Please strip to your underwear and sit with your hands folded behind your head in preparation for a courtesy visit from your friends and fellow Class 1 citizens from Homeland Security's Produce Control Division.
And stop thinking about goats when you play with yourself.
I don't think it should be the Project's job to write the software themselves.
They should provide guidance, SDKs, maybe even funding, but the software and materials should be home grown.
For one thing, local educators will best know what their students need.
For another, this is a chance to employ the local talent.
Imagine if Nigeria and/or some NGOs started employing all those computer-literate kids who are sending out 409 letters to instead do some useful coding!
There is no reason not to simultaneously provide medical aid, food aid, aid to repair infrastructure, and etcetera, and computers. That is a phony dichotomy.
One of the big failings of aid and development programs in the past has been a lack of appropriateness; clueless big projects which do little or nothing to help.
It is possible that the One-Laptop-Per-Child project is one of these clueless projects. It could, however, end up as a sort of force multiplier, a source of intelligence (in the "information" sense of the word) and a form of feedback that would let aid organizations know what is really needed and where.
We use it as our video servers' OS!
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't around when it was ported, or ever learned why it was chosen, but a Plan 9 based OS called "Transit" runs on the video servers made by our company. The machines started out as general-purpose supercomputers, but after various shake-outs the hardware evolved into something optimized for storage and streaming.
All the real fun work was done ages ago. All we see is a csh-like shell. Perl and Apache and other basic tools were ported to it, which is nice.
This is a seriously cool idea, but how long before someone uses Spore and 3DP to make alien sex toys and gets the technology banned in Alabama?
Hmmm.
On second thought, if the printer-makers charge as much for the plastic composition used to lay out models as they do for inket ink, it will cost $500 just to make a gaming-miniature sized item.
Will Wright sent by aliens to neutralize us!
on
What Spore May Spawn
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Really. No kidding. The Mutual Interdiction Service of the m'Guhk Meld and the Federation of Eight and the One sent him to neutralize future competition.
Here, read this:
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the [Fermi] Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain's ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels...ever so good.
Moreover: Battlebots viewers with long memories may recall that Wright's daughter built at least one entry for the robot combat game. No doubt as part of a contingency plan to eliminate those who try to avoid the Games.
This was the set-up for David Brin's novel Glory Season: The vast majority of the population of an isolated colony world were female, and most of those were clones of various ancestral mothers.
A few men were kept around to provide sperm for modification; there was also a small minority population of non-clone women produced the old fashioned way.
The protagonist was a young "mixed" woman trying to move up in the world.
Larry Niven pondered this question in a short story. "Cloak of Anarchy," I think.
But SF speculation aside, I don't think we're going to need to worry about surface roads becoming obsolete any time soon.
Even if a significant fraction of passenger traffic switches to flying cars (which is utterly rediculous itself, but anyway...) I really, really doubt you could economically shift frieght traffic to flying mode. If it isn't perishible, or absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, it is far cheaper to let it roll to its destination.
The project organizers never intended it to be bought *by* the students. It is intended to be bought *for* them, by charities, governments, aid organizations, and so on.
The board itself is designed to encourage hardware hacking - the 500 prototype boards currently built come with a VGA jack soldered on. But production models will leave the jack leads etched on the board, though unpopulated. Want to turn a laptop into a device that can drive an external monitor? Solder one on. Also on the board but unpopulated will be connectors for additional RAM and flash memory, as well as a mini-PCI slot. A goal for the next iteration is a board with a wider pitch, which makes it easier to repair the board or to hand-solder additional connections. The case is designed to be easy to open and access the innards - this makes it easier to make Frankenmachines from dead machines, and also makes it easier to mass produce lots of these devices quickly.
I worked as a sales trainer / trade show roustabout for HeadStart, a division of N.A. Phillips, in 89-90.
One of its most hyped products was a compact "dorm room" XT clone called the Explorer. It was actually pretty neat-looking. Folded up like a laptop so it could slide under the monitor stand.
One of the accessories was a 40 MB hard drive. It came in a plastic case and slid into a bay in the side of the unit. The drive was never widely distributed, but all of the display units sent to appliance stores got one. It came loaded with a fairly neat animated demo cartoon.
Good enough. But while the stores all got drives for their demo units, they didn't all get monitor stands and . . .
