From: tjfs@tadtec.uucp (Tim Steele)
Subject: Douglas Adams in Cambridge
Organization: Tadpole Technology plc
Distribution: alt
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 15:56:12 GMT

Some friends and I who have stayed on in Cambridge since taking our
degrees dug out our old society membership cards and went to see
Douglas Adams this afternoon.  He gave two talks; the first, to the
Union Society, was his standard talk promoting Mostly Harmless.  The
second talk was to the Computer Society, and was very interesting.  I
didn't take down more than a few surreptitious words, so most of this
is from memory I'm afraid.

Union Society

DNA read sections from his books as follows:

Mostly Harmless
        Chapters 1 and 7

Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
        Dish of the Day and Frogstar Battle Robot

Last Chance to See (had to borrow a copy from the audience!)
        Trying to buy condoms in China
	Australian Venom Expert

In questions afterwards, he said his next projects would probably
include a Dirk Gently book - One Spoon Too Short - and a scientific
documentary series provisionally titled "Life, the Universe and
Everything".  He mentioned that he wrote to New Scientist to complain
about Kate Charlesworth using the title Life, the Universe and
(almost) Everything, only to be told that the phrase was in common
usage.  He had to remind them that he had actually coined it!

He then signed books.  I am now the proud owner of a signed Mostly
Harmless and a signed set of Hitch-Hiker scripts.

Computer Society

DNA started by explaining that he would be talking about his thoughts
on computing, not his books.  He spoke without notes, and by his own
admission was talking off the top of his head until he ran out of
things to say.  Although he is very interested in computing, he read
English at St. John's and was used to people accusing him of not
studying a rigorous subject.  He said that the first thing the faculty
taught him was to explain that English was formal really, it had lots
of formal work on languages and really ought to be taken seriously.
In fact, however, it was a cover for doing whatever you wanted to do
while you were at Cambridge.

Computers have completely changed his writing method.  Before, when he
had something to write, he would go out and buy some new notebooks,
sharpen his pencils, go downstairs, look in his fridge and study
whatever he found there.  After a bit of this the fridge would be
empty and he would be having difficulty getting back up the stairs!

Nowadays when he has something to write he spends all day
reconfiguring the operating system on his Macintoshes!

He first saw a home computer in Lasky's on the Tottenham Court Road in
London.  It was a Commodore Pet.  Although he couldn't actually think
of a use for it, he wanted to own one just to experiment with.

The way we see computers has changed; first we saw them as very fast
adding machines, then we realised the numbers could represent letters
and we could use them as typewriters; now we're thinking about making
them behave like televisions.  The breakthrough came with Visicalc,
which for the first time enabled people to model - suddenly the
personal computer could be used for real work.  Businessmen could try
out changes in software before inflicting them on the real world.  The
computer's many personalities are a clue to what it is really good at
- a tool for modelling things in the real world.

Until the computer, the scientific method was based on "taking things
apart to see how they work".  The computer allows us to "put things
together to see how they work".  This works to extend human mental
capabilities - a bit like dropping INITs into our System Folders.

We now have virtual reality.  This has already proved itself capable
of some remarkable feats.  For example, a road was recently planned by
creating a model of the landscape inside the computer, together with
constraints such as houses which would have to be demolished if they
were in the path of the road.  An operator then donned a virtual
reality headset and used a stylus to draw in the new road.  The
computer was programmed to vary the resistance to movement of the
stylus in a particular direction in proportion to the cost of
diverting the road in that direction.  In a few moments they produced
a route for the road which subsequent exhaustive analysis showed was
extremely good.

This is perhaps an early example of how the computer's information
pre-processing skills coupled with a human doing something it can do
well - in this case, performing a delicate manual operation - could
achieve a task which the human or the computer alone would find very
difficult.

Our society is composed of cavemen whose brains haven't kept up with
the complex society in which we live today.  Homo Sapiens 1.0 shipped
a million years ago, and - as if we hadn't mailed in our registration
cards - we haven't had any updates since.  Put on a desert island, how
many of us could make a computer?  And if computer people couldn't do
it, what hope is there for the majority of people who don't understand
the first thing about the technological trappings of our daily lives?

We evolved to cope with sudden changes in our environment.  Things
that change slowly really don't matter much in a primitive
environment, so our brain tends to ignore them.  As an example, a
lobster only notices changes in temperature, so if you put the lobster
in a pot of cold water and heat it up then the lobster thinks "Well,
it's only slightly warmer than it was, so I'm still OK" - right up
until it dies!  Put it in boiling water and it will cry "Shit!  It's
Hot!!" before dying in great pain.  Our minds work in similar ways -
when we look at data, we don't really understand it unless it's
presented to us properly.

The lobster talk was accompanied by a lobster impression.  DNA is a
tall chap, and with one hand on his head pointing upwards like a tree
and the other hand in a similar shape above his head he really did
look very amusing!

Take the perception of risk.  When the Gulf War happened, people
living in, say, New York avoided flying to Europe in case of terrorist
attack.  In fact, travelling on an aircraft is a very safe activity,
and the terrorist risk only made it a little bit less safe.  In
comparison, a day in New York is much worse - traffic accidents,
pollution and stress take their toll.  But we don't pay much attention
to these background things - our minds are taken up by contemplation
of the awful, but remote, risk of an air crash.  Perhaps this is
because our minds evolved when the only information we could acquire
about our environment was local, and therefore important.  We have
only recently had the ability to learn almost immediately about events
thousands of miles away, and our minds can't put them into context.

