When all else fails, read the instructions

Captain Rumpelstoss: But… how will I learn to fly, Herr Colonel?

Colonel Manfred von Holstein: The way we do everything in the German army: from the book of instructions.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

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The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analogue computer with a series of 37 interlocking dials that was used to calculate astronomical positions. It was crafted with the precision and complexity of a Swiss clock, but it was actually made in 150 BC. Such craftsmanship would not be seen for another 1,000 years. Recovered in 1900, from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, the mechanism had initially baffled scientists, who had no idea what it was used for. They tried reverse engineering it. Fortunately they were helped by script etched on the Antikythera mechanism’s wooden housing. This could be considered the world’s first instruction manual. Deciphering it must have been a complex task, and I certainly don’t want to take anything away from these experts. But today’s manuals also present a massive challenge. Modern-day instructionese sometimes feels like Ancient Greek to me. Trying to understand it is one of life’s more frustrating experiences. Indeed for some it can lead to read rage. Today I will be looking at instruction manuals and why they can be so exasperating.

Why are instruction manuals so hard to understand? There are linguistic challenges. Languages deal with and describe reality but this is so complex that any individual attempt to represent it comes up against an important obstacle – actions are, by their very nature, indescribable in words. We can only ever approximate reality.

A typical manual will include instructions for the setup, normal usage, programming maintenance and troubleshooting of your device. In the past manuals would include detailed repair information. However, with the increase in products’ complexity and functions, this information has been disappearing. The fact is that many devices are so cheap it’s just not worth repairing them.

We need to analyse the manufacturers and their products. Many companies seem to assume that the user will know all the technical terms about their product, and do not bother explaining them. I think many of the problems originate in the design. Good design of the products and the user interface is not prioritised. They have lots of engineers, but few or no human factors designers. Designs seem to be feature-oriented rather than task-oriented. The attitude is one of adding more and more features rather than trying to think what the customer will want to do with the device. I have noticed this with DVD players, especially the cheap ones. They tend to have lots of buttons making them really hard to use. On the other I have a Phillips which has fewer buttons. I am not a big Apple fan, but they do make many of their interfaces intuitive. A really well designed product wouldn’t need an instruction manual.

The quality of documentation can also leave a lot to be desired. Many manufacturers do not hire enough technical writers. To save money they will create a single manual for all international markets. So you end a massive booklet, but only a few of those pages are in your language. They will also use one manual for many different models, which can make it more difficult to find the information relating to the particular model we have bought. They want to keep these manuals as compact as possible and so the type-size of the text is a problem for those of us who are in our late 40s.

You get the feeling that many of the writers did not have the product to hand when preparing the manual. However I wouldn’t want the actual designers writing the manuals. They are too close to their creations and tend to make assumptions about what the users will know.

And when it comes to texts originally written in another tongue the problems multiply. Products can now be made all over the world and the meaning can be lost in translation. Many firms evidently do not bother to get their translations checked by a competent English speaker. In instructions this is especially problematic. As precision is so important poor language can make it difficult or impossible to understand what is meant. Do they consumer test new instructions?

We are also partly to blame. We can be lazy. I often think that life is too short to wade through these manuals – they are not exactly compelling reading. If I can get by, I tend to avoid the instructions at all costs. It also depends on our motivation. When I am interested in something, I will make that extra effort. I suppose the people in tech support will come at this from a different perspective. Indeed they have an acronym RTFM, which stands for “Read The Fucking Manual”. There is even a website,
http://www.readthefuckingmanual.com
, where they dish out some practical advice:

If you believe that you may be one of those who, for some strange reason cannot get your product to work, then this is the site for you. Each time you experience a problem installing or using a product, please come to this site to read the following advice, and what do you know… IT’S FREE OF CHARGE! And another thing… It may even work!:

READ THE F***ING MANUAL!

If you follow this advice, probability is that up to 8 times out of 10, you can solve your own problem right there and then, without any hassle and frustration, and without having to call the manufacturer. The manufacturer will tell you to RTFM anyway!

I think that today many product manuals are generally much better than they were in the past I particularly like the quickstart guides, which are so useful for getting quickly accustomed to the basic operations of the product. But there is still room for improvement. It would be nice if companies stuck with simpler designs. I remember a Sony Television I used to have. It had a reversible remote control – one side was for dummies with just the most common buttons, while the other was for the more sophisticated users. The internet is a wonderful tool if you have a problem with a product that the manual can’t solve. You can search the company’s website and look online for solutions from other users of the item that’s giving you trouble. Those how-to videos are especially useful. I like the amateur stuff. It is written by people like us who understand our difficulties. Maybe there really is light at the end of this particular technological tunnel.

A couple of videos

Here is a classic ad for the Sony Betamax:

And then we have this Norweigan sketch:

Will Bitcoin make the world go round?

The Bitcoin tribe is still a small one, and consists mainly of computer geeks, drug-dealers, gold bugs and libertarians. From the Economist Apr 13th 2013

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative. But I am not familiar with the specific product to assert whether it is the best potential setup. And we need a long time to establish confidence. I only talk from skin-in-the-game. If I had money in Bitcoin, I would have reported it. But I don’t yet. I am waiting to understand it better, not with my brain, but with my experience… Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Money is:

1. A unit of account

2. A store of value

3. A medium of exchange

Right now, Bitcoin is none of those things (in any serious sense).  From a tweet

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A couple of years ago I heard An EconTalk podcast about a new electronic currency called Bitcoin. To be honest I found it all rather baffling and didn’t really think much about it until recently. However the Cypriot banking crisis has put Bitcoin in vogue. On Saturday March 16th Nicos Anastasiades, the Cypriot President announced a rescue strategy for the country’s banks that involved confiscating money directly from every single bank account in the country. The following Monday, the price of the Bitcoin rose from $45 to $55 on the major exchanges, and by Wednesday it had reached $65 dollars. There does seem to be a link between the events on the Mediterranean island and the performance of Bitcoin. In Spain the number of Google searches for Bitcoin has been increasing. Although the plan for Cyprus was eventually modified, the interest for Bitcoin remains. I was just looking at the exchange rate online one Bitcoin is now worth nearly 117 dollars. Has its time come?

Bitcoin is virtual currency that was introduced on January 3^rd 2009. It is a cryptocurrency, a type of digital currency that is based on cryptography, making it difficult to counterfeit. Bitcoin is not the only virtual currency around – gamers on Second Life, a virtual world, pay with Linden Dollars. Their emergence shows that the creation of money is not, nor has ever been, a government monopoly. I have always found money and its creation one of the most challenging areas in the study of economics. Anything people come to view as money can serve some of money’s functions without any governmental authorisation. The classic example is the use of cigarettes in prisons as a medium of exchange.

