$10 Mil Google Prize

Here it is. Here's a chance to use the mega power of a mega corporation to do some good.
That's right. All you need to do is have an idea that will benefit people other than yourself.
Just one. So just frakking do it. Go to GooglePrize for details.

WHOO_HOO!!! Connected at last!

Connected the PS3 to the Computer through Medialink and an ethernet router.
Accessing everything through the file browser..Streaming audio. Takes a little time to buffer but then seamless.

                        .
                   .:.
                   :|:
                  .:|:.
                  ::|::
   :.             ::|::             .:
   :|:.          .::|::.          .:|:
   ::|:.         :::|:::         .:|:;
   `::|:.        :::|:::        .:|::'
    ::|::.       :::|:::       .::|:;
    `::|::.      :::|:::      .::|::'
     :::|::.     :::|:::     .::|::;
     `:::|::.    :::|:::    .::|::;'
`::.      `:::|::.   :::|:::   .::|::;'      .:;'
`:::..     ¹::|::.  :::|:::  .::|::¹    ..::;'
`:::::.    ':|::. :::|::: .::|:'   ,::::;'
 `:::::.    ':|:::::|:::::|:'   :::::;'
   `:::::.:::::|::::|::::|::::.,:::;'
      ':::::::::|:::|:::|:::::::;:'
         ':::::::|::|::|:::::::''
              `::::::::::;'
             .:;'' ::: ``::.
                  :':':
                    ;

This ascii worm has been through some spacetime discontinuities in writely but still all Whay!
Peace and love abound but you have to pay $79 for ILife as medialink doesn't recognize IPhotos below 08.

The Wayback Machine

We often think that whatever we publish on the web stays there forever. This is not the case. Not only is the average lifespan of a page 40-75 days, forums often go defunct, web designers are forever tinkering with the layout, and the need for being "current" is constantly driving the turn-over of web pages in the corporate world. All that data, lost? Not so. Not if you have access to The Wayback Machine . The Wayback machine is a browser that gives you access to an archive of the internet since 1997. The brainchild of Brewster Kahle, inventor, librarian and one of the director of the EFF, the machine is named after the fictional machine from a segment of the cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show used to transport Mr. Peabody and Sherman back in time. Type in a url of the site in question, click on the archival date and your web page will be retrieved as is, with all the links in working order. It is free, it is legal and it works.

Kahle's premise for The Wayback Machine was "to build a library of everything, and the opportunity is to build a great library that offers universal access to all of human knowledge." As he often says in his promotional lectures "We really need to put the best we can offer in reach of our children. If we don't, we are going to get the generation we deserve." This project was designed to take a snapshot of the web and preserve it for future generations. there are 85 Billion pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. It is a a computer system with close to 400 parallel processors, 100 terabytes of disk space, hundreds of gigs of RAM, all for under a half-million dollars. The Archive has turned clusters of PCs into a single parallel computer running the biggest database in existence and with its own operating system, P2, which allows programmers with no expertise in parallel systems to program the system. The crawlers record pages into 100MB files in a standard archive file format, and then stores it on one of the storage machines, which are nothing more than normal PCs with IDE drives. Then they're indexed onto another set of machines and that is kept up to date on an hourly basis. It uses the link structure of the Net and the usage trails from the Alexa users to be able to compute this data. Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites. Some of the notable archives are Web Pioneers , sites ranging from Trekky user-groups to Amazon, that made a global impact in the early days, and the Asian Tsunami Web Archive which is a collection of over 1500 sites relating to the December 2004 Tsunami disaster in Asia. A snapshot of these sites has been taken once a week starting from the first week of January 2005. All in all, you can source pretty much any site you want, however these sites are restricted to those who gave copyright permissions.

The Wayback Machine is not limited to just web pages, it includes a move to archive all books, music, film, television and software. Kahle, ever the librarian, "whenever I try to read a book on my laptop it feels like work". "I like the physical book. And I think we can go and use our technology to digitize things put the on the net, and then download, print them and bind them and end up with books again." The archive is scanning 15,000 books a month, and has 250,000 books online in 8 collections. A book is about a megabyte, so 26 Terabytes for the entire library of congress which it fits on a 3x3 ft machine on spinning linux drives with the total cost around $60,000. It only archives that which is free publicly. Kahle started a program called the bookmobile for children, a van with its own satellite, printer and binder. It costs about $3 to download, print and bind a book. There is even an Espresso Book machine, for personalized books, printed on an assembly line. The New Library of Alexandria in Egypt has 30,000 national books scanned, the Chinese 1,000,000 and the Indians have about 300,000. The push now is to provide In-Library machines, and so far there are 8 scanning centres in N. America.