Humans are so used to thinking of themselves as very intelligent that
they don't realise their limits.  Recently, a dolphin research group
tried to train a new dolphin to perform a trick by jumping out of the
water and producing a noise.  Every time it jumped out of the water,
if it made a noise then they would give it a fish.  They spent all
afternoon trying to train the dolphin to make the same noise, but each
time it made a noise of a different pitch and sometimes it didn't make
a noise at all.  Eventually they decided they must have a particularly
stupid dolphin and gave up for the afternoon.

Later, in the lab, they played the tape of the afternoon's session
back and monitored it with an oscilloscope.  They discovered that the
dolphin had always produced a noise, although sometimes it was above
or below human hearing.

They realised they hadn't really been training the dolphin at all; the
dolphin had actually been studying the limits of their hearing.

Evolution is a difficult idea for humans to grasp as it seems so
unlikely that such a complex world could have arisen from such a
simple mechanism.  But consider beings that might live in a world
which was in fact the Mandelbrot Set.  They would be amazed by the
complex and beautiful world in which they lived, and probably start
worshipping sea horses.

The book he enjoyed writing most was Last Chance to See.  This book
gave him an opportunity to explain to others the things he himself had
learned about the natural world while researching it.  For example,
most people don't think much about the destruction of the rainforest -
after all, it's just another of those gradual processes humans are so
bad at noticing - and might have some vague idea that the rainforest
is important because it produces oxygen and if we burn it all we might
not have enough oxygen to breathe.

In fact the rainforest is a vast repository of genetic information.
Normal deciduous forest which we are used to in temperate climates is
seasonal; each year the leaves fall, and form a nutrient mulch which
is recycled in a simple manner by the trees.  Rainforest is
non-seasonal; leaves fall occasionally all the time, and are digested
rapidly by bacteria which pass the nutrients back to the trees.  The
nutrients live in the trees, not in the mulch.  An incredibly complex
ecosystem has evolved based on these nutrients.  Every acre of
rainforest contains an amazing amount of genetic material in plants
and animals, including several new species of which we know nothing.
Rainforest isn't like money; if we destroy half a rainforest that
isn't like losing half your money, as the information we have
destroyed is gone forever.  The destruction of the rainforest is more
like burning down an entire library every day.

Imagine there are a billion locked boxes and a billion keys.  There
are a lot of combinations, but occasionally we find a key that fits a
box and what's inside may be immensely valuable.  Destroying the
rainforest is a bit like melting down the keys because we want the
metal.

The drug quinine was discovered by Jesuit priests in Peru, who
discovered a tribe who were immune to malaria and traced it to their
habit of drinking an infusion made from the bark of a tree.  For a
time doctors wouldn't accept that the drug worked, preferring their
traditional method of bleeding.  When King Charles II of England fell
ill with malaria and all other remedies had been tried, a doctor was
able to secretly treat him with quinine.  When he recovered, the King
demanded that he reveal which medicine he had used.  The doctor would
only agree to reveal the name of the drug in a letter to be opened on
his death.  When he eventually died, the efficacy of quinine against
the King's malaria was revealed.

Quinine is a very complex molecule and is impossible to synthesise
with today's methods.  Drugs have been produced which mimic small
zones of the drug, but these quickly lose their effectiveness as the
malaria parasite builds up resistance to them.  Only quinine is
completely effective, and it still has to be extracted from the bark
of the trees which grow in that remote part of Peru.

It has been said that quinine is the most important drug ever
discovered.  This may strike us as odd today, until we remember that
malaria used to be a very serious disease in temperate countries until
quinine enabled us to eliminate it from many countries so that it is
now almost entirely confined to the tropical climate.  Good stuff,
this anti-elephant powder; I can't remember when I last saw one!

At the end, a friend asked him about Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Douglas Adams replied that he thought artificial intelligence would
only be arrived at by successful attempts to create artificial life
inside the computer, as he thought intelligence was an emergent
property of complex life forms.

I asked him about Richard Dawkins' meme hypothesis (that information
in today's society behaves like genes undergoing evolution; a
successful meme might be something as trivial as wearing a baseball
cap backwards or as profound as the Catholic faith.  Douglas Adams
replied that he agreed with almost everything Dawkins said about
evolution, except that he thought memes and genes were exactly the
same thing.

I knew that Dawkins was a personal friend of Adams as he had invited
Adams to read from his books during last year's Royal Institution
Christmas Lectures, which were excellent by the way - I have them on
video.  Adams went on to say that he had recently turned 40, and at
the party he had introduced Dawkins to Lalla Ward, who Adams had got
to know as she once played one of Dr. Who's assistants.  Lalla Ward
was once married to the actor who played Dr. Who at that time, Tom
Baker.  Anyway, they must have got on well since they got married a
few days ago!

Douglas Adams spoke for over an hour and I had the impression that he
had merely scratched the surface of his fertile mind which seems to
brim over with ideas drawn from every area of science.  Why does he
just write science fiction?


(c) 1992 Tim Steele
-- 
Tim Steele
Network Manager
Tadpole Technology plc

Newsgroups: alt.fan.douglas-adams