waka waka waka

According to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, fascinating things are afoot at the University of Reading. Researchers are growing little biological brains made of rat neurons, and training them to control robots by way of a Bluetooth connection.

The scientists have in fact created several of these wee brains, which even seem to have their own personalities.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said [professor Kevin] Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

It is still early days, and the homegrown brainlets, however boisterous, are nonetheless capable so far of only the most rudimentary mentation, roughly equivalent to a record-company executive, Biblical literalist, or member of Congress. But the project shows great promise. Learn more here.

This is a giddy week for particle physicists: very soon now the Large Hadron Collider, the most potent instrument ever built for the investigation of nature’s most private parts, will be brought on line. (How soon? Have a look here.) [Note: the LHC countdown site now (August 18th 2008) seems to be down. -MP]

There are those who fear that the collider, which occupies a 17-mile-long tunnel straddling the border of Switzerland and France, may kill us all by creating a world-devouring black hole or strangelet. While we can all enjoy a little frisson at the thought of such a gaudy exit, it is not going to happen. Here’s why.

There is an inverse relation between the scale we can examine and the size of the instruments required; we have come a very long way indeed from the first cyclotron, which Ernest Lawrence built for a cost of about $25, and which could be held in one hand. The LHC is an enormous, and enormously complex, triumph of human ingenuity and engineering skill.

I’ve just run across a beautiful collection of photographs of the project; you can have a look at them here.

Finally, our friend Eugene Jen has sent along a YouTube clip of a rap song about the LHC, written by Kate McAlpine, a science writer covering the project. If you think you might enjoy such a thing, it’s here.

There was a significant debut on the Internet today: a search engine that may well give mighty Google a run for its money. It is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who had previously written a search application that impressed Google so much they bought it in 2004, and hired her as a technical lead, when their own product needed a lift.

This one’s not for sale.

I do almost all of my written correspondence by email these days. I’ve always liked communicating in writing, and I generally take email-writing as seriously as I ever did letter-writing. I’m not one of those people who writes emails like:

dude u wanna go 2 the game? I got sum tix lemme know

I appreciate the objectivity and re-readability of the written word, but the latency of paper mail makes for conversations that seem very slow indeed these days, so I hardly ever send any.

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In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”.

The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, and then technological — which, if extrapolated into the future, predicts that something extraordinary is about to happen.

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If you haven’t heard, embattled Microsoft has now taken aim at Google Sky with its new application, the World Wide Telescope. Have a look here.

My daughter Chloë has sent along a link to an article about Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of SuperMemo, a software application that uses some neglected facts about the workings of human memory to help users retain more of what they learn. The system is designed to remind users at specific intervals of items they have studied; the spacing of these reminders is carefully tuned to occur just as the material would normally be about to be forgotten. Wozniak has dedicated himself with single-minded zeal to applying this system to himself; it appears to be effective, but is clearly not for everybody.

It’s an interesting story; you can read it here.

Have a look here.

From today’s CodeProject newsletter, here is an assortment of useful software that you can get for nothing.

Having come finally to the final hour of a far-from-restful weekend (I call them “TGIM” weekends), I’m far too pooped to post. So I offer instead an interesting look at what I am sure will be a transformative technology, still in earliest infancy. Here.

I got home quite late tonight, and serious scribbling is not in the cards. So go to this website, install Silverlight if you haven’t already, and have a look at where we’ve got to in the presentation of visual data.

If you’re wondering what you’re missing at TED 2008, have a look at this on-the-spot blog. If this isn’t the place to be for these few days, I don’t know what is.

Today was the beginning of the annual TED conference, which has become just about the toughest ticket in the world to get hold of. Held in Monterey, California, it’s a gathering of 1,000 of the “edgiest” members of the tech, entertainment, and design communities, and frankly, it sounds like a blast. Each speaker is given 18 minutes to present something amazing, and at its best, it’s a glimpse of the future.

You can learn more about the conference, and see some videos of past presentations, at the TED website, here. You can also find lots of TED-talk videos on YouTube.

NASA’s MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) vehicle made a close pass by the innermost planet today, executing a gravitational “slingshot” maneuver in preparation for an orbital insertion on on March 18, 2011, after which it will settle in for some long-term observations. As it passed by, it photographed parts of the planet that have never been seen before.

Learn more here.

I’ve just run across a website that might have interesting possibilities. It’s called BigThink, and its aim is to be a sort of online multimedia venue for the exchange of Ideas. I’ve only just started poking around in it, so I haven’t anything much to say about it so far — and being so new that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet, it might take a little while to gather steam. It’s the kind of thing that could go either way: I’ve learned how easy it is for these promising ventures to flop. But it could turn into something worthwhile.