When it comes to film, you will be surprised to know that all theatrical releases since inception have been estimated at 100,000, and about half of these are from India. About a 1000 out of copyright and these are legally available. If you factor in independent flicks and archival films they are in a couple of 100,000s. That for the user is unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth forever, and not only is it free, you can do whatever you want with it. One of the points that Kahle raised when dealing with Television is how can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past. There is just so much rich information, without having inclusive viewpoints and a historical perspective, context is lost.
The archive is recording 20 channels 24 hours a day of global TV and is about a Petabyte. There are 50,000 videos on archive now. Noteworthy is the archive of a full week of News on September 11, 2001, some of which you can find here. Music is quantitatively tiny in comparison. There're only 2-3 million records that have been produced over the last century and the archive has stored about a 100,000. As its obvious and in keeping with copyright infringement values of the Music Industry, this is taking the longest to consolidate. Software titles are only about 50,000 and again there are legal issues. Kahle is trying to build a business model where "free for all" and "loan for all" meet somewhere in the middle.

Of course for every Utopian dream that comes out of Silicon Valley, it is followed keenly by sharks, and the great white thats in the thick of it today is none other than Google Books. according to Wikipedia, Google is scanning more than 3,000 books per day, a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually. Google has encountered choppy waters itself as
The Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers have separately sued Google, citing "massive copyright infringement. Apparently it has been surreptitiously scanning books and uploading them until the owner becomes aware and yanks it off. The books are also scanned in English, leaving 3 Billion people out of their "historical or literary" say. Google's aim is qualitatively contrary to the adage "what is in the public domain should remain in the public domain."

The Library of Alexandria, repository of all written knowledge in its time was burnt by Julius Ceasar in his conquest of Egypt in 48 BC. where he set fire to his own ships, burnt the docks and accidentally destroyed the great library. Today a copy of The Wayback Machine resides within the library of Alexandria, free, for all.

Google - "A teensy weensy bit evil"

Well, no surprises here, Larry Page has raised eyebrows with its talk of AI being incorporated
into Google's search engine. Well there's a minority which is keeping watch on our favorite e-toy, Google Watch .

WYSIWYG WTH

About 20 years ago there was a new guy in town, and his name was WYSIWYG. It was the buzzword of the times and often semantically confused with Syzygy, Fuzzy Wuzzy logic and all things Polish. It was cool to have it somewhere in the cloudy nebulous regions of our subconscious but nobody really cared what it did or even what it was. WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and pronounced "wiz-ee-wig".

In Wikipedia it says that WYSIWYG acts in 3 different modes :
"Composition Mode - in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result, but with additional information useful while composing.
Layout Mode- in which the user sees something very similar to the end result, but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.
Preview mode- in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible."

You get the picture, or not. Without WYSIWIG, your resignation to your boss would actually have to be composed something like this;
And that's about "Dear Sir". By the time you've finished your resignation minus our WYS, you are likely to go out, buy a Remington and deck the halls with your version of Shotgun Annie.
Actually the above picture is of Mark-Up Language, commonly used by HTMLers(can't call em coders), but you get the Zeitgeist of the thing...persnickety fussy typing, massive numbers of colons, and a shaky "print" command. In fact the ubiquitous nature of the dreaded Font hadn't raised its ugly head yet, people didn't understand what a font did, because computers only used a simple text only display 40 characters wide and 24 tall. Now we have Turkish Genocide, Nasalization, Dingbat, a cornucopia of totally useless fonts we can flourish at any given moment. We have colour, we have margins, bullet points. Its origins are simple-Charles Simonyi was hired by Xerox PARC. He and Lampson developed Bravo, the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. And then he promptly went to work at Microsoft and in the begining there was Word. Simonyi made 1 Billion US$ off this ridiculous software, and we have been paying ever since.

Now you could actually format a composition and have a pretty good facsimile at the end. However, WYSIWYG has had a few things called at it, and for some very good reasons, one of them being WYGIWYG -What You Get Is What You Get or WYGIWYWNG (pronounced "whining")- What You Get Is Not What You Want. The reason is quite simple;

1. The resolution of your printer is far superior to the resolution of your monitor. As of 2007, monitors typically have a resolution of between 92 and 125 pixels per inch. Printers generally have resolutions between 240 and 1440 pixels per inch. This means that everything will gain definition and contrast once you print it, whether you like it or not. Your stylized fonts will look like wrought iron toothpicks, and that lovely lens blur filter pass that you just applied will look like a muddy view of the nearest pawn shop window with gnarly hands sticking out of it. ALWAYS OVERCOMPENSATE.

2. Lets talk about colour shall we. Its the one thing that sends my print-out bills skyrocketing. For one, saturation, hue and contrast need to be calibrated and if you are an Apple Follower then you'll be happy to know that the Mac comes with its own calibration system. However the catch here is, you are calibrating based on your own eye. I know you can tell y'self "wth..I used my bloody eyes to compose this damn thing". Well sorry pal, thats just not good enough..your final print colours are still likely to come out desaturated, and with a loss of detail. What you need, if you are actually printing professional grade stuff, is a colorimeter. In its heyday it was a bulky apparatus resembling R2D2, now it comes in a rather less appealing but very functional form known as a SPYDER. You stick it in front of your monitor and allow it to do its creepy cal liberation, and you are done. This PCMAG Article is a little old so don't be too burned over the price. You can now get a Spyder2Express for $79. After a host of colour tragedies and disappointments you'll find that this little baby keeps the money in the bag.

As for WYSIWYG, oh its still around, infact it is mandatory for almost every practical output that comes offscreen, we just refer to it as wysiwyg, if at all, after all its had a rather quiet decade.

