Been thinking about humans as the first* domesticated species for a while and Leopard soon spotted a breadcrumb left in a folder of 'unsorted' notes:
Disruption and Signals
Context: a domesticated environment, given that humans domesticated themselves first.
Almost all intentional disruptions are signaled in advance. The significance of most such signals is missed, at least until after the event.
Disruption is often necessary and sometimes very advantageous.
If you decide today to have a child, that child, likely as not, will live to see the 22nd century.
Three and a bit years later, I'm unsurprised that little experiment in lateral thinking led nowhere fast.
I've also been reading lead author Hawks's feed fairly thoroughly for quite a while despite concerns about his obsessive hydrophobia. On dry land he usually presents a balanced view of oft contentious anthropological topics like Homo floresiensis.
It will be interesting to see how many of our recently domesticated genes proved advantageous to those making precarious shore hugging journeys on the long route around the Indian Ocean close to his starting time.
*I've also played with the standard line that we were domesticated by house cats or, more experimentally, that domesticating humans was the African elephant's great mistake (c.f. the dinosaur space program nudging mineral-rich asteroids towards orbits where they could be mined more efficiently).
This thread has been sitting in a tab for six days as I slowly worked my way down to find your marvelous exposition here. I'm just glad I know enough to follow it and appreciate it, though far from enough to try to add anything to it. And I am definitely going to link to it from somewhere a lot less volatile.
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.
Back before we first got involved with Mathematica 1.0, I was already looking for something that would put real calculations in table cells but Wolfram became wedded to the notebook format that was arguably the only practical solution to being cross platform in the 1980s.
On the Mac more was often promised but rarely delivered. There was a very early "spreadsheet" called Trapeze which allowed you to lay out a multiplicity of typically smaller grids which always appealed to me more than the idea of forcing unrelated data structures into a single sheet. For a moment I hoped that Numbers, the new spreadsheet component of iWork, might have finally revived that concept but on the minimal playing around I've done to date, it too misses the point.
Meanwhile there has been one product from Germany, originally Mac only but nowadays also available for Windoze which is the only moderately expensive software that I keep going back to when I really need to get something right. RagTime is positioned mostly as a layout program but it does have full-feature spreadsheet and word processing components (able to import Orifice files) and a very strong component model, despite the developers having been badly burned by Apple's misadventures with object systems in the 1990s.
Even earlier I had been able to use it to automate the weekly random positioning of display ads in a printed newsletter. And even in 2007, I retain a sneaking wish that it would at least gain a developer API so we might be able to add Perl and symbolic math to make a true Swiss Army knife.
Smolin, Wolfram and others consider evolving graph-theoretic networks as a more likely base model for a theory of everything.
My first, and to-date only, experiment with a simplest-of-class evolving graph very soon produced a good analogy of inflation.
(Before I figured out what was going on, this 'inflation' had the side effect of making my puter seem to 'go away' even when I capped the clock at ten ticks... an interesting experience which helped inspire my OSDC 2004 'Design on the Fly' paper (PDF) and slides (S^5 HTML).)
There is something profoundly wrong with societies where somebody like Keith who has lived a productive, generous, pioneering life can have their liberty curtailed because they piss off somebody with greater access to The Law's capacity to pursue single dubious issues against anybody who has really lived.
But we should place more blame on the personal empire builders who are ensuring untrammeled expansion of The Law-Politics-Mass Media axis of evil^Hauthoritarianism than even the criminally motivated cult which has become so good at exploiting our excessive 'authorities'.
an exponentially growing pack of machinery that does nothing but turns the matter it find into more copies of itself
Change that to: "an exponentially growing pack of machinery that does nothing but turn 'empty' space into more copies of itself" and you get very close to an idea I've been playing with for a while that the Hubble expansion is an aggregate of a space production process which naturally (anti)gravitates to the voids.
Some other comments in TFA certainly seem to add evidence that is better than consistent with my idea:
The region had been previously been dubbed the "WMAP Cold Spot," because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite. (...)
Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through normal regions of space with matter, the researchers explained. But when the CMB passes through a void, the photons lose energy, making the CMB from that part of the sky appear cooler.
CMB photons are stretched by the expansion of space thereby losing energy.
... continue to develop our position of natural leadership in world sport, not just on-field but even more so in sports administration, sports medicine and sports media.
That's enough aspiration for twenty million who still run one of the world's great quarries as well as exporting vast quantities of naturally processed water from our already very dry land.
It's all still just bread and circuses and the margins are better in circuses.
