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As I posted moments ago on my own site, Google is now exceeding M$/IBM/GE/GM/Standard Oil/The East India Co at their worst.

Apple remains Apple. Comparing the two is like calling atheism a religion ... a category error.

Which is a good thing, because my priorities have moved on anyway.

All I ever wanted the never really started TransForum 2.0 for was a tool for communication and collaboration about other, potentially media-rich, projects.

Now a decade on from when TransForum 0.99 was momentarily state-of-the-art, I have a dozen projects ready to try surfing this next Southern Ocean Wave ... as always too much choice.

Now if only Google will finally complete what has long been their obvious mission and provide a guaranteed permanent URI for everything ever worth citing.

In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.

Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.

The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100

I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.

Just tried it out with the 140 page PDF of a manuscript I'm half finished laying out and even got my octogenarian mother interested in touching my new toy when the only think she remembered from the first time I showed her was the price.

Also tried a 1920 x 1200 aerial photo I had cropped for use as one of my dozen iMac desktop images and one which I definitely need on the toy before hiking season. Intriguingly, it was reduced to 960 x 600 so I'm either going to need to experiment further or wait for some youngsters to explore further.

Amusingly the SDK announcement came only hours after I had posted elsewhere declaring my confidence that "Apple will release an SDK after they stabilse the internals". My timing is usually out by a lot more than my typing.

I can dream too, but it takes generations for even the most obvious paradigm shift to start to inform even the wider academic populace. Communicating a genuinely new underlying physics is going to present even more obstacles than a new life science paradigm. Even though they're a century old, no other theoretical field has yet drawn a serious metaphor from GR or QM.

And I say that as somebody with a reasonably strong math backgound.

What we are really saying is that we have been able to assign a bunch of attributes to some things which are at the lower limit for infered observation because ultimately all relevant observation is mediated by photons and they have their well known limits.

From another perspective, we really haven't much of a clue about what a quark or an electron is, especially after you think about the fact that for some important purposes, the 'hole' left where an electron is 'missing' behaves almost indistinguishably from an electron (save for the charge reversal).

So just how are we supposed to tell the difference between three kinds of neutrino which oscillate amongst themselves and one kind which oscillates between states where it can interact with electrons, muons or taus? Even the idea that they interact so rarely because they have such a small 'cross section' might be hard to distinguish from the idea that they undergo a long oscilation cycle through some state space that is impenetrable to photons, and that it is only at specific moments of that cycle that they can interact with ordinary matter at all.

Particle physicists and cosmologists still don't seem to be able to get over their fetish for "too easy" answers.

Back before the restart of time, I was sufficiently out of synch to ask (w)hat happens if there is no "Next Great Thing"? on July 19th, 2001.

Only goes to show how stupid such predictions can soon look when I therein also predicted "(t)he inevitable Peace with Drugs".

But with even the war machines increasingly looking outside for innovation, it isn't hard to wonder just where left field went.

Nearly nine months old already, my most recent Slashdot journal entry was about Longhorn FUD.

The secret I may never learn is how to form such opinions when the world is ready for them rather than long before anybody else is interested.

Then I move on to something else nobody much is ready for and lose the motivation to follow up on what for me is already yesterday's news.

Before you write off this post as self-indulgent, you might at least recognise that at least it isn't self-serving, though it has been a demanding week.

John's funeral at least provided a chance to catch up with a colleague whose big picture analysis is as good as any and who was open to parallels between Longhorn and Apple of the mid '90s, though he still sees the next five years as particularly uncertain times.