Hot Air

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My all-time favourite in the literature of exaggerated claims on behalf of the digital computer is from John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence.’ McCarthy says even ‘machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs.’ And indeed, according to him, almost any machine capable of problem-solving can be said to have beliefs. I admire McCarthy’s courage. I once asked him: ‘What beliefs does your thermostat have?’ And he said: ‘My thermostat has three beliefs — it’s too hot in here, it’s too cold in here, and it’s just right in here.’

— John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science, 1983

(Searle responded with the “Chinese room argument” — a computer program that formulates convincing answers written in Chinese to questions posed in Chinese doesn’t “understand” Chinese any more than would an English-speaking human who followed the same instructions. “There is more to having a mind than having formal or syntactical processes. … Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.”)

| Technology

“A Sea Voyage on Wheels”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daddylonglegs1.jpg

In 1896 engineer Magnus Volk faced a problem. The electric railway he’d built on England’s south coast reached a terminus at Paston Place — the difficult terrain beyond that point made a conventional railway impractical. The solution he reached was unique: He laid tracks under the surface of the English Channel and built a car on 7-meter stilts that could wade, so to speak, through the surf to a pier at Rottingdean. Driven by electric motors, it was christened Pioneer, but crowds quickly dubbed it Daddy Long-Legs. By the end of 1897, 44,282 passengers had undertaken a rail voyage at sea — under regulations at the time, the car was even equipped with lifeboats and kept a sea captain on board.

The line ran successfully until 1901, when the local council chose to build a beach protection barrier and Volk couldn’t afford to divert the railway. Eventually it was moved onshore, but the concrete sleepers can still be seen at low tide.

| Technology

“Dispatch Is the Soul of Business”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Stanhope,_4th_Earl_of_Chesterfield.PNG

Advice sent by Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), to his son Philip on how to attain success in the world:

  • Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
  • An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
  • Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.
  • I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.
  • The manner is often as important as the matter, sometimes more so.
  • Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.
  • I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.
  • Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.
  • The characteristic of a well-bred man is, to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect and with ease.
  • Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.
  • It is a great advantage for any man to be able to talk or hear, neither ignorantly nor absurdly, upon any subject; for I have known people, who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly; it has appeared by their inattentive and unmeaning faces.
  • A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones.
  • In short, let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the informations of others.
  • It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.
  • It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.
  • Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
  • The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man’s general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling.
  • Let this be one invariable rule of your conduct — never to show the least symptom of resentment, which you cannot, to a certain degree, gratify; but always to smile, where you cannot strike.

“I wish to God,” he wrote in 1750, “that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it to you.”

(From Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1774.)

| Society

Which Witch?

Hob and Nob live in Gotham, a village stricken with “witch mania.” Rita visits both of them. Hob tells her, “The witch has blighted Bob’s mare,” and Nob tells her, “Maybe the witch killed Cob’s sow.” Hob and Nob themselves don’t suspect any particular person of being a witch, and there’s no definite description (such as “the Gotham witch”) that they both think applies uniquely to some alleged witch. Hob isn’t aware of Cob’s sow, and Nob isn’t aware of Bob’s mare. Rita herself doesn’t believe in witches. She reports the following:

“Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.”

How do we make sense of this? The two assertions seem to refer to the same person, but how is this possible if no such person exists? What can it mean to say that one nonexistent object is the same as another?

(P.T. Geach, “Intentional Identity,” Journal of Philosophy 64:20 [1967], 627–32.)

| Oddities

A Boomerang Sequence

From reader Éric Angelini:

What distinguishes this sequence of integers?

10, 9, 18, 10, 17, 10, 9, 10, 16, 10, 9, 18 …

Adding 9 to each successive digit and inserting a comma after the result reproduces the original sequence:

1 + 9 = 10
0 + 9 = 9
9 + 9 = 18
1 + 9 = 10
8 + 9 = 17, etc.

This example (A369603 in OEIS) is lexicographically the earliest such sequence beginning with 10.

(Thanks, Éric.)

| Science & Math

Slacker

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My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which, however, I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, ‘Think of it! He stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers.’

— Thoreau, journal, March 28, 1853

| Literature · Society

Three Hats

Donald Aucamp offered this problem in the Puzzle Corner department of MIT Technology Review in October 2003. Three logicians, A, B, and C, are wearing hats. Each of them knows that a positive integer has been painted on each of the hats, and each of them can see her companions’ integers but not her own. They also know that one of the integers is the sum of the other two. Now they engage in a contest to see which can be the first to determine her own number. A goes first, then B, then C, and so on in a circle until someone correctly names her number. In the first round, all three of them pass, but in the second round A correctly announces that her number is 50. How did she know this, and what were the other numbers?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles