Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That, and an off-centered tail, causes them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.

Here.

When I read article titles like this (”45 percent of world’s wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO”), I wonder what these people mean by “wealth”. For example, people in a neighbourhood (say 50 people) get together and decide to pass a house back and forth between them, ratcheting up the value of the house by $50,000 each time. “Pretty soon,” reason the neighbours, “all our houses will be worth millions more!” Multiply $1,000,000 by 50 houses, and you have “created” $50M in wealth. I think the destruction of this sort of wealth is what the person quoted above is referring to.

I think a more useful definition of wealth would refer to something tangible. I have an orchard, and it reliably produces a large bounty of fruit - so I might have peach wealth. Or I have a nice home in a good part of the world, so I have habitation wealth. And so on.

For the most part, what hasn’t happened is the destruction of this sort of real wealth (yet, anyway). What has happened is the destruction of fake wealth - wealth that never really existed in the first place, but that some people thought existed.

Theoretical change is often achieved through the reinterpretation of ambiguous data that people often didn’t realize was ambiguous.

Probably the most important things in the world are the boring ones. Slow, plodding, everyday factors that in the end make the real difference. Demographics is foremost of these. It is clear from trends - with a little bit of common-sense extrapolation - that the world population is about to enter a free-fall.*

* ‘about’ here means within the next 50 years

While people are still going on about the dangers of the Earth having more people, population decrease is already happening in “first-world” countries - buoyed only by large amounts of immigration. Canada is a good example. It imports nearly 1% of its population every year, causing a dramatic change in the cultural and ethnic make up of the country. The reasons for this government policy are probably fairly complex, but one argument for it is that a rapidly decreasing population will cause economic hardship. If indeed the whole world starts to experience population loss, this strategy will probably become less and less tenable, regardless of the merits of arguments for it.

We’ve been learning how to deal with population growth for some time, but the Western world hasn’t seen sustained population decrease for a long, long time. Significant population growth in the world started around 1750, and for the previous 3,000 years it seems that human population growth was occurring more slowly. Before that, it seems population levels were relatively stationary.

So what is more dangerous - continued population increase or population decrease? This question doesn’t seem to be debated that often, so the implicit answer would be “population increase”. How do we know that, however?

Can someone name 5 prominent female directors?

Can someone name 5 “good” movies made by female directors?

This post over on Double Blind and the ensuing comments got me thinking about who my favourite directors are. Here are 5 I like, off the top of my head. (I should mention that there are many films by these directors that I don’t like …)

1. Ridley Scott. From Blade Runner to Gladiator, Scott’s visual style is stunning, and his themes often resonate with me. An English director. He is currently working on Robin Hood.

2. Peter Weir. Weir’s Master and Commander is his crowning achievement in my view. However, he has depth and versatility, including Mosquito Coast and Dead Poet’s Society. An Australian director. Currently making The Way Back.

3. Moving outside the Commonwealth to Germany, Wolfgang Petersen. Although I’m not familiar with most of his German language movies, Petersen’s Das Boot and Troy earn him a place on this list.

4. Mel Gibson. Although engaging in embarrassing public behaviour from time to time due to his manic-depressive cycles, Gibson’s manically inspired work Braveheart is truly amazing. Apocalypto was also an engaging, unique movie in the current Hollywood landscape.

5. M. Night Shyamalan. I like the issues he explores more than anything, with movies Signs and The Village being my favourites. Shyamalan typically slows everything down, instead of simply trying to throw explosion-chase-whatever after whatever at the viewer.

Honourable mentions: Peter Jackson for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Zack Snyder for 300 - both amazing technical achievements, even if I didn’t like some of the content.

(4 of the 7 aren’t Americans, which is interesting since the U.S. has 300M people, while the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Germany combined have only 170M people.)

Eagle Eye, a political thriller that features elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator, is a thought provoking film about surveillance and inter-connectivity. However, it’s also a little silly. The reason is that “Artificial Intelligence” - i.e., getting computers to behave like adult human organisms - doesn’t really work, yet. Much of what seems like “intelligent” behaviour from computers is actually “kludges”, neat programming tricks, and so on - probably nothing like how humans actually do it.