The Long Now

I believe I need to put this "out there" because the events of the last few days, the stock market crash and the bombing in India, the 3 dead infants and 1200 sick in China from tainted food, all just tends to highlight that something has gone terribly wrong in the way we think. In a world of exigencies, whether its the minute tremors on the exchange, instant wealth and loss, instant stardom and obscurity and the politics of opportunism, it seems that we are rushing into the future and forsaking our present. We see the present as Risk Management, pithy, controllable, exploitable, with no thought to the larger consequences of our actions. The present is something you can put up on a billboard, that's the amount of detail and depth that we view it with. We have ADD on a scale of 4 billion.

The Long Now Foundation is more than a web page or a movement headed by pioneers of the digital age and the subculture which seeds it. Just like Oppenheimer after the fact, it seems that the owners of revolutionary technologies now want to see that it is in responsible hands. This philosophy is called "Deep Time". To paraphrase Stewart Brand, in ancient times a farmer would plant trees knowing that the beams of his house would need replacement 400 years from now. We cannot even imagine the next few years. Two huge forces are going to shape us in the next 50, the way we view time and the Singularity which will make time itself invalid. This blog attempts to familiarize the reader with both.

The Long Now Foundation took its inspiration from an observation by Brian Eno about New York life. Eno known as the "Godfather of ambient music" is the founding member of Roxy Music. His full article, The Big Here and Long Now, if freely available but I've taken the liberty to quote some passages.

"I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be ‘passing through’. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".

‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows....

......
Meanwhile, we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded with pots of treasure. We face a future where almost anything could happen. "

The Technological Singularity is a very familiar concept to sci-fi buffs and geeks alike. It portends of a time in the near future where technology would have reached such a level that it would be unintelligible to all of us. It would move on its own wheels, steer its own course, with its own purpose, and leave us a giant irrelevance, dissembling in the dust. It follows from Moore's Law, "the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer. Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras." -Wikipedia. The reason we may feel that it applies only minimally right now is because Corporations hold back their innovations for maximum profitability. The future is already patented.

The term "Technological Singularity" was coined by Vernor Vinge. The metaphor of the singularity is taken from astronomy. When a giant star collapses, its density is so great that it swallows everything which doesn't move faster than the speed of light. It becomes a black hole and this region where all light is drawn in, the "event horizon". Its worth having a look at Stewart Brand's article on it. Stewart Brand is the founding editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, as well as "The Well". He is also a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The man who applied the metaphor to human events is science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge in his novel 1991 novel Across Realtime. The characters realized that technology advance was radically self-accelerating at the time. Innovations that used to take years were being made in months and then days. Then the record stopped. Vinge's characters called the event the Singularity-"a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.

In the metaphor, radical progress is not progress, but the end of the world as we know it.


Opinions vary as to what would be the Singularity's leading mechanism. Proponents of nanotechnology (molecular engineering) are sure that the turning point will be "the assembler breakthrough"-when ultra-tiny, ultra-fast nanomachines capable of self-replication are devised. Others expect that it's the convergence of computer technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, each accelerating the other, that would fuse into a new order of life. Vinge himself sees the tipping point as the moment when machine intelligence, or machine-enhanced intelligence, surpasses normal human intelligence and takes over its own further progress. Another possibility is some emergent property of the all-embracing Internet, which Vinge proposes might "suddenly awaken."

The Long Now Foundation, followed through on its philosophy and decided to build the "Millennium Clock". The architect was none other than Danny Hillis. Danny Hillis is the inventor of massively parallel supercomputers. He pioneered the technology such as the RAID disk array used to store large databases today. He is in the process of creating an artificial life program that emulates biological evolution in the real world.

"I want to build
a clock that ticks
once a year.

The century hand
advances once every
100 years, and the
cuckoo comes out
on the millenium

I want the cuckoo
to come out every
millenium for the
next 10,000 years

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks." - Hillis on the Millennium Clock

"The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000. At midnight on New Year's Eve, the date indicator changed from 01999 to 02000, and the chime struck twice, to ring in the "third millennium". The Long Now Foundation has purchased a mountaintop near Ely, Nevada, surrounded by the Great Basin National Park, for the permanent storage of the full sized clock, once it is constructed." -Wikipedia

And this is where we are at.
For those who want to have a shot at predicting the future, you can go up against the very people who made it possible @ The Long Bets "The arena for accountable predictions"

In Rememberance

20 people died yesterday, somebody's brother, wife, child, father, mother, sister. I'm not going to write where they died and how they died because I'm not going to give those responsible what they want. People died, for no reason and people are living with that loss. To those who believe that they are correct, that their vision of the world is the only viable one, I say, you are in hell already because you stripped away your own humanity.

Know Your Blogging Rights

"From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public.

EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight —and win—more cases."

• DRM (Digital Rights Management) : Copyright protection (restrictions) on Itunes, WMA, Real Networks & Napster 2.0. You only own things ONCE
  

Kevin Kelly's E-book "True Films 3.0". Free Download

Kevin Kelly's wikipedia entry reads - Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has also been a writer, photographer and conservationist. Kelly is a student of cultures (Asian ones in particular) and is considered by some an expert in digital culture.