Paper currencies have been accepted as money even when they no longer had government backing. When the first Gulf War concluded in 1991, dinars that had been withdrawn by the government of Saddam Hussein were used in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. They became known as “Swiss dinars” because they were printed with plates from Switzerland. Curiously, this illicit currency was soon worth far more than the government-backed dinars that Saddam was printing like there was no tomorrow. Swiss dinars would serve as northern Iraq’s fiat money for some ten years until a new national currency was brought in.

There is a strange mystery at the heart of Bitcoin. Who is John Galt? In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that was the question. With the cryptocurrency we have a new question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Bitcoin’s creator was a hacker(s) going under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. From now on I will refer to him in the singular. Nakamoto no longer seems to be actively involved in the project but at the beginning he was behind much of the innovation. In 2008 he posted Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System on the internet, the foundational text of this virtual currency.

There have been a number of journalists seeking to unmask Nakamoto. The New Yorker named Michael Clear, a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin, who is knowledgeable about economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networks. Nakamoto’s. He is allegedly said to have said this to a journalist: “I’m not [Nakamoto], but even if I was I wouldn’t tell you.”

Fast Company’s investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry. CNBC’s Rick Santelli says that many believe that it is Grigory Perelman, the eccentric Russian mathematician, who famously turned down the million-dollar Millennium Prize 4 he had won for resolving the Poincaré conjecture. Business Insider believes that it is “a small group of quants from New York or London, who are all experienced software developers. Whatever the truth may be, Nakamoto does not appear to be actively involved in the project. In April 2011, he told a Bitcoin contributor he had “moved on to other things.”

Gavin Andresen, the Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, has described it as an attempt to bring back a decentralized currency of the people. It is not administered by a single authority and the currency is not subject to inflationary moves by a central bank. It enables instant peer-to-peer transactions all around the world, bypassing banks altogether. Unlike our beloved banks, there are low or zero processing fees. As it is stateless it is hard to tax, freeze or trace this money.

Bitcoin fluctuates like any other currency – its value is determined by supply and demand in the market. One Bitcoin can be divided to eight decimal places. 50 Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes. As such, this currency behaves much like gold and other precious metals. With Bitcoin, miners use special software to solve mathematical problems and are issued a certain number of Bitcoins in exchange. This is how one Bitcoin one website describes the system:

“Mining is an important and integral part of Bitcoin that ensures fairness while keeping the Bitcoin network stable, safe and secure.” The idea is to mimic digging gold out of the ground. In the beginning you find a lot, but then you work harder and harder, and go farther and farther, less and less to find. The rate of growth will gradually be scaled down, with a final limit of 21 million Bitcoins.

There are a number of problems that I can see with this cryptocurency. The number of people who accept Bitcoins for products or services is fairly small. It is growing every day as the system becomes more popular, but getting enough people to trust it is complicated. They are in a catch-22 situation. Merchants don’t want to accept Bitcoins till more people are using them, and people don’t want to use Bitcoins until more merchants and other people are accepting them.

The currency has been criticised as a tool of speculators and money-laundering.  Could it be another Ponzi scheme or a speculative bubble, like the mania for tulip bulbs in 17th Century Holland? There are also important security issues with the ever-present danger of hacking. I am suspicious of central government. There are many examples of governments debasing their currency or deliberately provoking inflation. However, are the alternatives going to turn out worse? I am not sure I would want to trust in the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto,

According to philosopher John Gray Bitcoin represents a kind of cyber-anarchism.   Its proponents hope that internet will help them free themselves from government. Bitcoin’s users put their faith in the laws of mathematics. However, a virtual currency will never be able to escape the dangers of the real world. It is not difficult to envisage a number of negative scenarios. Bitcoin may crash and burn, be replaced by rival virtual currencies or be banned by governments because it is actually doing too well. For Gray, the freedom Bitcoin promises is illusory – the dream of finding some kind of technofix that can shelter us from power and crime and protect us from each other.

Having said that, I think that it is a worthy experiment. Anything that challenges the banks is a good thing. We do need new forms of money for the 21^st century. However, I don’t think I’ll be putting my millions in there just yet. I can’t really get my head around it. I tend to be a late adopter with a lot of technologies. Indeed, I have never used PayPal. But I will be following this experiment closely. It’s going to be a fascinating ride.

Anything you Khan do: how a former hedge fund trader is trying to transform education

In 2004 Salman Khan, then a senior hedge fund analyst, began remotely tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics. Word got round and other relatives and friends sought his help too. Realizing that it would be more efficient to distribute the tutorials on YouTube, he created an account there in November 2006. The videos proved to be extremely popular and the organization was incorporated as a non-profit in 2008. A year later Khan quit the day job to focus exclusively on developing Khan Academy full-time. Its goal is to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” Students can make use of their 4,000 video tutorials, as well as interactive challenges, and assessments.  It can be used by both individual students or in the classroom and the system provides you with personalized data about how you are doing and which areas you are struggling in.

Khan Academy is just one example of the educational resources available online. I have been interested in online learning for a number of years now. Here are a few examples of what you can find out there:

Open Yale This is one of my favourites. You have video, audio and even the mid-term and final exams. The lectures come with the transcript, No course credit, degree, or certificate is available, but it’s a great way to capture a bit of the flavour of this prestigious Ivy League institution. Here is a selection of some of the courses:

Death

Financial Markets

Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics

Fundamentals of Physics

Game Theory

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Introduction to Political Philosophy

Introduction to Psychology

Listening to Music

The American Novel Since 1945

The Great Courses This company was founded by Thomas M. Rollins, began life as The Teaching Company in 1990. Videos got Rollins, who graduated from Harvard Law School, out of a tight jam when he was a student. He had skipped a number of classes and was facing a difficult exam on the federal rules of evidence. In desperation he sat through ten hours of videotaped lectures by Professor Irving Younger. The lectures were, in his words, “outrageously insightful, funny, and thorough“. He describes it as one of his best experiences as a student. What’s more he got an A. He had initially intended to create a government program to produce tapes for the public, but was unable to do so because of legal restrictions. After leaving his job as Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labour and Human Resources, he went looking for top professors to create courses for sale to the public. The Great Courses offers hundreds of courses in such areas as economics, literature, fine arts, music, history, philosophy, religion, mathematics and the social sciences. There are more than 500 available via CD, DVD and Internet download.

Their current top ten shows the enormous range of what they offer:

1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World
2. The Science of Natural Healing
3. Physiology and Fitness
4. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation
5. Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works
6. Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time
7. Introduction to Nanotechnology: The New Science of Small
8. Physics and Our Universe: How It All Works
9. Great Tours: Greece and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul
10. Writing Creative Nonfiction

Coursera This educational technology company was founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University in October 2011. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. Coursera is able to cut costs by having students grade their peers’ homework and employing statistical methods to validate the assessment.

