Elizabeth May - Officially, May would likely claim that her weapon of choice would be something reusable and compost-friendly, like a farmer’s axe. Hornswoggle. May would get behind the wheel of the biggest bus she could find and blare the horn as she hit you at top speed. Then she’d back over you. There would be juice and cake served on the bus.

Michael Ignatieff - Ignatieff has the cold eyes and pained rictus of a poisoner. I see him sitting on an iron throne with steepled fingers and pale eyes, scheming in the night. He wouldn’t just use the most efficient poison: each obstacle would be removed with something suitably whimsical and appropriate.

Jack Layton - Jack Layton is 100% Kung Fu. If someone rushed at him Chretien-protester style, I would fully expect him to rip off his shirt and jacket to expose an oiled up torso, shriek, and go Bruce Lee on you. It would look impressive, but there would be a lot more arm waving and yelling than strictly necessary.

Gilles Duceppe - Bow and arrow. Historically, very effective. And deadly-looking, for sure. But not exactly terrifying when seen in use. Slow, awkward, and really only effective at very short distances.

Past leaders

Stephane Dion - Dion has the tremulous voice and meticulous attention of an explosives expert. I see him sitting at a desk surrounded by wires and electronics. He’s savvy enough to want to do the most damage in the right way, but doesn’t have the stomach to be there when it happens.

Brian Mulroney - Baseball bat. He’d kneecap you before you even saw him coming. Then once you’re down he’d toy with you like a cat.

Pierre Trudeau - Small-caliber pistol. Bond style. Something easily concealed in a tweed vest that you would initially dismiss as a toy, until he was already making out with your girlfriend over your corpse.

Jean Chretien - Although the temptation is to joke about ‘the claw’, Chretien would use piano wire. He’d make sure it was done right: quickly, quietly, without any mess.

Joe Clarke - Tank.

Paul Martin - Pillow in the night. He wouldn’t want you to suffer, but he also wouldn’t want to feel bad by hearing you. He might sing to you softly as he did it. French and english, just in case.

Would you believe I wrote almost all this up two years ago, and only just figured out how to make it spiffy in Excel?

There’s more research baked into this than I’d like to admit. And for all that, I realize none of it is ‘true’, but almost everything is defensible.

The concept is that all products based on a new technology have a predictable series of stages. What I wondered was whether the time between each stage might be the consistent for each product. Some rocket through conception to where everyone who might want one has one, and some that gestate for decades and inch slowly forward.

Sometimes products move slowly due to technical limitations, some because the change they facilitate is so fundamental. ‘Replacement’ technologies almost always move much faster than ones they replace. The infrastructure is already in place, either in public awareness or actual physical infrastructure.

A few technologies are so perfectly replaced by a superior version that they are eliminated entirely. Dial-up internet, does still exist in large numbers, but was suddenly squeezed out a few years ago by broadband.

Predicting the start of any technology beyond the present date is almost impossible, of course. A technology is actually fairly predictable when deeply familiar with it. But when a technology will finally come together into an effective product could happen tomorrow or never. But still fun to think about.

Finally, this refers to North American technology/consumer markets. Line colours are non-informative, but I’ll take suggestions on how to categorize them.

Group X and Group Y show a range of performance at Acitivity Z. And the distribution of sample means for both groups show a normal or Gaussian distribution.  But the mean of means for X is higher than the mean of means for Y.

No one’s going to say that.

But we do need to figure out a way to convey that idea. Because it’s a blanket statement to say X’s are better than Y’s at Z. And almost half the time, it will be untrue. But we still need to talk about groups in a meaningful way, and we’re not there yet.

The standard practice for science writing for years has been to write to one of two audiences: either a specialized niche, or a general populist one. The former gets a bone-dry examination of a specific topic using inside language, and the latter a ‘Learning is fun!’ collection of Science Facts, a font you could read from ten feet away, and even fewer objectionable points.

Not Bad Science. This has the big font and bright cover, all right. But it’s clearly the result of years of the author arguing with skeptics on the internet. Skeptics of climate change, vaccines, hospitals, you name it. There is a tone of barely contained exasperation. As if the whole thing was written in one stretch at 4am after a particularly intractable exchange.

Goldacre does a good job of broaching a few subjects other, even brave science writers like Dawkins and Bryson, stay far away from. Namely statistics. He does a nice job introducing topics like Type 1 error and sampling, and although no one will walk away capable of doing a t-test, props to him for getting those topics on the reader’s radar.