Anyway, have a look here.

It may not have escaped your notice that the readable content available on the World Wide Web, though generally of very high quality in terms of both educational utility and literary style, contains a sparse admixture of comparatively shoddy material. This is, of course, an unavoidable consequence of the democratic nature of the Internet, and until now it seemed that there was nothing that could be done.

There are some very clever people in the world, however, and fortunately for the rest of us, a few of them have now applied their talents to this problem, with promising results. Have a look here.

I’ve found another fun way to waste your time: a website that ranks the “education level” of your favorite blogs.

I should warn you that I have absolutely no idea how the rankings are determined. Perhaps the algorithm is based upon complexity of sentence structure (such as, for example, the use of parenthetical clauses); maybe it looks for indicators such as proper compound-adjective hyphenation, occurrences of sesquipedalian words, or usage of words, once common, that have now fallen into desuetude.

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By now you have probably heard of Second Life, the enormously popular online “world”. I’ve poked around in it a bit myself, but am such a reclusive old grouch that I haven’t been inclined to hang around much. (One of the things I have found off-putting is the lack of a good audio interface, which has meant that one must communicate by typing — though I understand they’re working on that.) But I can see why it’s doing well; you can do and see and build all sorts of creative things, if you aren’t already worn out from writing code all day long at work, and you can certainly meet all sorts of people, from all over the place. (Well, not all sorts, I suppose: you aren’t, for example, likely to meet many technology-shy, bookish sorts, or blind people, or my mother-in-law, or Sentinalese tribesmen. But you get the idea.)

Anyway, it’s easy to imagine that Second Life would be a nice getaway for folks who are confined in one way or another in their real lives: lighthouse keepers, say, or the endungeoned. Now we find, thanks to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, that Japanese scientists are working on a way to make Second Life available to paraplegics by allowing them to control the user-interface with their thoughts alone.

Learn more here.

My friend Wayne Krantz has sent along a link to an item in the New York Times about the social perils of email.

The article, by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, is entitled E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread). In it, we learn that:

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

We are not, of course, startled to hear this. What is interesting, though, is that it should rise to the level of newsworthiness.

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Here’s a pretty picture:

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I ran across an odd website the other day. Its purpose is to demonstrate what a completely click-free browsing environment would be like. The authors clearly think it’s better, somehow, but I don’t think I like it at all. How about you? See for yourself here.

Well, enough politics for now. I’ve dwelt on the topic overmuch lately anyway; folks might get the idea it was something I’m actually interested in. I’m gratified, at least, not to have received the cataract of vitriol that I might reasonably have expected to follow that previous post, though it might be too soon to tell.

So, on to lighter fare. Here’s something nobody saw coming, so to speak: the newest hybrid and electric cars are so quiet, apparently, that they pose a risk to blind people, who rely on their hearing to know when it’s safe to cross the street. Story here.

Not having the time this evening for any long-winded jibber-jabber, I’ll share with you something nifty I’ve just run across: a new system that enables ordinary digital cameras to take multi-gigpixel panoramas. Have a look here, and zoom in all you like.

To do physical science, one needs uniform references for fundamental quantities: length, duration, mass, and so forth. Over time, as the need for accuracy has increased, attempts have been made to place the fundamental units on ever more precise footing. For example, the reference meter, which was declared in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian running through Paris¹, is now taken to be “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

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1. By the way, the measurement of this distance by a seven-year surveying expedition undertaken by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre François André Méchain is a fascinating story, and is told in the recent book The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder.  

As a software engineer, and a techie all my life, I don’t get all that excited about most of the products that come down the pipe. But this could really be the Next Big Thing: Windows RG. Have a look here.

Yale’s David Gelernter, the well-known computer scientist, has written an article in Technology Review on the problems that bedevil AI research. He has some interesting things to say — not only about AI, but also about consciousness itself — and it’s well worth your while to read it.

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Longtime waka waka waka readers will recall that I used to work for an outfit called PubSub. It was an immensely promising idea, with truly revolutionary potential, but despite the fact that first-tier VCs were lining up around the block to give us money, the company perished in a spectacular (and wincingly public) implosion. I think of it as the USS Thresher of Internet startups.

The concept was simple enough; PubSub did “prospective search”, which turns the Google-type search paradigm on its head.

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Elton John would like to do away with the Internet.

