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The concept of privacy is born from the antagonism between individuality and the desire to belong to a group. The instinctive drive to form groups – for protection, mating and warmth – is much older than the human race itself. It’s an instinct of almost every animal, and a successful characteristic or many plants and fungi. Individuality itself comes from pride and greed, two characteristics more specific to higher animals (such as felines, canines and primates).

Pack animals, like zebras, benefit a lot from being indistinguishable from each other (this is why they have stripes). Other animals, such as most felines, have leaders and there’s a succession line (much like royalty, but favouring physical strength). However, even on hierarchical species, the people is just the people, and they’re fine with it. Even on primates, you seldom see identification of one’s work or specific concerns with privacy. You can see them mimic privacy (if you beat them when doing something you wouldn’t do in public), but that’s Pavlov’s conditioning more than anything else.

Communism

However, group behaviour’s strengths and benefits if applied to the human race are quickly dismissed as communism.

There was a lot of group psychology in Marx’s political views (and a lot of Marxism in Pavlov’s ideas), hence, there was a strong rejection of any conditionalization of the people impose by the state or any strong enough body, on the capitalist side of the world.

The individual entrepreneurism of modern capitalism (as opposed to the original binary model from Adam Smith and co.), borne during the colonisation of America (no rules, no government), has been revamped by communism fears during the cold war, Cuba and now China.

Faith

As with any faith, the belief that individuality is the landmark of the human race brought its own problems.

First, individuality goes against most of other values we have as humans. My right to fart in a bloated bus goes against the respect I should have for others. My right to eat my pudding goes against the compassion I should have to spend the same amount for the mains of an impoverished child. My right to press the tooth-paste in the middle goes against my love for my wife.

Putting individuality higher than other important human values, such as respect, compassion and love, makes it a lot harder to live in societies. And given that we are now passing the 7 billion people, it’ll be a lot harder to be alone. But faith has no boundaries, nor logic. People were raised believing their individuality is more important than anything else and they die for it.

Biting the hand…

But life has it’s ways of being ironic, and deeply satisfying at it, for the bystanders. Extremely capitalist countries (like UK and US) have figured out long ago that such freedom cannot be. There is no society based on individuality (they’re antagonistic, after all). Worse still, a society that is purely based on individuality is a society without government. That, whose people have the right to do whatever they please. For this society to thrive, people would choose the right thing to do more often than not. That apolitical society has a name: anarchy. I don’t believe any government would like that!

To control people without telling them they’re being controlled, you have to resort to subversive techniques, extensively described in Orwell’s 1984. For centuries, both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to such measures, but today, no country is more Orwellian than the US.

Countries in Latin America or old USSR are failed nations (in the ayes of the American Government), where people know how bad it is and, well, live with it.

West European countries have, to a certain extent, succeeded in creating a more stable, if somewhat socialist, government. People still have their own liberties, but the government is strong and has it’s strong hand (NHS, public schools, social security, etc.). While they could do much better on many things, people know the failures and, well, live with it.

But the US is a special case. And the critical elements in the country’s history of the aggressive capitalism (internally and externally), individualism and greed, is biting the hand that fed it. For decades now, the government is increasing the grip on people’s freedoms, while increasing the liberty of major industries such as media, software, pharmaceutical, weapons on its grip of the government. After all, the recent breakdowns (like the one in 1929) of Enron, the Internet bubble and now the housing market and the financial crisis are signs that capitalism still has a lot to go wrong if unrestrained.

And still, the government gives more power to those same companies every year. The social reform Obama promised is yet to be seen, the technology-savvy campaign he did turned out on a technology-moron government, failing to understand basic concepts of day-to-day life that most Americans already know for ages. And since the US has such a power on the world’s economy, they’re spreading their chaos to Europe, as they did with Latin America for centuries (ever since Monroe Doctrine).

Recent court battles in EU for copyright infringements, the three-strike laws (rushed in by puppy Sarkozy even before the US) and all the prosecutions over Europe regarding software (Microsoft) and stupid hardware patents (Samsung vs. Apple), shows that stupidity took over the world, for good.

SOPA

After the recording industry successfully convincing underpaid musicians that they were being robbed by piracy, and the successful creation of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making legal things such as DRM (and illegal to have the right of privacy), and crippling their own patent system with useless patents (giving birth to a whole new industry, called patent trolls), the US government now is superseding itself by creating the Stop Online Piracy Act, the new idiocy that goes beyond any idiot boundaries any human being has ever gone.

