Author Archives: qsf

Are you being a fuel fool?

Petrol pump handleI’ve been driving an electric car for about a decade now, but because we also have a fossil-burning campervan, I do still occasionally need to visit one of those dirty, smelly, legacy refuelling stations, so…

If you use a site like PetrolPrices.com, you can find out roughly how much fuel costs at the various petrol stations near you.

This is handy. But it’s not really what you want to know, is it?

You actually want to know whether it’s worth driving 10 extra miles to fill up your tank at a cheaper location, given the extra time and distance involved and the fact that your tank is already half-full at present. It’s not always easy to translate a potential saving of 2.5p per litre into a number that means very much. Will it, for example, help pay off your mortgage, or just let you buy an extra chocolate biscuit when you get there?

So, in a burst of enthusiasm this morning, I threw together a little calculator to help with the maths:

Are you being a fuel fool?

Feedback and bug reports welcome!

How daft do they think we are?

Our bathroom cleaner announces in large letters that it removes ‘up to 100% of bathroom grime and limescale’. I suppose there could be a more meaningless claim, but really…?

Still, perhaps it’s actually a disclaimer to avoid legal action from those who believed that it would remove more than 100%.

Can Quentin get Quantum?

Like many… shall we say… classically-trained computer scientists (i.e. old ones), I have only the vaguest notion of how quantum computing actually works.  My understanding of the various topics can be best pictured as a cloud-like set of probability distributions which doesn’t exhibit any very high peaks!

So I was quite taken with Grant Sanderson’s latest video in his ‘3Blue1Brown’ YouTube channel, which does lovely graphical illustrations of mathematical concepts (each of which tends to get viewing figures measured in millions.) It increased my knowledge considerably of the kind of algorithms one might be able to run on a quantum machine.

“But what is quantum computing? (Grover’s Algorithm)”:

 

(Direct link to YouTube)

GPT

I liked this funny and perceptive 5-minute film about AI, by Ari Frenkel. The more you’ve played with ChatGPT and the like, the more you’ll probably appreciate this.

(Direct link to YouTube)

Curiouser and curiouser

Amongst the more bizarre aspects of the Trump tariff announcements last night were the figures he came up with for the tariffs being charged by other countries.

Even people who are as unfamiliar with economics as I am wondered, “Where on earth did he get those from?” They didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to reality. And while lies are part and parcel of most Trump announcements, the numbers had to come from somewhere, surely?

Well, it turns out that’s because they’re actually not to do with tariffs at all. These are not extra costs being imposed by other countries. They are simply a measure of the trade deficit that the USA has with those countries. Or, to put it another way, the degree to which US citizens want stuff from your country more than your citizens want stuff from the US… that’s how much we’re going to punish your country.

The FT has more details and an appropriate dose of incredulity. As they point out, suppose your country sells lots of bananas to the US… Well, bananas don’t grow in the US, so Americans can’t buy them locally. But we’re still going to impose tariffs…

“The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers … based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.”

Faster horses

Henry ford 1919.

I do like collecting quotations.  Here are some of the references to them on this blog, and I also have a collection of favourites here.

But one thing you quickly discover, if you dig a little deeper, is that a large proportion of the most popular favourites cannot be traced reliably to the people to whom they are commonly attributed.  

And here’s the latest example I’ve found… If you’ve done anything related to innovation or product design, you’ve probably heard Henry Ford’s famous comment:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!”

This is pretty well-known, but, once again, there seems to be very little evidence that he ever actually said it.  There’s a nice examination of the story on the Quote Investigator site.

If you’re like me, for some reason, you find this slightly disappointing.  But it’s hard to work out quite why.  Is it because, if we agree with a sentiment, and we then find that Henry Ford agrees with it too, it somehow validates our opinion?  “You know, Henry Ford agreed with me on this…”

 

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, and you can find further discussion of this idea by clicking on the image below.

Gell-Mann Amnesia

My thanks to Kit Hodsdon, who, responding to yesterday’s post, pointed out that there was a name for a phenomenon related to something I discussed there: the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

This term was first coined by Michael Crichton, and to quote the Wikipedia page linked above, it describes “the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.”

The page is worth reading for more info. For example:

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy, which states: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.” ‘

And what about the name? Crichton said he had once discussed the effect with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann “and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have”!

