So what’s going on here? Freak coincidence? Supernatural powers? At a first glance, both sound ridiculous to me.

But I want to think about the more “interesting” explanation a bit: perhaps Paul really is psychic. Perhaps Paul can tell the future.

And then what? What does that really tell us? Does it answer our problem? Say we have a psychic octopus. It could show us anything. It could’ve predicted the financial crisis, it could have predicted the death of Michael Jackson, it could have given us next week’s lottery numbers. And yet this psychic octopus chose to show us the World Cup results of all things.

Why? Was there some significance behind this? Is God telling us that the World Cup is important? That we should forget about oil leaks and bank bailouts and climate change, and instead focus on who won the World Cup? That seems unlikely. Why would God, or anyone else, care about that? Or are we back where we started, that it’s just a freak coincidence that they chose to predict the World Cup, rather than the hundreds of other sporting events?

Does it mean that our lives are predetermined, that Spain had to win, that we have no free will? Or does it mean that Paul was able to control events? Perhaps Spain could have lost, but Paul exerted his mighty Psychic will and gave them the victory. (Is that cheating? Does it count as doping perhaps?)

How did Paul know the results? Reading people’s thoughts wouldn’t help, unless someone else also knew the results. Perhaps he can simply see into the future. But is he intelligent? Is he able to choose what to report back to us? Could he have chosen to instead arrange stones at the bottom of his aquarium into the shape of the next week’s lottery numbers? How did he know what it was we were asking him to predict? All Paul saw from us were two boxes with food in them, and a different flag on the top of each. How did Paul figure out “they must be asking about who will win the World Cup”? For that matter, how did he determine that we would interpret it as “the box I open indicates the winning team”? He could just as well have meant it was the team that was going to lose (he’s taking their food, after all)

The problem is that in order to explain anything, it is not enough to say that Paul has psychic abilities. We have to assume that Paul is an intelligent psychic octopus, that we live our lives along predetermined paths (unless Paul is able to control us) and that Paul has an interest in soccer specifically, and figures that of all the things he could reveal to us, the results of each World Cup match is what matters. And we’re still not able to say anything about how he manages to make these predictions.

Taken together, those assumptions makes the “supernatural” explanation sound at least as unlikely as calling it a pure statistical coincidence.

I’m generally a pretty skeptical person. I don’t believe in Gods, magic, ghosts, spirits or anything supernatural. Not because I’m sure none of it exists, but because it seems so absurdly unlikely for those specific beliefs to be true. Let’s say there really is something to the belief in ghosts. How do we know what it is? When you hear weird noises in an old house, how do you know it is the ghosts of dead people specifically? Perhaps instead the house itself is alive. Perhaps it’s the people who live in it in some alternate dimension? Perhaps it’s the Martians remote-controlling little dust clouds to mess with us. Believing in the supernatural isn’t an easy way to dodge the questions we can’t answer. Instead it just makes the problems bigger. Instead of explaining “Last night, I heard someone breathing even though I was home alone”, we now have to explain why somehow dead people are able to walk around here with us, and they’re able to make noises and for some reason they can think of nothing better to do than breathing heavily in my house. We have to explain how dead people come to be here (and that means we have to explain what happens to us when we die), and we have to explain how they can manipulate the world of the living. Somehow, they’re simultaneously insubstantial and invisible, and at the same time, able to make noises, or flick light switches or throw small objects around?

I think it was a lot simpler to explain back when it was just “I heard a weird breathing noise and I have no clue what it was”

Just like I’d rather have to come up with a plausible explanation for an octopus through random chance managing to predict World Cup matches, than having to do the same for the idea that the octopus can tell the future, is intelligent, cares about soccer, and cares about letting us know the result of soccer matches. Oh, and that the future is fixed and we can do nothing to change it.

Correctly guessing the outcome of 8 matches is pretty unlikely. Assuming it has a 50/50 percent chance of correctly guessing the outcome of each match (which sounds likely, given that octopuses probably don’t know much about soccer), the odds of this are 0.39%.

That’s low, very low, but not impossible. Statistically, one out of 256 octopuses should manage such a 8/8 success rate. Pretty lucky then that it happened to be Paul who got it right.

But that’s not quite right. Statistics don’t work like that. Paul made a number of predictions before he got famous, which were what brought him to our attention in the first place. The miracle here isn’t that he predicted 8 matches. Paul only really became famous when he predicted that Germany would beat England. If he can keep guessing correctly, we might start wondering if there’s something going on. But of course it’s going to look miraculous if we include past results. If you roll a die long enough, you’re going to get, say, four 6’es in a row. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. And once that happens, it’s hardly a miracle if you roll another 6. There’s a 16.6% chance that it’ll happen. We can’t include the first 4 rolls and say “I rolled five 6’es in a row! The odds of this happening are 0.013%,! It’s a miracle! This die is magical!”, because you cheated: you waited until you’d got the first four rolls right. The real coincidence is just that the final die roll came up a 6 as well.