We've seen a marked increase in spammers flooding us with garbage.
At least a couple of currently low traffic forums I visit have recently suffered very different spam attacks, one from what seemed like a bot net trying to develop a toehold for unsolicited advertising and the other by a crazed vigilante pushing her own perverted agenda. On the one that runs my code, I've made a couple of minor coding changes to block much and make the rest easier to deal with and have ideas for a few other defensive tactics if they are needed.
Unrelated, I've also intended for nine years to institute a three dimensional/colour rating system: one indicating endorsement/agreement, a second rejection/opposition and the third recognition/importance, to draw others' attention to the item without implying a value judgment. Feel free to steal it unproven if you like.
Bill was in Sydney on the day he became a billionaire* and was surprised to find a bunch of locals wanting to hear more of his recently published thoughts on the then still prospective new medium, but was happy enough to participate in a breakfast discussion quickly arranged by his then Australian representative Linda Graham.
CD-ROM was arguably his last time Bill was close enough to the leading edge that others who made a living at that edge sought his opinion.
All this strikes me as being political hot air that won't go anywhere once the election is decided.
In this particular case the hot air is all from one side, though I wouldn't generalise from that to too many other issues, where much of Rudd's appeal is that he will be as "safe" as Howard, but from a younger generation.
This report had me running to my bookshelf to extract my copy of the December 1994 Networking Australia's Future: The Final Report of the Broadband Services Expert Group, one of the flagship efforts of the final term of the Keating government. (I was responsible for a commissioned sub-report on future demand for broadband in education, so what happened next cuts deep.)
Fifteen months on, well before the long term thinking that had dominated Keating's too-brief reign had any chance to become entrenched, our electorate decided it was finally time to give then recidivist opposition leader Howard "his turn"... a very Australian sentiment... compounded by Keating never having really connected with "the masses".
Then Howard installed his despicable power-broking deputy senate leader Alston in a mega department of Communications, Information Technology and The Arts, reportedly because the now high commissioner to London had at some stage expressed an appreciation of "The Arts" and that became the tail, reviving its long diminished role in film classification, which wagged the IT&C dog right through the boom and bust... leaving Australia an internet policy-free zone.
Even worse, the Howard regime, ever blinded by a pathological hatred of its opposition, pigeon holed all the long term policy work that Keating had bank rolled. Even Tweedle Beasley didn't let go of the idea that we should continue to build on the impressive export education industry built during the Hawke-Keating years rather than profit skim it to a degree that even the worst of the private equity players must envy.
Others here are right that better pipes to the rest of the world have always been the core issue and that Telstra is afflicted by an even worse case of monopoly culture than Qantas or M$, but that culture problem the market will eventually sort out, unlike broadband access which our vast distances make potentially even more valuable than anywhere else.
I swear, Apple should just make one of these devices and bitch-slap everyone else out of the market.
Having got nowhere with a similar exercise myself these last few weeks since being intrigued by similar offerings at a recent photographic trade show, I made a similar suggestion while visiting a local Apple reseller. Now we've all forgotten the unfortunate HTML sidetrack that used that name, surely iFrame could be to iPhoto what iPod has become to iTunes.
I know my mother's immediate reaction is that she would prefer prints. We've actually had that discussion a few times already. For singular important photos worthy of their own permanent frame that is no doubt correct, but the first downside of your xx cents a copy prints is that they get put away and never looked at again. The second downside is my own convenience as there are still practical limits on how much time and effort I am willing to invest in minor amusements for my mother. So I'm a definite starter for an Apple iFrame the day it comes out, if only as a means of selling her the idea of digitising a lot of her own old pics.
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting there on the bench. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench.
Not even the worst of the worst wanted to associate with a litter bug.
Dropped litter is also hard on ancient backs when it blows into your yard, but even worse when you are out in some otherwise pseudo-natural area and it disrupts the scenery.
It may be interesting to those who aren't just here to bash Wolfram that this offer to provide a prize for a proof of one of his key conjectures in A New Kind of Science (NKS) comes only seven weeks after another key conjecture was disproved. (The fact that that disproof was brought to public notice by the NKS Forum moderator might suggest that the ongoing NKS project is happy enough for results to fall whichever way they will.)
On a visit to Champaign-Urbana in the late 1980s, still before he officially started on NKS, Wolfram took me through where he felt his cellular automata research was headed which hinted at some of the inferences he would eventually draw from his mountains of research data. That was even before the Santa Fe Institute paper which was foolishly read as retreating from the edge of chaos-border of order which had briefly been the focus of the quest for the source of emergent complexity during the 1980s.
