Tesco Bank targets the Optimistic

The post has just arrived. (11.30am! Remember when it used to come before you set off to work?) A weighty letter from Tesco Bank has my name on it. Inside is a pile of bumpf advertising their Over 50s Plan. There's no way I'm wading through it all, but there's something to do with preserving my photos for posterity, and a free £30 Tesco Gift Card. Actually not that free, as I'd first have to take out a policy that costs at least £7 a month.

Just before I consigned it to the recycling bin, I noticed this wonderful paragraph, which I feel needs wider circulation:

The Tesco Over 50s Plan is a whole of life plan. You choose a monthly mount you can afford, from £7 to £50 a month, and as long as you pay all the premiums until you're 90 years old, you are then covered for the rest of your life.

In fairness to Tesco (and their no doubt formidable legal team), this is a Life Insurance policy, so in the quite likely event that you don't make it to 90, the policy will pay up. Also, the plan is aimed at people aged 50 to 80, and maybe when I'm writing from The Wrong Side of 70, offers like that will be more of a selling point.

My Thoughts on the Fermi Paradox

Enrico Fermi famously asked why, if our galaxy really does contain other intelligent, technologically capable species, we haven't seen any trace of them. Against the great age of the galaxy, the time required for a civilisation to explore every single star system in it is relatively small, so we should have encountered a probe or something by now. That we haven't would imply that in fact intelligent life is not very common.

Speaking personally, I would very much like there to be intelligent extra-terrestrial life. I largely grew up on Science Fiction, so the possibility of humanity one day making contacts with aliens featured highly in my formative years. Ironically, I automatically assumed that ET would be friendly towards Humanity, despite this rarely being the case in SF films and books.

To rebut the Fermi Paradox I used to reason that ET would very likely be thousands or even millions of years more advanced than us, and so would have little interest in making contact with a such primitive species as we would seem to them. Indeed, they might not even recognise us as being intelligent enough to be contactable. A second line of defence was that perhaps we have observed evidence of them, but have wrongly constructed naturalistic theories to explain the evidence.

Recently a third possibility has occurred to me. I wonder if we're being a bit parochial in our assumptions about what an advanced civilisation would do. Sure, it seems natural to us that they would expand out from star system to star system, building that Galactic Empire I used to read about, but maybe your needs and aspirations change as your civilisation advances. When our culture looks into the future we typically have a time frame of no more than a few decades. Many of our politicians seem to look little further than the next election, so that's probably not surprising. I'd hope, though, that this would change eventually. A sufficiently advanced culture might conquer problems like ageing and death, and start to think on a far longer scale. When your potential lifespan might be measured in millions of years, and remote possibilities morph into inevitabilities, you might become rather risk-averse. Galaxies contain supernovas, wandering planets, and who knows what other perils. Sure, their advanced technology might allow them to, say, relocate away from a star that would one day explode, or maybe even dismantle the star to stop it going off at all. But an easier solution might be just to leave the stars behind.

I wonder now if the missing alien civilisations aren't to be found in intergalactic space, millions of light years from anything that could harm them. According to David Deutsch in his book The Beginnings of Infinity (an excellent book, by the way), the density of matter is thin indeed out there, but a volume the size of the Solar System would still contain over a billion tonnes of matter, mostly Hydrogen. A sufficiently advanced civilisation, perhaps one that has moved from organic lifeforms to some form of miniaturised cyber-existence, might manage quite well.

'Might' seems to be the operative word in this post, so I'll permit myself to finish with another piece of even wilder speculation. Maybe a sufficiently advanced civilisation gets the option of abandoning ordinary matter completely, and migrates to dark matter. Then passing threats can be ignored as they'll just pass straight through you.

Additional: maybe this is how you'd do it.

Isaac Asimov on Life-long Learning

Sometimes you stumble upon someone who's thinking exactly the same as you, only expressing themselves far better.

