Science – Page 17 – Fooyah

December 17 2015

Terrorism Datamining

I’m going to try and explain my position on data mining and data collection and profiling. The government wants to collect lots of data on all of us to help fight terrorism. This won’t work. The amount of data they want to collect is immense. They want to find terrorists using sophisticated computer programs and mining this data for connections.

Problem 1
If I was a terrorist I wouldn’t use social media for communication. I would use face to face meetings, dead letter drops and PAYG mobiles using them for a week and then dumping them. I would never directly contact anyone in charge and all organisation would be off the internet. It’s no use searching these data for patterns. Terrorists don’t use communication methods we can tap into.

Problem 2
The laws of probability. Let us suppose that the software can recognise a terrorist, by using their behaviour traits, 99% of the time and it incorrectly states an innocent person is a terrorist 1% of the time. Let’s suppose we are monitoring a million people and that there are 100 terrorists in that population. This would extrapolate to around 7000 terrorists in the UK. It would seem likely/reasonable that there are that many people within our borders willing to cause damage to the state.

The Sums

Of the 100 terrorists the software finds 99% of them so 99 terrorists are taken into custody. 1 terrorist remains at large.

The software also falsely accuses 1% of the population as it is only correct 99% of the time. This means that 9999 honest members of the public are wrongly accused of being terrorists.

So we have taken 10098 people into custody. The chances of you being accused but innocent is 9999/10098 which is about 99%.

The chance of you being guilty if taken into custody is 99/10098 or about 1%

This is a bad situation.

Data mining isn’t going to work. Neither is profiling or algorithms about people’s behaviour. The numbers don’t make sense. This measure won’t work.

To give you an idea of the scope of this problem I will now expand this to those people who enter this country each year. Let’s assume that the domestic population of the UK is perfectly happy with the State and not partaking in naughty behaviour (a false assumption). According to this BBC report there are 200 million people who enter and leave the country each year. So that means 100 million coming into the country each year. This profiling method assumes we have access to all of the data about every person who enters the country. Let’s look at the numbers and just for niceness let’s increase our software detection accuracy to 99.9%.

99.9% at selecting a terrorist correctly.
0.1% at selecting an innocent person.

Let’s also increase the number of terrorists to 10,000 (although this seems remarkably high to me).

9990 terrorists will be correctly detained. This means that 10 will go free.

99990 innocent people will be detained.

The probability of a detained person being guilty is: 9%. This is slightly better but not a system I want to be a part of.

Enjoy your winter break.

September 29 2015

Holograms FFS

So, I have been spending time in Rugby to see Sally. It’s actually a really nice town and I like it a lot. The town has three markets a week, plenty of independent shops in the town centre and plenty of drinking establishments. It is well connected and easy to get to. There are a number of out of town shopping places and I hope these don’t detract from the town centre income. Many of the villages around Rugby are nice, pretty and look expensive.

There also happens to be a school where a game started. It is called The Rugby School and the game is Rugby Football. Now, as you might imagine, the town itself is very proud of this heritage. The game is named after the town. The game was invented in the town. The town doesn’t have a stadium for the purposes of playing the said sport and so it makes the most of its history.

I have two issues with Rugby and its branding along with rugby football:

History:
The evidence shows that William Webb Ellis was more than likely NOT the boy who picked up the ball and ran with it. He never mentioned this himself in the rest of his life. He worked as a vicar at St Clement Danes church in the Strand and then in the South of France where he died and is buried. The ONLY source is someone writing about WWE running with the ball about 40 years after the actual event. It is most likely that WWE wasn’t the boy. It is also most likely that rugby developed over time and Rugby School only tried to impose its own version when there were differences with the game around the country, just when it would have been handy to have history on its side.

By the way, it was perfectly ok to hold the football and run with it as long as you ran towards your own goal. What the boy did was run towards the opposing goal, this was illegal at the time.

As a good friend said to me recently.

You shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

Here’s the statue to William Webb Ellis outside the front of The Rugby School. Please understand he didn’t look like this. He was modelled on the sculpture’s own son.

More Important Things:
HOLOGRAMS were invented in Rugby. Denis Gabor worked for British Thomson-Houston in Rugby where he invented the hologram. The hologram FFS. In Rugby. There are holograms on nearly every bank card and bank note around the world. In terms of affecting most people and importance to the world holograms easily beats the game of rugby football. Jesus, HOLOGRAMS!

