Time was when a blogger in search of inspiration looked no further than the search terms people brought with them. Me too. Today, though, I happened to delve into my muck filter and discovered the schizoid spammer pictured above. So am I appreciated, or despised? You be the judge.

In any case, inspiration is often more about a bit of time than a bolt from the blue. This morning, however, three bolts struck, and it wasn’t until 11 hours later that I’ve had time to unravel them.

Bolt No. 1 a Ted talk by Kevin Slavin about How algorithms shape our world. I’m not sure I entirely got everything he was trying to say, but I certainly got the way he used some great footage of, I assume, starlings in megaflocks to illustrate his point. Or points.

Bolt No. 2 the immediately following Ted talk, by Markus Fischer, who demonstrated his robot that flies like a bird, a mechanogull that flaps its wings, steers, lands, and everything.

Bolt No. 3 a comment from my friend Derek on my previous post, which augurs well for the impact of this post, not least because Derek is a big fan of starling flocks and portents for the gull-able. So I’m hoping he’ll be able enjoy those two Ted talks, and maybe we can consider some options. A huge flock of mechanogull birdbots, linked to one another only as a network and doing the starling fling. Or a single steerable mechanogull doing his bidding and so creating his own auguries. Like the white dove that shoots from Florence cathedral on Easter Sunday. When I saw this spectacle, I was told that in times past an actual dove was released, and that if it flew straight out of the cathedral doors, that presaged a good year. Nowadays the dove is fake, and on a wire that takes it straight out of the cathedral door, thus guaranteeing a good year. Of course, that’s not the story they tell in this history of the bird on a wire, but I don’t care.

Bonus Bolt Ted gets the same stupid kinds of spam that the rest of us have to put up with, and even thier awesome filters, which are surely more advanced than anything in the real world, fail to block some of it.

Which lends a certain roundness to this post.

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 is unfailingly interesting. Even sub-par episodes are head and shoulders above most other discussion programme. This week’s episode, on Malthusianism, was no exception, being full of insights into the background and context of Malthus’ famous Essay on the Principle of Population. I learned much, not least that I could probably call myself a Phyiocrat and get away with it.

The programme title — Malthusianism, rather than Malthus — should have alerted me to the likelihood that there would not be too much discussion about the fundamental premise, that population growth, unchecked, will always outstrip growth in the food supply. This, to me, is axiomatic. One of the participants said that Malthus’ numerical analyses were “not correct,” but I frankly do not see how anyone can dispute the conclusion that geometric growth, compound interest, if you will, must necessarily outstrip arithmetic growth, the simple interest represented by bringing more land into cultivation.

Of course it was Malthus’ misfortune to be making this crucial point just as the scientific approach started to increase the productivity of land per hectare, and we have seen something approaching geometric increases in the food supply as a result. But the amount of sunshine falling on the Earth represents a fundamental limit to agricultural productivity, and hence the food supply, unless we’re somehow all going to be fed on sulphur-reducing tube worms and the like.

The modern-day optimists who cry “Malthus was wrong” do not understand that Nature does truly set limits. And I believe we are bumping up against them.

Of course, Melvyn doesn’t usually do argument on In Our Time, and his guests are invariably pretty clubable, but this is a case where I think it might have been a good idea to have an ecologist, or even an economist on hand to explore this other aspect of Malthusianism. Most of the comments about the programme (self-selected, I know) seem to say the same thing. So maybe we can look forward to a more substantive discussion of food security, agricultural productivity, and international aid and the culture of dependency. And Physiocracy.

More or Less is one of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio Four. Not for the presentation style, which for me sometimes grates like fingernails on a blackboard, but for what they present, which makes it well worth getting beyond the style to the substance. And last week’s episode was particularly good for its first item, on the mysterious disappearance of a map of climate change refugees from the website of the United Nations Environment Programme. Lest the programme, or at any rate that segment, suffer the same fate, I thought it was worth extracting and making available here.

Climate Refugees.mp3

If you haven’t already listened, consider spending 10 minutes doing so. And don’t miss the bit at around 6’48″ when the source of all the fuss defends himself with the immortal “you can’t prove that smoking causes cancer”.

Note, as many people in the item do, that this is not about the reality of climate change or its environmental impact. It is about simplistic extrapolation and the credence given to accurate numbers emanating from authority figures, especially after much repetition.