He laments, as do I, that people no longer get together to make music, but do so now mostly alone, sequestered in their little digital studios. He’s quite right about that part; music has a strongly social component, and good things happen when people play together, and usually don’t when they don’t. But close down the Internet? Dream on. As Tony Soprano said, “you can’t put the shit back in the donkey.”

Anyway, even if he did manage to get the Internet shut down, he’d be pilloried in the blogosphere.

Here’s a good idea: to harvest the restless energy of crowds of people. Two MIT graduate students have a plan to do just that.

The noted computer scientist David Gelernter has been working on what he believes will replace the World Wide Web. He calls it the Worldbeam. Learn more here.

If you’ve ever set up a wireless home network using Windows machines, you know what a vexatious task it can be. David Pogue, tech reporter for the New York Times, shares his personal adventure here. It appears there is room for improvement.

There is a front-page story in today’s New York Times about a radical and highly controversial proposal that, if adopted, will almost certainly shake our civilization to its very foundations: voluntary guidelines for well-mannered blogging.

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From my good friend Duncan Werner, one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met (I’m sure he’d rather I hadn’t said that, but there it is), comes something brand new that I think will be a Big Deal indeed before long — and as far as I know, you waka waka waka readers are the very first people in the whole wide world to hear about it. It’s a simple enough idea; one of those that make you ask yourself “why didn’t I think of that?”

What is it? Well, think of Wikipedia. Now think of a good place to eat. Now look here.

You may already know about the TED conference, which is held each year in Monterey, California. The acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and the conference is a forum for presentations by, and discussions among, some of the brightest bulbs at the vanguard of technological and cultural evolution. I hadn’t heard of it myself until reading this article last week , by New York Times technology writer David Pogue, whose own weblog , by the way, is a rewarding destination for those of you who like to keep up with the latest nifty gadgetry.

Only a thousand people may attend the TED gathering each year, as it is intentionally confined to a small and intimate venue. (Next year’s event is apparently already sold out, at $6,000 a seat!) But the organizers have made videos of many of the presentations available on the Internet; you can find them here. I’ve only poked around a little, but there seems to be quite a lot of interesting material there; readers are encouraged to go and have a look.

We mentioned a little while ago the increasingly vexatious problem of space debris. Astronomers and aerospace engineers worry that we are fast approaching a sort of critical mass, in which the breakup of some some large orbiting derelict will generate enough fragments to begin a chain reaction that could well end up with the lowere reaches of orbital space too cluttered with lethal projectiles to fly safely through any longer. For this reason the recent demolition of a Chinese satellite in a weapons test was greeted by shock and derision from the spacefaring community, and now comes the news that things may have just got a good deal worse.

Learn more here.

There were two excellent articles in the science section of today’s New York Times, and I encourage all of you to go and read them.

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Here’s some disappointing news, in case you hadn’t heard: the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has gone blind, the result of a blown fuse. While the other instruments aboard the orbiting observatory are still in fine shape, this is the camera that has been responsible for all those astonishing images we’ve marveled at in recent years. Learn more here.

One of the greatest liberations in human history will arrive when we truly begin to master the physical system that is closest to us of all: our own bodies. Despite enormous triumphs in our command of the external world, from the building of vast and towering cities to the development of computers to the exploration of the planets, we still live and die as prisoners in the biological machines we are born into, held hostage every day to the caprices of their vital systems. Without the least regard to our station in life, or our virtue, wit, or wealth, we can all be brought down — stopped, literally, dead in our tracks — by some trivial malfunction, some slight physical insult. It might be a virus, or the bursting or occlusion of some tiny bit of plumbing. It could be a gene that causes a milligram too much or too litle of some necessary substance to be produced, or perhaps a renegade group of cells that, having mutinied, encourage others to join them. And of course we all, without exception, suffer the progression of a disease that is universally fatal, and which subjects its victims, little by little, to a withering and debilitating course of mental and physical demolition; that disease, of course, is aging.

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As I’ve mentioned recently, there is always something at Edge.org to engage the curious mind. One of the more interesting features of the website is the annual World Question project, which consists of asking a diverse collection of thinkers some simple but provocative question, and presenting their responses.

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You may have heard of the Antikythera Mechanism: a mysterious clockwork device, over two thousand years old, that was found in a Mediterranean shipwreck in 1902. Archaeologists have puzzled over it ever since its discovery, and the atavistic doohickey has meanwhile fueled many an Atlantean’s febrile imaginings. Now, a team of researchers have announced that they have determined exactly what the Mechanism does, but the mystery of how such a thing came to exist at all in 80 B.C. has only deepened.

