Dick Pountain/ Idealog 260 /09 March 2016 13:42
I imagine many readers are well old enough to remember BT's 1988 TV advert starring Maureen Lipman, where she comforted her grandson for his bad exam results by pointing out that he'd passed an "ology" (even if it was just sociology). I've never obtained an ology myself, only an "istry" or two, but in any case I'm actually rather more interested in "acies": literacy, numeracy and a couple of others that have no acy name.
Not a day goes by without me being thankful for receiving an excellent scientific education. A couple of decades ago I'd have thought twice before admitting that, but no longer because pop science has become a hugely important part of popular culture, from TED talks to sci-fi movies, via miles and bookshelf miles of explanatory books on cosmology, neuroscience, genetics, mathematics, particle physics, even a few ologies. Being a nerd is now a badge of honour. But my thankfulness has little to do with any of that, and more to do with the way basic numeracy, plus a knowledge of statistics ("riskacy"?) and energetics ("ergacy"?) help me understand everything that life throws at me, from everyday accidents and illnesses, through politics to my entire philosophical outlook.
Take for example relationships with doctors. As an aging male I'm on the receiving end of a variety of government-sponsored preventive medicine initiatives, aimed at reducing the incidence of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and other disorders. After an annual battery of tests I'm encouraged to consider taking a variety of drugs, but before agreeing I ask my GP to show me the test results on his PC screen, both as annual historical graphs and raw figures compared to recommended ranges. When shown my thyroid hormone level marginally out of range, I can argue about experimental error and standard deviations, and win since my doctor's no statistician. This process has lead me take lisinopril for my blood pressure, but refuse statins for my marginal cholesterol and ditto for thyroxin.
Numeracy, particularly concerning percentages and rates of change (ie. calculus) is becoming essential to an understanding of just about everything. If some website tells you that eating hot dogs increases your risk of stomach cancer by 20%, you need to be able to ask from what base-rate: 0.000103 rising to 0.000124 doesn't sound nearly so scary. Western citizens face a risk of death from terrorism way below that from being in a car crash, but those risks *feel* very different subjectively. We accept driving risk more readily than dying from an inexplicable act of violence, our politicians know this and so over-react to terrorism and under-react to road safety. But the "acy" that's most poorly distributed of all concerns energetics.
Perhaps a minority of scientists, and almost no lay people, understand the laws of thermodynamics in theory, let alone have an intuitive grasp that could be usefully applied to everyday life. Thanks to the pop science boom, everyone knows Einstein's formula E = MC², but that's only marginally relevant to everyday life since we don't ride nuclear-powered cars or busses, and our bodies run on chemical rather than nuclear reactions. Hence the confusion among would-be dieters over counting calories: does water have any calories?, do carrots have more than celery?
Some variables that really do matter for an energetic understanding of life are energy density and the rate at which energy gets converted from one form to another. You could place a bowl of porridge on the table alongside a piece of dynamite that contains the same number of calories. Dynamite has around 300 times the energy density of porridge so it will be a small piece. More important though, the calories in the porridge (as starches, sugars, protein) get converted to muscular effort and heat rather slowly by your digestive system, while a detonator turns the dynamite's calories into light, heat and sound very quickly indeed. But grind wheat or oats to a fine-enough powder, mix with air as a dust cloud, and deadly industrial explosions can occur.
Energy density calculations affect the mobile device business greatly, both when seeking new battery technologies and considering the safety of existing ones like lithium-ion (just ask Boeing). As for transport, fossil fuels and climate change, they're equally crucial. Electric cars like Tesla are just about do-able now, but electric airliners aren't and may never be, because the energy density of batteries compared to hydrocarbons is nowhere near enough. And when people fantasise online about the possibility of transporting the human race to colonise Mars, energetics is seldom properly discussed. We all ultimately live off energy (and negative entropy) that we receive from sunlight, but Mars is much further away. Try working out the energetics of "terraforming" before you book a ticket...
