1. 29 February 2008

    Cellphone dilemma.

    189 days ago

    I have a problem with cellphones. The most I’m willing to carry in my pockets is a pen and sometimes my wallet, maybe a stick of chap. So I either: (a) leave my phone sitting in my room all the time, in which case I pay attention to it, but it’s never with me when I leave (and inevitably I either miss a call or want to make one). Or (b), I throw it into my backpack, on silent so as to not ring during class, and then leave it there for days, completely forgetting to check it, and, being on silent, it never reminds me to so do.

    If it’s at home and someone calls me, I either answer it (when I’m also home) or notice it chirping that I missed some amount of calls (when I do get home). But if it’s in my backpack and someone calls, although the damn phone is in all likelihood within reach of my person, I won’t answer it, and even more, I’ll completely forget about it for 3 days until I happen to both rummage through whatever pocket it’s lodged in and I can be bothered to take the energy to grab and check to see whether the damn phone has calls on it or has run out of battery yet.

    And I’d better say something about this leap day, because it’ll be 1460 days before I get another chance to.

  2. 31 July 2007

    Out of Control

    Kevin Kelly

    403 days ago

    Out of Control, Kevin Kelly

    An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…

    We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20

    Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?

    Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43

    I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.

    “To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49

    Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52

    And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

    When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107

    Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.

    Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124

    This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.

    Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165

    John Perry Barlow, 184. (Barlowettes, consider me I don’t know what, but a little impressed. Maybe some combination of you being cute and me having a science-man crush upon your father lead me to an undeserved idea of your merits. I would just like for you to know we may be near in age, depending on how recently certain sites prominently mentioning your ages have been updated. I also understand how I have revealed myself to be a total creep by just making this note, but it’s not like I’ll ever meet you or you’ll ever read this anyway. Take that.)

    Teilhard de Chardin, 201

    There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236

    Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276

    This is a tremendous notion.

    Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323

    Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363

    Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363

    Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364

    Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371

    This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.

    Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375

    Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.

    “If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398

    Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.

    Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460

  3. 24 March 2007

    The Batteries of Life

    Christopher Assendorf

    531 days ago

    A look at early technology and the changes coming from it through the history of art and literature. Stuff that turned my head enough for me to get up and put it into the computer:

    “Advertisement on the Firmament” 101

    the clock… a compensation for the failure of our activities to follow each other any longer in a natural way. Musil, 140

    The Metropolis and Mental Life

    Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” 176

  4. 10 February 2007

    573 days ago

    The automobile works honestly. Long before its birth, when it is still just layers of metal and piles of drawings, it diligently murders Malayan coolies and Mexican laborers. It is born in agony! It shreds flesh, blinds eyes, eats lungs, destroys minds. At last, it rolls out of the gates into the world which, before its existence, was known as “bright.” Instantly, it deprives its supposed owner of his old-fashioned peace of mind. Lilac withers, chickens and dreamers dash away in terror. The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning, it flies down a slope. It can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: It is destined to wipe out the world.

    Ilya Ehrenburg - The Life of the Automobile

  5. 04 January 2007

    Machine Beauty

    David Gelernter

    610 days ago

    I thought this was going to be more of a look at HCI, but instead it’s beating the drum for beauty and technology. Preaching to the choir a bit, as I’ve already decided the issue for myself. Being written in 1998 dates it a bit, but an interesting read nonetheless.

    Complexity makes programs hard to build and potentially hard to use; beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. 22

    “to hell with mathematics; let’s teach our programmers about beauty” is what we ought to hear. 27

    The mark of a well-designed interface is that, as soon as you see it, you immediately form guesses about how it works, and the guesses turn out basically to be right. 88

    Lifestreams as diary (111) – I think this is really what I’m going with this here website. It’s sort of a slice of what I’m about right now. I’ve cut down ‘past’ by only putting one article on the main page and making it a bit of a pain to go back through old stuff. But just a quick portrait of myself through the things I’ve said/linked/listened/done lately.

    Great technology is beautiful technology. If we care about technology excellence, we are foolish not to train our young scientists and engineers in aesthetics, elegance, and beauty. The idea of such a thing happening is so far-fetched it’s funny – but yes, good technology is terribly important to our modern economy and living standards and comfort levels, the “software crisis” is real, we only get from our fancy computers a tiny fraction of the value they are capable of delivering: we are a nation of Ferrari drivers tooling around with kinked fuel lines at fifteen miles per hour. 129

  6. 04 November 2006

    Quicksilver

    Neal Stephenson

    671 days ago

    There isn’t really much that I can say. Here’s some previous stuff on Stephenson, who’s hands down my favorite fiction writer.

    I’m pissed that the last 35 pages of Quicksilver are the first chapter from the next in the series. The ending just ran up behind me and bashed me over the head. Not that it was stunning (a fault lots of people find with Stephenson’s books), but there was still a good chunk of pages between my right thumb and forefinger that threw me.

    The second I got done with it I hopped onto amazon to order the next two. It’s been awhile since I’ve really read at a good pace, much less stuff as good as Stephenson. They pull you through just like pulp/trash novels do, but after reading a Dan Brown or a John Grisham you feel almost guilty because reading the book doesn’t really get you anything. I’ve read a few, and they all just blur together. (If you want, you can switch the pronoun you for me in the rest of this…)

    Stephenson won’t just blow you away for the few days it takes to get through the book (I read 80 pages thursday, ~250 yesterday, and 100 today), but you can actually tell one of his novels from another. Which is a plus. I take it as a sign that they didn’t just rot my brain.

