Thanks bongk. You are quoting http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/FAQ/FAQCCD.pdf (insightful deserves a source link!) -- so far, has anyone managed to actually produce MAPS with REAL DOTS on them, aside from those silly "affected states" maps? The http://beealert.blackfoot.net/~beealert/index.php people are taking surveys -- not even asking people to volunteer zip codes by incident (I've emailed them about that) so what kind of GIS treatment is there, could there be?
The other notable aspect is the 'sudden' onset of this problem. And unlike the genetics of monoculture bees, dissemination of crops, introduction (and use!) of pesticides... if the cell network had changes to its signalling patterns, there is the possibility to fit the suddenness aspect.
is a theory where phones themselves -- through routine queries to go to high power and ID their location, could have been asked to step up their activity in 2006. Or some 3G rollout. Still hoping for some cell aware slashdotter to weigh in on this. And no, for the record I'm not the guy claiming there's some cell-tower based shadow mind control network out there. With all due respect -- I'm starting to lose mine.;-)
If you have a Feb 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction Magazine, or one of the other collections in which it has been reprinted since -- check out a neat little story entitled "If The Sabot Fits" by Walt and Leigh Richmond. The mind is like a steel trap sometimes.
Slashdot cell-aware folks help me here.
Could it be that some network-wide control software change implemented in late 2006, such as the timing of periodic 'location becaons' required by CALEA (law enforcement) in the United States, and in general dial-911 location, that has (suddenly) caused idle phones to go to high power to fix their location, more often.
Or the new, additional requirement of unit triangulation has extended the beacon sequence, where more towers spend more time at high power on all channels while communicating with more units.
Or the timing pattern of the signals has adopted a distinctive pulse whose off-on characteristic has suddenly become 'noticed' by the bees -- where it had been sensed but was not a serious distraction before.
Here's an experiment you can try at home. Take a on-but-idle cell phone and place directly on top of a video computer monitor or TV set. Call the phone. Do you see a movement in the screen a second or so before the ring? If so, you have a reliable means to see easily when the phone unit goes to 'high power' to scan towers and fix location.
With the phone idle, log the times you see the screen wiggle -- I carried a cell in 2000 and noticed it would do a beacon every five minutes or so, whenever it was turned on.
Perhaps the becaons have gotten more frequent in 2006, and/or some higher powered transmitters are being used at the towers. But the 'sudden' appearance of CCD -- would seem to more imply some industry-wide process protocol change, since the industry didn't majorly 're-tool' in late 2006. Perhaps the five-minute cell beacons have become much-more-often beacons, and a borderline CCD situation where bees' navigation might only rarely intersect with an idle cell entering a beacon sequence, has been pushed 'over the edge' by the network.
If phones are going to high power you'd see this happening with cells placed on computer monitors and TVs (sorry plasma/LCD folks you're in the dark!) and would note a decrease in battery life compared to previous.
As to commercial honeybees being 'monocultures' of few species -- okay, insects are the most precisely replicated machines out there. Where mammals and reptiles are rich blends of irregularly built tissue, insects are precise in structure and replication: those of a particular species resemble one another more closely than other living things, even most plants -- because plants are designed to scale.
So if I was asked to speculate -- of all creatures on Earth, which sort of creature would be the first to be affected by radio-frequency 'pollution' of a specific kind -- affected by signals not just the presence of electromagnetic energy -- I'd say insects. And as it happens, honeybees are some of the most complex insects there are. And the most complex part of the bees' makeup? 'The Dance' -- topographical memory -- and navigation.
We know Scripps and US Navy was screwing with the whales...?
Every 400 years or so the planet's surface of intersecting strip malls grow into a
single hot spot. Comprised of Little people molecules, helium and shelium, carouse on its
surface, binding with each other, singing those silly molecule songs, trying to be cool,
tossing excess heat at their gentle Neighbors to the North when they think no one is
watching. A level of excitation not just outrageous but embarassing. Stable molecules feel
stable in their shells, the heat does not bother them but are soon caught in the fracas,
rudely knocked about, rock back and forth by shifting mass above, lots of giggles. Stable
molecules have no windows and prefer it that way. Champaigne bottles are broken over
them.