Coursera is following an approach popular among Silicon Valley start-ups – grow fast and worry about money later. Venture capitalists and even two universities have invested more than $22-million but even Coursera seems unsure how it will monetise its courses. Daphne Koller explained the rationale:

“Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow“. Possible solutions include:

1. having companies sponsor courses
2. offering certification
3. the sale of information to potential employers

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 These online courses offer the possibility for great teachers to leverage their talent. This is just like what happened to singers when new technologies meant that records could be sold or concerts broadcast. Lecturers who could only be seen by those actually in their class can now be enjoyed by people all over the world.

The great advantage is the flexibility; you are not bound by timetables or location. You can listen to a lecture on MP3 or watch it on a smartphone. This is perfect for me. I’m a bit of a commitment-phobe when it comes to online learning. I like to flit from one topic to another. I don’t really want to do an exam – for me it’s just a bit of fun. But there are other models. What Coursera offers is much more like a traditional college class. Students have to do around ten hours of study per week. They can watch the videos any time you want during the week, but they have to finish your assignments by the end of the week. The advantage of this is that everyone is working on the same thing at the same time; if they then want to go onto a discussion forum, they can get immediate help from one of your peers.

Many of the courses, such as Open Yale involve just a lecturer standing up in front of a group of people. That is what inspired Thomas Rollins. I love this format. Listening to an engaging professor talking about a subject that he is passionate about is a guilty pleasure for me. However, some people argue that this is a bad use of this medium. Salman Khan has been critical of the lecture format. He sees it as relic from the past. 200 years ago there was no alternative – but now we have so many technological possibilities. I can see what Khan is getting at. Filming someone teaching is not visually compelling. The great insight of what Khan does is that you listen to the voice, you don’t watch the professor. The material you see on the screen is what engages you visually, not the teacher’s face, mouth, gestures etc. Khan has another criticism of a lot of the material online. He thinks that people can pay attention for ten or twenty minutes. Then they start to zone out. That’s why they have micro lectures, which last less than 20 minutes

For us the availability of this material has meant that we haven’t had to pay for a private tutor for our son. How many tutors would be happy to go over the same point twenty times? That is the beauty of video – it enables you to go at your own pace, pausing whenever necessary and reviewing the material as many times as you want.

What about the classroom? Khan Academy materials can be used for class teaching. Flip teaching is one of the key concepts. This involves students watching the videos on their own, and then coming together to discuss them. A teacher can spend more time interacting with and tutoring students instead of lecturing. In the classroom pupils can then try to apply this knowledge by solving problems and doing project-based learning with lots of peer-to-peer learning.

I hope you find this as inspiring as I do. We are living in exciting times for education. I like the fact that there are different models. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t believe that the traditional university will disappear anytime soon. Some of these ideas will prove to be dead ends. But others will help to transform the way we learn. We don’t really know what the best mix is. We are at a very early stage in the application of these technologies, and I can already see massive benefits.  So, I salute you Mr. Khan.

How we saw education of the future

I thought it would be a good idea to look at how the future of education was seen in the past. My starting had to be the Paleofuture blog, which features articles, photos  and videos from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries predicting how the world would be in the future. Here is what they said about classrooms and schools:

The Public School of Tomorrow (1912)

Our future transportation for the school of tomorrow will be the automobile, interurban railway, mono railway, gyroscope car, overhead cable car, pneumaticair pressure tubes, flying machines and other means of travel, which future geniuses may develop. Distance will be annihilated and many miles will be as one mile today. Population will be denser in our rural districts and there will be a family on every forty acres or less.

Movies Will Replace Textbooks (1922)

Schools have had a longstanding immunity against the introduction of new technologies. In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that movies would replace textbooks. In 1945 one forecaster imagined radios as common as blackboards in classrooms. In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner predicted that teaching machines and programmed instruction would double the amount of information students could learn in a given time. Filmstrips and other audiovisual aids were fads thirty years ago, and the television, now seen as a supplier of brain candy, once had a sterling reputation as an education machine.

The Push-Button School of Tomorrow (1958)

Tomorrow’s schools will be more crowded; teachers will be correspondingly fewer. Plans for a push-button school have already been proposed by Dr. Simon Ramo, science faculty member at California Institute of Technology. Teaching would be by means of sound movies and mechanical tabulating machines. Pupils would record attendance and answer questions by pushing buttons. Special machines would be “geared” for each individual student so he could advance as rapidly as his abilities warranted. Progress records, also kept by machine, would be periodically reviewed by skilled teachers, and personal help would be available when necessary.

The student desk of the future includes a small camera, presumably so that the teacher being projected on a large screen in the front of the class can keep tabs on the little rascals. One thing that fascinates me about computer consoles of the retrofuture is that the QWERTY keyboard is not yet an assumed input device. Each computing device seems tailored to meet the needs of the intended user, as with this learning machine of the futuristic year 1999 and this auto-tutor from the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

1968′s Computerized School of the Future

Picture yourself in front of a television screen that has an electronic typewriter built in below it. You put on a set of headphones, and school begins.

“Good morning, John,” a voice says. “Today you’re going to study the verbs ‘sit’ and ‘set.’ Fill in the blank in each sentence with the proper word — ‘sit,’ sat’ or ‘set.’ Are you ready to go?”

 “YES,” you peck out on the typewriter, and class gets under way.

The machine clicks away in front of you. “WHO HAS ____ THE BABY IN THE MUD?” it writes.

You type “SAT.” The machine comes right back: “SET.” You know you’re wrong, and the score confirms it: “SCORE: 00.”

A generation or so from now a truly modern school will have a room, or maybe several rooms, filled with equipment of the type shown on the cover of this issue. Even kindergarten children may be able to work some of the machines—machines such as automatically loading film and slide projectors, stereo tape recorders and record players, and electric typewriters or TV devices tied into a computer.

Customizable instruction seems to be the largest benefit touted by the article when it comes to every child having their own computer terminal:

The major advantage of the computer is that it helps solve the teacher’s biggest problem—individual instruction for every student. In a large class the teacher has to aim at the average level of knowledge and skill, but a computer can work with each child on the concepts and problems with which he needs the most help. A teacher can do this, too, but she often lacks the time required.

Computers combined with other teaching aids will provide schools with new flexibility in teaching. Students will be able to work at their own speeds in several subjects over a period of time. A boy might work all day on a science project, for instance, and complete his unit in that subject before some other children in his class had even begun. But they would be working on other subjects at their own speeds.

