From liralen@netcom.com Mon Mar 18 18:43:58 1996
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To: flynn@kodachi.com, liralen@netcom.com
Cc: rostykus@fermi.phys.cmu.edu
Subject: Douglas Adams on Internet Publishing
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 96 15:24:59 -0800
From: Liralen Li <liralen@netcom.com>
Status: R

The experience of a talk by Douglas Adams 
Chief Fantasist of The Digital Village

He was tall, white haired, with a beautiful British accent, and spoke as
much with his body and hands as with his voice and words.  He started his
talk by pacing about the stage and telling the story of a professor in
Pavelovian theory and how his class decided that every time he was on the
left side of the stage they would be cheerful, brilliant, ask the best
questions they could think of and make the best discussions they could
think of; and when he was on the right side of the stage the class would
fall asleep.  By the end of the semester they'd gotten the professor
cornered on the left side of the room.  Behavior can be modified with
encouragement.

Adams then spoke of the fact that he's one of Those Kinds of speakers who
seem to speak of everything, one of those... Macintosh types... <grin> who
might or might not get to the point, though he intended to bring
everything together at the end of the talk.  He also noted that this very
Microsoft kind of stage had a Big Clock that counted, to the second, the
amount of time he had left in which to speak.  He said that if he never
got to the point, he would hold a contest by email to see who came up with
the best summary of what he *might* have been talking about.

He then spoke about some fighter jet that was completely built and
completely modeled on computers, and that it was a marvelous bit of
technology and it flew beautifully the first time it came out.  And a line
of four of those fighter jets were doing rounds, one day, and suddenly,
the first plane flipped over to fly upside down.  The pilot behind him
wondered why and then found that his plane flipped.  And so on, so that
all four planes suddenly were upside-down.  It turned out that the four
planes had just done something that none of the fighters flown, so far,
has done.  They'd crossed the equator.  There was a sign error in the
control software.

There is a lot of data in the real world, and the way most of us make
sense of it is by ignoring most of it and deal only with what's left.

A research group got a new dolphin and they put it through some
rudimentary paces, basically asking it to jump out of the water, make a
noise, and then it would get a fish.  The dolphin did it perfectly at
first, and then its behavior started to drift.  It would always do the
jump just fine, but the sound it made was sometimes softer, sometimes
louder, sometimes higher and something's lower, and by the end of the
session there were even times when it didn't make a sound at all!!  They
thought the dolphin wasn't all that smart, `cause by the end it wasn't
getting many fish.  Later, they brought up a recording of the session and
found out that the dolphin had actually made a sound every time it had
jumped.  Some of them, however, were beyond the range of human hearing.
Seems that while they thought they were testing the dolphin's learning
capability, the *dolphin* had been testing the range of human hearing.

There was some other experiment, where there was a screen that, on the
most part and for most of its area, showed complete gibberish.  The
smaller other part would show Hamlet's `To be or not to be' speech.  There
was also a helmet that had a sensor that tracked the velocity and vector
of the wearer's eyes, so that it would know where the person was looking,
and everywhere the person looked, for just that one word, in that one
coordinate, it would substitute the gibberish for the `To Be or not to be'
speech.  To the wearer of the helmet, the screen would, therefore, only
show the `To Be or not to be' speech and the wearer would never know
anything different.  The wearer of the helmet's model of what was on the
screen would, therefore, always be the `To Be or Not To Be' speech, and
the model would persist in the reader's memory.

The eye has this feature, no... this bug in it, that were the optic nerve
exists the back of the eye there is this blind spot.  It's kinda the
opposite of the above, in that there's a single spot that is never there.
It's not a black hole, but a blind hole, if you look at a pea, with just
one eye, there is a spot where it will simply disappear.  But when you
look at the world, you never miss that spot, your memory and your model of
the world just fills it in with what you `know' is there.  Charles II had
this eccentricity... you knew you were in problem if he started looking at
you with only one eye, he was trying to see what you'd look like without
your head.