Monday 8 August 2016
GAME ON?
Dick Pountain/ Idealog 259 /08 February 2016 11:16
I wouldn't ever describe myself as a gamer, but that's not to say that I've never played any computer games. On the contrary, I was once so hooked on Microsoft's "FreeCell" version of solitaire that I would download lists of solutions and complexity analyses by maths nerds. I was almost relieved when those miserable sods at Redmond removed it from Windows 7, and have resisted buying any other version. Long, long before that I played text adventures like Zork (under CP/M), Wizardry (crude graphics, on Apple II but nevertheless highly addictive), and graphic shooters like Doom. I even finished the hilariously grisly Duke Nukem. I still play a single game - the gorgeous French "stretchy" platform game Contre Jour - on my Android tablet.
So, with this rap-sheet, how can I claim not to be gamer? Because I lost all interest in shoot-'em-ups after Duke Nukem, never got into the modern generation of super-realistic shooters like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, and have never purchased a computer for its game-play performance. I do realise that this cuts me off from a major strand of popular culture among today's youth, and *the* major source of current entertainment industry revenues, but I had no idea just how far I'd cut myself off until I read an article in the Guardian last week.
Called "Why my dream of becoming a pro gamer ended in utter failure" (http://gu.com/p/4fzjt/sbl), this fascinating article by tech reporter Alex Hern came as a revelation to me. First of all, I had only the vaguest idea that computer games were being played for money, but secondly I was utterly clueless as to exactly *how* these games are being monetised. The games Hern played aren't GTA-style shooters but up-to-date versions of that mean old Wizardry I used to play, in which play proceeds by casting spells, chosen from a range of zillions. The strategy of these games, played online against human opponents, lies in carefully choosing the deck of spell cards you'll deploy, and in how and when to deploy each one. In game-theoretic terms this is fairly close to Poker, revolving around forming a mental map of your opponents' minds and strategies. And like Poker, these games (for example Hearthstone, which Hern tried) are played in championship series with huge cash prizes of £100,000, but as he soon realized, only one person gets that pay-off and the rest get nothing for a huge expenditure of playing effort. Instead the way most pro gamers get a regular, but more modest, pay-off is by setting up a channel on social-network Twitch, on which people watch you play while being shown paid-for ads.
I'll say that again in case it hasn't sunk in. You're playing a computer simulation of imaginary spell casting, against invisible opponents via a comms link, and people are paying to watch. This intrigues me because it fits so beautifully into a new analysis of modern economies - one might call it the "Uberisation Of Everything" - that I'm, along with many others, trying to explore. Everyone has recently been getting all whooped up about robots stealing our jobs, but for many young people the miserable jobs on offer are no longer worth protecting, and they dream instead of getting rich quickly by exploiting what talents they were born with: a pretty face, a fine voice, a strong imagination, in football, in hip-hop, or... in streaming Hearthstone.
IT lies at the very heart of this phenomenon. Long before robots get smart enough to do all human jobs, computers are assisting humans to do jobs that once required enormous, sometimes lifelong, effort to learn. Uber lets you be a taxi-driver without doing "The Knowledge"; a synthesiser makes you into an instant keyboard player and auto-tune a viable singer; an iPhone can make you a movie director; and Twitch can make you a Poker, or Hearthstone, or Magic pro. The casino aspect of all this, that your luck might make you instantly rich so you don't have to work, merely mirrors the official morality of the finance sector, where young dealers can make billion dollar plays and end up driving Ferraris (and very rarely in jail, LIBOR-fiddling notwithstanding). This is the economics, not of the Wild West itself, but of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Over recent decades the media have so thoroughly exposed us all to the lifestyles of billionaires that now everyone aspires to be a star at something, work is regarded as the curse that Oscar Wilde always told us it was, and money (lots of it) is seen as the primary means to purchase pleasure and self-esteem. The Protestant Work Ethic that motivated our parents or grandparents is being flushed spiralling down the pan...
