Published on Thursday, December 31st, 02009 by Alexander Rose
This year there are several Long Bets and Predictions up for adjudication. We will be contacting these bettors this year to ask them to make a self assessment of the bet, if the parties cannot come to an agreement we will make a determination. Some wont be decided officially until the end of the year, but we may have passed the tipping point on some of these already.
“It will be years –not in my time– before a woman will become Prime Minister.” –Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.
She became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only 10 years after saying that, holding her chair from 1979 to 1990. But she wasn’t all that wrong since she is the only woman to have held this post. Maybe she should have added the word “again.”
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” –Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859)
It may sound impossible to Dr Larder, professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at the University College London back in the 1800, but in 1939 the first high speed train went from Milan to Florence at 165 km/h (102.5 mph). Thankfully no one died. Nowadays these trains go at 200 km/h (125 mph) and faster.
This also reminded of what has become my favorite bathroom reading: The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky. It is a brilliant listing of predictions and quotes like the ones above organized by category. I have been paying attention to books and listings of future predictions since we started the Long Bets project. The Experts Speak is most certainly the best compendium I have come across to date. It turns out there are several books and lists like this as they are endlessly entertaining. What is curious though is how little attention is paid to good predictions, I have yet to find a good list or book about successful predictions. I cant tell if its because there are so few correct predictions, or just because they are less interesting to us.
On a side note, the way I found the book was by a round about recommendation from Douglas Adams of all people. In his last book Salmon of Doubt Adams discusses The Experts Speak along with Stewart Brand’s original idea for Long Bets as he wrote in Clock of the Long Now.
Published on Tuesday, November 24th, 02009 by Austin Brown
It took a while to get all the numbers crunched, but the first year’s results from the Long Bet with the highest prize are in. Over a year ago Warren Buffet challenged the managers of several funds-of-funds to outperform the S&P 500 over a 10 year period. A one million dollar charitable donation is on the line and so far Buffet’s opponents, Protege Partners, are doing less bad. Carol Loomis, author of the original story on the contest, gives us the details:
Remember “Buffett’s Big Bet” (see fortune.com), in which the noted
investor and Ceo of Berkshire Hathaway maintained that an S&P 500 index
fund would outperform five funds-of-hedge-funds over 10 years? Well, the
results for the first lap, the ago-nizing year of 2008, are finally in,
and the funds-of-funds soundly whipped the index. Vanguard’s S&P 500
Admiral shares, the index fund “bought” by Buffett, were down 37.02%. on
the average, and net of all fees, costs, and expenses, the five
funds-of-funds backed by Buffett’s opponent, Protégé Partners llC, a new
York money-management firm, delivered –23.9%.
Considering that hedge funds can and do sell short, and that they are
not limited to investing in stocks, Protégé’s victory in a bear market
year like 2008 was not surprising to anyone involved in the bet. Ted
Seides, the Protégé partner who engineered the bet with Buffett, says
that until September of that year the five funds-of-funds were in fact
doing well enough that they still anticipated achieving the up year that
hedge fund seek to deliver, even in difficult markets. “But when markets
failed in the aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy,” says Seides, “the
funds couldn’t avoid the storm.”
Which funds are these, you ask? The bet stipulates that their identities
would not be disclosed. Buffett, however, knows their names and has seen
their audited results. About his trailing position, he says, “I just
hope that Aesop was right when he envisioned the tortoise overtaking the
hare.”
The reader will note that we said the results of the bet are “finally”
in, and therein lies a little story. originally, the thought was that an
update on the bet would be announced each year at Berkshire’s annual
meeting, held in late spring. But the five funds-of-funds did not have
audited financial statements at that time, which made Buffett unwilling
to announce results. only in late october, when the last of the five
funds finally delivered its audited figures to Protégé, were complete
results known. They were very close to what Protégé had earlier
estimated they would be, so it is likely that next year Buffett will
indeed announce 2009 “approximate” results at Berkshire’s meeting in the
spring.
The author of this article is both a friend of Buffett’s and the editor
of his chairman’s letter in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report.
