Boring answers to Powell's questions
A while back I answered some questions for Powell's City of Books web site. I didn't know they had posted the answers until it was brought to my attention by John Gabriele. Thank you, John.

They sent fifteen questions and asked me to pick at least five. I had a lot of trouble finding five of their questions that I wanted to answer. Most of the questions were not productive of interesting answers; I had to work hard to keep my answers from being super-dull.

The non-super-dull answers are on Powell's site. Here are the questions I didn't answer, with their super-dull answers:

1. Have you ever taken the Geek Test? How did you rate?

   Hardly anyone seems to answer this question, and really, who cares? Except that Sir Roger Penrose said something like "There's a Geek Test?".

   I did take it once, but I forget how I scored. But if you read this blog, you can probably extrapolate: high on math, science, and programming. But really, who cares? Telling someone else about your geek test score is even more boring than telling them about your dreams.

2. What do you do for relaxation?

   I didn't answer this one because my answer seemed so uninteresting. I program. I read a lot; unlike most people who read a lot, I read a lot of different things. Sometimes I watch TV. I go for walks and drive the car.

   One thing I used to do when I was younger was the "coffee trick". I'd go to an all-night diner with pens and a pad of paper and sit there drinking coffee all night and writing down whatever came out of my caffeine-addled brain. I'm too old for that now; it would make me sick.

3. What's your favorite blog right now?

   I answered this one for Powell's, and cited my own blog and Maciej Ceglowski's. But if I were answering the question today I would probably mention What Jeff Killed. Whenever a new What Jeff Killed post shows up in the aggregator, I get really excited. "Oh, boy!" I say. "I can't wait to see What Jeff Killed today!".

   It occurs to me that just that one paragraph could probably give plenty of people a very clear idea of what I'm like, at least to the point that they would be able to decide they didn't want to know me.

4. Douglas Adams or Scott Adams?

   I think they're both boring. But I wasn't going to say so in my Powell's interview.

5. What was your favorite book as a kid?

   This should have been easy to answer, but none of the books I thought of seemed particularly revealing. When I was in sixth grade my favorite book was "The Hero from Otherwhere," by Jay Williams. (He also wrote the Danny Dunn books.) A few years back Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.sf.written that he had recently read this, and that it occurred to him that it might have been his favorite book, had he read it in sixth grade, and had anyone had that experience. I wasn't the only one who had.

   I reread it a few years ago and it wasn't that good anymore.

   Robertson Davies writes about the awful juvenile-fiction magazines that he loved when he was a juvenile. Yes, they were terrible, but they fed something in him that needed to be fed. I think a lot of the books we love as children are like that.

6. What new technology do you think may actually have the potential for making people's lives better?

   I couldn't think of any way to answer this question that wouldn't be really boring. That probably says a lot more about me than about the question. I thought about gene therapy, land mine detection, water purification. But I don't personally have anything to do with those things, so it would just be a rehash of what I read in some magazine. And what's the point of reading an interview with an author who says, "Well, I read in Newsweek..."?

7. If you could be reincarnated for one day to live the life of any scientist or writer, who would you choose and why?

   This seems like it could have been interesting, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I might like to be Galileo, or to know what it's like to be Einstein, but that's not what the question says; it says that I'm me, living the life of Galileo or Einstein. But why would I want to do that? If I'm living the life of Einstein, that means I get to get up in the morning, go to an office in Zurich or Princeton, and sit behind a desk for eight hours, wishing I was smart enough to do Einstein's job.

   Some writers and scientists had exciting lives. I could be reincarnated as Evariste Galois, who was shot to death in a duel. That's not my idea of a good time.

   I once knew a guy who said he'd like to be David Lee Roth for one day, so that he could have sex with a groupie. Even if I wanted to have sex with a groupie, the question ("scientist or writer") pretty much rules out that form of entertainment. I suppose there's someone in the world who would want to be Pierre Curie, so that he know what it was like to fuck Marie Curie. That person isn't me.

8. What are some of the things you'd like your computer to do that it cannot now do?

   I came really close to answering this question. I had an answer all written. I wrote that I wanted the computer to be able to manufacture pornography on demand to the user's specification: if they asked for a kneecap fetish movie featuring Celine Dion and an overalls-wearing midget, it should be able to do that.