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From my old PubSub pal and fellow software engineer Mike Zaharee comes a link to a massively depressing story about the next space shuttle mission. It seems that NASA is considering delaying the launch until after the New Year, because — wait for it — they don’t want the ship to be in space when the calendar “rolls over”, because the shuttle’s software can’t handle it.

“The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover,” space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing.

Well, on second thought, I can see his point. I mean, that’s a holiday, for Pete’s sake.

OK, as promised, politics entirely aside for the moment (although just for the moment, I’m afraid, as there’s just too much material out there, and more every day).

Sure, the war in Iraq, and the jihadists’ campaign to bring down the West generally, get most of the headlines. But today’s item is about a new weapon in a much older war - the fight against hiccups.

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Here is further proof that some people simply don’t get out enough: a Flash-based simulation of that ancient (and I’m ancient enough myself to have two of them gathering dust in a closet) proto-PC, the Commodore 64.

One advantage of my having toiled for a couple of years at PubSub is that everyone who worked there keeps one eye on the Internet at all times, looking out for odd or interesting items, and when they find them they pass them right along to yours truly. From Jon Mandell comes a link to a vituperative article about Wikipedia, the online resource that seems to be emerging as America’s second-most-polarizing cultural entity, right behind George W. Bush himself (Righteous Swordsman of Freedom, or Chimpy W. Hitler, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on).

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A lot of people have been asking me about recent doings at PubSub Concepts, the innovative Internet-search company where I spent the last two years designing and building client software. Word has got around that the company has fallen on hard times, and folks are wondering what’s up.

Indeed, as seems to be no secret, things haven’t gone so well lately. Given my staid British upbringing, however, and an innate sense of tact, I feel that it would be indecorous for me to say much about it publicly, other than to allow that I do find myself with rather more free time these days, as do some of my newer friends.

Though unfortunate, this sort of thing is hardly unprecedented. Think of World War I, or perhaps the Challenger disaster.

Yesterday, I made a brief and rather positive reference to the communally written Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Today, my good friend David Pauley has sent me a link to an essay, posted at Edge.org by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, that makes some very pertinent criticisms of the increasing fashionability of such examples of Internet “collectivism”. Lanier’s argument is that “hive minds” like Wikipedia are good at some things, but very bad at others, and that the current trend seems to be toward an uncritical embrace of a kind of “digital Maoism” that he sees as potentially quite destructive. Lanier writes:

In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.

This is a fascinating and important discussion. Read Lanier’s essay here, and an assortment of responses here.

The other day I had a familiar tune repeating itself in my head (an irritating phenomenon sometimes called an earworm), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. Convinced that the Internet had to be able to help me somehow (my answer for everything these days), I got online and started poking around. I quickly turned up a website called SongTapper, where the idea is that most tunes are distinguishable by their rhythm alone. All you have to do is find your way to their song search page and tap out the rhythm of the song on your space bar. I was skeptical, but lo and behold, out popped the correct answer: Mozart’s Turkish March.

Try it yourself.

From time to time I mention amusing or imaginative Web sites in these pages. I’ve just stumbled across a good one; it’s an artificial-intelligence engine that plays (and usually wins) the game of Twenty Questions. It has just managed to guess that I was thinking of a snail, a pair of sunglasses, a pencil, and a grapefruit.

Click here to give it a try.

My friend Jon Mandell has sent along a link to a story about the rapid rise of blogging in China. It is estimated that by the end of the year, exotic Cathay will be home to sixty million online scribes.

What is remarkable to me about the technological revolution of the last few years is the way that it enables us to ignore traditional barriers of scale. Just as we can, with Google Earth, take in the whole world from space, then in seconds swoop all the way down to our own rooftop, with tools like PubSub and Google we can survey the entire Earth-girdling ocean of human expression, and zoom in on any given drop.

It is easy to imagine that some emergent event, some critical mass, must be approaching as the worldwide interconnectedness of everyone with everyone else increases. In chemistry, solvents are used to provide a medium in which molecules may react; as the reagent concentration increases, the number of reactions per second does too. What we are doing here is putting an ever-increasing number of highly reactive molecules - people - into solution. And the Internet is the solvent.

This is, of course, an imperfect analogy. Perhaps a better choice might be Boyle’s Law, or nuclear fission.

I’d prefer not to dwell on that last one.

I know today’s post was supposed to follow on the previous item about C.S. Lewis, but in this morning’s email was a very interesting note from my friend Gus Spathis.

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