An Appraisal of Two Magical Artifacts

I was recently tasked to appraise two magical artifacts. In particular, I was requested to make the assessment purely on the economic benefits and effects of the items, without taking into consideration any innate value (for example, as a curiosity or object of study) the items could possess. In other words, I was asked whether these magical artifacts would serve as good investments capable of reaping decent monetary dividends.

The first item was a small cloth purse with exotic runes woven into the fabric. It was not difficult to cross-reference the runes and thus to identify the artifact; this was a pouch of lesser reward, and it had the wondrous ability of conjuring a single silver coin, weighing about an ounce, each day.

The second item was a refined necromantic ritual which was capable of reanimating a skeleton from a corpse. The skeleton, once magically animated, would be able to execute simple commands autonomously without the need for food, drink, or rest. Based on the text of the tome, the skeleton would be free of decay without requiring further maintenance of any sort. Unfortunately, the ritual depended on several rare components, but it was possible to source for them. The question was simply whether it was economic to do so.

Both magical artifacts attracted much interest. Both promised to generate income forever, and thus seemed to be attractive investments. In particular, the necromantic ritual could potentially be used to replace all simple human labor! These seemed like no-brainers.

I remained unconvinced. The important consideration was the return on investment, which depended on the pricing of the magical items. While it was true that given enough time, both artifacts would generate a positive return, this ignored the opportunity cost of investment. In order words, it might be more profitable to invest in other financial instruments if the magic artifacts were simply too expensive. 

I proceeded to make an assessment on a fair pricing for both the items. First, to be competitive with other investments, the artifacts would have to yield at least an annual return of 3%, otherwise I would easily be better off parking my money in, for example, government securities. The next step would be to estimate the annual return each artifact would generate.

For the pouch of lesser reward, this calculation was simple. A single silver coin a day would fetch about 15 USD, give or take. Thus, over a year the pouch would generate 5475 USD. Based on this, the pouch could cost at most 182,500 USD; if it were any more expensive, it would be a poor investment.

For the necromantic ritual, the annual return would have to be based on the cost of simple labor which the skeleton would replace. A conservative estimate for a sweatshop worker's wages is 1 USD an hour. Compounded over a year, a skeleton would replace 8760 USD worth of wages. At this rate, each ritual could not cost more than 292,000 USD, otherwise foreign labor would be more competitive.

The Lycurgus Cup

Several years ago, I visited the British Museum and took a pair of photographs of the Lycurgus Cup. The photographs are below:

The Lycurgus Cup.

The same artifact!

The two photographs depict the same object, but clearly the glass is of a different color in each photograph! This is due to special properties of the glass which scatters and reflects light differently. When light passes through the glass, the blue end of the spectrum is scattered to a greater degree, resulting in its normal red appearance. However, when light is reflected off the glass, the spectrum is reflected about equally, showing a green color.

Of course, the Lycurgus Cup is kept secure behind a wall of glass, which makes tampering with the lighting to create the color changes difficult. I managed to capture the color changes using a camera flash; the reflected light off the flash makes the Cup appear green. Signs of the flash can be seen in the first image above.

Space Weapons

It has been suggested that militaristic civilizations will not develop spaceflight; the reason being that any aggressive civilization will sooner destroy itself. I think this is rather true. To be more specific, any civilization with the capacity for interstellar travel, if even the lowest grade of travel that takes centuries, will have acquired simple means of destroying themselves. Interstellar travel implies the capacity to accelerate and propel large masses to high velocities, possibly near-relativistic speeds. In other words, any space-faring vessel is necessarily a weapon.

In that vein, I wonder if a simple means to create a weapon of mass destruction is to simply launch a tungsten probe into space, let it acquire velocity through gravity-assists, and redirect it at a planetary target. If the probe is sufficiently hardened to survive reentry, then this is essentially an artificial meteor impact.

It would be a fitting weapon for any bond villain, and probably cheaper and easier to build and acquire than a nuclear weapon.

Binaural Hearing

We have, of course, two ears which jointly allow us to localize the direction of incoming sound. But our ears are much more than simple point hearing devices; there must be some more advanced mechanisms contained within. Why? Because we can tell whether a sound is coming from our back or our front.