For anyone familiar with those topics, and the last few years worth of public spats about science (climate change, vaccines, etc.) then there will not be much new material here. The best reason to read it is the material on placebos. Although Goldacre raises the topic in order to condemn Homeopathy (uproariously), the takeaway message is how important the role of a doctor is.

I had always despaired at the thought of humans through history condemned to suffer at the hands of ignorant ‘medicine men’. Although some treatments might have worked, far more either made the patient even worse, or were empty acts of theatre. Well, I believe that no more. Those men and women were healers. Not because their ‘root tea’ or whatever actually did anything, but because they said it would.

Modern research into placebos show that living things (humans and animals both) have an astonishing capacity for self-healing when they believe that an intervention has helped them. Treatments that should inflict discomfort, when given as medicine, can act as that medicine instead. Placebos given across cultures work differently depending on cultural expectations. It’s crazytown. This is in addition to the fact that every year placebos are getting more effective, period.

Whether it is the mind imposing healing on the body in some sort of feedback loop, or simply relaxing the patient enough that healing can occur, it’s completely unclear. Now, people get better on their own all the time. But that ‘healing narrative’ is helped hugely when an outside party provides it to them. I now realize now how much of modern medicine depends on the fact that a doctor is as much a theatre coach as a pharmacist. Except, they’re the envy of every director alive, because the imaginary narrative they give someone has an excellent chance of actually becoming reality.

I’ve joked for years that I want to start getting a prescription for placebos whenever I get sick. “It’s cheap, there are no side effects, and it works.” I say. “But it won’t work if it’s a placebo.” is the usual and rational response.

“No.” I insist. “It will if I believe it will. That’s what makes it a placebo.”

I was always kind of kidding. I don’t think I am anymore.

You have to remember how close everything was. Even London and Berlin are the same distance as Winnipeg to Saskatoon. Breaking Enigma would mean they might overhear Hitler’s location and scramble bombers within the hour; the war could be over that night if you could just break the fucking code. The pressure was intense. The story of how Enigma was eventually cracked is a tale worth telling, but today I want to talk about one man on the British codebreaker team: Alan Turing.

Turing was an ‘English eccentric’, who today would almost certainly be diagnosed as Asperger’s or simply autistic. In a room of the most brilliant mathematicians in the western world, no one was quite sure how smart Alan was, exactly. He thought so differently from the others that few could understand him. Short and pudgy, fussy and dreamy, he could be half asleep or deep in a problem; no one could tell the difference until he suddenly had a solution.

The mathematicians worked out of a country estate secretly requisitioned for the British military for the duration of the war. They could work there with close access to books and assistants, and at a given time they’d either be feverishly arguing in front of a chalkboard or trying to get a few minutes sleep on one of the deep leather couches strewn about the room.

One day Turing was considering the problem of speed. Half the problem with breaking Enigma was the frequent downtime necessary to run their solution attempts on Enigma data. The painstaking and tricky work of computing symbols and letters into interpretable results were done mostly by huge teams of women and called (unimaginatively) ‘computers’. It took time, and a single error could mean their attempt to break Enigma would fail.

“You could build a machine.” murmured Turing, opening his eyes.

“Eh?” grunted a mathematician, perhaps Jack Good, slouched at a table and trying to enjoy his tea.

“You could build a machine to do the work of the computers.” said Turing quietly.

“Nonsense.” says Good. “It would be the size of a barn. Full of switches, levers, and gears. It would take an army of engineers and clockmakers and cost a fortune.”

“But it would work.” insisted Turing. “We input the data and it would calculate the output immediately. We’d know whether we’d broken the code within a few minutes, or even seconds.”

Good shrugged. “Why bother? It could take months, or years, to get such a mechanical device to work properly. And the Germans change the encryption of Enigma all the time. Updating your ‘machine computer’ would be impossible. You’d have to start over building a new mechanism from the ground up every time. A team of our computers work at their desks for a few hours, and they’re done.”

Turing sighed “I suppose.”

Good shook his head. “You’re lucky if a mechanism does the one thing you made it to do.” he muttered, winding and tapping his pocket watch.

Turing frowned. “But the one thing is whatever we want?”

Good didn’t look up. “I suppose, in theory.”

“What if we made one that only did something else?”

Good was reaching for his tea. “Hm?”

“What if we built a device whose sole function was to become a different device?”

A lesser product of English schooling would have spit out his tea. But Good choked down a curse as some slopped into his saucer.

“The new device” breathed Turing, rubbing his chin “could be reset and customized to whatever we want. We’d just give whatever instructions were necessary, and the new device could be anything we imagine. We’d only ever have to build one, and then it would transform into whatever we wanted.”

