Pizza delivery reloaded

[pozorvlak]

Rob Colvile, over at whyoftheworld, has responded to my recent post about IP law. It's a good column: go read it. I appear to have been comprehensively misunderstood (by Rob's commenters, though not by Rob himself), but hey, such is life on the Internet.

The only thing that makes me less than completely reassured by Rob's explanation is that, with software, we're getting damn close to selling pure thoughtstuff (and let's not forget the dizzying tower of abstractions that is modern finance). How much further up the "value chain" is there to go? Will someone eventually invent a way of selling mathematical theorems? The day they do is the day I (and most of the world's mathematicians, I suspect) hand in my chalk and open a bar. The Straightedge and Compasses, perhaps. With blackboards on the tables, and packets of chalk behind the bar.

Comments

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

Shiny! I'd go there!

Have I ever told you about my plans to open a 'geek' pub if I ever get the chance - it would have large screen TVs showing Doctor Who every week and tables in a backroom for table-top roleplaying... haven't really though how I could extend it beyond that yet though(!).

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we have a business plan...

The other aspects of my idea were to open it near to the science departments of a university, have an "equation of the day" somewhere on the board (and get people to suggest them), and generally try to make it the post-seminar boozer of choice for the university's science community. You'd need a good choice of games, too - Go, chess, shogi, Polarity...

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

If you ask me, it's all about the beer. I still seem to know one or two people not interested in really nice beer, but none of them are mathematicians[1]. All the rest is will fall flat if you don't have the essentials right.

[1] Actually, now I come to think about it, French mathematicians are more interested in really nice wine, aren't then? But don't go for the expensive wine-bar huge range of nonsense. Go to France, tour around some vinyards, and pick up cheap some unbottled vats of pure joy. Then serve it in earthenware jugs. Actually, can I come on the vinyard trip?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Good beer is a given. Surely you know me well enough by now to realise that? :-)

Actually, judging by the mathematicians I know, the differentiator would be good whisky.

[michiexile]

There was a viable gamer's pub in Nürnberg while I lived there. It crashed, badly, shutting the place down and leading to the divorce of the proprietors just about the time I left - mainly because the rent of the place was skyhigh and earnings didn't quite cover it.

But that had a lot of focus on getting the pub built to accomodate at least 6-8 gamer groups simultaneously and without them interfering with each other.

They didn't have blackboards though.

[terpsichore1980.livejournal.com]

Yep, I would certainly drink there, but probably not very often if it was in Glasgow ;-)

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Actually, I would be a bit re-assured if they found a way to sell theorems. (Especially if you could pretend to me that you were selling them for some eco-friendly-nonsense purpose). There does come a moment when you have to ask yourself: ``But is what I do actually pointless?''

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I spent the evening after the auditions being badgered by my next-door neighbours about what the commercial possibilities of my research were. The answer "I don't know, ask an engineer in a century's time" wasn't good enough, apparently.

I'm not at all worried about it: the history of maths strongly suggests that even the most abstract work gets applied sooner or later, and usually sooner. You know that Cayley and Sylvester invented matrices with the hope that they were so pure they'd never be applied to anything, right?

[totherme.livejournal.com]

The value chain doesn't have to be monotonic in abstractness - the next big industry could be cybernetics, or bio-chips, or happy pills, or wormhole generators, or nanotech, or perfect heat-pipes, or materials with unlikely (variable?) density...

There's all sorts of weird stuff left to invent - don't worry :)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is true. Actually, one of Rob's commenters makes a nice suggestion: the Next Big Thing could simply be a greater appreciation of how human beings work, and how to organise companies more efficiently to take advantage of your employees' untapped potential. That kind of thing ought to be very easy to steal, but cultural factors tend to slow down adoption. Have many companies reorganised themselves to be more like Google?

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I do hope for that to be a Next Big Thing :)

Another commenter asserted that the big gains that western countries have had were when those countries were not in fact the freedom loving democracies they are today.. I'm not sure how true that is, but it sounds plausible ;)

I vaguely remember reading that lots of people thought the reason for the rise of the US was the damage that two Great Wars did to all the existing powers. If that's the main cause of shifting power bases, then maybe we should be waiting for the US to do something stupid...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

War Nerd reckons they've already done it (http://www.exile.ru/2007-May-04/war_nerd.html)...

