to suspect a traveler of anything except international travel.

But the new CBP policy stretches the government’s claim of authority for warrantless, suspicionless, searches and seizures of electronic devices and data even further than its 2009 predecessor.

As the new PIA correctly notes, “The 2009 policy was silent regarding CBP’s handling of passcode-protected or encrypted information.”

CBP now says as follows, without citing any basis for this assertion:

Travelers are obligated to present electronic devices and the information contained therein in a condition that allows inspection of the device and its contents… Passcodes or other means of entry may be requested and retained as needed to facilitate the examination of an electronic device or information contained on an electronic device, including information on the device that is accessible through software applications present on the device. If an Officer is unable to complate an inspection of an electronic device because it is protected by a passcode or encryption, the Officer may… detain the device pending a determination as to its admissibility, exclusion, or other disposition.

In other words, CBP is now claiming the authority to confiscate your cellphones, laptops, memory cards, and any other electronic devices if you won’t tell CBP your passwords, and to retain the passwords you give them as well as the contents of those devices.

Yes, this applies to U.S. citizens and permanent residents as well as visitors.

The PIA admits that, as a general “Principle of Purpose Specification” for fair information practices, “DHS should specifically articulate the authority which permits the collection of PII [Personally Identifiable Information] and specifically articulate the purpose or purposes for which the PII is intended to be used.”

But the DHS dismisses these concerns: “There is no privacy risk to purpose specification. The legal precedent is clear, and all information is maintained, stored, and disseminated consistent with published systems of records notices.”

The claim about this all being consistent with published notices sounds plausible and perhaps reassuring — until you look at the notices in question. CBP says that passwords for electronic devices, and images of data extracted from electronic devices, will be stored  in the Automated Targeting System (ATS). But there’s no mention of passwords or device images in the most recent (or any previous) system of records notice (SORN) for ATS. Nor is there any “catch-all” category in that SORN that would appear to include this data.

Even if the public had been given proper notice, the Privacy Act permits the collection of information about how individuals exercise rights protected by the First Amendment only if this has been explicitly authorized by Federal law. No Federal statute mentions the collection by CBP or DHS of passwords for, or data from, travelers’ electronic devices.

Pursuant to the Privacy Act, it’s a crime for a federal agency or official to maintain a system of records without having first published a SORN  giving notice of all of the categories of information included in the syatem. If CBP officials have been storing passwords to travelers electronic devices, or data obtained from those devices, in ATS, any CBP agents responsible for those actions are criminals.

We won’t hold our breath waiting for these CBP officers to be prosecuted, but travelers shouldn’t think that any of this is within what is allowed by existing laws and court precedents, much less what should be allowed by the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.

What should you do if officers of CBP or other DHS components ask you for the password to your electronic device or want to confiscate it or copy data from it?

First, don’t disclose your password(s) and don’t consent to any search or seizure. Telling an officer your password might be construed as giving them permission to use that password to make a complete copy of all of the data on your device.  Police at borders or elsewhere have the legal authority to conduct some searches without your consent, but you are never required to consent. That’s what “consent” means. If they are going to do it anyway, they will do it with or without your consent. Consenting to a search or seizure they are going to carry out anyway can only make your situation worse, not better. Make clear that if they search or seize your device or data, it will be a nonconsensual search. If you are given a receipt for your device(s) or some other form to fill out or sign, use it as a chance to put your denial of consent in writing in a way that will make be harder for them later to claim that you consented. Write, “I did not and I do not consent to this search or seizure.” It’s generally a bad idea to sign anything without first consulting a lawyer.

Second, if they ask you for your password or other data, ask them for the Paperwork Reduction Act notice including the “OMB Control Number” applicable to this collection of information. “What is the password to this device?” is a verbal collection of information, which is prohibited by the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) unless it has been approved in advance by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),  a “control number” has been assigned by OMB, and individuals from whom information is to be collected are given notice of this. Neither CBP nor DHS has ever requested or received OMB approval for collection of device passwords or images, so these agencies are forbidden by the PRA from imposing any sanctions on individuals who decline to provide this information.

Third, tell the officers if any or all of your devices contain privileged data, and invoke your rights under the Privacy Protection Act. If you intend to post some of your photos or descriptions of events on social media, your documents and digital materials are covered by the Privacy Protection Act — but only if the officers conducting the search or seizure know that the device contains privileged information. So tell them. Consider putting a copy of this notice and copy of the law on each of your devices as a “README” file, and carrying a paper copy of at least the first page in your wallet or somewhere handy. This probably won’t stop the border cops, but it might get them to pause while they ask for higher-level approval for the search or seizure. As we’ve discussed previously, there’s a partial exception to the Privacy Protection Act for some border searches, but it’s limited. And if they search or seize your device anyway, knowing that it contains material prvileged by the Privacy Protection Act, you can go after them personally for money damages.

The Making of Apple’s Emoji: How designing these tiny icons changed my life

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Sample of emoji I made at Apple in 2008.

When design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design, magic happens. This is the story of how an intern and her mentor designed Apple’s original emoji set and together changed the way people communicate around the world. It was also a project that led them to become lifelong friends, a key ingredient in the success of these tiny icons. In a nutshell, I was the intern and Raymond is my lifelong friend and mentor. In the course of three months, together we created some of the most widely used emoji: face with tears of joy, pile of poo, red heart, and party popper, plus around 460 additional ones. Later, as a full time Apple employee, I even got to create a few more.

It was the summer of 2008, and I was one year away from receiving my MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). It was the same summer I landed an internship at Apple on a team I was eager to meet. The same design team responsible for the iPhone; a magical device that launched the year prior at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. One could only imagine the size of my butterflies as I flew to Cupertino and arrived at 1 Infinite Loop. To add to the uncontrollable fluttering, I had no idea what project I would be given, the size of the team, where I would sit, or if I could really bike to work (I’m terrible on bikes).

Soon after my arrival and meeting the team (oh and biking to work!) I was handed my project. I was still trying to make sense of the assignment I’d just received when someone asked if I knew what an emoji was. And well, I didn’t, and at the time, neither did the majority of the English speaking world. I answered ‘no’. This would all change, of course, as the iPhone would soon popularize them globally by offering an emoji keyboard. Moments later I learned what this Japanese word meant and that I was to draw hundreds of them. Just as I was looking down the hallway and internally processing, “This isn’t type or an exercise in layout, these are luscious illustrations,” I was assigned my mentor.

For the next three months Raymond and I would share an office and illustrated an array of faces, places, flags, animals, food, clothing, symbols, holidays, sports, and well, you probably know the rest. But long before any of this was complete, I had to learn how to design Apple-styled icons. We split the batch and the lesson in humility and craftsmanship began.

Raymond designed the face with tears of joy and pile of poo and I designed the red heart and party popper. Emoji examples are from Emojipedia.

Raymond taught me everything there was to know about icon design. Little did I know that he, my humble mentor, was one of the best icon designers in the world. In other words, I sat next to one of the best iconographers, got to pick his brain until I could kick off my training wheels, all the while exchanging stories of our time growing up in South Florida including our trips to ‘Pollo Tropical’ in the search of amazing plantains. Lesson in humility, check.

My first emoji was the engagement ring, and I chose it because it had challenging textures like metal and a faceted gem, tricky to render for a beginner. The metal ring alone took me an entire day. Pretty soon, however, I could do two a day, then three, and so forth. Regardless of how fast I could crank one out, I constantly checked the details: the direction of the woodgrain, how freckles appeared on apples and eggplants, how leaf veins ran on a hibiscus, how leather was stitched on a football, the details were neverending. I tried really hard to capture all this in every pixel, zooming in and zooming out, because every detail mattered. And for three months I stared at hundreds of emoji on my screen. Somewhere in there we also had our first Steve Jobs review, which had created a shared experience of suspense and success when they were approved for launch. And if Steve said it was good to go, I’d say lesson in craftsmanship, check.

Sometimes our emoji turned out more comical than intended and some have a backstory. For example, Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget. No one else who discovered this little detail did either.

Another example is the order in which we drew them. We left the tough ones to last, so the dancer with the red dress emerged towards the end of my internship as it was the one that kept getting punted. You can thank her ruffled dress for that and Raymond for the final output. The woman’s turquoise dress with the brown waist band, on the other hand, was one I drew earlier in the process. It was inspired by the color pallet and proportions of a dress that my sister had created in real life that same year.

So from funny backstories to realizing he and I attended high schools less than 30 miles apart, our shared past and days drawing together triggered unstoppable laughing spells with watery eyes and all, in other words, with tears of joy. Ten years after my internship, Raymond and I still fill a room with laughter and he continues to provide me with the most flat out honest feedback to keep me in check, and vice versa. All this is what I believe made the emoji successful, our friendship through design.

