When I say "I heard about a study that ..."

Here's a fascinating thing I heard the other day. And how I have to incrementally correct myself in retelling it:

I heard about a thing.
I think I heard about a thing.
I remember thinking what I heard about the thing.
I am reporting what I remember thinking what I heard about the thing.
I am reporting earnestly what I remember thinking what I heard about the thing.

The thing is usually some new finding from a scientific investigation:

It was a scientific study.
It was the final results of a scientific study.
It was the final primary result of a scientific study.
It was a media article about the final primary result of a scientific study.
It was the headline of a media article about the final primary result of a scientific study.

The scientist had an idea about a new pattern that seemed to fit with a new explanation for patterns that other scientists couldn't explain.

The scientist gathered some data.
The scientist gathered some data and noted some patterns.
The scientist gathered some data, noted some patterns, and analyzed the patterns statistically.
The scientist gathered some data, noted some patterns, analyzed the patterns statistically, and wrote a report on the multiple, nuanced conclusions one can draw from the analysis.

And this is all when things are done well.

More Star Trek Tech Progress

In a previous post, I listed a number of science fiction technologies used in the original Star Trek series and the progress our current society has made towards making them real. I also commented on how quickly we might achieve them.

I was just watching some reruns the other day...sorry, let me rephrase that in contemporary language in ephemeral tech language... I was watching a few of them them on Netflix (how long will the tech assumptions behind that phrasing last) and I realized that I had left out a number of things, some very obvious, some that seem like throwaways now. They are hidden, outside of the script but somehow mostly necessary assumptions for the plot.

- needle-less injections - Someone needs to be sedated? They're writhing in distress? With the 'hypospray' (which I suppose is hyperdermic), no need to be restrained when you don't have to find a vein. Just inject them without a needle via some transcutaneous mesh.

In some sense, the current transdermal patch effectively delivers chemicals to the blood stream but has its own limitations. Both aren't particularly effective for medications that need to be administered directly to the bloodstream for quick systemic dispersal (putting a bolus in your butt is slower release to the blood stream).

- earth diseases entirely solved, alien ones solvable in days with at-hand tech - every other episode someone contracts an alien disease. The other episodes some one is phasered in the face or breaks a leg, but they walk out of sick bay as chipper as ever. Medical science slowly does this, almost like this ST tech list, some things get solved perfectly (antibiotics?), some there's progress (chemotherapy), and some you solve well by cheating smart (colonoscopy screening). But in the show, any new unsolvable medical problem takes a long 48 suspenseful plot hours to solve.

- anti-gravity - elevators, walking on flat floors. That's just crazy. The only 'anti-gravity' is gravity from the other direction. But really, they need seat-belts even with anti-grav floors. For something like this which is technically impossible, a lot of tech cheating can go a long way

- deflector shields, force fields - a prison cell is fronted by it seems a painful invisible electric field. And the outside of the ship is protected from alien explosions (and the often forgotten cosmic particles and dust hit at interstellar speed). I presume if you can do this for a door way, you could do it for the outside of a ship so that the same tech would work for detention as well as protection.

- automatic pocket doors - doors are more privacy devices than security. They all seem to know when you're going to walk into any particular one otherwise like kids playing at the entrance to a grocery store, every single door would whoosh open as you walk along the hallway.

- bloop-bleep sounds - special futury sounds that alert you to danger or notification. These sounds were invented for the show (the communicator opening sound, the door opening whoosh).

Door opening sound
Red Alert
Tricorder scanning

OK, these are just fun. They're pretty much 1960's '101 Fun Experiments with Transistors!!'.

- the real time vital stats monitor - this is entirely doable, or even done, today. Maybe just badly. We can totally do this now. Get those ST set designers to work on the UX for the ICU/OR patient monitors!

Maybe the fancy scifi bit is in not having loads of tubes all trailed all over your body. That's practically possible now with bluethooth wireless.

- 'subspace' communication - this is very inarticulately presented in the shows. Sometimes they can communicate instantaneously over long distances, sometimes it is just somewhat faster than the ship. The physics of this is unclear to me. Somehow I expect that for the ability to transfer knowledge, there is some physics theorem that says that it is restricted by the same principles as the speed of light (i.e. if you could transfer knowledge that fast, you could have consequences (I don't know!) that would be equivalent to faster-than-light travel.

(oh almost forgot, bluetooth earpiece, pfft done that already)

Frankly there is so much in the original series that I'm sure I've missed even some big ones.
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Much of these imaginations were on purpose, but then some were just natural tweaks (needleless injection) or even unconscious assumptions (antigravity).