Within the dainty fundament of the universe Brawlian Motion is tolerated for its own
brutish sake, to a point. The boiling point.
As the boiling point approaches, some molecules -- who promised money or left dents in
heavier molecules early on -- may detach and drift into the ether. But now an awesome
principle of nature suddenly reveals itself. In flux you can never be sure who made the
call, but a call is made, even before the party begins. It is not wise to trifle with an
awesome principle of nature. The party is OVER, time to grab your cups and move
along.
A few sullen parting kicks sending heavy molecules skidding around. A quark is
squeezed, emitting that field effect so tragically cute even the glum dissolve into
helpless fits of laughter. Or perhaps... something else completely that merely resembles
it, to us.
This crowd is not dispersing and nature's princple -- perhaps its finest --
realizes it has made a blunder: to reveal only impresses the scientific observer; but what
is being shown could't possibly be anything not seen around here countless times before.
The nervous
principle tucks in its fanfare without fanfare and boldly asserts itself in a way
that, while small, is terrifying and morbidly fascinating. This might have changed
everything -- but the amazing Event has just been unobserved by Science, its gaze is
elsewhere.
And so they leap! Up they leap! For the leap year! And you thought I'd
forgotten.
MEET THE PROBLEM: What was done was to resolve a locally insane yet globally
complacent thermodynamic difference of potential. Since what is described took place on
the surface of an oblate spheroid, which has no beginning and end... don't ask me where to
begin, anyway it must still be going on.
MEET THE PLAYERS: They are the PROBLEM's 'cause', and also the ones who 'addressed' it.
There was this wild party of crazy little things that couldn't possibly have known what
they were doing at the time, they were so kineticly ferneticaly wasted... when they awoke
the next morning, they couldn't have known where they'd end up; by the time figured out
where they were, by that time even if they still remembered, they couldn't possibly know
when. Forget it! Is it any wonder these jittery dudes party hearty? They have
nothing to worry about, what ever they do they'll make out: they cannot be unmade! Which
as it turns out, is only possibly so. A modern mystic (I thought, cold have been 'fish
stick') said 'Tampering' is in, then booked without explaining it all, probably just
someone tampering with me. There a bit of winking and blinking, and interdementional
whoopee that makes transition between several states, at least one a Muppet state
[obscene, big bird, hotnerd] And then: stand still while the whole freaking
Universe moves round and round? Maybe a theory developed by the adorably cute kind of kids
who covers their eyes so you can't see them. I could stand still
that long, even longer, but no way if I was surrounded by that much.
SUMMARY: If left unresolved it might have mattered to us a great deal: things matter to
us, we are the ones w
Years ago I was asked by a rich toymaster (one for who money was no object) whether X10 consumer products were 'a way to go' for a his überhouse. I told him the protocol and transport was iffy, the standard was designed for discrete TTL logic before LSI chips and slow... and to achieve reliability with off the shelf stuff (RS) you'd have to crack the units and replace the deliberately small (almost fire hazard) transformers that they use to cook themselves to death. He had no problem with this... he understood retrofit expense and compromise. then I explained the house code thing. "A-H? You mean someone could frig with the house from outside, flip the lights?" Of course, I said. I could probably open your garage door too. "That's insane."
This was years before PGP, let alone PKI friendly chipsets, et. al. He wasn't looking for missle silo grade security (little did we know the Permissive Action Link code was all zeroes!) he said, but is there ANYTHING out there not succeptible to simple guessing and aligator clips? He loved 'Mission Impossible'.
Now there is. IF COST IS NO OBJECT and he asked that question today... what are the 'thinnest' most self contained clients with which one could build a 'Really Secure' PKI home control system... complete with a CA computer in a vault signing transactions (open the valult and all bets are off -- he'd understand that), perhaps even a panic function for repudiation broadcast etc. etc.... The werks, Mission Impossible proof?