When I spotted the ever-changing rock found at Bernal Heights Park in San Francisco, both Raymond and I had to pay tribute to the magical pile of poo. Photo taken in 2016.

This year will mark the tenth anniversary of Apple’s original emoji launch. They were first released in Japan on November of 2008, shortly after my internship at Apple concluded. I had no idea that within a few months of completing such project, it would revolutionize our culture’s way of communicating or how the emoji would physically appear everywhere. And I mean everywhere: toys, apparel, stickers, candy, music videos, books, jewelry, landmarks, movies, and whatever else you’ve seen.

It should be noted that although Raymond and I, Angela Guzman, are the original Apple emoji designers responsible for the initial batch of close to 500 characters (and were awarded a US patent for them), there are of course additional Apple designers who contributed extensively to the set which now totals somewhere in the thousands — some are even animated!

Ten years ago Raymond and I worked on one of my favorite projects to date, one that led me to experience my own ikigai. This Japanese term is defined as the place where one’s passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect; what some would say the reason to get up in the morning — literally me in 2008. I would eagerly wake up, and on the days I had to bike, I’d carry my bike down three long flights of stairs and head to work with a smile on my face. Now that’s magic!

Gift from Raymond upon the conclusion of my internship, his version of real life emoji. The orange, apple, and eggplant were part of a set that I had created.

On that note, I would suggest to any designer looking for their reason to get up in the morning to find their humble mentor, or be one, and get on the road to friendship. Because magic happens when design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design. For every emoji made, I learned something new. For every emoji made Raymond and I became better friends. The better friends we became, the better designer I became. In this case, friendship and design happened one emoji at a time. And that’s a story worth sharing.

Let’s Kill JavaScript (and Replace It with Something Better)

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Let’s take a piece of JavaScript code and convert it to CSS, extended with a plausible (but by no means set in stone) syntax. The following JavaScript is a sample from this webpage, highlighting the current section in the Table of Contents as the user scrolls through the page:

window.addEventListener('scroll', function(event){varlinks =
        document.querySelectorAll('#text-table-of-contents a')
    links.forEach(function(link, i){varanchor = link.getAttribute('href')varsection = document.querySelector(anchor)varsectionTop = section.getBoundingClientRect().topif(sectionTop - 10 <= 0){if(i > 0) links[i-1].classList.remove('active')
            link.classList.add('active')}else{
            link.classList.remove('active')}})})

(The .active CSS class applies rgb(255, 248, 212) as the background andvar(--select-color) as the color.)

Converted to our extended CSS, this is what the equivalent could look like:

#text-table-of-contents a[href="#" $id]:last-match {background: rgb(255, 248, 212);color: var(--select-color);} while [id=$id]{ y-rel <= 0; }.

The syntax introduces a couple of things:

ExampleFeature
$idLogic variables– that is, variables local to the current rule that are automatically unified without any explicit assignment by the programmer. Instead, the interpreter figures out from the information provided by the programmer what the value must be.
while ...Conditions– terminated by a period.
y-rel <= 0Comparisons. Also note the new property y-rel, denoting the element’s current position on the y axis relative to the viewport.
[href="#" $id]Support for concatenation in attribute values – with the same syntax as for property values.
:last-matchA new pseudo-class selector selecting the last element matching the entire preceding selector. Compare this to :last-of-type, which only selects the last sibling of the same type.

The CSS rule above could be put into words in the following way. It applies to the “:last-match” out of all a elements inside #text-table-of-contents whose attribute href consists of the concatenation of # and some variable $id– but only while there exists any element whose id is $id and whose y position, relative to the viewport, is less than or equal to 0.

Whenever the browser finds any elements matching the selector in our while condition (that is, is an element that has an id and whose relative y position ≤ 0), it will recognize that the $id variable can be equal to the id of either one of those elements. For all possible values of $id, it will apply our rule – but remember, our rule concerns only the last match, so it will only be applied to the last element. While you’re reading this section, that element’s href is#css-examples.

The complete explanation might be a little long, as I also needed to introduce the concepts behind the syntax, but the actual code is short and understandable, once you have become comfortable with the interface. As demonstrated, it is possible to achieve a whole lot, with only a limited number of additions to the regular CSS syntax. What’s more, the code is clearer than the equivalent JavaScript code, and it is more declarative, describing what the designer wanted and not how they wanted it.

Of course, simpler things would be simpler:

#nav .menu {display: none; }/* default rule */#nav .menu {display: block; } toggled by #menu-button:active.

In this example, we extend the syntax further with the toggled by condition. Another plausible condition type would be on, which would enable the rule after the condition has been met, but would not disable it once the condition ceases to be met.


The Widow, the Bank, and the $8B Verdict

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Jo Hopper is sitting in her lawyer’s office in North Dallas, slowly, calmly telling the story of how she believes the nation’s largest bank tried to take away her home and her possessions, and destroy the relationship she had with her stepchildren. Her saga began eight years ago this month at Medical City Dallas. There, on January 25, 2010, Max Hopper, who had been a titan of early corporate information technology, a genius who had led the development of American Airlines’ AAdvantage program and its SABRE reservation system, died. Max had been in good health but suffered a stroke the day before. He was 75.

“I remember at the hospital,” Jo says, “I kept saying to the doctor, ‘What else are you going to do? You do not understand. This is Max Hopper. He cannot die.’ I would not accept it. Even today, it is hard to fathom.”

Spread his wings: Max and Jo had lifetime passes to claim available seats on American flights, but his son thought Jo mightbe using his Max’sAAdvantage miles.

Jo was 62 when the man she’d been married to for 28 years died. She has spent much of the ensuing eight years locked in a legal battle over $19 million in assets she and Max jointly owned. Her opponent: Manhattan-based JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, with $2.6 trillion in assets under management. Jo and her stepchildren hired the bank to administer Max’s estate in 2010, after Max died without a will, leaving his assets in financial limbo. But soon after JPMorgan had collected its $230,000 fee for the estate administration, something went horribly wrong between the bank and the beneficiaries. Lawsuits ensued. Jo sued the bank. The bank sued Jo. Jo sued her stepchildren. The stepchildren sued Jo. The stepchildren sued the bank. And so on.

In September of last year, a jury finally heard the case. It ruled in favor of the family with a historic and headline-grabbing $8 billion award against JPMorgan. That was the largest punitive award ever in Texas. The jury’s ruling was so abnormally large that attorneys representing the plaintiffs weren’t even sure how to calculate it—the initial guess of $4 billion eventually gave way to the higher $8 billion estimate.

Jo has claimed in her court filings to be a widow wronged by the bank, but she is no frail, little old lady. In 2007, she was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma and given six months to live. She has been in remission for almost eight years and today stands steady at 5 feet 4 inches. On the day we meet, she’s wearing a flowing white top and black pants. Silver bracelets adorn her wrists. Her gray hair is pulled back tightly into a bun. Her attorney, Alan Loewinsohn, is here sitting beside her. But Jo leads the conversation.

As she weaves this narrative of endless court fights, Jo hands over pages of documents. There’s a pamphlet produced by JPMorgan called “The Well-Prepared Family” that explains how to choose an executor. She has highlighted the part that says an executor “is legally responsible for preserving the value of the estate until it is distributed” and another passage that says, “An executor is obligated to act in the best interest of the estate’s beneficiaries.”

Next comes a printout of a job listing at JPMorgan in Dallas. They’re hiring someone in asset management to oversee trusts and estates. “I’m looking for a job,” Jo says. Her attorney laughs. “No, really,” says the Nashville native, née Jo McClendon.

Finally, she hands me a paper written by a professor at Ohio State University called “The Stepmother’s Role in a Blended Family.” Jo has highlighted a paragraph noting that “there have been more than 900 stories written about evil or wicked stepmothers.” Cinderella and Snow White are just two among them.

Better days: Max and Jo were married for 28 years.

The family feud between Jo Hopper and her stepchildren—61-year-old Oklahoma City physician Stephen Hopper and Laura Hopper Wassmer, the 55-year-old mayor of Prairie Village, Kansas—is a big part of this story. But Jo’s version is different from the bank’s. The bank has based its legal defense on the toxic relationship between Jo and Max’s children. It claims the family would have had no complaints about its services had the three of them just found a way to get along. The three heirs, in turn, allege the bank botched Max’s estate—committing fraud and possibly a felony in the process, as well as driving a wedge between stepmother and stepchildren.

Fraud. Felony. How did a jury come to believe that a bank that has been part of the bedrock of the American financial system since 1871 might have done such things to a widow and her stepchildren? And what made that jury so angry—or so concerned that what happened to the Hoppers could happen to any of us—that it insisted on making an unprecedented statement with its verdict? To be sure, Jo Hopper’s story is a good one. But good enough to deserve $8 billion?


JPMorgan would never have been hired to manage Max Hopper’s estate, if Jo had her way. She would have done it herself.

