This is my dynamic, frequently updated homepage. This is a NewsLog, also known as a WebLog or Blog.
Everything is evolving, so don't assume too much.
People to watch:
Adina Levin
Andrius Kulikauskas
Britt Blaser
Catherine Austin Fitts
Chris Corrigan
Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor
Dave Pollard
David Allen
David Weinberger
Dewayne Mikkelson
Dina Mehta
Doc Searls
Elisabet Sahtouris
Elizabeth Lawley
Euan Semple
Florian Brody
Frank Patrick
Gen Kenai
George Dafermos
George Por
Graham Hancock
Greg Elin
Hazel Henderson
Heiner Benking
Inspector Lohman
Jean Houston
Jerry Michalski
Jim McGee
Jim Moore
John Abbe
John Perry Barlow
John Robb
Joi Ito
Jon Husband
Jon Lebkowsky
Jon Udell
Jonathan Peterson
Judith Meskill
Julian Elvé
Julie Solheim
Kevin Marks
Lawrence Lessig
Leif Smith
Letecia Layson
Lilia Efimova
Lisa Rein
Marc Canter
Mark Oeltjenbruns
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Woods
Martin Dugage
Martin Roell
Mary Forest
Matt Mower
Max Sandor
Michael Fagan
Mike Owens
Mikel Maron
Mitch Kapor
Mitch Ratcliffe
Nathalie dArbeloff
Netron
Noam Chomsky
Paul Hughes
Peter Kaminski
Phil Wolff
Philippe Beaudoin
Ray Ozzie
Raymond Powers
Rebecca Blood
Roger Eaton
Roland Tanglao
Ross Mayfield
Scott Lemon
Sebastian Fiedler
Sebastien Paquet
Skip Lancaster
Spike Hall
Steven Johnson
Stuart Henshall
Thomas Burg
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
Thomas Nicholls
Timothy Wilken
Todd Suomela
Tom Atlee
Tom Munnecke
Tom Tomorrow
Ton Zijlstra
Lionel Bruel
Loic Le Meur
Nancy White
Mark Frazier
Merlin Silk
Robert Paterson
Colby Stuart
Nova Spivack
Dan Brickley
Ariane Kiss
Vanessa Miemis
Bernd Nurnberger
Sites to watch:
FutureHi
Co-intelligence Institute
Global Ideas Bank
Collective Intelligence
YES Magazine
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Expression Network
Greater Democracy
Independent Media
Disinfopedia
Disinformation
Friendly Favors
Action without borders
Manufacturing Dissent
Explorers Foundation
Imaginify
WorldChanging
Smart Mobs
ThoughtsOnThinking
Disclosure Project
Forbidden Science
Nanodot
Edge
HeadMap
BoingBoing
MetaFilter
Absara
Rhizome
Escape Velocity
Webcamorama
Do No Harm
Junto
NotThisBody
Openworld
Space Collective
Emergent by Design
Collective Web
French:
Emmanuelle
Manur
Elanceur
Loeil de Mouche
IokanaaN
Blog d'Or
Le Petit Calepin
GeeBlog
Absara
Guillaume Beuvelot
Ming Chau
Serge Levan
Jean Michel Billaut
C'est pas Mécanique
I live in Toulouse, France where the time now is:
01:33
Unique Readers:
Primarily
Public Domain
Everything I've written here is dedicated to the
Public Domain.
The quotes from other people's writings, and the pictures used might or might not be copyrighted, but are considered fair use. Thus, overall, this weblog could best be described as being:
Primarily Public Domain. |
Syndication:
 
|
Tuesday, January 11, 2005 | |
|
|
I can rant a lot about the evilness of corporations. But it is very nice that there are some corporations that actually can figure out to stick with the light side of the force, while still remaining profitable. I'm talking about IBM here. I'm sure there must be something bad one can find to say about them too, but they do seem to be doing a lot of things right. They're one of the biggest supporters of Open Source, having released a lot of stuff out in the open, and paying lots of people for developing more. Interestingly, they will probably insist that it has nothing to do with any kind of inherent philosophy of free sharing. It is simply that they listen to what people want and try to find a viable business in delivering it. And people want open source. But you can of course contrast that with the Microsoft type of corporation, that apppears to have no interest in delivering what people actually want, but which wants to persuade, trick and hook people into buying what they want to sell, and which has a definite agenda about it, which isn't ours.