Just pressed a virtual flower into my 1973 first edition hardcover: Communication Networks for Computers; Donald W. Davies, Derek L. A. Barber, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington; Wiley; ISBN 0-471-19874-9
I landed this book in '78 when I was barely a teen -- and it blew my mind apart and opened a new world.
At the time I was banging away in TRS80 BASIC and Z80 assembler. Modems were 300 baud, 'telnet' wasn't a protocol, it was Telenet, the world's largest X.25 packet network. Dial an access number, give a 'C' followed by a telephone area code and pick two extra digits and -- zing! A login: prompt coming to you from a machine in New York, Omaha, Los Angeles. Before Internet there was ARPAnet. Before ARPAnet there were HOSTs and IMPs; and there was Telenet.
Davies' book was no guide to any particular network -- it was a bible of Communication Theory itself, a Gray's Anatomy of telephony and packet switching. From the subscriber loop to crossbar switches, carrier networks, traffic analysis and routing; modulation modes; for data -- from NAND gates to shift registers shuffling bits to parity checking, buffers, packets to queues, state automata, handshaking, protocol layers, virtual connections... culminating in a clear and concise description of a very new, very interesting 28-node experiment called "ARPAnet".
As a programmer I began my career shuffling strings and numbers around, just as early communications centered around simple modulation technique, bits and bytes. There soon came a time when I bumped limits of time and space, storage and response time: the 255 character string, the 64k heap. My elegantly written BASIC masterpieces filled the heap and started collecting garbage more frequently -- then stopped.
You trim, consolidate, generalize and flush. You break the program into overlay segments and watch your response time erode further still, because all the optimization you can muster has merely bought you... more time.
As I absorbed the principles of Communications Theory so well presented in that book, examples taken from real life, an amazing thing happened: I began to see communication networks everywhere -- between people, in operating systems, in my own software and the software I would later write.
If you are smart and resourceful (an avid apprentice of Knuth) you can build data structures that move method bit by bit into the data itself to create smarter data, procedure embedded within the data. But even these castles must funnel through the meat grinders of the trade: registers, pools of memory, character and block devices, modems.
If you are clever you can work around immediate limitations and stretch resources to an amazing degree.
But there is a moment of sublime brilliance in store for you if you can take the roadmap that is your human tendancy towards procedural thinking -- fold it a certain way, cut it into pieces and find the magic glue to connect it again... so you now have a tightly folded crane resting delicately on its feet. It represents the same system. It still has limitations but their impact on your design has been reduced not by a linear factor but an _exponential_ one.
You will pay a penalty... there are now more folds than there existed in the original design. But upon close examination you can see that there are fewer _types_ of folds, and some of the folds embody behaviors that may be inherited from others.
This mental origami is "state oriented" thinking. It is what communication networks do swiftly under penalty of death; it is what compilers do once, interpreters do constantly and late-binding languages try to do only as often as they must.
Contemplation of state is what Object Oriented programmers do until or unless they become mired in calling conventions; the stack becomes their grail, while procedural programmers keep time by the statement.
We code smart objects, apply -O3 and hope for the best -- a few subroutines collapse together and a fair amount of code is consolidated to keep things in the architechural neighborhood... but groundbreaking brilliance can only occur when people take charge of the process on a grandly recursive scale.
Even Object Oriented approaches can fall prey to procedural thinking. ++ lets you fold your code together and breathe life into the data... but you can never forget that the compiler is there, so long as you directly manage pointers or your integers lack the magic to evolve dynamically.
Where we once fought 255 character strings, we now use 'elegant' GUI that stuffs pulldown list boxes with abandon -- only to hit the swap too soon and eventually smack into a 64k item limit. Worse yet, no limit -- and the user must wade through minutes of swap swamp to select the first item on the list.