All four wills that Max drafted before his death, but never signed, said Jo should serve that role. She’d handled the family finances for decades, and, like her husband, she’d worked as an executive at American Airlines, once managing a staff of five systems analysts, a personal assistant, and a multimillion-dollar budget.

Plus, the law, Jo figured, was easy to understand. When someone dies “intestate,” as a lack of a will is called, Texas law stipulates that the decedent’s share of the community property—anything Max and Jo owned jointly—will go half to the surviving spouse and half to the decedent’s children. Any property owned outside of the marriage should go two-thirds to the children and one-third to the surviving spouse. “So all we had to do,” Jo says, “was go through the assets, divide everything by two and then divide again by two. Then we’re out of here.”

Max didn’t grow up to become a cowboy, but he was a maverick in his industry. Before that, he spent time in the armed services.

Stephen and Laura didn’t see it that way. In March 2010, two months after Max died, the Hoppers met at the $2 million, 8,000-square-foot Preston Forest home on Robledo Drive that Jo and Max had bought in 1997. The children, as Jo calls them, even though they were both adults when she married Max, insisted on hiring JPMorgan as an independent administrator in part because they wanted someone impartial to handle any disputes that might arise. “That’s what the children wanted,” Jo says. “They wanted assurances. So I agreed.”

Days later, the family settled on JPMorgan for the job. The bank was charged with doing what Jo had proposed to do: find all the assets, add them up, divide by two, and divide by two again. But the Hoppers found the process to be too slow. They say the bank didn’t act quickly enough in executing stock options Max owned. They allege taxes were improperly filed. And they say the bank was tardy in responding to other requests to make financial transactions. All of that cost the children and Jo tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income, attorneys for both parties have claimed.

Jo and the children placed much of the blame for that on Susan Novak, a 66-year-old JPMorgan executive who had worked on estate cases for nearly 20 years both at JPMorgan and at Bank of America and was the person in charge of the Hopper estate. The family painted Novak as inexperienced, noting that she had worked on only one intestate case before in her career. The bank has said Novak did her job flawlessly. Novak, in court, said that although she had 25 to 30 other estate cases to manage, she spent 70 percent of her time—about 1,800 hours per year—working on the Hopper estate.

In many of those hours, court records indicate, she was trying not to get involved in the mistrust between Jo and her stepchildren. To cite just one example out of many: early on in the bank’s administration of the estate, Stephen contacted the bank to complain that he believed his stepmother might have been using Max’s share of American Airlines AAdvantage miles—a share that, legally, would belong to the children.

In fact, there were no miles needed. Jo and Max were R-class flyers on American, meaning they both had a lifetime pass to claim available seats on flights. That was thanks to Max’s long tenure as a top executive at the airline. The children claim that Novak never told them about the R-class status, never cleared up the issue of potentially missing AAdvantage miles. Without information to the contrary, the children continued to believe—until the facts came out in court filings—that their stepmother was taking trips using miles that belonged to them.

(Novak retired from JPMorgan in the spring of 2017, but she represented the bank in an official capacity during the jury trial. JPMorgan declined to make any individuals involved in the case available for comment for this story.)

Max Hopper was a titan of early corporate information technology, a genius who led the development of American Airlines’ AAdvantage program and its SABRE reservation system.

The children allege that there were other imbalances that also put them off. For one, the bank flew Jo to New York and sent her, gratis, to The Phantom of the Opera, trying to woo her to open a wealth management account. She did, and as assets were divided and released to Jo, her share was transferred to a JPMorgan investment account. Over time, that money accumulated to more than $4 million. The children were never told about the New York trip. They also alleged that they weren’t told that Jo wasn’t asked to pay any of the $230,000 fee JPMorgan charged to administer the estate.

In January 2011, Jo says that Mike Graham, her probate attorney at the time, sent an offer to Novak saying Jo wanted to buy all of the personal property that had not yet been distributed by the bank. That included Max’s collection of 6,700 putters, 900 bottles of wine, the furnishings in her Preston Forest home, jewelry, and more. Basically, everything except the house.

Novak replied to Graham but never notified the children of the offer, Jo says. Two more emails from Graham followed. No counteroffers came back. “We assumed the children had rejected the offer,” Jo says.

This pattern continued. Family members mistrusted each other. Family members contacted the bank with various allegations. The bank didn’t share those allegations with both sides. Mistrust festered.


By the summer of 2011, Jo’s attorneys had become so concerned with the bank’s lack of communication that they advised her to close her wealth management account. The $4 million she had invested with JPMorgan promised to eventually bring a nice return to the bank. Financial institutions typically charge a fee of just under 1 percent of the total assets in accounts worth more than $1 million. Meaning that JPMorgan, in less than five years, could have made more off of Jo’s wealth management account than it would make administrating Max’s estate. (The bank says it never collected more than $5,000 in fees from Jo’s account in that first year.)

As soon as the account was closed, Jo says, the bank turned against her. “The relationship became adversarial,” she says. “Suddenly, if the children objected to something I wanted, the bank sided with the children.”

That’s what seemed to happen when a dispute arose over Jo’s Preston Forest house. The same summer that Jo closed her wealth management account, she asked the bank to divide the ownership of the house evenly between her and the children. Jo had already exercised her homestead rights on the property, meaning that as long as she could make the payments on the house, she would have the exclusive right to live there. Now she wanted the home divided into equal ownership. The children, though, wanted cash for their half—Max’s half—of the home.

Max and Jo’s $2 million, 8,000-square-foot Preston Forest home.

The way the children, and their then attorney, Gary Stolbach, figured things, dividing ownership in a home they could not use and could not sell so long as Jo lived there (which was her guarantee under the homestead rules) was not a fair division of the estate. The children wanted the property “partitioned,” meaning they would get compensated for their half of the home and Jo would then own it outright.

There’s a lot more brain-rattling legal nuance involved from there, but the important thing to know is that this “partition” was a novel legal theory Stolbach had floated. Jo says such a thing had never been done before to a widow or widower in Texas, and the bank had no obligation to go along with it. JPMorgan, in fact, had the right to simply declare the home equally divided, which is what Jo wanted and what the bank also initially said it wanted.

“The bank was appointed as the independent administrator,” says James Bell of James S. Bell PC in Dallas, who represented the children during the jury trial but is no longer an attorney on the case. “In an independent administration, it means the bank can do whatever, whenever, however it wants to do. It can split the assets how it wants as long as it is not violating the statutory guidelines. And for over a year the bank could have divided that house how they saw fit in accordance with the law. But they just didn’t do it until there was litigation.”

The litigation was initiated by Jo. She filed a lawsuit against both the children and the bank in late September 2011. From the children, she sought a court declaration that a partition was not legal. From the bank, she sought a declaration that the bank had breached its contract with her, that it had committed fraud and breach of fiduciary duty by misrepresenting its expertise in handling cases like hers and by failing to properly communicate with her and the children. Further, she sought the bank’s removal as independent administrator.

The Collector:Max and Jo’s home held Max’s collection of 900 bottles of wine and 6,700 putters, which Jo tried to buy from the estate.

After it was sued, the bank asked the probate court to declare that it had the right to do what the children had asked, even though it had previously told Stephen and Laura that it preferred to do what Jo wanted—divide ownership equally. From there, JPMorgan doubled down. The bank also asked the court to affirm that it not only could “partition” the house—forcing Jo to compensate the children for their one-half interest in the house—but it could force Jo to sell her house to a third party, at a price she could not negotiate.

The bank acknowledged that because Jo had exercised her homestead rights, it could not kick her out of the house. But it maintained that it still had the right to make her a tenant in her home, which someone else might own. The bank further said that it had the right to take back some of the assets it had already distributed to Jo and make her use those assets to buy out the children’s interest in the Robledo home.

Here’s how the $8 billion jury seems to have heard those facts: the largest bank in America told a court that it would consider forcing the sale of a widow’s home over the widow’s objections.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Jo says, speaking in Loewinsohn’s office. “Max and I owned that house. The probate code doesn’t allow for a partition.”

There’s a book on the table beside her—Johanson’s Texas Estates Code Annotated. It’s a 1,661-page reference book on probate law in Texas that Jo bought in 2011. That year she spent Thanksgiving reading it. All of it. Every page.

“One juror told me, ‘If the bank didn’t care about Jo Hopper and the money she had, why would they care about us when we don’t have that kind of money?’ ”

Jo picks up the bulky book with one hand and flips it open to a page she has marked. It shows the probate code’s stance against partitioning a home after the death of a spouse. “It’s right here. It’s the law,” she says. “The bank knew that. But the bank was bullying me, trying to emotionally break me. This tactic was unbelievable and unprecedented as far as I could find. They were going to sell a widow’s home.”