Now NY Times (registration required) reports that 500 of the patents they hold will now be freely available to anybody who works on open source. Bravo. But, again, it isn't just to be nice. As the article describes, they've carefully examined where their own economic self-interests lie, and they've realized how open technology standards and collaboration stimulate economic growth and job creation. Many smart folks can be found that agree with that, but it is still much too unheard of for a large corporation to proactively act accordingly. [ Technology | 2005-01-11 15:32 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Monday, January 10, 2005 | |
|
|
Edge posted this question to a bunch of smart people: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Which is a great question to ask, and particularly interesting to ask of scientific types who often try to insist they only believe things they can prove.
Now, at first I thought it was just going to be some inspiring things to quote from. But there are some interesting subtexts going through most of the answers. You know, most of these guys are materialist atheists. But yet the red thread that goes through all of them is *consciousness*. A bunch of them quickly move to very dogmatically declaring that there's no God, no design to the universe, and everything is just the result of random accidents. They seem very convinced of that. But of course they indeed are answering the question, because they can't prove it, and they know it. Another bunch of them make very hopeful declarations of being very sure that it is "just around the corner" that we'll discover what part of the brain consciousness comes from and how it works, and we'll able to duplicate it in computers or the like. And implicitly admitting that such things aren't in any way proven, and nobody actually have done so. But, again, they seem very sure of it. And, indeed, most of them are practically squirming and bending over backwards to try to make the case for what is essentially a negative belief. That there's no consciousness and anything that can't be proven in a materialistic sense is just stupid supersticious nonsense. Oh, none of them actually say there's no consciousness, but they wrap it up in it just being an illusion or some phenomenon that happens late in the evolutionary process or some chemical neuro-physiological phenomenon.
Quite remarkable, to see the amount of fear that is stirred up, and the convoluted beliefs that people construct in order to avoid the more simple and unified answers. And the peer pressure that obviously must exist amongst scientists, to look and sound scientific and objective at all times, even when the truth is that you can't really prove very much about anything.
Anyway, there are still many inspiring statements there, and a few of them aren't just hiding behind negative dogma. So, here are a few I liked:Anton Zeilinger:"What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality. The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make scientific predictions we make statements about information we possibly attain in the future."
Paul Steinhardt: "I believe that our universe is not accidental, but I cannot prove it. Historically, most physicists have shared this point-of-view. For centuries, most of us have believed that the universe is governed by a simple set of physical laws that are the same everywhere and that these laws derive from a simple unified theory."
Gregory Benford: "Why is there scientific law at all? We physicists explain the origin and structure of matter and energy, but not the laws that do this. Does the idea of causation apply to where the laws themselves came from? Even Alan Guth's "free lunch" gives us the universe after the laws start acting. We have narrowed down the range of field theories that can yield the big bang universe we live in, but why do the laws that govern it seem to be constant in time, and always at work? One can imagine a universe in which laws are not truly lawful. Talk of miracles does just this, when God is supposed to make things work. Physics aims to find The Laws and hopes that these will be uniquely constrained, as when Einstein wondered if God had any choice when He made the universe."
Alison Gopnik: "I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces."
Lynn Margulis: "That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drum beats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals. Such sensitivities to wafting plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light register because of our "sensory cells"."
Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi: "When I first read your question, I was sure it was a trick—after all, almost nothing I believe in I can prove. I believe the earth is round, but I cannot prove it, nor can I prove that the earth revolves around the sun or that the naked fig tree in the garden will have leaves in a few months. I can't prove quarks exist or that there was a Big Bang—all of these and millions of other beliefs are based on faith in a community of knowledge whose proofs I am willing to accept, hoping they will accept on faith the few measly claims to proof I might advance."
Randolphe Nesse: "I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations."
Douglas Rushkoff: "I can't prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has purpose and direction. It appears obvious, yet absolutely unconfirmable, that matter is groping towards complexity."
But the only one that actually wasn't afraid of believing in consciousness is this guy:Donald Hoffman: "I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience."
