Random Rambler

Discovery: TiddlyWiki

2008-10-25T16:01:35Z

A discovery which I think may be of value to some people: TiddlyWiki. This is a fairly complete Wiki, implemented as a single HTML file - albeit one rather heavy on the Javascript. You all know what a Wiki is - you have all used Wikipedia. It is a set of hypertext-linked pages which can be freely edited - and quite easily so, once you learn the style.

Which makes TiddlyWiki a great vehicle for a non-linear notebook for project planning. Or a journal - it has a special button for creating a new journal entry, and of course links to web pages are trivially easy.

The ingenious thing about TiddlyWiki is that it manages to save itself, and all the Wiki content, into a single HTML file. Which means that you can open, read, and edit the file in any modern browser. The obvious think is to save the file onto a USB stick or equivalent. You can then open that on any computer anywhere that runs a decent browser. And backing up is just a matter of copying the file.

Just go to the site and hit the download button, which will give you a file called empty.html. For each journal or project, copy that file to a suitable new name, open it (e.g. double click), and you have a new notebook. There is a support Wiki as well.

Brilliant. Hats Off to the original designer, Jeremy Ruston. Who, apparently, is BT's Head of Open Source Innovation, which would deserve a second Hats Off, if I had two hats to take off.

randombler @ 2008-10-21T20:24:00

2008-10-21T19:56:49Z

I have just been to see this lecture by Ben Goldacre.

It was extremely funny, absolutely fascinating, and rather frightening.

Those who read The Guardian; will recognise him from his regular Bad Science column on Saturdays. In it, he regularly shreds, with detailed facts, bits of outstandingly bad science reporting and fake claims, mostly in the medical and health fields. As he puts it himself, he is "rather anal" - he has a habit of going back to the original papers - if any - and finding out what the facts are behind the reports and/or claims. To the dismay, often, of those he catches out,

That there are quacks, snake oil salesmen and ignorants incompetents around is nothing new. And, while it is always to be regretted, it will always be so. But the point of his lecture was the terrifying extent to which the media - in particular the newspapers in most of his examples - positively reject fact in favour of sensationalist falsehoods.As he showed it, it goes far beyond presenting the truth in the most sensational light, it involves the active espousal of fallacious statements, In one case, the Editor of the Evening Standard insisted to two professors of microbiology that his expert (equipped with a degree in engineering and what he admitted was a diploma-mill PhD) knew more about MRSA than they did. And claims by self-styled unpublished scientists who will not release their source material are preferred, even headlined, while simultaneous (but unsensationally) negative reports in peer-reviewed journals are totally ignored.

The fact that this is Goldacre's hobby - his day job is as a doctor working the NHS - makes his determination and effort all the more credible.

Which sounds very worthy, but a tad boring. Which was the opposite of the truth. The lecture theatre rocked with laughter. He was a fluid and interesting speaker, who used the power of ridicule (and his targets were very ridiculous) with wit and style.

Very highly recommended. if you get the chance to see him, do so. Here is one:

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A tough job, but somebody has to do it

2007-10-14T23:00:51Z

I read, in many sources (New Scientist, The Economist, The Guardian) of the latest selfless contribution of scientists our knowledge. Someone has teamed up with the lap dancers of Albuquerque to analyse their tips. Apparantly, when they are in the fertile stage of their personal cycle, they get about 50% more tips than those infertile, either because it is the wrong time of the month or because they are on the Pill. One's sympathy goes out to those forced into such uncongenial environs for their research.

Dissonnance

2007-10-14T22:55:41Z

There is, I now find, a form of cookie called ladyfinger. I didn't know that, and now that I know it, I would call it a sponge rather than a cookie. It is the kind of hard, sweet sponge often dipped in tiramisu, and that I have seen sold as Sponge Fingers. I had to Google to find this out. And, despite the presence of the cookies, okra (a.k.a. Ladies Fingers) and a rock band of the same name, the only ad offered was for vibrators.

Why was I Googling ladyfinger? Just to exorcise one of the worst screeching tyre-smoking emergency stops that have ever disturbed my reading progress. The book is called Stumbling Onto Happiness, by psychology Prof. Daniel Gilbert and is, so far (about 1/4 of the way) quite good. But he is spending quite a lot of time talking about, and proving, that you really don't know what is going on inside your own head. So I was already in a state of slight existential doubt. Then he turns to speak of a dog being offered something yellow and sweet, and whether the dog is thinking "Damned fine ladyfinger".

Never having heard of the cookie, I took it literally - the dog, by some mischance, had bitten off a ladies finger. At which point I wondered how this tranquil domestic scene of giving a treat to a pet had suddenly turned to bloody carnage - and how I had missed reading it. Because of the frequency with which my prejudices had been overturned in preceding pages, I was prepared to belive almost anything could have happened. It took me three or four passes over the paragraph before the alternative hypothesis, that there was some entirely innocent but unknown meaning to the term "ladyfinger", came to the rescue. Considerably to my relief.

Not a very significant event, probably. But it showed me easily it is to go off in the wrong direction once ones initial cosy assumptions have been shaken. While we are safe in our normal world, we can handle one or two unexpected things, a certain level of noverly with ease. We can be blase about our ability to handle such novelty. But, it seems to me, that this circle of security is surprisingly small. It didn't take much alienation for me to find a quite ludicrous interpretation of the writing plausible enough to need several rescans to clarify it.

It also says to beware of your cultural biasses: I think the name ladyfinger is American (the Prof. is), so this is just another case of transatlantic incomprehension

Legalising Drugs.

2007-08-01T23:45:40Z

As many people will have read in various forums I have posted to, I believe that we ought to legalise at least some drugs. Not that I believe that the various illegal drugs are harmless, though their harm has in some but not all cases been exaggerated. But becasue I believe that the law shopuld be organised to minimise drug use, not maximise drug-related convictions. My contention is that the current law, as curently enforced, certainly does not minimise drug consumption. On the contrary, it is probably close to maximising it. It also tends to make such consumption as dangerous as possible (impure drugs, uncertain doses, re-using needles, hiding away so overdosers cannot be rescued, ignorance of safe doses and practices). And, most importantly to my way of thinking, it maximises drug related crime. This includes both upper level crime (shoot-outs between rival drug gangs) and lower level crime (crimes committed to finance a drug habit).

It is my contention that the truly vast profits to be made from drugs drive a smuggling and marketing engine bigger than any legitimate business could possibly create. Because the source cost of the drugs is trivial, and their transport costs (seen as freight) negligible, there is a huge profit margin to be made. From the Afghan poppy grower or the Columbian coca grower to the end consumer, the markup is probably of the order 100 times - or, to use the more exciting figure, 10,000%. This produces incentives to those at the upper levels that the most draconian law enforcement can never cancel out.

At the lower levels, the commitment of the sales force is enforced by their own addiction. It is perhaps an exaggerstion to say that an addict will do anything to feed their habit, but they will certainly do a lot. If they can fund their habit by selling to others, they will do so. And that is the way the drug market works - the lowest level distributors are overwhemingly addicts, buying a batch, using some, and selling the rest for the same price as they bought the whole batch.

Advertisers in the the legal marketplace know that word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising they can get. People will give a value to the word of a slight acquaintance which they will not give tens of expensive, high quality adverts. Hence the use of viral advertsing on the internet, and person-to-person home sales by such companies as Avon and Amway. A person talking to you, individually, has a credibility of a completely different order to any form of placed advertising. And the current legal status allows the drug barons to employ literally tens of thousands of such sales people, motivated to a degree that most of us will never reach, to market their product. Is it any wonder that it sells?

If we look at the world as it is, not as we wish it could be, it is a fact that anybody can obtain most illegal drugs if they want to. Of course, they run a little risk in doing so, but for a smal scale, non-addicted user (which everybody imagines themselves to be) it is hardly hard to obtain most drugs. And it is not just adults who can get them - the sellers have no compunction about selling drigs to the youngest, if they can raise the necessary funds. So we live in a world in which anybody who wants drugs can get them, there is a mhuge sales force dedcated tgo making people want them, and also one in which there is a massive level of drug-related crime.

So why doesn't everybody take drugs, if they can obtain them? Two answers. Firstly, because it is illegal, and people run a (small) risk in buying and possessing drugs. Secondly, because they don't want to, either because they don't like them, or because they are aware of the danger of taking them and have reasonably decided that the pleasure given by drugs is not worth the risk that they incur. But how may people who would not be deterred by the second reason would be detereed by the first, by the knowledge that what they do is "naughty", illegal, against custom? My opinion is, very few. of course many people would be deterred by illegality. But those same people would be equally, or more, deterred by the danger. People who ignore the medical dangers are risk takers, chancers, who will also ignore the legal dangers.

Therefore, it is my opinion that if we legalise drugs, and allow them to be sold in the roughly the same way as other pleasant but damaging substances such as alcohol and tobacco, we stand a chance of cutting the consumption of drugs considerably, cutting the ill effects of that consumption even more (due to better quality etc), and almost wiping out drug-related crime. My focus is not on minimising the consumption of drugs, but on minimising the harm done by the consumption of drugs. Obviously, since the drugs themselves are harmful, it is good to minimise total consumption; but not at the cost of driving up the other harm done by their distribution and purchase. Since, as I bleive, consumption is actually nearly as high as it can be, the only way for consumtion to go is down. Of course, consumption may stay the same - but it is still a gain to reduce drug-related crima and accidents casued by illegality.

Which drugs should we legalise? If the harm which we decide to mitigate is the illegal drugs trade, there must be no illegal drugs. Which means that we should legalise everything - though perhaps not on the same basis. But we need to ensure that there is no crevice in which the criminal fraternity can insert themselves. But it is no use to replace an extensive and florishing criminal drugs trade with an equally extensive, flourishing and profitable legal drugs trade. We want to minimise drug use. Recognising this, we want the smallest possible legal drugs trade. We recognise that it is not possible to wipe out the trade, and a small legal trade is not so much the best solution as the the least bad solution.

I propose therefore that we legalise all currently illegal drugs, subject to a set of controls designed to minimise the ill effects of drug consumption, rather than minimising drug consumptions itself. In doing this, we allow that any adult who knowing wants to take pleasurably damaging substances should be allowed to do so, and a reasonable profitable business can be set up supplying such people with their desired substances.

So how do we control such a trade in such a way as to minimise (but not eradicate, which we have conceded is impossible) legal drug use while killing stone dead the illegal trade and its ill effects.

All such drugs are sold in the simplest packaging, such as a white cardboard box with black printing. The printing will be statutorily defined except for two line upon which the distriubutor can put a brand name (e.g. "Gallaghers") and a product name (e.g "Old Skunk"). the rest is product information (strength, quantity etc.)

In order to buy drugs, you must register to use that particular type of drug (i.e. a user of marajuana would not be able to buy cocaine). To register, you must attend a short lecture on the use of the drug and, if necessary, precautions such as safe injecting, lasting perhaps 2 hours, pass a simple test, and get a photo + chip ID card. The objective is not to put people off - taking the course should be made easy and cheap, and the test is purely to prove the prospective user was listening and was of adult years. The objective is purely to ensure that the problems have been pointed out at least once, to provide a validated card for purchases, and to prevent complete impulse purchases.

No advertising of drugs is allowed at any time under any circumstances.

No supplying of drugs to under 18s at any time under any circumstance

Drugs can only be purchased in a separate room, not accessible to the under-age, in which nothing else is sold. Other than the drugs themselves, and possibly warning notices, the only allowe display is the packets themselves, and a plain price list of items on sale. But, for example, a separate room at the back of a High Street off-licese (or its overseas equivalent) would be perfectly acceptable. Pehaps you could swipe your registry card for access.
All drugs shoudl be traceable. Every pill, syringe, or reefer shoudl have a number which traces back to its packet, and every packet should be logged agaisn the card of the user to whom it is sold. That way, when drugs are misused, be it by giving them to children or by dropping used syringes in public places, the purchaser of the drugs can be traced and punished for the abuse. (This might mean making some pills larger than they would otherwise be. Tough)

Drugs you have purchased yourself you may consume yourself anywhere at any time subject to normal rules of behaviour (e.g no smoking in indor publisc places, public intoxication is unacceptable etc.) However, you may not pass on drugs sold to you (and traceable as such) except under the circumstances outlined below.

You may offer drugs to any guests who would themselves be allowed to buy those drugs in your own home, or in restaurants and the like in private rooms accessible only to invited guests. You are therefore allowd to offer narcotic hospitality to your friends - should they wish it

In order to allow people living together to share supplies, each person may register up to (say) four people who are entitled to act as their agents in buying drugs. The agents must be registered to buy drugs themselves. It seems reasonable to allow (e.g.) husband and wife to share their supply of drugs.

Since all legal drugs are traceable, it is an offence to possess any drugs which do not have the appropriate trace marks. We will have to provide some features for home brewing/growing. We can also trace any drugs which go astray and punish the people who should own them and also the people who actually own them but shouldn't.

Commercialised drugs should be taxed at "sin tax" rates, as are tobacco and alcohol. The government should expect to take its cut. On the other hand, companies sshould be able to make a commercial profit by supplying drugs. A diversity of suppliers should be encourages so that normal price competition will erode profit margins and prevent prices rising to the point where illegal trade becomes worthwhile (as is approaching the case for cigarettes).