Initially, the bank’s stance was upheld, in part, by the probate court. But eventually, the probate court modified its ruling, and the litigation over the house concluded in two ways. In June 2012, the bank decided to divide the house ownership in equal interests, as Jo had wanted all along. Then, on December 3, 2014, the three justices who preside over the Eighth District Court of Appeals issued a 26-page ruling that chided the earlier probate court and declared the novel partition theory unlawful. Jo had her house; the children had half a mortgage.


JPMorgan is not wrong about the family’s blood feud. The bank says it tried to get the sides to come to terms before the issues about the house ended up in court. “We continually urged the family to reach an agreement on the division of the home and personal property,” says Greg Hassell, a spokesman for JPMorgan. The children declined to comment on specific questions regarding their stepmother. But attorneys who have represented both Jo and the children say neither side is speaking to the other, except through their lawyers. That might have something to do with a handful of nasty court filings that came out after Jo sued JPMorgan and the children in September 2011.

In one such filing, from 2016, the children said that they “have been antagonistic to Mrs. Hopper (personally, legally, or in both contexts) for nearly six years. Beginning with Max Hopper’s sudden death in 2010, distrust marred the relationship between the Heirs and Mrs. Hopper. This uneasy relationship is precisely what prompted the Heirs to insist Max Hopper’s estate be administered by a neutral, independent third party. That is what the Heirs believed the Bank to be when they engaged its services as independent administrator in 2010.”

In another filing, from 2014, Jo’s attorneys compiled a long list of things that they wanted to be sure would never be mentioned in front of jurors. Those included:

Jo’s “decision to pay for or not pay for any college related expenses, including tuition, for any grandchild of Max Hopper”; why Jo “did not sit on the front row of Laura Wassmer’s wedding in 1987”; that, when a “document production” on Jo’s behalf in this case was held in a garage in 2012 “it was cold outside, and/or the house was locked so if anyone needed to use the restroom, they had to go down the street to a public restroom”; “Any suggestion that Jo Hopper had any type of romantic relationship with Max Hopper prior to his divorce”; and any “reference to a book entitled How to Marry a Millionaire.”

Jo insists the bank exacerbated that infighting. “I’ll admit,” she says, “there was a crack in our relationship. Anybody who goes through the loss of a father with a stepmother, you’re going to have a crack. But what JPMorgan did was they took that crack and they made it into the Grand Canyon.” But since JPMorgan officials have said in court that the family dynamic was toxic and unsalvageable, and since both Jo and the children sued to have the bank removed as independent administrator, one wonders why the bank didn’t just resign.

The answer to that question, say attorneys for the children, ends with two words: “theft” and “felony.”

“That is the key question you have to ask yourself here,” says Bell, the attorney who represented the children during the jury trial. “Why did the bank not step down as the independent administrator? The reason is if they stepped down, there was a lawsuit naming them, so they would have had to pay the legal fees for that lawsuit out of their own pocket. But if they stayed in the case, they had a war chest to defend themselves with. And the war chest they had just so happened to be an account with my clients’ money in it.”

Independent administrators are allowed to hire attorneys and pay legal fees using assets of an estate so long as they are using those lawyers and fees to represent the interests of the estate. And when Jo sued the bank and the children in 2011, the bank decided to cover the legal costs of defending itself by withdrawing money from an estate account that had nearly $4 million in it. The children claim that money belonged entirely to them.

When the children in turn sued the bank, the bank used that same war chest—the money that would have gone to the children—to fight their claims.

Once the children discovered the estate’s money was being used to pay the bank’s lawyers in the legal fight, they asked for the bank to stop using the account. JPMorgan did not comply. Eventually, the account was drained of all but $100, just enough to keep the account open. Then JPMorgan made its own novel legal move. The estate, as administered by the bank, took out a loan, from JPMorgan, for more than $900,000. The bank, in other words, loaned itself money, indebting the estate in the process.

That was only revealed during the trial when Bell cross-examined the lead attorney for Hunton & Williams, which JPMorgan had retained. Just before closing arguments in the jury trial, JPMorgan decided to forgive the estate that loan amount and pay the $900,000-plus out of its own pocket. But it did not reimburse the estate for the nearly $4 million it had already spent on legal fees.

The six jurors found that JPMorgan had committed something called “conversion” when it took money out of the estate’s account to pay attorney’s fees against the will of the children. “Conversion” is a term of art that means taking something that doesn’t belong to you and exercising control over it even when the rightful owner demands that the something be returned to their control.

“Fiduciaries are entitled to hire counsel,” says Russell Fishkind, a partner with Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr in New York and the author of Probate Wars of the Rich & Famous: An Insider’s Guide to Estate Planning and Probate Litigation. “So long as the fiduciary’s goal is to further the interest of the estate and enhance the purpose of the estate, and their fees are reasonable, courts will typically allow the fiduciary to hire counsel and for the counsel fees to come out of the estate.

“The question in this case was, ‘Is that what JPMorgan was doing?’ Clearly the jury thought not. It thought the company was working in its own interests, not in the interests of the estate.”

The children’s attorneys, in an October filing with the probate court, also now say that the conversion they’ve alleged in this case qualifies as theft under the Texas Penal Code. They contend that the theft is a first-degree felony because the value of the property stolen is more than $300,000.

If the court agrees with the children’s attorneys, then the state’s caps on punitive damages—Texas generally limits such damages to two times the amount of actual economic damages—may no longer apply. JPMorgan could face a significant payout to the children and maybe to Jo as well.

Tom Fee, a partner with Dallas-based Fee, Smith, Sharp & Vitullo, told me by phone in early October, “We think we can bust the punitive damage caps in Texas. There is a provision that says if you’re a financial institution and you basically commit a crime, the caps don’t apply.”

Still, Fee and his partner Lenny Vitullo, who was on the trial team for the children, haven’t asked the court to uphold the jury’s huge award—whatever that award might be. Initially, the firm said Jo had been granted $2 billion and their clients had been granted $4 billion by the jury. It even issued press releases to that effect. But, looking more closely at the jurors’ paperwork, it became clear that the jurors had gone further. The six-person panel found that JPMorgan had made malicious breaches in its fiduciary duty to the estate—meaning Stephen and Laura collectively. It awarded the estate $2 billion for that. The jury also found that JPMorgan had committed fraud, for which it gave $1 billion each to Stephen and to Laura. It also awarded the same $1 billion amount to each of the children for negligence on the part of JPMorgan. That’s $6 billion total for the children and $2 billion for Jo.

The bank has suggested the jury award is out of line and will not stand up to judicial review. But, even though Fee believes the award is something more than jackpot justice from a runaway jury, they won’t ask the probate judge reviewing the jury award to uphold the unprecedented award. Instead, they’ve asked for about $75 million, or nine times the actual economic damages they say the children have suffered. “We realize we’re not going to collect the $2 billion,” Fee told me just two weeks before Stephen and Laura asked their attorneys to stop speaking with the media. “So we’re seeking the maximum that the law does allow us to recover. For our clients, this is about more than money. Our clients really wish Chase would take some responsibility here. So we want to back up the jury, back up those citizens who gave their time and attention to this. And to protect other consumers, we believe we need to make this stick.”


The jury verdict in the hopper case came after midnight on September 27. The jurors had deliberated for four hours. As soon as they were done, they sought out Jo, Stephen, Laura, and their attorneys. “They said they felt bad about what Jo had been through,” says Loewinsohn, Jo’s attorney. “One of them told me, ‘If the bank didn’t care about Jo Hopper and the money she had, why would they care about us when we don’t have that kind of money?’ ”

The jurors said the same thing to Stephen and Laura, who agreed to answer a few of my questions jointly, by email. “In talking with several of the jury members after the trial, they commented that they felt we had been bullied by JPMorgan, and that they awarded the huge verdict because they didn’t want other families to go through what we have had to go through,” the children wrote. “They were hoping that the verdict would change the way JPMorgan conducted business.”

Funny thing about that: on the trading day immediately following the early morning jury verdict, JPMorgan Chase stock opened at $93.70 per share and closed up, at $95.18. Either Wall Street figured a company with 243,000 employees and a net income of $24.7 billion could survive an $8 billion payout, or the verdict hadn’t registered at all with investors.

Still, the verdict did generate some bad publicity for the bank. On The Motley Fool Podcast, for instance, co-hosts Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp bantered about it. “Anyone who reads about this case will be told it’s going to get knocked down in appeals,” Brokamp said. “They’re not going to get $4 billion to $8 billion. The lesson, here, is to get an estate plan. But if you don’t have one, hire JPMorgan. They’ll do a horrible job—”

“And,” Southwick said, “You get your payday.”

That remains to be seen. The probate court will have more hearings on the case early this month, but a final ruling on the historic jury award is likely months, if not years, away. The stepmother that neither Stephen and Laura are speaking to, the stepmother who is no longer in touch with her grandchildren because of this case, she will have to wait. “We fought,” Jo Hopper says. “But we haven’t effected change. Not yet.”

Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom

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Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But Ludo, mind if I ask how much time you’ve actually spent with lions? Thought not. Because that’s rubbish, at least in the sense that humans and lions couldn’t possibly have common ground for a conversation. Wittgenstein can beat me in any logico-philosophical contest of his or anyone else’s choosing, but he hasn’t spent as much time as I have hanging out in the bush with lions.

It was a few weeks ago in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. Six lionesses had just slain an antelope and were avidly devouring it. From where I was, a quarter of a mile off, all I could see of this meal was a companionable rosette of tawny fur. Near me, a lone nomad male lion was also watching. He had picked up an injury and had been unable to hunt for a few days. He was very hungry; you could count the ribs. He had no pride of his own; he wasn’t yet big enough, or strong enough, or confident enough to attempt a takeover. He had to kill for himself and he couldn’t.

He was watching a vision of everything he wanted in the world: food, the blessed intimacies of pride life and the company of those six sexy lionesses. He wanted more than anything to join them. But something very powerful stopped him from doing so. They wouldn’t have welcomed him. They would have chased him off; it would have ended in violence; it was no good. But he couldn’t stop himself watching. He made a series of retreats, each time stopping and staring back longingly.

Eventually, like Andrew Lincoln fighting the pangs of his unrequited love for Keira Knightley in Love Actually, he pulled himself together and forced himself to leave the world of longing and get back to reality. He walked into the river and swam decisively across: enough! Had he stopped to talk about that experience, I would have understood. So would we all. Loneliness, longing, hunger, despair, desire: are these things so remote from our own experience?

But this is dangerous ground. Most of our science, philosophy and religion starts from the assumption that there are humans and there are  animals – and there could never at any point be any common ground between them. To call someone an animal is as bad an insult as you can offer, and yet we’re all mammals. For centuries, the notion of human uniqueness was the most fundamental orthodoxy. Now it is being challenged. Book after book ventures into the no-man’s-land – the no-animal’s-land – that lies between our species and the other ten million or so in the animal kingdom. As often as not, they reveal more of ourselves than of our fellow animals.

With every page we turn, we can feel the resistance to any suggestion that non-human animals are even remotely like ourselves. Of course animals can’t think, can’t feel, can’t talk. We resist this not because such things are impossible but because they are unthinkable. Our lives would be horribly compromised if we accepted that we humans were just one more species of animal.

Lucy Cooke, in The Unexpected Truth About Animals, examines the way in which humans have looked to animals for moral lessons, often framing them as creatures to despise, thereby failing to perceive countless things worthy of wonder and admiration. And though she is very sound on the ancient notion that a beaver will escape capture by biting off its own testicles and offering them to his pursuers, she is still better on sloths.

This is an animal named for one of the seven deadly sins – it’s hard to write off a creature more completely. “I have never seen such an ugly animal or one that is more useless,” wrote Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in his 50-volume encyclopaedia, published in 1526. Cooke reveals the conceptual beauty of the sloth and the way that it is exquisitely engineered for a low-energy lifestyle. She shows that a sloth is a survival machine every bit as elegant as a cheetah or, for that matter, a human.

Not inferior: different. But that’s a concept that humans have struggled with across the centuries, probably since before language began. “One scientific survey from the 1970s found that sloths ‘are the most numerically abundant large mammal’, accounting for almost a quarter of the mammalian biomass,” writes Cooke, “which is a sophisticated biological way of saying you can take your patronising looks and direct them at some other animal.”

For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism.

Mary Midgley, the ethical philosopher, wrote about mahouts, elephant riders, and how, if they failed to take into account “the basic everyday feelings – about whether their elephant is pleased, annoyed, frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry – they would not only be out of business, they would often simply be dead”. Anthropomorphise or die. Anyone who works with horses knows that.

Peter Wohlleben had a hit with his book The Hidden Life of Trees. In this, he described the fungal connections between tree and tree, which he interpreted as highways of communication and wittily called “the wood-wide web”. He made trees the sort of living thing that we humans can empathise with, rather than pieces of rural furniture.

His new book, The Inner Life of Animals, is less assured. He mixes science with his love of a nice story, knowing that nothing upsets scientists as much as anecdotal evidence. So when he writes about Barry, a rescue dog – a cocker spaniel – that had been through many homes before joining Wohlleben’s family, and asks if Barry felt gratitude, we’re back in that dangerous border country: for the rest of his life he worried that there might be yet another handover, but other than that Barry was always happy and friendly. He was grateful. It was as simple as that – or was it?

Wohlleben also tells a story about two deer running from the dog he used in his forestry work. The fawn left its mother’s side and turned around to run straight at the dog, forcing it to run away. Had that fawn been human, we would have called it courage. We humans know what we’re supposed to do in dangerous circumstances, but we have no idea if we’re actually going to do it. Some do, some don’t. Those who do the right thing we call brave: so if the human is brave, is the fawn also brave?

These are not areas that have often been explored. That’s true in literature, as well as in science and philosophy. But in an odd, altogether unexpected book, Animals Strike Curious Poses, Elena Passarello writes of human-animal relationships with all the weight of mighty literature that she can bring to bear. That she attempts so bold a feat shows that this border country can be explored in unapologetically literary terms and it is worthy of deep seriousness of purpose.

In this series of essays, she includes a kind of love letter to Charles Darwin, ostensibly from a tortoise he collected on the Galápagos Islands, and thickens the mixture by writing it in the second person. “He will shortly thereafter name you ‘Harry’, but don’t doubt that some part of him knows that you’re all woman.”

She also writes with some elan about Mozart’s starling, a bird for whom he held a solemn funeral, one of those curious Mozartian episodes in which he seemed unable to decide where the joke began and ended. And that prompts me to ask: when a nightingale sings – with a vocabulary of 600 sound units put together into 250 phrases – is he merely responding to his annual urge to make more nightingales? Or is he (it’s always the cock that sings) lost in the music? It’s always the hen that makes the decision on the quality of the singer – so is she responding to mere biology? Or is she making some kind of aesthetic judgement?  Your call, dear reader: but perhaps the question points us at an understanding of life that does not take human uniqueness as a compulsory starting point.

Does the real answer lie in objective science? No doubt it should. But traditional scientists don’t start with the hypothesis that a non-human animal has nothing in common with us humans: instead, they start from the stone-cold certainty that it couldn’t possibly have anything of the kind.

Carl Safina, a professor of nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, New York, wrote:

Suggesting that other animals can feel anything wasn’t just a conversation stopper; it was a career killer. In 1992, readers of the exclusive journal Science were warned by one academic writer that studying animal perceptions ‘isn’t a project I’d recommend to anyone without tenure’.

It is odd that scientists, who claim to work only from data, and philosophers, who, like Wittgenstein, might speculate without anything as sordid as data but still love a good bit of logic, operate on the certainty that, while all placental mammals are put together in the same way physiologically, one of them is somehow completely different from all the other 4,000-odd – so different that we don’t even need evidence to prove it. Are we talking about the soul here? I ask only for information.

Throughout the years, people have sought to isolate and identify humanity’s USP, and every time they have done so, they discover that some animal – some non-human animal – has it, too. All the barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals turn out to be frail and porous: emotion, thought, problem-solving, tool use, culture, an understanding of death, an awareness of the self, consciousness, language, syntax, sport, mercy, magnanimity, individuality, names, personality, reason, planning, insight, foresight, imagination, moral choice… even art, religion and jokes.

It’s all in Darwin, but we have spent getting on for two centuries ignoring or distorting the stuff he taught us. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” If you accept evolution by means of natural selection, that must be true.

Why, then, are humans so resistant to the idea? We can find the answer in human history. For many years it was important to uphold the notion of the moral and mental inferiority of non-white people, because without such a certainty colonialism and slavery would be immoral. And that would never do: they were so convenient.

To change our views on the uniqueness of human beings would require recalibrating 5,000 years or so of human thought, which would in turn require revolutionary changes in the way we live our lives and manage the planet we all live on.

And that would be highly inconvenient. 

Animals Strike Curious Poses
Elena Passarello
Jonathan Cape, 256pp, £12.99

The Inner Life of Animals: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World
Peter Wohlleben
Bodley Head, 288pp, £16.99

The Unexpected Truth About Animals: a Menagerie of the Misunderstood
Lucy Cooke
Doubleday, 400pp, £16.99

Simon Barnes’s most recent book is “The Meaning of Birds” (Head of Zeus)

In the eating disorder unit

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The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman found last month that Averil Hart, who had anorexia nervosa and died in December 2012, was failed by ‘every NHS organisation that should have cared for her’. ‘Sadly these failures, and her family’s subsequent fight to get answers,’ the PHSO report says, ‘are not unique.’

