How Many Memories Do People Have?

How many events, stories and facts do people really remember? I decided to do a very crude experiment. From a complete list of vocabulary words, I generated sets of word triples (Noun, Verb, Noun) such as:

1 clarity consider sonnet
2 letterman propose tapdance
3 assignment deduce senate
4 virtuoso weaken ferment
5 controversy jeopardize globe
6 dialysis recur rooftop
7 dislocation admit portal
8 swirl decrease bough
9 dolphin install compatriot
10 gust beware extrapolation

There are about 200 billion possible triples. I seem to be able to assign an obvious word triple to almost anything I remember. But in a random set of 1000 triples, I didn't see any that obviously described a memory. I decided to cut back the experiment and just generate pairs of nouns:

1 lunch clarity
2 fist sonnet
3 letterman gamble
4 tapdance assignment
5 ounce senate
6 extrapolation mast
7 ferment controversy
8 yip globe
9 dialysis artisan
10 rooftop dislocation

There are 100 million possible pairs from my vocabulary set, and I'm looking for clear associations with memories, like "kennedy assassination" or "birthday party". Out of a random sample, about 2 percent could be associated in such an obvious way with a memory. If every memory could be assigned a fairly obvious word pair, then this implies that I only have about 2 million memories.

That's a surprisingly small number. I'm pretty skeptical about this experiment, and I'm sure we can find countless flaws in the whole concept of it. But it is amusing and suggests a contrary notion that the human mind might be far more limited that we like to believe (and we all know how much I enjoy contrary notions).

One obvious flaw is that meaningful word pairs might only number in the millions, but could refer to hundreds of different memories. So I tend to conclude that people have somewhere from 1 to 100 million memories.

Another approach to estimation of long-term memory capacity is to note that people only live for about 30,000 days. How many events per day really stand out enough for people to remember them permanently? That makes it easier for me to believe that people only have on the order of a million memories.

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PS. I haven't been posting a lot to my blog, because I've been putting my thoughts on Facebook notes. (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=506882584). Folks are welcome to send an add request, but I can't guarantee I will accept requests from strangers, unless they have a real Facebook page that let's me know who they are.

The Economy and Energy

I. Who's Fault Is This Mess?

I believe in free markets. As a computer scientist, I've seen how the principles of capitalism have led to astonishing new inventions and positive economic activity just in my own field. As an historian of the Soviet space program, I also see just how poorly socialism functions in comparison.

In our current economic problem, there is plenty of blame to spread around. I personally see two places where the market was subverted:

1. Pressure from liberal government policies to give loans to people who couldn't afford them.

2. Dishonest labeling of the risk and quality of some mortgage-based bonds.

I'm not adverse to regulating the amount of leveraging in the market, but I can't help but think that people would never have risked so much if they had not thought they were buying "A" rated securities. Civil and criminal liability needs to be applied to those responsible for that.


II. Fear Mongering and Political Opportunism

Crisis brings out the best and worst in people. The mainstream media has contributed to the problem by flat out telling people to dump their stock. If you sell your stock now, you turn unrealized loss into actual loss. If the meat puppets on the network news keep yammering about bad banks, they could cause a run on the banks, and then of course they really would fail.

Talk of the Great Depression are popular now, but in fact there is no comparison: Depression Fears Overblown


Crisis also creates opportunity for would-be political mass movements. On the far left we hear talk of socialism and the failure of capitalism. On the far right, we hear populist nonsense about the bailout. Just the kind of hysterical actions that are bad for America now.


III. Fundamentals - Education and Energy

Adam Smith taught us the most important thing we can know about economics: the wealth of a nation is created by human productivity, not by "treasure". Compare a resource-poor nation like Japan to a resource-rich nation like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. Where would you rather live? Nations that are truly wealthy have invested in their people, educating them to be productive and self sufficient. America does a fair job of this, but should do better.

Both candidates of said something to this effect, probably because they have been talking to T. Boone Pickens: we could revitalize our nation’s economy by embarking in a project to rebuild our energy infrastructure. Here is why I think that is a great idea:

1. Energy is crucial to a modern economy because it amplifies human productivity. We cannot allow ourselves to ride the downslide of global petroleum production.

2. New energy sources will free of us from dependence on hostile foreign petroleum suppliers.

3. Building a new infrastructure will create jobs and build long-term economic opportunities in the same way that the space program and the computer revolution did.