Or one little static buffer whose job is to swallow a MIME tag encounters an elaborately crafted superstring with a nasty bit of assembly tacked into it, and a root shell is born. Or a computer freezes because a counter folds to zero after a few weeks of furious ticking.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks bongk. You are quoting http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/FAQ/FAQCCD.pdf (insightful deserves a source link!) -- so far, has anyone managed to actually produce MAPS with REAL DOTS on them, aside from those silly "affected states" maps? The http://beealert.blackfoot.net/~beealert/index.php people are taking surveys -- not even asking people to volunteer zip codes by incident (I've emailed them about that) so what kind of GIS treatment is there, could there be?
1 &threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=1874544 5
;-)
The other notable aspect is the 'sudden' onset of this problem. And unlike the genetics of monoculture bees, dissemination of crops, introduction (and use!) of pesticides... if the cell network had changes to its signalling patterns, there is the possibility to fit the suddenness aspect.
My offering in the bees/cellphone intersection set,
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23089
is a theory where phones themselves -- through routine queries to go to high power and ID their location, could have been asked to step up their activity in 2006. Or some 3G rollout. Still hoping for some cell aware slashdotter to weigh in on this. And no, for the record I'm not the guy claiming there's some cell-tower based shadow mind control network out there. With all due respect -- I'm starting to lose mine.
If you have a Feb 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction Magazine, or one of the other collections in which it has been reprinted since -- check out a neat little story entitled "If The Sabot Fits" by Walt and Leigh Richmond. The mind is like a steel trap sometimes.
Slashdot cell-aware folks help me here.
Could it be that some network-wide control software change implemented in late 2006, such as the timing of periodic 'location becaons' required by CALEA (law enforcement) in the United States, and in general dial-911 location, that has (suddenly) caused idle phones to go to high power to fix their location, more often.
Or the new, additional requirement of unit triangulation has extended the beacon sequence, where more towers spend more time at high power on all channels while communicating with more units.
Or the timing pattern of the signals has adopted a distinctive pulse whose off-on characteristic has suddenly become 'noticed' by the bees -- where it had been sensed but was not a serious distraction before.
Here's an experiment you can try at home. Take a on-but-idle cell phone and place directly on top of a video computer monitor or TV set. Call the phone. Do you see a movement in the screen a second or so before the ring? If so, you have a reliable means to see easily when the phone unit goes to 'high power' to scan towers and fix location.
With the phone idle, log the times you see the screen wiggle -- I carried a cell in 2000 and noticed it would do a beacon every five minutes or so, whenever it was turned on.
Perhaps the becaons have gotten more frequent in 2006, and/or some higher powered transmitters are being used at the towers. But the 'sudden' appearance of CCD -- would seem to more imply some industry-wide process protocol change, since the industry didn't majorly 're-tool' in late 2006. Perhaps the five-minute cell beacons have become much-more-often beacons, and a borderline CCD situation where bees' navigation might only rarely intersect with an idle cell entering a beacon sequence, has been pushed 'over the edge' by the network.
If phones are going to high power you'd see this happening with cells placed on computer monitors and TVs (sorry plasma/LCD folks you're in the dark!) and would note a decrease in battery life compared to previous.
As to commercial honeybees being 'monocultures' of few species -- okay, insects are the most precisely replicated machines out there. Where mammals and reptiles are rich blends of irregularly built tissue, insects are precise in structure and replication: those of a particular species resemble one another more closely than other living things, even most plants -- because plants are designed to scale.
So if I was asked to speculate -- of all creatures on Earth, which sort of creature would be the first to be affected by radio-frequency 'pollution' of a specific kind -- affected by signals not just the presence of electromagnetic energy -- I'd say insects. And as it happens, honeybees are some of the most complex insects there are. And the most complex part of the bees' makeup? 'The Dance' -- topographical memory -- and navigation.
We know Scripps and US Navy was screwing with the whales...?
But of course. Year 2000 was a giant leap year.
Every 400 years or so the planet's surface of intersecting strip malls grow into a single hot spot. Comprised of Little people molecules, helium and shelium, carouse on its surface, binding with each other, singing those silly molecule songs, trying to be cool, tossing excess heat at their gentle Neighbors to the North when they think no one is watching. A level of excitation not just outrageous but embarassing. Stable molecules feel stable in their shells, the heat does not bother them but are soon caught in the fracas, rudely knocked about, rock back and forth by shifting mass above, lots of giggles. Stable molecules have no windows and prefer it that way. Champaigne bottles are broken over them.