Within 10 years, in fact, silicon will fall to the computer scientist’s triple curse: “It’s bulky, it’s slow, and it runs too hot.” At this point, computers will need a new architecture, one that depends less on electrons and more on… well…what else? Optics.
Optical computers still seem about ten years away even now.
The PC will be protected from theft, thanks to an advanced biometric scanner that can recognize your fingerprint.
They got that one bang on.
You’ll communicate with the PC primarily with your voice, putting it truly at your beck and call.
Not so much. While there are decent voice control systems for limited applications, I would not call voice based computing a mature technology.
In 2010, a “desktop” will be a desk top…in other words, by plugging our computer into an office desk, its top becomes a gigantic computer screen–an interactive photonic display.
It is certainly true that this type of computer has come out, not quite a standard yet though.
What do we do with our 2010 computer when we arrive home after a long day’s work? Plug it into the wall with a magnetic clamp and watch as our home comes to life. In essence, the computer becomes the operating system for our house, and our house, in turn, knows our habits and responds to our needs
Hmmmm. There are more computer controlled home appliances now, but my bet is this will happen more with smart phones than PCs (like Apples Remote app for the iPhone).
The disk will be holographic and will somewhat resemble a CD-ROM or DVD. That is, it will be a spinning, transparent plastic platter with a writing laser on one side and reading laser on the other, and it will hold an astounding terabyte (1 trillion bytes) of data
Bingo! sorta…. Yes you can buy a 1 terabyte hard disk at Best Buy, but it sure isn’t holographic storage.
Our 2010 CPU will operate on the same principle as today’s PCs. But instead of electronic microprocessors providing the brains and brawn, our future CPU will have optoelectronic integrated circuits (chips that use silicon to switch but optics to communicate). With communication between components no longer bottlenecked by electronic transmission, we can probably push the clock rate to 100 gigahertz, 100 times faster than what’s available now.
Well I am writing this on a two core 3 Ghz computer, and there are 8 core versions commercially available, but we certainly have not reached 100 Ghz.
Our main RAM will be purely optical, in fact, holographic. Holographic memory is three-dimensional by nature, so we can stack up any number of memory planes into a rectangular solid to create 256 gigabytes of optical main memory, 1,000 times as much as a really powerful desktop computer today.
Again no optical RAM, and machines seem to be selling with around 2-4Gb of the old standard silicon in them.
Nice work Forbes for putting some actual testable predictions out there!
Published on Friday, January 2nd, 02009 by Alexander Rose
Stewart Brand sent me this excellent piece by past Seminar Speaker, historian and author, Niall Furguson. It is a retrospective of 02009, bravely published a year in advance. An excerpt from the intro:
“It was the year when people finally gave up trying to predict the year ahead. It was the year when every forecast had to be revised – usually downwards – at least three times. It was the year when the paradox of globalisation was laid bare for all to see, if their eyes weren’t tightly shut.”
The piece is impressive for a historian, as it puts his written history into the territory of the future. And aside from letting his McCain adviser status show fairly bluntly, I think it is an unfortunate but likely scenario. The main take away for me is that it reinforces the idea that the borrow and spend economy cannot sustain, it will always have to brutally correct at some point…
“With total debt above 350 per cent of US gross domestic product, the excesses of the age of leverage proved difficult to purge. Households reined in their consumption. Banks sought to restrict new lending. The recession deepened. Unemployment rose towards 10 per cent, and then higher. The economic downward spiral seemed unstoppable. No matter how hard they saved, Americans simply could not stabilise the ratio of their debts to their disposable incomes. The paradox of thrift meant that rising savings translated into falling consumer demand, which led to rising unemployment, falling incomes and so on, ever downwards.”