Right. And that is to a large degree what I get from the eloquent statements of most of these other prominent folks I'm not quoting. They have failed to come up with any reasonable explanation, let alone proof, as to how mindless matter accidentally develops consciousness, or how a beautiful and very functional system of natural laws and evolution of life emerges by mere accident. They have no proof, so they make long explanations to try to delay that realization, and most of all they BELIEVE strongly that they're right, so they are willing to continue to the bitter end without any shred of evidence for that which they believe in. [ Science | 2005-01-10 20:43 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Sunday, January 9, 2005 | |
|
|
Nature via Slashdot, talks about "Quantum Darwinism":"If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states. researchers suggest in Physical Review Letters, the world would be very unpredictable: different people might see very different versions of it. Life itself would then be hard to conduct, because we would not be able to obtain reliable information about our surroundings... it would typically conflict with what others were experiencing."
Connecting that up with Darwinism sounds a little silly, I'd say. Seems perfectly obvious to me. That the Buckingham Palace has the same number of windows whenever you look at it is not because some little quantum thingies are fighting it out, and the state we see is what came out the strongest. Rather, they need to really get the thing about what you observe being a result of how it is observed. Looking straight at something isn't the only way of observing it. A great many people have observed the Buckingham Palace very carefully over time, and have taken pictures of it, written books about it, etc. In the bigger scheme of things, they're all observing it. It is a simple matter of averages, and maybe of a power law. If the majority of people believe it to be in that particular state (its location, color, construction, number of windows, etc), then that's what you're likely to find, if you don't manage to make the extra effort to find some drastically different way of looking at it. Picasso might have seen it rather differently, no matter what anybody else thought. But most people are pre-disposed to seeing it the way it "is", which means largely the way that the majority of everybody else has seen it. In part because the majority opinion reinforces itself. Nothing to do with darwinism between quantum particles. Maybe natural selection within the attention from observers. If millions of people are seeing it a certain way, whether they happen to be there at the moment or not, and that way works, and is consistent with its surroundings and perceived history, then that's what you're likely to see too. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out. But this is still so strange to anybody who, despite any advances in quantum physics, still thinks about things in a newtonian manner. So they might look for more convoluted ways of figuring it out. [ Science | 2005-01-09 12:40 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
|
BoingBoing had a couple of postings, here and here, about somebody having noticed that Google had indexed a lot of web cameras, and it is easy to list them if you know how the URLs tend to look for certain manufacturers' viewing pages.
The sort of mischievous thing about that is that many of these folks might not have intended for their webcams to be that public and easy to find. Well, obviously they can't be all that secret either. Google will only find them if they're linked from some other public page somewhere. And we're talking about cameras that are viewable for anybody who accesses that IP number in a web browser.
Anyway, I like webcams, and I was anyway thinking about making some webcam pages, so I couldn't resist going a little further on this opportunity. So, look at this page I just made. I grabbed the URLs of the first 500 or so of those pages from Google (using the SOAP interface). I figured out how to grab the currently first image from one of those streams. And then I set up a thing that scans through them every couple of hours and take a snapshot from each. And then, since we'd like to know where they are, I ran the IPs through HostIP which tells us the country and sometimes the city. So, you click on any one of them and you see the live video, at least if your browser can handle Motion JPEG. IE seems to have a problem with that.
Hopefully I won't hear from anybody's lawyer too soon. It seems harmless enough. You can see some airport lobbies, some streets and freeways, some people working in offices, some museums, some malls, some factory assembly lines, a school cafeteria, somebody's aquarium, a hangar where somebody parks their corporate jet, the snow conditions on some ski slopes. Doesn't seem to be any private bedrooms or anything like that.
What I like about webcams is not particularly the snooping, but more the telepresence. You can a little bit be somewhere else, far away, and watch a slice of life going by. [ Technology | 2005-01-09 13:06 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Saturday, January 8, 2005 | |
|
|
Bill Gates did an interview last week where he essentially labeled all those folks who are into free software and sharing of content with liberal licenses and that kind of frivolity as a modern form of communists. So, great, some clever folks, made some nice commie graphics for the occasion. See BoingBoing here, here, and here. So, join the revolution, comrades.
In case you somehow don't know, that reverse C in the circle is the copyleft symbol. Copyleft is the license you apply to work that is free and that must remain free. Pure communism, of course. [ Culture | 2005-01-08 20:07 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Friday, December 31, 2004 | |
|
|
I can't really add much to the Tsunami coverage, as it is already all over all the media. It is tragical and devasting of course. I don't know how to deal appropriately with over 100,000 dead and many more personal tragedies. Strange that I can't personally even relate to it before I read that there are still around 500 Danish people missing. That's about a 10 times bigger chunk of Denmark than 9/11 was to the U.S. And 1500 Swedish people. But the much bigger disasters were for many faraway villages that can't even be properly accounted for, and many of which no longer exist.