4. More young people will be encouraged to learn science and engineering.

5. I believe we can create vast amounts of cheap electrical power, but it may have new characteristics. Electricity might be cheap when the wind is blowing in northern Texas, and expensive during week-long lulls. People and the market can adjust. It creates a market incentive to store energy when its cheap and sell it when its expensive, which will level the pricing to some extent.

6. The free market can solve the energy-storage problem, but nation action is needed to upgrade our electrical grid so we can move more power over greater distances. The Soviets did this in the 1930s, we can certainly do it in America today. But it requires the national will to override eco-extremists and opponents of eminent domain.

Telegenomic Colonization

Can man colonize nearby stars? Most of the discussions of this problem seem to assume non-existent or practically impossible physics -- warp drives, antimatter power sources, giant lasers that defy the law of diffraction. Is there a way to do it with technology that could actually be developed? I think so:

Step 1: Super-Telescope Survey

Build a multiple-aperture telescope in space, able to image and spectroanalyze the nearest extrasolar planets. The law of diffraction dictates that the synthetic aperture must be hundreds of kilometers or perhaps thousands. This is expensive but far cheaper than sending probes to many nearby stars.

Step 2: Robotic Probes

If suitable planets are found, send unmanned probes using fission-powered ion drives with relativistic exhaust velocities. They must be big enough to reach the star and decelerate into planetary orbit. They will be expensive and take centuries to reach their destinations, travelling at 1 or 2 percent of the speed of light. Use somewhat more efficient fusion power, if it is developed.

Step 3: Telegenomic Transmission

Once in position, the probes can receive radio transmission of human genomes of volunteers (and/or carry some onboard in digital storage). Remote growth of clones from synthesized DNA would need to be developed. Remote raising of the children would also be necessary -- these would be clones of terrestrial hosts, but would of course not have the host's memory or personality.

Radio transmission of genomes (telegenomic) allows unlimited colonization without the extreme expense of carrying human payloads. I believe it is a practical impossibility to carry living beings between stars. I also do not believe any power source beyond nuclear fission or fusion (tenths of a percent mass-conversion efficient) will ever be possible, which places severe limits on intersteller travel.

Credit Crisis 101

A friend at Morgan Stanley recommended this article written in March at the New York Times. It briefly discusses some of the problems caused by unregulated leveraged buying of mortgages. Basically, this is how the conservatives screwed up:

NY Times

Another article that has been widely discussed, from the Washington Post, explores how the liberals screwed up, by pushing banks into giving home loans to the underprivileged:

Washington Post

Plenty of blame to go around...

Citizens of the Stratosphere

In 1934 Sergei Korolev, future leader of the Soviet space program, published his first book: Rocket Flight to the Stratosphere. While a handful of people were talking about flight in outer space then, considerably more attention was being focused on the conquest of the upper atmosphere. An international race commenced with many of the characteristics of the space race decades later.


Crocco's Refrigerated Supersonic Cabin
The Italian pioneer of aviation, General G. Arturo Crocco had been a major inspiration to Korolev and others, when his writings about Superaviation in the 1920s. Crocco pointed out the tremendous value of flying at extreme altitude and speed, but in 1926 he had proved that propellers couldn't function in these conditions. Inspired by the new theory of jet engines developed by Soviet scientist Boris Stechkin, Crocco wrote an influential paper in 1931 advocating the use of ramjet engines to fly through the stratosphere at "super acoustic" velocity. At such speeds, the pilot's cabin would have to be refrigerated to counteract the heat of friction with the atmosphere.


Soviet ramjet engine, GIRD-04
In 1933, Korolev's jet propulsion research group in Moscow began the world's first work on ramjet technology. GIRD-04 was a hydrogen powered engine, tested in a supersonic wind tunnel. History of this work has been largely eclipsed by GIRD-09, Korolev's first rocket, launched later that year.


Soviet Balloon "Osoaviakhim-1"
Interest in the upper atmosphere soon triggered a dangerous international contest to reach the stratosphere in hydrogen balloons. One of the first to perish was the American explorer Hawthorne Grey, who reached an altitude of 12.9 kilometers. On the way back to Earth, his oxygen supply ran out and he suffocated.