Published on Tuesday, December 9th, 02008 by Alexander Rose
The Foreign Policy journal has an excellent top ten list for 02008. Top ten worst predictions. This type of accountability is exactly why we started Long Bets. Excerpts below:
“[A]nyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of ‘recession.’” —Donald Luskin, The Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2008
“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006
“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org regarding the Large Hadron Collider
Published on Tuesday, December 2nd, 02008 by Alexander Rose
I met Derek Dukes the other night the founder of Dipity, the maker of the coolest web based timeline software I have seen yet. You can manually generate timelines, or set up a timeline that is auto-generated out of RSS feeds, Twitters, Facebook updates, etc. He set up a timeline for Long Bets in about 10 seconds based on the Long Bets RSS feed (seen embedded above). They are still working on some of the longer term timeline issues like the BC problem.
While visiting the UK last week my wife and I were invited to high table dinner at Cambridge’s Caius College by a friend who is now a fellow there. Touring the grounds was stunning, that all of those gorgeous buildings and ancient libraries could be there for you as a student is so impressive. High table is where the fellows (professors) like Stephen Hawking eat at the college — Harry Potter style overseeing the students. When not in term, as it was for us last week, they eat in a separate set of rooms. After dinner we retired to the “desert room” which was built around the 1300’s I believe, and was paneled in wood from one of Her Majesty’s famous wooden ships. After some port and claret was served, we were told about the “betting book”. Apparently since the late 18th century they have kept a book in this room to record predictions and bets made at the table as people like like Francis Crick got drunk in the wee hours. In the room they only had the most recent book, which had more recordings of presentations of bottles of wine than bets and predictions. But the following day I went to the library and saw some of the older texts. Unfortunately time was limited so I did not get a chance to look through them all (I would love to find a student there to help catalog it!). But I found a couple good bets while looking through…
A page from the second oldest betting book I came across, From England 08
This bet from March of 01817 reads “W.White bets Mr Standby that if a Person call a woman a Wh—e they may have a Remedy of Common Law.” I am not at all sure, but it seems like the W word is Whore, and they are referring to a way someone might avoid having their mistress receive common law marriage rights to property.
And the below image is of the first entry in the oldest betting book I found. It reads “March 10, 1789, On the memorable day in which the Parliament was opened by commission after the Kings Recovery.”
The first entry in the oldest betting book I found, From England 08
Published on Sunday, October 5th, 02008 by Alexander Rose
Next Sunday October 12th, six different programs will attempt to pass the computer intelligence Turing test (according to the guardian.co.uk). This also marks a serious attempt to decide the $20,000 Long Bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor, as well as win the $100,000 Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. In the tests, a human questioner will get to question both a computer and human through a chatroom like text interface. If the questioner guesses wrong or can’t decide which is human, the program will have passed the test. Judging from the conversations below however I don’t think the machines have much of a chance this time around… (click though to the article and scroll down to find out which is human and which is machine)
Can you tell human from machine?
One of these conversations is between Professor Kevin Warwick (KW) and a human; the other between Warwick and a computer. Can you tell which is which?
Conversation one:
Subject: Hello. My name is Nick and I am a human.
KW: Are you happy being a human?
Subject: Yes, I am. Are you? Good. Then we are both happy.
KW: Yes, I am. Are you happy with your life at present?
Subject: Parts of it. I hate my job, but most people do, right?
KW: I’m OK with mine. What is your job?
Subject: I work as an ‘online internet advertising monitor’, which is fancy language for electronic filing. What do you do?
KW: I interrogate humans and machines.
Subject: Which ones do you prefer, humans or machines?
KW: Which do you prefer?
Subject: Hmm. Depends on for what purpose you mean.
KW: To go to a restaurant, for example?
Subject: Then I would much prefer going with a human.
Conversation two:
Subject: Hello, my name is Mike and I am a man.
KW: Are you happy being a human?
Subject: Judge, I’m a guy.
KW: Does that worry you?
Subject: Don’t worry, we’ll work everything through.
KW: Do you have worries then?
Subject: Let’s move on from that basis.
KW: Why?
Subject: Why? I like this subject.
KW: What is the subject, do you think?
Subject: What is the subject I wonder if I think? I know that it’s good to thonk about. Think deeplt about mysterious subjects.
KW: What mysterious subjects?
Subject: Think deeply about mysterious dubjects.