. . . oh, did I mention that the Explorer didn't have a COOLING FAN? This wasn't a problem if there was no hard disk drive. But if there was, the top of the plastic case got really hot. Hot enough to soften . ..
. . . when the store personnel set the monitor directly on top of the unit running the demo, it SUNK INTO THE CASE.
Eventually, the heat killed hard disk drive, but not before causing trouble for me, personally, because I had to visit all sorts of stores to do a reformat and reinstall the demo software.
[searing sarcasm] If leakers are allowed to reveal to reporters how incompetent, corrupt, and dishonest our leaders are, the terrorists have won. [/searing sarcasm]
Also in the works are a miniseries based on the book "Chariots of the Gods"
Oh, Puh-LEEZE!
I was a gullible little tweener dweeb when Chariots of the Gods? was a hot paperback. It didn't take long to see that it was a crock.
Now, it's an old crock. (Heck, the idea was getting kind of corny when the first Battlestar Galactica series cribbed from it for their background.) There are tons of SF books that Sci-Fi could be adapting that would have better name recognition.
Freeman Dyson: "One Species or a Million?"
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
... When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the questions 'Can man play God and still stay sane?' will lose of of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local dieties and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane , and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of use will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among the species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth.
... The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million different forms."
-- "The Greening of the Galaxy," Freeman Dyson, 1979
Unless we start building household fabricators that can handle the demand, manufacturers of clothing, medical gear, and personal care products are going to have to come up with whole new lines to support each new model of human.
I mean, dang! Imagine trendy parents who have kids of four different models. Back to school clothes shopping would be a real bitch. "Oh, look Tiffany, Sextopodal Kids "R" Us is having a sale on those . . . RONALD! Get your hands out of your mouth this instance!"
Careful what you wish for!
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Fur is high maintenance. It gets all over, has to be brushed a lot, harbors parasites, and makes it hard to keep cool.
My "high tech" junior high and high school was wired for video. Most classrooms had a coax port on the wall . . . nor for "cable" TV but for local transmission.
As I recall, there were maybe four channels.
The A.V. room had a funky old rack unit with a patch panel and a couple of small B&W monitors. Feeding into this were three reel-to-reel video tape machines: Two half-inch, plus one giant 1" Ampex. (Near the end of my high school years we got a video cartridge machine; nothing you'd be familiar with. The carts were huge, pre-VHS and pre-Beta.)
There were also units on wheels we could trundle into classrooms that didn't have the connection. There were maybe three or four video cameras as well; these were not self-contained, and had to be plugged into a reel-to-reel unit.
There were no commercially available tapes to speak of. We recorded stuff off of the air, mostly from PBS. (There MIGHT have been a timer available, but maybe I'm imagining that!)
Now, the nerd pay-off:
One of the senior AV guys (Richard Salz?) figured out a neat trick. He connected a camera to VTR "A", and the patch panel monitor to VTR "B." He then ran a tape from the "source" reel of "A", past "A"'s recording head, across a foot of space, over "B"'s recording head, and into "B"'s "sink" reel.
He then pointed the camera at the monitor, creating a "tunnel" effect . . . monitors nested in monitors.
Bear with me.
When you waved a hand between the camera and the monitor, it appeared in the FIRST of the nested monitor images on screen.
A few seconds later -- the time it took for the tape to travel from the recording head of "A" to the play head of "B" -- the waving hand appeared in the next nested monitor image..
And so on, until you could see just a blur in the inmost-visible nested monitor image.
"Neoteny describes a process by which paedomorphism is achieved, and is a subject studied in the field of developmental biology. In neoteny, the physiological (or somatic) development of an animal or organism is slowed or delayed. Ultimately this process results in the retention, in the adults of a species, of juvenile physical characteristics well into maturity."
The notion that longer-lived, highly intelligent, highly social species take longer to grow up has been around for quite awhile. To take a couple of examples from SF:
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, World Controller Mond tells a biology class touring a baby hatchery about experiments to create drudge-class workers that grow up more quickly. One of the failures hit sexual maturity at age six but are too stupid to even be broom-pushers.
In Stapledon's Last and First Men, an advanced race of humans takes decades to grow up.
I suspect, but of course can't be sure, that what we're seeing in the case of bright kids are marginally more neotenic humans. You might naively say that they are more evolved "humans of the future," except the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or in this case, the proof of fitness is in the cradle. Maybe being able to suck down toxic sludge or live in a sticky hot greenhouse climate will be a better guarantee of reproductive success than mere smarts.