   Then I came to my senses and I realized I didn't want that answer to appear on my interview on the Powell's web site.

   But it'll happen, you wait and see.

   I also said I'd settle for having the computer discard spam messages before I saw them. I think the porn thing is a lot more likely.

9. By the end of your life, where do you think humankind will be in terms of new science and technological advancement?

   First I was stumped on this one because I don't know when the end of my life will be. I could be crushed in a revolving door next week, right?

   And assuming that I'll live another thirty years seems risky too. I'm hoping for a medical breakthrough that will prolong my life indefinitely. I expect it'll be along sooner or later. So my goal is to stay alive and healthy long enough to be able to take advantage of it when it arrives.

   Some people tell me they don't want to be immortal, that they think they would get bored. I believe them. People are bored because they're boring. Let them die; I won't miss them. I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.

   A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything.

   I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!"

   Well, even assuming that I live another thirty years, I don't think I can answer the question. When I was a kid my parents would go to the bank to cash a check. We got seven channels on the TV, and that was more than anyone else; we lived in New York. Nobody owned a computer; few people even owned typewriters. Big companies stored records on microfiche. The only way to find out what the law was was to go to the library and pore over some giant dusty book for hours until you found what you wanted.

   And sixty years ago presidential campains weren't yet advertising on television. Harry Truman campaigned by going from town to town on the back of a train (a train!) making speeches and shaking hands with people.

   Thirty years from now the world will be at least that different from the way things are now. How could I know what it'll be like?

10. Which country do you believe currently leads the world in science and technology? In ten years?

    In case you hadn't noticed, I hate trying to predict the future; I don't think I'm good at it and I don't think anyone else is. Most people who try don't seem to revisit their old predictions to see if they were correct, or to learn from their past errors, and the people who listen to them never do this.

    Technology prognosticators remind me of the psychics in the National Enquirer who make a hundred predictions for 2007: Jennifer Aniston will get pregnant with twins; space aliens will visit George Bush in the White House. Everyone can flap their mouth about what will happen next year, but it's not clear that anyone has any useful source of information about it, or is any better than anyone else at predicting.

    I read a book a few years back called The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty Years, by Kahn and Weiner. It has a bunch of very carefully-done predictions about the year 2000, and was written in 1967. The predictions about computers are surprisingly accurate, if you ignore the fact that they completely failed to predict the PC. The geopolitical predictions are also surprisingly accurate, if you ignore the fact that they completely failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union.

    But hardly anyone predicted the PC or the fall of the Soviet Union. And even now it's not clear whether the people who did predict those things did so because they were good at predicting or if it was just lucky guesses, like a stopped clock getting the time right twice a day.

    Sometimes I have to have dinner with predictors. It never goes well. Two years ago at OSCON I was invited to dinner with Google. I ended up sitting at a whole table of those people. Last year I was invited again. I said no thanks.

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Why two ears?
Aaron Swartz, remembering my earlier article about interesting science questions, sent me a reference to an interesting article about odd questions asked of students applying for admission to Cambridge and Oxford universities.

The example given in the article that I found most interesting was "Why don't we just have one ear in the middle of our face?". As I said earlier, I think the mark of a good question is that it's quick to ask and long to answer. I've been thinking about this one for several days now, and seems pretty long to answer.

Any reasonable answer to this question is going to be based on evolutionary and adaptive considerations, I think. When you answer from evolutionary considerations, there are only a few kinds of answers you can give:

1. It's that way because it confers a survival or reproductive advantage.
2. It's that way because that's the only way it can be made to work.
3. It's that way because it doesn't really matter, and that's just the way it happened to come out.

(Why only one heart? There's no benefit to having two; if you lose 50% of your cardiac capacity, you'll die anyway. Why one mouth? It needs to be big enough to eat with, and anyway, you can't lose it. Why one liver? No reason; that's just the way it's made; two livers would work just as well as one. Why two lungs? I'm not sure; I suppose it's a combination between "no reason, that's the way it's made" (#3 above) and "because that way you can still breathe even if one lung gets clogged up" (#1).)

