The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Science/Technology

Cool stuff from the world of science and tech

  • Hacking Las Vegas

    A group of “baby-faced MIT students, hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids” figured out how to cheat casinos efficiently at blackjack.

    Fifty thousand dollars strapped to each thigh. A hundred thousand dollars, in 10 bricks of hundreds, taped across my upper back. Fifty thousand more Velcroed to my chest.

    I try to control my breathing as I stroll through Logan International Airport. Terminal C is buzzing and chaotic, an over-air-conditioned hive of college students escaping Boston for a long weekend. I am dressed like everyone else: baggy jeans, baseball hat, scuffed sneakers. But in my mind, I have as much chance of blending in as a radioactive circus clown. There’s enough money hidden under my clothes to buy a two-bedroom condo. And to top it off, there’s $100,000 worth of yellow plastic casino chips jammed into the backpack slung over my right shoulder.

    I think it’s nice to see students putting the stuff they learn into practice :o) Read the entire article on Wired.

  • The economics of crack-related violence

    Violence related to the sale of crack cocaine in the US is way down. Steven Levitt, the author of the excellent book Freakonomics, looks at why, in an article in the NY times:

    …as of 2000 — the most recent year for which the index data are available — Americans were still smoking about 70 percent as much crack as they smoked when consumption was at its peak.

    If so much crack is still being sold and bought, why aren’t we hearing about it? Because crack-associated violence has largely disappeared. And it was the violence that made crack most relevant to the middle class. What made the violence go away? Simple economics. Urban street gangs were the main distributors of crack cocaine. In the beginning, demand for their product was phenomenal, and so were the potential profits. Most crack killings, it turns out, were not a result of some crackhead sticking up a grandmother for drug money but rather one crack dealer shooting another — and perhaps a few bystanders — in order to gain turf.

    But the market changed fast. The destructive effects of the drug became apparent; young people saw the damage that crack inflicted on older users and began to stay away from it. (One recent survey showed that crack use is now three times as common among people in their late 30’s as it is among those in their late teens and early 20’s.) As demand fell, price wars broke out, driving down profits. And as the amount of money at stake grew smaller and smaller, the violence also dissipated. Young gang members are still selling crack on street corners, but when a corner becomes less valuable, there is less incentive to kill, or be killed, for it.

    So one of the most pressing problems for big cities in the US went away more or less on its own. Not through increased police presence, tougher laws or anti-drug programs. But through economics. This tells me, that we could use a similar approach to solve similar problems. Rather than fight it (by declaring war on poverty, terrorism, hunger or poverty) but by changing the economics involved. Interesting thought, huh?

  • Book review: Freakonomics

    In the 80’s crime rose sharply in the US. Instances of murder, robberies, muggings all went up in the big cities. Experts were crying doom, predicting that it could only get worse. Then it got better. Not just a little, but a lot. The question is Why?

    Giuliani took credit for cleaning up New York City. The police took credit for having more people and better methods. Politicians took credit for passing tougher laws. But the real credit, according to Steven D. Levitt lies with Roe vs. Wade, the supreme court decision from 1973 that made abortion legal all over the US. Because abortion was now legal, many young, poor, single, uneducated mothers chose that option rather than having children – children with the exact background most likely to lead to a criminal future.

    This is just one of the claims put forward in the book Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The book’s motto might be “It’s all in the numbers – if you can get them”. There is no one common theme to the book, in which Levitt uses economic and statistical tools to look at areas such as The Ku Klux Klan, cheating in Sumo wrestling and why your real estate agent isn’t really interested in getting you the highest possible price on the house you’re selling.

    Rather the book’s central message is how far you can go by looking at the numbers – and that you must keep an open mind to some of the startling and counter-intuitive realizations that might bring you. Reading this book is an unbroken string of Aha-experiences, where common sense thinking is shown to be just plain wrong.

    Levitt is by all acounts a brilliant young economist, who hasn’t yet been tied into one field. A more senior economist is quoted in the book as saying “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine”. And anyone with the creativity and open-mindedness to look into the correlation between crime and abortion as explained above (not to mention the guts to take the controversy it has generated) certatinly seems to fit that bill.

    This has got to be the most entertaining and eye-opening book on economics I’ve ever read. Can you apply anything from the book directly to your endeavours? Probably not. But it gave me a sense that the world is more complex than common sense would dictate. And that by looking at what is actually going on, rather that just running on the usual assumption, you can actually get a better, more accurate understanding og the world – one that is simple in its complexity. As illustrated in this quote.

  • Book review: The golden ratio

    1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576286213544862270526046281890
    244970720720418939113748475408807538689175212663386222…

    Doesn’t look like much does it? What if I told you, that this number is significant in such varied circumstances as:
    * The construction of pentagons
    * The number of spirals in sunflowers
    * The construction of sea-shells
    * Fractals

    Spooky, huh?

