Sounds like an obvious question with an obvious answer.
The customer is whoever buys it and uses it.
That works in Tesco.
No, wait. You got that shopping list from your partner. You're the errand boy, and you're paying, but it's your partner who will be using that stuff and expressing disappointment if you forgot the radishes and got the wrong brand of pasta. (You didn't know there was a wrong brand of pasta?) You are Tesco's customer, and your partner is your customer.
How about the NHS? You don't pay for NHS treatment, so you can't be the customer. Patients are just raw material for the process. Who pays? The Government does. Whose complaints get attention? Um. The staff, especially the consultants and surgeons. Maybe the managers listen to the politicians, but mostly not. The NHS does not have a customer. Which is why it is a self-contained, unaccountable, uncontrollable organisation. They are all going to get paid no matter how long the queues.
By contrast, Harley Street has customers. They're called "clients" because Harley Street is posh.
Who are the customers for universities? Foreign students actually pay with their (parents') own money. UK students "borrow" money from the Government to pay, but the debt is not distrainable and does not count against the credit score. UK students also borrow money from the bank, and get some from their parents. Sounds to me like they are just the means by which that money gets to the Bursar. Like NHS patients, undergraduates are raw material for the process. The Government is paying for the universities to provide an illusion of employability and education. The parents are paying in the hope that it's not all an illusion. The one group we have overlooked are the academics: they are expected to bring in research grants. Those are handed out by the Government. So that makes the State the customer, and it dictates what gets researched. (Yes, all that junk soft science is actually commissioned by people who know it is junk. You wouldn't want the money spent on real research would you?)
Who are the customers for airports? Not passengers. Airlines.
Who are the customers for airlines? Some of the customers are the actual passengers. But then Ryanair gets a chunk of money from provinces for flying into their regional airport. So that's Government again.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out who is the customer for Social Services? And who is just raw material for the process.
It's a wonderfully clarifying question.
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Friday, 17 January 2025
The Sophons Arrived in 1995
In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy, sophons are neutron-sized supercomputers with a propulsion system that can whizz around the solar system in no time and mess up any experiments we do that might advance our understanding of fundamental physics.
(Yes, I know, but it makes for an interesting read.)
That has to be the best explanation of why, all of a sudden in the mid-1990's, everything stopped developing: physics, music, politics, fashion, art, literature, mathematics, movies, name it. There have been engineering advances in computing, but no fundamental breakthroughs, and look at what that got us. TikTok, dating apps, Facebook, the Lockdowns, working from home, mass-scale social flaking, and Netflix. Yep, real progress.
I think the Sophons are distracting us with that stuff.
The essence of Sophon intervention is that it should look as if it's a neat idea and will make our lives better, easier or more fun; absorbs a huge amount of effort and smart people in its implementation; but after a while turns out not to be such a good idea after all.
I hereby suggest that the adjective 'Sophonic' be used to describe anything that meets these criteria, and those who devise and push be described as 'Sophons'.
Not all distractions are Sophonic, we do quite enough on our own to distract ourselves. Celebrity and royal gossip is just plain ordinary stuff, as is corporate PR. Political BS has always been with us. Bogus research in psychology, social "sciences", behavioural "sciences", not to mention anything prefaced by "Evolutionary", are just plain old-fashioned academic BS.
The Green agenda and Climate Change were taken over and exploited by the Sophons. I demur from suggesting what research in maths is Sophonic, but String Theory and Supersymmetry are both clearly Sophonic. Facebook, Instgram, Pinterest, TikTok, You Tube, and the rest... all Sophonic media.
(Yes, I know, but it makes for an interesting read.)
That has to be the best explanation of why, all of a sudden in the mid-1990's, everything stopped developing: physics, music, politics, fashion, art, literature, mathematics, movies, name it. There have been engineering advances in computing, but no fundamental breakthroughs, and look at what that got us. TikTok, dating apps, Facebook, the Lockdowns, working from home, mass-scale social flaking, and Netflix. Yep, real progress.
I think the Sophons are distracting us with that stuff.
The essence of Sophon intervention is that it should look as if it's a neat idea and will make our lives better, easier or more fun; absorbs a huge amount of effort and smart people in its implementation; but after a while turns out not to be such a good idea after all.
I hereby suggest that the adjective 'Sophonic' be used to describe anything that meets these criteria, and those who devise and push be described as 'Sophons'.
Not all distractions are Sophonic, we do quite enough on our own to distract ourselves. Celebrity and royal gossip is just plain ordinary stuff, as is corporate PR. Political BS has always been with us. Bogus research in psychology, social "sciences", behavioural "sciences", not to mention anything prefaced by "Evolutionary", are just plain old-fashioned academic BS.
The Green agenda and Climate Change were taken over and exploited by the Sophons. I demur from suggesting what research in maths is Sophonic, but String Theory and Supersymmetry are both clearly Sophonic. Facebook, Instgram, Pinterest, TikTok, You Tube, and the rest... all Sophonic media.