Imagine the case in our ears were replaced with two simple mono microphones of appropriate sensitivity. Any sound would be picked up by the two microphones, though at different delays. Knowing the speed of sound, it is simple to calculate the distance of the source from each microphone and hence, the intersections (locii). Note the word intersections. With two point microphones, there are two intersections (in a 2-D scenario) and infinite intersections (dispersed in a circle in a 3-D scenario).

If our ears were only point microphones, we would not be able to differentiate sounds coming from behind us. 

But of course, we can. That is because our ears are directionally sensitive, or at least, structures in our ears serve as directional filters.

One interesting result of this line of thought is that with headphones, it is not possible to duplicate full directional sound. Headphones are merely two point sources of sound; there will be ambiguity of direction, leading us to confuse front-back sounds.

The Age of Contention

The main battleship design during the Terran era was a cylindrical vessel body where one end housed the propulsive drives and the other end, the main laser batteries; this design is retroactively known to us as the Lance-type battleship. Contrary to popular perception, Lance-type battleships were not armed with a single very massive laser cannon, or even a small number very large lasers; rather, the main laser batteries were formed of a sizable number of heavy (in terms of output, not size) lasers recessed into the main weapon receptacle, each of which contributed to a large beam of immense firepower. However, since the laser batteries themselves are hidden within the body of the cylindrical vessel body and only exposed in combat, it is easy to understand how such a public misconception came about.

This battleship design resulted in a ship that could output heavy forward fire, but only presented a small cross-section that was difficult for enemies to hit. This was excellent at siege warfare against immobile orbital or planetary targets, but difficult to use against naval targets. Admirals relied on flanking and ambushes to place their ships at optimal positions where damage could be properly inflicted on enemy fleets, but such tactics were rarely effective. However, the very impotence of battleships ensured that battles during the late Terran era were relatively bloodless, even though wars large and small broke out all the time. Hence, the late Terran era was also nicknamed "The Era of Inconsequence".

The status quo was eventually broken by an innovative battleship design, pioneered by the Caled. The primary weakness of old Lance-type battleships was an inability to target (and consequently damage) anything that did not lie in the narrow arc of fire directly forward. This problem stemmed from the cylindrical vessel design, which made it difficult to situate weapons of any effective size on the sides of the ship. The Caled overcame this problem by constructing spherical ships (though in practice the ships were polyhedral rather than pure spheres) with weapons facing each possible direction except the rear (where the engines were). Such ships were considered ugly and were named "Spikeballs" according to their spiky appearance. However, their combat potential was very high, compared to the earlier battleships.

Though some naval designers recognized the value of the Spikeball-type battleship, politicians and naval planners were unconvinced by the advantage of this new design. The Caled themselves secretly doubted the unproven worth of their new ships, and did not pursue construction of Spikeballs on a massive scale. This turned out to be a massive error, though, as it gave rival powers some time to begin their own experiments in battleship design.

The value of the new battleships was proven in the battle of Proxima Delphi, where a fleet of Spikeballs-type battleships was able to inflict decisive damage on a fleet of conventional warships, while suffering little damage themselves. Henceforth navies everywhere adopted the Spikeball design over the older Lance-type battleships. The sole exception was the Terran navy, which found itself in the unenviable position of being stuck with a large fleet of outdated vessels and having insufficient resources or industrial capacity to modernize its fleet on a large scale. This led to the diminishment of Terran power and prestige and the loss of its position as the galactic superpower, though in any case it was still a first-rate power of prominence.

The Spikeball battleship brought about a new era in naval warfare. Though no power was especially advantaged by the introduction of the Spikeball (with the minor exception of the Caled, who unfortunately due to their initial hesitation only retained a small numerical advantage in the number of modern battleships), since all powers had equal access to the design and production of Spikeball-type battleships, the galactic scene was changed forever. Where naval battle in the Terran era was inconclusive, the newer battleships were much more capable of dealing damage to each other. Battles could once again be won or lost, and wars were once again bloody.

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Part I: Battleships in the Terran Era 

An Extrasolar Ark

In the scenario of planetary extinction, it does not seem out of humanity's technological capability to build an ark to seed life on other (extrasolar) worlds. Granted, of course, that no higher life forms will survive.