Otherwise the only thing I can say is that it shouldn't have happened. Well, you can't stop the biggest earthquake in memory from happening. But it took several hours for the tsunami to hit the beaches it hit. It is an example of terrible communication systems that most people had no clue. The U.S. military and the State Department knew, and secured the Diego Garcia military base. But it succeeded in alerting only two foreign governments. The top meteorologists in Thailand knew, but they decided to not tell anybody, to not disturb the tourist industry. As if an unexpected tsunami isn't a lot more disturbing. And, anyway, there wasn't much of a system in place to warn anybody in most places. The people who knew didn't quite know who to contact.
Interestingly, the animals knew, even if nobody told them in advance. There were largely no dead animals, because they can sense stuff like that coming, and instinctly get themselves to safety. [ News | 2004-12-31 17:01 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Sunday, December 26, 2004 | |
|
|
Hm, I haven't written much here the last month.
Mostly because I've been a bit occupied. With trying to make a living mostly. Yet another time my main contract that was paying the rent ran out, last month. And that's the time when I belatedly realize that I don't have much of a working plan. I usually live from paycheck to paycheck, whether it is big or small, which is first of all stupid. And when it has been coming in every month I tend to get complacent, forgetting that it could end any time. You know, I usually don't even have a real contract. Just a few companies who pay me something every month while there's something useful for me to do. And sometimes their situation changes and they don't need me any more. And it is always "Thank you so much for your great work. If there's ever anything we can do for you, just let us know." Well, keep paying me, for starters. But it doesn't really work that way. A business isn't a charity.
The answer is either that I do something on an ongoing basis to have projects and acquire new projects before the old ones run out, or that I start thinking more entrepreneurially building up business of my own, or that I go get a JOB. The latter being my worstcase scenario. I'd rather not. Jobs are rather badly paid here in France, and, well, you've gotta be somewhere all day. Oh, it would be less work than the hours I normally keep, but I just can't bring myself to put that option anywhere else than near the bottom of the list. Not to mention the difficulties of getting a job where I am, where one ought to speak perfect French and one's list of diplomas is all important.
So, short term we're talking about that I need projects. I do programming in PHP (or Python or C if I have to). Website database stuff on Linux. And I administer servers. I have a lot of experience and I'm very good at what I do. Shouldn't be hard, should it? But where does one actually get projects that aren't just 9-5 jobs? Usually people have somehow found me by themselves, and I haven't done much to actively seek business.
I previously mentioned rentacoder.com which is a site where people put up projects and coders bid on them. Well, last I looked I thought it was ridiculous. People put up large projects with outrageously small maximum amounts. You know $50 or $100 for something I would have thought of bidding $5000 for. And programmers in Romania and India actually take those jobs and apparently do them successfully. Anyway, I now took a second look. And have actually spent the last few weeks doing interesting jobs. At ridiculous prices. But I'm learning a good deal. For one thing I made several pieces I actually needed myself, but didn't get around to making. And then there's the clarity and discipline needed to do a specific job at a relatively low price. It actually often is quite possible if one analyzes it well enough and one does exactly what is asked for. Oh and then there's all the good business ideas. People often lay out their whole business plan and ask for a bid for somebody who can do the whole thing. Anyway, I'd wear myself out very quickly making a living on rentacoder, but I think it will be a very useful experience, and some useful contacts. I probably did more real work in the past month than in the year before that.
But, really, I'd much rather figure out how to be an entrepreneur. And it is not like I haven't talked about that before, but what exactly do I do? And, now, how does it work to actually put great focus into making businesses that make money? I mean, that's what successful business people generally do. Most of their actions relate to increasing what comes in and lessening what goes out. Not that that is complicated, but my priorities have never really looked like that. I find it sort of blasphemous to make profits the primary focus of one's activities. But, ironically, that usually ends up meaning that I spend an extraordinary amount of effort making up for the fact that I didn't make wise long-term business decisions. By avoiding thinking of money other than in the abstract, I easily end up having to think about it all the time, because there are things that need to be paid.