The US government has consistently and strongly reminding us, the rest of the world, of countries like China, where people don’t have the right to freely access the internet (due to the Big Firewall of China), and how much better is the freedom that capitalist countries give you. That freedom, ultimately linked to individuality and the greed to make more money that your peers, is what makes the American capitalism thrive. But every action, every argument has been destroying this dream, for more than a decade already.

Of course, as with any decent Orwellian government, they don’t tell you your freedoms are being displaced. And people that do say that, like Richard Stallman, are tagged as crazy lunatics, in spite of what GNU has done for society in the last 30 years. Anyway, the government’s arguments are, actually, promoting freedom. The freedom for the companies to make pornographic profits at the expense of the population’s freedom.

We, the people

But the people is not fooled. Recent movements to occupy Wall Street and the increasing mention that capitalism is failing in the alternative media (blogs, independent media channels, etc.) are clear indications that the nation’s mindset is changing.

A recent survey has shown that 75% of the Americans disagree with the outrageous fines (or any fine at all) for copyright infringement. Actually, most of them are knowingly infringing copyright themselves.

So, how does this happen? From a nation that valued their individuality and community to a nation of filthy pirates that don’t give a dime about other people’s property? Well, nothing has actually happened. To the people, I mean. But two things have, indeed, happened to the government.

First, the notion of property, individuality and respect, that were never meant individually, are now showing its colour. Second, the greed in which people were bred made them respect so much their individuality that other people’s profit is not as important as their own comfort. While this is the driving factor behind the population fight against the failed patent and copyright system (a fight that I do support), it’s for the wrong reasons.

Respect

My view is that the patent system, copyright, the media industry, the firewall of China, etc. fail on a basic respect level. Not only individualism, mas also the sense of society and community. Respect is by far more important than individualism or community. It’s a concept that, when applied correctly, can derive communities that do respect your right to individuality and privacy, at the same time that it stops abuse short of damaging others.

Respect is not perfect, nor equal to everyone. There are always those that abuse of the system and people will get hurt, or killed, before the community can do anything about it. But isn’t it true to every kind of community? Do you really believe that SOPA will stop piracy more than harm loyal customers? Did DRM? Did DMCA? Did the Terrorism Act really stopped more terrorists than it locked up regular air travellers?

All those solutions were direct infringements of privacy, the right to defend yourself (ex. Guantanamo Bay and patent trolls), the right to share and give away (DRM), the right to use your property where and how it’s meant to be used (DRM). Now, the US is also losing the right to use the Internet. And don’t think that this is staying within their borders… it’s most definitely not!

Expect Cameron and Sarkozy to be adhering to that idea sooner than the Americans do…

Since the end of the dark ages, and the emergence of modern capitalism, science has been connected to business, in one way or another.

During my academic life and later (when I moved to business), I saw the battle of those that would only do pure science (with government funding) and those that would mainly do business science (with private money). There were only few in between the two groups and most of them argued that it was possible to use private money to promote and develop science.

For years I believed that it was possible, and in my book, the title of this post wouldn’t make sense. But as I dove into the business side, every step closer to business research than before, I realised that there is no such thing as business science. It is such a fundamental aspect of capitalism, profit, that make it so.

Copy cats

Good mathematicians copy, best mathematicians steal. The three biggest revolutions in computing during the last three decades were the PC, the Open Source and Apple.

The PC revolution was started by IBM (with open platforms and standard components) but it was really driven by Bill Gates and Microsoft, and that’s what generated most of his fortune. However, it was a great business idea, not a great scientific one, as Bill Gates copied from a company (the size of a government), such as IBM. His business model’s return on investment was instantaneous and gigantic.

Apple, on the other hand, never made much money (not as much as IBM or Microsoft) until recently with the iPhone and iPad. That is, I believe, because Steve Jobs copied from a visionary, Douglas Engelbart, rather than a business model. His return on investment took decades and he took one step at a time.

However, even copying from a true scientist, he had to have a business model. It was impossible for him to open the platform (as MS did), because that was where all the value was located. Apple’s graphical interface (with the first Macs), the mouse etc (all blatantly copied from Engelbart). They couldn’t control the quality of the software for their platform (they still can’t today on AppStore) and they opted for doing everything themselves. That was the business model getting in the way of a true revolution.

Until today, Apple tries to do the coolest system on the planet, only to fall short because of the business model. The draconian methods Microsoft took on competitors, Apple takes on the customers. Honestly, I don’t know what’s worse.