His personal site is www.kk.org, where among articles and blogs you can also find his paradigm setting E-book Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World.
Also present are
New Rules for the New Economy
And
True Films 3.0 is his recent E-book in PDF format explicitly for download. Scroll to the end of the page for the file.

Support Kevin Kelly, buy hardcopies of his books. You won't get a better bang for your buck.

Your Residual Self

Set and his brother Osiris, half-brother technically speaking, anyone who's dared to tumble through the vengeful, ethnically confused hierarchy which is the Egyptian cosmogony will have no problems with that. Not so with Set, who has a problem with Osiris, and so irritating is this problem that he dismembers him into teeny little bits and throws them into the nearest Egyptian swamp. It takes Isis, Osiris's devoted wife to put him back together again. Let me introduce you to your Residual Self, your fractured emergent Doppelganger. Right now it exists as a minute speck, weak, like a new fetus enveloped in the warmth and anonymity which is the Web 2.0. It's the beginning of a mirror image infinitesimally small,slowly coalescing, a hundred bits of seemingly unconnected information about yourself stored in various massive corporate and governmental servers. You are the "target ", to which you can add "audience", "consumer", "troll" that elusive creature that can determine the economic or strategic model of a company. Every time you make a purchase, subscribe, search and browse, you are depositing a tag with your name on it. The sum of your interactions maybe innocuous..yesterday's shop at MotherCare, for fast-flow nipples,.. Ikea, for bamboo slats, Futureshop.. for your PS3 accesories, Expedia for your plane tickets, The Guardian.. for less on Gordon Brown, and E! for more on Seth Rogen. As Web 3.0 approaches, and we find ourselves more dependent than ever on online accessibility and we spend more time online trying to spend less money and effort in the real world. In the meantime this digital fetus gets a little bigger and with a little help organized. But its not really a homogeneous entity you say. And its not. Yet. It will be if someone decides that your "complete" profile is worth a lot of money, or if the self-organizing principle that is Artificial Intelligence, begins to form complexity. There is of course the option to embed yourself in a virtual world straightaway, but there is qualitative difference, the latter you can control the former you can not,. not much. It is important NOW to understand where exactly your doppelganger is and you might, just might, be able to have a say whether it will be a Jeeves or a Frankenstein. After all it is the direct sum of your subconscious needs and desires, your curiosity and yes, plain old laziness.

The first indications that something odd is going on is when you start receiving electronic flyers for grain-fed chicken and Taichi classes. This is a direct consequence of a Data mining algorithm which will determine who we are and what we consume, we will be given what we are most likely to like, or the next best thing. Initially there will be lots of hits and misses, as the algorithms are still immature, corporations are not trading data that freely and your prescence is mostly minimal. Though it seems at first glance that a whole world of choices is opening upto us, our choices will eventually shrink because that is the indestructible arithmetic of any successful economic model,small overheads. Lateral thinking which has often been seen as the exclusive domain of annoying advertising executives, will be what that chains us to the things we consume. I clicked on a purple plum on website x and gave it a rating of 4, the common denominator being that prunes are a great source of natural fibre especially for those that suffer flatulence, I got Lilydale and Taichi. Far fetched..oh you have no idea how bizarre its going to get. Data mining is the exploration of large databases for discovering relevant patterns. "Behavioral analytics requires the capturing, analyzing and acting on consumer actions and reacting with precise counter-actions, which are beneficial to both. Behavioral analytics is made possible by subscription to advertising, demographics or recommendation networks, as well as by the use of traditional data mining software, web and mobile analytics as well as new real-time streaming analytical software or a combination of all. " - Jesus Mena. All those little harmless things that we don't pay attention to, cookies, widgets, innocuous polls, star ratings, all add to our online profile. Right now you are on more than one mailing list with your psychological profile attached to it. So the question is how did we get here and how can we choose not to stay here before its too late.

To begin with the simplest security you need to look out for is the little lock on the corner of your browser. This indicates whether its a SSL ( Secure Socket Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) which is essential and indication that all data transfer between your web browser and the server is secure. However this only protects data in transit, rather than the site itself and this leads the door open for Phishing, Pharming and the Evil Twin activities. Then there are webcrawler applications that download details of entire sites rather than attacking servers. The other entity we must be aware of are BOTs. BOTs short for "Robots" are Artificial Intelligence programs doing automated tasks which are too repetitive and time consuming for a human to do. Spambots harvest e-mail addresses from contact info or guestbook pages. Or you can channel a BOT to look for bargains on a site like E-bay. There are millions of them, and they are running in the background all the time, just know that for every single one we use there will be atleast 10 that use us as information-for-profit. Many website secure themselves from BOT incursions by using a simple visual quiz. Remember that box of twisted letters and numbers that you are sometimes asked to type in for authentication. Well, a BOT can not comprehend it, and you are safe.
So to conclude,
Check for a lock on your web-browser,
Check for HTTPS in your URL,
Delete all cookies and widgets after browsing,
Feel confident that a site is safe from BOT attacks by the appearance of the little box of random alphabets and numbers,
Never save your passwords online,
Never open applications or e-mail that seems unfamiliar or out of character.
Or go through a proxy site that makes all your interactions anonymous.