The resources Wolfram is bringing to the table are significant and have certainly helped put complex systems back in the spotlight after far too many of the first generation of researchers were seduced by the marginal returns they could get by applying their methods to the derivatives market, no matter whether their methods made a significant difference or not.
The downside of continuing to focus on the simplest possible mechanisms (Wolfram calls them 'programs') as the source of a critical threshold is that all those much sought after proofs of universality, from the early one for Conway's Life on, are vast feats of engineering and thus make no useful progress towards the implicit goal of helping to explain how we/anything got here in the first place.
So I'll keep playing with my own idiosyncratic program to explore a bit deeper in that narrow and difficult transition region between order and chaos, but might be tempted to have another look at Mathematica's increasing support for such research once it is available via CP6AN.
A radio serialisation of Orwell's 1984 finished here the other night and I found myself listening again to the last few bleak installments. The premise of that extreme dystopian view is that you willingly forget everything while Big Brother remembers everything, and that sounds like exactly where the professor's half baked idea (400k PDF) would lead us in practice.
Please keep it all and more, so that idle process in some unimaginably rich future environment which finally gets far enough down the list of reincarnation candidates will have access to the maximum possible amount of data surviving from first time around, enough data that new process it spawns will be happy it is me.
See Clowe, Douglas et al (2006). "A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter," The Astrophysical Journal, ISSN 0004-637X, 648 (September 10): L109-L113.
It was big news at the time so Google will find you plenty of commentary online.
My own instincts suggest that we will eventually come to realise that dark matter and "dark energy" are as close as we will ever get to the main game in town and that baryonic matter will come to be seen as just the scum on the pond.
Anybody trying to play the relativism card with regard to Monbiot's work is deluding themselves.
He has always been more thorough with his research than anybody else who is published regularly in mainstream media and shares his left leaning on social justice issues.
This is the same guy who in much younger days snuck deep into the jungles of West Papua to expose what the Indonesian military neo-colonists were doing to a native population with one of the world's oldest agricultural heritages.
If what he says riles you so much, the smart thing to do would be recheck all the facts with an open mind. Way too many people are quickest to anger when deep down they know they are on shaky ground.
Once heard an interview with a very respected older society woman who had taken on charitable support of released prisoners and who had come to the conclusion that any sentences over five years crossed the boundary where the prisoner lost hope and thus became a greater danger.
At one level his first chapter of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is titled "There is nothing outside the universe" and insists science draw a line of denial at event horizons.
Then in a recent paper "The status of cosmological natural selection" he claims to show that his 20 year old theory of black holes begetting big bangs produces testable predictions for "landscape theories" which he sees as being more scientific than string theory's reliance on the weak anthropic principle.
My own take is that everything we observe is at some level mediated by photons which are subject to Heisenberg's resolution limits and that it is more likely that type 1a supernovae beget seeds of chaotic inflation within which cosmoses subject to conservative physical laws naturally bubble out.
Slashdot Mirror
So the permanent lunar colonies will inevitably be Asian.
I've also been reading lead author Hawks's feed fairly thoroughly for quite a while despite concerns about his obsessive hydrophobia. On dry land he usually presents a balanced view of oft contentious anthropological topics like Homo floresiensis.
It will be interesting to see how many of our recently domesticated genes proved advantageous to those making precarious shore hugging journeys on the long route around the Indian Ocean close to his starting time.
*I've also played with the standard line that we were domesticated by house cats or, more experimentally, that domesticating humans was the African elephant's great mistake (c.f. the dinosaur space program nudging mineral-rich asteroids towards orbits where they could be mined more efficiently).
This thread has been sitting in a tab for six days as I slowly worked my way down to find your marvelous exposition here. I'm just glad I know enough to follow it and appreciate it, though far from enough to try to add anything to it. And I am definitely going to link to it from somewhere a lot less volatile.
Last time I checked we were supposedly going to have the second biggest gathering outside North America, with 31 acceptances.
The eight of us who actually turned up on the right night had an enjoyable evening, albeit with far too much cake.
The obligatory photographic record was already linked from my rarely used journal.
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.
History is entertainment.
And CleverNickName posted a warmly personal take to his blog earlier.
Back before we first got involved with Mathematica 1.0, I was already looking for something that would put real calculations in table cells but Wolfram became wedded to the notebook format that was arguably the only practical solution to being cross platform in the 1980s.
