The Stripy Strudel's Journal

This entry concludes the series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, but these “laws” are empirically valid and have some degree of serious value.

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One young office clerk decided to skip vacation. He was fed up by the beaten routes to Turkey and Egypt with more tourists than locals around you, but could neither afford nor envision anything better. That's why he thought he'd rather spend the time off at home doing nothing, with no alarm clocks or obligatory plans. But because his friends and especially relatives would certainly accuse him of wasting time, leading an unhealthy life and other crimes against humanity, he didn't tell anyone.

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A hypothetical planet P is inhabited by sentient beings of n different genders g₁, g₂, …, g_n. Successful reproduction requires one member of every sex. In the ideal case, such a group is involved in exclusive long-term relationship and forms a complete family where each parent plays one of the n unique parental roles.

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This entry continues the series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, but these “laws” are empirically valid and have some degree of serious value.

Benford's law is an empirical observation that in many, although not all, large arrays of real-life numerical data, the first digit of the figure won't be uniformly distributed: it will be 1 in about 30% cases, with diminishing frequences for other digits, all the way to the least frequent 9 which occurs in less than 5% values. Take heights of city buildings (in any measurement units), country populations, taxpayers incomes, and they will most likely closely follow Benford's law. The explanation is straightforward in cases when the logarithm of the value has uniform distribution, but the law surprisingly holds also in many cases when this is not true. As it often happens, although the law was stated by Frank Benford in 1938, it was first observed already in 1881 by the astronomer Simon Newcomb. He noticed that in logarithm books, the earlier pages, which contained numbers starting with 1, were much more worn than the other pages.

Parkinson's law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson who stated this quite true law seems to have stumbled upon some fundamental principle, various manifestations of which have since been given their own names. Douglas Hofstadter stated the recursive Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Roemer's law, which says that in an insured population, a hospital bed built is a bed filled, is actually being used in health planning in the US. Wirth's law saying that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster (Niklaus Wirth) seems to be a particular case of the Jevons paradox: technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase, rather than decrease, the rate of consumption of that resource (William Stanley Jevons). If there indeed is something common behind all these phenomena, that law is still to be discovered and named after someone.

The Jeane Dixon effect, named after the American astrologer Jeane Dixon, is the tendency of some predictions out of a large amount made to come true. Those predictions that came true can then be brought to public attention while forgetting about the numerous predictions that proved wrong.

The Navigation paradox states that increased navigational precision may result in increased collision risk. Before widespread availability of GPS, ships and airplanes used to follow random trajectories that only roughly resembled navigational paths. Surprisingly, when navigational electronics allowed vessels to follow these paths with greater precision, the collision rates went up. Today, as a mitigation measure, pilots are recommended to fly one or two miles to the right of the center of the airway.

The Thomas theorem, formulated by William Thomas in 1928: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. A classical example: false rumors about a bank's bankruptcy can cause many of its clients to withdraw their money, causing the bank to become bankrupt in reality. According to John Keynes' beauty contest theory, stock share prices depend not so much on the market players' real estimations of their worth as on what they think others estimate their worth to be.

По-русски: Наблюдения с серьёзным лицом, выпуск 2

Disclaimer: this article contains offensive language which is essential to it subject.

An old Russian joke goes like this:

— Нахуя дохуя нахуярили? Расхуяривайте нахуй!
— Нихуя не дохуя, похуярили!

All content words in this snippet have the same root as the Russian vulgar word for penis. Despite that, for any competent Russian speaker the short dialog invariably means something like this:

— Why have you loaded so much? Unload it now!
— It's not at all too much, let's go!

But how is this possible?

First of all, it's not possible in every language. For example, it would be at least much harder to pull off in English. Russian is a highly synthetic language, which means a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Besides the root, a Russian word often contains several information-bearing prefixes and suffixes. They can be used to convey negation, inducement, intensity, undesirability and numerous other aspects. These expressive devices are so powerful that the root itself can easily become unnecessary.

In the joke above, the obscene root isn't being used literally, but rather as a placeholder for the mandatory root slot in a word where all important information is already encoded with other morphemes. Many Russian speakers resort to using words with this root in place of any other word they can't remember (akin to “thingy”). Any other root, even a non-existent one, could be used instead, and although the text would sound weird, a Russian speaker wouldn't have a problem with deciphering the intended meaning.

Lewis Caroll's “Jabberwocky” (“'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves // Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; // All mimsy were the borogoves, // And the mome raths outgrabe.”) is a good English example. Here we get a pretty good impression of what was happening, although nearly all the roots in the poem are nonsense.

Here are some examples illustrating the power of Russian morphemes. They can be used, among other things, to express aspects such as “annoying repetition” (заколебал — has driven crazy), “satisfaction from completing something mandatory” (отстреляться — to be finally through [with something]), and even, surprisingly, “berry” (земляника — strawberry).

An idea that inevitably comes to mind is one of a highly synthetic artificial language where this mechanism would be taken to the extreme: an even wider choice of affixes than in Russian, but no roots at all in content words. Such a language would make it difficult to refer to very specific objects and phenomena (”maple”, “ankle”), but easy to describe only those aspects that are relevant in the particular context (“something rapidly moving”, “to do harm”, “very desirable”). Whatever isn't indicated with such aspectual morphemes is irrelevant and so left unspecified.

An important corollary for those learning a foreign language: the vocabulary is not the most important thing. If you think that the hardest and most important part is learning as many words as possible, remember the obscene joke from this article. There are indeed some native speakers of the language whose speech is almost like this! Although they do know more than just a single root, their lexicon is likely very scant, quite possibly smaller than yours. Their “knowledge” of the language is not in their vocabulary but rather in the intuitive grasp of word formation, morphology, grammar and syntax. An hour spent mastering these things is an hour way better spent than many hours of memorizing words.

По-русски: Язык без костей

To while away the time in a long road trip, two can play a game. One thinks of an adjective while another thinks of a noun. When both are ready, they say their words and end up with a random, often absurd word combination. Then they both need to come up with an explanation of what it could mean.

For example, digital suffocation is the agonizing state of an Internet addict when the connection is down. In desperation, like a fish gulping air, they try to get the last out of any available backup connections, be it GPRS or a modem for voice lines. The philosopher's pencil is a legendary writing utensil which turns any scribbler's drivel into a literary masterpiece. In futile search of such a pencil, adventurers have tried hundreds of material combinations for the core and casing. And what do you think edible committee might be?

Here is another game. Each thinks of a comparative phrase starting with the word “the”. When they say their halves together, they sometimes end up with complete nonsense, and sometimes with a surprisingly apt aphorism, and the latter happens more often than you'd think it would.

Some examples. The more you earn, the deeper the disappointment. The narrower the eyes, the higher the GDP. The smaller the penis, the greater the need for money. The harder you try, the more you're screwed. The more you study, the dumber the jokes.

This game uses the formula “The [comparative] X, the [comparative] Y”. Similar games can be constructed using other formulae, for example, “A for B is like C for D”. One says a phrase of the form “A for B”, and the other has to complete it with “is like C for D”. This way, you come up with maxims like: A man for a lesbian is like meat for a vegetarian. Or take, for example, the formula “X is not Y, [negation of a property]”. A cucumber is not a flower, can't give it to a girl. Or “X is not Y. Nothing is Y but Y”. Life is not all beer and skittles. Nothing is beer and skittles but beer and skittles.