Here's Isaac Asimov in a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, in which he explains, among other things, what it'll be like once the internet comes into our homes (sadly he just missed seeing it come about). This bit about his love of learning new stuff really struck a chord for me:

I think it's the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there's now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it's time to die, and that will come to all of us, there will be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilised your life well, that you had learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it.

Tom and Jerry

As a child growing up in the 60s and 70s one of the pleasures of early evening television was the Tom & Jerry cartoon. The BBC used to show at least one of these every evening (if my memory serves me right) for a while, certainly long enough for me to get to see a good many of them.

Fast forward to about 2004. By the miracles of digital technology the entire Tom & Jerry collection is now available on six DVDs, and under cover of getting them for my young son, I purchase the whole set. Often when I go back to something I loved as a child I find that three decades or more of experience and growing up have robbed it of the charm it once had for me. Not so Tom & Jerry: all the cartoons I remembered laughing at before I still found funny, and do still, even after repeated viewing. (And if you don't understand why the viewing is repeated, wait until you have a small child in your home.)

Of the six DVDs, four and a bit contained the episodes I loved; the rest were mostly ones I'd never seen before. According to their Wikipedia entry, the cartoons were originally done by Hanna and Barbera for MGM. After those two set up their own company in 1957, 13 Tom & Jerry cartoons were made in Eastern Europe, then a bunch more made by Chuck Jones. The difference in production companies is painfully obvious

In the earliest cartoons, Tom is very much a cat, running on all fours or curling up in a basket, for instance. Quite quickly though he matures into the classic Tom, who walks like a human, stretches out on a hammock, and can play a mean game of tennis. There is huge charm in these cartoons, which feels as if it has been almost surgically removed in the later episodes. There the jokes are rarely funny, and are usually telegraphed well in advance to minimise the risk of laughing at them. The physical appearance of the cat and mouse have also been altered, not for the better.

So much for my opinion.

Here's a thought though: if some enlightened soul at MGM commissioned a DVD's worth of new cartoons made in the same style and to the same quality as the ones from the 40s and 50s, I would be more than willing to pay full price for a copy of them. The continuing popularity of these cartoons on TV networks around the world would surely also provide enough income to justify the expense. And sixty years on the production cost of making cartoons like this must have gone down a bit? All it would take is a production team that loved the originals and didn't (apart from steering clear of outdated racial stereotypes, please) feel the need to update the characters.

Living in a Simulation - Some Thoughts from Within

It was about 2007 when I first encountered Professor Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument.

You are well advised to read the original argument rather than my digested version of it, but basically it suggests that, providing it is possible to create a conscious entity in a computer simulation, and if humanity ever achieves the technological ability to run such simulations, and if humanity chooses to, then the overwhelming likelihood is that you are a conscious entity in a computer simulation.

The first condition is still a big IF. However, the second one possibly only involves humanity and our technology continuing on their current path for another few decades. The third condition I would argue is almost a certainty.

Ever since I first met this idea it has intrigued me. If it could be shown to be true, how should that affect the way I live my life? Should I try to be more interesting and entertaining, to decrease the risk of being edited out? Should I try to make contact with my programming overlords?

And might there be a way of working out for sure that our universe was really inside a computer program?

Putting myself in the place of the simulation designers, but using the computer technology available to me today, I tried to imagine what constraints or short cuts might be evident to the inhabitants of my creation, and these three points occurred to me.

1. The constraints of working in a digital computer would mean it was easier if there was a minimum possible size for such quantities like length, time, etc.
2. Likewise, it would be nice if it was possible to average the effects of the basic components of the universe, so that a wall, say, could be treated as a surface without needing to calculate the movements of all its component particles.
3. There would be a largest possible number.

Now as it happens, Quantum Mechanics says that there is a smallest possible value for time and length: the Planck time and Planck length, respectively. They are very, very small: the Plank time is 5.4 x 10-44 seconds, and the Plank length is a mere 1.6 x 10-35 meters. Nevertheless, this feature of the Universe is not intuitive.

