Ari has finished producing and uploading the videos, you can check them out here.

Of course, it would have been nice if they did this, and deployed a widespread education campaign, many many months ago.

In fact, the conspiracy theory side of me thinks that they don’t want Net Neutrality to be maintained, but they want to go down in history as being the good guy when the battle was being fought, even though, whoops, now they are profitting from their synthetic ability to fragment a commodity market.

The Net Neutrality bill already died yesterday in the House.

–Sidney J. Harris

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vison and a task is the hope of the world.

–From a church in Sussex, England, ca. 1730

See the video at crooks and liars here (i think this isn’t a complete video, if anyone finds a better one let me know), and more coverage here.

UPDATE: a torrent of the full video here (thank you, helpful anonymous commenter!)

UPDATE: full length easy to watch version here.

There is a room with 3 lights in it (each with one bulb), controlled by 3 switches outside the room. We don’t know which switch controls which light. How do we figure this out, with only entering the room one time?

When interviewing for tech companies, these brainteasers are a pretty common part of the interview. Another one that I was recently asked:

We have a 3 quart jug and a 5 quart jug and an infinite supply of water. How do we measure out 4 quarts of water?

(The “solutions” are at the bottom of this post)

These two questions are good examples because they demonstrate the two main categories of interview brainteasers:

The first type of question tests the interviewee’s ability to map out a problem space, aka to think “outside” the box (what I like to call “not ignoring most of the box”). In the light bulb question, a successful interviewee will think “wait a second, there are more variables here than the interviewer explicitly mentioned using english words. Light bulbs also… create heat!”.

So the challenge is to think of variables that were not explicitly mentioned. This also implies that you can use tools (a stepstool or a ladder) and perform actions (touch the light bulbs) that were not explicitly mentioned. The essence of the challenge is restrictioning information, tools, and activities. There are no labels on the light switches, you can’t peer around the corner while you flip the switches on and off, and you can only enter the room once. All of these restrictions are artificial things that you would never experience in the real world. And that’s fine. The point of asking anyone anything in an interview is because there is neither time nor resources to see how the candidate performs on a 6 month project with a real client.

BUT, if I can use a ladder, why can’t I use a sledge hammer to break down the wall? Or better yet, buy 2 or 3 $10 mirrors and set them up so I can see the bulbs go on and off. It sounds absurd, but how is that more absurd than not being able to enter a room twice?

Okay, let’s say we’ll put a little more faith in the validity of the universe of the question. Let’s say that the reason we can’t enter the room twice, or peak around the corner, OR set up mirrors, is because the switches are too far away from the bulbs. Well then wouldn’t the second bulb possibly warm up by the time we walked from the switches to the bulbs, so that, within the resolution of heat perception of human skin, it is the same temperature as the first bulb?

Let’s say that the restrictions on tools and actions represent limited resources in a project, but the ladder is an acceptable tool because it’s cheap. Okay, you, reader, sitting there reading this. Do you own a ladder? Now, do you own 2 computers, a web camera, and a wireless router?

Yes, the ladder is cheaper, if you don’t have any of the above. But since the average programmer / consultant is more likely to have 2 computers, a web-camera, and a wireless router, is that not the more efficient solution? Somebody tell me what I’m missing here.

These questions ask you to map out a problem space, but which dimensions are considered “outside of the box”, and which dimensions are considered silly, is completely dictated by the predetermined outcome devised by the question designer. And this is supposed to identify the candidates who have innovative thinking skills?

The jugs problem represents the second type of interview brainteaser. These questions are pretty much a test of raw math and reasoning skills. They aren’t a horrible idea in and of themselves, but I still question their usefulness in an interview context. Everyone is going to get the answer to the jugs problem, the only question is will it take 30 seconds, 3 minutes, or — if the person is anxious — longer than that. So there are only two things that can be ascertained from a candidate’s performance with this question: [1] the raw time that it took for them to find the solutions, [2] how they perform, in terms of reasoning path and self confidence, while finding the answer.

Regarding [1], of all the things you can learn from someone during an interview, are you really going to learn that much more about their intellectual ability by seeing how many seconds it takes them to manipulate jug volumes in their mind?

Furthermore, (while we’re still talking about raw time to the solution), there are more variables than math and reasoning skills at play here. A perfectly capable and sharp interviewee might be very nervous about the interview, being around new people, or being in the unfamiliar environment of a new city. I realize that most adults aren’t nervous wrecks during interviews, but it doesn’t take much anxiety to double the time it takes to do artificial math problems, when for the past 30 hours you’ve been worrying about traveling, printing resumes, getting directions to a new building, and giving a good first impression at a social and professional level.

