Image: Amphora (neck-amphora): Berlin, Staatliche Museen F 1867; Beazley ABV 371, Leagros Group no. 148; Stähler no. 2. Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft Huangdi and Chiyou clashed on the plains of Zhuolu. Huangdi (the ‘Yellow Emperor’), ruled the Huaxia tribes while Chiyou, his nemesis, commanded an alliance of barbarian tribes. Under the cover of heavy fog, Chiyou’s army attacked the Huaxia army and inflicted heavy losses as the Yellow Emperor’s troops got lost. The fog lingered and Chiyou had the advantage. The emperor and his master craftsman retreated for three days and built a chariot. It was equipped with a wooden figure that had one arm extended, pointing southwards. The wooden figure was connected to the wheels of the chariot in a special way so that it always pointed south. When the chariot turned, a self-adjusting mechanism (a modern solution would use differential gears) translated the turn into an equal and opposite movement of the pointer. The reliable arm of the chariot’s wooden statue steered the army of the Chinese nation through the fog. Chiyou was defeated and captured. …

Image: Roy Batty, as played by Rutger Hauer after the “Tears in Rain” monologue in Blade Runner Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft The 1982 film Blade Runner is set in 2019 and features an eclectic mix of hardware and software. The hardware is spectacular.  There are flying cars and spaceships and almost-perfect robots. Roy Batty, a renegade “replicant”, is a Nexus-6 model artificial human. He is a beautiful specimen, perfectly built, resistant to pain. But he has a software (or hardware?) problem. He is “built not to last”. Replicants are designed to perish after four years: an in-built timer as a fail-safe. So Roy is on a quest to meet his maker. He finds the man who designed his eyes, then a genetic designer who leads him to meet the man responsible for his existence. “What seems to be the problem”, the man inquires. “Death”, says Roy. He wants to be modified, he wants to be saved, but it can’t be done. In his final moments as his clock winds down, Roy launches into …

Image: 19th-century engraving of Goethe’s Faust and Homunculus Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft Part 1: Hume and the Middleman Raise your wine glass! Odorant molecules rise from the liquid and pass through your nasal passage before reaching a patch of neurons with hair-like extensions. A biochemical reaction sends an olfactory signal to the centre of emotion, your brain’s limbic system. That’s just the start. Drink! Your sensory experience deepens. Onion-shaped structures called taste buds containing up to 100 taste receptor cells, again with neuronal properties, pass more information about the wine’s chemical qualities to your brain. Waves of information hit your consciousness as your “brain” processes them. How much of this are you aware of? You struggle to come up with more than a few words: red fruit, stale cardboard, mushrooms on a forest floor and ladybug taint. All that information. All those neurons. And the best that you can do is stand by and take a few notes. It seems a bit disappointing. David Hume was a great theorist of impressions and ideas. According to Hume, impressions are like pictures …

Image: Heart and its blood vessels, Leonardo da Vinci Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft More people die of heart-related disease than from any other cause. The World Health Organization estimates that 17.5 million people died from cardiovascular diseases in 2012, about thirty percent of all global deaths. A cardiovascular disease becomes an acute problem when it leads to a reduction in blood supply to the heart. For example, one of the coronary arteries supplying the heart with blood may be blocked by a blood clot. The part of heart muscle supplied by this artery will die without a blood supply, a process called myocardial infarction. “Heart attack” is the more familiar umbrella term. Twenty years apart, here are two examples of data analysis in the treatment of acute heart disease: a data-based decision tool for patient classification and a “computationally generated biomarker”, which is a risk indicator derived from objectively observable clinical data using advanced data processing. The two examples reveal the progress that has been made and the challenges that lie ahead in using …

Image: Wounded arriving at triage station, Suippes, France Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft In healthcare, a triage – from the French verb “trier”, to sift or to sort – is a system to evaluate and categorize patients by the severity of their medical condition to prioritize care. The future of healthcare hinges on new triage technology. Triage was first developed for battlefield medicine by Dominique Jean Larrey, an army surgeon during the Napoleonic wars. In 1792 France was at war with most of Europe and Larrey was a newly minted twenty-six-year-old regimental surgeon-major frustrated by the state of combat casualty care. Surgeons like him were confined to field hospitals located no less than five kilometres from the battlefield. If he was “lucky”, a wounded soldier was able to make his own way to the field hospital or comrades might carry him. Otherwise he’d have to wait for a slow moving cart from the field hospital to haul him in. These carts, called Fourgons, were piled high with bodies and provided the most basic transport. If …

Image: A Swiss Railway Clock. Photo Credit: Yang Yuxin Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft In the 19th century railways brought about a revolution in speed. A trip of days by coach became a matter of hours by train. But there was a problem. Every town had its own local solar time. Solar time and space are linked: each degree of longitude is 24 hours divided by 360 degrees, which is four minutes of time. In England, Oxford ran five minutes behind London, while Leeds was another minute behind and Bristol was ten minutes off the mark. When travel was slow the time shifts were manageable. After a day or two travelling by coach, you’d simply adjust your watch to local time upon arrival, like we do today when we travel by airplane. On a longer trip by sea you might notice your lunch time shifting relative to the time on your watch – no big deal. On a rail network, dealing with a profusion of local times became impractical and dangerous: you can’t have trains …

Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft What you say isn’t always what you mean. It is one thing to talk about the probability of an event or about how much you enjoyed your dessert wine. It is another thing to commit to a number consistently. What odds are you willing to accept? How does this wine or stock rate against the others that you evaluated today? Professional wine critics write and rate. The word cloud above represents a selection of the most frequent words in about 8,000 wine notes written by 12 popular wine writers. It gives an impression of what is said. Most of these wine notes also include a score. No matter how many words are in the note, this is what it boils down to. 98 points from Robert Parker can make a wine’s price rocket, 72 points won’t. A wine writer might argue that you can’t really separate a score from its note. The score is justified by the note and vice versa. In an interview, wine critic Neal Martin said: I don’t see …

Image from: Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Struwwelpeter, 1917 Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft First Europe was said to be sleepwalking towards a Grexit. Then suddenly there was no time to sleep at all. Tsipras, Merkel, Hollande and Juncker looked tired even before the 17 hour marathon of negotiations had started, Merkel went without sleep for 27 hours and Tsipras was “mentally waterboarded” according to an EU official. To what extent did sheer exhaustion force an agreement? Sleep is a necessity. Even the dolphin sleeps with one eye closed, half of its brain showing the even patterns of a brain at rest. We require temporary immobilization in the same way that we require water. Should we be worried when important decisions are made in states of exhaustion? In last weekend’s FT Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, argues that the future belongs to artificial minds, which “will not be confined to the 14 mile layer of water, air and rock in which organic life has evolved at the earth’s surface.” What will a summit of artificial minds look like? Unconstrained by the necessity of …