mandarine

The bulk of technical works is not-for-profit. How many scholars or experts make a fortune writing a book on the specifics of Madagascar nematodes, on extended Kalman filtering for interplanetary navigation, on time and narrative in George Bernanos’ novels? It is already a miracle that they should find a publisher for such works, and another miracle that the book should find its way to a finite number of academic libraries and specialized bookshops. The motivation for writing these books is about sharing the best nuggets of human knowledge with the rest of mankind (at least that part of mankind which can understand it). Sometimes it is also about (peer) recognition. Never about money.

Trapped in paper and copyright

When paper was the only way to get the word out, then authors of technical books and articles had to find publishers. Publishers imposed copyright rules, in the unlikely event the book would sell. Then the knowledge was trapped: trapped in paper, therefore available only from the lucky academic libraries or specialized bookshops who managed to host a copy; and trapped in time, as the probability of a reprint for specialized non-fiction works is close to zero — how many books are gathering dust or lost forever in the limbo of underground shelves and copyright restrictions is beyond imagination. For all practical purposes, these books are largely unavailable to the world, except inside academia (and when you have time to wait for an interlibrary loan). As if academia was the only place where people want to learn things.

What is not searchable does not exist

But now there is the internet. Knowledge does not need paper anymore. Therefore it does not need publishers, it does not need copyright, it does not need libraries. My understanding is that authors will soon discover this, and they will also discover the one key reason why their works should be freed from paper and copyright protection: what cannot be found by an internet search engine does not exist.

When a book’s card was missing from the library catalog, the book was as good as burnt. Now when a text is not accessible to Google, ditto. Authors whose main intention is to get their message out will therefore make absolutely sure their book can be found via a full-text search on the internet. The Amazon ‘search inside‘ feature is not good enough. First pages of scientific articles at IEEE or Springerlink are not good enough. The result of an internet search is like an anteroom with 50 doors. I will visit the doors that are wide open. The locked ones, or the ones which say ’sign in to enter’, I will not visit because I already have enough with the open ones.

Therefore, if content is to be read, it has to be fully accessible. And authors want content to be read. I imagine that the wish for recognition would not readily accept a complete absence of copyright. I believe that a creative-commons licence with attribution and share-alike clauses would be the general choice for authors, although I would choose public domain straight away myself. After all, Plato, Augustine and Newton have chosen the public domain: is there no pride in just sharing what I know with the world and the world can do whatever they want with it?

What if I do not like to read on-screen?

This does not preclude paper, under the exact same model as xerox copy in academia: when I want just a short paragraph from a great book, I print the relevant page on my printer. If I want the full book, then I order it. For books which do not have enough orders to justify a conventional printing process, maybe we will see printing services specialized in on-demand printing for public-domain works: they will be sending you the book printed for you with the paper, the font-size and font-family you chose, for a price not higher than you woud have paid for a conventional book which would have had to go through the whole editor/publisher/distributor process.

What about editors?

But there remains a big question in my suggestion: how about editorial quality? Having to go through a publisher has the immense advantage of imposing an editor and a quality target. I know that whatever I write, if I can get someone to proof-read and comment, the result after correction will be greatly improved. What could replace the conventional editing process? The readership is probably generally too narrow to trigger a wikipedia-like self-improvement of the works. Will it just be volunteer-peer-based, with authors trying to find other authors to edit them? Will it be simply survival of the fittest (but then there will be a huge waste of sub-par books who could have made the cut if there had been an editor)? In fact, I am not really worried: I believe a smart solution will appear almost by itself.

And boy will I be happy in a world where all the best knowledge is at my fingertips!

After my recent diatribe against scientism, maybe this is the right moment to write a little something about Jules Verne, the archfather of scientism in literature. I used to love Jules Verne novels when I was a child, although the red cover of the hardback editions had always intimidated me. Then I had almost forgotten all I’d read until some years ago when I delved into ‘De la Terre à la Lune’ for a physics class I was giving: I ripped all space mechanics references from the book and made a very funny physics test out of them (providing that units were properly converted). The one question I remember best was an illustration of Michel Ardan’s head, where I had drawn a downward arrow with a legend ‘m.gamma’ representing the apparent weight of the head on the neck during the acceleration phase of the shell in the cannon. Students were expected to show that even with the hydraulic cushion below the cabin floor, there was no way Ardan & co. could come out alive from an acceleration of 21,000g (you can check for yourselves: the cannon is 900 feet long, the liberation velocity was and still is 11000 m/s), as the head would have appeared to weigh more than 30 tons, i.e. the weight of twenty midsize cars. [more]

I get angry when I see theories and schemes which do not acknowledge failure and justify an eternally delayed success by trying to turn the guilt on me. They tell me that I did not try enough, that it will work only if I do more, that if I do not do exactly as they say, if I make but one false step, it will fail and be worse than if I had done nothing. These are totalitarian theories. Generally, they do not deliver.

