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[pozorvlak]

Rob Colvile, over at whyoftheworld, has responded to my recent post about IP law. It's a good column: go read it. I appear to have been comprehensively misunderstood (by Rob's commenters, though not by Rob himself), but hey, such is life on the Internet

Comments

[pozorvlak]

Sounds like we have a business plan...

The other aspects of my idea were to open it near to the science departments of a university, have an "equation of the day" somewhere on the board (and get people to suggest them), and generally try to make it the post-seminar boozer of choice for the university's science community. You'd need a good choice of games, too - Go, chess, shogi, Polarity...

[half_of_monty]

If you ask me, it's all about the beer. I still seem to know one or two people not interested in really nice beer, but none of them are mathematicians[1]. All the rest is will fall flat if you don't have the essentials right.

[1] Actually, now I come to think about it, French mathematicians are more interested in really nice wine, aren't then? But don't go for the expensive wine-bar huge range of nonsense. Go to France, tour around some vinyards, and pick up cheap some unbottled vats of pure joy. Then serve it in earthenware jugs. Actually, can I come on the vinyard trip?

[pozorvlak]

Good beer is a given. Surely you know me well enough by now to realise that? :-)

Actually, judging by the mathematicians I know, the differentiator would be good whisky.

[terpsichore1980]

Yep, I would certainly drink there, but probably not very often if it was in Glasgow ;-)

[half_of_monty]

Actually, I would be a bit re-assured if they found a way to sell theorems. (Especially if you could pretend to me that you were selling them for some eco-friendly-nonsense purpose). There does come a moment when you have to ask yourself: ``But is what I do actually pointless?''

[pozorvlak]

I spent the evening after the auditions being badgered by my next-door neighbours about what the commercial possibilities of my research were. The answer "I don't know, ask an engineer in a century's time" wasn't good enough, apparently.

I'm not at all worried about it: the history of maths strongly suggests that even the most abstract work gets applied sooner or later, and usually sooner. You know that Cayley and Sylvester invented matrices with the hope that they were so pure they'd never be applied to anything, right?

[totherme]

The value chain doesn't have to be monotonic in abstractness - the next big industry could be cybernetics, or bio-chips, or happy pills, or wormhole generators, or nanotech, or perfect heat-pipes, or materials with unlikely (variable?) density...

There's all sorts of weird stuff left to invent - don't worry :)

[pozorvlak]

Yeah, this is true. Actually, one of Rob's commenters makes a nice suggestion: the Next Big Thing could simply be a greater appreciation of how human beings work, and how to organise companies more efficiently to take advantage of your employees' untapped potential. That kind of thing ought to be very easy to steal, but cultural factors tend to slow down adoption. Have many companies reorganised themselves to be more like Google?

[totherme]

I do hope for that to be a Next Big Thing :)

Another commenter asserted that the big gains that western countries have had were when those countries were not in fact the freedom loving democracies they are today.. I'm not sure how true that is, but it sounds plausible ;)

I vaguely remember reading that lots of people thought the reason for the rise of the US was the damage that two Great Wars did to all the existing powers. If that's the main cause of shifting power bases, then maybe we should be waiting for the US to do something stupid...

[pozorvlak]

War Nerd reckons they've already done it...

[antoniabaker]

I think its a fantatic idea, but idream of having a multi-geek pub, we'll have a revolving sign up on teh door, and it can be a pub for mathematicians, folk music afficiandos, poetry readings, harry potter nights, we'll fix it so the decor and games etc can easily be swapped about to suit which ever customer group we're aiming for that night. I'm very tired having done nothign consturctive all day but when I wake up i'll put some more thought into this.

[pozorvlak]

Even better, if we could get them all in at once, not interfering with each other...

[totherme]

lots of little squirrelley places, with variable decor - ideally controlled by a dial next to a seat, so people can come in, find a seat, turn the dial to "maths" and play with the newly revealed blackboard...