The Jet Engine was partially developed at the British Thomson-Houston labs in Rugby. Whittle used the manufacturing firm to build his first jet and then the company was involved with the development of the engine, mostly at the Lutterworth site. While many places can claim the jet engine Rugby is allowed some kudos. This, complex, beautiful piece of engineering has easily affected more people than the game of rugby football.

Rugby Cement is based somewhere locally. Oh, they are based in Rugby. They are now owned by Cemex but once their red trucks were seen all over the country. They still produce plenty of fine cement and other products. The cement works serve as a guide over the countryside to find your way back to Rugby. The industrial site looks awesome. It is arguable that Rugby Cement has affected more people than the game of rugby football.

RUGBY – home to holograms, the jet engine, cement and a game for men played with odd shaped balls.

May 30 2015May 31 2015

Units

I have some new proposed SI units for you to use. I think you should use them liberally because language evolves and changes over time so these could be commonplace in the next couple of decades. Both of these units have been developed with Sally.

THE WARDROBE

The wardrobe is an integer measurement with an upper and lower bound for determining the minimum number of romantic dates before new clothes must be purchased because clearly outfits can’t be repeated. The symbol for the wardrobe is:

][

This unit is quite person specific and covers the following range:

Lower bound – the number of complete clothing outfits that can be worn given that no single item of clothing may be worn twice.

Upper bound – the number of clothing outfits that can be worn given that any complete combination can’t be used twice.

As an example consider the following rather basic wardrobe contents:

7 different pairs of socks (socks of same colour and style count as 1)
5 different pairs of pants (pants of same colour and style count as 1)
4 different shirts
5 different pairs of trousers
6 different pairs of shoes/boots

Given this situation then clearly:

This person can only wear the four different shirts before they need repeating. It doesn’t matter what else that person owns. The upper bound is simply calculated as the product of the number of items in each group that can be considered as being fully dressed for a romantic date.

As you can see the ][ unit has a wide range. The minimum is merely equal to the fewest items of a clothing category. The upper bound, because of combinatorics, becomes quite large, quite quickly.

example question:
I own shoes, pants and onesies. If determine how I organise my wardrobe.

Solution:

4823 = 13 x 371
371 is product of two primes, namely 53 and 7.
Therefore you have either have 53 sets of pants or 53 sets of onesies. Either way I would suggest that you use a pack of playing cards, with one joker included, attached to your clothing to organise the items in a wardrobe.

THE FUCKTON

This unit developed out of the need to describe large quantities where previous units and measurements had failed. It may be clearly seen that the etymological derivation of this unit comes from a portmanteau of fuckloads and tons. This unit is not specifically a measure of mass, but could be used as such. The fuckton is used primarily to give a sense of more than “very much”.

The symbol for the fuckton is:

The fuckton should be used as a non-specific answer to questions where the term “a lot” doesn’t quite give the correct impression.

How many raindrops fall on the UK over a year?

How much does middle lane driving annoy you?

If you go in the express petrol lane, how wrong is it to then pay in the shop?

How many colours are there in a rainbow?

To give a sense of scale I think it is necessary to indicate what size the number is that a fuckton could represent. The fuckton is defined as the total number of Lego bricks ever made. So the current value of a fuckton is:

This, we believe, to be an extremely useful unit of measurement. The difficulty associated with a changing definition is outweighed by the usefulness of the value.

By the way, a Fuckton << googal.

April 30 2015April 29 2015

Duality

It is time for us to accept that our mind exists entirely within ourselves. The construct that is Duality is false.

For far too long humans have talked about our “mind” almost as a separate part of our existence. We long to avoid death and we would like to believe that we aren’t just the product of cells, chemicals and electricity. We talk about consciousness as though it’s some magical, other worldly, thing that produces us. There’s this idea that we have “free will” and we are able to make choices and react to things outside of our experiences. The worst possible interpretation of this is that our mind is our soul and it will be preserved when our body dies. This kind of thought leads to myths and stories of eternal life, these things are dangerous to mankind.