The positioning of your ears is important. Having two ears far apart on the sides of your head allows you to locate sounds by triangulation. Triangulation requires at least two ears, and requires that they be as far apart as possible. This also explains why the ears are on the sides rather than the front.

Consider what would go wrong if the positions of the eyes and ears were switched. The ears would be pointed in the same direction, which would impede the triangulation-by-sound process. The eyes would be pointed in opposite directions, which would completely ruin the triangulation-by-sight process; you would completely lose your depth perception. So the differing position of the eyes and ears can be seen a response to the differing physical properties of light and sound: light travels in straight lines; sound does not.

The countervailing benefit to losing your depth perception would be that you would be able to see almost 180 degrees around you. Many animals do have their eyes on the side of their heads: antelopes, rabbits, and so forth. Prey, in other words. Predators have eyes on the fronts of their heads so that they can see the prey they are sneaking up on. Prey have eyes on the sides of their heads so that predators can't sneak up on their flanks. Congratulations: you're predator, not prey.

Animals do have exactly one nose in the middle of their face. Why not two? Here, triangulation is not an issue at all. Having one nose on each side of your head would not help you at all to locate the source of an odor. So the nose is stuck in the middle of the head, I suppose for mostly mechanical reasons: animals with noses evolved from animals with a long breathing tube down the middle of their bodies. The nose arises as sensors stuck in the end of the tube. This is another explanation for the one mouth.

Another consideration is symmetry. The body is symmetric, so if you want two ears, you have to put one on each side. Why is this? I used to argue that it was to save information space in the genome: there is only so much room in your chromosomes for instructions about how to build your body, so the information must be compressed. One excellent way to compress it is to make some parts like other parts and then express the differences as diffs. This, I used to say, is why the body is symmetric, why your feet look like your hands, and why men's and women's bodies are approximately the same.

I now think this is wrong. Well, wrong and right, essentially right, but mostly wrong. The fact is, there is plenty of space in the chromosomes for instructions about all sorts of stuff. Chromosomes are really big, and full of redundancy and junk. And if it's so important to save space in the chromosome, why is the inside of your body so very asymmetric?

I now think the reason for symmetries and homologies between body parts is less to do with data compression and storage space in the chromosome, and more to do with the shortness of the distance between points in information space. Suppose you are an animal with two limbs, each of which has a hand on the end. Then a freak mutation occurs so that your descendants now have four limbs. The four limbs will all have similar hands, because mutation cannot invent an entirely new kind of hand out of thin air. Your genome contains only one set of instructions for appendages that go on the ends of limbs, so these are the instructions that are available to your descendants. These instructions can be duplicated and modified, but again, there is no natural process by which a new set of instructions for a new kind of appendage can be invented from whole cloth. So your descendants' hands will look something like their feet for quite a long time.

Similarly, there is a certain probability, say p, of an earless species evolving something that functions as an ear. The number p is small, and ears arise only because of natural selection in favor of having ears. The chance that the species will simultaneously and independently evolve two completely different kinds of ear structures is no more than p², which is vanishingly small. And once the species has something earlike, the selection pressure in favor of the second sort of ear is absent. So a species gets one kind of ear. If having two ears is beneficial, it is extremely unlikely to arise through independent evolution, and much more likely to arise through a much smaller mutation that directs the same structure, the one for which complete instructions already exist in the genome, to appear on each side of the head.

So this is the reason for bodily symmetry. Think of (A) an earless organism, (B) an organism with two completely different ears, and (C) an organism with two identical ears. Think of these as three points in the space of all possible organisms. The path from point A to C is both much shorter than the path from A to B, and also much more likely to be supported by selection processes.

Now, why is the outside of the body symmetric while the inside is not? I haven't finished thinking this through yet. But I think it's because the outside interacts with the gross physical world to a much greater extent than the inside, and symmetry confers an advantage in large-scale physical interactions. Consider your legs, for example. They are approximately the same length. This is important for walking. If you had a choice between having both legs shortened six inches each, and having one leg shortened by six inches, you would certainly choose the former. (Unless you were a sidehill winder.) Similarly, having two different ears would mess up your hearing, particularly your ability to locate sounds. On the other hand, suppose one of your kidneys were much larger than the other. Big deal. Or suppose you had one giant liver on your right side and none on the left. So what? As long as your body is generally balanced, it is not going to matter, because the liver's interactions with the world are mostly on a chemical level.