On the Mac more was often promised but rarely delivered. There was a very early "spreadsheet" called Trapeze which allowed you to lay out a multiplicity of typically smaller grids which always appealed to me more than the idea of forcing unrelated data structures into a single sheet. For a moment I hoped that Numbers, the new spreadsheet component of iWork, might have finally revived that concept but on the minimal playing around I've done to date, it too misses the point.
Meanwhile there has been one product from Germany, originally Mac only but nowadays also available for Windoze which is the only moderately expensive software that I keep going back to when I really need to get something right. RagTime is positioned mostly as a layout program but it does have full-feature spreadsheet and word processing components (able to import Orifice files) and a very strong component model, despite the developers having been badly burned by Apple's misadventures with object systems in the 1990s.
Even earlier I had been able to use it to automate the weekly random positioning of display ads in a printed newsletter. And even in 2007, I retain a sneaking wish that it would at least gain a developer API so we might be able to add Perl and symbolic math to make a true Swiss Army knife.
Smolin, Wolfram and others consider evolving graph-theoretic networks as a more likely base model for a theory of everything.
... an interesting experience which helped inspire my OSDC 2004 'Design on the Fly' paper (PDF) and slides (S^5 HTML).)
My first, and to-date only, experiment with a simplest-of-class evolving graph very soon produced a good analogy of inflation.
(Before I figured out what was going on, this 'inflation' had the side effect of making my puter seem to 'go away' even when I capped the clock at ten ticks
There is something profoundly wrong with societies where somebody like Keith who has lived a productive, generous, pioneering life can have their liberty curtailed because they piss off somebody with greater access to The Law's capacity to pursue single dubious issues against anybody who has really lived.
But we should place more blame on the personal empire builders who are ensuring untrammeled expansion of The Law-Politics-Mass Media axis of evil^Hauthoritarianism than even the criminally motivated cult which has become so good at exploiting our excessive 'authorities'.
Some other comments in TFA certainly seem to add evidence that is better than consistent with my idea:CMB photons are stretched by the expansion of space thereby losing energy.
... continue to develop our position of natural leadership in world sport, not just on-field but even more so in sports administration, sports medicine and sports media.
That's enough aspiration for twenty million who still run one of the world's great quarries as well as exporting vast quantities of naturally processed water from our already very dry land.
It's all still just bread and circuses and the margins are better in circuses.
Unrelated, I've also intended for nine years to institute a three dimensional/colour rating system: one indicating endorsement/agreement, a second rejection/opposition and the third recognition/importance, to draw others' attention to the item without implying a value judgment. Feel free to steal it unproven if you like.
Bill was in Sydney on the day he became a billionaire* and was surprised to find a bunch of locals wanting to hear more of his recently published thoughts on the then still prospective new medium, but was happy enough to participate in a breakfast discussion quickly arranged by his then Australian representative Linda Graham.
CD-ROM was arguably his last time Bill was close enough to the leading edge that others who made a living at that edge sought his opinion.
*M$ had listed overnight Australian time.
This report had me running to my bookshelf to extract my copy of the December 1994 Networking Australia's Future: The Final Report of the Broadband Services Expert Group, one of the flagship efforts of the final term of the Keating government. (I was responsible for a commissioned sub-report on future demand for broadband in education, so what happened next cuts deep.)
Fifteen months on, well before the long term thinking that had dominated Keating's too-brief reign had any chance to become entrenched, our electorate decided it was finally time to give then recidivist opposition leader Howard "his turn"
Then Howard installed his despicable power-broking deputy senate leader Alston in a mega department of Communications, Information Technology and The Arts, reportedly because the now high commissioner to London had at some stage expressed an appreciation of "The Arts" and that became the tail, reviving its long diminished role in film classification, which wagged the IT&C dog right through the boom and bust
Even worse, the Howard regime, ever blinded by a pathological hatred of its opposition, pigeon holed all the long term policy work that Keating had bank rolled. Even Tweedle Beasley didn't let go of the idea that we should continue to build on the impressive export education industry built during the Hawke-Keating years rather than profit skim it to a degree that even the worst of the private equity players must envy.
Others here are right that better pipes to the rest of the world have always been the core issue and that Telstra is afflicted by an even worse case of monopoly culture than Qantas or M$, but that culture problem the market will eventually sort out, unlike broadband access which our vast distances make potentially even more valuable than anywhere else.