And the properties of large objects can be calculated without having to consider all their component particles, which is one of the reasons we could do Physics before the particles were discovered.

The maximum number idea was a non-starter though, as everyone knows about infinity, and some people even know about the many different infinities. It was while hoping to learn more about the fascinating world of transfinite numbers that I recently watched the BBC program To Infinity and Beyond. In the middle of a series of interviews with mathematicians, I almost fell off my chair when one Dr Doron Zeilberger said that he didn't believe in infinity. No, he thinks that if you keep counting indefinitely, you eventually reach a maximum number, after which you get back to zero. The maximum number would be very, very big, but he believes it does exist. I don't know if he is alone in this view, but the fact that any serious mathematician could hold it I find very intriguing.

If Bostrom's Simulation Argument is valid, then its discovery must surely be a landmark in the running of a simulation, perhaps hastening the point when the simulation ceases to be of interest to its creators. I would guess that the 'turn off the program' point is when the bulk of humanity's behaviour becomes influenced by the knowledge of the true reality. If so, publicly speculating on the Simulation Argument might not be quite the good idea it seemed when I started this blog post.

For which I apologise; although if it makes me more interesting...

Getting Spotify to work on my Android phone - Part 2

For a while now my Spotify app for Android has exited abruptly shortly after launching. True, this was only if I was online, but as I needed to be online in order to save music for playing offline, I was effectively stumped.

In a previous post on this subject I described how I briefly fixed the problem, only to have it come back again shortly afterwards. I have now fixed it again, and it hasn't gone wrong again six hours later, so I thought I should describe how I did it.

It seemed to me that the problem was happening when my phone (a Nexus S running Android 4.0.3) tried to synchronise playlists with Spotify Headquarters. I have a lot of playlists, since I create one for every album I like, and these are themselves kept in playlist folders by band and genre. But in a moment of revelation yesterday, I realised that I hardly ever refer to the playlists when looking for something to listen to. If I'm not playing some album I've just found out about, I tend to play something that just springs to my mind. Occasionally I will tell Spotify to randomly play tracks in my playlists.

It occurred to me that I could save a lot of effort by just starring at least one of the tracks in any album I wanted to remember, and could then forget about making a playlist for it. Spotify can play starred tracks in a random order, and the built-in search facility is usually good enough to find music.

So I went through my playlists, checking for one star or more in each album, before deleting the playlists altogether.

The moment of truth: would Spotify for Android now work? No.

So I switched off WiFi and went in again. I opened the settings and cleared the saved data. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled the App. Now it worked.

It's a shame that the app had this bug in it, but I seem to have cleared the problem, and as a side benefit, I won't spend any more time in Spotify creating playlists I never really needed. As with GMail, where I used to make folders and sub-folders galore to store my mail in, I now just stick it all in a heap and fetch it back with Search.

Update - it lasted for two days. Now, once again, the app exits shortly after launching. Looks like I might need to reinstall it every time I want to use it!

Updating a ZoneAlarm subscription

ZoneAlarm e-mailed me last month to let me know they would be automatically renewing our 3PC license. I wouldn't need to do a thing. Two and a half weeks later there comes another e-mail:

Congrats! Your subscription has been renewed.

To verify your subscription has been renewed:

1. Open your ZoneAlarm product.
2. Look in the lower right corner of your product for the updated number of days your license is valid.

It may take up to 48 hours for your new date to appear, but, rest assured, your product will continue running and you will stay protected.

A week later, the date is still telling me that the sub runs out shortly. ZoneAlarm begins to get edgy, putting up pop-ups to remind me to renew my sub.

For the record, rather than waiting 48 hours for nothing to happen, this is how to tell ZoneAlarm that you've renewed your license:

1. Open your ZoneAlarm product.
2. Open the Tools menu.
3. Select the 'Enter License' option.
4. Highlight the license key.
5. Type Ctrl + X.
6. Type Ctrl + V.
7. This will have enabled the OK button—click it.

ZoneAlarm should now be showing the correct expiry date.