Computers are expensive for teaching, and they will not become a major force in education for some time. But apparently they are here to stay. One educational publication predicted that “another generation may well bring many parents who cannot recall classwork without them.” And a computer specialist went even farther. He said, “… I predict that computers will soon play as significant and universal a role in schools as books do today.”

 CNN education in 2025

Looking through my own stuff I also found this piece from a CNN documentary from the year 2000. the piece featured predictions for 2025 from Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard graduate school of education.

There are also no freshman, sophomore, junior or senior classes. Students advance to three levels of learning: not by taking tests or getting grades, but by completing projects.

They can work at their own pace. They can pursue their own interests. They can have contact with people who could be mentors. And I think equally important, they can give. They can help other people.

If we’re lucky is that some will go for 14 and some will go for 10, because you take your formal education as long as it takes to demonstrate that you have the intellectual power that the state, that your community, that your family expects.

People will be able to work more at their home will be able to have contact with other kids elsewhere who have the same kinds of talents and skills they do. They won’t be sort of stuck with the same 30 kids in a classroom for eight or 12 years.

Unless schools prepare us for an information-rich society, then our youngsters simply won’t be prepared for dealing with a world that’s here any day now.

 I thought I’d finish with a couple of contrasting videos:

The world is flatus

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed, that he went to Travell 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, ‘My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.  John Aubrey, Brief Lives.

… farts are a kind of language. They are inherently social in a way that defecation is not. They tend to take your companions by surprise. Furthermore, farts are an occasion for self-examination, for questioning the extent of our freedom and the nature of self-mastery. We can’t help farting; it is a question of need. So part of what the Middle Ages wrestled with when people were talking about farts was this constant reminder of the needs of the body. Farting carries this reminder that the body behaves on its own, and there is nothing you can do about it. It reminds us that our bodily freedom is limited.

Farts carry anxiety and humour and disgust. People see themselves in the reactions of others and are thus intensely aware of themselves in those moments when farts manifest themselves. When you smell somebody you are closer to them than when you are just looking at them, but you are farther away than when you are touching them. Farts can create these moments rich with insight. I think much of the humour of farting is located on this very ordinary, humble level. On Farting: Laughter and Language in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

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Joseph Pujol was a singular character. When he was twelve he discovered that he had a unique talent. While swimming near Marseilles – he found that by contracting his abdomen muscles he could take water into his bowels and expel it in a powerful stream at will. He then stated practising with air instead of water and was able to make tenor, baritone, and bass fart sounds.

In 1892 Pujol began a stellar career at The Moulin Rouge in Paris with the stage name Le Petomane (The “Fartiste”). His show was pure spectacle. As well as thunder and cannons, he would imitate the farts of a little girl, a mother-in-law and a bride on her wedding night. He would then go backstage to put one end of a rubber tube into his anus. He returned to the stage and smoked a cigarette from this tube, which he used to play a couple of tunes on a flute. After removing the rubber tube, he would blow out some of the gas-jet footlights, before leading the audience in a rousing sing-along for the grand finale. The piece de resistance was his anal version of La Marseillaise, which would bring tears to the eyes of those watching. The Moulin Rouge is said to have hired nurses to deal with audience members who had laughing fits. His artistic talent has recently been commemorated in the musical “The Fartiste“, an Off-Broadway production.

Today I am going to be looking at farting. Flatulence, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, backdoor breeze, letting one rip and airbrushing your boxers – the act of expelling intestinal gases has been a rich source of language. The word “fart” is one of the oldest in English. Its immediate origins are in the Middle English word feortan, which itself is kin to the Old High German word ferzan.

The American comedian Sarah Silverman once commented that fart jokes are “the sign language of comedy.” In South Park they have been making them for nearly two decades. But Parker and Stone are in pretty exalted company. In The City of God Augustine mentions men who “have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing“. Flatulent demons in the eighth ring of Hell make “trumpets of their asses” in Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the most celebrated incidents of flatulence humour in early English literature is in The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. The character Nicholas sticks his buttocks out of a window at night and humiliates his rival Absolom by farting in his face. Absolom gets his revenge by thrusting a red-hot blacksmith’s poker between Nicholas’s cheeks. In 1776 Benjamin Franklin found the time to publish a book of bawdy essays called Fart Proudly. The British explorer, and an outstanding linguist in his right, Sir Richard Burton wrote about a tribe of Arabian Bedouins who employed a subtle system of farts to transmit codes and warnings.

We like to think we are more sophisticated now. But we still find this kind of lavatorial humour funny. I Who can forget the scene from Blazing Saddles? The insult “I fart in your general direction” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail has become a classic n 2008, a farting application for the iPhone raked in nearly $10,000 in just one day. There are over 60 fart apps for the iPhone and iPod touch alone. Here are 31 of them:

The technical term for a fart is flatus. Farts contain variable amounts of nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and oxygen in subtly distinct combinations and percentages, they blend to form the infinite olfactory variety of the human fart – in the words of Alan Kligerman a “gas smell is as characteristic of a person as a fingerprint.” Human flatus may contain hydrogen and/or methane, which are both flammable. If sufficient amounts of these gases are present, it’s possible to light the fart on fire. This is the stuff of YouTube videos and as far as I know there has not been any significant scientific research on the subject.

There are many possible reasons why some people fart more than others; two of the most important are swallowing air when you eat or eating a lot of carbohydrates. If the gas results from the former the chemical composition will approximate that of air. If the fart is produced by digestion or bacterial production, the chemistry will be more varied. Foods that contain a high amount of indigestible carbohydrates include many of the usual suspects:

apples

artichokes

beans

broccoli

brussels sprouts

cabbage

cauliflower

lentils

prunes

pulses

raisins

Health conditions that can cause symptoms of flatulence include constipation, lactose intolerance, irritable bowel syndrome and coeliac disease. This last one is a common digestive condition which involves intolerance to a protein called gluten, which is found in wheat, rye and barley.

The gastrointestinal tract works like a factory production line breaking everything down so that it can enter the bloodstream. Once food reaches the stomach, all nutrients are broken down into smaller components, amino acids, fatty acids and glucose, which are absorbed in the small intestine. Flatulence occurs when a food does not completely break down in the stomach and intestine. This undigested food arrives at the large intestine. When the bacteria break this material down, they produce a variety of gases in a process analogous to when yeast produces carbon dioxide to leaven bread. The principal culprit of the odour we associate with flatulence is hydrogen sulphide. Anyway, these gases have to go somewhere. And that’s when the problems begin.

In January 2011, the Malawi Minister of Justice, George Chaponda, said that air fouling legislation would make public flatulence illegal in the southern African country. After being subjected to media ridicule the minister withdrew his proposal. Chaponda obviously went too far, but there is no doubt that flatulence is a constant source of embarrassment. Walking away is not a good solution the odour follows us, pulled along in the farter’s direction by air currents. Moreover, the smell gets caught in the clothing, and diffuses out slowly. You can always blame the dog. But that doesn’t cut the mustard. Surely in the 21^st century there must be a solution.