So I think that's why you have an ear on each side, instead of one ear in the middle of your head: first, it wouldn't work as well to have one. Second, symmetry is favored by natural selection for information-conserving reasons.

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Bone names
Names of bones are usually Latin. They come in two types. One type is descriptive. The auditory ossicles (that's Latin for "little bones for hearing") are named in English the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, and their formal, Latin names are the malleus ("hammer"), incus ("anvil"), and stapes ("stirrup")

The fibula is the small bone in the lower leg; it's named for the Latin fibula, which is a kind of Roman safety pin. The other leg bone, the tibia, is much bigger; that's the frame of the pin, and the fibula makes the thin sharp part.

The kneecap is the patella, which is a "little pan". The big, flat parietal bone in the skull is from paries, which is a wall or partition. The clavicle, or collarbone, is a little key.

"Pelvis" is Latin for "basin". The pelvis is made of four bones: the sacrum, the coccyx, and the left and right os innominata. Sacrum is short for os sacrum, "the sacred bone", but I don't know why it was called that. Coccyx is a cuckoo bird, because it looks like a cuckoo's beak. Os innominatum means "nameless bone": they gave up on the name because it doesn't look like anything. (See illustration to right.)

On the other hand, some names are not descriptive: they're just the Latin words for the part of the body that they are. For example, the thighbone is called the femur, which is Latin for "thigh". The big lower arm bone is the ulna, Latin for "elbow". The upper arm bone is the humerus, which is Latin for "shoulder". (Actually, Latin is umerus, but classical words beginning in "u" often acquire an initial "h" when they come into English.) The leg bone corresponding to the ulna is the tibia, which is Latin for "tibia". It also means "flute", but I think the flute meaning is secondary—they made flutes out of hollowed-out tibias.

Some of the nondescriptive names are descriptive in Latin, but not in English. The vertebra in English are so called after Latin vertebra, which means the vertebra. But the Latin word is ultimately from the verb vertere, which means to turn. (Like in "avert" ("turn away") and "revert" ("turn back").) The jawbone, or "mandible", is so-called after mandibula, which means "mandible". But the Latin word is ultimately from mandere, which means to chew.

The cranium is Greek, not Latin; kranion (or κρανιον, I suppose) is Greek for "skull". Sternum, the breastbone, is Greek for "chest"; carpus, the wrist, is Greek for "wrist"; tarsus, the ankle, is Greek for "instep". The zygomatic bone of the face is yoke-shaped; ζυγος ("zugos") is Greek for "yoke".

The hyoid bone is the only bone that is not attached to any other bone. (It's located in the throat, and supports the base of the tongue.) It's called the "hyoid" bone because it's shaped like the letter "U". This used to puzzle me, but the way to understand this is to think of it as the "U-oid" bone, which makes sense, and then to remember two things. First, that classical words beginning in "u" often acquire an initial "h" when they come into English, as "humerus". And second, classical Greek "u" always turns into "y" in Latin. You can see this if you look at the shape of the Greek letter capital upsilon, which looks like this: Υ. Greek αβυσσος ("abussos" = "without a bottom") becomes English "abyss"; Greek ανωνυμος ("anonumos") becomes English "anonymous"; Greek υπος ("hupos"; there's supposed to be a diacritical mark on the υ indicating the "h-" sound, but I don't know how to type it) becomes "hypo-" in words like "hypothermia" and "hypodermic". So "U-oid" becomes "hy-oid".

(Other parts of the body named for letters of the alphabet are the sigmoid ("S-shaped") flexure of the colon and the deltoid ("Δ-shaped") muscle in the arm. The optic chiasm is the place in the head where the optic nerves cross; "chiasm" is Greek for a crossing-place, and is so-called after the Greek letter Χ.)

The German word for "auditory ossicles" is Gehörknöchelchen. Gehör is "for hearing". Knöchen is "bones"; Knöchelchen is "little bones". So the German word, like the Latin phrase "auditory ossicles", means "little bones for hearing".

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MadHatterDay 2006

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