The most famous of the latter was Anonymizer, extremely popular in the last decade, a proxy site which enabled you to browse without ever divulging the IP of your PC. I remember it being blocked in Dubai, no surprises there. Unfortunately it has shut down. "With no fanfare, and apparently no outcry from the privacy community, Anonymizer Inc. discontinued its web-based Private Surfing service effective June 20, 2007. No reason was given, either on the Anonymizer web site or on founder Lance Cottrell's privacy blog. Private Surfing customers are now required to download a anonymizing client that handles all TCP traffic, but the program is Windows-only (with Vista support still a work-in-progress). And of course it's closed-source, which means it has few advantages over several other alternatives." - Slash-Dot. There are alternatives. TOR is anti traffic-surveillance software, which is compatible with both PCs and Macs. It's an anonymous distributed network and its free. Its run by a relay of volunteers and is often used by NGOs(though most suck upto the govt for funds and are more than happy to be surveillanced) and Journalists (who are, hopefully, not).

You can choose to participate willingly in the creation and growth of your residual self, one which is not the prey of data-mining programs. But this self is about as organic as styrofoam. The most popular of user-domains were the MUDs (multi-user dungeon/domain/dimension). The term MUD encompasses many multi-user environments including MOOs, MUSHes, MUCKs and are text based universes, an endless series of rooms e.g LambdaMOO using Telnet. At the other end of the spectrum lies a high-end Gameplay oriented universe of the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) strategy game such as World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment. Founded in 2001, it has over 10 million subscribers. Another extremely popular environment was SimCity - created by Will Wright in the late 80s, it was a city building simulation game with social networking as its prime goal. The SIMS, released in 2000 & published by EA is the best-selling PC games ever with 6.3 million copies. You download the game and play on a server, present as an "Avatar", a virtual self with its own clothing, hairstyle and credit history.

The complexity of the "in world experience" has now reached another degree with the coming of Second Life. Its an online, 3-D virtual world imagined and created by its residents (in fact it seems to mirror smalltown USA with a property market of Miami). Residents own intellectual property rights, they can create buildings, art, fashion and hence they can trade, buy, sell. The currency of choice is the Linden Dollar which can be traded for US Dollars, and this economy supports millions of dollars in trade every year. It is a virtual world, filled with avatars of residents and a viable economic model where people trade and invest in properties. These transactions are referred to as being of "in world" in nature. People can walk, run and fly and use transport but also create transport. And the deus ex machina of nerds worldwide lets you Teleport. The world is divided into 256x256m areas of land called a "region" or "sims" and given a unique name and content rating such as PG or Mature. Wikipedia - "The Maldives was the first country to open an embassy in Second Life. In early 2007, LifeChurch.tv, a Christian church headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma, and with 11 real world campuses in the USA, created "Experience Island" and opened its 12th campus in Second Life."

There's a long way to go before creating something close to Gibson's Idoru, a virtual Japanese pop-goddess, an AI program that exists as a hologram in the real world. There's a long way to go when you can completely upload your persona onto a server and completely forsake the "real". Right now Avatars are just badly rendered marionettes with polygons dying to burst out from their armpits. However the fact is, that for most people partaking in these worlds, text or 3-D, the social experience is as real as anything outside of cyberspace. BOTs will become more ubiquitous and complex, our profiles will coalesce towards a real world resemblance and privacy will be circumvented. BOTs are a double-edged sword, the more we use them, the less we will object to being used by them. Eventually we will end up having our own BOT proxying for us and simply fall into the habit of letting the Bot do all the heavy lifting. Like an infant it too will face a whole manner of threats. If it swims to the darker corners of cyberspace it can easily be turned into malware and set loose upon its creator. We will have to choose the quantity and quality of parental intervention, otherwise we will have an offspring who you'll be meeting at a virtual police station, virtual bail in hand or a quisling that sells off your dearest secrets to the highest bidder.

Krishna Das & The Kirtan Posse

Listening to Krishna Das on some downtime. *self-censored 150 words of great and essential wisdom, mostly about how hashishins can be fended off by handing them a pair of maracas.*

Downside - Bong's cost 40 bucks..and Gabcast won't allow MP3 Album upload.