Below is a list of such theories, which have consistently failed in the past but keep asking us for more:

• capitalism will reduce poverty
• communism will improve people’s lives
• GMs will feed the third world
• preventive war will stop terrorism
• increasing agricultural yields will abolish hunger
• vaccines will eradicate infectious disease
• the telethon will find a cure against myopathy
• science is good

If you look around, you can find such theories by the dozen. They always have the same modus operandi: an unchallengeable basis relying on circular logic, unquestionable dogma or good intentions. Let us quickly flip through the list above. [more]

I used to be very heavily prejudiced against homeopathy and alternative medicines (acupuncture, aromatherapy, reflexology, you name it), for the following reasons:

• the homeopathic system is founded on pure dogma (law of similars); it is invoked repeatedly, without having been put to the test in the first place.
• the theoretical models and the underlying concepts invoked are disconnected from the rest of science.
• the more serious the clinical trials, the less evidence there was in support of an efficacy above placebo effect. It also seemed rather suspicious that homeopathic theory (one doctor, one patient, one treatment) had arguments to refuse randomized double-blind clinical trials as adequate evidence.

Now that I have been married for ten year to someone who feeds me latin-named sugar grains on a regular basis, I will share with you how I managed to come to terms with homeopathy in a rational way, without having to split my personality or sell my soul. I confess it is a rather jesuitic move. Such moves tend to be quite customary to me, and it makes me wonder whether I would be able to keep any sort of principles in troubled times, but this is another matter altogether.

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A small maths exercise: consider a world with p people, where people read and people write. On average, each person writes w pages and reads r pages a day. How many readers will each page have on average?
[more]

A car is faster than a bike. At least, that’s what we all believe. But in fact, it is false. We already know that in congested downtown traffic a car is hardly faster than a bike, but I am saying that riding is faster than driving — always [more]

Emily was recently mentioning her passion for pens, and I confessed to being quite a pen lover myself, but whined about how seldom I now use one, as keyboards and screens gradually spoliate pen and paper.

And I had an idea: although I know I would not change keyboard for pen while editing, I also know that I still like writing down the final manuscript patiently, as a remembrance of when I wrote letters. Fellow bloggers have recently set a foot in the podcasting world. Maybe I won’t. But I can start a pencasting fad. It is quite suited to literate blogs, and much more bandwidth-sober than podcasting.
So here is my first pencast, the handwritten version of my latest post, entitled standing on the shoulders of giants.

I work in the aerospace industry. A domain where the best happened between 1950 and 1980. Mainly for bad reasons, among which an ambition to send a hydrogen bomb through or above the atmosphere over to the other side of the world was probably chief, the best scientists and engineers ever to work together did Sputnik, the SR-70, the Apollo programme, the Pioneer probes, the Jumbo Jet, the space shuttle, the Soyuz and Energiya launchers, the Buran space plane, the Concorde, the Airbus.

Nowadays, [more]

Ten years ago, back in early 1997, I would be constantly looking up to the night sky to marvel at the fabulous tails of comet Hale-Bopp. It was pure magic to be able to see such a rare bird with the naked eye.
One day I met a group of friends in Paris at night, and while we where walking to wherever we were to spend the evening, I talked about the comet.
- The comet, what comet? [more]

The XVIIIth century, by allowing free thought, unleashed creativity. People knew they could change things. Obviously, they started by changing those things that were bad. This resulted in unprecedented improvement. This led everybody to believe that change was good. The word progress best conveyed this confusion in meaning between change and good. The end of the XIXth century strongly believed that technology would bring happiness, that science would unveil truth, that industry would remove hunger, that medicine would cure death.

The XXth century, with its unprecented leap forward in scientific and technical prowess did a great job at convincing people that technological progress was steady, accumulative and good.

I want to challenge these three assumptions. [more]