Have you tried all these games, but the road ahead is still long? Try the ultimate entertainment: the meta-game! One says a phrase beginning with “One says…”, and the other has to complete it with “and the other has to…” so as to make the rules of a word game. Then you try the new game, and if it's good, post its rules as a hint on how to while away the time in a long road trip.

All examples are taken from real word games which Kristina and I were playing during our Scandinavian road trip. Thank you for the great company, my dear friend! Driving around the world won't be boring with you.

По-русски: Чем дальше едешь, тем больше «мета»

> Begin game.
You are a section of a quantum wave function called Alice.

> Elaborate.
You are a set of quarks and electrons called Alice.

[…]

> Elaborate.
You are a mammal called Alice.

> Elaborate.
You are a girl called Alice.

> Realize the boundary between “you” and “not-you”.
You cannot yet find the exact boundary between these fuzzy, gradual categories.

> Inhale atmospheric air.
You draw, through your two upper orifices, large portions of atmosphere into your body. You notice that atmosphere taken through your topmost orifices is more efficiently scrubbed of contaminants while you cay take in larger (but less sterilized) quantities through the some what larger orifice directly below it. You currently prefer the topmost orifice, which you have decided to refer to as your "nose".

> Exhale atmospheric air.
As you compress your diaphragm against your lungs now full of air, you wonder whether you should use your nose to exhale as well as inhale, or whether your mouth would be the more efficient orifice. You'd better decide quickly, as the pressure inside your mouth is building rapidly.

> Exhale using nose.
You choose to expel the air through your “nose” orifice. However, the elevated level of carbon dioxide in your blood urges you to inhale again. From now on, you decide to breathe automatically, regulating the frequency of excursions according to the body's demand for interchange of gases.

> Conduct analysis of the air.
You don't have any equipment with which to conduct a proper chemical analysis! However, the sensory input from your skin receptors informs you that the molecules of the air are in an organized motion relative to your body.

> Look around.
From the pattern in which your neurons fire you infer that your retinas are reacting to electromagnetic radiation reflected by nearby macroscopic bodies.

> Become aware of color.
You notice that you can distinguish between several frequency bands and call particular combinations of intensities in these bands “colors”. The most prevalent color in the immediately observable environment you decide to refer to as “green”.

> Examine green objects.
The complexity of geometrical shapes of the solid bodies around you suggests that they are, most likely, living organisms not very dissimilar from you. You decide to call a mass of such organisms a “forest”.

> Predict trajectory of the forest.
You notice that the forest, together with a planet attached to it, is accelerating towards your body. This must be due to the gravity pull you exert on the planet. Assuming that the gravitational constant remains unchanged, the planet's trajectory will intersect yours within a few seconds.

> Assess probability of collision vs. tunnel effect.
Within the precision available to you, the probability of collision is 1.0, while the probability of tunneling is 0.0.

> Pick appropriate name for the approaching surface.
What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like… ow… ound… round… ground! That's it! That's a good name — ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me? — Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”.

> Mitigate impact.
You alter the shape of the body to influence the point of impact favorably. You hook your extremities together with the extremities of the large organisms, and thus manage to decelerate to a complete stop.

> Look around.
You can now discern that this environment is much more complicated than you first assumed. The geometry is nearly intractable, and the biodiversity is staggering! There is something else too, the visuals of this place seems to have a property that causes a release of dopamine in the observer's organism. You decide to call this property “beauty”.

This excerpt is an edited version of a text adventure written in collaboration by anonymous authors. The recently-started game “Alice in Realworld” is just one of the multitude of forms that this genre takes. Interactive function was one of the earlies types of computer games, and in this form it peaked in popularity in the 1980s. Recently, the genre has received a new development when the role of the “environment”, previously played by a computer, was taken over by a human. Compared to a computer game where all possible responses are preprogrammed, and the diversity of player commands is limited by the capabilities of the interpreter, interactive fiction with a human author displays an order of magnitude more creativity and variety.

Recently, I've started a text adventure on the questions-and-answers page of Tauhid Bondia, the author of the Epicsplosion webcomic, and thus gave his programmer friend the idea to create Epicsploitation. It's a web service where anybody can contribute to an existing adventure as a player or an author, or start a new adventure. Because all contributions are anonymous, nothing stops one author from picking up a story arc started by someone else. A story can be branched by submitting a command after any scene. The “Alice in Realworld” game I mentioned is also hosted there, and you can take part in it right now.

По-русски: Алиса в реальном мире

I'll try to describe an idea for a computer game that I've had for a while, although the idea is very raw, and only numerous prototyping cycles can answer the question of whether it can be made playable.

The game models the development of a multicellular organism from a single fertilized egg (zygote). The modern science has more questions than answers about how the same genetic information that's copied to every cell in the organism determines the development of a complete organism with complex structure and more than 200 types of specialized cells from a single cell. However, we do know some basic facts.

Cells that have particular functions in the organism are called specialized. Such are, for example, myocytes (muscle cells), neurons (nerve cells), erythrocytes (red blood cells) and many other types. On the other hand, the so-called stem cells do not have a particular function, but they can divide. The zygote is the most universal (totipotent) stem cell which gives rise to all cells of the organism. The first several cell generations after the division of the zygote are also totipotent, but after a few days after fertilization some cells become different from the others — they differentiate. After the first differentiation, the cells are still stem cells, but they are not totipotent anymore. Rather, they are multipotent: they can give rise to many, but not all types of cells in the organism. As the number of cells in the organism grows, their differentiation continues. After a number of such steps, the stem cell finally transforms into a specialized cell of one or another type. The reverse — transformation of a specialized cell back into a stem cell — is impossible in most organisms. An adult organism always contains stem cells in different stages of differentiation. They divide periodically to maintain their own population as well as specialize to replace worn or lost tissue cells, such as in regeneration.

But how does a stem cell “know” what it should turn into? Why don't we end up with heart cells in the brain and nerve cells in the liver? How do the cells making up tissues stick together, and why do organs grow to be certain shapes and sizes? The development potential in a stem cell is regulated by receptor proteins that “monitor” the situation around the cell. At the same time, the cell produces signal substances — ligands — to let others know about its presence. Each receptor is activated by a certain type of ligand and stimulates or inhibits specific processes in the cell, such as production of a particular protein. As a result, the presence or absence of particular types of cells at short or long distances determines the fate of the stem cell: passivity, division without differentiation, differentiation into a certain other type of stem cell, final specialization or even self-destruction (apoptosis). Cells of some types tend to group together with other cells of the same or related type. Special binding proteins (cell adhesion molecules) allows cells to stick to their neighbors and form tissues.

This is an extremely simplified and imprecise description of the development of a multicellular organism, but it's good enough for our purposes, especially because we'll have to simplify it further for the game.

The player's goal is to program the development of a multicellular organism with desired properties by editing the genetic code in the single cell — the zygote. The game does resemble programming, but it's programming with pictures and arrows rather than with lines of code.

The player has access to several types of specialized cells complete with pictures and descriptions of their functions. I'm thinking about flat pictures from the biology textbook, with different types of cells painted in different colors. To get the cell to specialize into one of these types, one needs to start production of a particular substance called a growth factor. The player can create as many other proteins as needed, such as receptors, cell adhesion molecules, enzymes, transcription factors. The proteins get funny names like “tralalase”. By having these proteins activate each other's production, one can in fact program the cell's behavior. For example, for a membrane receptor: “If no doodle ligands are around, trigger production of the munchmunch factor”.