Given that the interviewer probably doesn’t have a stopwatch on hand, factor [2] is probably the primary purpose of the question. Do companies really want to hire adults in their 20s and 30s who feel totally normal while being commanded to think of solutions to brainteasers from middle school math club (which is the first time i saw the jugs problem)? To me this would indicate that the interviewee suffers from social maladjustment, or even a personality disorder. In fact, this type of situation is an example of the core apparatus of coercion employed by car salesmen, the CIA, and cult leaders: inducing the subject to regress into a childlike state.

On top of that, most candidates will be at least somewhat aware that their demeanor is being observed. So now you have a bunch of candidates putting on something of a show, smoothly and casually talking through their reasoning process. Or just trying to not look stressed. When I’m doing my best work, I’m not looking unstressed and socially smooth. I’m shaking my knee up and down, sucking down green tea, jamming to music, occasionally picking my ear, and occasionally doing celebratory funky dances in my adjustable chair, all while wearing anti-RSI wrist splints.

When I was asked the jugs problem a couple months ago, I didn’t even have time to get to it because I was too busy scrambling around trying to figure out string manipulation in C, which I haven’t done in 7 years. In-interview programming questions are another issue, and the topic for a future essay. Stay tuned…

1. Turn on the first switch for a few minutes, then turn on the second one and immediately go into the room. The bulb that is warm is the first switch, the other bulb that is on is the second switch, and the bulb that is off is the third switch.
   
   
2. Fill up 5QT, use it to fill 3QT, leaving 2 quarts in 5QT. Empty 3QT, then pour the 2 quarts in 5QT into 3QT. This leaves a 1 quart void in 3QT. Fill up 5QT and release a quart into this void, and you end up with 4 quarts in 5QT.

In Commons-Based Business Models I asked the panelists if there were any revenue models other than advertising that might get some legs in the next decade or so. I sited micropayments as the pie in the sky that in many ways Makes Sense, but perhaps consumers would never be able to get past the threshold. The responses brought to light some very interseting things:

• Some anime outfits in Japan are using the “monetize the head, give away the tail” model, and selling super expensive special edition box sets (in the thousands of dollars) to hardcore fans. I’m not sure where the “give away the tail” part of this comes in… not pursuing media pirates for the primary content I suppose?
• In China, 95% of music consumed is from pirated media. Musicians and/or their labels must pay others for inclusion in other products (like doing the theme song for a show costs the musician on the order of 2 million USD). They are able to make the money back from the popularity it generates. The quality of musicians in China is considered to be better than those in other Asian countries, and their careers last much longer.
• Consumers actually are fine with micropayments, look at the iTunes Music store.

The iTunes Music Store model is not quite what I consider The Micropayments Dream. To me the micropayments model is pay-per-click: a fraction of of a penny for most pages, up to a couple dollars for some content like music and videos.

The panel got me thinking: one of the major problems with transitioning to micropayments is having a centralized service, so that users don’t have to give their credit card number to every single site they visit. What if Apple started offering micropayment services? Users would visit arbitrary sites using only their micropayments account from Apple.

Apple could make a killing. They would get a cut of all content transactions on the internet.

Of course, any other company that has a massive existing userbase is also in a position to begin offering this. Yahoo and Amazon come to mind. But Apple is the only one that is really doing anything that looks like micropayments.

Lyceum Public Beta

The front page explains everything. Basically, sign up for a blog (or several), write posts, adjust settings, comment on other people’s blogs, and then send bug reports to lyceum-bugs AT lists DOT ibiblio DOT org.

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.

Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge, he said, and to “cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money”.

Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.

I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.

Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:

I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.

95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.

On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.

Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.

Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?

Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.

I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.

You look like you’re in good shape.

Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.

What do you do to slow the aging process?

I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.

It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]

Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?

Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.

Where is the “bottom” in the stock market? I realize that it is basically all driven by hype, psychology, etc now, but in theory, what is being traded? Why would/should a corporation’s performance theoretically affect the value of it’s [sic] share [sic]? is it something to do with what happens if the corporation dissolved [sic]?

You can see the entry and the responses it generated here.

When I got the first response, I had basically full confidence in what elids said. elids seemed reasonably knowledgable, and was certainly very confident and enthusastic. Then elwtee comes on the scene and shakes everything up with a completely different answer! elwtee seems just as knowledgable and self-assured as elids!

It makes me wonder about who these two people are, what their motivations are, and what they do with their time. Keep in mind that these were both left as comments to the question and not submitted as answers, so they aren’t in it for the money.