Several micro-organisms are hardy enough to tolerate the harshness of space conditions, such as severe radiation and the lack of water or oxygen. They may not thrive, but for the purposes of an ark survival is enough. 

I imagine a large vessel filled with several chambers, or pods, each vacuum sealed. No additional protections are granted to it, save the hull of the vessel, which provides some measure of radiative shielding. This vessel is targeted at a particular system, being propelled at very low sub-light speeds. It is slow, but it is expected to survive it.

Several redundant computers, each set to wake at infrequent intervals, maintain the minimal systems on the vessel. There is little to do for the journey, since there are little to none life support systems, and the ship is not actively propelled. 

On arrival, simple planetary analysis procedures are used to study the planets in the system. Then, the target site and lifeform combinations most likely to sustain life are chosen, and the appropriate pods launched to seed the site with life.

Channel Limit of Human Senses

I think it is interesting to conduct experiments to determine the channel limit of each human sense; that is, the maximum amount of information that can be conveyed by each sense. It is commonly said that 80% of the information we process comes from vision, which makes sense. For example, reading text is much more efficient than hearing text, which is more efficient than reading Braille.  However, the statistic itself is quite useless without knowing the information capacity of sight. 

Actually, in hindsight, I am beginning to doubt the 80% figure, as the visual channel is clearly much more capable than the other senses, not only in sheer capacity, but also in responsiveness. In contrast, taste and smell have poor responsiveness and poor differentiation ability. I am, however, very much interested in knowing the dynamic range of smell (the maximum and minimum concentrations detectable for a given substance). 

Why is this important? Most likely it is not. However, it is possible to develop special assistive devices to replace damaged senses by transmitting through the other still functional senses. The fundamental transmission limits of the senses should provide a useful guide as to the full potential of the assistive device.

Knowing the transmission capacity of each sense should also allow us to design better machine-human interfaces. I posit that an interface providing visual, aural, and tactile feedback would be better than one that provides the same capacity using only the visual channel. In particular, the additional sensory channels may be used to provide interrupts or higher priority signaling, as they may not use the same attentional channels as vision does.

Revival of Extinct Species

Lonesome george died. Well, ok, that's only one extinct subspecies. What's more, it might not be gone forever.

Apparently, one animal has been un-extincted, though only briefly. The Pyrenean Ibex, which first died out in 2000, was subsequently cloned in 2009, though the clone lived for only seven minutes. Still, fairly promising. One factor in favor of reviving Lonesome George is the fact that only the particular subspecies was extinct. Subspecies can capable of interbreeding, that is, they are not differentiated by reproduction. In other words, other subspecies still exist, that are capable of surrogancy for cloning.

While that's fine and good, the thought of reviving extinct species made me wonder if we could indeed resurrect creatures even more far gone, where no direct genetic material, or no subspecies of the like, exist.

Typically, we might imagine evolution to be a one-way process, where species change with time into forms that are more adapted to the existing conditions. Such changes are brought about by recombination and mutation, the reshuffling and flipping of genetic material into new forms. Conceivably, the process is irreversible, or at least difficult to reverse. It is hard to imagine a modern creature evolving assuming ancient, extinct forms. 

Yet, it seems possible to revive extinct species, or some approximation of, through 'devolution' of a modern descendant. First, imagine if environmental conditions were reset to the time of the extinct species. If so, then the optimal adaptation is no longer of the modern evolved creature, but rather of the extinct form! Natural selection therefore favors the evolution of the modern creature towards the ancient, extinct predecessor. Just like how the final products of chemical reactions can vary with temperature and pressure, the direction that evolution takes can be redirected by varying the conditions under which evolution occurs.

Given a supervised hand, the revival of extinct species from their modern descendants can be made even more viable. If the path of evolution is known, for example the amounts of environmental change, and the corresponding change in the species, it is possible to perform directed artificial selection. By seeking incremental regression along the known evolution history of the species, one can create a ratchet-effect to gradually skip backwards.