Having specified the set of proteins encoded in the genetic information, the player clicks the start button and watches the organism develop. The protein molecules synthesized in the cells can be seen at a sufficient zoom level. The simulation can be paused, rewound and fast forwarded. To make things simpler, everything happens in two dimensions. By changing the set of proteins and restarting the simulation, the player tries to produce an organism with the desired properties.

Every level has its own requirements to the organism. For example, on the first level the player is to build a semblance of volvox: a ring with a particular diameter made of flagellate cells. The player gets only one type of specialized cells at this level, and has to use cell adhesion molecules to bind the cells together in a ring and receptors to control its size.

The requirements get more complex on subsequent levels, such as to produce a coelenterate with two layers of cells, to create a creature that moves from the darkness towards the light, or to provide for regeneration after minor damage to the body. The number of available specialized cells grows. Because any complex enough structure of the body would require immensely complex cell signaling, the player gets readily available proteins activating increasingly complex development processes, such as a “heart forming factor”. Also, a free modeling mode is available where the player has access to all growth factors and specialized cell types that exist in the game. In this mode, the player can use their imagination to build an organism without particular prerequisites. Players can share genetic codes for interesting organisms in an online community.

I'm not sure such a game is possible to implement. In case it can be implemented, I'm not sure it will be playable. Finally, in case it's playable, I'm not sure anybody will want to play that. In this sense, the idea is even more raw and controversial than my previous idea for a computer game, “Full Speed Astern!” — because here we're trying to model something extremely complex and not completely understood for entertainment purposes. But there is a rather playable game about star formation, why can't there be one about morphogenesis, too?

По-русски: Многоклеточный организм своими руками

This opens a series of writings about deities in fictional worlds who put themselves in stupid, awkward or pathetic situations.

Eilikrines is an open, candid god who doesn't hide from his creations. Instead of relying upon blind faith that would not ask for proof, he works miracles on a daily basis, appears in the flesh before the people and in general does everything he can to make his existence known. Despite the overwhelming evidence, numerous atheists, in many countries supported by the state, still believe that there is no god. They come up with absurd, illogical explanations for the abundant evidence of god's existence, and dozens of branches of atheism keep disagreeing about these explanations, sometimes escalating all the way to armed conflicts. Jokes about the Big Bang and caricatures of atheists have repeatedly caused international scandals.

Whether Asafes, commonly known as Schrödinger's god, exists, is still undecided. Because he has never been witnessed, he is a superposition of a god and godlessness. The observationist sect in Copenhagen believes that eventually a prophet shall come and cause the Great Wavefunction Collapse. At the same time, the Church of Many Worlds considers the sectarians heretics who are condemned to eternal damnation in every universe where hell exists.

The lazy god Tempeles became tired of appearing before his creations and working wonders for them. Instead, he gave people mind-altering substances that cause experiences equivalent to divine presence. Users of these substances are just as confident that they have spoken to the creator himself, and the people around them are just as reluctant to believe that. Thanks to this fact, Tempeles hasn't had the need for an actual in-person epiphany for the last twenty centuries.

По-русски: Боги-неудачники, выпуск 1

Here is an idea for a comic strip, TV series or another serial format.

The protagonist is introduced and faced with a task typical for a fantasy setting. Let's say the task is to find a magical artifact and bring it to the king. The hero begins his quest, gathers some information and finds out where the object is. Only one man knows the way there, and that man is a hermit who lives on a mountain top. This means our hero now has a new task: to get the hermit to show the way, which he needs in order to retrieve the artifact.

The protagonist finds the hermit, but he won't show the way to just anyone. Only to a worthy warrior will he reveal his secret. And he will only consider someone worthy if they bring him a dragon's hide. Here we have a new task required to solve the previous one: to procure a dragon's hide.

A dragon can only be defeated with a sword forged by the god of fire himself. Only three such swords have been forged; two of them have long been destroyed, and the last one is kept in the armory of a hostile kingdom. So the new task is to steal the unique sword.

With every issue of the series the stack of side quests only grows. Quests are never resolved, they only generate new quests on the way. Like Zeno's arrow, the hero advances along the storyline but stays just as far from the goal. The reader (viewer) tries to keep track of the growing chain for a while, but soon realizes they're being trolled by the author!

How can one read or watch a work like this? By accepting it as it is. Don't stress, just open a new issue and find out what prevents the protagonist this time from striking just one item from the to-do list. Of course, for it to be interesting, the fruitless adventures have to contain some artistic value. I see a work like this as a post-modern comedy where we laugh at the futility of the story and the tireless hero's diligence.

По-русски: Напрасные приключения неутомимого рыцаря

There are pairs of qualities that are usually seen as opposites, but if you look at them closely, they turn out to be orthogonal rather than contradictory, so that a subject can possess or not possess each of them independently.

For example, smart and stupid are usually considered opposites. But smart is not the same as not stupid: haven't you met any of those PhDs who can't ever get a joke? Not smart and not stupid is also one possible combination. So, one can be not smart and not stupid, not smart and stupid, smart and not stupid, and, finally, smart and stupid.

Lazy and industrious are also not quite opposites. Lazy is one who cannot or does not want to control one's own unwillingness to work, which sometimes happens even to the industrious. And industrious is one who's craves for and enjoys labor. One can love one's work but sometimes be lazy about it. At the same time, one can be neither lazy nor industrious: it's when one does the hated job painstakingly and meticulously.

Greedy and generous. One can be neither greedy nor generous if one knows the price of what's hard-earned and thinks that everybody ought to support themselves; one doesn't want what's not theirs, but won't squander what they have either. But what does the greedy and generous do? It's simple: they give away what's not theirs to give.

Finally, good and evil at the sime time: the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and one can do good for a malicious cause, too. There are also people who aren't good but aren't evil either: like that old grumpy neighbor from which you'll never hear a kind word, but who doesn't really wish you ill, it's just that he can't treat people in any other way.

Know another pair of false antonyms? Leave a comment!

По-русски: Ложные антонимы

Usability testing of a new version of a software product is in progress. The test subject sits at the computer and makes occasional cautious clicks in the application window. In an adjacent room, crowded behind a sound-proof wall with a one-way mirror, a group of experimenters observes the user.

The developers watch the test subject with disappointment while he looks, confused, at the menus, toolbars and dialog windows that they themselves know and understand so well. They say:

— Doesn't he see? The “Apply” button is right there!
— Damn, where the hell is he clicking?
— Did he just dismiss the error message without reading? What's he thinking?
— Do we even have the automatic download feature in this version?
— We do, but it doesn't quite work… See, it crashed.

This happens in usability labs all over the world. Meanwhile, our civilization is being watched by omnipotent beings residing in the extradimensional abyss. They comment:

— Look at them idiots, every time someone actually understands something, they burn him at the stake. Can we fast forward to the point when they're done with the burnings?
— Another caloric theory here. Look, maybe we should actually implement caloric if the users want it so much?
— Why did they call the electron charge “negative”? Isn't that backwards? Now they have current “flowing” in the opposite direction, what were they thinking?
— Don't they understand the structure of the atomic nucleus? What's so difficult?
— Looks like they got it now… But wrong, dammit.
— What are they're doing here, looking for Higgs boson? Did they find it?
— Do we even have the Higgs boson in this version?
— We shouldn't, didn't we it from everywhere?
— Oops, looks like we forgot to remove it from one place… Everything has just crashed.

По-русски: Чтобы было понятно обычному пользователю

Night. The road is not illuminated. You are driving. A car approaches in the opposite direction, and its high beam dazzles you. You signal to him by briefly switching to high beam and back, and he changes to low beam. That's better.