Good glared at Turing. “That’s ridiculous. A ‘metamorphosising mechanism’ would be the size of a city, take a thousand years to build and explode as soon as you turned it on.”

“Of course, of course. But the new device it became wouldn’t have to physically exist.”

Good’s eyelids lowered. “Oh no?” he murmured. Turing didn’t notice Jack had switched to patronizing him.

“The original pre-transformed machine could be very simple, as long as the new machine always had one quality.”

Good waited.

“The new machine would be made purely out of information.” he explained helpfully.

“Knox!” said Good loudly, turning. “Wake up! While the rest of us have being trying win World War II, Turing has been using drugs. Get towels and some whiskey.”

Garbled swearing comes from a shadowed couch, but no movement.

Turing is perplexed. “I haven’t been drugging, I assure you.”

Good turns back, aghast. “You can’t be serious with all this.”

“Just think.” said Turing softly “Machines are just…just a mechanical manifestation of a math problem, right? Levers are multipliers, switches are binomial expressions.”

“Maybe.” says Good doubtfully, after a long silence.

“What if we built a device out of mathematical equations, that did the work of the computer team? And the physical machine could just express that equation using a huge set of switches and levers. As long as we could make a machine that was truly customizable and able to accept a huge amount of instructions it would be…a…a universal device. It would work.”

“But it wouldn’t actually be doing the work.” sighed Good. “For the sake of argument. It would appear to, you might…might get some kind of result, but the transformed ‘information device’ wouldn’t actually be doing any calculations. It would just be preprogrammed to create some output.” He set his cup down. His tea is cold and Turing is pacing along the windows.

“Of course it would be doing the work.”

Good’s tone is patient. “No. Even at a very basic level, like arithmetic, it would just be following your rote instructions for how math operates. Math only works because we establish very specific parameters and rules before putting pencil to paper, whether we’re aware of it or not. You couldn’t trust any answers an ‘information device’ gave you, because it wouldn’t be operating in the universe, governed by physical laws and assumptions. It would just be a bunch of meaningless exchanges of numbers somewhere in a vast room of clacking switches. We know whether a car engine works because it either works or it doesn’t. We can’t verify whether something is working when it doesn’t depend on reality to keep it in line.”

“You’re wrong, Good. Anything that appears to be fully functioning perfectly is functioning perfectly. Given proper instruction and proper input, it would be perfect arithmetic calculator. In fact, if it was sufficiently large and with proper instructions, a universal machine could solve anything. And it wouldn’t be limited to becoming codebreakers. It could become anything we could imagine.”

This was becoming tiresome. Good pointed his finger. “You’ve gone looney. The world is not a code to be broken. And it would need years of work and an entirely new branch of mathematics.”

Turing crossed his arms. “As you said we’re busy winning World War II. But the theory is sound. As for the math, I’ve already invented it: my graduate thesis. And of course the world is a code. Name something that isn’t.”

“A streetlight.”

“On or off.”

“A chair.”

“Shape, density and colour spectrum identified and modelled.”

“A dog”

“I don’t need a universal machine to calculate how a dog acts. Sniff, bark, piss, crap, eat, roger leg. Repeat.”

“Fine. A person.”

Turing nodded impatiently. “Why not? With sufficient equations prepared it could talk back and forth for years through Morse code and the other end would never know who or what the source was. It would be a person.”

Good couldn’t believe it. “But you could never replicate in math a human soul.”

“I wouldn’t need to do any such thing. Souls don’t have anything to do with being a person. A perfect fake of normal is the same as actually being normal, and faking being a person is being a person.”

“That’s absurd.”

“No.” Turing’s expression was blank. “For example, I’m not supposed to talk about all the penises.”

A muffled shout and thud as Knox falls from the couch at the other end of the room. Newspapers spill, and Knox makes a show of deliberately ignoring the conversation as he walks out, shaking his head.

Good grabs Turing’s collar and slams him back against the wall. “Turing I told you to shut your mouth about that.”

“About how much I like penises.”

“Yes about that” Good hisses.

“I still don’t understand your argument from a logical perspective. Surely you like your own very much. Why is liking more objectionable? There is much lovely variation.”

“We are not fucking arguing about this because this conversation never happened. Just like the rest of your little indiscretions.”

Turing opens his mouth.

Good slams him again. “I am speaking to you as a fellow member of British Intelligence in the War Effort. You will shut your fucking mouth about anything other than breaking Enigma.” Good sighs heavily. “I swear to God, Alan. You have to listen to me for your own good.”