On the other hand, Open Source was born as the real business-free deal. But its success has nothing to do with science, nor with the business-freeness. Most companies that profit with open source, do so by exploiting the benefits and putting little back. There isn’t any other way to turn open source into profit, since profit is basically to gain more than what you spend.

This is not all bad. Most successful Open source systems (such as Apache, MySQL, Hadoop, GCC, LLVM, etc) are so because big companies (like Intel, Apple, Yahoo) put a lot of effort into it. Managing the private changes is a big pain, especially if more than one company is a major contributor, but it’s more profitable than putting everything into the open. Getting the balance right is what boosts, or breaks, those companies.

Physics

The same rules also apply to other sciences, like physics. The United States are governed by big companies (oil, weapons, pharma, media) and not by its own government (which is only a puppet for the big companies). There, science is mostly applied to those fields.

Nuclear physics was only developed at such a fast pace because of the bomb. Laser, nuclear fusion, carbon nanotubes are mostly done with military funding, or via the government, for military purposes. Computer science (both hardware and software) are mainly done on the big companies and with a business background, so again not real science.

Only the EU, a less business oriented government (but still, not that much less), could spend a gigantic amount of money on the LHC at CERN to search for a mere boson. I still don’t understand what’s the commercial applicability of finding the Higgs boson and why the EU has agreed to spend such money on it. I’m not yet ready to accept that it was all in the name of science…

But while physics has clear military and power-related objectives, computing, or rather, social computing, has little to no impact. Radar technologies, heavy-load simulations, and prediction networks receive a strong budget from governments (especially US, Russia), while other topics such as how to make the world a better place with technology, has little or no space is either business or government sponsored research.

That is why, in my humble opinion, technology has yet to flourish. Computers today create more problems than they solve. Operating systems make our life harder than they should, office tools are not intuitive enough for every one to use, compilers always fall short of doing a great job, the human interface is still dominated by the mouse, invented by Engelbart himself in the 60′s.

Not to mention the rampant race to keep Moore’s law (in both cycles and profit) at the cost of everything else, most notably the environment. Chip companies want to sell more and more, obsolete last year’s chip and send it to the land fills, as there is no efficient recycling technology yet for chips and circuits.

Unsolved questions of the last century

Like Fermat’s theorems, computer scientists had loads of ideas last century, at the dawn of computing era, that are still unsolved. Problems that everybody tries to solve the wrong way, as if they were going to make that person famous, or rich. The most important problems, as I see, are:

• Computer-human interaction: How to develop an efficient interface between humans and computers as to remove all barriers on communication and ease the development of effective systems
• Artificial Intelligence: As in real intelligence, not mimicking animal behaviour, not solving subset of problems. Solutions that are based on emergent behaviour, probabilistic networks and automatons.
• Parallel Computation: Natural brains are parallel in nature, yet, computers are serial. Even parallel computers nowadays (multi-core) are only parallel to a point, where they go back on being serial. Serial barriers must be broken, we need to scratch the theory so far and think again. We need to ask ourselves: “what happens when I’m at the speed of light and I look into the mirror?“.
• Environmentally friendly computing: Most components on chips and boards are not recyclable, and yet, they’re replaced every year. Does the hardware really need to be more advanced, or the software is being dumber and dumber, driving the hardware complexity up? Can we use the same hardware with smarter software? Is the hardware smart enough to last a decade? Was it really meant to last that long?

All those questions are, in a nutshell, in a scientific nature. If you take the business approach, you’ll end up with a simple answer to all of them: it’s not worth the trouble. It is impossible, at short and medium term, to profit from any of those routes. Some of them won’t generate profit even in the long term.

That’s why there is no advance in that area. Scientists that study such topics are alone and most of the time trying to make money out of it (thus, going the wrong way and not hitting the bull’s eye). One of the gurus in AI at the University of Cambridge is a physicist, and his company does anything new in AI, but exploits the little effort on old school data-mining to generate profit.

They do generate profit, of course, but does it help to develop the field of computer science? Does it help tailor technology to better ourselves? To make the world a better place? I think not.

The difference between science and engineering is pretty obvious. Physics is science, mechanics is engineering. Mathematics is (ahem) science, and building bridges is engineering. Right?

Well, after several years in science and far too much time in software engineering that I was hoping to tell my kids when they grow up, it seems that people’s beliefs are much more exacerbated about the difference, if there’s any, than their own logic seems to imply.