OK. There it is. I don't think these proposals would quite wipe out the illegal market, but they should reduce it to a shadow of its current size. It becomes much easier to keep drugs out of the hands of the young. And those who are addicted, or who don't care about becoming addicted, can get their products at a price which reflects the commercial cost (plus tax). Everybody who takes drugs will have some minimal knowledge of their relative harm. The upper level drug dealers will be put out of business by the legal drugs trade. And the lower level addict pushers will not be able to sell at a markup what everybody can buy themselves, more legally. But they won't need so much money, and won't commit so much crime, when the cost of drugs falls.

Punctuated Equilibrium

2007-06-17T20:52:40Z

One of the many storms-in-a-teacup of Evolutionary theory is the idea pf Punctuated Equilibrium, proposed by Gould and Eldredge. Rather than expound the details, here is Wikipedia's reasonably clear take on the subject

Dawkins has, as the Wikipedia article describes, attempted to belittle the theory as merely obvious becasue no evolutionary theorist would ever assert that evolution has to proceeed at a constant speed. To Dawkins, there is a continuous variation in the rate ate which species evolve, from so slow as to be effectively stopped to so fast as to appear to be a jump in the poorly-sampled fossil record. To Gould and Eldredge, there are two different clusters of speeds - slow, which fixes a smoothly changing fossil record, and fast ,which produces breaks in the fossil record which could be mistaken as saltationist.

I think the community at large has agreed that the truth is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. Furthermore, the disagreement has become embarassing because the Creationists (or Intelligent Designers or whatever flag they fly under these days) have taken to portraying a purely technical argument within a totally Darwinian academic comminity as some kind of deep schism which shows that Darwinians cannot even agree on their own theory. Since nobody wants to give the slightest aid to such falsehoods, the community has agreed that the benefits of discussing a minor flourish to Darwinian theory are outweighed by the succour given to the forces of irrationality, and it is better to keep quiet for a decade or two.

Nonetheless, I (in this case totally unembarassed by the slightest trace of repute in the field) am going to put my point of view - which is closer to that of Eldredge and Gould than that of Dawkins.

Eldredge and Gould built their view on the evidence of their speciality, paleontology. And in particular, on the admitted fact that it is very difficult to find transitional species. The fossil record tends to show many milennia of a species being essentially constant, and then it is suddenly replaced (or sometimes joined) by a related, but distinct, species. Their view is that this represents a sudden spurt in evolution. The view of their oppponents is eithr that it just represents the paucity of the fossil record, or it represents a spatial takeover by a species that eveolved separately, but relatively slowly, in a different area, and then invaded and took over the territiry in a geological blink of the eye. An example of the latter would be the displacement of the British Red Squirrel by the North American Grey Squirrel, which has take place over the last century or two. Paleontologically, this will appear instantaneous.

Military service is described as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. I view the life of a species (insofar as a such a diffuce concept can be said to have a life) as being much the same. For most of the time, ecosystems are in balance. All ecological niches are occupied, and each species is trying to maximise the yield of whatever niche it has. Of course, with the slow grinding of the years, one species may manage to outcompete, and steal the niche of, another; and for various reasons a species may split. Wet and dry hot and cold years may come and go, but the ecosystem is broadly in balance, and the species has fully exploited its niche.

But this does not mean that mutations have stopped. The DNA of the species is being updated at the same rate as always. Ofr course, as always, most mutations are negative and are dropped. And the ones that are not negative are probably, in a stable ecosystem, nearly neutral. Imagine one which makes the animal hairier. Well, it is probably at optimal hairiness for its current niche. So the appearance of a new, slightly hairier, gene, will probably simple depress the occurrence of the existing hairiness genes, so that the current phenotype remains approximately as hairy as before. And the same applies if a gene for less hairiness arises - the gene pool will be perturbed, but the phenotype (and hence its fossils) will be apparently unchanged.

And then something changes. Maybe a climate change; maybe a new territory opens up; maybe a new predator, a new competitor or a new food source arrives. Suddently, it is all change. The ecosystem itself is changing. Old niches are closing and, most importantly, new niches are opening. And niches are "winner takes all". If one species occupies an ecological niche,it is very hard for another to take it over. And which sopecies will find it easiest to take over the new niche? The one with the most genertic variation which it can use to optimise itself to that niche. Which means the one which has evolved least in recent millenia, and hence has the largest bank of unexploited variation to draw on. New species, which have recently emerged from small populations, will have relatively small amounts of variation to draw on, and will therefore be out-evolved by an old, apparently static, species that has a huge bank of diversity to draw on.

Hence, I would expect the typical pattern to be for a lineage to remain stable for a long time, and then to jump into a new niche, and hence become a new species. In doing so, they will "elbow aside" more recently developed species which do not have sucha a deep pool of exploitable variation. Hence, Punctuated Equilibrium.

Dramatic photographs

2007-06-17T18:30:13Z

There are many dramatic and beautiful photographs on the Web. But for me, just about the most dramatic and meaningful, and one of the more beautifuyl, is the Hubble Deep Field: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/41/image/b/format/large_web/ .This is the second such picture, taken in 1998. Essentially, for 10 days, the Hubble telescope pointed at an apparenty completely featureless tiny corner of the sky. And this is what it saw. Galaxies. Lots of Galaxies. And every single one of those galaxies contains literally billions of stars. Many contain, as does our own, of the order of a hundred billion stars.

It really puts me in my place.

Given the sensitivity of the Hubble, I wonder how many photons it took to build the image of each of those Galaxies. At a guess, of the same order as the number of stars in those galaxies - a hunderd billion or so. Which means that of all the gazillions of photons put out by all the stars in those galaxies during the ten day window of opportunity, around one made it to where we could see it.

Which, on the other side, puts the Hubble in its place, as a fantastic human achievement, to detect such faint objects. We should all be proud of it - and Americans, who actually paid for it, the more so.

RNA - Phew

2007-06-17T14:38:03Z

In the news of recent weeks is a sudden upsurge of interest in RNA. The Economist had a lengthy article on it. My reaction to the whole surge is "At last they have found it". Since they sequenced the Human Genome, and found only 30,000 genes, or possibly even before then, I have felt that there was something missing in the basic story of how cells are built and maintained. Just as cosmologists have needed Dark Matter to stop galaxies flying appart, and Dark Energy to keep the universe flying apart, as both are observed to do, I felt that there was some Dark Information needed to make cells work. And now it has been found.

