Note: this is a long, rambling entry that swings from naval gazing to some interesting stuff on global energy futures.

Houmous

There's a gymball in my bedroom: silver, 800mm wide. Having stared at it for a while, I started to wonder - if the sun were that gymball, how big would the Earth be? A few sums later I got 7mm. Some frantic measuring of dried pulses followed, and a chickpea emerged as the perfect - if slightly lumpy - candidate for sitting on the floor next to the gymball. There it sits still, so every night I can stare at it and mutter to myself, 'that's just stupid.' I include a photo of chickpea on gymball. But photos, this description - they don't do it justice. Find a gymball of equal size, get a chickpea: hold it between thumb and forefinger, having made sure to watch a video of the sun first. (Some would argue 'blue marble' better captures the wonder of it; each to their own.)

Incidentally, you can scale to anything you like at this website. At the scale above, chickpea would be 85 metres away from gymball.

I've also been trying to wrap my noggin around our place on Chickpea Earth. This has included an alarming assault on my sense of Earthly security, such as a list of all the ways in which we might never have existed. Some of these were covered in rather sensationalist tone by Tony Robinson's channel 4 series, 'Catastrophe Earth'. This quote sums up the general approach:

85000 years ago, humans were just heading out of Africa; the meteoric rise of our species makes us feel indestructible. Yet we are more vulnerable than we might care to imagine. We live on a thin crust that floats on a sea of pressurised molten rock and we rely on the proximity of a star to keep temperatures optimal for life. Meanwhile our planet moves through space, which is populated by numerous flying objects.

In 1918 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was given to Fritz Haber: he invented a method for synthesizing ammonia - that is, nitrogen 'fixed' with hydrogen - a chemical vital for organic life. The process was used during the First World War to make munitions: the allies got theirs from South American mines. Without industrial-scale production of ammonia, the war would have been considerably shorter. Verdun, for example - where a service took place today on WWI's 90th annivesary - was bombarded with a hundred thousand shells an hour - an hour! - at the start of the battle. (As well as a hundred thousand gas shells a day: Haber was instrumental in the development of gas warfare. Randomly, I now realise he was the subject of a brilliant Radio 4 play I caught the second half of. His scientist wife committed suicide. If the play is to be believed, this was to shock him into realising the monster he'd become. I buy that: radio 4 fiction will do for me as a factual source.)

Just updated my about page, thought I'd repost here:
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In the early 20th century, Ludwig Von Mises started off the 'socialist economic calculation debate'. He claimed that a planned economy was not only undesirable, but logically impossible. Friedrich Hayek - another Austrian economist - took up the argument and ran with it.

Hayek argued that society was just too complex to plan. Human minds - smaller, less complex systems - could never grasp the intricacies of the whole. For Hayek, this meant that all planning was the road to serfdom.

In the past ten to fifteen years, many people working on computation and society have found Hayek's writing prophetic. Whether or not you agree with his politics, Hayek made a compelling case for society as an evolving process, and of people as bounded in a 'sensory order' from which they must get all their information. He was, perhaps, an agent-based thinker - one who could see the limitations of economic theory at the time, but lacked the tools we have now to investigate these ideas robustly.

I caught a programme last night on the beeb about property. Nothing new there - you can be guaranteed to find a property programme of some description 50% of the time the telly goes on: if the schedulers are to be believed, we're obsessed. (Indeed, there was another property prog on Channel 4 at the same time.)

But this one was a little more thoughtful. The last person to be interviewed was an estate agent based in Sandbanks, Poole - not too far away from where I used to live in Bournemouth. A few years back, one place sold for a particularly large amount of money, and worked out at something like £900 per square foot. This particular estate agent did a quick calculation and discovered this made it the fourth most expensive place to live in the world. The next step is brilliant: he then trumpeted the whole area as such. 'Sandbanks: the fourth most expensive place to live in the world!' Thus began Sandbank's insane rocketing into the property stratosphere, accompanied (as he notes) by developing new offices and a whole selling style suitable to people wanting to buy into the Sandbanks glow.

Over at Crooked Timber, there's a great post on the minimum wage where Kathy argues that 1) there are plenty of empirical reasons why increasing a minimum wage may not lead to higher unemployment and 2) that you'll get into trouble with the economic 'fundamentalists' if you try and work on this issue without concluding that it does.