    The number is called variously the golden mean, the golden section number, the golden ratio or simply phi (pronounced fee), and in the book The Golden Ratio – The story of phi, the world’s most astonishing number, Mario Livio explains the history and relevance of this number. He looks at many phenomena that are definitely linked to this number (such as the ones mentioned above) and dismisses some which are waaaay more speculative – such as phi appearing in the proportions of the cheops pyramids and in Mona Lisa.

    Basically, phi is the ratio you get, if you divide a line in two different lengths so that the ratio between the shorter and the longer piece is identical to the ratio between the longer piece and the whole line. This ratio is 1.618033… It is not only an irrational number (ie. one that can’t be written as a fraction of two integers), but it is in a sense the most irrational of all irrational numbers. Here’s a more in-depth description.

    It takes a rare writer to write an interesting book about math, but Livio pulls it of magnificently, pulling together the history, the math, the beauty and the weeeeeird properties of phi.

    And here’s phi to 20.000 decimal places.

  • Firefox browser reaches 25.000.000 downloads

    Since Firefox 1.0 became available a few months ago it has been downloaded a staggering 25 mio. times. Not bad for a free, open source product developed by volunteers.

    If you’re not already using it, you need to know that:
    * It’s free
    * It has more and better features than Internet Explorer
    * It is more secure than Internet Explorer
    * You can download and install it in minutes

    Go get it, already.

  • Giving it away

    According to a recent analysis, 35% of all traffic on the internet today is done in a protocol called bittorrent. So this was probably developed by Microsoft, who’re making a zillion bucks on it, right? Wrong! Well, then it must’ve been created and marketed by some other big internet company, RIGHT? WRONG!

    Bittorrent, which is a radically new way of transferring large amounts of data, which has the distinction of becoming MORE efficient, the more people use it, was created by one lone geek name of Bram Cohen.

    Like many geeks in the ’90s, Cohen coded for a parade of dotcoms that went bust without a product ever seeing daylight. He decided his next project would be something he wrote for himself in his own way, and gave away free. “You get so tired of having your work die,” he says. “I just wanted to make something that people would actually use.”
    …
    “Give and ye shall receive” became Cohen’s motto, which he printed on T-shirts and sold to supporters.

    He open sourced the whole thing, and there are now lots of bittorrent clients that use his technology and code. There’s a very interesting interview with Bram Cohen on Wired.

    This technology is about to change the way we access media. It’s easy, user-friendly and unstoppable because since nobody owns it, you can’t sue to make it stop like they did with Napster and are doing to Kazaa.

    Which just goes to show that one man’s work CAN change the world.

  • Wikipedia: Coolest tool on the net

    Of course there’s no way you could engage thousands of people world-wide in creating a comprehensive, up-to-date, on-line encyclopedia. If you simply opened up the system, so anybody could contribute to any subject, it would be completely impossible to protect the system against vandalism, jokes and random errors. Such an encyclopedia could never work.

    Except it does: The Wikipedia may be the coolest application of the internet so far. I use it constantly and I find it to be incredibly comprehensive. But don’t take my word for it.

  • Bad astronomy

    Philip Plait debunks weird, pseudoscientific claims at his excellent webiste badastronomy.com. Here’s his take on what it’s like to stand up for science:
    Have you ever gone to a carnival, or a fair of some kind, and played the game “Whack-a-Mole”? It’s a table with holes in it, and little mechanical rodents pop their heads out for about a half a second. You have to hit them with a mallet. If you wait too long, they duck back under. But every time you hit one, one or two pop up again. No matter how many you whack, there are always more.

    Pseudoscientists are like those moles. You can whack one down, but then another springs up…

    He does an excellent job of it. For a taste, read his debunking of the claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

  • Browser upgrade

    I just upgraded to Mozilla Firefox 0.8, and it’s a great browser. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, cursing about incessant advertising popup windows, consider giving Firefox a try. It’s more stable, faster and has more features than Internet Explorer, plus it downloads in minutes and installs in seconds.

    And of course it’s open source and free.

    Get Firefox

  • Identity

    I keep coming back to the concept of identity. Lots of human ideas, activities and concepts are influenced by identity. Personal identity. Group identity – if there is such a thing.

    Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Owen Davies who’s working on one aspect of this, namely digital identity. A secure, trustworthy digital identity would be a really nice thing to have these days, but there is still no one accepted system available.

    The Identity Commons are creating a solution for this, which will ultimately be owned by all of us – and doesn’t that feel a little better, than having Microsoft own your digital identity (or at least the systems supporting it).

    They are basing their work on chaordic principles, which feels exactly right for a project of this kind. From what Owen told me about it, it sounds like a really cool thing. Rock on, guys!