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Go Paula, Go Paula
I spent quite a bit of one trip in and out of town recently with a silly grin on my face because this track is a DOOZY!
Friday, 10 January 2025
Death's End - The Dark Forest Attack on the Solar System
Towards the end of Cixin Liu's Death's End, someone in a planet far, far, away sees that the Trisolarian system was destroyed, and works out that our Solar system probably did it. This person is about as low in the organisation as anyone can get without actually being a cleaner. He goes to his boss to ask for the relevant weapon, and having been authorised, flips it carelessly in the direction of our Sun. It's a small two-dimensional thing, and is observed with curiosity as it makes its way towards us. Then it is activated, and... squish squash squwash... the space around it loses the third dimension. Everything is crushed down to two dimensions and destroyed in the process. The effect expands outwards at light speed, and nothing can stop it. We now understand the episode where our heroes encountered a four-dimensional world that seemed to be shrinking to three-dimensions. Our solar system, and in fact ultimately the whole universe, is going to be rendered two-dimensional. Which, as one of the characters says, is only not a problem for the aggressor, if they are actually two-dimensional in the first place.
This kept coming back to me. Such Dark Forest attacks, we have earlier had suggested, would only happen when the cost and risks of doing so were minimal and did not give away the attackers location away. Which is exactly what happens. The casual destruction by a lowly employee. The fact that destroying a solar system and then a galaxy is not something anyone needs to debate or get clearance for. The sheer off-handedness of it all.
Before you worry, the physics of the device - along with most of the physics in the series - is utter nonsense, but we go along with it because the story it enables is so interesting.
After a week of this sticking in my mind (I really am not that preceptive) I got what Cixin was up to. It's an analogy with the legal bureaucracy. Where public employees can reach out and destroy careers, marriages, and lives with a charge here, an investigation there, a court case, and the sentence, tossed as it were at the offender with a flip of the wrist. They only penalise what comes to their attention, investigate as little as possible, spend as little effort as possible running the process, and hand out the penalty with no thought for its effects or consequences.
I suspect it may be possible to read a lot of the book like that. In fact, there's a passage in it where he tells us that's what he's doing. But I'll leave that for you. And I could be reading far too much into it.
This kept coming back to me. Such Dark Forest attacks, we have earlier had suggested, would only happen when the cost and risks of doing so were minimal and did not give away the attackers location away. Which is exactly what happens. The casual destruction by a lowly employee. The fact that destroying a solar system and then a galaxy is not something anyone needs to debate or get clearance for. The sheer off-handedness of it all.
Before you worry, the physics of the device - along with most of the physics in the series - is utter nonsense, but we go along with it because the story it enables is so interesting.
After a week of this sticking in my mind (I really am not that preceptive) I got what Cixin was up to. It's an analogy with the legal bureaucracy. Where public employees can reach out and destroy careers, marriages, and lives with a charge here, an investigation there, a court case, and the sentence, tossed as it were at the offender with a flip of the wrist. They only penalise what comes to their attention, investigate as little as possible, spend as little effort as possible running the process, and hand out the penalty with no thought for its effects or consequences.
I suspect it may be possible to read a lot of the book like that. In fact, there's a passage in it where he tells us that's what he's doing. But I'll leave that for you. And I could be reading far too much into it.
Tuesday, 7 January 2025
The Fermi Paradox - A Boring Answer
The Fermi Paradox is the difference between the supposed number of planets supporting intelligent life that there should be in the vastness of the Milky Way, never mind the Universe, and the fact that we haven't picked up any radio-signals from any of them, let alone slapped a parking ticket on a visiting space-craft. Whenever anyone gets bored, they form a theory on why we have the Fermi Paradox.
The doozy is the Dark Forest Hypothesis, exploited by Cixin Liu in his Three-Body Problem trilogy, appearing so I gather on a Netflix near you. This is the idea that the universe is actually stuffed full of advanced civilisations, and they are all keeping quiet so that they aren't attacked by another one, rather like an animal moving through a forest at night, which keeps as quiet as possible to avoid giving its presence away to the predators all around it.
At the other extreme is the Uniqueness of Us hypothesis, which is that there's only us in the Universe, because making a planet that can support intelligent life and Kier Starmer is 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% possible. And that may be too high.
Then there's the We Got Here First hypothesis, which holds that we are the first civilisation advanced enough to support Angela Rayner, and all the others have just about reached Plato, or are currently building Stonehenge, or maybe are still single-cell organisms. Just think, in another million years, they too will be have their very own Rachel Reeves.
And of course, there's the Smartypants theory, which is that we have been visited by aliens, and they found us so stupid and crude, they flew off and give us a 1-star review on TripAdvisor. Or they found us too aggressive. Or they thought they would come back when Wes Streeting was not in charge of anything.
However, the boring answer is this....