This is probably a foolish venture (given my math ignorance) but here's some thoughts on an economic random walk. (Any pointers to elementary fuck-ups / blindingly obvious things I'm missing appreciated.) I've come across the graphs here in each of the simple models I've done of trade exchanges. This one isn't a real trade exchange - it's had price decisions removed entirely. So apart from the limit on the amount of money in the economy and the requirement that money is 'exchanged', they are random walks. It's like this. We start with:

• 100 people, 100 pounds each (so the amount of money in this 'economy' remains constant: the mean is always 100.)
• Run for 200,000 days
• On each day, each person randomly chooses someone, and gives them a pound if they have a pound to give. If they don't, on to the next person's random choice.

(See links below for graphs and code.)

Was reading this from Crooked Timber yesterday: Maria asks, how does OPEC exist in a world where of legal and institutional free trade? She says "I'm not looking for the realpolitik answer. That's pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutional answer to this question?"

I got sent a link this week to Zotero - iTunes for researchers, in the form of a Firefox extension. I'm now evangelising to people about it on a daily basis. It worries me how excited I am by it. Zotero just won a 'citefest' competition - can't say it had ever occurred to me such competitions occur, but they do. Zotero won a number of challenges and came out on top overall. Having used Endnote a little, I can see why. I have even written to them in order to become a campus rep. I'm going to get a t-shirt.

Zotero is spectacular. It's open source and funded at least in part by the US state, as well as some private foundations. A pretty large team have put it together; extensions and third party stuff should be on the way. Ctrl - alt + z brings it up. Any ISI / library / amazon page I'm on (and many, many others) will offer me a little button in the address bar to stick all the citation info in. If there are a lot of references on the page, it'll offer me a folder-full and I choose which ones to add. They can be dynamically searched and foldered, as in itunes, as well as tagged. The search index includes all text and, with a PDF plug-in, that text can be indexed too. Notes can added (also searchable), and any kind of file attachment. The tags act as dynamic toggle switches. Related things can be connected. Genius.

Tory David Willetts (apparently 'Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills') is to make a speech tonight at the LSE - the Oakeshott lecture indeed - espousing the virtues of reciprocity, community and altruism. He is proposing that institutions be designed to support this sort of thing. The dry stone wall metaphor comes in because, as the Times quotes:

A dry-stone wall, like the one David Willetts pointed out to David Cameron, does not have any glue or cement holding it together. It holds together because of the way it has been designed. Similarly, the aim of Tories is not to pour social glue on civil society through public policy, and armies of new laws, nor is to enunciate some new abstract principle of justice that might be at variance with human nature. It is to help society find different kinds of equilibrium.

Willetts was on radio 4 this morning enthusiastically recounting how game theory, evolutionary economics and neuro-biology are giving scientific weight to his argument: as the lecture website says, he uses 'latest research from these disciplines [or at least popularisers of...] to explain what Government can and cannot do to influence our behaviour.'

I had a couple of bottles of wine and a tangled bank of discussion last night with Andy Goldring. One of those ones where notes must be taken - at least on my part, since I got so many ideas from him. The one I want to write about here is Stafford Beer, a plummy, crazy-bearded cybernetician. After his World War Two service he got into cybernetic management theory, consulting for a load of large companies. I'd heard about his attempt to create a cybernetic economy at some point but never followed it up. It's a fascinating chunk of history. The economic system he designed was called Project Cybersyn; there's a website with films from a documentary / art installation about it, which has a wonderful bit of footage from Beer's time at UMIST. It's accessible via one tiny little pink dot - or if you're impatient, the direct link is in the source of the page - I've kindly put it here for you. [update: video is now on youtube here] The silent UMIST audiovisual timer at the start gives it a convincing sense of antiquity. I recommend watching the first five minutes at least.

One day while working in London in 1971, Beer - to quote from the film -

... got a letter that very much changed my life. It was from the technical general manager of the state planning board of Chile. He remarked in this letter that he had studied all my works, he had collected a team of scientists together, and would I please come and take it over? I could hardly believe it, as you can imagine. But this was to start me on a journey that had me commuting 8000 miles over and over between London and Santiago.