The dogma for the last 50 years is that the working parts of the DNA, called genes, code for a particular kind of RNA, which in turn constructs a particualr protein. 1 gene coded for 1 protein, though that protein may have several uses, and the gene may be turned on or off at different times and in different ways. So far so plausible - except the number of genenes seems to me to be much to small for the complexity of body built, and worringly constant despite the complexity of the animal constructrd. The flatworm Planaria, 1100-odd cells whose function has been mapped in great detail, has 20,000 genes to our 30,000. Is all the extra complexity of vertebrates, primates, and humans expressed in only 30,000 genes? Seems rather improbable to me.

So what, other than genes, is there in the DNA? Them genes form less than 10% of the total length of the chromosomes. A few other bits have identified uses, like the telomeres, the "endcaps" of the chromosome. But the rest was called "Junk DNA" and was widely believed not to code for anything. Various reasons were proposed for the Junk DNA - pure accident, stops useful genes getting destroyed during meiosis, raw material for new genes, remains of invading viruses. But it was believed it didn't do anything - it did not do the basic job of DNA, which is to be transcribes into RNA.

And now it transpires that it is transcribed into RNA - lots of kinds of RNA. Just not the kinds of RNA that build proteins. But they seem to do lots of other things, perhaps more directly than the protein coding ones. Genes that throw switches, rather than genes that build the machines with the switches. So suddenly we have a source of much more variation to explain the variety of life - and of people.

Phew.

Fear Emergent Systems

2006-01-22T16:42:42Z

In the US, the Bush Administration is pushing Congress to renew the Patriot Act, which it is reluctant to do. Amongst other things, the Patriot Act allows a much greater level of snooping than would otherwise be so. New Scientist has an article about new lie detection technology which, it is claimed, detect your truthfulness without you knowing it is in use - unlike the current so-called lie detector, the Polygraph. The United Kingdom has a greater density of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) cameras than anywhere else in the world, and records are kept for a long time. The British police intend to convert all their traffic surveillance cameras so that they will read and log car numberplates, thus tracking every journey of every vehicle on a major road in the country. I have a wallet full of credit and store cards, each of which pinpoints me to a place, time and product every time I use it. My mobile phone can, in principle at least, be used to track me to within a few hundred metres already - and next year's model may have a GPS sensor and track me to within a metre or two.

All in all, far more information is being collected about me than ever before, being filed for far longer, and being kept in a way in which it can be far more easily cross-indexed and searched. The people collecting that information have, they claim, good reasons for doing so. And those claims are not bogus. Terrorism, organised and disorganised crime are real threats to our safety and comfort, and I am sure that those organising these new data collection systems are doing so with the best of intentions. And yet, in common with many other people, I find this trend disturbing. Up to now, I have not been able to formulate exactly why it worried me so much, but it did. But recent reading and events, and my work, have given me more of an understanding of what it is that so worries me. It is that which I propose to expand on here.

The police and security agencies who want to collect this extra evidence say, with some justification, that their activities do no harm to the honest, and help to detect real crime. Of course, it is a theoretical infringement of my privacy - people know things about me that I have not chosen to tell them. But if that has no effect upon me, then the loss of privacy is hardly a great pain. If nothing ever comes of it, the fact that a policeman may know (for example) that I have frequently been visiting a mistress is not going to affect me. It makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, but if it saves me, or someone else, from being blown up by a terrorist, that would be a price worth paying - if it were then only price worth paying.

But this brings up the first, and lesser, of my reasons for worry. I simply do not believe that it is possible to keep confidential a database to which thousands of people have access. It is probably possible to secure a database to which only a dozen or two have access, and for more than one reason. Firstly, is is possible to screen that number of people to a high level of confidence. Though, as the steady stream of spy scandals over the years have shown, far from a perfect level. People will break confidence for a remarkable number of reasons: money, ideology, sex, self-importance, thrills... Secondly, the very fact that they know that a database is regarded as Top Secret will make people more cautious about divulging its contents.

If a database is used by thousands of people world wide, and dozens in the same place, such as a police station, they will inevitably feel free to discuss its contents amongst themselves. Man is a gossiping animal. Indeed, if you believe Robin Dunbar's theory in "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" (which I largely do), human language was invented to gossip. The sheer number of people who have access to the database will mean that they treat it more casually than something restricted to the few. And the sheer number will mean that some will misuse the database, either out of curiosity, or for gain, for for all the other reasons I have already listed for spying into databases.

I therefore regard it as axiomatic that databases of personal information will leak. And the more gossipy the database, the more personal and potentially salacious, the more likely it is that it will leak. The ability to detect patterns of terrorist misbehaviour by correlating many inputs is also the ability to detect patterns of social misbehaviour. And I am sure that, until human nature changes drastically, the social misbehaviour will be searched for and it will leak. And if human nature does change that much, either thee will be no terrorists (the perfect society has arrived) or we will all be terrorists (society has collapsed).

So there is immediately a cost to the new mega-databases. And, in my opionon, it is a high cost. But not necessarily too high a cost. Terrorism and large scale organised crime are also great evils, and there is definitely a case to be made that it is a price worth paying. I lean slightly in the direction of saying that it is too expensive - but only slightly. If that (and the considerable cost) were the only problem, I might be able to accept the politicians "we know better".

But I think there is a much more serious problem, which is that those who use these gigantic multi-sourced database do not have, in many cases, the training to use them properly. Humans have shown that they are remarkably bad at understanding statistics and probability, particularly the interactions of very many low-probability events. And when people feel out of their depths, the crisp cleanness of a computer display, the hard (though possibly completely meaningless) numbers on the screen, give a totally spurious authority to computer results. The computer system, without in any way malfunctioning or doing anything for which it was not designed, will push people into faulty judgements and misreadings of the situation which will cause serious harm to innocent people.

The trigger for this line of thought was this web page about the shooting down of a Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf, and the chilling conclusion of the US Navy report. For full details, read that page. But the broad conclusion was (a) no computer or machine malfunctioned, and (b) no naval personnel acted contrary to their training and orders, and no mistakes were made which were not within the normal range of human error under stress. Therefore the sad death of 290 people was just one of those unfortunate things that happen. To put it colloquially, "shit happens" - but it was no fault of the US Navy - or, indeed, anyone else.

What they miss is that this is a case of an Emergent System - a complex system where the behaviour of the system is strikingly different from the behaviour of the sum of the parts. Emergent systems are remarkably common in the environment around us. In fact, human being are an emergent system. It is pointed out from time to time that the human body consists mostly of water, and that the total value of the chemicals contained in it is some triflingly small cash amount. We know that humans are worth far more than their value as chemicals, or even their value as meat and leather. Humans are multi-layered emergent systems: emergent systems built of emergent systems. The cells of which we are built are far more than the sum of their parts. The process of Darwin Evolution which created us emerges from the properties of DNA and the cell replication mechanism. Brains and though emerge from neurones which themselves cannot think.