    If I had to describe Quicksilver (I can’t), I’d say it was history/science/fiction. All three about balanced. Its going on in mid 17th century england, featuring scientists at the genesis of the Royal Society in London. Daniel Waterhouse makes friends with Netwon, Liebnitz, and plenty of other bigwigs; not to mention sails through a flotilla of pirates in the second, temporally distant plot line. I’m not describing any more than that, you should read it.

  7. 20 January 2006

    959 days ago

    When something is too hard it means that you

    DHH, the rails guy

  8. 18 September 2005

    1083 days ago

    Within Twenty Years

    The c2 wiki is endlessly cool. Here’s to the future.

    via Kjell Olsen1083 days ago

  9. 29 July 2005

    1134 days ago

    Wired 13.08: We Are the Web

    Kevin Kelley on what the web is going to become. This guy has the real scoop on Web 2.0.

    What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical – but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer? 4

    What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’d had a lobotomy. 5

    It’s on.

    via Kjell Olsen1134 days ago

  10. 17 July 2005

    Natural Born Cyborgs

    Andy Clark

    1146 days ago

    A very interesting look at human technology interaction and what it may become in the future. I’m looking to call a lot of what Clark describes postmodern technologies, where technology is moving away from large and arcane solutions (like mainframes, or desktops) and into small encapsulated inter-communicating devices. Clark describes changes happening now and how a future human technological bond would look.

  11. 23 June 2005

    1170 days ago

    Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile, Connected World" (plasticbag.org)

    Mena really brought memories to the fore. She stated that she wished she had a record of everything that had happened in the first twenty-seven yearas of her life like she has since she first started weblogging. She revealed that she takes a picture of herself every day as a hook to hang her memories around – saying that she could see immediately her mood and her background and her surroundings and very quickly get a sense of what she was feeling at that precise moment, even years after the fact…

    This is the kind of thing that really floats my boat – I’ve always wanted to keep a journal, but never could. I think about all the fuzzy memories I have now, things I would love to remember but just aren’t really there, and wish that there was some way for me to get back to them.

    How long will it be until theres a chip behind our ears that broadcasts and records everything we see, hear, do, and think? And what intermediate technological steps will there be before we get that advanced?

    Coates’ full notes from the session.

    via Kjell Olsen1170 days ago

  12. 22 May 2005

    Make Volume 2

    Mark Fraudenfenlder

    1202 days ago

    Another well done issue, even if I probably won’t make anything from it for awhile, its real fun to read through.

  13. 06 March 2005

    1279 days ago

    AlterNet: Dearth of a Nation

    US is falling behind in technology markets:

    “We no longer have a lock on technology,” David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and the current president of the California Institute of Technology, wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. “Europe is increasingly competitive, and Asia has the potential to blow us out of the water.”

    A good example is broadband. Most experts predict that when a critical mass of homes and businesses acquire high-speed internet connections, an explosion of economic growth will follow as whole new industries, such as video-conferencing and online video gaming, become possible. But these new industries are likely to flourish in whichever countries achieve near-universal broadband first, and at the current pace, that won’t be the United States.

    So subsidize it… Please?

    But overall the US is doing squat right now to position their (our) economy well in the future. Energy efficiency? We don’t even give a rats ass, and that could turn into trouble.

    Kjell Olsen1279 days ago

  14. 15 February 2005

    1298 days ago

    Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN - Popular Science

    Minneapolis rocks. Now if we could just get some decent public transit…

    More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at Popular Science launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with … Minneapolis.

    “I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he [a coffee jock] says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.”

    via Kjell Olsen1298 days ago

  15. 20 January 2005

    1324 days ago

    Apple Pro Keyboard Shuffle

    I don’t care what comes next either… I don’t want visual feedback!

    Funny bit, but I do believe the iPod Shuffle will be a smashing success, I just already have a real iPod and don’t feel the need to downgrade.

    via Kjell Olsen1324 days ago

  16. 1324 days ago

    Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

    I don’t know what all the fuss over googles new rel="nofollow" has been, but Ben Hammeresly does a good job at bunking it:

    There’s no incentive for me to spam those sites for the sake of getting Pagerank, that is true, but there’s even less incentive for me not*to. Why would I bother even testing the site for rel=”nofollow”? I might as well just hit it and leave. It’s less work for me, for exactly the same gain (some) and exactly the same loss (none).

    All it does is shift the problem from the high pagerank blogs we here might have, with rel=”nofollow”, custom sanitize settings, and mt-blacklist in full effect, all the way over to the less technically adept. And that is one enormous customer service problem heading towards Blogger, 6A and the rest.

    Technorati will have to choose if it’s a site that measures raw interconnectivity, or some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don’t-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute will produce. For many purposes, this would mean the results are totally debased and close to useless.

    The web has always been build on links – and yes, when it was build there wasn’t this marauding problem of comment spam, referrer spam, and really, there wasn’t spam at all – but I don’t think that the solution to spam is to fundamentally corrupt what has become the primary presence of the web – the interconnection and relation between various nodes in the larger network.

    via Kjell Olsen1324 days ago

  17. Also somewhat recently

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