You'll never know where he was coming from and where he was headed. You won't see in the dark what kind of car he (or she) has, or whether he is alone or with passengers; you won't know if he smiled or sweared when he got your signal. Maybe you don't even speak a common language. Your transient interaction will never repeat. You'll drive on towards your respective destinations, and even if you happen to meet again in a few years, you won't know. Probably the only thing you learned about him was this message: “I exist, I'm conscious, I'm alive”.

All the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with giant telescopes makes me think about this night road communication. Suppose we found them, got their message, now what? By the time a message is received, it's inevitably outdated by thousands or even millions of years, and the civilization which sent it is either dead or has developed into something entirely different. Any attempt to reply will be epochs late, as if nowadays Ares responded to the ancient greeks' pleads for military prowess. Alas, the only contact that's possible between civilizations situated thousands of light years apart is letting them know we exist and learn they exist, too.

Or asking them to cut that high beam.

По-русски: Дальний свет

Happy New Year! It's been a while since the last entry in this blog. But enough with the digital hiatus! With the beginning of 2011 I'm opening a new blogging season. From now on, there will be a new entry every Sunday.

Many entries in the coming year will be describing ideas for sci-fi stories which I, most likely, will never write. Why? It takes more than an interesting idea to write a good book. You need detailed, believable characters and not cardboard figures saying author's lines. You need a dynamic progression that would make the reader want to know what happens next. You need a writing style that accommodates the story. These are the things that make the difference between a writer and a scribbler, although the latter might have just as many ideas as the former. Ideas are a worth a dime a dozen, and only a compact presentation of a pure idea in a blog format might justify the kilobytes of infospace it consumes.

I'll take the opportunity to mention that all ideas published here are free to be used without even asking for permission. I'll be glad to know that my essay has inspired someone to write a story or a novel. Should such a thing happen, I'd be grateful for an opportunity to read what came out of it.

So the season is open. Stay tuned, and you'll find out, among other things:

• about the psychological issues in ghosts;
• about an unconventional way to study an alien language;
• about nanotechnology used by smugglers;
• why physicists don't believe in magic.

По-русски: Сезон открыт

In an imaginary, ideal and pitch abstract world live people who don't give a damn about being trapped in our thought experiment: they're people, too, and try to get their human fun from life. Just like us, they meet, make friends, mix and give each other simple pleasures. And just like in our world, they have social obstacles, having grown up in somewhat different cultures and then gotten mixed together. That's why what's natural for some is unthinkable for others.

For example, some people love massage of the head so much that they're willing to spend hours scratching, stroking and massaging each other's heads — if they find someone like them. But here's the catch: for some others touching the scalp is a taboo that can't even be mentioned. Because nobody knows whether it's disgusting or delightful for someone, you can't really offer this to a person: what if they get offended? So two head massage lovers don't dare to offer it to each other because each one of them is afraid that it's unacceptable for the other. Same thing with nose-rubbing, round dances, riding horses together, pat-a-cake and numerous other ways in which our speculative poor things bring enjoyment to each other.

Here is the problem the society is facing: invent a way for fans of various pleasure to recognize each other. It seems trivial: why not introduce conventional signs? For example, a red T-shirt could mean a round dance devotee. But it's not that easy: a round dance lover wouldn't like those for whom round dances are a taboo to know about their devotion. Hey, there are places where they won't let you in if you wear that! Therefore, a signaling system has to be more selective.

Let us call the whole range of ways to please each other acceptable for a person their easiness, as in “he's an easy (uncomplicated) person”, “she's easy to be with”. An easiness is a mathematical set. Let us designate the easiness of a person X as E_X. Then the requirement to a signaling system should be stated as follows: for every person Y, conventional signs worn by Y should suffice for X to derive E_X ∩ E_Y. Consequently, for each of his devotions X will only find out whether it's shared by Y, but he won't find out about those of Y's passions that X himself dislikes. He'll find out what he can what he shouldn't try with Y, but won't know anything shocking or destructive to their friendship.

A solution to this problem can be a variety of signs with limited knowledge of them. For every questionable pastime A enthusiasts establish a club, society or some other kind of community for A-doers. To become a member, one needs to do A with any current member. For lovers of A it's not a problem but rather a pleasure, but those for whom A is unacceptable won't even think about joining the community. Of course, the lists of community members are kept in secret. Because the world is ideal, everyone knows about every such community, and can and will join all the relevant ones. In a closed meeting, members of the A-doers society decide on a sign by which fans of A will recognize each other. It can be anything: an item of clothing, an accessory, a feature of speech or gait, a code word or gesture. Different communities pick essentially different signs, so that it's impossible to tell by the look of how many communities a person is a member. This way, everybody only knows the signs of belonging to those communities one is oneself a member of, and when X and Y meet, they instantly see what their common easiness, the intersection of E_X and E_Y, is, and within that intersection they feel at ease with each other.

The problem and the solution have been found in brainstorming together with Wheezle, for which I'm thankful to her. This way, we have determined by experiment that joint brainstorming is included in our common easiness. And if you, my dear readers, also love head massage — welcome to the club!

По-русски: Общество любителей фантазировать с умным видом

Under one of the possible interpretations of existence, every fiction is somebody's reality. Each time a thought crosses your mind that it would be good if that nice girl looked your way, you create a reality where exactly that happens. That reality has both past and future, and it's inhabited by people with real consciousness who have no idea that their existence is caused by someone from another world. But if a reality spawned by someone's imagination is as existentially complete as the “real” one, how can you tell in what kind of universe you live? For those reading my blog in alternative worlds, here are some tips; though they won't give a definite answer, in many cases they help rule out improbable options. So what isn't your reality?

• If your speech doesn't rhyme, you're not a hero of a poem.
• If you have no horse, you're not in a western.
• If you say something funny and don't hear any laughter, it's not a sitcom.
• If there is crime, poverty, corruption in your country, you're not in pre-election promises.
• If you have genitals, you're not in a children's book.
• If you can see anybody who isn't sexually attractive, you're not in someone's erotic fantasy.
• If you have at least one pimple, you're not in a commercial.
• If your mouth takes intermediate positions between completely open and completely closed when you speak, you're not an anime character.
• If neither you nor your relatives are famous, you're most likely not in a newspaper hoax.
• If you work at least sometimes, you're hardly a character in a Latin American TV series.
• If your or your friends' names don't begin with the first three or four letters of the alphabet, you're not in a cryptography book.
• If there are people with the same first name around you, it's quite unlikely that you are a character in fiction or cinema at all.

По-русски: Краткий определитель реальностей

The development of information technologies sometimes looks like the eternal fight between Good and Reason. Whatever great technical solutions people invent, others always come up with creative ways to abuse them. I tried to compile a list of ten things surrounding today's regular computer user that are often misused, often to the harm of the user. The criterion was that the misuse should be so widespread that the very usefulness of the particular technology is questioned, and software authors develop technical means to restrict or disable its use. As it's a hit parade, I'll start from the end.

10. <meta name="keywords">. This HTML element was intended to list the keywords for the web page to help search engines find pages relevant to given keywords. Of course, some webmasters were so eager to advertise their sites, “helped” so much that a search for a popular keyword would bring you anything but what you were looking for. Since 1998, search engines started ignoring <meta name="keywords">. The last search engine still honoring the keywords finally gave up on them in 2002.