In October 2009 I went to see my GP to ask for help with my anorexia. A few months earlier, I’d completed 30 sessions of therapy, and improved; but with great humiliation and anxiety, I had to admit that it hadn’t been enough, and things were getting worse. The advice was not encouraging. Since I’d already been given the treatment available in my borough, and my weight was only just within the ‘anorexic range’ (below a body mass index of 17), I was told I’d be better off registering with a university GP with access to better mental health services.

Reminded of the endless assessments to nowhere of previous years, being made to feel like I wasn’t thin enough, or wasn’t crazy enough, or was too crazy, or wasn’t consistent enough in my craziness, I resolved instead to keep fighting on my own. A few months later, even more ashamed, I was at the university GP. I had lost more than a stone. In April 2010 I was admitted to a daycare programme, but I was already falling downhill faster than I could clamber up, and after a few weeks my doctor referred me for inpatient care, warning me that it would be a long wait.

The hospital I was referred to had (and still has) 20 inpatient anorexia beds. Thanks to NHS ‘restructuring’, these serve five London boroughs, as well as parts of Essex and occasionally elsewhere in the country. When I was treated, only two beds at a time could be allocated to male patients. A patient had died the year before I was admitted; another died shortly after being discharged while I was still being treated there; and a third ex-patient, a close friend, killed himself two years ago.

Weeks before I was admitted, I was told that my heart and kidneys were at risk of failure. I was ordered to stay in bed as much as possible, to avoid walking or taking stairs, but at the same time I had to make it to two appointments a week at two separate hospitals, one for blood tests and one to be weighed and checked up on. One week at a weigh-in, I was told that I had been at the top of the waiting list, but the person below me had lost weight, so I had been moved down. When a blood test suggested my organs were failing, I was told to go to A&E and ask to be admitted. I was kept on the acute ward for a couple of days, where I was vaguely monitored and then allowed to discharge myself. By that time I had lost everything – my job, my degree, my relationship, all facets of my ‘normal life’ – and become suicidal.

By the time I arrived at the eating disorders unit in August 2010, my BMI had dropped below 12, indicating ‘serious risk of death’. My memories of the first few days are hazy, but I know that for much of the time there was no doctor on site. I refused to eat or to drink the squash offered to me, and was told that I couldn’t have water because there was no dietician present ‘to prescribe it’. I became delirious, and blood tests confirmed that I was in kidney failure. I was taken by ambulance to a different hospital, where the exasperated A&E doctor, confused as to why I had been brought there if I was already in hospital, tried to discharge me, despite my nurse escort explaining that they didn’t have the equipment to care for me on the EDU. Another doctor intervened and admitted me for the night. The following day my heart and kidneys failed. My blood sugar was below 1mmol/L, and I was clinically dead for eight minutes.

I spent three weeks in critical care. For a while I wasn’t expected to survive. My sister was called home from a holiday to say goodbye to me. I am lucky not to be permanently physically disabled. I spent a further five weeks immobile on a cardiology ward which had recently experienced dramatic staffing cuts, and often had to wait for hours for help with basic care. On one occasion, my mattress deflated, leaving me with the metal bed jutting into my back. It was only when a friend showed up for a visit and found me in tears, trying to pull myself off the bed, that it was dealt with. One nurse refused to help me turn over, telling me I had done this to myself. Another, after accidentally bursting my catheter bag and covering me in urine, told me she didn’t have time to clean it up and left me lying in it till morning.

There were ongoing conversations between the eating disorders unit and the medical ward about whose care I should be under (and therefore who should pay for it). As soon as I could stand and walk a few metres with a Zimmer frame, a meeting was held to discuss moving me. The physiotherapists and EDU staff, who were not equipped to care for me fully, recommended that I stay on the medical ward until I was fully mobile, but I was discharged in a wheelchair the next day and taken back to a locked ward.

Patients below a certain weight were allowed out once a day, to sit on a bench outside the ward for 15 minutes, but only when a nurse had time to take us. There were very strict rules, many of them humiliating, and often harshly enforced. When I was told I wasn’t allowed to do my physiotherapy exercises, I argued back, and was picked up and slammed to my bed. A nurse broke the arm of another patient, but avoided legal repercussions because the patient, like many with severe anorexia, had osteoporosis. My belongings had been put in a damp storage room, and many of them came back ruined and mouldy. For the first few weeks I felt like I was in prison. I had severe flashbacks of intensive care and of my mother’s death years earlier, but the overstretched staff didn’t have much time to support me, and I was often left crying on my own. Sometimes my tears were taken as evidence of ‘non-compliance’.

The hospital itself was old and seemed to be in the process of being shut down around us. Half the wards were empty, including the one opposite – a strange sight to those of us who had nearly died waiting for a bed. In winter, when it was too cold to be taken to ‘the bench’, we would instead be taken down another, deserted corridor, to sit for 15 minutes in a disused waiting room. When the five-bed rehabilitation house for patients leaving the inpatient unit was threatened with closure, doctors started to send patients there at a lower weight than advised, to secure its funding. Funding applications had to be made for each patient every two weeks, and I remember at least one patient being discharged suddenly and prematurely, because she had reached a weight beyond which her Primary Care Trust wouldn’t pay for treatment. Others, including me, had to prove that we weren’t ‘chronic’ cases and therefore worth funding. The ward was designed for patients who had already begun recovery, and would be healthy enough to engage with therapy, but it mostly dealt with early stage ‘refeeding’, which several doctors told me should be done in medical hospitals.

Some of the help and therapy I eventually received was excellent, but as much as my recovery was supported by the NHS, it was also fuelled by my determination never to have to rely on it again. As I reached a healthier weight, less help was available to me, which often leads to relapse. The continual need to fight for help exacerbates an illness that is often fuelled by shame and self-hatred. I was lucky enough to be able to get private treatment towards the end of my recovery, but most health insurance policies will only cover 28 days of inpatient care – far less than is required to treat most cases of anorexia. The hospital I was in cost £750 a night, not including therapy or consultations.

NHS England has claimed, since the inquiry into Averil Hart’s death, to have improved its service provision and waiting times for people with eating disorders. But as far as I am aware, anorexic patients are still just as at risk of falling into the gaping hole between gradually eroding ‘medical’ and ‘mental’ health provision.

The website of my former mental health trust tells me that ‘there is an exciting new vision’ for the hospital I was in. Two-thirds of the site is being turned into housing, an unspecified portion of which will be ‘affordable’. The ‘poor quality mental health wards’ will be replaced with a ‘new purpose-built inpatient building’, but nowhere does it say anything about an increase in beds.

Economics is overdue for a quantum revolution

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‘I’m not absolutely certain of my facts,’ wrote P G Wodehouse in his story ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ (1925), ‘but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare … who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.’

It certainly seems to be the case in science that, just before a field is completely disrupted by a major discovery, someone has to make a statement that sums up the field’s complacency for future historians. For years in the future, people can look at it and think, they had no idea what was about to hit them (and sometimes the lead pipe is used more than once).

In 1894, this task fell to the American physicist Albert Michelson, later Nobel laureate, when he announced that ‘it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established, and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles’. A few years later, those principles were hit by the discovery that, at the subatomic scale at least, nature moves in sudden quantum leaps and jumps.

A century on, at the 2003 Presidential Address of the American Economic Association, the job fell to the Nobel laureate, economist Robert E Lucas Jr, who told his audience: ‘My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.’ A few years later, that conclusion was shattered by the discovery that the economy had suddenly leaped off a cliff.

Lucas’s optimism was not out of place at the time. With its visions of ‘efficient markets’ and ‘rational expectations’ all firmly grounded in mechanistic equations, economics was the undisputed queen of the social sciences. But the question now is whether history will repeat itself in another sense. In physics, the quantum revolution reshaped the field. Will the financial crash lead to a similar reshaping of economics? After all, mainstream or neoclassical economics is explicitly based on the classical mechanics of the 19th century, with people seen as individual atoms, their behaviour guided by deterministic laws. Surely it is ripe for an update?

Indeed, in recent years there have been many calls for economics to reinvent itself, most noticeably from student groups such as the Post-Crash Economics Society, and Rethinking Economics. In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council announced that it was setting up a network of experts from outside economics whose task it would be to ‘revolutionise’ the field. And there have been countless books on the topic, including my own Economyths (2010), which called for just such an intervention by non-economists.

But progress has been slow. Back in 2008, the French physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud wrote the paper‘Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution’ in the journal Nature. In late 2017, he provided an update to the Financial Times: ‘Following the financial crisis, many of us hoped that the economics profession had finally realised that their models were not representative of how the real economy works, and that their flawed methods would quickly change. That assumption was wrong.’ He concluded that: ‘If we don’t embrace new methods of modelling the economy, we will be as blind to the next crisis as we were to the last one.’