As an aside, social progress is interesting to watch, both in the invented extended world timeline of ST (TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, Ent) and the real one. It's almost grating how tin-eared white-male-centered TOS appears now in comparison to the less presumptuous later series. Ent itself isn't as embarrassing as TOS even though Archer is (again the captain) an alien-femalizer and his two male subordinates are always whooping it up with the brosplaining... ok maybe it is intentionally embarrassing (but Ent is only 150 years in the future, 150 years behind TOS you'd think there'd be a little more progress)?

Science is all mental

Science is all about figuring things out. How do I move this big rock? Which way do a turn the wheel when parked on a hill? Why is that guy such a jerk?

That's all dealing with real world things but we're doing it with our thoughts. The non-obviously obvious ways of doing it are:

Looking or using memory - You can't just make things up (which memory often does sometimes), so you have to look to to make sure you're not remembering wrong. Your mind may make ideas, but you should check them against reality to make sure you're not wrong/crazy.

Naming - we use language to communicate what we have ideas about with others. But frankly, just for ourselves, giving a name to something, using that name with something the same, giving another name to something that is different, those are all mental tools even for yourself.

Guessing well - names don't always fit perfectly or are vague, but start with one word and if that doesn't fit, then use another or create a new one.

Quantity vs quality - big litter vs few children - product strategy

There's a set of biological characteristics around number of children that seem correlated.

(picture source)

(picture source)

Some organisms, like mice, salmon, and dandelions, have lots of children in a litter. This is correlated with those children (or eggs or seeds) having little parental maintenance, small body size, short-lived as adults, not particularly robust, having a low probability of any individual one reaching maturity. Others have small litters or even just a single child, tend to large body size, long life expectancy, and lots of time and energy is spent in making it a high probability that the offspring lives to child bearing age.

The theory behind it is called r/K selection theory (I only described a vague phenomenon, not any reason or mechanism behind it). The r and K come form a simple equational relation those as probabilities to the number of offspring.

The theory says that the evolutionary pressure that's behind all these correlations is stability of the environment. 'r-species', those with quantity offspring like mice, tend to exist in unstable, unpredictable environments with a lot of room in their niche (high 'carrying capacity'). 'K-species', quality offspring like elephants, usually occur in stable (low population change) environments or close to filling the niche.

That said, there is a loose, not perfect, analogy with product design. Consider a widget making company. The company can spend all its energy creating lots of different widgets of acceptable quality. Some may work out some may not, but having a lot of then increases the chances that at least one will work out in the end.

Another company with the same resources may spend them all on making very few widgets but very refined specially made ones. Each of these few widgets are very likely to become successful because of the resources put into them

So, just like with animal reproduction frequency, it's a tradeoff. For constant resources, low probability survival of individuals can be offset by many individuals, and high probability of survival requiring lots of resources offset by having very few individuals.

For business, the corresponding explanation would be that in an unstable unknown business environment, having lots of products with slightly different features, can increase the chance of viability (eg web game companies have many games on offer but only one or two become famous). In a very stale business environment, with few companies selling few alternatives, a lot of company resources should be spent on just a few very large well-known products.

So this is just theory, and an analogy of a theory, and one can imagine many examples for which the explanation works, for which it practically works, and for what it just makes no sense.

'Agile' and 'lean' and 'fail quickly' are recent manufacturing trends. They are usually in contrast to the software development 'waterfall' planning method. Agile and waterfall don't necessarily apply well to the same kinds of software. Waterfall usually works best for a large scale well-understood design situation, and agile for a small project where all issues are not well-understood before hand and quick changes need to be made based on changing circumstances.

The analogy from biology to business to software development is not perfect but there are enough similarities to be recognizable.

One more analogy: scientific publishing. Historically (Europe), publishing of scientific knowledge started off as monographs (eg Aristotle, or at least that's all that has survived) and during the renaissance included personal correspondence which morphed into privately bound collections of papers and now (early 21st c) the library-industrial complex of journals. Textbooks and monographs are still considered the pinnacle, but are infinitesimally small by weight of paper, or more modernly, number of bytes.

Also, research has turned, during and after WWII, a government supported endeavor (where before only rich people had the means to do it).

There is so much research going on and papers being produced and science being fractured into narrower and narrower domains, that many papers are published (after being peer reviewed) and never read by anyone else. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It sounds bad because that effort seems wasted. I'm just pointing out the analogy with quantity vs quality; the recent trend is towards quantity. Actually I don't think quality has necessarily bee traded off, just that the resources has exploded, allowing lots of failures to exist alongside really great advances that would never have come without the resources.