The evidence is quite clear though. We exist within our bodies. Our thoughts are contained within our skulls. There is no single place within our brains where our “soul” or consciousness reside. What we consider to be our thoughts and free will are simply electrical and chemical signals developed within our brain, across the entirety of it. If parts of our brains are damaged our personality may change. Other parts of the brain can learn how to counteract the damaged parts. We are the sum of our experiences mixed with some pretty basic instincts.

Just because I dismiss the human psychological construction of duality doesn’t mean I don’t find everything fascinating. It is simply quite stunning how we have developed over time to become these thinking beings, able to discover the rules of the world around them, able to manipulate the environment to produce more humans. Very slowly we are coming to a collective recognition that we are failing the planet, that we need to stop carrying on, but that requires political will and that is desperately lacking.

Our emotions are chemicals and reactions developed and evolved over millennia. This doesn’t make it any less magical. It makes it more magical. The mystery isn’t removed when we accept what is plainly true, it allows us to wonder at what we now know. Just because we know the truth it doesn’t stop feelings being real.

On the matter of free will I should explain why we have none. We have the ability to make decisions and we constantly do that based on the available information. As our decisions are part of a chemical and electrical brain it is clear to me that if we were placed in exactly the same situation again with the same stimulae we would make the same decision. There is no way we would have done something different. Our language has developed so that we talk about “changing the course of history”. What a bullshit phrase that is. The things that have been can’t be changed. The course of our futures is unknown. We don’t change the future. The future just happens. We can’t change the decisions we have already made and we most definitely won’t choose a different path in the future. We are the product of our chemistry.

Does this mean that we can predict our future choices? No. Our brains are quite brilliantly complicated and simple at the same time. There is no way we can really model a brain at the moment. We can’t take a snap shot of our brains and then run those processes forward. Even if we could as soon as the external influences were different the two minds would diverge with increasing speed.

I am constantly amazed at how we humans have developed our understanding of the universe while at the same time deluding ourselves about reality.

April 11 2015April 11 2015

Science Reporting Rage

I am annoyed.

The BBC are arseholes. The headline and photo ALL imply that plucking makes hair grow in humans. Here’s the first few paragraphs. With my emphasis.

Plucking hairs in a precise pattern can make even more pop up in their place, a US study suggests. Playing with the density of hair removed altered how serious an injury the body recognised and in turn how much hair regrew. The team managed to regenerate 1,300 hairs by plucking 200, in the study using mice reported in Cell journal. Experts said it was “really nice science” but were uncertain if it could lead to a cure for human baldness. Half of men have male-pattern baldness by the age of 50. The team at the University of Southern California were investigating how hair follicles communicate with each other to decide on the scale of repair job needed.

So, with only a single reference to the fact that the study was in MICE and lots of human type text and a picture this article screams that plucking in humans will cause hair growth.

Ok, so it happens in mice. So fucking what. When they can show it works in humans I may interested in knowing about it. Not for myself although I am mostly bald, I’d rather have less hair.

This is extremely poor reporting. There is no need for this article. It is a waste of time.

March 7 2015March 7 2015

Televisions

I guess this is an historical type communication. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to write this but this site does have some odd pages, like this one and this one. The communication about my home network is incorrect now and one day I intend to update it.

I am a bit of a gadget fan. Although I would like to think that I evaluate whether something will add to my life and make it easier before I go ahead and buy something. The Apple Watch, for instance, or any other smart watch is not something that I am currently willing to invest in. I have looked at it, and decided that I am currently happy to stick with my watch and phone as separate devices. My phone is within easy reach and the watch tells me the time and date [if I remember to correct the date at the end of months where d<31]. I also spent quite a long time looking into wearable technology when my Up band died [again].

So, this communication is a list of televisions I have owned. The title really does say it all.