So we only really started wondering about Paul’s predictive abilities after England’s defeat. Since then he’s made four predictions: the odds of that are much better. Even by a random coin toss, you’d have a 12.5% chance to get 4 matches right.

So now it’s no longer a supernatural phenomenon, but “just” a curious coincidence. But there’s another interesting thing to note: take a look at the results listed on Paul’s Wikipedia page. In particular, take a quick look at the flags.

Notice anything?

They don’t look very random. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t even notice that the flag in the “prediction” column varied in a few matches. They’re generally dominated by yellow and red. Nearly all the losers had flags with a lot of blue in them. Perhaps Paul just likes red and yellow better than blue. Serbia is really the only oddity then.

The trend is even more pronounced if we look at the results from 2008: Paul guessed that Germany would win every single match, regardless of the outcome of the actual match.

So perhaps Paul just likes the colors. Or perhaps he’s getting used to fact that whenever people show him a German flag, there’s food underneath it.

On monday the 12th of April, I’m going to defend my master’s thesis. If you’re in the area, and are geeky enough to find it interesting, feel free to drop by.

The precise place and time is: 15:00, April 12, 2010

Room S125 / 3–1-25 DIKU (Datalogisk Institut) Universitetsparken 1 København Ø

Looks like I’m going to be busy the next couple of days preparing my presentation.

That is all.

Here is what I’ve previously written about my thesis on the blog, here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, and here is the thesis itself, including source code.

I’ve been meaning to write this post pretty much for the last month. The reason I’m finally doing it is that I also wanted to drop a quick line on a cute aprils fool joke that should be of interest to a lot of gamers:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun dedicated the entire day to perfectly ordinary PC game reporting/blogging as if it’d been April 1st, 1993. Cute and intelligent, and served as a fun trip down memory lane. Nice idea, and a nice change from the usual fare of everyone trying to pull off outrageous or absurd stories ad nauseam. Especially as there seemed to be practically no worthwhile pranks to be found anywhere this year (even Google had some pretty tame ones), your up to the minute coverage of PC gaming news as of 17 years ago really made the day.

The result is that a lot of people now have sensitive personal information floating around in public. An example of this (found via ArsTechnica) is this woman, who starts her post like this:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

Ouch.

Others, with less at stake personally, are also pissed:

See, I love the idea of neat new tech innovations that lead to streamlined communication, real-time updating, in-line video and photo posting, and supersimple friend and contact integration. I do not, however, like a product that bursts through my door like a tornado and opts me in to wanton in-box clutter and spam (or, more precisely, bacn) publicly reveals my personal contact list without asking me, threatens to broadcast my e-mail address anytime someone wants to @ me in a Buzz, and even appears to grab photos off my Android phone that I’ve never uploaded.

or this one

So…yeah, I guess I’m on Google Buzz. It’s linked to my Picasa and WordPress accounts, so you can follow everything I do. Cause that’s not creepy or anything. The best part is that the defaults for everything are public, and you end up broadcasting to a bunch of random people unless you sit down and sort through. I’m expecting this to backfire for a bunch of people, and not just eventually but almost immediately. It might not be a bad idea to start a betting pool on when the first child porn charges are filed as some highschool student accidentally sends herself to the entire school.

I could go on, but I really don’t want this to turn into some kind of link farm.

I’m not personally affected by this. I do have a GMail account, and yes, they opted me in to Buzz, but the account contains no personal information whatsoever, and no personal emails. I use it exclusively as a dumping ground for spam, and form mails I don’t want cluttering up my real email inbox. I’ve never even sent an email from the account.

I use the Google search engine, but I am not signed in to it, and have never created a profile or a customized homepage on it. I’m sure they could still identify me just by examining cookies or my IP address, but at least they’d have to work for it. And it’s not like my Google searches are state secrets anyway. As long as people are not able to search for my name and bring up a list of everything I’ve searched for, I’m satisfied.

I also use Google Analytics for this blog. I feel OK about that because this blog is already my public face on the internet. Google already knows a lot about it simply by indexing it for their search engine. I have no problem with them generating statistics on where my visitors come from, as long as they make the information available to me too. The only sensitive information associated with this blog is my login password, and I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t have that. And they’re not getting it, even if they launched a GPassword service tomorrow.

I use the WordPress software, but not hosted on WordPress.com. I don’t use Picasa or Google Reader. I don’t use Google Documents.