There is something that happened to Adams on the way from Cambridge to
London, which is on the verge of something that would only happen in Urban
Legend.  But Urban Legend happens to your wife's brother's friend's second
cousin.  This happened to Adams.  He'd gotten to the station 20 minutes
early, and so bought a newspaper (as he was going to do the crosswords), a
packet of biscuits (Oh, right, west of the Atlantic, that's cookies.
Please do a global search and replace of biscuits for cookies) and a
coffee at the station store.  I then set all my things on a table and sat
down.  Picture this... the newspaper to the right, the coffee to the left,
the packet of  biscuits... uhh... cookies before me, and opposite me was a
quite ordinary guy in a business suit who looked like he wouldn't harm a
thing.

Then... the man across the table, took a hold of my packet of cookies,
opened it and ate one.

<giggles>  I can't capture the complete rant Douglas Adams went into at
this point, suffice it to say that "Nothing in British social culture had
prepared me for this... I did as any model of English propriety would have
done. [ long pause ]  I ignored it."

"Instead, I took a cookie and ate one.  Then *he* *did* *it* *again*.  And
after ignoring the first, it was an unscalable problem to even mention the
second one, far harder to even think of mentioning it after ignoring the
first.  Our eyes met for a bit, but we were both silent.  We finished the
whole packet in this fashion, he'd take one and I'd take one.  There were
only around eight biscuits, but an eternity in tension.  Finally, when
they were done, he stood up and went away and I finally breathed a sigh of
relief.  My train pulled in then, and I finished the last of my coffee.  I
then picked up my paper, and lying there was _my_ packet of cookies.

"There is some man out there, telling exactly the same story, but HE
doesn't have the punch line..."

Sometimes, we use all the mass of incoming data we get to update a model
which is intrinsically wrong.

Archeology, paleontology, and other sciences used to be done by wealthy
amateurs.  And quite a few of them would go into a dig with a very solid
idea of what they wanted to find and they'd force all the data they'd get
into that model, often bending or breaking the data in order to fit the
model.  One guy had gone into a dig for Knosis looking for a highly
populated city that had been destroyed by fire and, therefore, abandoned,
later.  He published several papers on that `fact'.  A tourist geologist
had wandered in and, on inspection, disproved the possibility.

The City was made of a particular type of gypsum that, with a certain
inpurity, had the gloss and glow of alabaster.  It was softer than
alabaster, so a identification of the substance could be made as easily as
running your fingernail over it and if it scarred, it was gypsum.  The
floors of the city were made of the same substance, but hadn't been worn
before modern times, which would be odd for a city that had been lived
in.  So the clues pointed towards the city being one that hadn't been used
much.  Basically, the man went back to the original data and derived a
model that was far more fascinating and accurate than the one that someone
had come into the site with.

At one time, he went to look for rhinoceri, and found a rhinoceros and
found that a game of `Grandmother's footsteps' (run closer while their
back is turned and freeze when they look) worked very well on the rhino,
as it couldn't see them at all when they weren't moving.  But the moment
the wind turned and they suddenly became downwind of the beast, it
instantly started and ran away.  A rhino's senses are the opposite of a
humans in that a rhino uses visual information solely for alarms, but did
their modeling of the world from scent, whereas a human mostly uses scent
as an alert but visual information as their main modeling input.  Which is
an interestingly different model.  Sight input comes nearly
instantaneously with the phenomenon, where as scent can linger for days
after the actual presence of the source of the scent.  What is the mental
landscape of something that always has the past right there?  Where time
is part of the landscape?  And what of creatures with other modeling
input?  Dolphins model the world through sound, as do bats.

He was studying the nearly blind Yangtze River dolphin.  The Yangtze
River, for thousands of years, has gradually become more and more silty,
as more and more earth has been washed into the river.  The dolphin had,
over generations, evolved to the smaller and smaller visual field of the
river by becoming nearly blind, but also very, very accurate at modeling
its world with sound.  Then we invented diesel engines, so the River is
now filled with sound, too.