I know my mother's immediate reaction is that she would prefer prints. We've actually had that discussion a few times already. For singular important photos worthy of their own permanent frame that is no doubt correct, but the first downside of your xx cents a copy prints is that they get put away and never looked at again. The second downside is my own convenience as there are still practical limits on how much time and effort I am willing to invest in minor amusements for my mother. So I'm a definite starter for an Apple iFrame the day it comes out, if only as a means of selling her the idea of digitising a lot of her own old pics.
Dropped litter is also hard on ancient backs when it blows into your yard, but even worse when you are out in some otherwise pseudo-natural area and it disrupts the scenery.
It may be interesting to those who aren't just here to bash Wolfram that this offer to provide a prize for a proof of one of his key conjectures in A New Kind of Science (NKS) comes only seven weeks after another key conjecture was disproved. (The fact that that disproof was brought to public notice by the NKS Forum moderator might suggest that the ongoing NKS project is happy enough for results to fall whichever way they will.)
On a visit to Champaign-Urbana in the late 1980s, still before he officially started on NKS, Wolfram took me through where he felt his cellular automata research was headed which hinted at some of the inferences he would eventually draw from his mountains of research data. That was even before the Santa Fe Institute paper which was foolishly read as retreating from the edge of chaos-border of order which had briefly been the focus of the quest for the source of emergent complexity during the 1980s.
The resources Wolfram is bringing to the table are significant and have certainly helped put complex systems back in the spotlight after far too many of the first generation of researchers were seduced by the marginal returns they could get by applying their methods to the derivatives market, no matter whether their methods made a significant difference or not.
The downside of continuing to focus on the simplest possible mechanisms (Wolfram calls them 'programs') as the source of a critical threshold is that all those much sought after proofs of universality, from the early one for Conway's Life on, are vast feats of engineering and thus make no useful progress towards the implicit goal of helping to explain how we/anything got here in the first place.
So I'll keep playing with my own idiosyncratic program to explore a bit deeper in that narrow and difficult transition region between order and chaos, but might be tempted to have another look at Mathematica's increasing support for such research once it is available via CP6AN.
A radio serialisation of Orwell's 1984 finished here the other night and I found myself listening again to the last few bleak installments. The premise of that extreme dystopian view is that you willingly forget everything while Big Brother remembers everything, and that sounds like exactly where the professor's half baked idea (400k PDF) would lead us in practice.
Please keep it all and more, so that idle process in some unimaginably rich future environment which finally gets far enough down the list of reincarnation candidates will have access to the maximum possible amount of data surviving from first time around, enough data that new process it spawns will be happy it is me.
See Clowe, Douglas et al (2006). "A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter," The Astrophysical Journal, ISSN 0004-637X, 648 (September 10): L109-L113.
It was big news at the time so Google will find you plenty of commentary online.
My own instincts suggest that we will eventually come to realise that dark matter and "dark energy" are as close as we will ever get to the main game in town and that baryonic matter will come to be seen as just the scum on the pond.
Anybody trying to play the relativism card with regard to Monbiot's work is deluding themselves.
He has always been more thorough with his research than anybody else who is published regularly in mainstream media and shares his left leaning on social justice issues.
This is the same guy who in much younger days snuck deep into the jungles of West Papua to expose what the Indonesian military neo-colonists were doing to a native population with one of the world's oldest agricultural heritages.
If what he says riles you so much, the smart thing to do would be recheck all the facts with an open mind. Way too many people are quickest to anger when deep down they know they are on shaky ground.
Which is exactly the difference between the price of the old fidelity DRM tracks and the new (higher) fidelity non-DRM tracks.
Once heard an interview with a very respected older society woman who had taken on charitable support of released prisoners and who had come to the conclusion that any sentences over five years crossed the boundary where the prisoner lost hope and thus became a greater danger.
Maybe it's the parenting concept we have got wrong, more especially since going nuclear.
Read Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption with an open mind if you want to know where I'm coming from.
At one level his first chapter of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is titled "There is nothing outside the universe" and insists science draw a line of denial at event horizons.
Then in a recent paper "The status of cosmological natural selection" he claims to show that his 20 year old theory of black holes begetting big bangs produces testable predictions for "landscape theories" which he sees as being more scientific than string theory's reliance on the weak anthropic principle.
My own take is that everything we observe is at some level mediated by photons which are subject to Heisenberg's resolution limits and that it is more likely that type 1a supernovae beget seeds of chaotic inflation within which cosmoses subject to conservative physical laws naturally bubble out.
Is that too big for your imagination?