So all in all, yes, Google certainly knows a lot of fragments of information about me. Google searches can turn up quite a bit, they can collect a few more bits and pieces through cookies when I use their search engine, and they have a lot of statistics on who reads my blog. But they can’t read my emails. They don’t have any really sensitive information about me. Nothing related to my work, personal life or studies is tied to Google.

And this brings us to the point of this post:

Don’t blame Buzz, blame GMail

A lot of people are furious at Google for the mixture of incompetence and indifference towards users’ privacy with which Buzz was launched, and while that might be justified, it is missing a fundamental point.

Buzz is just doing what Google does best, what they’ve always done, and what they should be doing. Here’s what Google’s own website has to say on the company’s mission:

Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Google is dedicated to making information universally accessible. For a lot of information, that’s a good thing. Their search engine turned the internet upside down — for the first time ever, users were able to actually find the information they needed. Google is good at this, and we’ve benefited hugely from it.

And social networking is right up Google’s alley as well: Social networking is all about making information about you and me accessible to the world in an organized manner. A lot of Facebook’s popularity relies on their ability to analyze our existing relations, friendships and networks, and use this to suggest new friends. My Twitter would be useless if I couldn’t follow the people I wanted to keep up with, and if others couldn’t find my tweets through searches. Buzz is simply more of the same, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s another social networking service, and Google is exactly the right company to do something like this. No one is better at organizing information and telling us exactly what we want to know.

The problem is that another of their services is not so well suited for the company. Email is something almost everyone considers personal and private. Even the US government, in its desperate war on people who wear turbans, speak funny and pray to Allah, has only given itself permission to sniff the subject lines of people’s mails sent over GMail. This is considered the equivalent of reading the envelope, without opening it and looking at the letter inside. Because that letter is personal. And so are the bodies of our emails.

But if we consider our emails to be sensitive personal information, then why do so many people entrust them to a company whose stated mission is “to make the world’s information universally accessible”?

A company like that should never be entrusted with our sensitive information.

Facebook has made some major blunders regarding privacy, but their mission seems to be something like “can’t we just all get along”. In Facebook’s perfect world, everyone are friends with everyone else. This doesn’t excuse their privacy issues, but at least it tells us that they’re not directly opposed to the idea of privacy. They’re just clumsy and don’t think things through.

Google, however, is different. In the perfect Google world, privacy does not exist. In Google’s dream world, I could go take a look at Bill Gates’ emails or Steve Jobs’ search history. or Bono’s shopping list. It is information. It should be made available to the world.

So no, there’s nothing wrong with Google Buzz. It should absolutely broadcast everything Google knows about us to the world. The problem is that Google has been given sensitive information in the first place. Google shouldn’t know anything about us that can’t safely be published through Buzz. If GMail had never existed, Google would not know that the woman in the first example has received emails from her abusive ex-husband, and so they couldn’t have caused her any problems. The only things Buzz would have known about us would be what we told it.

Imagine if Twitter or Facebook had been built by Google, based on their search engine and their ability to categorize and organize information. That is what Buzz could potentially become, and that’d be nothing short of amazing. At least as long as we all take care to keep our emails and other sensitive information far away from Google.

Don’t opt out of Buzz because of privacy concerns. Opt out of GMail instead. Expect every new service Google launches to do as Buzz. Their mission is to make all information available to the world, and they’re going to keep trying. You’re fighting a losing battle. You can keep opting out of their services till the cows come home. It’s always a temporary solution at best. Instead, fix the root issue: Make sure Google is not given any sensitive information about you in the first place.

The connection works, but our router and the ethernet cables we ordered were apparently lost in the mail… So at the moment, we can have exactly one computer online at a time, and I pretty much have to sit right next to the adsl modem for the cable wehave to reach. Silly and annoying.

But overall, things are getting back to normal, and I’ve even had time to work on my thesis some. I’m going to put up a post soon with some code examples and such, but for now, the short version is that it works. I now have a prototype of the core functionality — a lot of importants features aren’t implemented yet (such as support for nested transactions), but the core works. I can start transactions, read and modify variables, and the system then attempts to commit, validates the modifications and if it fails, the transaction is rolled back and restarted.

Since the entire project is meant to take 6 months, and I have just over 3 months left, I’m pretty happy with this. Now that I’ve got a stable and functioning base to build on, future upgrades should go a lot faster.

Well, I finally found a place. As my brother wanted to move to Copenhagen (where I am), we decided to share an apartment. We found a sweet 3-room apartment, and moved in this past weekend. Everything has been extremely hectic lately, but things should clear up a bit soon — although it’ll be a few more days, as we still don’t have internet, which makes blogging somewhat tricky.

I’ve got 24 draft posts queued up in various stages of completion, so it’s not that I’ve run out of things to write about — I just haven’t had time.