Human evolution has ended.  It ended with the usage of tools.  Evolution
happens when a small group is split off from the main group and put into a
new environment.  Put the small group into a cooler environment and in a
few generations, that small group will show adaptation to the cold with
features that allow them to conserve warmth.  For most furred animals that
would mean heavier and denser coats.  We see an animal with a thicker coat
and we'll just have it off him.  If you get sick, you don't die.  If
you're injured, you don't die.  If a crop fails, you don't die.  If a
hurricane blows through, you don't die.  If you're put in a more harsh
environment, you don't die.   If you're slow witted, you don't die. If you
are thoroughly stupid, you get elected to high office.

There is a buffer between us and the environment.  Most of the buffer was
created by our ability to model things in our head and to deal with it in
the fashion before it happens, and that had led to the rise of human
culture.

There is a parallel to this in the rise of the computer, mostly due to the
ability to model in the computer things that we can't do in reality.

When he first looked at the first personal computer to hit his
neighborhood there was the usual excitement and that strange feeling which
usually precludes learning the exact extent of the usage of the phrase,
"Disposable Income'.  The only thing holding him back was the question,
"What would I, a writer, do with a machine made to do calculations very
fast?"

Really, at that time, everyone only thought of computers as machines that
could manipulate numbers very quickly, and, ah hah: A computer is a
calculator!  It took someone who wondered, what if we used numbers to
represent letters?  Which came up with the concept of ASCII codes.  And,
ta dah: A computer is a typewriter!  Now... if you use those same numbers,
and assign each something that has to do with colors and/or pixels,
then... ah hah!  A computer is a television! Then you add html and the
Internet and the ability to run about getting pictures and text from
people and, ta dah!  We get it NOW!  A Computer Is a brochure!!

<hee>

A computer actually isn't any of those things.  It can model all of them
very well, which should provide us the clue that a computer is actually an
excellent modeling machine.  But we'll have to abandon our old mental
models in order to take advantage of the modeling capabilities that a
computer can offer.

Adams was often asked `What impact do you think computers and the Internet
will have on publishing?' or `What impact do you think computers and the
Internet will have on TV?' And most of them wanted him to say, `Not very
much.'

In reality, it's a bit like asking the Mississippi or the Nile, "What
affect is meeting the Atlantic ocean going to have on you?" And the honest
answer is, "The rule of the river will no longer apply."  The publishing
company trying to build river banks in the middle of the ocean is going to
be in for a rude awakening.  There is an ocean of data out there, and
there needs to be a way to have it make sense to us.

A computer can be an extension of our ability to model the world, it has
the ability to work with our mind in making the sea of data that we
swim in every day make more sense to us.  There are good ways and bad
ways that the computer can be used.

One of the bad ways is perfectly rendered by a project that Adams saw at
the Media Lab.  They had assumed that there would never be enough
bandwidth for full video communications.  So they were attacking the
problem of `How can we simulate it with only a narrow bandwidth?  Why not
store, locally, a picture of the people that you usually talk with and
when they call, bring the picture up and have the incoming sound waves
waggle the mouth?  It was ridiculously bad.  It looked Pythonesque.

It was self-defeating.  When human beings talk with someone, there is not
just the semantic content of what is being said.  There are the hand
gestures ("if my mother wanted to shut me up she'd make me sit on my
hands..."), the posture, facial positions, voice pitch and tone, and
thousands of subtle things which can be communicated when two people are
face to face.  The human modeling system is fantastically good at filling
in the gaps that narrowing bandwidth leaves out.  Even when it goes all
the way down to the simple voice communication of a telephone, people can
fill that in with what they know of how other people speak.  We derive it
from what we know, unless the computer fills it in with junk.

The computer can enhance the model that we have, if it gets out of the way
of the things that we do well, or, better yet, plays to those
capabilities.  There was some other lab doing haptic modeling, a system
that involved not only light and audio, but also tactile feedback.  Touch
can be fantastically subtle as well as capable of covering a wide range of
possibilities.

The problem was as follows:  A road has to be built through a series of
hills _ The road has to be as flat as possible.  _ It needs to be as
straight as possible.  _ But any houses that it goes through must be
bought, so it costs money/resources.  These requirements are all somewhat
contradictory, but all necessary.  So they modeled the problem by
assigning a certain amount of resistance to how far these rules were
violated, and they found that nearly anyone, when given the handle with
touch feedback, was able to find a good path with the least resistance and
cost to those doing the road planning.

