"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

work was done mechanically, that is, by converting known and accessible data to the unit of time
indicated in the title. When data were unavailable, they had to be arrived at in a roundabout way,
by searching for correlations (there is a high positive correlation, for example, between an
accident at a power station that cuts current to a big city or area of a country and the number of
children born roughly nine months later). Where we are dealing with single phenomena (and it
was precisely with these that Sherlock Holmes grappled), the well-chewed mouthpiece of a pipe
might testify to the smoker's strong jaws and his attachment to that pipe and no other, though he
has a large collection, or it might simply be the result of a nervous tic, or, finally, the pipe might
not be his property at all -- he might have found it, stuck it into his pocket, then got himself
murdered, in which case the pipe would be a red herring.
Five billion people, on the other hand, is a big enough aggregate to be governed by the
laws of large numbers. Nothing is simpler than predicting the number of automobile accidents
under specific weather conditions and a given volume of traffic. But how do we arrive at the
number of accidents (say, per minute) that did not take place but were "close calls"? Or, as
someone said more pointedly, how do we calculate the danger of driving, given the fact that
heavy metropolitan traffic represents the sum of miraculously averted crashes? We can, it turns
out, although only the accidents that actually take place leave behind evidence in the form of
dented cars and sometimes corpses. Between the "unrealized collisions" and the collisions that do
occur, with the number of dead and injured, with the frequency according to road surface and
quantity of vehicles, there exist definite mathematical ratios, and one can make use of them. This
is still a relatively simple matter.
Some calculations were merely tedious and complicated, but did not require any special
ingenuity on the part of the programmers. There was the amusing idea of comparing the global
circulation of money with the circulation of red corpuscles, except that money does not pass from
vessel to vessel but from hand to hand, and does not even physically participate in the
transaction, because it consists of electronic impulses that change the balances in bank accounts.
Despite bank confidentiality, a team of One Human Minute researchers secured the global
payments-per-minute figures. By way of illustration, a small map of the Earth was put above the
statistics, the "flow of currency" resembling the lines on a meteorological map. It is evident that
considerable effort was put into imagery in this new edition, for often such data do not easily lend
themselves to visualization. One could say that One Human Minute became a reality thanks to the
collaboration of the publisher's computers and the computers of nearly the entire world, and
humanity was the raw material they processed.
Formerly, when a central data bank of drivers with traffic violations did not exist, one
could not obtain the necessary information with such wonderful precision. The number of people
who travel by plane per minute can easily be established from the statistics on the utilization of
passenger seats for all the airlines, information that is readily available. Corporate secrecy and the
confidentiality of the medical (or legal) profession presented obstacles. There was also the
problem of the "guesstimate" or "dark number": of incidents that happened, for example, but
were not made public (as in the case of rape). Yet these numbers are not pulled out of a hat; in
every area, whether hidden alcoholism, perversion, surgical blunders, or engineering mistakes,
they merely vary according to the various indirect methods of calculation. But to learn how the
seemingly impossible was accomplished, the reader must read the afterword himself.
The new edition also has a new introduction. It is odd. Its author is unquestionably an
intellectual who wished to remain anonymous; instead of praising One Human Minute, he speaks
of it critically and ironically, making one suspect that he considers this numerical fruit of
computers collaborating with computers, under human management, to be like the forbidden fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge.
He advises against reading the book page by page, for that would be like reading an
encyclopedia in alphabetical order -- it would only make the reader's head swim. Moreover, he