It is thus an example of Aunt Jobisca’s Truth and The Bellman’s Truth  rolled into one perfect package.

Bravo More or Less!

Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions”.

OK, but …

Lodged deep in my memory was a snippet from an elementary stats lecture in which the statistician with the stiffest neck ever said something about coin tossing, or dice throwing, harnessing the unpredictability of average human motor control to generate randomness. Off I went looking, and found this: Dynamical bias in the coin toss, and the first author is the magicians’ mathematician, Persi Diaconis, so I had to pay attention. That paper actually goes beyond my memory, to prove that even a manual coin toss has a bias to come up as it started. However, the paper does begin from the standpoint of a coin-tossing machine, in which case, of course, the preconditions are (or can be made to be) constant. The conclusion:

With careful adjustment, the coin started heads up always lands heads up – one hundred percent of the time. We conclude that coin-tossing is ‘physics’ not ‘random’.

That ought to have been enough to be getting on with, but I kept digging. Here’s the abstract of the paper:

We analyze the natural process of flipping a coin which is caught in the hand. We prove that vigorously-flipped coins are biased to come up the same way they started. The amount of bias depends on a single parameter, the angle between the normal to the coin and the angular momentum vector. Measurements of this parameter based on high-speed photography are reported. For natural flips, the chance of coming up as started is about .51

Not exactly an edge I’d bet the farm on, especially not with Diaconis (presumably) inserting stuff like this:

In Section Three we prove that the angle ψ between M [with an arrow above it] and the normal to the coin stays constant. If this angle is less than 45°, the coin never turns over. It wobbles around and
always comes up the way it started. Magicians and gamblers can carry out such controlled flips which appear visually indistinguishable from normal flips.

It was, however, enough of an edge to get some elements of the press interested. And the kicker in that story — *Note: In football’s inaugural kickoff coin toss, the coin is not caught but allowed to bounce on the ground. That introduces an extra complication, one mathematicians have yet to sort out. — leads effortlessly to Coin Toss Makes Team See Life Is Random.

Night all.

Melvyn Bragg’s two recent programmes on the industrial revolution were entertaining, informative and thought-provoking.

Entertaining because Melvyn going full-tilt for one of his guests is always a pleasure, and Pat Hudson gave as good as she got. Was Britain, especially in the north, away from the impractical doodlings of the Royal Society, a hotbed of genius? Probably less so than Melvyn thought and more so than Pat was prepared to concede, which is nice.

Informative because, well, experts talking with passion about their subjects is always sure to throw up stuff that is simply Good To Know. Like that among the first to suffer from the mechanisation of processes were the 75% of rural married women who spun wool in their homes. Which leads on to …

Thought-provoking because although Melvyn and his guests did consider the role of agriculture in literally feeding the industrial revolution, and the ways in which the industrial revolution affected rural life, there wasn’t all that much discussion of the revolution(s) in agriculture. So on the one hand, people were forced from the countryside to labour in the new factories of the cities, where their life may or may not have been appreciably better. And on the other changes in agriculture and the rural way of life were such that many labourers were destitute and sought salvation in the cities and factories.

One of the points made repeatedly during both programmes was that the industrial revolution saw change replace stasis as a way most people viewed the future. Improved agriculture seems to have been in large measure a driving force.

[A]n expanding population from [1750] on was largely fed by home production. In 1750 English population stood at about 5.7 million. It had probably reached this level before, in the Roman period, then around 1300, and again in 1650. But at each of these periods the population ceased to grow, essentially because agriculture could not respond to the pressure of feeding extra people. Contrary to expectation, however, population grew to unprecedented levels after 1750, reaching 16.6 million in 1850, and agricultural output expanded with it.

That’s from a BBC page about the agricultural revolution by Professor Mark Overton, who puts some effort into debunking the idea that the agricultural revolution, like the industrial revolution, was the product of the heroic agricultural improvers of legend. I’d like to understand more about the recent history of agriculture, and would welcome suggestions of a single book that will give me a good oversight. Overton’s own book might be a good start, although there are surely others.

More than that, though, I wonder if there’s a readable and accurate history of rise of industrial food, which is surely a second revolution with possibly more far-reaching consequences. It’s a long time since I read Reay Tannahill’s Food in History but my recollection is that she doesn’t do much on the modern transformation of ingredients into food. Nor do people like Margaret Visser or Harold McGee, except tangentially. Polemicists aside, any suggestions?