This search for a cure has been joined by a number of unsung heroes. No article about farting is complete without a reference to Dr. Fart. Michael D. Levitt, of the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, is the world’s leading authority on flatulence. He has produced 34 papers on flatus. He notes that if you have on average more than 22 separate flatulent occurrences a day. This contrasts with two male patients who farted more than 140 times a day. It turned out that they were both lactose-intolerant; once dairy products were cut out of their diets, they returned to the normal range.

Buck Weimer, a retired Colorado psychologist designed fart-proof underpants for his wife Arlene, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, which causes bad-smelling gas. “You’re lying in bed with your wife and suffering but you don’t want to divorce a lady for body gas – it doesn’t look good on your resume; – so you start looking for solutions,” said Weimer talking about what motivated him. After a number of failed prototypes, he would eventually perfect and patent a filtration system. And the rest is history. Arlene’s social life was transformed and everyone in her bowel disease support group was demanding a pair. The Weimers now sell their Under-ease anti-flatulence underwear online. The website proudly proclaims:

“revolutionary patented underwear recommended by doctors for offensive gas“. Their strapline is “wear them for the ones you love.” This consideration will set you back some $30. They have been a success and they are now on their second generation.

You also have this alternative, Check out this infomercial for a blanket:

This is high-tech stuff. According to the manufacturer its layer of activated carbon fabric is the same technology used by the U.S. army to protect against chemical weapons.

There are, however others for whom the farts are not a problem. Just like everything else there are fetishists. The infatuation is called flatulophilia. Flatulophiles are usually male, and there is an important niche market for porn to cater for this group. I normally do extensive research preparing for my blog. I am fascinated by all manifestations of human behaviour. But fart porn is too much even for me.

A small article about Big Data

The statistics about data boggle the mind. The world’s data is doubling every 1.2 years. 90% of it has been created in the last two years. In 2012 there were two trillion gigabytes; by 2020 it will be 35 trillion gigabytes. We are not just consumers of this stuff. We have become active data agents, who spew out over 2.5 quintillion bytes every day from consumer transactions, communication devices, online behaviour and streaming services. This is our digital footprint. Of the 7 billion people on our planet over five billion own a mobile phone. Every day we make five billion Google searches, watch 2.8 billion YouTube videos and send over 11 billion texts. To be honest, I think that the names -terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte or yottabyte – are like a foreign language. I would also like to know who compiles all these factoids that abound in TED talks or YouTube videos. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that we do have access to ever-increasing amounts of data

Welcome to the world of Big Data, the next big thing in the world of tech. The term is said to have been coined by John Mashey, a computer scientist working for Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s. We are not the only source of this deluge of information. Data is becoming more understandable to computers. We now have the capacity to analyse unstructured data – stuff like words, images videos and streams of sensor data – that were inaccessible for traditional databases. Here are some of the major sources:

Scientific research data At CERN alone they produce 40 TB every second.

Retailer databases As a result of e-commerce and loyalty card schemes, retailers have been able to build up vast databases of recorded customer activity.

Vision recognition As vision recognition improves, it is starting to become possible for computers to glean meaningful information and data relationships from photographs and videos.

Internet of things As more smart objects go online, Big Data is also being generated by an expanding Internet of Things. One example is the sensors used to gather climate information.

Big Data generates value from the storage and processing of humongous quantities of digital information. Rather than just to putting data into silos for data storage for relatively little return we will be able to analyse these enormous datasets. It’s a new kind of asset – like a vital new mineral. Big Data is best understood in terms of the three Vs: variety, velocity and volume, i.e. large quantities of data of all kinds generated in real time. Crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves and our world; it is “humanity’s dashboard”. This data can’t be analyzed using traditional computing techniques. It requires new systems, software and computers. And then you have those incredible machine-learning algorithms – the more data, the more they learn.

Big Data has the potential to improve analytical insight. It really is an extraordinary time to be a researcher with so much internet data available. It is being mined in areas as diverse as astrophysics, biology, economics or linguistics.

Google, Amazon and Facebook have already shown how it is possible to deliver personalised search results, advertising, and product recommendations using the vast amounts of data they handle. One third of Amazon’s sales are said to come from its recommendation engine. In a previous post I talked about the company Epagogix, whose algorithm uses big data analysis to evaluate the potential profitability of movies and TV shows before they get made.  It is not just something that can be exploited by corporations. Big Data has the potential to be an intelligent tool that will enable us to:

Improve traffic management in cities, permitting the smarter operation of electricity generation infrastructures.

Help farmers to accurately forecast bad weather and crop failures.

Predict and plan for criminal activity or pandemics.

One exciting application is medicine. In the U.S. there is now an ambitious project to collect data on the care of hundreds of thousands of cancer patients and use it to help guide treatment of other patients across the health-care system. Cancer specialists would be able to consult the database, where they would be able to see how similar patients had fared on a particular regimen. The rationale is that information gleaned from huge clinical databases will give us a wealth of information about the benefits and harms of treatments. Ultimately it should lead to better quality healthcare and the development of new drugs.

Chris Anderson, an early fan of Big Data, foresees the end of theory and the demise of the expert:

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

So are we about to enter a data utopia? I fear not.

There are important privacy issues, but those will have to wait for another post. I am going to concentrate on the methodological objections.  What is the value of having this amount of data? Nassim Taleb has branded it a nasty phenomenon, cherry picking on an industrial scale. It may mean more information, but it also means more false information. Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford has warned about the danger of looking for a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data; many bits of straw look like needles. We must be wary of lies, damned lies and Big Data. I am particularly nervous about its application in finance.

Nevertheless, I am a fan of Big Data. As an English teacher, I love the access to so much grammar and lexis in the wild. Of course we need to be aware of generating spurious correlations. However, we had spurious correlations before the invention of big data. The classic case of this comes from the late 1940s in the USA when it was thought that there was a relationship between polio and the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks. We always need to have a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to statistics. But I feel that knowing more about the world is a good thing. In the past inventions like the microscope and the telescope opened our eyes to worlds we could never have imagined. Some people feel uneasy about human activity being quantified in this way. In his book about the calculation of risk, Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein talked about how the Catholic Church had been opposed to statistics because they believed they were incompatible with the notion of free will.

I don’t believe in panaceas, but I think that Big Data presents us with some important opportunities. Time, that incorruptible judge, will tell us how much was hype.

__________

*In this article I have used data with a singular verb. Though strictly speaking it should take a plural verb, as far as I am concerned data wants to be singular. This is like agenda – no one ever uses agendum.