KW: What’s a dubject?
I can imagine the next line, “Dubject… Let me tell you about my dubject!” At which point the skin job stands up from the Voight-Kampff test and blows poor KW away…
Published on Thursday, October 2nd, 02008 by Stuart Candy
Photo: John Cage Organ Foundation, Halberstadt, Germany
via ABC News Online
Fair warning for long-term music lovers: the world’s slowest concert, a 639-year organ piece by American avant-garde composer John Cage (01912-01992), will next change notes in just over a month’s time, on 5 November 02008.
St Burchardi church, in the eastern German city of Halberstadt, has played host to the performance since 5 September 02001 (the late composer’s 89th birthday), when it kicked off with 17 months of silence. Cage originally wrote ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) in 01985. Its maiden performance by organist Gerd Zacher lasted 29 minutes, but Cage didn’t specify a maximum, so in accordance with the piece’s title, musical scholars and scholarly musicians since decided to stage a multi-century version, approximating the lifespan of an organ.
According to a New York Timesreport on the 5 May 02006 note change, the odd duration and location for this ambitious project, called Organ²/ASLSP, are due to Halberstadt’s cathedral claiming the first organ with a modern keyboard arrangement, built in 01361, 639 years before 02000, the intended start date for the performance. The sustained notes of the performance are possible thanks to the organ’s customised bellows, and tiny sandbags on strings, rigged to hold each note as long as necessary.
The upcoming change will be the seventh chord in the piece. The last change, on 5 July 02008, attracted over one thousand slow-music fans.
(Above, a home video of the most recent note change, on 5 July 02008.)
Blind writer Ryan Knighton was among those present for the previous occasion, on 5 May 02006 (note changes are always on the 5th of the month). In a short but beautifully written article, he recounts his pilgrimage to the Halberstadt organ, as one of the long, tranquil stretches between increasingly note changes draws to a close:
After a few moments standing here, I begin to crave the next note — any note, any change whatsoever. The chord fills my ears, and a kind of audio-claustrophobia overwhelms me. No sightseers or tour guides around to offer any reprieve. Nobody except Justus, an eleven-year-old local boy who took my hand and guided me the final hundred yards to hear this particular sound before it changed. Lucky he was there — once the new chord begins tomorrow, it won’t change again for more than two years. Got to get to church on time.
…
As I move into the monastery and toward the organ, the familiar clicking of my white cane adds texture to the drone. My own noise feels like blasphemy, chatter during a prayer. Granted, this chord has been playing only four months — a frilly little trill in the scheme of things — but that’s no licence for irreverence. I stop again and listen. Perhaps ten minutes have passed, and I’m becoming aware of the chord’s impurities. The faintest blemishes in tone pop and burn away like sparks. The sound heaves and exhales slightly, like the sigh or groan of a weary traveller.
Sighted folks ramble the world to see Grand Canyons and Eiffel Towers, monuments that dazzle the eyes. Because the last bit of my sight could desert me any day now, I asked myself, what would the equivalent pilgrimage be for me? So a white cane tapped its way from Vancouver to Toronto to Berlin and to Halberstadt to hear a single moment out of centuries of sound. One thing giving way to another — the basis of all drama. It seemed monumental to me.
I’m standing in front of the organ now, and what began as noise has become a familiar hum. As I think of the generations who will take care of a song that assumed they would be there to keep it going, I’m reminded of my debt to Justus and everyone else who guided me here. As this song will be, I’ve been passed along from one person to another, slowly, until I made it. Just in time.
In case you happen to be unavailable for the upcoming November change, you might pencil in a visit to Halbertstadt for February 02009, or July 02010.
Incidentally, Organ²/ASLSP is the subject of Prediction 282, registered with Long Bets in 02007; that the performance will continue uninterrupted to the halfway mark, in the year 02319. Although a clear majority of folks weighing in on the issue have disagreed (18 doubters vs 8 supporters to date), the proposition is yet to find an official Challenger to turn it into a fully-fledged Long Bet.
“It will be years –not in my time– before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
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