Pre-personal ownership:

<1982 black and white valve based TV, needed to be turned on 5 minutes before you wanted to watch it. Blood was black. Had to physically move and touch the TV to change channel. RF port only.
1982 – 1990 colour TV with remote control AND Ceefax! Probably a 21 inch machine 4:3.
1991-1992 lived in university halls, no need for television.
1992 -1994 bought a second hand TV for £50 from a second hand TV shop. Carried it down the North End Road to Winchendon Road. RF port only. No remote. Maybe 6 programmed channels. Mainly used for Megadrive games. Maybe 21″? 4:3
1994-1999 inherited a 21″ 4:3 colour newish TV. RF and SCART ports. Mainly used for Megadrive games.
1999-2006 bought a Sony 28″ widescreen 16:9 CRT from a TV shop in Brentwood. RF, SCART and S-Video inputs. Remote control. Quite heavy. Good sound but never used it as got into external amplifiers in 1997 or so. Loved this TV but before a year was up a single pixel died in the middle of the screen. I had a new CRT fitted but the alignment and colour mix was never quite correct after that. Used mostly for West Wing, Sony PlayStation and PS2.
2006-2013 Sony HD Ready TV. 40″ 16:9 screen. 720P. RF, SCART, S-Video and 1 HDMI. Mostly used for West Wing, PS3 and Gran Turismo. Lovely television, bought after seeing HD images on similar TV of the Royal Albert Hall. HD looked great, even if it was only 720.
2013 LG 1080P 3D Smart TV. 47″. It has speakers but I have no idea what they sound like as I currently have a 7.2 home cinema amplifier. This TV is used for streaming TV from BBC iPlayer and the Amazon video thing. You can play games on it but they are shit. Both the PS3 and PS4 are wired into this thing. Amusingly I rarely use the 3D effects because I don’t think 3D adds anything to the viewing experience.

So, there it is. The list. I’m not sure I get the 4k thing. Once the resolution is high enough your eye can’t differentiate a higher resolution. I think 4k content providers are also a long way away. Curved TVs – WHAT!!!!? How does a curved TV improve my experience? It reduces your viewing points and take sup more space, surely a backwards move.

February 22 2015March 20 2022

Normalizing

I wish to register a complaint.

Firstly the spelling of the title of this communication is deliberately wrong, I’ve used the US American English version. Secondly, where is this going?

I like watching Hawaii Five-O. I like seeing the wonderful Hawaiian scenery. I also quite like the characters. I’ve been watching for five seasons now and I still enjoy it. OK, the technology is purely comical and the team can hack into any CCTV system and use facial recognition etc. The plots are far fetched and they have jumped the shark many, many times. In fact I think I have tweeted about that before.

I think Hawaii 5-O just jumped the shark.

— Ian Parish (@iparish) June 13, 2014

Now I have a problem with this and many other films and TV series which include dubious science. Having this level of nonsense in the public domain creates an impression where some things are seen as essential or that they actually work. I do understand that 5-O is a TV show and that they must get their man. I honestly do get that. I also understand that a major plot device is that they aren’t the police but a “special taskforce” and so they can blow shit up without too much hassle. Much like Inspector Morse gave the impression that Oxford was full of murderers so 5-O gives the impression that violent crime is rampant in the USA’s 4th smallest state [by land area].

Another thing that this TV show pushes into the public perception of acceptability is torture. Suspects are often beaten and are left chained to a chair in a small room to consider their options. I am pretty sure that this helps permeate public perception that torture works. There are many films where the bad people are tortured and then the world is saved. This is all good for governments who indulge in poor unscientific behaviour. I would suggest you follow the links in these articles to see what I mean.

This is one at The Guardian.
This one is at FreeThought Blogs.
Scientific American.
Science Magazine.
Research Gate.

Ultimately, torture doesn’t work. It’s illegal. It won’t help you get the information you want. It makes you barbaric. For a good discussion about stopping terrorism then I suggest you listen to this episode of Freaknomics. I still watch 5-O. But at the same time I like to think that I can ignore the bullshit aspects of it and use the TV show as 45 minutes of escape and relaxation [apart from the bloody Halloween specials that they do I hate those shows].

Halloween specials in TV series are annoying. — Ian Parish (@iparish) February 12, 2015

While I’m on terrorism here’s why data-mining doesn’t work.

November 26 2014November 26 2014

The Extreme Rule – A Gaussian Explanation

Why do nutters make the headlines? Why is it reportable if a 13 year old kid decided to go and fight for Islamic State? There are plenty of people who have decided to go and fight, it shouldn’t surprise us that one of them turns out to be a youngster. It WASN’T news. People lied about their ages and signed up for WW1, that was seen as patriotic [different issue though].