Tunnel visionaries: how the Victorians transformed public transport

Yet every line, and every station, has its own particular identity. The Northern Line is intense and moody, while the Central Line is filled with purpose and energy. The Circle Line is adventurous and breezy, while the Bakerloo Line is disconsolate and brooding. The sorrows of Lancaster Gate are preceded by the liveliness of Notting Hill Gate, while the comfort of Sloane Square is followed by the brisk anonymity of Victoria. Underground trains have a different tone, and atmosphere, at distinct times of day. In the afternoon, for example, when “everyone else” is at work they become more seductive and luxuriant places redolent of ease or even indolence. In the late evening they become more sinister, a haven for the drunk or the mad. Peter Ackroyd, London Under

The London Underground is 150 years old. In 1863 the United States was still in the throes of a horse-drawn civil war. Germany hadn’t been created, nor was Italy unified. Another 13 years would pass before Sitting Bull defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. And Paris would have to wait another 37 years before it had its own underground. The London Underground may not be the best in the world now, and it is said to be the most expensive in the world, but we shouldn’t take anything away from the Victorians for their incredible feat of engineering.

The London Underground has become a symbol of the capital, a part of popular culture. In Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature, the 1926 film The Lodger, he makes a cameo appearance as a passenger on a tube train. In Keith Lowe’s novel Tunnel Vision, a young man has to travel through every Underground station in nineteen hours for a bizarre bet. In Down in the Tube Station at Midnight Paul Weller is assaulted by some men whose breath exuded an aroma of drinking establishments, a certain penal institution and fascistic political groupings. According to Otto (Kevin Kline) in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, the London Underground is a political movement.

It was in 1845 that Charles Pearson, Solicitor to the City of London, began championing the idea of an underground railway to bring passengers and freight services into the centre of the city. Less than twenty years later, on 9 January 1863, the first train pulled out of London’s Paddington Station for the five kilometre underground journey to Farringdon Street. Originally steam trains were used to pull the carriages.

The great and the good, the 700 dignitaries gathered at Paddington for the opening ceremony, were driven through the tunnels in a succession of trains. When they eventually emerged into the terminus at Farringdon Street, they were greeted by police bands. On the following day the line was opened to the general public. Before the opening there had been some doubts about the public’s reaction. What would be lurking down there in the depths of London’s underworld? The tunnels were not well lit because they only had gas lighting at the time. Would people really  risk their lives? The Times was sceptical that Londoners would want “to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul sub-soil of London.” But the naysayers were proved wrong – on the first day it opened 30,000 people went down and the trains were completely full. One journalist compared the opening night of a West End play. This was indeed the greatest show on earth.

The early underground lines were built by a method called cut and cover. This involved cutting open a massive hole in the ground. The idea was to use an existing road rather than to demolish a lot of houses, though a few houses did have to be demolished. You put in the railway and then covered it over again. Then in the 1880s James Henry Greathead invented a tunnelling shield that let you go very deep underground. There had been tunnelling shields before, but Greathead perfected it. To this day, most tunnelling shields are still loosely based on the Greathead shield. The shield enabled the City and South London Railway to open the world’s first deep-level underground electric railway between Stockwell and King William Street in 1890.

Like London itself, the Underground grew in a haphazard and piecemeal way – just how I like it. There was no master plan. The system was developed by competing private operators. Money and power guided its development. In the first stage of its history it was administered by capitalist financiers of dubious reputation. Nevertheless, by the first decade of the 20th century what became the Northern line, the Piccadilly line, the Bakerloo line, Metropolitan and District were all in place.

The companies started to realise the potential benefits of mutual co-operation And gradually it started to happen. In 1908 a meeting was convened to find a common name for their enterprise for marketing purposes. The choice was between “Tube” and “Electric” and “Underground”, with the latter emerging the winner. Another distinctive symbol, the Roundel, a red circle crossed by a horizontal blue bar, was also introduced in this year.

In 1933, all public transport in London became integrated into an unsubsidised public corporation ultimately known as London Transport which, after World War II, was nationalised, bringing the Underground under the direct control of central government for the first time in its history. During the post-war period, the electrification of the network was completed, the last steam locomotive disappearing in 1961.

Harry Beck’s London underground map was revolutionary. Beck, an engineering draftsman had a key insight. Geographical accuracy was not really important. What mattered to passengers how to get from one station to another, and where to change. Simplicity is genius. It reminds some of Mondrian, and social historian Eric Hobsbawm called it “the most original work of avant-garde art in Britain between the wars.” Beck took his inspiration from electrical circuit diagrams where there are straight lines and if you have to have a curve, it is a 45° one. It did meet with some resistance from the bosses, but when it was finally published in 1933, it was a huge hit with the public. In fact, London Underground have now made more money from the Tube map than they have from running trains.

The Underground is a popular venue for suicides. Of the three attempts each week, one is successful. “Jumpers”, as they are known to staff, prefer to die below ground; more deaths occur in underground than in overground stations. Apparently most deaths are caused by being crushed by the train, and not by electrocution. Those who survive may well be charged with offenses such as “endangering safety on the railway” and “obstruction of trains with intent“.  11:00 a.m. is the favoured time.

According to statistics for the nougties released by Transport for London (TfL) in 2011 the rate had gone up to 80 per year, as compared with 46 in the year 2000. This was put down to the global financial crisis. The worst-affected station was King’s Cross St. Pancras while the numbers for the decade by line were as follows:

145 Northern Line

99 Central Line

92 Piccadilly Line

81 District Line

27 Jubilee Line

When there is a suicide a certain Inspector Sands may be called. It may sound like the protagonist of an English detective series, but it is actually a code phrase used by public transport authorities in the United Kingdom, including Network Rail and London Underground, to alert staff and other agencies, such as the police, to an emergency or potential emergency situation without creating panic among the public. The emergency might be a death on the track, a fire or bomb scare The automated public address announcement can be generated automatically by the station’s fire warning system, or can be activated from the station control. “Mr Sands” has long been used as a code for “fire” in theatres, where “Mr Sands is in the foyer” means that a fire has broken out in the foyer.