Battleships in the Terran Era

The earliest battleships were designed to meet the very specific needs of their time, which was not ship-to-ship combat, as fleet planners did not expect the outer colonies to possess any sizable naval resistance. Rather, battleships were purpose-built to destroy orbital and planetary defences, and to partake in planetary bombardment roles. Fleets of battleships had little purpose except to bring unruly planets into line with the threat of annihilation from orbit. Since vessels only expected resistance in the form of satellite-based weapons platforms or (more rarely) planet-side weapons, early naval designs emphasized heavy frontal armor and forward-facing heavy lasers, with corresponding penalties to propulsion. Such designs enabled battleships to dish out the largest amount of damage to largely-immobile defence platforms, while being relatively unscathed by the return fire. 

Such design philosophies were sufficient in the early Terran era, when space was the sole domain of a single power. But the galaxy was too large for a single watchful eye, and eventually, whether through neglect or exhaustion, other powers rose. Though these nascent nations stood united in opposition to Terra, their actions towards the less developed worlds was far from benevolent. With fleets of their own, they too spread to stake their claim over the various worlds. The tools of war were unchanged, and only the flags flown were different.

The first purely naval battle was fought between two fleets of much different size. Even with the advantage of numbers, the Terran fleet was unable to inflict a total defeat on the enemy forces. Though at the time much blame was placed on the commanding admiral, the modern consensus is that early battleship design was far too ill-suited for fleet-to-fleet combat. Forward-facing heavy lasers directed a devastating beam, but only in a extremely narrow firing arc. Against a mobile target, one that could maneuver in any direction in 3D space, this was a severe handicap. The problem was compounded by the comparatively slow charge times for the weapon and the poor maneuverability of the battleships, especially in performing spatial rotations. Taken together, the battleships could not track and hit moving targets with much reliability. 

The end of the late Terran era was marked with several major fleet battles, none of which had any conclusive victor. Very rarely was the balance of powers changed in any significant way purely though the use of naval force. Despite the failure of battleships as decisive weapons, the concept of naval power retained its place in popular imagination as symbols of national power. Later technological advancements would vindicate the importance of the battleship as mighty weapons of interstellar war.

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Part II: The Age of Contention

True Human

Maybe we're not even true humans anymore.

A definition for species (though often contested) is a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. No problems there, since we're all capable of interbreeding.

But this merely means that we're all the same species, not necessarily that we're human. Perhaps we've acquired so many minute mutations, so many incremental changes, that we're too different.

If there was a time machine, would we be able to successfully mate with an ancestor from many millennia ago?

Bamboo Charcoal

A friend recently expressed his interest in buying a bamboo charcoal product, which was said to be able to reduce electromagnetic waves and radiation emitted from daily electronic products such as monitors. I gave him a dressing down.

It is pseudoscience, I said. It only requires a basic understanding of physics to know that the product cannot achieve what it pretends to do. Buy a lead sheet, and that would be more effective at blocking radiation.

A simple test for detecting pseudoscience products is to ask whether there is a plausible mechanism for action. If the action of the product cannot be explained, that it is no different from a magic bauble. If one thinks that a bag of bamboo charcoal, placed somewhere near the monitor, is somehow able to attract and absorb the electromagnetic radiation, then one must either presume that the bamboo charcoal is a black hole, hence bending local space to redirect the path of radiation, or has an immense electromagnetic field by which to alter the waves. This does not seem sound.

It might improve health, or at least the perception of health, by the placebo effect. But then again, after my cruel lecture, even that effect may be lost.

Time Units

To be honest, many of our most commonly used time units are quite rubbish. Consider, for instance, the hour, the minute, and the second; these divisions of time, in units of 24 and 60, render many computations of time difficult. A small saving grace is that they are more suited for fractional computations, but then again the utility of such fractional convenience is limited since most people think in whole units, if one scale down. Beyond this small saving grace, these units of time are almost entirely arbitrary.

On the other hand, the day, month, and year are elegant and logical measures of time, in that they can be easily (in terms of required technology) calibrated against natural phenomena. Hence, these units of time have been independently invented by almost every civilization.

Take the day, for instance. It requires no explanation as to how it is defined. It is measured by the length of time for the Sun to move from the apex of the sky to the apex of the sky again (i.e., noon to noon). However, taking this fact into account, it seems inherently more sensible for the day to start from noon rather than from midnight, since one requires additional tools to accurately determine the onset of midnight.