In 1933, the balloon "USSR-1" reached 19 kilometers, performing cosmic-ray experiments and taking samples of the atmosphere for chemical analysis. The airtight nacelle carried liquid oxygen tanks and chemical scrubbers to remove carbon dioxide and excess water vapor.

A few months later, in January 1934, the balloon "Osoaviakhim-1" was launched. Osoaviakhim was a paramilitary club that sponsored events ranging from parachute-jumping clubs to the funding of Korolev's research lab. Its confident pilots, Fedoseyenko, Vasenko and Usyskin, boasted that they would be "citizens of the stratosphere". Osoaviachim-1 reached the record breaking altitude of 22 kilometers, but during its descent an unexpected cooling of the gas in the balloon caused it to contract and trigger an uncontrolled descent. Trying to remove the 24 bolts holding the hatch closed, the young aeronauts died when the capsule struck ground.

In 1939, the stratospheric balloon "Konsomol" was launched by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Its commander, A.A. Fomin sent a radio telegram to Stalin from an altitude of 16.8 kilometers. During his descent, at an altitude of 9 km, the hydrogen balloon caught fire and the capsule began to fall. Fomin quickly threw a switch to disconnect the nacelle from the flaming balloon, but when he pulled the parachute ring, it failed to deploy. At 6 km, they got the hatch open, then waited breathing from their oxygen supply while the capsule plummeted. At 4 km they could safely jump with personal parachutes.


1934 All-Union Conference on the Study of the Stratosphere
In 1934, a major conference was held on the study of the stratosphere. After an open address on the mastery of the stratosphere, by academician S.I. Vavilov, 79 scientists presented papers on the structure of the atmosphere, high altitude photography, spectroscopic studies of the far ultraviolet wavelengths blocked by the dense atmosphere, cosmic rays, biomedical problems of high altitude flight, and the technology of rockets and jet engines.

For Sergei Korolev, the conference was an important opportunity to promote his idea of boost-glide rocket planes, which has recently been cancelled by his new boss. In his report, he described a rocket-powered glider that would reach an altitude of 23 kilometers, and then glide a distance of 280 km. Shortly after, he was able to resume work on the project.

The published proceedings were 927 pages long, but when they were translated into English in 1938 the size had dropped to 307 pages. Only 39 authors were presented. In the intervening years, most of the missing authors had been executed or imprisoned during Stalin's political purges.

Eric Hoffer

In 1951, the American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer. This book discussed the phenomenon of the politcial mass movement, which one can argue, is the cause of a great deal of historical evil and suffering. While blaming the charasmatic and dishonest people who start such movements, he placed the majority of responsibility on a certain type of individual who becomes a zealot.

Hoffer considered large mass movements like Fascism, Communism and radical Islam. But movements can be smaller and thankfully less damaging, revolving around smaller issues like animal rights, software, conspiracy theories, etc.

I ran across a small collection of quotations from that work, which I wanted to post here:

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."

"In an affluent society, the alienated who clamor for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realization, and cannot escape the confrontation with an ineffectual self."

"Such persons sooner or later turn their backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect."

"When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker..."

"A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self."

The Universe for Dummies

What has happened to the art of making great documentaries about science? I'm thinking about amazing programs like "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski, "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan or even the more recent "Planets" by the BBC? The first two really communicated the history and motivation and spirit of science, and The Planets at least communicated a coherent history of planetary exploration.

I recently bought the History Channel's series "The Universe", thinking I might send a copy to my niece's kids. I didn't bother, because it was absolutely terrible. The program was a series of flashy images and factoids, many of them simply incorrect. It failed to interview highly prominant scientists who were engagned in space missions. The episode on Venus, for example, didn't even discuss any of the spacecraft sent to Venus or describe their experiements or interview the men who sent them.

These modern science programs simply fail to communicate the spirit of science. What questions are asked, how are they considered and answered by experiments and discourse, how did people make mistakes and then correct them? They fail to teach the scientific method. They fail to show how real scientists are engaged in a meaningful life that gives them pleasure.

Is it any wonder that so many people today cannot differentiate science from pseudo-science? A program like "The Universe" is not not much different in structure from a quack documentary like "The Secret" or a program about UFOs.

Science is being presented as "Gee whiz! Don't you wish you were smart like these people?" instead of something that young viewers might actually want to do when they grow up.

PS. If you haven't seen "The Ascent of Man", consider renting it and watching it.