I might be boring you. Most people have it figured out quite well, and don't think it is hard. I.e. having a routine that keeps you having an income most of the time, and making sure you have reserves set aside for slow periods, and investments for your retirement and that kind of thing. It isn't rocket science, to plan for being able to pay the electricity bill next month. But maybe I'm too dumb, or rather, my mind has mostly been elsewhere.
Anyway, so I'm making an attempt of being a money-motivated, success-oriented internet business entrepreneur. Greed is good. Buy low, sell high. Well, at least I'm exploring some things I normally wouldn't explore, and changing my focus. Chances are that I can't be somebody who makes profits the primary focus on my life. But there should be some happy medium where I stay true to my principles and still can be successful and prosperous. By my own design, and not just some of the time, by luck. No reason not to.
I started a second blog last month. I had sort of vowed that I'd never have any reason for having several blogs, but I guess I can change my mind. You know, I need a place where I can talk about making money more directly. And, hm, somehow I find many aspects of that a bit embarrassing to mention. And I had in mind exploring various things I normally would have a bad opinion about, like MLM and internet money-making schemes and marketing. Well, to try some of it on for size, and see if I'd feel like changing my mind. And since my tone in this blog here is mostly quite anti-commercial, there was a bit of a conflict. Wouldn't really fit here if I asked all of you to join my MLM downline or something. I'm not sure that works for me anywhere else either, but, hey, I'm looking in a few different places. Anyway, it actually seems that I'm finding that what I'd write when talking about making money isn't all that different from what I'd otherwise write. I don't think I'll end up writing up a lot of hype with lots of underlines and superlatives and exclamation marks to get stupid, but motivated, people to sign up for some worthless money-making scheme somebody has cooked up. But then again, there might be sensible and valuable things out there, or I can invent some, which can be explained in plain terms to smart people, and which also happen to make money. Of course there is. Happens all the time. Business of any kind doesn't have to be based on lies.
OK, enough qualifiers. My other blog is called Escape Velocity, so take a look. For some people it will probably sound pretty much the same as this blog, but other people might find something here and there to be offended about. Whatever. For me, I put on a different hat when I step over there, so it has to be a different place at this point.
I have several of my own projects that are beginning to take form. More on those later. In the meantime, if any of you have programming projects or server management jobs you need a little help on, you know where to find me. [ Diary | 2004-12-26 17:52 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Monday, December 20, 2004 | |
|
|
ABC News:A millionaire activist who believes the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 were and "inside job" is offering a $130,000 reward to anyone who can prove him wrong.
Jimmy Walter has spent more than $3.9 million promoting the conspiracy theory and is offering the reward to any engineering student who can prove the World Trade Centre buildings crashed the way the Government says they did.
"Of course, we expect no winners," Mr Walter, 57, heir to an $14.3 million fortune from his father's home-building business.
He accuses figures in government, the military and business of involvement in the September 11 attacks.
Mr Walter says a panel of expert engineers will judge submissions from the students.
Notice, the award is for proving the official story. You know, planes hit the buildings and the burning jet fuel softened the steel, so they collapsed. Should be easy money for any engineering student to lay out the calculations, no? The problem with that is unfortunately that what officially happened doesn't seem to fit with any known laws of physics, so, aye, there's the rub. Which one is the theory, now? I don't think anybody will claim the reward. And neither is the mass media going to lose any sleep over that. [ Science | 2004-12-20 18:24 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Saturday, December 18, 2004 | |
|
|
Chris Justus diggested the very cool Google Suggest. The code is absolutely brilliant and uses a bunch of tricks that few people knew about. I didn't even realize there were functions that could pick up live XML data without reloading the page. As he says, that's going to raise the bar for what we expect from webpages. I just have to figure that out and do some cool things with it. Apparently most of the major browsers support the necessary functionality. Which means one can do web apps that work much more like "real" apps, in terms of being responsive and picking up data from a database without having to reload the whole thing. It is still a mystery how google's servers can respond so damned fast, though. [ Programming | 2004-12-18 16:24 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
|
To demonstrate how simply it could be done, Ed Felten wrote a tiny peer-to-peer file-sharing program. Fifteen lines of Python:
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten
ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search)
pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer)
def ls(p=""):return filter(lambda n:(p=="")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd()))
if ar[2]!="client": # license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
myU,prs,srv = ("http://"+ar[3]+":"+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever())
def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs
def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0]
f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a))
def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,"f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]):
for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,"wc"))
And it can both be a client and a server. Of course this isn't going to run any network with 100s of thousands of users. But it shows how impossible it is for the enemies of file sharing to stop it. [ Programming | 2004-12-18 16:48 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
|
A posting on Metafilter about a mysterious, eh, project, called Neurocam.:A billboard appears near a Melbourne freeway entrance inviting people to "Get out of their mind". "Those who follow the instructions on the neurocam website are assigned missions, with the threat of grave consequences should these tasks not be carried out. Individuals prove their mettle by completing progressively more complex, riskier assignments - possibly of questionable legality."
