a convenient truth

At first sight there might not seem to be much connection between the belief in Intelligent Design and the ongoing meltdown of the world’s financial systems. I think there are some interesting parallels to be drawn though, that help explain perhaps some of what went wrong.

Intelligent Design (ID) is the belief that some or all parts of the universe were designed by something.  At it’s most basic the belief is driven by the idea that some of what we perceive in the world around us is so complex, or well-designed, that it could not possibly have arisen through simple processes driven by the laws of nature.  That it must have been “designed“.

One oft cited example is the human eye.  This, some claim, shows such a marvellous degree of fitness for it’s purpose, such remarkable appositeness, that it could not have arisen through nature.  This is a property known sometimes as irreducible complexity.

This of course leads to a most interesting question - what is the limit of what can be produced by simple laws?  How can we spot something that has been created by “design” and one that has been created systemically.

Well, there is one property that tends to be exhibited by goal-seeking systems,as opposed to designed results.  That is the presence of local maxima.

You can think of goal seeking systems, such as evolution, as systems that attempt to maximise one or more properties.  The example I’ll show below is a very simple one, but imagine it extended to encompass multiple properties in many dimensions.

Imagine we start at a certain time and the thing we’re trying to maximise has a certain value.  We make some modifications to the available “knobs” we can twiddle, and step forward a step in time.  We discover this property is at some new position.  If this position is better than the previous one, then we’re winning.

Systems like that often find local maxima - the highest local point.  Here’s a lovely diagram from Wikipedia that illustrates it.

If we are somewhere in the little hill under “local maximum” then in attempting to find the “best” solution we will fail - but we will find the local maximum. There are algorithms that can improve on this sort of thing, such as Simulated Annealing, however all of them have the same property, ultimately, of  a lack of what we could term “vision”.

So, do we see this in the human eye?  In fact this sort of thing is found throughout the “design” of every life form you can examine - in the case of the eye, it is is built “backwards and upside down”, requiring “photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses- which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns.” (Dr. Michael Shermer, as quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his book “God is Not Great”, pg.82).

The human eye is very poorly “designed” in fact.  It contains many local maxima in it’s construction, showing it’s systemic roots.

So, the Credit Crunch.  Here we have another example of a system - one we optimistically call a Free Market.  Here we have another goal-seeking system.  Individual players are supposed to maximise their profits without indulging in coordinated planning.  Such planning is in fact frowned upon - cartels, price fixing and insider trading are illegal.

Again we see in the leaden hand of the market that it finds local maxima, not global ones.

Each individual system’s attempt to find the maximum manages to find at best only local maxima.  Certainly they may do better than the simplistic example above - they may continue past the tiny foothills tomorrow in search of a better hummock next month, however their horizons are relatively short, and they must show progress upwards, at least by the next quarterly statement.

This of course is fine when local maxima are acceptable, but just as the human body would have profited greatly from a designer, so would our financial system, as is now painfully revealed.  You cannot blame the players for following the rules, just as you cannot blame our genes for our rubbish eyes.  They were only following the rules.

Blame must be laid, in the case of this financial disaster, on the regulators and politicians who believed that markets were somehow magically able to find the best of everything.  They just cannot, and to expect them to is the same as expecting evolution to produce perfection.

It is almost amusing to note, of course, that many of those in the US who do not favour intelligent design in markets do believe in it for mammals.  A bizarre confluence of opinion that would be funny if, as Andy said today, we weren’t actually living here.

[The following facts, and the point, come from The Tiger That Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot.  A book every person in the UK should read]

What is the average income in the UK? You’d think everyone would be able to get this right, since it has such a strong bearing on, well almost everything.  So, is it £14,000, £18,800 or £23,000?  (these are 2005/2006 figures, update: and are the incomes for childless couples - the incomes combined of two people living together).  There’s quite a spread there, so you should be able to get the right one.

The answer is… all three of them.  Because it depends how you measure averages.  The mean - what most people call “average” is £23,000.  This is the number you get if you add up all the incomes and divide by the number of them.  That’s the most common meaning of average.  But the other two kinds are useful too.  £18,800 is the income that divides the population in half, the median - half of the people have incomes lower than that, and half have higher.  And £14,000 is the mode - the most common income.

A lot of people might be surprised that the most common income is £14,000.  To put it in context, that’s just under £1200/month.  A salutary thought for some of us, I suspect.