And the combination for the US sailors and their fantastically sophisticated radar and computer systems was an Emergent System. It has properties which are properties of the system as a whole, and not properties of any of of its parts. So that the system can fail, as it obviously did, without any of its component parts failing. The finger must be pointed not at any particular sailor or at any particular computer, but at the whole system of which they, separately, formed parts. While the sailors are, in the larger scheme of things, intelligent human beings with their own free will, on that day in 1988 they were no more than cogs in the larger system, along with their computers, the radars feeding those computers, the ship itself, and the missiles which shot down the innocent airliner.

In the same way, what is being created by the interconnection of numerous police and security databases is an Emergent System. The system will have properties not predictable from the properties of its separate components. The way such a system will perform is not predictable. And, though they are individually intelligent and good-willed individuals, the humans in such a system will perform, all unknowingly, as cogs in the machinery. Just as the sailors of the USS Vincennes never intended to shoot down an airliner full of innocent civilians, but did so nonetheless, those using mega databases will, with out intending to do so and with the most honourable of motives, accidentally steamroller innocent people.

How will this happen? Since it is in the nature of Emergent Systems that their behaviour is not predictable from analysis of their components, one cannot say precisely. But there is one obvious source of potential problems. As already said, humans are very bad at evaluating the real risks of low-probability events. And the one thing is that enormous databases will do is to throw up a large number of coincidences. Coincidences which will look like - indeed, be indistinguishable from - real correlations.

Imagine a policemen is investigating several suspicious events. He gets the names of fifty or so people who were in the vicinity when the events occur, and finds the same person appearing in three or four of them,. This he finds, correctly, is quite suspicious and focusses his inquiries on that individual - possibly to the considerable discomfort of the individual. But with computer technology, instead of checking on the fifty or so people near the incidents, he can interrogate the records of every person who visited the cities in which those events occurred for weeks either side of the event. And when he does so, does he really have any reasonable estimate of how likely it is that a completely innocent person would have visited the same few cities within the same period. And having found somebody suspicions and interrogated the database for friends and friends-of-friends of the suspect, what is the real probability that any suspect connections will be coincidence? I don't know, and I don't think one in a thousand of those investigation know. The human brain is notoriously bad at evaluating low-probability events.

Therefore I fear the possibilities of a massive system of interconnected databases, even though each of the databases is innocent in its own right and those assembling them are acting from the purest of motives. Without knowing it, they could be assembling a Frankenstein's monster.

Identity crisis

2005-07-10T16:18:48Z

I spent last all Friday trying to find a fault in my software. It was quite a difficult problem, involving five different computers and special software to set up the condition in which it failed. Progress was slow, and by the end of Friday I hadn't found the fault. So I left work on Friday evening with a definite feeling that I had had enough for the week and I would not even think about the problem for the weekend. I emphatically closed the mental file, and later in the evening tried, unsuccesfully, to do some design work on a project of my own.

Then, at some time in the small hours of Saturday morking, I woke up and realised that I knew exactly what was going on in my system at work. An assumption I had been making was not true, and all my testing had been based on that assumption, and aus thus pointless because of that. However, ass soon as I saw the faulty assumption, I knew what the real fault was, and that it woulld be easy to fix. So I rolled over and went back to sleep, startled but pleased.

In the morning I had no recollection of my nocturnal discovery. But on Saturday evening, for some reason, I was looking foreward to the week ahead. Amd I remembered that I had solved my problem in the middle of the preceding night. I though that it would turn out to be one of those phantasmagorical memories one sometimes has of dreams, which fall apart when remembed while awake. But to my great surprise, the solution was as clearly right in the light of day as it had been in the dark watches. And I had a distinct feeling as I recalled it of a sort of mental opening of the filing cabinet - the retrieval of something that had been left for me to get out when needed by some other part of the brain.

Which is where I come to the subjecty of this ramble. What am "I"? "I" don't feel that I solved that problem. Indeed, so far as I can tell, the problem was solved while "I" was fast asleep. This is more than a little worrying. I earn my living by writing complex software, and I do it, according to a number of people (fortunately including my employers), rather well. Indeed, it is probably the only thing that I do do well - the rest of my life I bumble through tryng not to fail too badly rather than trying to succeed. And yet this ability, the source of my worldly wealth, such piblic esteem as I may have, and such self confidence as I may have, is generated by a mechanism over which I have, apparently, no control at all. So far as I have any control over that faculty, I told it to shut down for the weekend or, failing that, to work on my own project. It did neither, carrying on working on the work problem completely oblivious to my conscious wishes.

This reinforces my view that, so far as "I" exist as an entity, it is not as Lord and Master of my own facilties, but rather as the spokesman or PR person for a group of entities which resemble a quarrelsome revolutionary cabal rather then a co-ordinated team. One of that team wone might call the geek or problem solver. But also in the team are the dirty old man, only after one thing, and the altruist, who genuinely wants to help other people. Others include the glutton, only after one (different) thing, and the romeo, full of truly romatic love. Two close colleagues are the prevaricator, who always wants a second pinion and to wait longer to see if it will be better in a while, and the lazy git, who wonders whether anything needs to be done at all. And the conscious "I" has to make sense of this cacophony of disjoint voices.

Robert Heinlein described man as not so much the rational animal as the rationalising animal. I think this is very true - perhaps even truer than he meant. I thimk that all our real thiniking occurs in these lower, uncontrolled, levels of the mind. It is the the function of the spokesman of the group to comvert the decision thrown up by the real thinkers into words. But that spokesman, who is "I" doesn't think at all. All it does is to wrap the decisions of other levels in words. And sometimes it cannot find words to wrap those thoughts, which we then ascribe to "gut feel" or intuition. Such unvoiceable thoughts differ from the voiced ones only in that the lower levels have not offered up enough information for the spokesman to be able to clad them in convincing words.

An atheist's thoughts on religion

2005-07-09T19:51:44Z

Warning: this is quite likely to offend those of a religious viewpoint. I don't intend it to be offensive, but if I am to express thoughts clearly, I will have to say things which may be regarded as belittling religious believers. If you are likely to be thus offended, please read no further. To seek out offence where none is actually intended is, to my way of thinking, offensive in its own right.

