Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, 15th Century

If you’re looking to part a fool and their money, psychic readings are a great business*. Through the art of cold reading,by making statements that seem personal, but are true for most people, the psychic creates the illusion of having supernatural intuition about their client. For instance, they may say “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.” Who isn’t? Or, if the client is older, they may say, “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen,” which would be true for the majority of causes of death. Psychics also use the rainbow ruse strategy of making a statement that is vague and contradictory about the client, such as “Most of the time you are positive and cheerful, but there has been a time in the past when you were very upset.” It’s probably not hard to find experiences in your life that match this statement to yourself, and if you can’t, the psychic can claim you need to look deeper or that you are suppressing something.

A favorite tool of psychics in performing their readings are tarot cards. These cards come in a wide variety of themes, with fantastic artwork, and generalized symbolism that takes on different meanings depending on where the card appears in a spread. They work because they exploit both the cold reading technique and generate rainbow statements in their symbolism.

Tarot Universal de Dali
Credit: Le.Mat

I occasionally do Tarot readings for myself. Over the years, when confronted with a challenging life issue, I would turn to The Mythic Tarot set for help figuring out what to do. This set portrays four different Greek Myths in the four different suits, and I always have to keep the book open when doing a reading because I find it impossible to remember what the cards mean.

I expect many scientists out there would say that my playing with the tarot harms my credibility as a skeptic, but I am completely aware of what makes the tarot work, and have no delusions that the meanings I appear to find in the cards are self-generated. The cards are like the old Principia Discordia quote about books, “…a mirror, when a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.”

That doesn’t mean the cards are useless. The tarot meme has survived five centuries, in part for the solace it provides, but also because it serves a useful function. A tarot reading provides an exercise in deep, sustained thought on a subject, each new card challenging the practitioner to look at the subject of inquiry from a different angle. The tarot spread doesn’t answer any questions, but like a Rogerian Psychologist it prompts us to find the correct answers within ourselves.

Science Tarot

Brownian motion, the natural vibrations of atoms not at an absolute zero temperature, has long been the strategic key for anyone looking for a way to achieve the holy grail of reversing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that a closed system will always move toward a state of increasing disorder. I previously covered Richard Feynman’s Brownian Ratchet, which harnessed the power of Brownian motion to turn a rotor, and, as Feynman explains, wouldn’t work because the device would need to be so small that it would vibrate apart from the Brownian motion of its own molecules. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” to quote the old adage, or “You can’t stuff the mushroom cloud back into the shiny uranium sphere,” to quote Robert Heinlein, or “Things fall apart. It’s scientific,” to quote the Talking Heads.

Illustration of a Particle Rising in Potential Energy through Information Alone
Credit: Nature Physics, doi:10.1038/nphys1821

Last week, a paper published in Nature Physics, Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality, described an experiment where information was converted into energy by exploiting Brownian motion. It involved using the vibrations of an atom and observations of its changing position to let it naturally work its way up a sine wave, increasing its potential energy, which could, theoretically, be used to perform work when it vibrates back down the wave. It was a real-world demonstration of another thought experiment that challenged the Second Law. In 1867 Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell crafted a scenario whereby Brownian motion could be exploited to sort atoms according to their energy states, which later became known as Maxwell’s Demon¹, an apparent violation of the second law:

cloud passing by
Credit: Diego Sevilla Ruiz

“Cloud Computing will revolutionize IT!”

Really? What’s Cloud Computing?

“Instead of people installing software on their local computers, future applications will run on host computers!”

So Cloud Computing is just a funny name for a client/server Mainframe Architecture?

“But it’s not running on a Mainframe! It’s running in the Cloud!”

So it’s an application running on the World Wide Web… like Yahoo Mail and Google Docs?

“Not at all! In Cloud Computing, you own your application and the data running on it!”

So it’s an application I upload to my web host, like WordPress.org or EyeOS…

“No. No. No. Because with Cloud Computing you only pay for the processing power you use!”

Etc, etc, etc.

This sums up my last two years’ worth of trying to figure out what the heck this “Cloud Computing” thing is. I’ve downloaded and then uploaded cloud desktop applications that work in ways so esoteric as to make them useless. I joined Amazon’s AWS only to find it offers little more than my current Web Hosting provider. I’ve read lots of articles brimming with buzzwords like “single-tenancy”, “service-oriented architecture”, and “integration connector,” none of these articles apply a consistent definition of “the Cloud.”