Within the dainty fundament of the universe Brawlian Motion is tolerated for its own brutish sake, to a point. The boiling point.
As the boiling point approaches, some molecules -- who promised money or left dents in heavier molecules early on -- may detach and drift into the ether. But now an awesome principle of nature suddenly reveals itself. In flux you can never be sure who made the call, but a call is made, even before the party begins. It is not wise to trifle with an awesome principle of nature. The party is OVER, time to grab your cups and move along.
A few sullen parting kicks sending heavy molecules skidding around. A quark is squeezed, emitting that field effect so tragically cute even the glum dissolve into helpless fits of laughter. Or perhaps... something else completely that merely resembles it, to us.
This crowd is not dispersing and nature's princple -- perhaps its finest -- realizes it has made a blunder: to reveal only impresses the scientific observer; but what is being shown could't possibly be anything not seen around here countless times before. The nervous principle tucks in its fanfare without fanfare and boldly asserts itself in a way that, while small, is terrifying and morbidly fascinating. This might have changed everything -- but the amazing Event has just been unobserved by Science, its gaze is elsewhere.
And so they leap! Up they leap! For the leap year! And you thought I'd forgotten.
MEET THE PROBLEM: What was done was to resolve a locally insane yet globally complacent thermodynamic difference of potential. Since what is described took place on the surface of an oblate spheroid, which has no beginning and end... don't ask me where to begin, anyway it must still be going on.
MEET THE PLAYERS: They are the PROBLEM's 'cause', and also the ones who 'addressed' it. There was this wild party of crazy little things that couldn't possibly have known what they were doing at the time, they were so kineticly ferneticaly wasted... when they awoke the next morning, they couldn't have known where they'd end up; by the time figured out where they were, by that time even if they still remembered, they couldn't possibly know when. Forget it! Is it any wonder these jittery dudes party hearty? They have nothing to worry about, what ever they do they'll make out: they cannot be unmade! Which as it turns out, is only possibly so. A modern mystic (I thought, cold have been 'fish stick') said 'Tampering' is in, then booked without explaining it all, probably just someone tampering with me. There a bit of winking and blinking, and interdementional whoopee that makes transition between several states, at least one a Muppet state [obscene, big bird, hotnerd] And then: stand still while the whole freaking Universe moves round and round? Maybe a theory developed by the adorably cute kind of kids who covers their eyes so you can't see them. I could stand still that long, even longer, but no way if I was surrounded by that much.
SUMMARY: If left unresolved it might have mattered to us a great deal: things matter to us, we are the ones w
Years ago I was asked by a rich toymaster (one for who money was no object) whether X10 consumer products were 'a way to go' for a his überhouse. I told him the protocol and transport was iffy, the standard was designed for discrete TTL logic before LSI chips and slow... and to achieve reliability with off the shelf stuff (RS) you'd have to crack the units and replace the deliberately small (almost fire hazard) transformers that they use to cook themselves to death. He had no problem with this... he understood retrofit expense and compromise. then I explained the house code thing. "A-H? You mean someone could frig with the house from outside, flip the lights?" Of course, I said. I could probably open your garage door too. "That's insane."
This was years before PGP, let alone PKI friendly chipsets, et. al. He wasn't looking for missle silo grade security (little did we know the Permissive Action Link code was all zeroes!) he said, but is there ANYTHING out there not succeptible to simple guessing and aligator clips? He loved 'Mission Impossible'.
Now there is. IF COST IS NO OBJECT and he asked that question today... what are the 'thinnest' most self contained clients with which one could build a 'Really Secure' PKI home control system... complete with a CA computer in a vault signing transactions (open the valult and all bets are off -- he'd understand that), perhaps even a panic function for repudiation broadcast etc. etc.... The werks, Mission Impossible proof?