One problem is that, while there have been many demands for a revolution, the exact nature of the revolution is less clear. Critics agree that the foundations of economics are rotten, but there are different views on what should be built in its place. Most think that the field needs more diversity and should be more pluralistic, and feel that the emphasis on economic growth for its own sake needs to be reconciled both with environmental constraints, and fair distribution. Many, including Bouchaud, argue that economists need to adopt techniques from other areas such as complexity theory. There have been attempts to base the subject more on data than on theory. And, of course, the idea of rational economic man – which forms the core of traditional models – should be replaced with something a little more realistic.

But what if the problems with economics run even deeper? What if the traditional approach has hit a wall, and the field needs to be completely reinvented? What if, as with 19th-century physics, the problem comes down to ontology – our entire way of thinking and talking about the economy?

And what if the metaphorical piece of lead piping that mugged both physics and economics was in each case exactly the same thing– namely, quantum reality?

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For a start: what is economics? If you ask an economist, or look in a textbook, it turns out that most follow the English economist Lionel Robbins, who wrote in 1932: ‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’ Or as it is often paraphrased, economics is the science of scarcity.

And if you ask, what is the point of economics – what is it trying to do? – then the typical answer is to say that economics is about optimising utility. Or as one book put it: ‘Economics is about happiness.’

And finally, if you ask how this is accomplished, you learn that prices correspond to the intersection of supply-and-demand curves, which represent the utility-maximising behaviour of selfish rational consumers and producers, whose homogeneous behaviour is typically modelled using a handful of representative agents, perhaps with various tweaks for ‘bounded rationality’ and so on. The result is a roughly stable and optimal equilibrium.

But something doesn’t add up about these responses. For one thing, if economics is about solving scarcity and making people happy by optimising prices, then it appears to be doing a rather poor job. In many countries, inequality has ballooned in recent decades, while reported happiness levels seem to have peaked some time back in the 1960s. The financial crisis didn’t make many people happy, except some bankers.

The price theory assumes that there exist fixed and independent curves that describe supply and demand, but the reality is that these forces are coupled and in flux – and the idea that they lead to a stable and optimal equilibrium seems more than a little wobbly.

The tenets of mainstream economics are made-up, no more real than Medieval astronomers’ crystalline spheres 

Even stranger, though, is that in answering these basic questions money hardly seems to be mentioned – despite the fact that one would think money is at the heart of the subject. (Isn’t economics about money? Aren’t prices set by using money?) If you look at those textbooks, you will find that, while money is used as a metric, and there is some discussion of basic monetary plumbing, money is not considered an important subject in itself. And both money and the role of the financial sector are usually completely missing from economic models, nor do they get paid lip service. One reason central banks couldn’t predict the banking crisis was because their models didn’t include banks.

Economists, it seems, think about money less than most people do: as Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, observed in 2001: ‘Most economists hold conversations in which the word “money” hardly appears at all.’ For example, the key question of money-creation by private banks, according to the German economist Richard Werner, has been ‘a virtual taboo for the thousands of researchers of the world’s central banks during the past half century’. And then there is the mass of complex financial derivatives, whose nominal value was estimated in 2010 at $1.2 quadrillion, but which is nowhere to be found in conventional models, even though it was at the root of the crisis.

To sum up, the key tenets of mainstream or neoclassical economics – including such things as ‘utility’ or ‘demand curves’ or ‘rational economic man’ – are just made-up inventions, no more real than the crystalline spheres that Medieval astronomers thought suspended the planets. But real things like money are to a remarkable extent ignored.

In physics, the quantum revolution was born when physicists found that at the subatomic level energy was always exchanged in terms of discrete parcels, which they called quanta, from the Latin for ‘how much’. Perhaps we need to follow the quantum lead, and look at transactions between people. In economics, the equivalent would be exchanges of money – like when you go into a shop, point at something, and ask: How much? Or, if you’re in Italy, Quanto?, which makes the connection a little clearer.

Of course, the money objects we use in exchange, such as coins, might not seem to resemble subatomic objects. But look a littleharder, and the fields of economics and quantum physics have much in common.

The most basic insight of quantum physics was that matter or energy does not move continuously, but is transmitted in discrete, sudden jumps. Money, of course, is the same – there isn’t a little needle showing the money draining out of your account when you make a payment, it just goes in a single step. And as a Bank of England paper noted in 2015, one reason the money-creation process is hard to accommodate in traditional models is that it works ‘instantaneously and discontinuously’ (their emphasis) rather like the creation of quantum particles out of the void.

In quantum physics, attributes such as position or momentum are fundamentally indeterminate until measured, and according to the uncertainty principle cannot be known beyond a certain precision. Similarly, money’s use in transactions is a way of attaching a number (the price) to the fuzzy and indeterminate notion of value, and therefore acts as a kind of quantum measurement process. When you sell your house, you don’t know exactly how much it is worth or what it will fetch; the price is revealed only at the time of transaction.

One of the more mysterious aspects of quantum physics is that particles can become entangled so that they become a unified system, and a measurement on one affects the other instantaneously. In economics, the information encoded in money is a kind of entanglement device, because its creation always has two sides, debt and credit (for example modern fiat money represents government debt). And its use entangles people with each other and with the system as a whole, as anyone with a loan will know. If you go bankrupt, that immediately affects the state of your creditors, even if they don’t find out straight away.

According to quantum physics, matter is fundamentally dualistic in the sense that it is composed, not of independent, billiard ball-like atoms, but of entities that behave in some ways as ‘virtual’ waves, and in other ways as ‘real’ particles. Neither the particle nor the wave description is complete by itself. This sounds confusing – but the same can be said of money, which is also real and virtual at the same time. For example, a coin is made by pressing a stamp into a metal slug. The stamp specifies the numeric value of the coin, while the metal represents its value as an object that can be owned or exchanged. It therefore lives partly in the virtual world of numbers and mathematics, and partly in the physical world of things and people and value, which is one reason for its perplexing effects on the human psyche.

You don’t need to be an Einstein to know that tapping a credit card initiates a virtual money transfer

Throughout its history, money has alternated between these two sides, presenting either as a virtual system for accounting (clay cuneiforms in ancient Mesopotamia, wooden tally sticks in early Medieval England, electronic money today), or as a treasured thing (Ancient Greece and Rome, the gold standard), while retaining the essential characteristics of each. The dichotomy is also reflected in our two main theories of money: chartalism, which says that money represents a virtual debt to the state; and bullionism, which says it boils down to metal. Most economists ignore the debate and treat money as an inert medium of exchange with no special properties of its own. The situation therefore resembles the old debate about whether light was a virtual wave (Aristotle) or a real particle (Isaac Newton). Eventually, quantum physicists came to the conclusion that light isn’t a particle or a wave, it is both at the same time. Most people didn’t care, and just worried about keeping the lights on, and so it is with money.

It is something of a cliché to say that the discrete, dualistic, entangled and uncertain behaviour of quantum matter challenges every aspect of our commonsense worldview. But it does not seem quite so bizarre or alienating when viewed from an economic perspective – in fact, we deal with it every time we go shopping or cash a cheque. The point is not that quantum mechanics can be viewed as a metaphor for understanding money, but that the economy is a quantum system in its own right, with its own very real versions of measurement, indeterminacy and entanglement. An advantage is that these concepts lack the obscure and confusing nature of their counterparts in physics. You don’t need to be an Albert Einstein or an Erwin Schrödinger or have a degree in quantum mechanics to know that value is uncertain, or to understand that tapping your credit card initiates a virtual money transfer.

The quantum nature of money only comes fully into its own, however, when it interacts with another delicate quantum system – the one that designed it: our brains.

The most disturbing and weird feature of quantum physics, at least for quantum physicists, was that it seemed to hold out a role for consciousness. According to the standard ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, a particle such as an electron is described by a mathematical wave function, whose amplitude at any point describes the probability of finding the electron at that location. This wave function ‘collapses’ to a certain value during the measurement process. No one knows how this collapse occurs, but a conscious observer is usually assumed to be involved, which seemed to undercut the idea of physics as a purely objective science. (It tells you something about science that consciousness – the one thing we all have direct experience of – can be considered disturbing and weird.) It is perhaps unsurprising then that consciousness, and the way that we pattern our thoughts, seems to have much in common with quantum physics.

One of the hottest areas in economics, especially since the crisis, has been behavioural economics, which was founded in the 1970s by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The most basic lesson of behavioural economics seems to be that making decisions is hard, so we look for shortcuts. And we are easily influenced when someone – the state, an advertiser, our social group, or even our own habits – supplies that shortcut. For example, we prefer to stick with what we know and we dislike change, which explains why investors often cling on to shares that do nothing but go downhill. Recency bias means that we put too much weight on new information – like last year’s investment returns – than older information – such as historical returns. And in general our decisions are shaped by things such as history and context.