I wouldn't ever describe myself as a gamer, but that's not to say that I've never played any computer games. On the contrary, I was once so hooked on Microsoft's "FreeCell" version of solitaire that I would download lists of solutions and complexity analyses by maths nerds. I was almost relieved when those miserable sods at Redmond removed it from Windows 7, and have resisted buying any other version. Long, long before that I played text adventures like Zork (under CP/M), Wizardry (crude graphics, on Apple II but nevertheless highly addictive), and graphic shooters like Doom. I even finished the hilariously grisly Duke Nukem. I still play a single game - the gorgeous French "stretchy" platform game Contre Jour - on my Android tablet.
So, with this rap-sheet, how can I claim not to be gamer? Because I lost all interest in shoot-'em-ups after Duke Nukem, never got into the modern generation of super-realistic shooters like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, and have never purchased a computer for its game-play performance. I do realise that this cuts me off from a major strand of popular culture among today's youth, and *the* major source of current entertainment industry revenues, but I had no idea just how far I'd cut myself off until I read an article in the Guardian last week.
Called "Why my dream of becoming a pro gamer ended in utter failure" (http://gu.com/p/4fzjt/sbl), this fascinating article by tech reporter Alex Hern came as a revelation to me. First of all, I had only the vaguest idea that computer games were being played for money, but secondly I was utterly clueless as to exactly *how* these games are being monetised. The games Hern played aren't GTA-style shooters but up-to-date versions of that mean old Wizardry I used to play, in which play proceeds by casting spells, chosen from a range of zillions. The strategy of these games, played online against human opponents, lies in carefully choosing the deck of spell cards you'll deploy, and in how and when to deploy each one. In game-theoretic terms this is fairly close to Poker, revolving around forming a mental map of your opponents' minds and strategies. And like Poker, these games (for example Hearthstone, which Hern tried) are played in championship series with huge cash prizes of £100,000, but as he soon realized, only one person gets that pay-off and the rest get nothing for a huge expenditure of playing effort. Instead the way most pro gamers get a regular, but more modest, pay-off is by setting up a channel on social-network Twitch, on which people watch you play while being shown paid-for ads.
I'll say that again in case it hasn't sunk in. You're playing a computer simulation of imaginary spell casting, against invisible opponents via a comms link, and people are paying to watch. This intrigues me because it fits so beautifully into a new analysis of modern economies - one might call it the "Uberisation Of Everything" - that I'm, along with many others, trying to explore. Everyone has recently been getting all whooped up about robots stealing our jobs, but for many young people the miserable jobs on offer are no longer worth protecting, and they dream instead of getting rich quickly by exploiting what talents they were born with: a pretty face, a fine voice, a strong imagination, in football, in hip-hop, or... in streaming Hearthstone.
IT lies at the very heart of this phenomenon. Long before robots get smart enough to do all human jobs, computers are assisting humans to do jobs that once required enormous, sometimes lifelong, effort to learn. Uber lets you be a taxi-driver without doing "The Knowledge"; a synthesiser makes you into an instant keyboard player and auto-tune a viable singer; an iPhone can make you a movie director; and Twitch can make you a Poker, or Hearthstone, or Magic pro. The casino aspect of all this, that your luck might make you instantly rich so you don't have to work, merely mirrors the official morality of the finance sector, where young dealers can make billion dollar plays and end up driving Ferraris (and very rarely in jail, LIBOR-fiddling notwithstanding). This is the economics, not of the Wild West itself, but of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Over recent decades the media have so thoroughly exposed us all to the lifestyles of billionaires that now everyone aspires to be a star at something, work is regarded as the curse that Oscar Wilde always told us it was, and money (lots of it) is seen as the primary means to purchase pleasure and self-esteem. The Protestant Work Ethic that motivated our parents or grandparents is being flushed spiralling down the pan...
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