Beliefs

General beliefs that science is more abstract fall apart really quickly when you compare maths to physics. There are many areas of maths (statistics, for example) that are much more realistic and real world than many parts of physics (like string theory and a good part of cosmology). Nevertheless, most scientists will turn their noses up at or anything that resembles engineering.

From different points of view (biology, chemistry, physics and maths), I could see that there isn’t a consensus on what people really consider a less elaborate task, not even among the same groups of scientists. But when faced with a rejection by one of their colleagues, the rest usually agree on it. I came to the conclusion that the psychology of belonging to a group was more important than personal beliefs or preferences. One would expect that from young schoolgirls, not from professors and graduate students. But regardless of the group behaviour, there still is that feeling that tasks such as engineering (whatever that is) are mundane, mechanical and more detrimental to the greater good than science.

Real World

On the other side of the table, the real world, there are people doing real work. It generally consists of less thinking, more acting and getting things done. You tend to use tables and calculators rather than white boards and dialogue, your decisions are much more based on gut feelings and experience than over-zealously examining every single corner case and the result of your work is generally more compact and useful to the every-day person.

From that perspective, (what we’re calling) engineers have a good deal of prejudice towards (what we called) scientists. For instance, the book Real World Haskell is a great pun from people that have one foot on each side of this battle (but are leaning towards the more abstract end of it). In the commercial world, you don’t have time to analyse every single detail, you have a deadline, do what you can with that and buy insurance for the rest.

Engineers also produce better results than scientists. Their programs are better structured, more robust and efficient. Their bridges, rockets, gadgets and medicines are far more tested, bullet-proofed and safe than any scientist could ever hope to do. It is a misconception that software engineers have the same experience than an academic with the same time coding, as is a misconception that engineers could as easily develop prototypes that would revolutionise their industry.

But even on engineering, there are tasks and tasks. Even loathing scientists, those engineers that perform a more elaborate task (such as massive bridges, ultra-resistant synthetic materials, operating systems) consider themselves above the mundane crowd of lesser engineers (building 2-bed flats in the outskirts of Slough). So, even here, the more abstract, less fundamental jobs are taken at a higher level than the more essential and critical to society.

Is it true, then, that the more abstract and less mundane a task is, the better?

Computing

Since the first thoughts on general purpose computing, there is this separation of the intangible generic abstraction and the mundane mechanical real world machine. Leibniz developed the binary numeral system, compared the human brain to a machine and even had some ideas on how to develop one, someday, but he ended up creating some general-purpose multipliers (following Pascal’s design for the adder).

Leibniz would have thrilled in the 21th century. Lots of people in the 20th with the same mindset (such as Alan Turin) did so much more, mainly because of the availability of modern building techniques (perfected for centuries by engineers). Babbage is another example: he developed his differential machine for years and when he failed (more by arrogance than anything else), his analytical engine (far more elegant and abstract) has taken his entire soul for another decade. When he realised he couldn’t build it in that century, he perfected his first design (reduced the size 3 times) and made a great specialist machine… for engineers.

Mathematicians and physicists had to do horrible things (such as astrology and alchemy) to keep their pockets full and, in their spare time, do a bit of real science. But in this century this is less important. Nowadays, even if you’re not a climate scientist, you can get a good budget for very little real applicability (check NASA’s funded projects, for example). The number of people working in string theory or trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is a clear demonstration of that.

But computing is still not there yet. We’re still doing astrology and alchemy for a living and hoping to learn the more profound implications of computing on our spare time. Well, some of us at least. And that comes to my point…

There is no computer science… yet

The beginning of science was marked by philosophy and dialogue. 2000 years later, man kind was still doing alchemy, trying to prove the Sun was the centre of the solar system (and failing). Only 200 years after that that people really started doing real science, cleansing themselves from private funding and focusing on real science. But computer science is far from it…

Most computer science courses I’ve seen teach a few algorithms, an object oriented language (such as Java) and a few courses on current technologies (such as databases, web development and concurrency). Very few of them really teach about Turin machines, group theory, complex systems, other forms of formal logic and alternatives to the current models. Moreover, the number of people doing real science on computing (given what appears on arXiv or news aggregation sites such as Ars Technica or Slashdot) is probably less than the number of people working with string theory or wanting a one-way trip to Mars.