9. Quoting in e-mail. Quoting fragments of an e-mail when replying to it helps the reader match particular statements in the original message with replies to them. Because an e-mail application doesn't know which parts of the message the user is going to reply, it has no other choice but to begin with quoting the entire message and let the user remove unwanted parts. Those users who don't adhere to selective quoting as means of providing context, as well as those who don't know how to use it, leave the entire quotation intact. As a result, correspondence between two such users is an ever-growing chain containing all the messages they've previously sent each other. Some modern e-mail applications implement automatic hiding of quotations.

8. Windows desktop. The desktop was conceived as a place where the user can temporarily store documents and other files being worked on, shortcuts to often-used applications and other frequently used items. And that's what happens, but every other application somehow thinks it will (or should) be used often, and therefore it deserves a shortcut on the user's desktop. This kind of rubbish gets mixed with the really useful items, turning the desktop into a mess. One version of Windows introduced a new feature: Desktop cleanup wizard that tries to guess what on the desktop the user needs and what is actually rubbish.

7. Notification area of Windows taskbar. This area, often incorrectly referred to as system tray, is a good place for running programs to display their realtime status because it's always visible. Today's typical Windows user has about ten icons there and doesn't know what most of them are for. Those small applets do anything (their author wants): preload “their” application for quick launch, notify about updates, show ads — except for actually showing any kind of realtime status. In Windows XP, Microsoft implemented a solution as brilliant as treating appendicitis with painkillers: they hide the icons the user doesn't want to see instead of providing an easy way to identify and remove the offending rubbishware.

6. Automatic startup on Windows logon. Some programs, such as a keyboard layout switcher, really make sense to start automatically, but the possibility for a program to put itself into the automatic startup list is really appreciated by authors of adware, spyware and other evil programs. To make it worse, there are several such lists, and a typical user doesn't even know about most of them. Plenty of programs exist for cleaning those up. Surprising is the inaction of Microsoft who, despite their increased attention to security in Windows Vista, still allow programs to get comfortable in a startup list without the user knowing.

5. Word processing software. These applications were invented to make preparation of documents with prevailing text and no special requirements for typography easier than it is with desktop publishing programs. For many modern users, “word processor” has become synonymous with “text editor”, and the complex, heavy formats of word processors are now widely used to store, and, even worse, transfer any text at all. An extreme case is an empty e-mail message with a Microsoft Word file attached. Many mailing list servers automatically delete such messages or strip these attachments to avoid annoying the subscribers and wasting bandwidth. Here one can also mention using spreadsheets to keep and transfer simple lists without any calculations.

4. HTML e-mail. Emphasizing important parts of a message, marking up headers and creating hyperlinks are really useful features. I'd love to have them if only they didn't come bundled with the usability disaster of HTML in e-mail. Authors of e-mail software who implement HTML message composition seem to think that the point of HTML is that the user can specify the color, font and background for his e-mail. Instead of logical markup describing the structure of a message we got means of decoration so much loved by teenagers and advertisers but so much annoying for everyone else. To make it worse, images loaded by HTML messages from remove servers are often used by spammers to track who actually opens their e-mails. Though the idea was that the plaintext alternative would only be used by old e-mail clients that don't support HTML, all those clients which do still have an option to use the plaintext version instead of HTML.

3. Browser detection. All web browsers introduce themselves to servers, so that those can detect what browser the user has and serve an appropriately “optimized” version. I don't know where webmasters got that idea, but many of them decided that, since they “support” a particular set of browsers, everybody else should simply be denied access: apparently, no web page at all is better than a web page that possibly doesn't work. There is a number of ways to detect the browser, some of which are based on particular distinctive features to check for. All modern browsers can spoof themselves for more popular ones to avoid being denied service. Even the current market leader isn't an exception: during the first episode of the browser wars, they had to make Internet Explorer identify as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE …)”, and that's what it still does after ten years.

2. Pop-up web pages. Opening a web page in a pop-up browser window can be useful when viewing enlarged images in a photo gallery, online help on using a web service or a shopping cart. Yet the most popular use of pop-up windows is to display in-your-face advertisement. Most modern browsers either come with a built-in pop-up blocker or have an add-on for that purpose. These pop-up blockers have to be smart enough to guess which pop-ups are legitimate and which are advertising rubbish.

1. E-mail. E-mail, one of the most important today's communication means, is plagued by the most severe technology abuse problem. The volume of spam is estimated to be 85–90% of all e-mail transferred in the world. The total losses from spam, including lost productivity, wasted technical resources and measures for dealing with spam is an order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while the costs for spammers are laughable. Technical means for dealing with spam are diverse, but none of them is able to solve the problem completely. Spam makes the practice of publishing your e-mail address as a means of communication questionable. In fear of robots harvesting e-mail addresses from public web pages, many users avoid publishing their addresses on open message boards or mangle them, for example by replacing @ with “at”.

По-русски: Забивание шурупов гаечными ключами

The web is full of tips for job candidates on how to write a decent resumé, how to behave in an interview and so on. On the other hand, there's a clear lack of advice for employers looking for good candidates. Here I'm making up for this lack basing on my recent experience from dealing with HR departments of various companies.

• Healthy competition never harms business. It's only better if two of your HR managers make a go at the same candidate independently of each other.
• Big companies often hire a staffing agency, and the biggest ones might want to hire several to help each other.
• A conveyor is the best form of labor management. The better you manage to divide the hiring process into elementary operations and assign them to different people, the more candidates you'll be able to put through the production line in a unit of time.
• There's no point in storing of the information you can always get from the candidate. Ask them for their full name, address and telephone number every time you need these.
• Everybody wants to work for you, though not everyone realizes it yet. If you look for prospective candidates and approach them, always ask them to send you a copy of the CV you've found on their personal website, and inquire about why they want to work for your company.
• Never miss a chance to approach an employee of your competitor. In the end, it's them, not you, who are bound with those non-compete clauses.
• If you're in USA and arranging a phone interview with a European, write something like 03/04 12pm PST. Everyone knows that the day comes after the month, and that PST stands for Pacific Standard Time.
• Engineers' work time is too valuable to have them conduct phone interviews. It's enough if an engineer prepares a list of questions with correct answers for the HR employees.
• Always include a “tricky question” in your phone interviews. Collections of such questions you can easily find on the web.
• If your teams have fixed interview schedules, assign candidates to teams basing on which interview comes next.
• If possible, invite a European candidate to your American office, and the other way round.
• Write an ultimate, ideal letter to a candidate and use it in all cases. Provide for all possibilities ranging from accepting a student for summer practice to enticing a superstar from a competitor. Start with “Dear Sir (Madam)”.
• Ultimately, replace all your human HR managers with robots. Machines never eat, sleep or make mistakes, and some are even able to reproduce without going on maternity leave.

По-русски: Хозяйке предприятия на заметку

What can you do when a vaguely familiar melody has taken over your head and threatens to not leave you alone until you recall where you heard it? You can try your friends and colleagues — it works sometimes. Doesn't help me, though: few of my current colleagues have heard, for example, the “Yeralash” TV show theme which I happened to remember today. But wouldn't it be cool if, say, Google indexed all the music published on the web and implemented searching among it! The user sings a fragment of a tune into the microphone, and the search engine finds melodies containing similar parts.

Theoretically, it's quite possible, though I doubt it would be commercially justified today. However, human is an ingenious creature, though this ingenuity doesn't always work for the mankind. There isn't a single technological achievement which man wouldn't find a way to abuse! Developers of the e-mail protocols didn't foresee spam, developers of HTTP didn't think of phishing (fraud using fake pages looking like banking websites). Some time ago, using meta keywords to find relevant web pages looked like a reasonable idea. With our present experience in the modern web, it's not that hard to imagine how the new type of search would be abused.