Firstly, let me make my own position clear. When I describe my viewpoint, some consider me an atheist and others an agnostic. I am not the sort of atheist who says that God cannot exist in any possible form, and that all those who think so are foolish. Such hard-liners I call anti-theists, and they are in many ways as unpleasantly dogmatic as the worst religious fundamentalist. On the other hand, I cannot accept the weakness of the agnostic "I don't know". As Douglas Adams said, after a reasonable amount of careful searching for something without finding it, at some time you must come to the conclusion that it probably does not exist. To continue to act as if something exists when several searches have failed so find it puts you in the company of conspiracy theorists. On the other hand, to conclude that because you have not found it, it cannot exist puts you in the company of bigots.

I have some knowledge of the world's major religions, and I disbelieve them in direct proportion to my knowledge of them. In Christianity, in which I was brought up, I disbelieve quite strongly. In the other Religions of the Book, Islam and Judaism, I disbelieve fairly firmly. In Buddhism and Hinduism, less so. But even within these religions, there is a wide variety of views as to what the nature of God may be, let alone his/her/its/their comandments. The bearded old man in the sky (to take one of the more extreme Christian models) is ridiculous. But a disembodied aggregation of the psychic energy of the whole of humanity, while needing physics for which there is no evidence, is not intrinsically stupid. So there is plenty of room in the universe for Divinity not as I know it, even if I reject all forms of divinity as other people would have me know it.

However, there is one conclusion you can draw from the world's proliferation of religions, which is that there is an innate tendency of humans to believe. All the worlds religions cannot be completely true. Even if one of them is the perfect rendition of the nature of God, anything which differs must be in some way wrong. Of course, those who wish to bridge the differences between religions insist that even those who who believe in the "wrong" way still see some aspect of the Divine, and that all the different names of God and Gods refer to aspects of the same Divine essence. As will be seen, this is a viewpoint I can sympathise with, though from the opposite direction,

One of the problems I have always had with looking at the behaviour of the churches from the outside is the fellow feeling between followers of completely disjoint religions. Even if you regard the descendents of Judaism, from Islam to Mormon with all between (a vast stretch) as one, there is a chasm between them and, say, Bhuddism. Surely, if one religion is right, then one with a totally diffent view must be wrong. Such a view has been taken, with distressing results, many times in history. But the rage shown to the believers in a totally different religions has rarely been stronger than that shown to those of the same religion whose views diverge slightly. In intolerant times, the heretic and the unbeliever were persecuted apallingly, with the heretic as often as not getting the worse treatment. And in tolerant times, both have been accepted as brothers and sisters with unfortunately misinformed viewpoints. But very often, in times of tolerance and of intolerance, the atheist or agnostic has been regarded as worth than either heretics or followers of a different God. This has confused me. How can disbelief be worse than contrdictory belief? Surely, in the journey from that foul lie to this wonderful truth, one must pass through the empty lands of disbelief? Is not the unbeliever only half as far away, and thus presumably only half as bad, as the believer in and alien God?

I recently realised that this is the point of view of the unbeliever, and that I was trying to argue in the wrong direction. As an unbeliever, I woould have to start from disbelief reach God by studying scripture, theology etc. to reach an understanding of the Divine, whatever it may be, and from there proceed to the appropriate Divinely-inspired behaviour. Thus, in my atheistic view, a believer in one religion would have to come to disbelieve in his of her previous religion and, rejecting that. to come to a position of unbelief from which he could ascend the heights of a new and more true religion. Thus the direction is from Scripture to God.

But this is eactly wrong. For the believer, it now seems to me, the direction of travel is exactly the opposite direction. The believer starts with a belief in the Divine, albeit of a rather inchoate and undefined nature, and travels toward Scripture in order to clothe this unformed belief with a history and a set of rules for behaviour. Thus when believers meet, they can put aside parts of their beliefs as mere cultural artifacts, at least thinkably not part of the underlying truth. Thus they meet not in the bleak wastelands of disbelief but in the warm fog of unfocussed, uninformative, but warm and comfortable, belief. And the atheist or agnostic stands further from any of them than they are from each other,

So it seems to me that believers derive from purely internal sources two core premises. Firstly, that the Divine in some way exists - though its form (one, many, human, intangible, animal...) may be unknown, And secondly, that the Divine's relationship towards humans is essentially the same as that of parents towards their children (including, for some of the more extreme religions, abusive parents). That is to say, the Diving is essentially benevolent, rewards in some way "good" deeds and punishes "bad" ones, and wants us to acknowledge its supervisory presence.

The first statement is uncontroversial. The religious sometimes acknowledge the "gift of faith". But the second is much more controversial. To me, it seems entirely possoble that God is a malicious being enjoying our sufferings. Or that God is actually an alien scientist, unemotionally studying his experimental animals. Or that he created the universe by accident and either does not care or is unable to do anything about the mess. And no revelation or prophet, including apparently divine ones, could contradict these hypotheses. If God is capable of lying, he is capable of lying through the mouths of prophets and emissaries of all sorts. If God can do miracles, he can do them to validate a lie as easily as to validate a truth.

When I put such hypotheses to the few religious believers with whom I would be happy to discuss such tender issues, I find the result surprising. The simply say, flatly, "God would not do that". They cannot, it seems to me, discuss the concept of a God who is not, broadly speaking, benevolent - at least to the chosen people. The unarguable point - they have faith, I have not - extends not only to the existence, in some form of God, but also of Gods essential, undeniable, goodwill towards humanity. This is not, as I used to believe, a matter derived from revelation and scripture, but a part of the central axiom of Faith.

In fact, the relationship is rather the other way round. A benevolent God would surely not leave humanity in ignorance of his/her/its/their wishes. Therefore at least one of the available claimed divine revelations must be right. The believer therefore doesn't have to worry about searching our a new and unique religion: one, at least, of the varieties on offer must be right. And, of course, that which most conforms with your cultural prejudices is likely to be most comfortable, and hence most likely to feel right. And once the believer has joined a faith community, the feedback of mutual support and encouragement will reinforce the feeling that "this is the right one". Of course, if one religion becomes, for some reason, unacceptable, it is normal not to reject God (as I in my atheist way would believe) but to reject that particualr religion and jump ship to another.

If I am right, this points to the centrality of the parent-child relationship to the nature of humanity. Religious belief would, under this model, appear to be merely a side effect of the parent child-relationship. When we are children, we see our parents as omniscient and omnipotent. They reward good behaviour , and punish bad. They give commandments (brush your teeth, bedtime) whose relevance we cannot understand. And they want us to acknowledge their parenthood, sometimes by doing things they could perfectly well do themselves (such as requesting gifts of childish paintings or first efforts at cookies). And when we grow up and realise that our parents are not omniscient and omnipotent, we transfer that relationship (often with the assistance of the parent themselve, who did it before us) to the Divine.