However, while behavioural economists can model these effects, they can do so only on a case-by-case basis. And a number of scientists believe that the problem is not so much that people are being irrational; it is just that they are basing their decisions, not on classical logic, but on quantum logic. After all, quantum systems, such as us, are intrinsically uncertain and affected by history and context.

A new kind of economics will point the way to a better, fairer economy. Or at least one less likely to blow up

One person to make this connection was the Pakistani mathematical physicist Asghar Qadir, who pointed out in 1978 that quantum mechanics seems a better fit than classical mechanics to modelling the vagaries of economic behaviour. His paper made few waves, but in the 1990s a number of researchersworking in social sciences such as psychology showed how our decision-making at the individual or societal level can be modelled and even predicted using a quantum formalism. This grew into the field of quantum cognition and later quantum social science. As the political scientist Alexander Wendt noted in Quantum Mind and Social Science (2015), the situation is again similar to physics at the start of the 20th century: ‘In both domains rigorous testing of classical theories had produced a string of anomalies; efforts to explain them with new classical models were ad hoc and partial; and then a quantum theory emerged that predicted them all with great precision.’

At the same time, other researchers were applying the quantum formalism to the area of quantitative finance, which is used for modelling the behaviour of financial markets. It turned out that many of the formulas regularly used by ‘quants’ to value derivatives such as options (the right to buy or sell a security for a set price at a future date) could be restated as quantum effects. The Black-Scholes equation, for example, can be expressed as a version of the Schrödinger wave equation from quantum physics. Markets even have their own version of an uncertainty principle (which will come as no surprise to investors).

To date, the focus in quantum finance and quantum cognition has primarily been on reproducing the results of neoclassical or behavioural economics using the methods of quantum physics. Combined with quantum money, though, the result I believe points towards a new kind of economics that will overturn the most basic assumptions of traditional economics, and point the way to a better, fairer and more sustainable economy. Or at least one less likely to blow up.

So how to define this new, quantum-inspired economics? It is not the science of scarcity, and it certainly isn’t the science of happiness (which is not to say these things aren’t important); rather, it can be defined as the study of transactions that involve money. Instead of assuming that market prices represent the intersection of made-up curves and optimise utility, prices are seen as the emergent result of a measurement procedure. Rather than modelling the economy as a kind of efficient machine, it makes more sense to use methods such as complexity theory and network theory that are suited to the study of living systems, and which as mentioned above are now being adopted in economics. One tool is agent-based models, where the economy emerges indirectly from the actions of heterogeneous individuals who are allowed to interact and influence each other’s behaviour, mirroring in some ways the collective dance of quantum particles. Agent-based models have managed to reproduce for example the characteristic boom-bust nature of housing or stock markets, or the effect of people’s expectations on inflation. Meanwhile, network theory can be used to illustrate processes and reveal vulnerabilities in the complex wirings and entanglements of the financial system.

Because it starts from different assumptions and uses different methods than mainstream economics, the quantum version also comes to very different conclusions and predictions. Instead of assuming that market forces drive prices towards a stable equilibrium, it sees the economy as driven by complex feedback loops, including those that affect the creation and destruction of money by private banks. One conclusion is that the risk models currently taught in universities and business schools, and relied upon by businesses and financial institutions, are not fit for purpose (as many guessed after the last crisis).

Instead of rational economic man, who makes decisions selfishly to optimise his personal utility, we have quantum economic person, who is unselfishly entangled with other quantum economic people. Happiness is therefore not a solo pursuit that economists can calculate and optimise. And instead of seeing the economy as a machine devoid of such things as will, volition and personal responsibility – Milton Friedman, for example, wrote in 1953 that economics is ‘in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments … [It] is, or can be, an “objective” science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences’ – quantum economics (if we can call it that) sees the economy as a living system where ethics plays an important role. One lesson from the crisis was that economists were heavily implicated in the financial system that they were responsible for regulating, for example through highly paid consulting gigs; as in quantum physics, the observer is never separate from the system.

And while neoclassical economics treats ‘market failures’ such as economic inequality and environmental degradation as aberrations or externalities, from a quantum perspective they appear more to reflect the conflict inherent in money between numeric price and real value, as manifested in a debt-based financial system that prioritises growth above all else. The theory therefore builds on the findings of thinkers such as the English chemist Frederick Soddy (who switched to economics after being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on the basic properties of radiation), the American ecological economist Herman Daly, and many others, who have made similar statements.

A theory is likely to be accepted if it tells a story that benefits a powerful constituency

In fact, many aspects of this quantum economics can be found in so-called ‘heterodox economics’ – ie, theories that don’t fit with the mainstream. And the problems were summed up as long ago as 1926, when John Maynard Keynes – perhaps inspired by the quantum revolution that was then in full swing, or perhaps mindful of that piece of lead piping left on the ground – wrote that: ‘We are faced at every turn with the problems of Organic Unity, of Discreteness, of Discontinuity – the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied.’ Conventional mechanistic models can no more incorporate such effects than pre-quantum models of the atom could incorporate quantum effects. Unfortunately, mainstream economists failed to recognise or act on this, but instead remained wedded to their classical approach.

So will the heterodox become the new orthodoxy, and economics go quantum? It would be nice to say that the answer will depend on some impartial test, like the ability to make accurate predictions, but of course this is far from being the case; neoclassical economics has remained in place for a century and a half without much of a predictive track record to boast of (the main achievement of the efficient-market hypothesis was to provide an excuse). Instead, a theory is likely to be accepted if it tells a story that benefits a powerful constituency.

The mainstream mantra that the economy is stable, rational and efficient was perfect PR for the financial sector, so quantum economics can’t compete with that. Its natural constituency is instead similar to that which fuelled the anti-nuclear protests: people – including scientists and non-economists – who have lived through the recent financial crisis, and who want to prevent it from happening again.

Economics, which models itself after 19th-century physics, is clearly due for an update.

But here ‘revolution’ doesn’t seem to be quite the right word, because the revolution already happened a century ago. What we need is a recognition. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in Laws of Media: The New Science (1992): ‘I do not think that philosophers in general have yet come to terms with this declaration from quantum physics: the days of the Universe as Mechanism are over.’ Nowhere is that more true than in economics.

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Social Media Is Making Us Dumber

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That’s because the pernicious social dynamics of these online spaces hammer home the idea that anyone who disagrees with you on any controversial subject, even a little bit, is incorrigibly dumb or evil or suspect. On a wide and expanding range of issues, there’s no such thing as good-faith disagreement.

The online anger aimed at Mr. Pinker provides a perfect case study.

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

The clip begins with Mr. Pinker saying he agrees with the other panelists (two journalists and a lawyer) that “political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be — I wouldn’t want to say ‘persuadable,’ but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs.” This problem presents itself when it comes to “the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who ‘swallow the red pill,’ as the saying goes, the allusion from ‘The Matrix.’”

Mr. Pinker goes on to argue that when members of this group encounter, for the first time, ideas that he believes to be frowned upon or suppressed in liberal circles — that most suicide bombers are Muslim or that members of different racial groups commit crimes at different rates — they are “immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable” and are provided with “no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.”

That’s unfortunate, Mr. Pinker argues, because while someone might use these facts to support bigoted views, that needn’t be the case, because “for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don’t license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.”

He then goes on to carefully explain those counterarguments: For example, while at the moment it’s true that, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the homicide rate is higher for blacks than for whites, that doesn’t really tell us anything about a group of people since at different times in history, different groups have had elevated crime rates — at one point Irish-Americans did. By that same token, he says, “the majority of domestic terrorism is committed by right-wing extremist groups,” not Muslims.

It would be impossible for a reasonable person to watch the eight-minute video and come away thinking Mr. Pinker’s point is to praise the alt-right rather than to make a psychological argument about political correctness, alt-right recruitment and how to better fight that movement’s bigoted ideas

Now, maybe you disagree with certain parts of this argument — I do, in that I think Mr. Pinker overstates the intensity of campus political correctness — but it’s hard to have that debate in the first place when such a wildly skewed version of Mr. Pinker’s point is spreading like wildfire on the internet.

Steven Pinker will be O.K. A fleeting Twitter blowup isn’t going to bruise his long and successful career as a public intellectual. But this is happening more and more — and in many cases to people who don’t have the standing and reputation he does.

It’s getting harder and harder to talk about anything controversial online without every single utterance of an opinion immediately being caricatured by opportunistic outrage-mongers, at which point everyone, afraid to be caught exposed in the skirmish that’s about to break out, rushes for the safety of their ideological battlements, where they can safely scream out their righteousness in unison. In this case: “Steven Pinker said the alt-right is good! But the alt-right is bad! We must defend this principle!”

This is making us dumber.

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