The simplest and mildest abuse would be recording and publishing advertisement songs to popular melodies. Such ads can easily be targeted, for example, Britney Spears' music could be used to target teenagers. A more aggressive approach: a commercial medley matching several different queries. An extreme case would be search spam, nonsensical sound files without a general musical structure, containing sequences of notes similar to those found in hundreds of popular songs; the only purpose of search spam is to redirect the user to the advertised website, often a fraudulent one, regardless of what they were searching for.

Of course, it's possible to devise technical measures against abuse, new ways to abuse against those technical measures, and so on. Given the modern pace of IT development, this scenario looks likely and usual. Typical sci-fi literature often misses out this important aspect of future technologies. It's hard to imagine holographic TV without annoying commercials, a “global data bank” (Internet, that is) without “search engine optimization” (it's a modern politically correct term for purposeful distortion of search results in favor of your web resources), and a future e-mail without spam. But I'm also sure that future will bring us conceptually new methods of abuse, impossible with the current technologies. We'll see.

По-русски: <meta name="keywords" content="технологии, будущее, злоупотребление">

You can mend a broken cup, straighten a car body and even rebuild a demolished building, but you cannot change the past. Cannot remove an awkward moment so that nobody remembers it, cannot make it as if a mistake you've made has never happened, cannot take back what you said carelessly. But it's the impossible that is the most desired! Along with eternal life, telepathy and teleportation, the topic of time travel is a fertile field for sci-fi writers for more than a century. The modern science doesn't rule out the possibility of one-way travel to the future, but is it that interesting? The most fruitful are those models of time travel that allow going to the past (or returning from the future) and thus spawn causality paradoxes. Some authors fondly ignore the arising contradictions, others build mystical and humorous effects upon them, and yet others construct complex models of the world to resolve the paradoxes.

One such model that allows for travel into the past has recently come to my mind. I haven't found any implementations of it in literature and am so far pretending to authorship. However, it's likely that someone had this idea before me; if it reminds you of some literary work, please comment.

On some planet there happened to arise life. In absence of competition, primitive organisms multiplied, adapted to various environment conditions, evolved into better developed species and finally gave rise to an intelligent being, for unambiguity let's say to human. Little by little, intelligent organisms built a civilization; empires grew, matured and collapsed; ages passed of stone, iron, gunpowder, electricity and atom. Sadly, the technological progress hadn't changed the man's essence, and the science was a slave of warfare in the stone age as well as in the time of atom. After a hundred generations of people who held the nuclear buttons, the hundred and first gave in to the primitive cruel chieftain sitting inside and unleashed the ultimate fatal war that destroys everything living on the planet, from human to amoeba.

The planet became unsuitable for life for billions of years, but numerous times the half-lives of the radioactive nuclei had passed, and the conditions on the surface became favorable for conception of life. Once again from a primitive organism to a humanoid, once again from a savage to a nuclear physicist, once again a fatal button, a world war and death of everything living. This happened several times, with inconceivable gaps of many billions of years between. Every evidence of a former civilization vanished in the abyss of time, and each time the mankind was unaware that there had been intelligent life on the planet before.

Of course, not only nuclear weapons could human minds produce. In its prosperity, each civilization gave many different fruits: developed medicine, computers, great works of art. Among many scientists, there always were those who invented something similar to the achievements of the former civilization because great minds think alike. Each time, by trial and error humans found electricity, radio, aircraft, microprocessor and… time machine. This machine worked according to the Novikov self-consistency principle: it was physically impossible to use it for such a travel that would generate a causality paradox. Because a travel into the past would allow an individual to affect oneself or one's ancestors and thus contradict the present, the machine couldn't perform such a travel. You couldn't go back a year, a hundred years, or a hundred centuries because of the physical limitations of the Universe, not on the designer's whim.

However, those who experimented with the time machine could easily find that it was quite possible to go into the very remote past, billions of years ago. This way, every civilization discovered the others that lived before. In a similar manner, it was possible to travel into the age of a future civilization and come back (but not before the time of departure) without generating a paradox. The possiblity of travel between the ages was determined by the fact that each civilization was doomed to collapse, and by changing something in a previous age, the traveller wouldn't change anything in one's own. Time travel gradually became usual, just like normal travel, and governments even had to pass laws to limit immigration from the past and the future. Cultural exchange between the former and later ages only further increased the similarity of historical processes and secured the same inevitable end.

The stability of this model is based on the postulate of inevitable convergence of macroscopic history to a predetermined outcome. If you like, the gloomy plot can be given a romantic development: in some age, a man is born whom the time machine cannot send into the past, and the reader realizes that this man is “the One”. He is predestined to bring ideas that will finally avert the imminent death. This is why the time machine cannot send him into a former age: otherwise the previous civilization would have survived until the present and generate a paradox. After numerous reincarnations, the new mankind finally finds a spark of hope for a better future.

По-русски: Культурный обмен между обречёнными цивилизациями

Primitive people who couldn't count beyond two or three, called any greater number “many”. Even though modern first-grade pupils operate numbers up to a hundred, and an adult understands what a billion is, human's ability for direct perception of quantities hasn't improved in a qualitative sense. We have ten fingers on our hands, fifty matches in a box, a hundred centimeters in a meter (both units are comparable to the sizes of body parts and therefore are available for direct perception). Starting with about a thousand, it becomes problematic to compare a number to something familiar. Your screen probably has several millions of pixels, each of which an acute-visioned person can discern. This seems like the biggest order for a number that can be directly matched against the environment. Because even secondary school education allows one to operate on numbers of greater orders, our perception lags behind the abilities of abstract thinking. Values that are orders of magnitude greater than the perception threshold feel immense.

Even though 1 000 000 000 < 1 000 000 001, the increase of one doesn't “make a difference”, and both numbers feel equally immense. However, both of them are more immense than a million. Basing on these intuitive assessments, one can say that the immensity of a number is a measure of psychological perception of its magnitude. In a similar manner to the other sensations (brightness, volume, smell or taste intensity), immensity is measured on a non-linear scale where every next equal interval corresponds to a bigger difference in input. The scale should also have a saturation threshold after which no increase of input can increase the psychological evaluation.

It would be naïve to assume that the sensation of immensity, just like vision or hearing, follows the logarithmic Weber–Fechner law. However, 10¹⁰³ is hardly as much more immense than 10¹⁰⁰ as a million is more immense than a thousand. To make as significant a leap from 10¹⁰⁰ as the leap between a thousand and a million, one would need a value like 10²⁰⁰. After that, the leaps become even more drastic: to give a “worthy increase” to 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, it takes something like 10^1010100. It seems that, with even increase of immensity, the numbers have to grow faster than any arithmetic function comprehensible to the subject.

I suppose that the feeling of immensity is related to description of a method to obtain a given value from numbers below the perception threshold. For example, a billion is a thousand of thousands of thousands, 2⁶⁴ is 2 doubled 64 times. The more qualitatively different steps it takes to reach the goal, the more immense is the number. For example, squaring a a number is a step, and squaring a number an immense number of times is two steps (“square a number” and “repeat the last step many times”). In this regard, the Graham's number is particularly interesting: it is so big that it requires a special notation to transcribe. To reach from non-immense numbers to the Graham's number g₆₄, it takes five qualitative transitions. The immensity of this number seems to approach the saturation threshold, and even though one could continue along the lines of g_g64, it's practically impossible to increase the sense of immensity compared to the Graham's number. However, the range of perceived immensities probably depends on the subject's mathematical grounding. A fourth grade pupil's saturation threshold is hardly above two or three steps, while Ronald Graham can probably appreciate numbers even more immense than g₆₄.

