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.
April 23, 2007 – 11:06 pm
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.
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 […]
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 it 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.
February 22, 2007 – 12:33 am
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.
February 6, 2007 – 11:59 pm
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.
January 31, 2007 – 12:11 am
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.
January 22, 2007 – 10:25 pm
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.
January 4, 2007 – 12:39 am
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.
November 30, 2006 – 12:41 am
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.
November 8, 2006 – 11:49 am
My friend and fellow software engineer Mike Zaharee has sent along 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.
October 1, 2006 – 10:22 pm
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.
August 25, 2006 – 3:45 pm
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).
It seems that a lot of people have been asking me about 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 all 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 correctly 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.
Read more here.
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, but 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 enable molecules to 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.
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.
January 23, 2006 – 10:46 pm
My friend Salim Ismail has written a good post about the evolution of the Internet (in fact, it’s called “Evolution of the Internet”) over at his excellently titled blog, You’ve Got Ismail! In it he talks about the three kinds of uses to which the Internet has been put. The first was messaging, which just involves transmitting a packet of data from one place to another. This was the underpinning of the first big-time Internet application: email, which got rolling in the 1980’s. The second was request-response which is what HTTP is all about, and which made possible the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s. The third, which is just getting underway, is publish-subscribe, in which information on the Internet, which so far has had to be actively fetched by the user, now will tell interested parties about itself.
Salim gives a clear and cogent account of it all. He has also added a post today, I see, in which he explains the important distinction between prospective and retrospective search.
Do take a look, what he is describing is the Next Big Thing.
January 21, 2006 – 4:20 pm
I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, he referred to an attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”. There are few technologies – and let’s acknowledge that the printed word is a technological artifact – that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.
January 20, 2006 – 10:33 pm
I am increasingly aware of how different my twenty-first century life is from the world I grew up in, and in fact from the life led by anyone more than a very few years ago. When I was a young boy, color televisions were a big deal. I remember the introduction of push-button telephones, audio cassettes, digital watches, and hand-held calculators. But the real revolution, of course, is the Internet.
I work as a software developer for a company that does Web search, so perhaps my immersion is deeper than some people’s, but I am noticing that it feels more and more odd to be “offline”. My life consists more and more of being seated at a computer, managing simultaneous streams of information – email, blog posts, online chess games, instant messages, Skype calls, PubSub alerts, news bulletins, desktop weather data, and so forth. Many times a day I wish to know something or other, and immediately retrieve the datum in question from some or other online source. I can swoop down on any part of the world with Google Earth.
Although this is a natural evolution – our success as a species is due above all to our gift for communication, and the Internet might well, I think, be on its way to being the wellspring of an emergent, collective human intelligence that will begin a new chapter in the history of mankind – we have also increased our risk of losing touch with the very real world around us and inside us.
January 19, 2006 – 11:20 am
From my friend Steven Cohen comes comes an interesting link for those of you who tend to accumulate books: LibraryThing. It’s a Web-based system for cataloguing your personal library. You can tag your books according to subject, view other online libraries, see who has collections similar to yours, and so forth. It looks like a fantastic tool for hard-core bibliophiles.
January 17, 2006 – 9:41 pm
In yesterday’s post I promised to write an item explaining the difference between “retrospective” Web search, which is what conventional search engines like Google do, and “prospective search”, which is a new and complementary paradigm exemplified by services such as PubSub. As I began, though, it dawned on me that I had already written such a post back in August, on the PubSub house blog, Sandbox. So for those who are interested, here it is.
Important Note: I don’t intend to do a great deal of writing about PubSub on this blog; waka waka waka is not intended to be one of those sites where people blather about the companies they work for. I have ample outlets for that sort of thing. But the ideas mentioned in this and the previous post – structured blogging and prospective search – are, I think, important new developments, and I believe that anyone who is involved in blogging or interested in the evolution of the Web should know about them.
January 16, 2006 – 10:37 pm
Here’s something you bloggers should all know about: Structured Blogging. Here’s what it is, and why it’s good.