Applied Communications Theory teaches us that strings may be finite, but >streams
Just pressed a virtual flower into my 1973 first edition hardcover: Communication Networks for Computers; Donald W. Davies, Derek L. A. Barber, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington; Wiley; ISBN 0-471-19874-9
I landed this book in '78 when I was barely a teen -- and it blew my mind apart and opened a new world.
At the time I was banging away in TRS80 BASIC and Z80 assembler. Modems were 300 baud, 'telnet' wasn't a protocol, it was Telenet, the world's largest X.25 packet network. Dial an access number, give a 'C' followed by a telephone area code and pick two extra digits and -- zing! A login: prompt coming to you from a machine in New York, Omaha, Los Angeles. Before Internet there was ARPAnet. Before ARPAnet there were HOSTs and IMPs; and there was Telenet.
Davies' book was no guide to any particular network -- it was a bible of Communication Theory itself, a Gray's Anatomy of telephony and packet switching. From the subscriber loop to crossbar switches, carrier networks, traffic analysis and routing; modulation modes; for data -- from NAND gates to shift registers shuffling bits to parity checking, buffers, packets to queues, state automata, handshaking, protocol layers, virtual connections... culminating in a clear and concise description of a very new, very interesting 28-node experiment called "ARPAnet".
As a programmer I began my career shuffling strings and numbers around, just as early communications centered around simple modulation technique, bits and bytes. There soon came a time when I bumped limits of time and space, storage and response time: the 255 character string, the 64k heap. My elegantly written BASIC masterpieces filled the heap and started collecting garbage more frequently -- then stopped.
You trim, consolidate, generalize and flush. You break the program into overlay segments and watch your response time erode further still, because all the optimization you can muster has merely bought you... more time.
As I absorbed the principles of Communications Theory so well presented in that book, examples taken from real life, an amazing thing happened: I began to see communication networks everywhere -- between people, in operating systems, in my own software and the software I would later write.
If you are smart and resourceful (an avid apprentice of Knuth) you can build data structures that move method bit by bit into the data itself to create smarter data, procedure embedded within the data. But even these castles must funnel through the meat grinders of the trade: registers, pools of memory, character and block devices, modems.
If you are clever you can work around immediate limitations and stretch resources to an amazing degree.
But there is a moment of sublime brilliance in store for you if you can take the roadmap that is your human tendancy towards procedural thinking -- fold it a certain way, cut it into pieces and find the magic glue to connect it again... so you now have a tightly folded crane resting delicately on its feet. It represents the same system. It still has limitations but their impact on your design has been reduced not by a linear factor but an _exponential_ one.
You will pay a penalty... there are now more folds than there existed in the original design. But upon close examination you can see that there are fewer _types_ of folds, and some of the folds embody behaviors that may be inherited from others.
This mental origami is "state oriented" thinking. It is what communication networks do swiftly under penalty of death; it is what compilers do once, interpreters do constantly and late-binding languages try to do only as often as they must.
Contemplation of state is what Object Oriented programmers do until or unless they become mired in calling conventions; the stack becomes their grail, while procedural programmers keep time by the statement.
We code smart objects, apply -O3 and hope for the best -- a few subroutines collapse together and a fair amount of code is consolidated to keep things in the architechural neighborhood... but groundbreaking brilliance can only occur when people take charge of the process on a grandly recursive scale.
Even Object Oriented approaches can fall prey to procedural thinking. ++ lets you fold your code together and breathe life into the data... but you can never forget that the compiler is there, so long as you directly manage pointers or your integers lack the magic to evolve dynamically.
Where we once fought 255 character strings, we now use 'elegant' GUI that stuffs pulldown list boxes with abandon -- only to hit the swap too soon and eventually smack into a 64k item limit. Worse yet, no limit -- and the user must wade through minutes of swap swamp to select the first item on the list.
Or one little static buffer whose job is to swallow a MIME tag encounters an elaborately crafted superstring with a nasty bit of assembly tacked into it, and a root shell is born. Or a computer freezes because a counter folds to zero after a few weeks of furious ticking.
[continued]