See also:

• S. Kozlovsky. The Biggest Number in the World (in Russian).
• E. Yudkovsky. Systematic Mistakes in Reasoning Potentially Affecting the Evaluation of Global Risks (in Russian), see “8. Scope neglect”.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: How immense are these numbers? It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Please assess how immense these numbers are. It's your psychological sensation that is important, not the encyclopedic knowledge of the magnitudes. The left end of the immensity scale corresponds to “modest” numbers like a million, while the right end is for numbers so inconceivably big that you cannot imagine a number that would feel significantly bigger.

• The number of atoms in the Universe (1…6)
• The number of possible chess games without repeating positions (1…6)
• The number of cells in all living organisms on Earth (1…6)
• The number of people ever born (1…6)
• The number of possible texts the length of “War and Peace” (1…6)
• The number of seconds having elapsed since the Big Bang (1…6)

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above.

По-русски: Теория громадности

Some work just for money, others achieve immediate satisfaction from doing the job, and for others still it's important that their work is of use to someone. Isn't it nice to know that a person becomes a little more happy, content and healthy from what you do for them? It's easy to feel something like this when you work as a hairdresser: a man comes shaggy-haired and leaves with a trendy haircut, saying thank you to you as he looks in the mirror. It gets harder if you repair hairdressing equipment. A man wouldn't have his haircut without this work as well, but he doesn't experience it directly. There seem to be different kinds of services: some of them are rendered to a person directly, and some are only indirect. For a more detailed classification of services by this principle let's consider the following set of rules.

1. Services rendered to a person directly are first order services.
2. Services rendered to subjects rendering nth order services are services of order n+1.
3. Production of goods is comparable to rendering of services. For example, baking bread is rendering a first order services.
4. Performing work as an employee is considered rendering a service to the employer if the nature of the service is substantially different from what the employer (the enterprise) renders to its consumers. For example, an employed hairdresser renders a first order service, but a packer at a confectionery renders a second order service to the enterprise because this service (packing) is different from the service rendered by the enterprise to its consumers (supply of finished confectionery articles).
5. Reselling of goods or services without introducing a qualitative change in their nature doesn't increase the order of service.

I work for SWsoft, Inc, a company that makes web hosting automation software. Here is how I analyze the order of my service:

1. When browsing a website, an internet user consumes first order services from the content author. (Of course, there are specialized websites for those who render specific services of various orders, but our web hosting automation software are not specifically tailored for hosting of such websites, so this fact doesn't increase the order of the service.)
2. The author uses a web hoster's service to host the website. This is a second order service. The end user mentioned above doesn't experience this service directly.
3. The web hoster routinely uses the automation software made by our company. Even though sometimes content authors use it as well, it's targeted at those who sell web hosting services, and contains specialized tools for this. Therefore, the web hoster consumes a third order service by purchasing our software.
4. Finally, I personally render a fourth order service to the company by working as a software architect. My output is not finished software, it's substantially different from what the company offers to the consumers, so my services are of the fourth order.

This concludes the chain because there aren't any special goods or services targeted at software architects for web hosting automation products. Even though there are products targeted at software architects in general (such as Rational software), they aren't specific to architects in this particular branch and therefore have a lower order. The higher the order of services, the narrower the specialization of labor. Higher orders become possible only with overall advancement of the industry characterized by increased branching of trades. I'm not sure if it's for good or bad, but I'm sure that there wasn't anything like fourth order services a couple hundred years ago. High order services make the service circulation chain longer. For example, in a small 19th century town the shoemaker would fix the barber's shoes, and the barber would shave the shoemaker's beard. The chain was two persons long. The distance could be bigger between some other professions, but not a lot. It's much harder now to trace the circulation of services between a web hosting automation software architect and a lawyer in an auditing company. Back to the original topic: the opportunity for satisfaction from realizing that your work is useful quickly diminishes with the growth of the order of services. Starting with something like the third order, it's nearly impossible, so those who render such services have to look out for other ways of getting satisfaction. For example, to me the work itself is interesting as an abstract task that I'm constantly solving. The original entry in Russian features a poll: Your work. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. What kind of work do you do? Examples: fixing televisions, writing articles for a financial magazine, driving a subway train. What order are the services you render? (1…6) What is the primary source of the satisfaction the work brings you?

• Knowing that I'm doing a useful job.
• The very process of working.
• Knowledge, experience, or physical form I gain.
• Communication with colleagues, partners, clients.
• Money.
• My work doesn't bring me satisfaction.

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. It's also interesting if you trace your service chain in a comment like I traced mine. UPDATE: The average service order according to the poll participants is suspiciously close to π. По-русски: Трудиться на благо тех, кто трудится на благо народа

You have most probably read someone's recommendations on interviewing job candidates, or, conversely, on attending interviews as a candidate. Starting from year 2000, when Joel Spolsky published “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”, these recommendations often include the advise to to ask an impossible question. The numerous advisers reprinting this recommendation from each other's articles offer various ways to pose such a question, but Spolsky has several examples in his article, including this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York?” (I think if I hear this in an interview, I'll reply “Just as many as there are cliche users in Novosibirsk”.) It turns out that the author of this question is Enrico Fermi. Here is the original version of the problem as well as the solution: Fermi's Piano Tuner Problem. The solution is similar to what Spolsky describes, and the answer comes out to be 150. I'll quote the last paragraph from Fermi's solution.

This method does not guarantee correct results; but it does establish a first estimate which might be off by no more than a factor of 2 or 3 — certainly well within a factor of, say, 10. We know, for example, that we should not expect 15 piano tuners, or 1,500 piano tuners. (A factor of 10 error, by the way, is referred to as being ‘to within cosmological accuracy.’ Cosmologists are a somewhat different breed from physicists, evidently!!!)

In my opinion, this last paragraph about interpretation of results is the most important. Without realizing what such a solution is and what it is not, the solution turns into guesswork, and the problem becomes something like a test for quick wit. Joel says that a candidate who starts solving such a problem is a good candidate; I'd rather say that one who immediately starts estimating how many gas stations there are in Moscow and cheerfully answers, say, 2500, is either self-assertive (you can't verify if the result is correct anyway) or reads too much Joel Spolsky. Quotation out of context is a powerful tool indeed. If only for the well-known Lenin's pronouncement: “The most important of all arts for us is cinema”, the full context of which is: “While the nation is illiterate, the most important of all arts for us are cinema and circus.” Seems like Joel isn't a stranger to it as well. Thanks to rimpocha for the food for thought. See also:

• Wikipedia: Fermi problem
• A collection of Fermi problems

UPDATE: Mr. Spolsky has left the advise to ask an impossible question out of the third revision of his article. По-русски: Об интерпретации результатов и о выдёргивании из контекста

“Human's physiological and psychological abilities are up to date poorly researched,” the lecturer's monotonous voice pontificated. “To believe in your own strength, to realize the depth of your hidden reserves is the way to discover the concealed abilities that each of us has.” The man who was telling this didn't look anything like a Tibetan monk who long ago had found the key to the secrets of his body and soul. He looked about twenty-five, and most of all resembled a programmer who had been working enthusiastically for the last fourty-eight hours.