The month, though a nebulous construct of varying lengths, also has a natural basis. This is the moon phase cycle, which can be easily observed to wax and wane with regularity. Unfortunately, while the lunar month can be accurately calibrated, calendars cannot be constructed based solely on it as it does not exactly cover the length of a year. Attempts to reconcile the two have led to many workarounds, such as variable length months, leap days, months, etc. Very messy work, not at all elegant.

The final regular unit of time, and quite possibly the one with the greatest importance, is the year. While we all know the year to be the length of time for the Earth to complete 1 orbit, it does seem quite difficult to measure this. The seasons do indeed repeat on a yearly basis, but variations make it impossible to use this fact to measure the length of a year. The easiest way is to observe the positions of the stars in the night sky; the patterns should change as the Earth orbits, and match again once the Earth has moved to the exact location it occupied one year ago. However, even this method is not simple, requiring some manner of astronomical technology. It may be easier to automate the process by constructing special structures that are only aligned with certain stars or constellations on a particular day of the year; many such structures exist. If I were to have the time and resources, I might find it interesting to design and construct a simple version of such a year-measuring device.

The worst time unit is, in my opinion, the week, which is entirely arbitrary and illogical. It is neither correlated to any naturally repeating occurrence, nor does it allow for simple computation, fractional or otherwise. It boggles the mind as to how it came to be adopted. Still, as with many things, it is so deeply entrenched in our societal model that it may be impossible to rectify this aberration.

Measuring the Volume of a Container

My sister was packing for an overseas vacation when she found herself with a small bottle of hand moisturizer. Unfortunately, she was uncertain as to whether the bottle was of a size within the travel limits, which was 100ml. My assistance was sought.

The first and probably the most commonsensical solution I came up with was to compare the size of the bottle with other containers of known capacity, such as my water bottle which has 100ml markings. But this method was unsatisfactory as the precision was poor.

I then suggested to fill the bottle with water, and to then measure the amount of water contained. However, this too was unfeasible, since the container already contained some moisturizer.

Being trained or born with scientific and mathematical thinking, I then came up with a most intelligent approach. First, I observed that the container was almost a perfect cylinder. Thus, using a ruler and the simple volume formula, I was able to calculate that the container was almost certainly a 100ml container.

Basic mathematical knowledge proves to be useful to daily life.

In retrospect, a fourth solution is possible, but this is rooted in more science. We can simply immerse the container in a beaker of water such that it is fully submerged. Then, the volume of the container is simply the amount of water displaced. This solution is clearly generalizable to all shapes of containers, assuming they are watertight.

Findings from Playing Diablo 2 Excessively

It is quite evident from the fact that I am still playing Diablo 2 after more than 10 years that I have spent an excessive amount of time on it. However, it is only recently that I was able to attain a small measure of success in it, completing about 6 of the 7 available classes (I am now attempting the last class).

On Saturday I made an unexpected discovery; I was playing Diablo 2 with my earphones on when I was momentarily distracted by the television behind me (to be entirely accurate, it was the television programme, but this ought to be obvious). Since I was in town, there was no danger of any sudden death by stupid causes, so I removed by earphones and split my attention between the television and the usual logistics tasks done in town (selling loot, repairing gear, cubing etc).

I had an excess of gems, so I cubed them. As I was moving a gem into the Horadric cube, I heard a faint ring. Curious, I repeated the gem movement, and the ring was heard again. This was interesting; the earphones were placed relatively distant from my ears, and yet the faint tone was audible. Perhaps it was because the gem sound was sharp and of high frequency, hence it was more easily transmitted.

I next tried moving other items. Skulls were, perhaps expectedly, quite inaudible from the distance, since the dull "plopping" sound wasn't very sharp. The metallic clang from shields was somewhat more audible, but very significantly less so compared to gems. Charms were quite detectable from a distance, almost similar to gems, though it required some training as the sound wasn't quite as sharp as compared to gems. It was an interesting experiment to run.