The role that Underground stations played in the Second World War is well known. We have all seen images of Londoners sheltering from The Blitz in tube stations. But, at first the government hadn’t wanted to let the public to take refuge in its platforms and tunnels during air raids. However, the heavy raids of September, 1940 eventually forced them to relent.  The conditions in the tunnels could be pretty unpleasant, and safety was not assured even within the bowels of London. The most horrific incident on the tube took place at Bethnal Green on 3 March, 1943 during an air raid. A woman with a child tripped at the bottom of a spiral staircase leading to the Central line platforms, and in the ensuing panic many others fell and were crushed to death by the sheer force of those trying to get down the staircase. It was later found that 173 people had died from suffocation. Since the end of the war the Underground has been marked by tragedy on many other occasions. The three most famous incidents are:

The Moorgate crash (1975)

King’s Cross Fire (1987)

July 7 Bombings (2005)

While the Tube may not be growing now, we are seeing the growth of complementary systems. The Docklands Light Railway, which is almost entirely unmanned, serves Canary Wharf. And then there’s Crossrail. This massive project, due to open in 2018, will link Berkshire and Buckinghamshire via Greater London to Essex and Kent. If it’s like the commuter trains in Madrid, it will also be a handy alternative to the tube in central London. In the Spanish capital a journey from Nuevos Ministerios to Sol, which used to take half an hour, can now be done in just three minutes. It’s going to be difficult to represent all these new services on a map. Boris Johnson got back to London after one of his foreign jaunts to discover that the river Thames had been removed. Boris sprang into action and London’s artery was rapidly reinstated. Let’s hope that it can continue for another 150 years.

Patents as weapons of mass destruction

The Patent Office is the mother-in-law of invention.  Anonymous

Next came the patent laws. These began in England in 1624, and in this country with the adoption of our Constitution. Before then any man [might] instantly use what another man had invented, so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this, secured to the inventor for a limited time exclusive use of his inventions, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.  Abraham Lincoln

Don’t negotiate with terrorists; patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history, every year. Entrepreneur Drew Curtis during a TED presentation.

___________

 For the last few years the world’s biggest technology companies have been embroiled in a series of acrimonious legal disputes. Apple, Google, Samsung Microsoft, HTC HP, Amazon and others have being suing one another in courts around the globe, alleging that they are infringing one another’s patents. Steve Jobs famously threatened to “go thermonuclear” over what he saw as Android’s ripping off of the iPhone. Indeed, Apple recently won an important legal victory over Samsung in the U.S. courts. All this litigation has been a goldmine for lawyers. In the smartphone industry in the past couple of years, as much as $20 billion has been spent on patent litigation and patent purchases. Why has it become such a controversial and expensive area of the law?

A patent is the government grant of monopoly on an invention for a limited amount of time. Different countries have different periods of time; a typical period is around twenty years. The economic rationale behind granting patents is relatively clear; imitation is a lot cheaper than innovation. If there were no patents, then someone who invested time and money to create a valuable invention would not necessarily be rewarded commensurately. Not every idea is susceptible to being patented; In order for a patent claim to be valid, the invention must be “useful,” “novel,” and “nonobvious.”

Patent trolls have become an important force in patent litigation in the last few years. This pejorative term is used for a person or company that enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in an aggressive or opportunistic way, with no intention of making or marketing the patented invention. Patent troll was popularized in 2001 by Peter Detkin, former assistant general counsel of Intel, to describe TechSearch, its CEO, Anthony O. Brown, and their lawyer, Raymond Niro, while Intel was defending a patent suit against them. He first branded the litigants “terrorists”, but they threatened to sue him for libel. So he decided to organise a competition:

… we got a lot of suggestions, but none really fit. But at the time my daughter was, I think, four or five and she liked playing with those little troll dolls. The original one, in fact, is still in my office. And so I turned to her and I said, oh, the story of a troll kind of fits because the whole Billy Goats Gruff thing. It’s someone lying under a bridge they didn’t build, demanding payment from anybody who passed. I said, how about a patent troll?

There is a less loaded term for such companies – NPEs, non-practising entities. One of the key players is Nathan Myhrvold. The former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents. Its business model is focussed on developing a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to companies. Intellectual Ventures has received a little over 1,000 patents on what they’ve invented in their labs, but they have bought more than 30,000 patents from other people. They claim that their goal is to assist small inventors against corporations. It could be someone with a brilliant idea. He has a patent, but despite this, companies are stealing his idea and he has neither the money nor legal nous to stop them. Intellectual Ventures can buy this inventor’s patent and make sure that companies who are using the idea actually pay for it. Curiously, Peter Detkin, who coined the term “patent troll” now, works for Intellectual Ventures.

I do think that patents are a good idea, but we need to be aware that there are downsides. By creating a monopoly you are imposing higher prices on consumers. And patents can also have a negative effect on innovation, becoming a toll gate on the road of innovation. Opponents of patent trolls point to the statistics about their economic impact. From 2004 to 2009, the number of patent infringement lawsuits jumped by 70%, while licensing fee requests went up 650%. According to James Bessen, the costs of patent litigation exceed their investment value in all industries except chemistry and pharmaceuticals. In the software industry, litigation costs are twice the investment value.

One noticeable trend is that companies are patenting concepts. Companies come up with a concept, and they file the patent for this concept before they actually figure out how to convert it into a product.  It becomes a race to get your invention to the patent office first. When you have vague, overreaching patents, it becomes harder for people and companies to innovate without falling foul of them. One of the more ridiculous examples of the granting of a patent must be Amazon patenting their one-click buying system. Then there is Drew Curtis’s company Fark.com, which was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources. Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email! And finally last year Google was sued over its Google Offers business venture. This is like those daily offers I receive from Groupon on my PC every morning.

The federal lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware, involves four patents owned by research firm Walker Digital. They have also sued Amazon and the aforementioned Groupon. In fact, there were some 100 companies involved. They were all accused of infringing the following patents:

7,039,603: “Settlement systems and methods wherein a buyer takes possession at a retailer of a product.”

6,249,772: “Systems and methods wherein a buyer purchases a product at a first price and acquires.”

6,754,636: “Purchasing systems and methods wherein a buyer takes possession at a retailer of a product.”

7,689,468: “Purchasing, redemption and settlement systems and methods wherein a buyer takes possession at a retailer.”

The cases were settled out of court with Walker Digital receiving $25m. The previous November they had sued Facebook for friending, or “Method and system for establishing and maintaining user-controlled anonymous communications“.

Invention is always going to be a minefield. History is littered with inventors unable to benefit from their creations. You need to strike a balance between protecting inventors and having a system that chokes off further innovation. It has to be said so far technology does seem to be a pretty vibrant sector. Of course this may be despite the patent system. Judge Richard Posner has argued that patents are unnecessary. He contends that even if other companies and copy and imitate their products, Apple will still be more than adequately compensated for their investment in research and development. I wouldn’t go as far as Posner but I would like to see more flexibility. How about 3-year patents in technology? And I would like to see them issued a little less liberally. In August two congressman brought in the SHIELD (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes) Act, a bipartisan bill aims to bring in a “loser pays” system for software and hardware patent lawsuits, to protect start-ups from companies that want to force settlements through the threat of high legal bills. However, there is no perfect system. Individuals and companies will always try to game the system.

Now That’s What I Call Music!