Mark was sitting in the third row of a lecture hall and fiddling with a leaflet inviting to the “Unique seminar on the original method of discovering your own potential”. He was scolding himself for coming to this stupid lecture in the first place, and also for feeling so inconvenient to just stand up and leave that he was listening to this plod for one solid hour already. He had failed to follow almost in the very beginning and was by now altogether sure that there was nothing to follow, and that the lecturer whom the leaflet styled “Certified professor” was making no headway from the very start. Mark had dropped in on the unique seminar after work, and now the fatigue, lack of sleep and the lecturer's monotonous voice did their bit. Mark sank into a muddled, absurd dream where he was analyzing his, or maybe someone else's undocumented abilities with a disassembler, but finding nothing but useless features canceling out other useless features.

He woke up because someone touched his shoulder. “Hey, sir! I have to lock the hall.” It was the certified professor. Mark sprang up and guiltily rushed to the door. “It's OK, it's OK”, assured the professor. “What do you think, did you like it?” His vivid voice was now nothing like the colorless recitative of the lecture. Mark stopped halfway to the door. “Well…” he mumbled and immediately cursed himself for doing it. “Honestly, I didn't exactly understand…” He cursed himself in the choicest language for saying this just because he had to say something, and prepared for at least half an hour of boring explanations. But the certified professor was already looking at Mark with understanding and interest, and there was no way back. “I didn't exactly understand what those abilities are that you can discover in yourself if you believe in your strength.” To believe and to discover were the only things Mark remembered from the entire lecture, but the professor seemed to enjoy this question as if he never had heard anything more interesting. “This is the most important thing! If you really believe in yourself, you'll realize that there's nothing impossible for you, and that you can do anything.” “Like what? Will I be able to move objects with my eyes?” “No, why? That's a stereotype. You don't have to move objects with your eyes. In fact, you wan't even need it because someone for whom nothing is impossible gains the firmest self-confidence and doesn't need to move objects with his sight to confirm it — it becomes simply unnecessary!”

“Hey, hey, wait a minute. Are you saying that I have to believe in myself in order to have a reason to be self-confident? What's the point of it?” Mark was really interested now. “The point is simple. For example, are you self-confident?” “Well… yes. Yes, I'm self-confident.” “But why? On what grounds?” the professor kept asking. “Well, I'm a good specialist, I'm valued at work, I've achieved everything I have myself…” Mark never thought about this before, but it was unexpectedly easy to find the answer. “See? You're self-confident because you have this and that. But what if you don't have it tomorrow — will you still be self-confident? But if someone is self-confident because he believed in himself and discovered his unlimited abilities, this won't go anywhere, anywhere at all!” Mark considered this. The professor was talking obvious nonsense, but Mark couldn't spot where the error was. “What about you, did you believe in yourself and discover your concealed abilities?” he asked. “Mind you, I'm still far from mastering my full potential. But I've made significant advancement.”

Mark walked home and couldn't get the blatant rubbish that the certified professor talked out of his head. During the dinner and later in bed, falling asleep, he was still chewing the already tasteless logical cud. Only deep in the night he fell into a dreamless sleep. In the morning he woke up as a firmly self-confident man.

По-русски: Безграничные возможности

According to a story of unknown credibility, on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries investors considered automobile to be economically hopeless. Nevertheless, Henry Ford had managed to obtain a credit of $1400 to build automobile construction under very tight conditions. It seemed that the revenue from car sales wouldn't be able to cover the investment within the term for which Ford could get the credit. Henry Ford might never have become the man who made automobile available for millions of people — if not for the idea, brilliant in its economical efficiency, that came to his mind. The idea was to produce cars deliberately less reliable than it was possible, and to make money by selling spare parts. A quote attributed to Ford: “I make cars to sell parts for them”. The new business model let Ford build a profitable enterprise, return the credit in time, and become the world's first mass producer of cars. Ford brought much to both industry and society. For example, the modern 40-hours week and the very notion of “weekend” became de-facto standard after having been implemented at Ford Motor Company. However, one of his innovations, namely “to make a worse product than you can when it's economically justified”, gave the world a dubious gain. Of course, if not for Ford, someone else would have come up with this idea, great in its simplicity; or maybe someone already had implemented it before him. Today you can see live examples of this wherever you look, and it's time to think about the reasons and consequences of this phenomenon. It's important to note the difference between production of goods or services of simply low quality and production with quality deliberately lower than the producer is capable of ensuring. For example, a software producer who releases software with bugs doesn't necessarily fall into this category because it's impossible to get rid of all bugs (moreover, it's possible than the capabilities of this producer are so limited that they can't make less than one bug per ten lines of code, or that the programmer does a bad job because he's underpaid). We are more interested in a producer who releases software without sufficient debugging in order to make money on paid support or upgrades. So what are the reasons that can make it economically justified to make deliberately worse products than it's possible?

• Releasing unreliable products stimulates demand for add-on goods or services (spare parts, repairs, tech support).
• Short life of the product stimulates demand for more units in replacement of broken or worn out ones.
• Low prime cost of a low-quality product allows to bring the consumer prices down and obtain greater revenue by entering the mass market.
• Low-quality goods are possible to produce faster or in larger quantities, which leads to competitive advantage over those who make quality goods.
• In the modern market, quality is no more the primary tool of competition, inferior to, for example, efficient advertising.
• The market has come to a situation where, for the above reasons, all the competitors release low-quality products; under such conditions it doesn't make sense to try to achieve better quality in this branch because the consumer will have to choose among the available offers anyway.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that Henry Ford's approach is widely implemented in modern industry. Of course, many consumer products, such as cars, we'd never have seen without it, or they would be elite goods available to just a few. On the other hand, the lowering of quality directly affects the consumer. It's especially prominent due to the last reason in the list: as a chain reaction, it impels the makers to skimp on quality more and more in order to gain competitive advantage by other means (low prices, high volumes, advertising). Competition based on “who makes better” seems to have been left out of the modern economy and survived only in particular branches with very specific markets. Each one of us is both a producer and a consumer. At work, we take part in production of goods or services, the rest of the time we consume what others produce. As a consumer, everyone is, of course, interested in having quality goods, however, as a producer, one might find it profitable to skimp on quality. Obviously, a single person's attitude towards quality can be contrastingly different when they routinely switch between the two roles. This means that there must be a conflict point somewhere where two approaches meet. In my opinion, there are three possible models for a person's attitude towards quality:

1. One can accept that most of what one consumes is of low quality, just like what one produces.
2. One can have double standards and expect high quality goods from the market while making low-quality production.
3. Finally, one can demand quality of the goods offered and have the same attitude towards one's own output.

It's worth noting that an employee who follows the third model is inevitably in explicit or, more commonly, implicit conflict with the employer who strives to save on quality. I must say I'm of the third kind. The second model I can't fit in my head at all, and for the first one I'm probably too old-fashioned. Having done some creative work well brings me direct æsthetic satisfaction, and it's for this satisfaction that I'm working in this particular branch and at this particular enterprise. Recently I've turned down an offer of a significantly higher salary elsewhere for a job that I could do but which was completely uninteresting to me. Having taken this decision, I've realized that I don't only work for money; an important part of what I get from my work is the very æsthetic satisfaction that I wouldn't have if I did a worse job than I can in favor of, say, production rate. This means that my and my employer's goals are unfortunately different: I squeeze the maximum æsthetic pleasure from my job by doing it as well as I can, while the employer strives for tighter timeframes, higher volume and everything else but quality. This conflict of interest is currently implicit. If it becomes explicit, I'll have to change my job. The original entry in Russian features a poll: How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?

• Model 1.
• Model 2.
• Model 3.
• A totally different model (please comment).
• I don't face this problem (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. По-русски: XXI век: прощай, качество?