Parents are broadly benevolent (and children will believe them to be so even in the face of evidence to the contrary) - and so is God . Parents reward virtue - and so does God. In earlier times by direct intervention in worldy affairs, nowadays by piling up the balance for the afterlife, or by purely mental ("spritual") support. Parents punish misbehaviour, with a claimed (and often sincere) heavy heart - and so does God, usually by inverting the rewards for virtue. Parents want children to show gratitude for what they receive - and so does God (via, apparently, the singing of songs and the performace of rituals). The language of the Catholic church is very explicit about this view - but I think it applies to all religion.

And hence I hope that, if you are a believer who has read this far, that I have not convinced you. I wanted to say what I had to say. But I do not want to make you an orphan again by depriving you of your spiritual parent. So, if you have one, return to your church, synagogue, mosque, gurdwara or temple with my best wishes.

Energy for the future - OTEC

2005-04-07T14:46:10Z

Once we run out of, or reject, fossil fuels, there are only two sources for energy: nuclear reactors and the sun.

Fission-type nuclear reactors - the only ones which exist at the moment - are, in my opinion, too dirty to use if we can possibly avoid it. I am sure that, despite one or two scares in the past, it is possible to build safe fission reactors. But it seems to me that the technology inherently, and thus unavoidably, produces relatively large quantities of frighteningly dangerous and frighteningly long-lived waste. Until we have a safe way of disposing of such waste, I don't want to produce it if it possibly avoidable. And it is emphatically not acceptable to suggest that science will have come up with a solution by the time it is needed. That is what was said about the current generation of reactors, now reaching the end of their lives - and it simply hasn't come true. When you have a safe and reliable way of disposing permanently of high-level waste (I favour dumping in subduction zones), nuclear fission is not an available option, for me.

Fusion reactors, which not perfectly clean, should be acceptably so. But fusion power is thirty years away, which it has been for the last forty years, and likely to remain that way as far ahead as I can see. When it appears, I'll be glad to see it. But, while I think it will be along eventually, I think that it is too far away to factor into any current plans.

So the only remaining option is solar power (which is, of course, just fusion power a long way away). All other energy sources, such as hydro-electric, wind, wave, and biomass, are simply ways of collecting solar energy and converting it into a more usable form. (There is an exception, geothermal, which is fossil fission energy, but this will always be a niche source).

So if we are to exploit solar energy, we need to use the biggest solar collector we can find. And the biggest collector by far is the oceans - 70% of the earth surface. Any other solar collector fades into insignificance compared to this. Wind and wave power are, to some extent, second-hand versions of the energy trapped by the oceans, so we exploit a little of it. But most of it just sits there and is eventually re-radiated to space. So, in my opinion Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is the best hope for long term renewable energy sources.

Most current OTEC energy schemes are shore based, and depend upon running pipes out from the shore to deep water. There are relatively few places that are suitable for this - you need dry land within a few miles of the edge of the continental shelf, which is not common. It has the advantage that the energy is generated on shore, and if you are reasonably close to energy consumers, can be delivered straight to them. But that combination of deep water, shore, and customer all close together is rare. Shore is inherently linear, whereas the oceans collect power in area. The larger the ocean, the fewer, proportionately, the number of places suitable for extracting energy on shore.

There is another problem with shore based OTEC, which it shares with wave power. Precisely because it has such large amounts of energy bound up in it, the sea can get very violent. And when it is constrained, by shallowing water and narrowing shores, it can get very violent indeed. The "surf zone" is a very destructive place indeed. One of the problems with wave power is building an installation that can withstand the destructive power of winter storms without being too heavy to generate power from everyday waves, and too expensive to be worth building.

So to extract power on a large scale, we will have to have platforms in the open ocean. And these platforms cannot be moored - the depth of then ocean is far too great, and moored platforms have many of the problems of fixed installations in terms of being "attacked" by the sea. A free floating platform is much more compliant (and, as we shall see, can be made even more so). This, of course, means that the energy cannot be transferred directly to the shore. However, if we want to generate hydrogen for the future non-polluting hydrogen powered economy, there could hardly be a better place to do it than at sea. Tankers will come and take hydrogen from our OTEC station just as they currently take Natural Gas from the places it naturally occurs to the population centres where it is consumed.

Current OTEC designs are based upon using some easily boiled fluid such as ammonia which is heated by warm surface water and condensed by cold deep water, driving a turbine in between. However, this is because they are shore based. I propose a much simpler system: a simple vertical tube, floating freely in the deep ocean. The tube must be long enough to reach down to the permanently cold volumes of the ocean, as 1km. and might be something like 10m in diameter.

Alongside the tube is a heat pumping system which transfers heat from heat exchangers in the warm ocean at the top of the tube to another set of heat exchangers inside the bottom of the tube. We are not extracting energy from the temperature difference in the heat pump, so it should be possible to make it essentially self-operating.What we are doing is transferring heat to the column of water inside the tube. This warm water will, of course, start to rise - whereupon we pump in more heat to warm up the cold water which has flowed in to replace it. Pretty soon, we will have a 1km long column of warm water rising It may not be rising very fast, but it has a heck of a lot of power behind it..

At the top of the tube is a taper, which could easily reduce the size of the tube from 10m diameter to 1m diameter, a reduction of 100 times. This effectively acts as a 100 to 1 step up on the power delivered. At the top of this taper we put a conventional turbine, which generates our electricity. The electricity is then used to electrolyse water to obtain hydrogen, which is stored until collected by tankers to transport to the users.

So far, so straightforward (or rather, so straight up-and-down). But there are a number of other matters to be dealt with. How do these generators keep on station? It is all very well putting dotting the equatorial oceans with them but how do they stay there? By aiming their exhaust water off to one side. This will deliver a gentle thrust which will enable our station at least to switch from one ocean current to another and thereby keep station, in a general sense. Furthermore, the generator needs to keep moving at least locally, because otherwise it will end up sitting in a pool of its own "exhaust gas" - cold water. So even if it doesn't need to navigate anywhere, it should push itself round in large circles to keep moving into fresh warmer water.

As already mentioned, the extremes of behaviour of the sea are a source of serious problems in designing maritime installations. The sea is capable of producing occasional extremes of behaviour which are orders of magnitude more destructive than the "average" weather. Being away from the shore, the very worst is avoided - but deep ocean storms can still be fearsome. How will this long, thin, and thus relatively fragile, structure avoid tropical storms? By ducking under water. We have a structure whose mass is probably in the tens of thousands of tons, which is already balanced at near neutral buoyancy. It is receiving considerable amounts of upthrust from the column of warm water contained within it (just like a hot air balloon). It has numerous hydrogen storage tanks. By playing all these factors off, it should be no problem for the whole system to drop down, say, 30 metres under the water when storms blow up. At that depth, the strongest storm would produce only a little mild rocking.