Radio, television and radar broadcasts use electromagnetic waves, and electromagnetism is, as we know, magic + Maxwell's Equations. How these waves travel depends on the medium and the wavelength. Very short waves (1-10 mm) are absorbed by the atmosphere in a few kilometres. Very long waves (1-100 km) bounce between the earth and the ionosphere and can flow over hills and down valleys. Radio, television, mobile phones and radar use waves between 10cm and 100m, and these mostly travel in straight lines. The transmitters are designed to direct the waves to where the audience is, not spray it all over the place where the audience isn't, like outer space. Some of it leaks, but not a lot.
Here's the calculation. Whatever the aliens were using to listen, our signals would need to be audible above the white noise of the Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, that covers the radio, TV, radar and mobile phone frequencies. At those frequencies, the CMB has a power of on the order of magnitude of 10^(-7) Watts / sq metre. For a station broadcasting at 5,000 kW / sq m (which would be a lot) and an inverse-square fall-off, since 1 light-year is about 9.5 x 10^15 metres, that's a fall-off of 53dB, so our station's signal would have a strength of about 5.5x10^(-10) Watts/sq m, which is about 4dB below the CMB. To get 5dB above the CMB, we would need to have 1,024 transmitters of that strength going flat-out. All of them so badly designed that they sprayed energy in all directions equally.
At 10 light-year's distance, signal loses around another 20dB, and there aren't enough transmitters on earth to get the total above the CMB.
The nearest candidate planets are 4.22 light-years away, and the next is 11 light-years. And those aren't good candidates.
Nobody ain't hearing nothing.
The doozy is the Dark Forest Hypothesis, exploited by Cixin Liu in his Three-Body Problem trilogy, appearing so I gather on a Netflix near you. This is the idea that the universe is actually stuffed full of advanced civilisations, and they are all keeping quiet so that they aren't attacked by another one, rather like an animal moving through a forest at night, which keeps as quiet as possible to avoid giving its presence away to the predators all around it.
At the other extreme is the Uniqueness of Us hypothesis, which is that there's only us in the Universe, because making a planet that can support intelligent life and Kier Starmer is 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% possible. And that may be too high.
Then there's the We Got Here First hypothesis, which holds that we are the first civilisation advanced enough to support Angela Rayner, and all the others have just about reached Plato, or are currently building Stonehenge, or maybe are still single-cell organisms. Just think, in another million years, they too will be have their very own Rachel Reeves.
And of course, there's the Smartypants theory, which is that we have been visited by aliens, and they found us so stupid and crude, they flew off and give us a 1-star review on TripAdvisor. Or they found us too aggressive. Or they thought they would come back when Wes Streeting was not in charge of anything.
However, the boring answer is this....
Radio, television and radar broadcasts use electromagnetic waves, and electromagnetism is, as we know, magic + Maxwell's Equations. How these waves travel depends on the medium and the wavelength. Very short waves (1-10 mm) are absorbed by the atmosphere in a few kilometres. Very long waves (1-100 km) bounce between the earth and the ionosphere and can flow over hills and down valleys. Radio, television, mobile phones and radar use waves between 10cm and 100m, and these mostly travel in straight lines. The transmitters are designed to direct the waves to where the audience is, not spray it all over the place where the audience isn't, like outer space. Some of it leaks, but not a lot.
Here's the calculation. Whatever the aliens were using to listen, our signals would need to be audible above the white noise of the Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, that covers the radio, TV, radar and mobile phone frequencies. At those frequencies, the CMB has a power of on the order of magnitude of 10^(-7) Watts / sq metre. For a station broadcasting at 5,000 kW / sq m (which would be a lot) and an inverse-square fall-off, since 1 light-year is about 9.5 x 10^15 metres, that's a fall-off of 53dB, so our station's signal would have a strength of about 5.5x10^(-10) Watts/sq m, which is about 4dB below the CMB. To get 5dB above the CMB, we would need to have 1,024 transmitters of that strength going flat-out. All of them so badly designed that they sprayed energy in all directions equally.
At 10 light-year's distance, signal loses around another 20dB, and there aren't enough transmitters on earth to get the total above the CMB.
The nearest candidate planets are 4.22 light-years away, and the next is 11 light-years. And those aren't good candidates.
Nobody ain't hearing nothing.
Friday, 3 January 2025
2025. Let's Be Careful Out There
It's going to be a good year if you're a train driver or a civil servant, or some hack pushing AI, or anyone selling arms and ammunition to anyone else, or in the business of selling emergency supplies of energy, or building those money pits HS2 and the Hinkley Nuclear station, or if you're a lawyer on the endless Covid enquiry whose conclusions we all thought we knew but will have been changing with the times, or if you are providing hotel accommodation for illegal immigrants, or if you're a human rights lawyer being paid by millionaire activists to prevent the expulsion of foreign criminals, or if .... oh heck, you get the picture.
Here's a financial goal for 2025. Try not to end the year with more debt that you started it.
Here's a financial goal for 2025. Try not to end the year with more debt that you started it.
Wednesday, 1 January 2025
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