Is it an art project, a cult, a marketing ploy, a game or a psychological experiment? Neurocam says none of these. Melbourne's Age newspaper investigates (free reg sometimes req'd). You can also read some blogs from participants here and here. Plus it seems to have something to do with this place dealing in Human Possibility(TM), which makes as little sense as the rest of it.
Reading the second blog there... hm, very interesting. Kind of like The Game. I'd be very tempted to join if I were in Melbourne. Mindlessly delivering packages, without knowing whether they contain drugs or explosives. But it is fun to be a secret agent.
I bet it is a psychological experiment. It will show how thrilled we are to do stuff we don't really know the consequences of, if we're just played the right way. [ Culture | 2004-12-18 17:48 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Wednesday, December 8, 2004 | |
|
|
This article by Paul Levy is supposedly about Quantum Physics and the 2004 U.S. Election. Well, it doesn't actually say much about elections other than at the end, essentially that what actually happened depends on how you look at it. You know, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem. And that the past really is created from the present by how we look at it, so it is somewhat meaningless to talk about what exactly it was. Actually I mostly agree. That is, I agree largely with the cosmology that he presents. He invokes various luminary quantum physicists like John Wheeler, the guy who came up with the idea of the black hole. The quantum universe is one which pulsates in and out of the void multiple times every nano-second, endlessly recreating itself anew. Each moment brings with it a potentially new past, which we are the ‘builders’ of in the present moment. In this present moment right now there are endless possibilities, it is an infinitely textured moment in time seething with unmanifested potential. In the future, when we consider this multi-dimensional moment we are in now, we will probably focus our attention and only remember a certain slice or aspect of this very moment, solidifying it in time, and this will be our ‘memory’ of that seemingly past event. And yet, by the way we remember this present moment in the future will have an actual effect on the way that moment in the future manifests. So on the one hand, the way we contemplate the past has a creative effect on how the present moment manifests.
What Wheeler is pointing out through the delayed choice experiment, though, is that the past doesn’t actually exist in a solid and objective way that causes or determines our present moment experience like is imagined by classical physics. Rather, he is saying our situation is just the opposite. He is saying that by the way we observe in this present moment we actually reach back into time and create the past. It is not just the future that’s undetermined, but the past as well; just as there are ‘probable’ futures there are ‘probable’ pasts. Our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.
And I think he's right. But the trouble is that so many people, myself included, find the metaphors of quantum physics so inspiring and illuminating, without really having studied quantum physics. It seems to provide such a fabulous cosmology that backs up a new agey "we're creating the universe" view. And I guess it probably does. But it is mainly its metaphors that are inspiring, and it gets a little dangerous to actually invoke quantum physics for their support, when one doesn't really understand them. The trouble is that even though there are greatly respected theoretical physicists who advocate such a radical view of the universe, there are just as many, or more, scientists who consider it complete hogwash. Using quantum physics as a reference for these kinds of cosmologies, as applied to various aspects of every day life, just tends to make those guys really furious. Well, I think it is probably because they're wrong, and they're stuck in a fundamentalist materialist belief system that isn't going anywhere, and eventually our shared ideas about the world actually will catch up with quantum physics, as some of those guys die off, but it will take a while.
While looking around for references, I ran into the story about Alan Sokal, a physics professor who in 1996 carried out what he considered a hoax by getting an article submitted to a serious scientific journal, which he filled with what he considered unfounded nonsense like references to morphogenic fields a la Rupert Sheldrake, and applications of quantum physics to politics. And it created quite a scandal when he later revealed that he did it to see how easily one could fool people by referring to a lot of authorities and by saying post-modern stuff that people would like to hear, without any kind of scientific rigor. So he complained that he was able to get away with publishing an article that wasn't properly peer reviewed and that didn't argue properly for its points. Actually, the crux of the matter seems to be that Sokal believes in one finite objective reality, so therefore he consideres all other views unscientific, and he tried to prove that point by satirizing them. Much of what he was saying, and which he himself considered utterly ridiculous, had been said before by much more respected scientists than himself, like Bohr and Einstein and Wheeler. See here. Some of whom went a good deal further in relating theoretical physics concepts to sociology, psychology and politics.