So, what do PHDs do in computer science? Well, novel techniques on some old school algorithms are always a good choice, but the recent favourite has been breaking the security of the banking system or re-writing the same application we all already have, but for the cloud. Even the more interesting dissertations like memory models in concurrent systems, energy efficient gate designs are all commercial applications at most.

After all, PHDs can get a lot more money in the industry than remaining at the universities, and doing your PHD towards some commercial application can guarantee you a more senior position as a start in such companies than something completely abstract. So, now, to be honestly blunt, we are all doing alchemy.

Interesting engineering

Still, that’s not to say that there aren’t interesting jobs in software engineering. I’m lucky to be able to work with compilers (especially because it also involves the amazing LLVM), and there are other jobs in the industry that are as interesting as mine. But all of them are just the higher engineering, the less mundane rocket science (that has nothing of science). But all in all, software engineering is a very boring job.

You cannot code freely, ignore the temporary bugs, ask the user to be nice and have a controlled input pattern. You need a massive test infrastructure, quality control, standards (which are always tedious), and well documented interfaces. All that gets in the way of real innovation, it makes any attempt of doing innovation in a real company a mere exercise of futility and a mild source of fun.

This is not exclusive of the software industry, of course. In the pharmaceutical industry there is very little innovation. They do develop new drugs, but using the same old methods. They do need to get new medicines, more powerful out of the door quickly, but the massive amount of tests and regulation they have to follow is overwhelming (this is why they avoid as much as possible doing it right, so don’t trust them!). Nevertheless, there are very interesting positions in that industry as well.

When, then?

Good question. People are afraid of going out of their area of expertise, they feel exposed and ridiculed, and quickly retract to their comfort area. The best thing that can happen to a scientist, in my opinion, is to be proven wrong. For me, there is nothing worse than being wrong and not knowing. Not many people are like that, and the fear of failure is what keeps the industry (all of them) in the real world, with real concerns (this is good, actually).

So, as far as the industry drives innovation in computing, there will be no computer science. As long as the most gifted software engineers are mere employees in the big corporations, they won’t try, to avoid failure, as that could cost them their jobs. I’ve been to a few companies and heard about many others that have a real innovation centre, computer laboratory or research department, and there isn’t a single one of them that actually is bold enough to change computing at its core.

Something that IBM, Lucent and Bell labs did in the past, but probably don’t do it any more these days. It is a good twist of irony, but the company that gets closer to software science today is Microsoft, in its campus in Cambridge. What happened to those great software teams of the 70′s? Could those companies really afford real science, or were them just betting their petty cash in case someone got lucky?

I can’t answer those questions, nor if it’ll ever be possible to have real science in the software industry. But I do plea to all software people to think about this when they teach at university. Please, teach those kids how to think, defy the current models, challenge the universality of the Turin machine, create a new mathematics and prove Gödel wrong. I know you won’t try (by hubris and self-respect), but they will, and they will fail and after so many failures, something new can come up and make the difference.

There is nothing worse than being wrong and not knowing it…

In most of the computers today you have the same basic structure: A computing hardware, composed by millions of transistors, getting data from the surroundings (normally registers) and putting values back (to other registers), and Data storage. Of course, you can have multiple computing hardware (integer, floating point, vectorial, etc) and multiple layers of data storage (registers, caches, main memory, disk, network, etc), but it all boils down to these two basic components.

Between them you have the communication channels, that are responsible for carrying the information back and forth. In most machines, the further you are from the central processing unit, the slower is the channel. So, satellite links will be slower than network cables that will be slower than PCIx, CPU bus, etc. But, in a way, as the whole objective of the computer is to transform data, you must have access to all data storage in the system to have a useful computer.

Not-so-useful

Imagine a machine where you don’t have access to all the data available, but you still depend on that data to do useful computation. What happens is that you have to infer what was the data you needed, or get it from a different path, not direct, but converted into subjective ideas and low-quality patterns, that have, then, to be analysed and matched with previous patterns and almost-random results come from such poor analysis.

This machine, as a whole, is not so useful. A lot less useful than a simple calculator or a laptop, you might think and I’d agree. But that machine also have another twist. The data that cannot be accessed have a way of changing how the CPU behave in unpredictable ways. It can increase the number of transistors, change the width of the communication channels, completely remove or add new peripherals, and so on.

This machine has, in fact, two completely separate execution modes. The short term mode, executed within the inner layer, in which the CPU takes decisions based on its inherent hardware and the information that is far beyond the outer layer, and the long term mode, executed in the outer layer, which can be influenced by the information beyond (plus a few random processes) but never (this is the important bit, never), by the inner layer.