[totherme.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read that... I dunno - he points out himself that the real big losers in a conflict are the hosts. And there doesn't seem to be any prospect of a big conflict on US soil. Sure, the iraq conflict is stupid and it costs a lot of money, but doesn't a lot of that money go back into US companies anyway? Arms dealers and the like? Maybe it's just the US keeping in practice...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

War is ultimately a money sink - you take money, and instead of spending it to create things people want, you buy expensive things and then blow them up (taking with them bridges, hospitals, etc, which have to be re-built at great expense, and productive individuals who take decades to replace). Individual people and companies get rich, sure, but the effect averaged over the whole economy is negative.

You could maybe make a case that the economic effects of, say, reducing the heroin flow into Britain (for the Afghan war) or ensuring the supply of oil might have outweighed the cost of the war itself, but given that neither of those things have happened, it would be at best a failed gamble. So while the US (and UK) haven't lost as big as the Iraqis (or the Afghans), the wars are definitely not helping us.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

That seems fair. I wonder if one could hypothetically make an argument based on athletics...

"If we don't practice making war in places that don't matter, we'll have forgotten how to do it when it finally does really matter."

What do you all think?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

My instinct is "no". The human (and other) cost of war is so high that we shouldn't undertake it just to keep our hand in. We should also think about the effect that permanent warfare would have on the society - think of 1984. Or North Korea. Or classical Sparta. Or Russia in the Cold War (or, arguably, the West in the Cold War). Now, you'll find some people saying that that warfare/military service has a net positive effect on society (think of Rome in its early days versus its late days), but I'm not convinced.

The other thing is that the UK has been practising warfare; I think there was only one year between 1945 and 2000 when our troops weren't deployed in some kind of hostile situation (Malaya, Korea, Kenya, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Bosnia...) The US military has also fought a fair few wars in that time, but they didn't fight a 30-year counterinsurgency war within spitting distance of their homeland. I've heard that this is (or at least was) reflected in the relative quietness of the British sectors of Iraq, but this could well just be self-congratulatory British media (and the Brits seem to be taking quite enough casualties, anyway).

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There's some very cool stuff going on in materials science at the moment - metallic glass (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/03/980331074950.htm), anyone?

I sometimes think that if we can get through the next thirty years, we're in for a serious Golden Age...

[totherme.livejournal.com]

That does look very cool :)

Having said that, what's your definition of a Golden Age? I've been reading my collection of "trashy, but old, and therefore cultured" books recently- Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Dorian Grey - and the empire of the time seems pretty Golden Age to me...

And then I get off the train... The mechanical barriers at the exit notice a particular bit of card-shaped plastic in my wallet without my having to get it out, deduce that I've already paid for this journey, and clear the way. I get outside, and fish a second bit of plastic (this one's a bit larger) out of a pocket, which I ask the current location of the friend I'm due to meet at the cinema.

He's late, so I use another bit of card-shaped plastic to alter a two numbers in two different databases - which are probably located somewhere in London but I don't really know or care - the result is that I get to drink some tea. While doing so I use yet another bit of plastic (the largest yet - this one weighs a whole kilogram) to correspond real-time with my relatives on the other side of the world, read the latest up-to-the-second news from several mainstream sources and a couple of weird out of the way ones too... Some of the news is augmented with audio and video - some of it is just text. My second bit of plastic politely beeps to let me know that my friend is getting close, so I finish my tea, pack up my stuff and accompany him to a room where we'll spend 3 hours watching photographic evidence of things that never happened.


I think you're right though - it does seem to get even better...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Indeed. We live in an age of wonders, and I for one try not to forget it. Of course, we also live in an age of great poverty, injustice, and other Bad Things.

Maybe a Golden Age is one in which things get better rather than getting worse?

[antoniabaker.livejournal.com]

I think its a fantatic idea, but idream of having a multi-geek pub, we'll have a revolving sign up on teh door, and it can be a pub for mathematicians, folk music afficiandos, poetry readings, harry potter nights, we'll fix it so the decor and games etc can easily be swapped about to suit which ever customer group we're aiming for that night. I'm very tired having done nothign consturctive all day but when I wake up i'll put some more thought into this.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Even better, if we could get them all in at once, not interfering with each other...

[totherme.livejournal.com]

lots of little squirrelley places, with variable decor - ideally controlled by a dial next to a seat, so people can come in, find a seat, turn the dial to "maths" and play with the newly revealed blackboard...