Fractal Art

I'm not big on fractal art. It just doesn't move me. Yes its very clever, and when Benoit Mandelbrot published his book and showed us his forms, we were awestruck. The point was, here was pure mathematics, in fact "monster", "pathalogical" mathematics producing these incredibly simple, elegant and natural forms. If it was a graphic artist, (unless your are Euclid and you can't be because he's dead) producing mathematics, the end result would not exactly be pretty, in fact it would probably be fatal.
However 20 million iterations down the line, anyone who has used fractal creation software will tell you, its mainly a hit and miss process, resulting in perfect forms and saturated colours(asking for a wash) and if you are really honest, repetition. I should qualify that the repetition that I allude to here is not the type created on mass market software like Kai Power Tools, for in the latter one finds that although no two fractals are the same, the interface is limiting and if you are a lazy graphic artist, its very easy to be happy with your creations that require only a few offsets. The repetition here is not a mathematical function, rather an attribute of our smug self-satisfaction at creating epiphanies with a few clicks of a button. To those who constantly tweak and tune their little algorithms, props to you, because its that very process, hard bloody work, which is art. The sad thing is that many fang_raphicsTM (TMMINEEEEEE!) have mistaken 'fractal iteration" or "refinement" for "repetition" and what you have is thousands on thousands of bright and totally uninteresting batik prints, each one so formally perfect that even the best of forgers couldn't replicate it exactly. But the basic premise of producing eye movement is lacking, big time. Even on dope, a single frame of Miyazaki's Spirited Away is way more visually rich, and colorfully harmonic than any psychedelia postcard fractals are likely to produce. With Joe Fractal Art you are meant to be floored, viewing it like a head-on collision, you are wallpapered.

Nor am I a big fan of pictures of trees and snowflakes, especially ones with a nude mermaid, rampant unicorn and celtic runes thrown in. I do not like pictures of serene (and blanched) broccoli either. I rather BE in a tree, thanks. I'd rather watch swarms of sparrows fly over a lake or a horizon of Thika tress on some plain in Africa*(View On Tv, I wouldn't risk having my head shot off and knickers stolen from my still warm body, not that modesty is something you worry about when you don't have a head). I'm looking for a far different and elusive species. I'm looking for ways in which we can SEE fractally.

While trying to figure out whether this blog shows up on a search engine effectively, the link listed above me led to some horrible sounding commercial site, but the item I found listed in there just blew my mind. This is Fracthis, the fractal art of Chris Oldfield . It's one picture, but what a picture. This is something that a Pollock, a Miro or an Escher would do. Initially I thought I was looking at a top view of a bunch of tables at a restaurant, and how each table seemed as complex as the larger whole. It's not. What it just might be is the beginnings of a whole new sensibility or the resurgence of an incredibly old one.

If you want to dabble for yourself you can try Apophysis "a free, open, source fractal flame editor and renderer" - Wikipedia. If you want to take it further, you can try BRYCE for terrian and other complex figures in 3-D. I'm still waiting for some Houdini fiends to say "you know nothing about all things procedural" (trust me, they really speak like that, if they speak at all)
The really fun stuff are SIRDS, stereophonic diagrams, images you view by crossing your eyes and in return a well defined unrelated image will appear in 3-D out of random noise. Don't try viewing a SIRD onscreen, as you eyes constantly try to uncross horizontally while reading vertically..it is just an incredibly bad idea unless you find epilepsy a fun experience. Yeah..do something daring today..go and buy yourself an analog SIRD.

* In no way is this site trying to disparage the continent of Africa. It is the womb of humanity, rich in fractal villages that defy architectural conventions. Africa is a welcoming place for many nationalities, it is the home of millions of Indians and Chinese who continue to extract gold, conflict diamonds, rhino horn and teak forests. Many forms of art thrive there, most of which you may find on your dining table. I was talking about napkin rings.

Google Me This

Well I've been allowed to reside here and freely vent, chuckle and rant, and like a good tenant, I thought I'd find a little more about my kindly landlord, only to discover that its none other than Norman Google Bates. So I decided to google Google. Predictably, after typing "Google" I was rewarded with google.ca, google.com, google directory,google maps..not until the 8th listing did I get Google-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I want to emphasize this because this is a battle of epic proportions, where Google is the Joker, hiding behind its crude grade-3 logo, and our Wiki, is nothing short of The Bat.

Google is the fat cat of the Internet, weighing a good 23 Billion dollars and should instead be called GOOOOOOOOOOGLE. The unofficial company slogan is "Don't be evil", yes, truly..you can imagine long lines of white coated lab technicians each with a smiley button, humourless as yesterday's potato. Googleisms-
"Google is known for its relaxed corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator."
"It is identified multiple times as the #1 Best Place to Work"
I save the best for the last, smiley in hand..but by now its become a laughey, a very large laughey.
"All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them." What, you wonder do they do with the rest of the 80%? Google?

You cannot but assume this wiki is being produced by this Neo-Googler factotum, ass on the line, trying to curry favour with his equally humourless boss, for as is our fate we are served with more mindnumbing facts, that Google Corp feels is appropriate of its self-image.
Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex) A googolplex is the number 10googol, which means it's a 1 followed by a googol of zeros (i.e. 10100 zeros).
Wow, Google bases its inspiration on a bunch of Zeroes. Run..duck..thats a herd of irony fleeing and throwing themselves off a cliff. It is not done with us yet, there is the ever hip Google Radio. caller : "hello, I can't find my husband" . DJ:"go to google maps. Next caller". Dj "you again: caller: "my husband is posted as deceased. Thrice. And thats not even his picture". Imagine the power of this corporation that it actually believes there will be a demand for something so totally uncool. We are Google for we are mainly zeroes(notice how the dimunitive e.e.cummings approach offsets any fears that we are facing a very large, confident, steamroller).
If you are under the impression that Google is a great innovator , and that would be downright silly knowing that its employees only work 20% of the time, think again
Google acquires Blogger
Google acquires Writely
Google acquires Keyhole Inc (Google Earth)
Google acquires Youtube
Google acquires JotSpot
Google signs an agreement to acquire enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini. Oh no no red flags here. Its Google after all. The red flag is Google China, transplanting its slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Dare to search" :D

Anyway the platitudes continued, and you might just go back to something productive unless you chance to glance upon an innocuous little word called "knol", third in line from the bottom.
Knol is google's attempt to wipe out Wikipedia. I deliberately linked Knol, because no longer are we presented with Google's humble and childlike self. We are presented with a sophisticated appealing version of what appears to be Wikipedia, with a few major differences. This is Google's confident self, flush with a major fanny pack of $$$, and it doesn't pull any punches when it says "Knol pages are meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read". Ok, imitation is the best form of flattery, and who wouldn't welcome more choices. Just like we often click on "terms of agreement" and move on to posting pictures of ourselves as cute babies, y'know like who the hell wants to read that long ugly thing, we might miss some massive implications hidden in the fine print.

1. All contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.
2. The authors have an option to allow their knols to be edited by the public, to make them editable only to co-authors or to make them closed entirely.
3. They may also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense to their knols.

And finally, jubiliantly losing its teachers pet position in Grade 3...
4. Relevant nudity is allowed (in most countries).
Whay!!!

Things haven't changed all that much really.You might guess correctly that Google's top order of billionerds are still grappling with their nerdy selves, forsaking the dismay of their (minute)army of marketeers, public relations experts, and advertizing agencies, by going ahead and naming Knol after as a unit of knowledge.

So whats the bottomline, and google has one big ass bottom.
The enforcement of intellectual property rights. Good? Y'think? Heard about the 1990s US patent on turmeric, tell a billion Indians who have been eating and applying its medical properties for 3000 years. Google becomes the arbiter of "hey it belongs to me", simply because its published it under authorship. Its Advertizement driven, and that means you may not necessarily get the best results but one thats propped by the Heavies on the page. And what about individual contributions, what about the simpler pleasure of updates, annonates, collates that we all love participating in, the essence of the "wiki" in "Wikipedia", a universal collaborative not-for-profit effort. Just as Apple didn't die out under the behemoth of Microsoft,
we can hope that the intense personal attachment we feel towards this humble and useful tool, that Wikipedia survives. Right now, Google is making Microsoft look positively angelic.

Vicky Cristina Bronson

Here is the quickest way to put yourself into a trance, otherwise known by its Teutonic name Crossreferencing. Breakfast time, scan the newspaper supplement for Literature, oh look a link, type the link, and a whole cartload of links falls into your lap. Based on these links order a book online, only to find at the end of the week, the hardcopy lists so and so as its inspiration who resides, ooh where else but in the blogosphere. Guttenberg to ASCII and back again..heigh-ho, merry-ho, smiley in place.

Onward, with Zero ( I always spell 0 & 1,"Zero" and "One", you have to be respectful to these guys, you'll be workin' for them now..for the rest of your lives.. (italics MUST sound as if coming from the bottom of a toilet for full effect.)) Anyway, no recall as to where I stumbled across the name Po Bronson, I chase the dragon for his work The Relentless Pursuit of Connection. Of course I don't find it, are you kidding me, all this activity would actually amount to something. A fan of creationism I'm not, but it seems we are probably genetically allied more to the headless-chicken than the naked ape. To my great surprise (yes this is an oft repeating pattern..if you are clueless every single thing is gonna knock you out) he writes about children, and he writes about children and parents (these two subspecies hasn't been seen together since Ted Nugent. Ted being God's Own Protoype(nod to you oh dead Hunter Thompson..there should be an expiry on well expired people..) sent to lay waste to pinko, liberal, progressive, animal loving PEOPLE OF COLOR..one in the eye for you, you old bastard). I really hate this guy, yes, I'm a hater. TedvsTED, no contest.

I give you Po Bronson

The Lost Hour - Sleep Deprived Children
How a single hour less of sleep has a huge impact on grades, and obesity.

Learning to Lie - Are Children Copying Parents
What begins as an early marker of intelligence, becomes a pattern kids grow into.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids
I haven't finished reading this yet.

I'm just a chuffed little garden gnome ready to SENNNNND IT OFFFFFF into the farthest reaches of the GALAXY. Just repeat this mantra a few times ala James Earl Jones where the caps occur..its a feel good moment.

And what about the book..the hero of our story...The Relentless Pursuit of Connection, it completely eludes my search engine..well Google is more "OUR" search engine, like the Everyman's farty old uncle. Yeah.. you can have him. He is YOURS.

"Can Kids Teach Themselves"

I am buying myself some time before the next post, and its too beautiful a day to be stuck in some cavern punching away at the keyboard.

This is a talk by Sugata Mitra @ TED which is light as it is surprising in its conclusions. I wholeheartedly recommend browsing through TED as its a remarkable and accessible resource.

The Why

It is nesting season. This is the time when vast numbers and species of birds, tired from their long journeys, stop to breathe, flirt, swim, breed and build. Some birds are hoarders, some are oppurtunists, their nests reflecting the strange melee, snatched from under their discriminating gaze, bits of fibre and fluff, their own poop and more often these days, long chained polymers indegistible by many that populate their ecosystem, a brown and gray complexity arising from the exigencies that are their daily lives.

This is not a wildly ambitous, technically savvy (and blind) attempt to provide solutions. All this blog is, is a fragile nest. It will assimilate and try and co-relate emerging patterns present in popular culture. It will make accessible science-fiction literature to new moms and dads. It will try to bring to light the essence of gaming and virtual worlds, hopefully settling once and for all erroneous information and phobias about them. It will try to be inclusive about emergent technologies and sometimes wander quiveringly into the realm of science. This blog will attempt to be a human-machine interface, where without trepidation we can say a machine is nothing more than an overbuilt algorithm. All comments and criticisms are welcome. And I hope, that you the reader, wandering into its weak gravitational pull, might say "hey this makes sense in my world".

I’m a reluctant blogger, as the world is increasingly meshed, I feel drawn to make sense of this complexity. Gone are the days when one invention completely dominated the public imagination, now there are a million small revolutions occurring every single day, and most of will change the face of communication as we know it today. We are not just talking about broadband speeds, or vocabulary, we are talking about our own personal commitment and type of involvement in this new superstructure. We are the fuel that is driving this Leviathan, we just don't know it yet.


As people we are likely to feel that THIS world is receeding from our grasp. The huge amount of data and connections, sensory and textual overload, the ability of obscure corporations in Palo Alto, India, Micronesia to affect how we buy our groceries, all this seemingly points to the fact that we are not in control. Readers of Gibson may remember something called “nodal points”. These are areas in our communications geometry where many diverse streams co-incidentally converge to create something that has a very large effect, a bit like the epicenter of a tidal wave. Most would believe this is the purview of Futures Trading, it is not, though it could well be. Those that can trawl the vast sea of information and the mindnumbing overload of data succesfully, will probably secure more than a modest future for themselves. For the rest of us, pinned like Gulliver by our habits, our future is totally out of our control. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We are on auto pilot, our plane will land, we will get our baggage, and that’s about all we care about. The fact is, our bodies want our brains to be small and economical, while our artifacts, language, culture, huge amounts of useless data, require us to have large brains which put a huge strain on our bodies. We will have to augument ourselves, it can be a simple thing as an Ipod carrying 40 Gigs of music (information) and it could be nano implants that regulate our melatonin, all this simply because we are on the cusp of great change, our artifacts require it.

Should we be passive consumers. Should we just indulge in the new technologies minimally, pay our bills, fill university applications, download music, blog ? What if instead we embrace it, believe that this new economy, and the technology that drives it, is far more inclusive than any before it. What if we look at the web as an enabler, an enabler that's not self-conscious about its innards, in fact it openly begs participation. What if you said, its not enough just for my kids, the next generation to immerse themselves in it, and be mindlessly driven to participate as if there was no option. What if, I the individual, the parent, the spouse, commits to learning the bricks and mortar that make up this mesh, and guide our children so they can make the right choices.

There are a couple of things we need to understand and well. These are quintessential to technology because it is quintessential to life as we know it. Fractal recursion is the basis of all life and diversity. It is the shape of the leaf you hold in your hand, the touch of a snowflake on your nose, the contours of a shell that lies on the beach, the very shape of the beach itself.
"In simple terms, the recursive definition is one that grows an awareness and clarity upon itself toward a conclusive end, with each recurrence contributing something new toward the end definition. The recurring theme or influence will strengthen the definition as it is repeatedly applied to itself, and will eventually arrive at a point where no more recurrence is required." - Wikipedia.
What does this tell us... it is self similar and it is an iterative process. It is a process that has been going on for 6 billion years, in every nook and cranny of the universe. It is a process, not just of the formation of rocks and trees and pretty computer graphics. It is a relationship, a relationship between us and our progeny. Secondly, everything alive in this universe runs on what is known as a Evolutionary Algorithm. Algorithm is not a word that we should be frightened of, it is why we are here. It is just a set of well defined instructions which terminate once a state is achieved. It is repeatable, and each time it will end in the same result. An evolutionary algorithm, simply put, is the assumption that if there are creatures that vary, and if there is a struggle for existence where most don't survive, and if the few survivors pass on to their offspring the very thing that helped them survive, then those offspring will be better adapted to their environment than their parents were. Genetically, it has been a mindless process of replication, emergent order from simple repetition, with no intelligence guiding it. No, we face a challenge where our artifacts will supercede us, how do we make sure that we still remain relevant, necessary.
So in conclusion what are we looking at
a) what is that thing that helps us survive
b) how do we translate this so our children can flourish
c) and most important how do we do this in a way that make them better human beings that can see value in all things animate and inanimate. And in doing so, we maintain sustainability and our humanity.
Instead of making artifacts that build other artifacts, why can't we create ones that make it easier for the elderly, the disabled, the disenfranchised and disaffected to enter into a new contract that can alleviate their present condition. No one left behind.