The outer layer

This outer layer change data by itself, it doesn’t need the CPU for anything, the data is, itself, the processing unit. The way external processes act on this layer is what makes it change, in a very (very) slow time scale, especially when compared to the inner layer’s. The inner layer is, in essence, at the mercy of the outer layer.

This machine we’re talking about, sometimes called the ultimate machine, has absolutely nothing of ultimate. We can build computer that can easily access the outer layers of data, change them or even erase them for good as easy as they do with the data in the inner layer.

We, today, can build machines much more well designed that this infamous machine. When comparing designs, our current computers have a much more elaborate, precise and analytical design of a machine, we just need more time to get it to perfection, but it’s of my opinion that we’re already far beyond (in design matters) that of life.

Living machines

Living creatures have brains, the CPU and the inner memory and the body (all the other communication channels and peripherals to the world beyond), and they have genes, the long-term storage that defines how the all the rest is assembled and how it behaves. But living creatures, unlike Lamarck’s beliefs, cannot change their own genes at will. Not yet.

The day humans start changing their own genes (and that’s not too far away), we’ll have perfected the design, and only then we would be able to call it: the ultimate machine. Only then, the design would have been perfect and the machine could, then, evolve.

Writing your own genes would be like giving an application the right to re-write the whole operating system. You rarely see that in a computer system, but that’s only because we’re limited to creating designs similar to ourselves. This is why all CPUs are sequential (even when they’re parallel), because our educational model is sequential (to cope with mass education). This is why our machines don’t self-mend since the beginning, because we don’t.

Self-healing is a complex (and dangerous) subject for us because we don’t have first-hand experience with it, but given the freedom we have when creating machines, it’s complete lack of imagination to not do so. It is a complete waste of time to model intelligent systems as if they were humans, to create artificial life with simple neighbouring rules and to think that automata is only a program that runs alone.

Agile Design

The intelligent design concept was coined by people that understand very little of design and even less about intelligence. The design of life is utterly poor. It wastes too much energy, it provides very little control over the process, it has too many variables and too little real gain in each process.

It is true that, in a hardware point of view, our designs are very bad when compared to nature’s. A chlorophyll is much more efficient than a solar cell, spider webs are much stronger than steel and so on. But the overall design, how the process work and how it gets selected, is just horrible.

If there were creators for our universe, it had to be a good bunch of engineers with no management at all, creating machines at random just because it was cool. There was no central planning, no project, ad-hoc feature emerging and lots of easter eggs. If that’s the image people want to have of a God, so be it. Long live the Agile God, a bunch of nerdy engineers playing with toys.

But design would be the last word I’d use for it…

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70′s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70′s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

Most game-changing scientific discoveries had a lot of logic and critical thinking, but also a bit of luck involved. As most scientists, I don’t believe in luck, so the definition of luck here is being the right person in the right place at the right time. As most (good) scientists, I don’t believe, I state, hypothesise, prove, refute, so the definition of belief here is also obvious.

My point is that evolution wouldn’t have been formulated if Darwin hadn’t gone with the Beagle, genetics wouldn’t be so solid if Mendel hadn’t believed the contrary so fiercely, Plank wouldn’t have found the quantum if there wasn’t a major argument about the black-body spectrum and Einstein would have won the Nobel prize for any other thing if he hadn’t been so drawn by God playing dice.

My story today starts in a similar way, but in a much more mundane problem… I lost my keys.

There is nothing I hate more than loosing my keys, especially in the 25th of December when we’re going to hit the road in the 27th. I lost all my keys, car, house, even my USB key. These modern car keys are not easy to replicate, I’d have to buy the whole thing again and loosing your front door key is not the kind of thing you let pass with a simple copy, you have to change the whole set, especially when you’re going away for a week.

Well, after despair came fear. After fear, despair again. We searched the whole house, inside, outside and in between. Nothing. Brute force wasn’t helping, but that hadn’t stopped me to do it once in a while again, just in case. In between the despair brute-force moments, we decided to be logical about the situation and think, rather than search for the answer.

First point, we had a spare of either car and house, so at least we could still travel and come back home. My worries were, in fact, what would we find when we came back home… If I had lot my keys outside or had left them hanging off the front door’s key hole (happened more than once), it’d be just too easy for someone to clean the house while we were away.