The consensus emerging from computational intelligence studies in the last few years is that either a) the brain is much more computationally powerful than previously thought (in particular, that neurons don’t compute just by their connections to each other - inter-neural - but also that within each neuron there is a significant amount of computation - intra-neural), or b) the process by which humans and other organisms develop “intelligent” behavioural capacities is very different from how scientists are currently trying to get computers to develop these sorts of capacities. My guess is that it’s a mix of both. Brains contain a lot more sophisticated of causal processes than previously thought ( a) ) and the way to get the sort of “intelligent” behaviour typical of human organisms requires different ways of setting up those causal processes than we have currently been doing ( b) ).

The short of this is that behaviour such as Eagle Eye’s computer is nowhere to be seen in current computers. People who don’t know how computer programs work often don’t have a sense of the range of possibilities, and so science fiction writers such as Eagle Eye’s can make up stories about things happening that are absurd. This is similar to myths where fantastic things happen to the characters - if you don’t understand the limits of “magic” then saying that a woman turns into a tree or what have you doesn’t seem absurd, but once you start to develop a detailed logic of how things in this area work (biology, morphogenetics, and so on), you can start to discount these stories. This is the basic trajectory science has charted over the past several hundred years, overturning beliefs people had that nowadays seem far too credulous, but at the time didn’t seem so because they didn’t have a developed logic or model of how the world works in that area which would exclude that sort of phenomena.

Post-script: The term “computation” is also a little silly. The human brain is a complex causal process, and “computers” are also complex causal processes. There is nothing magic about computation, except that it is used to describe what “computers” typically do. When it comes to computers emulating what humans do, the programmers are trying to set up a set of causal processes in the computer that are similar to the causal processes in a human brain. In this sort of case, “computers” are just open-ended platforms for setting up relatively intricate causal processes, interfaced with typically by some “language”.

Is that really the best movie Hollywood’s elites could find? Sitting on a plane, nursing a cold, with nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling, I didn’t manage more than 20 minutes of Slumdog Millionaire.

The other movies were predictably boring in their politically correct ways. The Duchess of Devonshire espousing the principles of freedom and voting for all people (”Freedom is an absolute, either you have it or you don’t” - a big crowd-pleasing piece of nonsense if I have ever heard it, even if historically based), some woman visiting Australia and showing that she could herd cattle, too (I didn’t actually watch that one, but the wonder of back of the seat PEDs is that I really don’t have a choice in watching parts of it).

The only one I found relatively interesting was Eagle Eye. A strange infusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a political thriller, it made me rethink how often I have my cell phone on - even if many of its plot elements strayed so far across the line of disbelief that I found myself almost laughing. Even there, though, I didn’t finish it (maybe 9/10ths of the way, so perhaps there’s a big twist at the end which makes it better? I don’t know, and I don’t care).

I simultaneously want PEDs eliminated, and want way more content so that I can actually pick some more promising movies to watch. I’m sure that the latter is coming.

The recent drop in home prices in the U.S. (see here) has been easy come, easy go for most people. Yet, while news writers are banging on the drums of doom about the drop, they didn’t seem so concerned about the real problem - which was that people bought foolishly on the up-swing. In fact, many news writers were happy to encourage the over-leveraging (very little down mortgages from people without the likely economic resources to afford a drop) or reckless consumption (people borrowing on their increased home prices in order to buy vacations, fancy cars, and so on) that caused a large amount of the problems, peddling stories of seemingly infinite sunniness in a situation where it was reasonable to attribute a significant chance that it was a bubble market in many places in the U.S.

There is a saying about how great dangers can lurk in your seeming success - the problems with the U.S. economy came because people were not tempered enough in their evaluations of their previous seeming economic ’successes’.

Here is an interesting comment on market ‘unregulation’ (via Fumbled Mumblings).