There will be other beneficial effects of this station. The open oceans are very poor in life, almost a desert. This is because or a shortage of nutrients. There is plenty of energy, but all the nutrients get cycled around and around the food cycle until they end op in something which sinks out of the energy-rich zone and into the depths. Sea life prefers the coasts, where rivers deliver nutrients or they can be gathered directly from the seabed. The depth, by contrast, are nutrient rich, and places where the deep water is forced up to the surface are astonishingly fertile (for example, the anchovy fishery off the west of South America). Our power stations will be pumping up megatons of this nutrient rich deep water, and spreading it out over the warm, well lit surface. We can expect an explosion of sea life, which can probably be profitably farmed.

What effect will this have on the ocean as a whole, and the climate. The answer , obviously, is that we cannot tell at this time. At a time when we still have not managed to convince everybody that Global Warming is real, we cannot possible predict the large-scale effects of power generation. However, leaving aside its ;replacement of CO2 generating fossil by hydrogen, it is likely to cause a net reduction of atmospheric CO2. Firstly, the sea life encouraged by the upwelling nutrients will extract its carbon from dissolved CO2 and some, at least, of it will sink to the abyssal depths. Secondly, it will cool the ocean surface, increasing the solubility of CO2 and hence removing it from the atmosphere. Large scale powered generation is likely to have ecological and climatological effects however it is done; this seems, on the face of it, more benign then most.

"Price" versus "Value"

2005-04-06T17:23:54Z

There are two concepts tied up in the words Price and Value which I think should be more clearly separated. Unfortunately, the English language is not as I would wish it to be, so the tangle will remain, whatever I might desire. But I think that it is worth trying to clarify the difference between the two concepts. To me, the clarification makes certain decisions much clearer.

Price is the easy word to define. Price is an absolute - a sum of money (or other valuable) asked, offered or accepted in exchange for something. A price is the same for everybody. Alright, some prices may not be available to everybody - for example, a discount for members only - but everybody knows exactly what the price means.

Value is much harder, because value is, in the sense I am using it, a relative quantity. You cannot talk about value in the abstract. You always have to talk about value to somebody. To pick an exaggerated case, a glass of water is of enormous value to a thirsty man in the desert, and of negative value to someone drowning in the sea.

And it is right that value varies with people. Differences in value are the basis of all fair trade. For a deal to be fair, the price must exceed the value to the seller, so that he feels that he has gained by the trade, and the value must exceed the price for the buyer, who also feels that he has gained. It is upon the the fact that different people place different values on the same object that the whole marketplace system is based. Every time a fair trade takes place, value is added to the world - the difference between the values placed upon it by the seller and buyer.

Unfortunately, modern commercial usage has muddled the two meanings, probably because the word value is regarded as more acceptable than price. Apart from the total mindlessness of packs of sweets labelled "Full Half Pound Value", there are often adverts claiming a certain value for things when they actually mean price. For example, a computer may be offered with bundled software "over £500 value". Nonsense. That software may be over £500 price, but it is not over £500 value unless you, the buyer, would be willing to pay £500 for it if it were not bundled. Given the collection of near useless packages usually offered, the value to most buyers would probably be would be nearer £5 than £500.

There is a more respectable case where convention uses value where I feel that price would be better. That is when you call on an expert to "value" some piece of property - a house, antique jewellery, a used car. The point is that they are not actually valuing it, they are pricing it. What the "valuer" offers is actually a price .They are offering their opinion of the price at which it could be sold in the current market place. Unfortunately, this usage is too well embedded in the language to be dug out. But I intend to ignore it for the rest of this note. If anybody knows a better word - one which represents the concept of value that I am outlining here, please let me know.

The fact that every fair trade represents an increase in value means that the act of trading, in its own right, adds value to the world. This is a point often missed by those who decry the relative decline of manufacturing industry. To such people, it seems that the only way to add value is by taking raw materials and working them up into finished goods. Such activities undoubtedly do add value - but so does trade. Failure to understand the difference between price and value, and the way in which proper trade adds value, is one of the reasons for the mind-boggling ineffiieincy of the Communist economies. Since the focussed entirely on price, with no concept of value, there was no way to tell if any transaction was adding value - or even if it was destroying it, by forcing one entity to buy above its value or sell below.

Of course, it isn't quite as easy as I may have implied above. Since value is a subjective matter, there is no way for buyer and seller to compare their respective values. Hence the glory of the haggle. Obviously, neither buyer nor seller is going to accept a price that gives them less than (approximately) half of the added value of the transaction. But this is half of the difference between two values, one of which they do not know. Hence each side in a transaction has a strong motive to distort their presentation of their own valuation of object under discussion - upwards for the seller, downwards for the buyer. Each is trying to minimised the perceived value difference, so that they can then be generous in appearing to offer the other party more than half of the apparent value added. And, in my opinion, there is no shame in doing this. Value is an intangible, so you are entitled present your valuation in the way that best suits you. What you are not entitled to do is to deceive the other party in order to distort their valuation. They must have all the information they need to form their own, internal, valuation. Then, effectively, to two parties compare valuations to see if they have a potential deal. But they compare without revealing too much - you never reveal your true valuation, lest the other side force you down too far.

Of course there are times when price and value are the same. This is for freely and bidirectionally tradable items - usually financial instruments. For things which can be freely bought and sold at the same price (barring relatively modest transaction charges) value and price are the same thing. But this is only true if the market is truly bidirectional. Even if there is an open market with many suppliers, if you cannot immediately re3sell what you have bought, you need to have some value added above the price paid to justify the loss of convertibility when you trade.

So, what is the point of this whole tirade? Mainly, to avoid being deceived by changes in price into thinking there are changes in value. There is a tendency for people to get "Sale Fever". If it is 50% off, surely it must be worth buying? Not necessarily. The value has changed not at all - and if the value was not there at full price, it is not obvious that it is necessarily there at the reduced price. If you, personally, don't have a use for it, then the value is close to nothing - or even negative if it takes up valuable storage space. Things which never come out of storage have a value of zero.

Also, avoid "Antiques Roadshow Syndrome". You see something for sale, say at a boot sale, which you know would be priced (not valued, in my sense) much higher in a specialist dealers. That item does not have that value unless you actually intend are and able to sell it in such a specialist dealer. If you are a professional dealer, that is indeed the value. But even if you intend to sell to such a dealer, you can only expect at most half of the price at which the dealer would display it. And too often, people buy such things without knowing where to find such a dealer, nor with the real intention of selling it. In which case the object disappears into a cupboard and has, essentially, no value at all.