So we tracked down every place we went, every thing we did. By logic, I couldn’t have lost them in the city or anywhere I would have gone by car. Nor I could have lost it inside the car, so at least we knew that it’d be either inside the house or around it (including the key hole, unfortunately). I almost cancelled our trip because of the key hole probability, but Renata, very logically, convinced me that everything we did could not have caused me to leave it there. It was very, very unlikely. So we went…

However very unlikely, that still bugged me the whole week and I felt a bit of panic when we got home. But to my comfort, the house was exactly the way we left. That was, in a twisted way, another indication that the key was not left in the key hole. It had to be inside the house. I went back to work, still using the spare keys, but always thinking about it, wondering wherever it was. Sometimes, just in case, I’d imagine that I would look somewhere and see the key there, and be very surprised I haven’t seen it there before. That feeling never came.

This week I thought enough was enough. I had to continue with my life, change the front door keys and buy the very expensive key set from the car’s manufacturers. I put a to-do in my mobile: “call toyota, landlord wrt keys”. It was then that luck stroke with an impeccable logic. I felt like Darwin finding the platypus or Mendel smashing peas.

I looked at our bag of snow jackets, hermetically sealed for the next winter (Cambridge has only one chance of snowing each year, and that was before Christmas), and thought: “If the keys are in there, we’ll only find out next winter.” The simple logic led me to think it’d be much cheaper for me to re-open the impossible-to-close-hermetically-sealed bag now and not find the key than to wait until next winter and have spent thousands of pounds for nothing. The risk assessment was positive, and that led me to the next piece of information that closed the gap: it was snowing before Christmas! It had to be there!

I opened the bag and tapped my jacket, nothing. But the logic was impeccable, I couldn’t be wrong. I wore the jacket and trusted logic above my own despair. Gently sliding my hands inside the pockets, as I always do. The pockets are deep, and I felt nothing at start, but that didn’t stop my trust in logic. Spock would have laughed at me if I did, it’s that serious, a vulcan could actually laugh. It was not out of faith or belief, it was the ultimately trust that scientists lay on logic above all feelings, common sense and general knowledge, that kept me going until I finally felt something…

Star trek seems a long way and yet, a few news had made into the headlines exposing some achievements that might lead us closer to Roddenberry’s universe.

Some research just found anti-matter in an unusual place: lightning! It might be easier to produce a warp core that we originally thought. Given, of course, that sub-space exists and can be reached by an matter/anti-matter reaction.

Another research, from the University of California, has just found a way to create a medical tricorder. That, for me, is the best achievement so far. Not to mention time travels, teleportation, quantum computers and faster-than-light communication already achieved since the series was created.

Finally, the University of Canada just made the first phaser. Though, it’s still only set to stun…

But I have to say that I’m a bit worried. The Temporal Prime Directive might be needed a bit sooner than the 29th century…

Would you give away your genome to research? It’s a bit tricky to define what kind of research and who will have access to it to do what…

I would kindly give mine, if it was licensed GPLv3.

Pension plans are always too optimistic, and in this case, being optimistic is not at all a good thing. It’s actually getting the situation worse and, if nothing is done about it, it’ll be impossible to make the work force pay the pension for the huge retired population.

During the 80′s and 90′s we learned in school that European countries’ population pyramid had clear signs of development, because it had low birth rate and high life expectancy. Opposed, of course, to those from Brazil at that time, which was pretty much triangular, especially in the poorest regions.

This is obviously a problem as much more children are being born and dying, due to lack of education of the parents (that have dozens of children rather than a couple) and complete lack of health care. They were adopting the R-selection (as insects and lower organisms), where the more children you have, the higher are the chances of having grandchildren (and so, propagate your genes). It may sound terrible, but if you actually go there and talk to those people, that’s what they say. If you say you only have two children they think it’s an absurd, asking: “what would you do if one or two die?”. It’s not lack of love for all of them, it’s the hard truth they have to live with.

Now, terrible as it is, let’s see the other way around. In a high educated society, with excellent public health care, you normally see couples with none, one or at most two children. Seeing three is ok, but four is an absurd. How can you cope with all of them? Imagine the cost of childcare! (Note that this is no problem for those that have 15 in the situation above). What happens is that, with time, less children become adults and the number of retired people get bigger than those that pay for their pensions.