The important thing to note of course isn’t the absolute numbers but the relationship between them.  £23,000 is an awful lot more than £14,000, but £23,000 is the one used in a lot of policy judgments.  That £23,000 figure is in fact pretty much useless - it’s completely skewed by all the tremendously wealthy people out there.  If you are making policy for the majority, the fact there are a few Roman Abramoviches around is actually uninteresting - but their incomes go into that number too.

The small number of wealthy have a tremendous impact on the average - 80% of the world’s population earn less than the average.  So what value the average?  This isn’t a rant against the wealthy - the reason they can skew the total so far is really because incomes don’t go below zero.

As an example, what is the average number of feet a human being has?  Clearly the vast majority of people have two feet.  Howevver, some people have only one foot, so the average is less than two - perhaps 1.999 feet.  So how about that, almost everyone has more than the average number of feet - we’re rich in feet!

Feet are not something where the mean tells us much - and nor is income.

What is the point of this?  Well, I was surprised by the above - very surprised that when the “average income” number is tossed around on TV there’s no thought by those doing the tossing into which average they should use.  Most of the people watching who hear the average income is £23k probably think they earn well below average, and so are poor, when in fact most of them are probably, really, average.

If something so fundamental can be interpreted so badly by journalists, then beware any other numbers they use!

The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Summary: A strong entry into the fantasy genre that may disconcert many typical fantasy readers.



Richard Morgan has previously only written science fiction. His SF writing is excellent, with a gritty, noir style that suits the genre.



This is his first attempt at fantasy, and the result is very interesting. A lot of fantasy is suitable for kids - this is not. It contains graphic descriptions of homosexual sex and rape, and some very strong violence as well. In fact, homosexuality has a strong presence in the book - two of the lead characters are gay and the past of one is strongly coloured by the prejudice he encountered.



This sort of thing is unusual for this genre, which rarely has such strong characters. It is reminiscent of Steven Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant perhaps, with one of the characters, Ringil also tormented by his past. I doubt absolution awaits him at the end of these books though.



The setting is particularly interesting, with some strong hints that in later books (this is clearly the first of several) we may learn enough to understand the detail of the ‘magic’ that takes place, and perhaps relate the setting to the real world. This is much more of a science fiction trait than a fantasy one, and I wonder if by the end we will be calling this a science fiction rather than a fantasy series, even though it contains some obvious fantasy elements: people hitting each other with swords, etc.



Overall this is a strong start for a new series of books, and continues Morgan’s writing from the ‘dark side’. Morgan handles the strong issues of sexuality and prejudice well.






View all my reviews.

John Gruber has become something of an Apple apologist over the last couple of years. His blog used to be pretty interesting, but it kind of morphed over the period of a year into a series of rants about basically how anyone who didn’t like Apple was deluded in one way or another.

A lot of us don’t like Apple’s approach under Steve Jobs. The products are uber shiny, but it’s just the same trap Gates cooked up for us 15 years ago, with a similar pitch. Back then Windows looked pretty good too, remember. It wasn’t brushed aluminium, but it had a whole 16 colours!

The deal is one that short sighted companies supplying almost anything will try and offer - lock-in. Lock-in is a well known issue in the IT industry, and in my day job it’s something we have to address with our customers in every pitch.

Lock-in describes a situation where a customer loses the ability to change supplier, because the supplier has a proprietary hold on them somehow. In my business the risk is generally that we deliver something nobody else can easily understand, but in other businesses it can be introduced in all sorts of ways.

I honestly believe lock-in is bad for both parties to a contract eventually. It is clearly bad for a customer to give up their control over their own property, and for a supplier it encourages lazy, inwardly-directed thinking that ultimately makes their products suck. c.f. Microsoft.

Apple are being creative in their approach to lock-in. Buy an iPod, and you can only really use it with iTunes. Install iTunes, and lo here’s a music store with DRMed music that you will never be able to move to another manufacturers player. Clunk, click, you’re locked-in. You shell out 500 quid on records from the Apple music store, and for the rest of your life you have no choice of music player - pick another supplier and you lose your entire music library.