Very Artificial Intelligence

Regular readers might assume that I spurn all things AI-related, and this is not the case. I do use and occasionally derive benefit from the tools that tend to come under this all-embracing phrase du jour. But it does sometimes seem as if, for general questions, the LLMs can throw up wrong answers as often as right ones, and, like others, I then feel a compulsion to point this out. I had one week recently where three different ‘AI’ systems, in three completely different contexts, gave me three answers that were demonstrably wrong on key points.

So it’s important to know the answer before you ask them a question, in which case…

The real problem is the certainty with which assertions are made. There’s no expression of doubt, no humming and hawing, before the response.

Having been listening on my recent travels to the wonderful audiobooks of Patrick O’Brian’s stories, I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT about archaic naval terminology – did it know what was meant by ‘Three points off the larboard bow’.

It started with a cheery phrase along the lines of “Ah! Nautical terms! Always a source of interest.” and then went on to give various bits of authoritative information, even with helpful diagrams, but including the assertion that ‘A point in this context is one-eighth of a compass’s 360 degrees, so one point is 11.25 degrees.’

Mmm. Do a little calculation and you’ll see the problem.

I’m paraphrasing slightly, because when I went back to copy and paste the exact text, it had conveniently lost its history, and when I asked again, it made no mention of the ‘one-eighth’. (There are actually 32 ‘points’ on a compass, so the 11.25 degrees bit was correct. Four points are 45 degrees.) It’s a worrying thought: perhaps the system could detect that I was surprised and go back and cover its mistakes!

Anyway, it did get the rest of it right. ‘Larboard’ is an old word for ‘port’, which was abandoned in the mid-19th century because it sounded too similar to ‘starboard’. If yelled from the mast-top in the heat of battle in a gale, I guess this could cause problems. So ‘three points off the larboard bow’ means (roughly) 34 degrees to the left of the direction in which the ship is pointing.

Many, many years ago, when a couple of the projects I was working on started to get some press coverage, I remember noticing that, in general, every single article about my work contained errors. (There were a couple of exceptions — the Economist was one — but they were notable for their rarity.) These were generally unimportant mistakes, and they were made by well-intentioned journalists working for reputable papers back in the day when they could afford to do real research but who were, after all, humans. It was an important lesson for me in my youth: you can detect the errors in the things you know about, but remember that every article you read about anything is probably similarly flawed.

This is why I think it is important to keep taking note of the times we can detect wrong answers, because they will also happen in places that we cannot so easily detect. I wonder if adding more human-like phrases to the output of LLMs will enable us to take what they say with a pinch of salt, too? (Sea salt, of course.)

Time warp

I realise that I should be slightly more cautious about my use of phrases like ‘today’ and ‘this morning’ in my posts, since quite a few of my readers receive them by email the following day. In the days of the Trump regime, phrases like ‘The news looks a bit better this morning’ have a very limited lifespan!

Ah well. Here’s yesterday’s (or the day before yesterday’s) Matt cartoon:

Peace for our time?

How very strange to wake this morning thinking about Starmer and Trump – as Churchill and… Neville Chamberlain.

I’m sorry Neville, you really didn’t deserve that!

I didn’t think about either of them for long, though, because I’m in my campervan looking at Lindisfarne (just visible in the background), where I’ll be heading after breakfast, when the tide falls low enough to expose the causeway.

The bed is across the back of the van, which meant that I could quite literally open the window and look out at this view without my head leaving the pillow.

Peace for the time being, at least. And the news is more encouraging this morning too.

More coffee-pot nostalgia

For those who read this blog and haven’t yet exhausted their enthusiasm for Trojan Room Coffee Pot nostalgia, Peter Leigh has just produced what is perhaps the best video about it yet, on his ‘Nostalgia Nerd’ YouTube channel.

(Direct Youtube link, for those reading by email)

You’ll have to get busy skipping YouTube ads, but it’s very nicely done.

The most popular typeface you’ve never heard of

I came across an amazing article by Marcin Wichary at the weekend, about a font you’ve probably never heard of: Gorton. And that’s despite the fact that you probably encounter it very regularly.

The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan is a long web page, but even if you don’t read the whole thing, there’ll be plenty to catch your interest if you skip bits from time to time.  There are even some interactive demos.  But do read most of it, too.

It’s always good to be reminded, amidst so much of the online rubbish we see today, just how much brilliant work is also out there.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser