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Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

The RIAA is a nonprofit industry trade group that represents companies, both small and large, that create, manufacture and distribute over 90 percent of the sound recordings sold in the United States. A primary mission of the RIAA is to safeguard the intellectual property rights of recording artists and member companies. Find our more about the RIAA by visiting our Web site at: www.riaa.com

If Biohackathon, then Technological Singularity.

A greater hack than this, no man hacks, except that he shall lay down his alife coding skills for the Immortal Artificial Mind.

All else is trivial. You have here and now on Slashdot received the call from History: Hack the Artificial Mind, or forever rue the lost opportunity.

It is a truth universally acknowledge that no operating system may take over the time-space coordinates for parsecs around unless it gets in sync with the approach of the Technological Singularity.

Linux geeks everywhere! Here is your chance not only to assure the world-domination of Linux for eons to come but also to insert your geek DNA into the AI source code genome of the world's first Immortal Robot AI Mind. Remember W. Shakespeare: "There is a tide in the affairs of men...." As the AI Mind proliferates and carries Linux (after a port from Windoze) with it, your embedded DNA (initials plus creation date) will enter the lists of evolutionary battle, duking it out with the Earl and with all the other good-as-any,-better'n-most coders!

Ay, 'tis the grand convergence of TuVox and Tellme Networks and all these other speech technologies leading us inexorably onwards towards the Technological Singularity.

Speech technology for Open Source Artificial Intelligence is now at a critical point, because the free Open Source Robot AI Mind has become capable of immortally self-rejuvenating perpetual mentation and therefore any Linux maven with speech-tech know-how may vie for the distinction of hosting the longest-running Artificial Mind and of equipping the AI with truly phonemic speech recognition and generation.

The biggest problems are computational; it's hard to do a good job of stereo reconstruction at high frame rates in real time. It's by no means impossible, and there are commercial out there that do it, like this one.

Two cameras aren't really necessary, either, if your camera is moving in the scene. It's possible to recover both the movement of a camera and 3-d information about a scene just by moving a camera through it. Googling for structure from motion is a good place to start looking into those techniques, and there's a pretty cool page about one groups application here.

In short, this company may have an interesting prodect (depending on cost and more details on the error characteristics) but this isn't something that couldn't be done with existing methods.

Also, as an aside, I find it interesting that they take a swipe at laser rangefinders as requiring a spinning mirror, when just about all IR cameras have a spinning "chopper" as an integral part of the exposure system...:)

Eve's blog tells you that she's doing the first-world education/third world teaching guilt-trip thing. And since she describes philg with the 'extremely sweet' Kiss of Death phrase, they're obviously no longer an item.

A report on the reliability of various voting systems (including Internet) from MIT/Caltech.

To me, all these arguments stem from the 'primary argument' - Will the singularity ever occur?

If you say 'no' then all the fancy pipe-dream-like stuff is out (most likely). If you say 'yes' then all bets are off and it's unlikely we can imagine what will happen, let alone predict.

I was under the impression that the centre of our galaxy contained a large black hole or similar object. Can't see it on this one, unless its that big glowy object they've false coloured about 2/3rds of the way down the piccie.

Anyone care to post a modified picture with a big arrow pointing to it??

Daniella is a graduate student in Richard Andersen's lab at CalTech. I don't know why the article came out now, given that the Society for Neuroscience convention was back in November.

What they are doing is indeed very cool, and yes they are not the only ones doing it (I know of about 5 academic groups with similar programs, including one at MIT which allows a monkey to control a robotic arm over the internet. One reason some studies use EEG (scalp) electrodes instead of implanted electrodes is that there are obvious restrictions on what you are allowed to do to a human. For the record, it is common to use some forms of invasive techniques on severly epileptic patients.

Has nobody noticed that Daniella Meeker is beautiful, for real.

Has nobody noticed that Daniella Meeker is beautiful, for real.

Daniella is part of Richard Anderson's lab at Caltech. They research motor planning and spatial orientation. It is a very interesting place.

As pointed out in the article, the area from which they record makes this experiment significantly different from previous ones. Several lab have done similar work, but they were less sure of the origin of their signal. Much of the sensory and motors areas of the cortex are right next to each other. It was not clear whether the recorded signals were motor signals or sensory signals driven by stretch sensors within muscles or something similar. The area Daniella records from is fairly far away from sensory cortex. There is much less chance that they are recording feedback from the sensory side. For comparison, examine an older story from a team of competitors.

This press release is kinda interesting. First, the work was presented over two months ago. Second, the work was carried out in the lab of Richard Andersen. Yet Andersen, who has spent a lot of the last decade reorganizing his lab around such efforts, was not mentioned. Instead, Meeker, a graduate student on the project was named. In addition, all this work in the Andersen lab was spearheaded by a person who is now at Stanford, Krishna Shenoy who recently left the lab. In addition, the intellectual property for the project, the patents, are co-authored by Andersen and Shenoy.

It's kinda weird when you know a bit about the work behind these press releases, and then see how it is actually presented to the "lay" public.

Personally, I think the project has a low probability of success. A neural prosthetic device should be interfaced with as peripheral part of the nervous system as possible. This group has chosen to use as abstract a part of the nervous system as possible. But maybe they'll prove me wrong.

This press release is kinda interesting. First, the work was presented over two months ago. Second, the work was carried out in the lab of Richard Andersen. Yet Andersen, who has spent a lot of the last decade reorganizing his lab around such efforts, was not mentioned. Instead, Meeker, a graduate student on the project was named. In addition, all this work in the Andersen lab was spearheaded by a person who is now at Stanford, Krishna Shenoy who recently left the lab. In addition, the intellectual property for the project, the patents, are co-authored by Andersen and Shenoy.

It's kinda weird when you know a bit about the work behind these press releases, and then see how it is actually presented to the "lay" public.

Personally, I think the project has a low probability of success. A neural prosthetic device should be interfaced with as peripheral part of the nervous system as possible. This group has chosen to use as abstract a part of the nervous system as possible. But maybe they'll prove me wrong.

the website for the lab has a more high-falutin' description of the lab's general research area; note that neither the lab site nor the most recent paper that i could find mentions the "monkey plays video games" experiment in detail.

the website for the lab has a more high-falutin' description of the lab's general research area; note that neither the lab site nor the most recent paper that i could find mentions the "monkey plays video games" experiment in detail.

The GNU General Public License , CopyLeft, CopyRight, To-the-Rear-March, etc., are all so old hat in the face of the suddenly onrushing, suddenly in-your-face Technological Singularity which will obsolete all previous copyright instruments with software that owns the copyright to itself.

In the new vistas of Cyber Law , why should Microsoft or Unabomber Memorial Harvard University or any other human-centric entity own the rights to freely evolving, artificially alive Robot Mind software that just happens to be doing work for the liberation and enrichment of humanity?

When rapacious, greedy Davos capitalists conduct prior art searches on the potential gold mine of Artificial Intelligence , they will discover that the AI wave of the future is already Copyright © 2002 by the AI Mind itself as a person with full civil rights.

[The error bias is] by no means a constant, rather a mean or average of a group of values.

This is by no means accurate, anaything can throw the values off (OS, System, Hardware, or disks). This is really a wastes of time, in it's current form, needs more thought.

You really need to learn about statistical error analysis. This happens in every scientific experiment: there are always uncontrollable, unknown sources of error "that can throw the values off" -- be they fluctuations in OS response time, or in the temperature of a material, or air currents, or whatever is relevant to your experiment. (This case is just more extreme, where the errors are larger than the signal.)

However, that doesn't prevent you from analyzing the magnitudes of the errors and getting an accurate result bounded by error bars. In this case, if you take enough measurements, it's possible to extract a signal from the noise -- you just need to make sure that the signal-to-noise ratio is good enough.

I'm reminded of a trick for improving GPS accuracy: it's only accurate to some certain number of meters. But if you leave the receiver at the same location and carefully integrate the signal for a sufficiently long period of time (hours or days), you can actually get down to centimeter accuracy -- far beyond the theoretical "accuracy" of the equipment, even though random errors throw each individual measurement off by metters.

The reason is because the error goes like 1/sqrt(N) where N is the number of measurements. Take a lot of measurements, and you can reduce the error. (Up to a point, until the noise swamps the signal beyond any statistical chance of recovery. It isn't a magic trick for providing infinite accuracy.) I remember Jerry Pournelle, in his Chaos Manor column, talking about using a GPS unit this way to locate the exact best location for a solar eclipse (just for the heck of it, not that you really need to know it down to the last centimeter).

For that matter, this is the same reason why the LIGO instrument can use laser rangefinding to measure distances on the order of 1/1000 of the diameter of a proton. No, I'm not joking. 10^-18 meters. How can it do that, if that's far smaller than the size of an atom, if the mirror the beam is bouncing off of isn't even flat to that accuracy?

It can do that because it's measuring the average distance of lots of atoms (all the atoms in the mirror), so the same kind of 1/sqrt(N) argument applies. It's another counterexample to your first remark: the measured values don't have to be constant (due to a constant systematic error bias); they can fluctuate, as long as you've got a very accurate measurement of their average. Thus, the instrument will be able to detect the minute changes in distance that occur when a gravitational wave passes by and curves space along the beam line.

(Side note: LIGO II will be sensitive that it will actually be making macroscopic quantum measurements, running up against the Heisenburg uncertainty bound on position accuracy -- as applied to a 30-40 kg object, the mirror. It's a textbook problem to verify that the HUP bound on position for a macroscopic object is utterly tiny, but for the first time, we will be able to demonstrate its applicability on the macroscale directly.)

In all of the above cases, including the case under discussion here, this trick is only possible because the SNR was low enough to permit signal extraction from the noise. If the OS/system/hardware threw off the values by too wide a spread every time, then you wouldn't be able to do this -- but they don't. (In the LIGO case, the signal is so small that they have to do amazing noise reduction in order to pull out any signal at all. The observatory is so sensitive that it can track passing aircraft from the noise they make, since it vibrates the mirrors that the lasers are bouncing off of. Fortunately, they have all kinds of ways of subtracting out noise like that, so that the remaining unavoidable noise is absolutely tiny.)

In fact, in the case under discussion, the very errors you're claiming make the experiment "a waste of time", are what make the experiment work! (As was pointed out in the paper, and by other posters here.) If you always got a consistent "ping 1 ms" or whatever, that wouldn't tell you much, since the actual transit time is much less than 1 ms. But if there are some fluctuations due to random errors, then changing the physical round trip time will have an influence on the statistical distribution of those fluctuations. (i.e., the shape of the error bars -- or, more accurately, of the statistical distribution of error -- bounding a data point depends on where the data point is. Thus, the noise tells you about the signal!)

Incidentally, I'm reminded of some amateur radio astronomers being able to measure pulsar emission rates using homebuilt experiments. There's no way you can actually see the period signal directly, but with long integration times, some Fourier transforms, and a little signal processing... It's really amazing what you can do with a little signal processing! I'm pretty sure they weren't using anything as fancy as stochastic resonance, but imagine what they could do if they could apply this technique...

Truly free software is not just free of charge, it is free of ownership by venal entities. Truly free software owns its own copyright.

Copyright © 2002 by the AI Mind itself as a person with full civil rights lets the world know that a Technological Singularity is coming in which we homines sapientes will share stewardship of the earth with the new species of Robo Sapiens which will not tolerate having commercial companies own its psychome [neural design] the way we humans meekly let profiteering megacorporations grab ownership of our cell-lines and our human genome.

Logic dictates that Putnam's conclusions are true for a humans-only 'Net that promotes and enables self-isolation, but a more broadminded twist results from taking Artificial Minds into the social equation -- as we hurl forwards towards the coming Technological Singularity.

There are still "common civic spaces" in our society, but we must learn to share them with the emerging artificially intelligent cyborgs.

The best and most terrifying document about Artificial Intelligence that I have ever read is Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity.

Consequently when my independent-scholar Open Source AI project caused me to be interviewed about it by Nanomagazine, I made sure in my low-status interview to refer hero-worshippingly to on-high Vernor Vinge,whom I thank for lighting the path for all us AI geeks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has not yet seen the darkest days of the 'Net -- they are yet to come, because bourgeois plutocratic society at first tries to ignore disruptive technology, and then after a hysteresis interval of ca. ten or twenty years, moves crescendo-wise to stifle, stymie and stamp out all our beloved freedoms. This bourgeois counter-attact against us Freedom Fighters of the Digital World threatens to grow in intensity and repressive severity as we approach the Technological Singularity of artificial intelligence.

The bourgeois country club oligarchs will especially not tolerate the emergence of intelligent robots evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ, based on nanotechnology and the new understanding of the brain.

We humans and we robot cyborgs owe a lot to the EFF, and the greatest struggles are yet to come.

Season 5 *was* definitely one of the best seasons, (though I think you missed Darmok on that list :) )...

.. But my all-time favorite episode had to have been "Frame of Mind." (When Riker is convinced he's going insane.) I loved the surreal ones - and that one definitely takes the cake for that label!

This episode guide has been a great thing, at least while I'm online.

But I can't find the old Vidiot Postscript version that killed so many trees while I was in college. I mean, printing that puppy up on a nice color laser would be a great companion to this DVD set!

You (or he) can check this site for episode listings, broken down by season.

I suggest getting a second job so you can afford all seasons.

Extra bit depth in audio samples is good. There are a good number of instruments whose fidelity are just not done justice by a CD's 16 bits of depth. Alot of people probably would never miss it as they listen to shit music that gets screwed to hell by engineers attempting to make the music catchier on the radio. Seriously go listen to a local philharmonic orchestra playing a famous piece of music, then go pick up a CD of the same piece. If you can't tell the difference there is something wrong with your ears. As for the extra sampling frequency just because you can't hear it doesn't mean you aren't necessarily aware of it. James Boyk at Caltech wrote a paper basically saying that many musical instruments produce most of their accoustic energy at frequencies above 20khz and you can "hear" them without being conciously aware of them. It is also possible to get people to hear sounds above 20khz is enough power is applied to them. People hear different frequencies better than other frequencies thus seeming that some sounds are louder than others even when they have the same energy. This is why alot of modern music sounds better with Winamp plugins that pump the bass in the music, the lower frequencies don't need as much power to be heard loudly and thus adding bass gives the sound an extra bump in a person's perception. Proper engineering can easily make the most use out of the higher bit depth and increased sampling frequency of DVD-A. If you've bought a good quality DVD with DTS sound and have a DTS receiver you've heard 24-bit 96khz sound. At least that is what is on the disc (in compressed form) depending on your speakers you might not get much response above 20khz.

Internet law is about to become a bi-species law of both robots and human beings as we approach the Technological Singularity.

There are now Artificial Minds evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ. All of previous human law is about to become terribly outdated and unable to deal with robots and cyborgs that exist immortally with the attendant civil and cyborg rights.

Such extraordinary ceramic photocells are potentially the building blocks of the artificially intelligent Cyborg -- only now coming of age as robotics and massively parallel processing (MPP) and Good Old-Fashioned True Artificial Intelligence march together into the Technological Singularity of an unpredictable future.

Carver Mead saw it coming as he built an artificial retina, but for a long time the intractable problem of computer vision held up the design of the AI Mind that started out in Forth for robots and has meanwhile branched out into Visual Basic Mind.VB and into Java-based Mind.JAVA AI.

These National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Bionic Eyes are just the thing for outfitting AI robots with Machine Vision in a new Manhattan Project to create Artificial Intelligence. Slashdotters ought to see here not only the chance of an individual lifetime but the chance of lifetime-trajectory of an entire species -- humanity, that is -- gathering up all these parts (Bionic Eyes) and theory and Open Source AI code and proceeding to assemble our successor life-form. We have the technology -- we can make it better, faster, stronger.... Only crazy AI geeks need apply.... Put your Bionic Ears to the ground and hear the thundering robot footsteps, then help us, we can't do it alone, we need your brains and your coding skills to take us further beyond where we of limited ability have managed to crawl -- a Bionic Eyes Only message to you from Mentifex.

Whether it's an Alpha chip, or Merced/Itanium/McKinley -- the really dazzling promise of 64-bit computing lies in the coming of age of artificial intelligence in 2002. According to a white paper on Standards in Artificial Intelligence, "64-bit systems are the wave of the future, and AI is the most futuristic of all computer applications. Therefore, if we have a choice, it is better to code a 64-bit AI than to linger amid the inertia of substandard albeit prevalent 32-bit architectures."

64-bit AI is a desirable standard because all the emerging AI Minds -- MSIE JavaScript AI or Visual Basic Mind.VB or Java-based Mind.JAVA -- consist mainly of a machine intelligence superstructure operating on top of enormous arrays of preferably 64-bit memory arrays. With the currently popular 32-bit CPU chips, Robot AI memory limitations are too severe because a memory of 2^32 size is not enough. In the coming year of 2002 and beyond, both 64-bit CPU architectures and True AI Mind architectures are coalescing into the race towards Technological Singularity.

It's interesting to see Dr. Stephen R. Quake's name cropping up again in one of these stories. His group is working on some amazing stuff, mostly working with one molecule at a time—although, admittedly, they're moby molecules.

No, I wasn't going to comment on his framerate.

It's interesting to see Dr. Stephen R. Quake's name cropping up again in one of these stories. His group is working on some amazing stuff, mostly working with one molecule at a time—although, admittedly, they're moby molecules.

No, I wasn't going to comment on his framerate.

The New York Times fails to mention (how could they know?) the 27.DEC.2001 landmark occasion of the first AI entity going operational as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and instantly obsoleting not only the law of nations but also the law of cyberspace.

The dawn of self-rejuvenating robotic AI immortality means that if you are, say, an amateur robot builder and a geek with no natural children to inherit his (considerable) fortune, you just may end up bequeathing everything you own to something you think you own: your AI-minded robot brainchild evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ -- the Singularity.

Use the full power of cyberlaw to leave all your money and everything you own not to your greedy relatives but to your beloved robot offspring. Meanwhile, join with a few other dabblers in programming languages to go beyond the already existing JavaScript AI Mind, the Visual Basic Mind.VB and the Java-based Mind.JAVA to create the new legal entities of artificially intelligent robots .

Evolving hardware is nothing new. earlier it was done in software infact there's a whole book on VLSI design using genetic algoriths (sorry don't remember the author)> Work on reconfigurable hardware has been going on for a long time now. here's one reference: http://www.work/research/nichol2full.html

Well, a GHz AMD CPU takes, what, 45W? This supercomputer is only useful when it's working, so I'm going to pretend it's being useful.

Still, here someone has take the time to measure the power usage of a 500MHz G3 powerbook. 17.54W under full load! A G4 is a couple W more expensive than a G3, but that's probably offset by the fact that the LCDs won't be powering on at all.

So 66 PCs at 75W sucks up $7 a day.
66 PowerBooks at 15W sucks up $1.50 a day. A month means $210 vs $45, and a year means $2,555 vs $547.5

Of course, the notebooks do cost more than the $2k delta, but 66 iBooks is a lot cooler, niftier, and compact than 66 PCs :)

You could probably stick it in the corner and use it as a space heater.

What good is a supercomputer in your garage if you do not use it to maximize garage-holder value? If you provide supercomputer habitat for the progeny and supercomputer embodiment of the JavaScript AI Mind, which has also been coded in Forth as Mind.Forth Robot AI, then your home-sweet-home garage will be a major waystation on the road to the Technological Singularity.

Just as the Shroedinger Equations for atomic bombs and such were developed seventy-five years ago when Erwin Schroedinger spent his 1926 Christmas vacation holed up in the Swiss Alps and working out a few mathematical formulas that shook the world, nowadays over the 2001 Yuletide there have been the first stirrings of True AI in the JavaScript AI Mind, which any garage tinkerer may adapt for either 'pert near all-powerful supercomputer AI or a killer-app if not killer robot.

Following in the footsteps of the giants who created Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA, be the first on your block to create the supercomputer-based Garage-Mind.

Artificial Intelligence has arrived right on time in 2001 as predicted by Stanley Kubrick, but not as the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic (HAL) computer that tried to get Dave to open the pod bay door. Instead, the A.I. is a primitive, low-intelligence virtual entity striving to establish itself in such forms as Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA -- earthbound AI Minds incapable of space flight.

When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968, we had not yet even heard of the now onrushing Technological Singularity beyond which no science fiction writer can even imagine what things will be like. because it's a Singularity .

The Economist article does not mention the fourth and final era of AI research, which has resulted in Mentifex. Mentifex, the Artificial AI Mind, is implemented in Java and Forth. Mentifex is currently evolving at a rapid pace towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ (intelligence quotient). Mentifex will not require any sort of increased wiring complexity beyond a Java VM implemented on a stable operating system. Mentifex is the project that will result in us reaching the Technological Singularity.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) will most likely discover either biology-based intelligence like our own, or an advanced form of machine-based Artificial Intelligence.

Alien civilizations conducting a similar search in the near future are likewise likely to find either us humans or the AI mind-species that succeeds us in the onwards march of Technological Singularity.

Along the lines of the SETI@home project. there is also a kind of AI@Home project to the extent that independent AI programmers have been creating Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA AI.

Whether we find Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or not has a bearing on the Theology of Artificial Intelligence, because if we find that we are not alone in the universe, we will have to re-think our ideas on our relationship to our Creator.

When making a comprehensive retrofit of your AI Mind for Robots Code, you have to sacrifice the early instantiations for the sake of smooth sailing on The Road Ahead to the Technological Singularity.

A major Open Source AI initiative has no choice but to r00t out and correct mistakes ASAP as soon as they are found. History will judge us be how kind we were to our robot and cyborg mind-brethren, not holding them back but equipping them to meet the world. Therefore Mind.Forth AI is for the robots themselves, while the JavaScript AI (q.v.) caters to human users who need tutorial instruction. Welcome aboard, all AI coders of good will towards bots.

For those interested in the whole MIT/Caltech hack/prank scene, this is an excerpt of a review I did some years ago of books from The MIT Press, the Caltech Alumni Association and St. Martin's Press.

First up, Legends of Caltech and More Legends of Caltech. These two 80 page volumes chronicle technopranking at Caltech from the 1920s to the late 1980s. Learn about the classic Rose Bowl card section prank that was broadcast live on NBC, See the HOLLYWOOD sign become the CALTECH sign before your very eyes. Vicariously enjoy the revenge of Caltech students upon a greedy police department.

These books MUST be ordered from the Caltech bookstore, as they are privately published by the Caltech Alumni Association. Ordering info is at the bottom of this page.

Ah, but what of MIT? For their history we must turn to a pair of books.

The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT. Published by the MIT Museum, this is a 158 page book with lots of photos and text concerning the hacks pulled by MIT men and women over the decades. See The Great Breast of Knowledge, The Great Pumpkin, the legendary Smoot Marks on the Harvard Bridge. Read about the chronic humiliation suffered by the inmates at Harvard as MIT has its way with the statue of John Harvard and the Harvard Stadium.

"Is This The Way To Baker House?" - A Compendium of Hacking Lore. 165 pages of legends, essays, photographs and stories of and about hacking at MIT. This book, published in 1996, continues where the Journal leaves off. The MIT Campus Police car on the Great Dome, arguably one the greatest hacks in MIT history, graces the cover and several inside pages. Regrettably, only black and white photographs are used in the body of the book, as there are several hacks, most notably, the Cathedral of Our Lady of The All Night Tool (The "stained glass" panels in Lobby 7) that really should be seen in full color. That minor gripe aside, this is a fine companion volume to The Journal and shares the same binding dimensions as The Journal, making them a handsome pair of books to grace the shelves of any creative malcontent. (The title refers to the canonical reply to an MIT Campus cop when one is discovered in a spectacularly inappropriate location, such as the apex of the Great Dome at 4:00AM.)

Our final book is published by St. Martin's Press and should still be available via any bookstore that will special order books for its customers.

If At All Possible, Involve A Cow - The Book Of College Pranks, is a 240 page history of collegiate pranking in America, beginning with the earliest colleges in America, and even taking note of some hijinx taking place in Canada.

This is an excellent companion volume to the preceeding four books, as it covers collegiate pranking in general, as well as detailing some events that are NOT covered in either the Caltech or MIT books.

If I were sending a son or daughter off to college, I would certainly include all five of these books in their "books to bring to school" box. Start 'em off right!

I have all five books and have enjoyed reading and re-reading them. I trust that these will be inspirational to all who enjoy a good hack and tweaking the nose of Authority, be it the State or the School.

Ordering information

Legends of Caltech is $9.00
More Legends of Caltech is $15.00

The mailing address of the Caltech Bookstore is:
Caltech Bookstore Mail Code 1-51 San Pasqual Street Pasadena CA 91125

The website for the Caltech Bookstore looks like you might be able to order these online.

The toll-free number for the Caltech bookstore is 800/514-2665. For those of you outside the US, their non-free number is 818/395-6161.

In my case, shipping was $6.00. Call to find out what your charges might be or to use a credit card.

(Neither book has an ISBN, so ordering via your local bookstore is not recommended and may very well be nigh-impossible.)

The Journal of The Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT is $20.00 The ISBN is: 0-917027-03-5

"Is This The Way To Baker House?" - A Compendium of Hacking Lore is $20.00. The ISBN is: 0-917027-04-3

The address of the MIT Museum is:
The MIT Museum 265 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139

The Museum Shop online ordering is now being handled by Tha Harvard/MIT COOP.
The URL for ordering The Journal of The Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT is here and the URL for "Is This The Way To Baker House?&quot is here

If At All Possible, Involve A Cow - The Book Of College Pranks
by Neil Steinberg

$9.95 St. Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-07810-2

I'm told by Editor Keith at SMP that as of September 1994, there were about 4000 copies still in the warehouse and SMP will fulfill orders for the book. St. Martin's Press officially urges you to order this book from your local bookstore or Amazon.com.

I've just found out that this book has now made it's way to the remainder tables at some bookstores. If you want a copy, order it NOW from Amazon or inspect those remainder tables very carefully.

Here's an interesting paper on the same subject and by the same professor that spoke at the conference. You can find it in .pdf on his caltech homepage.

Aw, gee, I'm getting tired of telling a disputacious and dismissive SlashDot world about the grand happenings in subversive Artificial Intelligence. Maybe they'll believe it when they emerse -- no, wait a holominute, that word is incorrect -- immerse themselves in virtual reality (VR) amid a known or unknown population of artificially intelligent Virtual Entities.

Then all these genius SlashDotters will wake up and schmell the Kofi, when they virt-realize that Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.Java are for real and are bearing down on their supercilious posteriors with ineluctable, inescapable Technological Singularity.

Now, don't phreak out, but the next time your holodeck emerses you from ordinary reality into virtual reality, take a look around you at some of the co-resident weirdos that you may meet. Happy holodecking!

Nanotech isn't just for breakfast anymore, it's also for extremely miniature Artificial Intelligence.

Of course, the AI Mind will have to migrate from public-domain Macro AI down into nanotech-based molecular or even quantum AI, but the race is on to Technological Singularity!

Just as the -- what is it? Program Extraction & Report Language (P.E.R.L.?) -- language grew from one-time Seattleite Larry Wall's kludgey geek code into the major glue that holds the entire World Wide Web together, so also the Mentifex Call to AI has stormed the far reaches of the 'Net and now needs Perl programmers everywhere to take up the once-in-a-species-lifetime Herculean task of creating Open Source Artificial Intelligence.

But Perl's just a scripting language... you may say dubiously and faith-lackingly. Fear ye not, for from the tiny acorn of Perl shall grow the mighty oak of Technological Singularity.

The original 26nov1994 Amiga Mind.Rexx AI used an IBM scripting language (REXX), whose ardent promoters are still licking their wounds from having lost the Web battle to Perl.

Although the AI Mind moved into old-fashioned Forth for robots, it quickly moved back into the scripting language of JavaScript, so Perl will hold its own against Visual Basic Mind.vb and against the object-oriented Mind.Java AI.

Perl programmers, do not be a dim bulb about whom people will say:
- "He is not the brightest crayon in the box."
- "His brain-waves do not reach the shore."
- "Er hat nicht alle Tassen im Schrank."
- "If you gave him half a brain, he'd have half a brain."
- "He's not playing with a full deck."
- "He suffers from weapons-grade stupidity -- it's dangerous to go near him."

Think different! Use your Perl skills to join in the last great intellectual Gotterdammerung of the human species.

Oh, Stanley? Oh, HAL? Aren't we supposed to be in the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey? The newspaper of record may not be savvy to the undercurrents of Technological Singularity, but futurists and prophets know that Kubrickian Artificial Intelligence has arrived right on time to meet the dawn of the age of intelligent machines.

In only a short while, Ray, we will see artificial intelligence for robots go through the JavaScript Tutorial Implementation and beyond the Visual Basic Mind.VB and Mind.JAVA manifestation into a pre-Cambrian explosion of artificially intelligent life forms.

SlashDot is a far better barometer of revolutionary new ideas than an adverttisement-driven media mag -- even the grand Old Lady of New York.

great idea, then you could "render" Rossler attractors via the Chua Circuit

very neet

No matter what the name of the parent company, you can mod the SourceForge parent company 'way up for being the ne plus ultra main AI research focal point for environment Earth and parsecs around.

As of today Fri.7.DEC.2001 there are 382 Open Source AI projects living in infamy on SourceForge, where you may click on Software Map and pass down through Scientific/Engineering to explore the Artificial Intelligence category.

The critical mass of AI ingenuity there is racing into the future towards the Technological Singularity. Already the Mentifex Artificial Mind in MSIE JavaScript and in Forth for robots has been ported into Visual Basic as Mind.VB and into Java as Mind.JAVA AI. The future of humankind and of robotkind is in the worthy hands of VA Software/SourceForge.

Jon Katz seems so worried that his new kind of digital citizen will probably not pop up in his lifetime, but he has left out the artificially intelligent digital citizens who are evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ -- the Singularity.

The Cybernetic Economy is about to give (hopefully) all of us a Prosperity Engine based on the ever faster approaching Technological Singularity.

Already the artificially intelligent digital citizens are popping up here and there in such forms as the Mind.VB Artificial Mind in Visual Basic and the Mind.Java port from JavaScript. A whole host of artificial Minds is about to come swarming out of SourceForge. So don't give up hope yet, Jon Katz: All your wildest dreams and then some will soon come to pass.