Many people seem to not know why there are seasons on the Earth.  Some
folks say that it's `cause the Earth is on an oval orbit about the Sun, so
when it's further away it's winter, and when it's closer it's summer, but
that doesn't explain why it's summer in Australia when it's winter in
London.  It turns out that it's because there's a tilt in the axis of the
earth and which ever end is pointed more towards the Sun during the
Earth's orbit has summer then.  Now... consider how you would get that
kind of information to other people.  You could type all that into a Web
page so that people could read it.  "The Computer is a typewriter!"  You
could use animation to demonstrate how the seasons work, to show them what
it's like.  "The Computer as TV!"  You could also build a model of how the
Earth goes around the Sun, using the mathematical models of gravity.  Then
you could use some of the same pieces to model the whole solar system.
Others could then add to the model.  Then anyone that looks at the model
can derive what they want from it.  It becomes more than simply the sum of
its parts.

There are stories about the Internet and the utterly useless things that
people do with it. One of which was of a young man who had to go down a
100 meter hallway to buy a Coke, and, sometimes, when he went there, he'd
find out that the Coke machine was empty.  To save himself the walk, he
plugged the Coke machine into the Internet, so that he could check the
status of the machine from his desk.  As a side affect, not only could you
check the status of the Coke machine a 100 meters away, but you could see
how many cans it had in any particular slot from anywhere in the world.
There are now hundreds of Coke machines on the net, so that someone in
Australia could see the temperature, and complete status of any of those
machines, all of which only adds to the enormous wealth of completely
useless information on the Net.

One of the marvelous things, though, is that if some user had put money
into a machine and, for some reason or another, had not chosen a can, with
some of the hookups, you could, if you happened upon a machine in that
pregnant state, make the choice yourself; and, possibly thousands of miles
away, you could make a can of Coke drop.  And someone just walking by a
Coke machine would be suddenly mystified by a can of coke just dropping,
as if by magic, from the machine, for, apparently, no reason at all.

In many ways, the Internet completes the last side of the old square that
was communication within our society.

In old times, when all that one could do was local communication, all that
one could deal with was with localized society.
  - There was face to face communication.  One on one.  
  - Singers and poets and statesmen could address those about them, and 
    affect them as one to many.
  - People could get together petitions to try and affect change at the
    ruler's level. Which is a many on one affect.
  - Finally, there were town meetings, where many people could speak 
    to many others at their level.  
    
With the electronic age we have
  - the telephone for one on one conversations 
  - an overload of one to many situations with the TV, radio, newspapers, 
    movies, and all that kind of media.  A frustrating situation in many 
    ways because you could react to what you were shown and told in 
    whatever way you would react, but there was no way to affect any of 
    what you were told about.
  - There are still petitions, and in the US, voting, where the many could
    affect the one.
  - Only the Web provides, however, the peer to peer communication for many
    to many, where you can reach out and affect the wide, wide world in as
    simple a manner as dropping a can of Pop a continent away.  Making the
    world respond to us.

The biological definition of life is a very tricky thing.  Anything that
has to cover everything from Bill Gates to the Great Barrier Reef has to
be very wide spread and very flexible.  Intuitively, it's easy to feel if
something is alive or not, but a strict definition is very, very
difficult.  There can be a wide, wide list of things that it needs to do
to be classified as life, a few of them might be the ability to grow,
organize internally, react to its environment, affect its environment in
some way, to reproduce and change.  What moves on the Net is something
that may be alive... instead of a wall between us and the rest of the
world, it seems to be providing an epidermis containing something of the
things that buffer us from the real world.  Threads and hooks that grow
more and more complex, and increase our ability to touch the world and
make it new and different and bring us a better modeling of what's out
there, further out than we've ever been able to just see before.

"So... I say to you, when you go out there to build your new elements on
the Internet, don't build dead things into it.  Build living models."