Turing puts his hand on Good’s shoulder and leans in intently. “Thank you, Jack. You are trying very hard. You see, I am very close to seeming normal. I just need sufficient instructions. Like the universal computer.”

Good grips Turing’s wrist on his shoulder. “It’s not just what you say Alan, it’s about actually…you can’t keep…”  Good shakes his head and sighs. ”I’m going for a pint. Call for me when the girls are done.”

Turing turned back to the window. “Sufficient instruction accomplishes anything.” he said calmly. Good didn’t hear him.

That conversation never happened, of course. Although the elements of that discussion played out over years with those surrounding Turing.

Lots of people in England at the time were gay, just like everywhere else. And a few may have been as socially stunted as Turing was. But no one else was a critical combination of gay, autistic, and at high risk of scandal all while vital to the war effort.

Anyone who knew Turing almost immediately discovered he liked sex with men, simply because he didn’t understand that he had to hide it, or had any idea how to do so. The fact that he was soon an important part of the war effort as a famous mathematician and codebreaker meant that it was vital that his behaviour not become a scandal to the government or university.

And so eventually as Turing’s usefulness waned he was quietly erased from society. His name was taken off  crucial accomplishments and papers. And soon Turing was imprisoned at an insane asylum, released under heavy sedation, and killed himself. He had completely failed at being a person society could accept, and so was no longer a person to anyone. Even himself.

His ideas were the basis for electronic computers, of course. Modern computers, through software, can functionally become almost any information device we want. The “Turing test” is still a yearly competition for software designers as the test for the successful imitation of a human via text. Amusingly, although computers have yet to successfully pass as human, many humans are mis-identified every year as machines.

But that should be no surprise. Computers are fundamentally the dream of a man trying to fake his way into being normal. Plenty of Turings are still out there.

I rolled my eyes when the TV specials (and the inevitable series) on hoarding surfaced in the last few years. The stories were so profoundly sad, and the public spectacle seemed only to serve as an opportunity for everyone to judge someone more screwed up than themselves. Sobbing fat people having conniptions as mountains of junk were carted out of a nondescript home. The whole thing was distasteful.

But the cover teased a philosophical take on hoarding. The ‘meaning of things’ subtitle seemed particularly interesting. A rumination on the nature of ownership, physical possessions, perhaps the anthropological history of the concept of ownership. All tantalizing. But the book was about none of the those things. In fact, it was much closer to being a simple written version of one of those television episodes. So I was surprised as anyone when I was completely captivated.

The book is divided into sections describing different types of hoarders, most of the content being a series of case studies done over years. The people Frost found (and chose to include) cover a range of dysfunction: from an egomaniac who frantically gathers garbage bags every night into his unimaginably filthy condo to a retired man begging for help to clean a slightly cluttered table in an otherwise immaculate home. Every profile shows someone with a distorted view of reality, the latter simply exaggerating the problem.

What grabbed was their thinking. For each person Frost draws out their thought process: why do they keep things? How does it make them feel? How does it feel to let things go? Many of them are completely self-aware, providing a clear narration of how each object they come across serves as a kind of key to future happiness. By retaining that object and knowing it’s story, they preserve the potential happiness that object holds. Throwing out that object is cutting that connection, forever abandoning the tiny universe of happiness they imagine to be within reach with that ‘key’.

One woman had lost her husband, job, and was about to be evicted from her home unless she made immediate changes to reducing her hoard. Inviting over one of her best friends to help throw things out marked for garbage, the friend absently threw out an empty gum wrapper crumpled on the floor without asking permission first. The hoarder became so enraged that the friend fled from the house. They are no longer in contact. (The best for both of them, I think).

What made me increasingly uncomfortable through the book was not the extraordinary intensity of their behaviour and illness, but how slippery the slope was at the start of their behaviour. A common refrain was ‘I don’t understand how things got this bad’. The emotional relationship to a possession for any of us is not that object itself, but the future we imagine with it. And who hasn’t held on to something useless that might someday be useful? ‘Stuff’ didn’t so much convince me that these people needed help, as terrify me into worrying that if I ever hesitate to throw out something useless I’m two years away from living in a maze of newspapers.

The irony is that I’ve actually discarded a tremendous amount in the course of several moves and regular spring cleaning; my struggle is with letting go of information. With Delicious, I’ve tagged thousands of links for ‘later use’. Google reader, Reddit, stumbleupon, readitlater, all have a ‘save’ function for links. Between them I probably have four to five thousand links marked for reading later, going back years.