Steven Pinker famously called it auditory cheesecake. It has been used as therapy for patients, but also as a form of torture. It can move us with its sublime beauty, but it can also whip us into a killing frenzy. The production and consumption of it is a multi-million pound industry. And writing about it is said to be like dancing about architecture. I am referring to music. Humans have been making music for more than 30,000 years. Its presence is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted.

What are the origins of music? We may well never know the answer; it is a subject full of speculation. This question came to the fore in the second half of the 19th century. Charles Darwin was one of those analysing its evolutionary significance He believed that music was important for sexual selection. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist. takes a similar line, arguing that it, like the plumage of a peacock, serves to demonstrate fitness to mate.  An alternative hypothesis for music’s emergence, put forward by Robin Dunbar, another evolutionary psychologist. is that in our evolutionary past it helped foment social bonding of groups. We can see this function in the national anthem or football chants. The final hypothesis that I am going to look at sees music as a biological accident.  Music did not lead to language; language led to music, in what has turned out to be a glorious accident. A brain which transforms sound into meaning goes into overdrive when it hears tone, melody and rhythm. An article in The Economist put it like this:

Singing is auditory masturbation to satisfy this craving. Playing musical instruments is auditory pornography. Both sate an appetite that is there beyond its strict biological need.

Music is not located in one part of the brain, but in many different areas. According to the famous British neurologist Oliver Sacks many of the musical parts of the brain are close to where memory and emotion are located. And so music tends to embed itself in memory and to evoke emotions with an immediacy greater than any other stimulus except perhaps smells. Moreover, playing music changes the brain. When looking at a brain scan you can tell that it is the brain of a musician because certain parts of the brain may become enlarged in response to music. This has nothing to do with the so-called Mozart Effect, which became a fad a few years ago, despite the fact that there is little evidence to justify it. It’s a seductive idea. But we should listen to Mozart’s music because of its beauty. That is surely enough.

If you are interested in the neurological aspects of music then Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is the book for you. The book features a number of case studies. One of the most mysterious is that of Tony Cicoria, an orthopaedic surgeon.

Cicoria was in a phone booth during a lightning storm, and his head was struck by lightning. He had a cardiac arrest and his brain got no oxygen; he was, in effect, dead for 30 seconds. He would soon recover his memory, but he then developed a sudden insatiable passion for listening to and playing the piano. His head was flooded with music that seemed to have come from nowhere – before the incident he had had no musical inclinations. Now he wanted to play and even compose. He didn’t give up his day job, but he hired a piano teacher and learned to transcribe the music that was going through his head. He has now become an accomplished musician who has given recitals in New York. He is according to Wikipedia, currently working on a number of pieces including a symphony based on Brahms’ Variation, op. 9, and a concerto. And you can buy his Fantasia The Lightning Sonata, Op. 1: II from Amazon.com. This is a fascinating story but I’m not sure it tells us anything about music and the brain.

Music can mean very different things in different times and places. In the West it has now become linked to expertise. Music is somebody standing up on stage performing for others. In traditional societies music pervades everything. That should remind us that music doesn’t necessarily have to be elitist. However, in recent years the amateur has made a comeback with the emergence of karaoke YouTube and talent shows. I have an ambivalent attitude towards karaoke. Whenever I think of it John Entwhistle’s comment about heavy metal comes to mind:

“I’m only interested in heavy metal when it’s me playing it. I suppose it’s a bit like smelling your own farts.”

The ultimate version of Karaoke are all these talent shows that have proliferated in the last few years. Marina Hyde writes about Simon Cowell and his karaoke-industrial complex. Cowell apparently has a net worth of: £225 Million ($364m). In Ben Elton’s satire of The X-Factor/Pop Idol style reality TV shows, Chart Throb, the producers divide the successful into three categories – Clingers, Blingers and Mingers:

Clingers: these are the desperate ones. They have just enough talent to be utterly self-deluded . . . actually, sometimes they manage to be self-deluded without having any talent at all, which is really good telly. They have to cry and plead and beg. God gave them their dream, you see. It’s that important. They are normally women but they can be male. Middle-aged guys who just want to give their kids a better life than they’ve had. Club singers who’ve done their time and paid their dues and want one last shot at the dream.

Blingers: these are the extroverts, the show-offs. The type of weirdly self-confident lunatics whose unshakeable faith in their own powers to fascinate actually makes them sort of fascinating, in a kamikaze kind of a way. They say things like Hey, what’s wrong with being a little crazy? They strike poses. They flirt. They think they’re sexy. Women Blingers tend to be plumpers but they’re comfy being curvy and invariably turn up half naked.

Mingers: these are the real entertainment. They are the lifeblood of Chart Throb, the most essential element. Without the Mingers Chart Throb would be nothing. They are the true casualties, the saddos, the uglies, the comically short-sighted, the cleft-palated, the misshapen, the obese, the educationally challenged, the emotionally stunted and the spotty nerds – the most vulnerable and inadequate members of society.

I have managed to avoid watching these programmes, but Elton’s cynical take does seem to have a ring of truth to it. I also refuse to watch Eurovision. When the Americans use music in this way, human rights NGOs denounce it as torture, but millions of people voluntarily sit down to watch it every year. I just don’t get it

Technology has played and will continue to play a massive role in music. Recording technology enabled talented individuals to leverage their talent. Records, CDs, radio and television made it possible for an artist to perform for millions. This allowed the elite musicians to become fantastically rich. But then technology turned on the industry that it had made. Now it is possible to pirate copies of any artist. This has had unintended consequences. Bands have to do more live concerts because this experience is the one thing you can’t download – yet. The problem is that music is now seen as something you get for free – once people get used to not paying, it’s going to be very difficult to get them to pay even a small amount.

What is the effect of all this piracy? I simply don’t trust those lobbying for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress. They claim that online piracy costs theU.S.economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs. These numbers are horrific. $250 billion per year would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in the USA. 750,000 jobs is twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010. It is impossible to know the real number. There are certainly a lot of people who download music without paying. In some cases, piracy does take away a legitimate sale. But just because people download a song for free doesn’t mean they would be willing to pay for the same song. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China. These cannot really be considered lost sales. And while jobs may be lost in the music industry, they will probably be created in another sector. Money that a pirate doesn’t spend on songs is likely to be spent on something else. This is a counterfactual world. We need to imagine what would happen if there were no piracy. It should come as no surprise that those most affected will tend to come up with the direst possible predictions.

So concludes my brief survey of music. I would continue but all this talk of music has put me in the mood for a bit of karaoke. I can’t decide between Sexual Healing or Fly Me to the Moon. Don’t worry I won’t be uploading anything to Facebook or YouTube. I firmly believe that my flatulence and onanism should remain behind closed doors.