Another finding made with the earphones off was that the game seemed to run slower; movements seemed more sluggish, and actions more delayed. In retrospect, sound may actually serve to affect our perception of time; a sound effect may not sound long but may actually occupy a significant amount of time and attention.

Perhaps playing without sound may serve to improve my neurokinetics.

A Physics Thought Experiment

Consider the scenario illustrated by the following diagram:

There is a hot object initially at temperature T. The hot object is instantly teleported into a larger container, which contains a perfect vacuum and has a perfectly reflective inner surface. The closed container is perfectly reflective at all frequencies.

Assume that the container is magically suspended in the larger container. As the container contains a perfect vacuum, no heat is lost by conduction or convection. Heat can hence only be lost by radiation.

Does the final temperature of the hot object depend on the size of the larger container?

The Diet of Advanced Aliens

What is the likely diet of an advanced (spacefaring) alien civilisation? I suspect that all such aliens will be omnivorous.

Firstly, let me explain why we are unlikely to find herbivorous aliens (for brevity, I use aliens to refer to intelligent ones). For intelligence to evolve, it must first be useful to the evolutionary fitness of the creature. Is intelligence useful to early herbivores? I doubt this.

Intelligence is much more useful for meat-eating animals than purely herbivorous animals. Intelligence allows for the development of hunting tools and simple hunting tactics, which would prove highly significant in increasing the food sources of the hunting animal. But for a herbivorous species, intelligence affords no such benefit. If it does not increase the fitness of the herbivorous species, it is unlikely to evolve.

Then, if herbivores are unlikely to evolve into advanced aliens, would the opposite, a carnivorous race, be more likely to do so? Again, I doubt so.

It is quite reasonable to believe that a carnivorous race would become reasonably intelligent. However, as a civilisation, they are inherently limited. The reason - the lack of argiculture. Without agriculture to support a sufficently large population base, civilisation would not form, and technological advancement would be halted. This is why purely carnivorous species are unlikely to become our advanced spacefaring aliens.

From process of elimination, it appears that any advanced alien species must be omnivores!

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Technorati Tags : Omnivorous Aliens , Advanced Alien Diet , Herbivorous Carnivorous Species , Evolution of Intelligence

Amateur Stargazing

Of course it may be quite pointless to try to stargaze in Singapore, because it is a bloody bright city at night. Still, I had at least 2 experiences of stargazing, but unfortunately I am unlikely to reproduce both experiences anytime soon.

The first incident was technically not in Singapore Island, but rather, in Pulua Ubin. Certainly you can see more stars unaided there than in Singapore. But as I said, it is rather unlikely that I would go there and be bitten by mosquitoes just to watch stars, unless they build a stargazing resort there with the comforts of modern life (and hence brighten up the surroundings and ruin everything ! Drats ! ). I wonder, though, whether one can get a good view from one of the resorts in Sentosa.

The second incident was set in an unfortunate background. I was serving POI (protection of installation) duty on Jurong Island when I discovered that the image intensifier binoculars the SAF provided for the POI was excellent for stargazing. I suppose any normal binoculars would have done well, but image intensifiers are especially good, because they magnify the insignificant specks of starlight into something visible. That said, I doubt I would have another chance to handle an image intensifier, unless I can purchase one cheaply from say, cash converters?

I do have some ideas for stargazing though. I was thinking of ways to duplicate the functions of an image intensifier when I realised that time exposure photography was remotely similar to an image intensifier. Basically, time exposure photography is when you expose the film for extended periods of time. Hence, each film grain has more time to react with more light.

Of course, for this idea to work, certain modifications will have to be made. First the platform for the camera must be super-stable. Second, preferably a blocking cone should be setup to eliminate sources of stray light. Third, the camera must be capable of this type of exposure photography. This third point sounds stupid, but I doubt normal digital cameras are capable of exposure photography (unless you consider manually holding the shutter still a smart solution.)

Now, the exposure time should be relatively short, maybe a few minutes at most. This is because the sky moves also, and if the period of exposure is longer you may get pictures like this (I would add pictures, but blogger is bloody acting up). I admit that that is nice, but the current aim is to capture stars, not startrails.

Anyone up for this stupid project ???

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Technorati Tags : Stargazing , Image Intensifier , Time Exposure Photography