The advantage with digital clutter is that I can literally erase all of it with a click of a button. There are no rats attracted to any of this, and information doesn’t block any fire exits. Still fairly embarrassing, however. The good news is that in the last few months I’ve reduced that digital backlog by about a third. Much of what remains is likely either irrelevant, redundant, or dead links. But I still can’t bring myself to wipe what remains. Too much interesting content.

The lesson from Stuff is that it’s not a storage issue: some hoarders lived in a tiny apartment, some were millionairs that filled warehouses and mansion to the brim. It’s a management issue: how do you deal with the emotions of the normal flow of possessions.

Frost doesn’t talk about digital hoarding. And although it will never become the hazard to health and home that physical hoarding does, we live in an age when the default position is ‘save and forget’. The problem is that increasingly important documents are scanned (or saved) and dumped in amongst old useless files. In the next few decades how to manage (and let go of) the colossal backlog of information may become a very serious issue. If Frost is planning a sequel, I think I have some interesting links for him.

I’ve said that they should revive the old strategy of having the same costars over and over again. Unable to sleep last one night last week, I found myself chewing over what these projects could be. So, here are three concepts just as dumb as the last one, but just dumb enough to get made:

Concept 1

Tina and Steve are the two top mail carriers in New Jersey. Pleasant, efficient, liked in the neigbourhood, but also fiercely competitive. They’ve had neighboring routes for years, and always race to a near-tie. Until as a marketing gimmick, the US postal service has a contest to see who can deliver mail to various locations across the country first. There’s a big cash prize.

The leads team up to win, but immediately start sabotaging each other, hitchhiking, stealing cars. Tattered clothes with chicken feathers in their hair.

Sidekicks: Owen Wilson plays a crazy winnebago driver who gives them a ride.

Nemesis: The evil corporate Fedex team racing them. Amy Poehler and Will Arnett.

Complication: Both leads have good reasons to win: one has a sick kid, the other wants to help their mother. They’ll split the prize money at the end.

Working title: Fail Mail

Trailer money shot: Leads covered in mud, feathers, and candy calmly hand over a filthy envelope. A confused teenage boy says “He died”. Carell snaps “Who cares. What are you, his mother?” Everyone stares at Carell.

Concept 2:

Leads are brilliant but romantically hapless scientists working in a lab, when an accident with a new particle accelerator gives them superpowers. They discover confidence and fun fighting crime. Costumes are shiny, slightly cheap uniforms. Carell is Strongtium, until Fey makes him change it to Captain Awesome. She is Superlady. Everyone thinks their names are stupid.

Sidekick: Superintelligent talking helper monkey named “Figgins”. He wears a mask, and a t-shirt with a banana on it. Figgins is voiced by Robin Williams.

Nemesis: Their belligerent corporate supervisor (Zach Galifinakis) also got powers, and assumes costume of a short pink silk bathrobe, flipflops, sunglasses, and a birthday hat. Identity: ‘Birthday Boy’; bellows “I get whatever I want on my birthday, and from now on…it’s always my birthday”.

Complication: Birthday Boy wants to destroy the city, and they have to stop him.

Working Title: Supernerds!

Trailer money shot: Birthday Boy flies majestically over a downtown street in his kimono, and a crowd gasps and flinches. Someone shouts: “put on some underwear!”

Concept 3

Carell is a disgraced wall street executive, who because of his friends gets away without jail time, but the judge rules he volunteer at a suburban school. The caring but overwhelmed principal (Fey) has him substitute. Montage of him (in an expensive suit and watch) getting hit with crumpled paper, dogdeballs thrown at him, paint thrown at his face at a kiddie table.

Sidekicks: adorable toddlers and secretly industrious latino teenagers.

Nemesis: The school is in financial trouble! Surely the evil moneybags Carell will still step in and help them?

Complication: Carell is secretly broke. He teaches the kids real business skills and they use the internet to start a business and hire him as a salesperson.

Working title: Class President

Trailer money shot: Student: “I don’t understand. How is a bonus different than a tip?” Carell, exasperated. “A tip is a percent of what you spent if they did well. A bonus is a percent of the entire economy because if you don’t…uh…anyway I don’t see what’s so hard about this.”

There’s still time to get out in front of this thing: organic, sterilized dirt in foil packets ready to mix into your kid’s food. Selling for about five bucks for a two-ounce serving, or thirty dollars for a coffee-tin. Endorsed by Jenny McCarthy!

What’s that? Sterilized dirt removes all the active bacteria? And there’s no such thing as organic dirt? Tsk tsk. You’re not thinking like an entrepeneur.