That’s pretty much par for the course for a lot of companies these days - many of them feel that’s fair business tactics. Apple have gone further with the iPhone though. It’s not just your music that’s locked down, but any applications you can run. If you are happy with Apple becoming your own personal Sky Daddy then that’s fine. But the odd one of us weirdos thinks that maybe at some point in the far distant future we might actually want to be able to control our own property. Just in case, you know?

Apple have almost immediately shown their true colours with their control over the iPhone Appstore with their decision to remove a piece of software because it competes with their own products. And yes, even John thinks it’s wrong. Which shows just how bad it really is.

The nerve Apple have here is far beyond Microsoft’s wildest dreams. For all their unfair business practices and shoddy code, Microsoft have maintained a neutral platform on the whole. Sure they hid some APIs and agressively bought and then killed competitors, but Windows is a thriving ecosystem with real software on it. Just imagine if Microsoft plain denied WordPerfect because they’d decided to release MSWord. Dear me.

So please, dear reader, remember that whilst a benevolent dictatorship might seem very efficient it can turn sour very, very quickly. And if you really want to keep control over your own life, choose Free Software.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Top notch fantasy from a new author. Distinguished, as with a lot of modern fantasy, by complex unsympathetic characters and a very detached moral attitude.



The characters are strong, varied and interesting and they develop believably as individuals during the story.



The backstory for the world as it is, and the unfolding storyline is deftly done, without the whole “and now the quest” bit that is common in more average fantasy.




View all my reviews.

Google’s new browser, Chrome, has been generating more column inches than I can believe. Outwardly, it’s a browser. “I think it is a web browser. I don’t think it is the first or the best browser,” says Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer (and he’s right). It’s difficult to see from the thing itself why it’s causing such a stir.

One reason it’s getting so much coverage is that many people think this is Google finally deciding to compete with Microsoft on shared turf. Here comes Google, like some big geeky gunslinger, ready to blow away the evil empire. Some of you may remember Gates himself predicting that the browser would defeat the OS. This is why Microsoft went on to destroy Netscape, and then slowly allow their own browser, IE, to decay so badly.

Seeing the end of Windows in this browser seems a little overblown given the product itself. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of work for the search giant, with nothing particularly revolutionary. The rendering engine is the same used for Safari and (on the whole) Konqueror. They’ve come up with a nice touch in the separate process for each tab and plugin - it’s a great idea, but it’s not revolutionary (Firefox on 64 bit linux does the same to get 32-bit plugins like Flash to run). They’ve written their own Javascript interpreter and JIT compiler, which is certainly not trivial, but again is hardly revolutionary.

Overall, compared to the squabillions Google have spent on search this racks up as another little project like gmail or google maps. It throws down the gauntlet to everyone else in the space, and shows how well you can do these days if you aren’t Microsoft - but as a product it’s no revolution.

So, why do people think this bit of software can destroy Windows? Partly it’s because the Microsoft hegemony is already dying all by itself. You don’t need to run Windows to use the Internet, and a lot of us work very successfully in heterogeneous networks now - some people on Macs, some on Linux, sometimes using mobiles and all sorts. This was completely unheard of 10 years ago - everyone had to run Windows, and it had to be closely managed by a dedicated IT team. It’s not uncommon now to see people in meetings using Eee PCs, and a lot of them still with Linux on them.

So, why the big deal over the browser? If it’s happening already, why does this new browser matter so much?

Truthfully, I don’t know. Firefox is an excellent product on Mac and Linux, although a lot of people claim it’s not so hot on Windows. I’m not a Windows user so I can’t say. For the average user, Chrome could be better than FF on Windows already. But then, if they just wanted a good browser, Google contribute a lot of developers to Mozilla, and could certainly have improved Firefox instead of developing Chrome.

I suspect for Google the minor outlay on developing a browser was worth it just to see what happened. They have shown before that they like to put the cat amongst the pigeons. They have said as much themselves - if their contribution forces IE8 to improve that will benefit Google more than it does anyone. The better people experience the web, the more pages they’ll see, and that’s more revenue for Google.

Also, there are people out there who will never use Firefox because it’s not backed by a big corporation. Many of us find that inexplicable, but I’m betting overall that Chrome will eat more of IE’s market share than it does Firefox’s. Again, that has to be a win for Google.

So, not an attempt to destroy Windows, just a low cost experiment in improving their ecosystem. Seen like that it makes a lot of sense. And if it gives them a lot of newspaper coverage and scares Microsoft - well, that’s nice too isn’t it.