The crazy 5% of our population seems to inhabit 95% of our news time and concern. This is pathetic. The news reporting for the Islamic killer kid should have been more realistic, along the lines of “This kid has decided to do go to Syria and fight for a cause he believes in but there are approximately twenty million children who haven’t”.

Crazy person drives down the wrong carriageway on the motorway, it happens and makes the news. The reporting is never “out of 200 million journeys this has happened only once”.

Here’s a diagram to show what I mean [with apologies to Karl Gauss].

The continuum in the top graph is meant to describe how there are stupid people who do stupid stuff and there are nutters who know what they are doing but do it anyway. 95% of the population are somewhere in the middle.

The media seems obsessed with crazy or stupid people who, by definition, do crazy or stupid stuff. This is made even more evident by the amount of this shit on the internet. There is never a realistic version explaining that actually this is a rare event and we shouldn’t be bothered by it.

Humans have a very poor “risk calculating” ability. We are unable to understand probability correctly. Partly because it actually gets quite hard and complicated and partly because we are shielded from correct interpretation of risk by a culpable media.

Some things we don’t seem to understand:

Flying is safer than crossing the road
MMR is safe
The difference between relative risk and absolute risk
Crime is falling
Education is a good thing [the stupid are celebrated]
Weather is not climate

A final hurrah before I go and do some ironing:

Q: If you have twenty people, how many different soccer teams could you create from those people (if you specified which position they played in)?

A: 6,704,425,728,000

Wow, that’s a lot you should say.

Q: If you have twenty people, how many different soccer teams could you create from those people?

A: 167,960

Q: Suppose you were the captain. How many different teams could you create from the remaining nineteen people?

A: 92,378

See, you are useless at numbers and probability.

November 22 2014November 22 2014

Conversions

Part of the plan of this collection of communications is to be a memory bank. A written form of my consciousness and what makes me work. Some who know me will probably agree that the world isn’t ready for a completely exposed view of Ian Parish yet and so, obviously this is an edited version of me. Unlike many people on the interwebbything I am acutely aware that this is a public forum. Most of my contentious points will be backed up with arguments, whether valid or not, to give some sense of how I reached my conclusions. I try to back up statements of fact with evidence and, my opinion is just that.

I’m quite happy to say that praying to a zombie-god-son-ghost thing is crazy, but at the same time I understand why people do it. I also think that following the Chinese-whispered depraved musings of a seventh century paedophile-war-lord is nuts. But then, I’ve looked at the evidence. My rule in life is the same as the rule in my classroom:

Be nice to people

If you think I’ve not been nice to people in the previous paragraph then please be aware I have just mentioned their beliefs and not the individual. you are welcome to believe in unicorns but I will calmly explain that unicorns don’t exist. If you get angry when I question your beliefs then you should possibly examine those beliefs. Also, if little ol’ me questioning you makes your faith waver then your faith is misplaced.

These pages are clearly like buses. Wait long enough and Parish will rant about religion or stupidity or anti-science or crazy people within a communication about a quiz question [yep, that’s what this is about]. There should be a Godwin’s Law thing for me.

In the early 90s I was closely involved with two main Air Cadet squadrons. There was the good one, 309, and our neighbour, 1096 Sqn based in Bishop’s Stortford. I once attended a quiz evening at 1096 Squadron. I’ve a feeling I was probably 19 or so. I’m not sure if I had started university or was working for Cossor Electronics at that time. I am going to moan about the quiz master getting an answer wrong.

So, we nearly at the point I promise. Also, it’s not worth reading any further, but if you’ve made it this far I am impressed.

What is the speed of sound?

I answered quite quickly with the answer 330 m/s [at standard temperature and pressure]. When the answers for that round were passed around for marking the official answer was 700mph give or take 50 mph. When we got our answers back I noticed that question was marked wrong. I took our answer sheet to the quiz master and explained that 330 m/s was near-enough the same as 700mph, I even demonstrated a conversion using those odd things that are called numbers and that strange thing called mathematics.

Was the quiz master convinced? No. I wasn’t allowed to have 330 m/s the answer. Why is this still in my memory? Possibly because of mathematical ignorance but really I don’t know but it’s there with other “key” events or interactions that surface now and then.

Another question was

How many wheels does Concorde have?

Look it up.