So goes the subject line of, so far, 4 separate emails sent out on the all-students mailing list over the last few months. All of them are from different people, and they’re all about… wait for it… pain research!

Between them they propose burning your hands with lasers and forcing you to watch horrific videos, whilst scanning your brain. It’s either unpaid, or for a (low, low) chance of winning a raffle of some kind. So it seems like there is going to be serious problem with selection bias.

What if they come to conclusions about pain based entirely on a sample of people who happily volunteered for this research? That is, people who like pain and enjoy watching car crashes? I can just see the BBC headlines:

New study confirms it: pain not so bad after all.

This just in: traumatic situations cause bleeding, grinning.

Scientists recommend at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted agony every day.

I spent many an enjoyable minute of the last half hour reading this photo-tour of the Gigabyte motherboard factory. Wow. Seeing so many things come together in one place to make one product makes me wonder how anyone ever thought an economy was something plannable by human minds.

Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of really amazing petrochemical infrastructure which I was indeed impressed by, but at least with oil you get the impression you are close to the source of the product. With the Gigabyte factory, all those millions of components has behind it a manufacturing story at least as complicated as every other component.

A really great project would be to create a similar tour which followed the manufacture of every component used to make a particular item. I reckon that almost every single product in the world couldn’t be made without the assistance of every other product, worker, industry and technology.

Example: a light bulb. The glass is made of sand and other chemicals. The sand comes from a beach, but goes via a refinery to purify it. The refinery is made of steel, runs on electricity, and is controlled by computers. So just one step back into the manufacturing history of a light bulb and you already find you can’t do it without the entire force of the steel, chemical and computer industries. Games like Civilization do no justice whatsoever to the world economy by presenting it as a tree that can be climbed in some kind of order.