You may think that you (retired folks) have paid already your public and private pension in the past, but truth is that both the government and the banks already spent your money on something else (probably paying the pension of your parents). They never think soo long term as they ask you to. They force you to think on your own pension when you’re around 30 years old but all that money is being re-invested, lost and getting money from the government to pay the bill. Government money (from your tax and pension payments) were actually to pay other bills they had in the past, and they hope they’ll have money in 30 years to pay yours.

The big problem is that, today, the number of employed and retired people are still similar, but in 50 years it’ll be very unequal. With better health care (as we all expect), with stem cell research, gene therapy, cloning and other wonders of modern medicine we’ll probably be immortals by the end of the century. How can a small group of people between 20 and 65 years can ever pay for the pension of 65 until 200 years old? We don’t have to go so sci-fi, nor so distant in the future, some predictions are telling that the size of the work-force is going to be much smaller. Either the pensions payments go up or it’ll be impossible to pay up.

Have more children?

Until now the answer is “Have more children!”. Lots of couples in “baby-age” nowadays are having more than three children. They do it because, in developed countries, it’s cheap. Health care is free, schools are free, medicines and most services are free too. Who is paying for that? All of us. What happens with having more children is that, not only the work force is paying for the pension of the old, but also for the joy of the young. If it’s already a disaster to rely on such a small work force to pay the pension, how fair is it to demand them to pay for the young too?

But there is another, even bigger, question: Isn’t the population already big enough? Can we ever give decent food to every single living being (including animals, of course) that already exists in the world? Do we really need more? Shall we let people kill babies in China with the one-child policy while we have joy with our 10 children? If we really need those babies, shouldn’t we be adopting the “unwanted” Chinese, Ethiopian, etc?

Well, I particularly don’t believe in cheap charity. As my mother always said (and stuck for life in my mind): “Give the fishing pole and teach them how to fish”. So, I still think we should promote education and health care for countries in need so they can also have a population pyramid like the developed countries, but the policy of children, pension and taxes has to change. Of course, education and health care do take some time to evolve, and the children on those countries today won’t benefit from that, so plain old charity IS also fundamental to help those regions.

Managing the retirement age

People’s health is better today that it was 30 years ago. More and more people today retire older and older (quick Google for “increase retirement age” and you’ll see), and some countries are even increasing the official retirement age. That helps a lot, of course, but it’s only temporary and can work against the people. What happens, for instance, if the average retirement age decreases from one year to another? Would the official age reduce too? Is it fair for everyone, between one year and the other? I don’t think so.

One possible solution is to provide incrementing retirement payments, proportional to age and external remuneration. Say I turn 55 and, because of health problem, I need to reduce my work load by one third. I should be able to get one third of my retirement and keep on working, until I need another break and get, say, half of it by the age of 65. I could have gotten the full amount, but because I’m still working (or getting funds from elsewhere), I only get the amount proportional to what I was earning before and am now.

In numbers: With 55, I’m earning 60K a year. I have to work only 2/3 and therefore get only 40K. My pension is total of 30K, and 1/3 is 10K, so my new salary is 50K. With 60 years I need another break, so my new salary is 1/2 (30K) plus 1/2 of my pension (15K) = 45K. If I stop completely, I’ll only receive the 30K or my pension. Of course, if you want more you can always make a private pension plan and trust your bank won’t go bankrupt in the next 30 years.

Why this is fair?

1. If you’re still working full steam you should not get money from the government.
2. If you still want to work but can’t full time, you should get a proportional help from the government, but only what the government can afford to pay
3. If you can’t work at all, you should receive the full amount, exactly what the government already pays you today

This is just an example of how things can be worked out, not intended to be extensive not exhaustive. There are plenty of room for good ideas, we just need to get people talking about the alternatives rather than only thinking about how to get MORE money.

Why is retirement SO important?

Simply because there is just too much people in the world. Malthus would say: “Kill’em all”. I’d rather say: “Don’t let them be born at such an enormous rate”. If the solution for the future recession is having more babies, we’ll get ourselves into yet another one, much worse, in the next generation, like a snowball.

We have to stop having babies right now, deal with the consequences right now and hopefully in the future, our grandchildren will be better off. According to the CIA, the world population has just passed 6.7 billion people. With birth rate at 20/1000 and death rate around 8/1000 (same source), it’s not going to lower so soon. Raising 2% per year and with mortality rate extremely lower than in nature (which varies a lot, but seldom reach 0.8%), it’s very likely that in a few decades we’ll be the only animal on the planet. In a few centuries maybe the only living being (if you can say so).

Will we discover how to do photosynthesis with melanin? Or will we become cannibals?

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