Maybe the joke is that mutually exclusive views on the world can all be right, because you do essentially get back what you start off trying to prove. So fundamentalist materialist scientists can proceed to stack up more proof for the world being essentially newtonian and objective, and that all the weird stuff like relativity and quantum uncertainty and 12 dimensional space just applies to some remote circumstances and have nothing whatsoever to do with us, and it is all just a theory anyway. And, well, more free-thinking scientists might arrive at a very different world view where reality is fluid and greatly influenced by how we perceive it and think about it, and where wonderous things are possible. For the first group to consider themselves right, they have to consider the second group wrong, as there can only be one objective reality. Whereas the opposite isn't particularly the case. Anyway, I choose to bet on the models that explain the most possible phenomena in the world, rather than the models that have to suppress and ridicule all the stuff that just doesn't fit into them.
Anyway, back to Paul Levy's article. In a circular, non-linear and acausal feedback loop, the past effects us in this present moment, while at the same time, in this present moment we effect the past. The way we observe the past in this present moment actually effects the past which simultaneously effects us in this present moment in what I call a ‘synchronistic, cybernetic feedback loop.’ The doorway is the present moment, which is the point where our power to shape reality is to be found. In quantum physics the universe wasn’t created billions of years ago in the big bang but rather is being created right now by what Wheeler refers to as "genesis by observership." The mystery of this universe doesn’t lie at some point way back in the past, but rather, right now, in this very living present moment.
This quantum perspective on the past arising or being conjured up out of and into the present moment collapses the sense of sequential time and linear causality. This points to the non-local nature of space and time, in that the past, present, and future completely interpenetrate and are inseparable from each other. In a bit of quantum weirdness, if we ask whether the universe really existed before we started looking at it, the answer we get from the universe is that it /looks/ as if it existed before we started looking at it.
Quantum physics is describing what I call the physics of the dreamlike nature of reality. Like a mass shared dream, we are all literally moment by moment calling forth and collaboratively ‘dreaming up’ this very universe into materialization. And dreams, by their very nature don’t exist in a ‘flat-land’ where they are fixed in meaning, but are extremely multi-dimensional. When we contemplate the past in this very moment, it has the same ontological status of and no more reality than a dream we had last night. Just like this present moment, when we contemplate it tomorrow, will in that present moment have no more reality than a figment of our imagination.
Might or might not be science mumbo-jumbo, according to hardcore skeptics, but who cares. I like it, and I'd say it pretty much works like that.
Doesn't mean we can't discover who won the U.S. election, though. Or maybe it is just that I prefer that we discover one alternate past, rather than the other. [ Knowledge | 2004-12-08 16:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
|
Here's ArtPad, another very cool Flash painting application. Like the one from GE. I want that on my server. I'm sure they're not sharing, though. [ Information | 2004-12-08 17:10 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
Tuesday, December 7, 2004 | |
|
|
There are some interesting stories breaking on The Brad Blog. In particular the one about a Florida programmer who in 2000 was asked by Tom Feeney, now U.S. Congressman and member of the House Judiciary Committee, to create software that would manipulate the votes in voting machines, while remaining undetectable, and that the software was used in Florida elections. That was while he was working for a company that Tom Feeney acted as lobbyist for, and which at the time also employed a later convicted Chinese spy who installed monitoring components in other kinds of software. There's a number of twists and turns, including the murder of an official who was planning on blowing the cover on some of this. His affidavit is here. All of this probably hasn't been verified yet, so all I can say is that the guy says so, and that the story seems consistent. If it happens to be true, it could be big, of course. The Brad Blog site seems to be overwhelmed most of the time, so I'm pasting in below the e-mail I got, with most of the information, so you can read it. [ Politics | 2004-12-07 13:55 | | PermaLink ] More >
|
|
<< Newer stories Page: 1 ... 25 26 27 28 29 ... 97 Older stories >> |
|
This is a collage of things that catch my eye, things that need to be said, and stuff I really care about
TRUTH BEAUTY FREEDOM LOVE TECHNOLOGY
|
Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
|
|