Make the device look like a little anthropomorphic cricket that sits on the user's shoulder. Program it to whisper helpful hints:
"From the way they're starting to nod off, I suspect you may have talked for a little too long about your D&D character. Maybe you should stop."
"I could be wrong, but this guy doesn't look very interested in how parking meters are a form of statist Piracy. Maybe you should stop talking and let him finish filling out that ticket."
"From the way she's wrinkling her nose, I suspect she thinks you smell like cat pee. Maybe you should politely back out now and think about taking a shower."
New Galactica's philosophy in a nutshell . . .
on
GDC - Ron Moore Keynote
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
To steal a line from a review Bruce Sterling wrote about Haldane's The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, the new BSG is . . .
"Totally lacking in comfortable bullshit."
Last week, when Sci-Fi started running Doctor Who, I actually felt a sense of relief at not having a new episode of BSG to watch at Ten. Not because I don't like the show, but because it is so damn wrenching. There's no feel-good sci-fi bogostity there. People die and suffer and doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
Please strip to your underwear and sit with your hands folded behind your head in preparation for a courtesy visit from your friends and fellow Class 1 citizens from Homeland Security's Produce Control Division.
And stop thinking about goats when you play with yourself.
I don't think it should be the Project's job to write the software themselves.
They should provide guidance, SDKs, maybe even funding, but the software and materials should be home grown.
For one thing, local educators will best know what their students need.
For another, this is a chance to employ the local talent.
Imagine if Nigeria and/or some NGOs started employing all those computer-literate kids who are sending out 409 letters to instead do some useful coding!
There is no reason not to simultaneously provide medical aid, food aid, aid to repair infrastructure, and etcetera, and computers. That is a phony dichotomy.
One of the big failings of aid and development programs in the past has been a lack of appropriateness; clueless big projects which do little or nothing to help.
It is possible that the One-Laptop-Per-Child project is one of these clueless projects. It could, however, end up as a sort of force multiplier, a source of intelligence (in the "information" sense of the word) and a form of feedback that would let aid organizations know what is really needed and where.
I wasn't around when it was ported, or ever learned why it was chosen, but a Plan 9 based OS called "Transit" runs on the video servers made by our company. The machines started out as general-purpose supercomputers, but after various shake-outs the hardware evolved into something optimized for storage and streaming.
All the real fun work was done ages ago. All we see is a csh-like shell. Perl and Apache and other basic tools were ported to it, which is nice.
This is a seriously cool idea, but how long before someone uses Spore and 3DP to make alien sex toys and gets the technology banned in Alabama?
Hmmm.
On second thought, if the printer-makers charge as much for the plastic composition used to lay out models as they do for inket ink, it will cost $500 just to make a gaming-miniature sized item.
Here, read this:
More:
Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens
Moreover: Battlebots viewers with long memories may recall that Wright's daughter built at least one entry for the robot combat game. No doubt as part of a contingency plan to eliminate those who try to avoid the Games.
Stefan
This was the set-up for David Brin's novel Glory Season: The vast majority of the population of an isolated colony world were female, and most of those were clones of various ancestral mothers.
A few men were kept around to provide sperm for modification; there was also a small minority population of non-clone women produced the old fashioned way.
The protagonist was a young "mixed" woman trying to move up in the world.
Larry Niven pondered this question in a short story. "Cloak of Anarchy," I think.
But SF speculation aside, I don't think we're going to need to worry about surface roads becoming obsolete any time soon.
Even if a significant fraction of passenger traffic switches to flying cars (which is utterly rediculous itself, but anyway...) I really, really doubt you could economically shift frieght traffic to flying mode. If it isn't perishible, or absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, it is far cheaper to let it roll to its destination.
"why can't we get Presidents like this anymore?"
Because anyone with huevos enough to buck the status quo or speak unpopular truths gets the Rove treatment.
So we'll be getting agreeable dunces from now on.
Dunces with strings to make them dance.
Virtually every Slashdot story about global warming has a post pointing out Micheal Crichton's "interesting speech."
0 05/02/06/checking_crichtons_footnotes/
And every time, I'll link to this thorough debunking of his claims:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
Here is another:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2
The project organizers never intended it to be bought *by* the students. It is intended to be bought *for* them, by charities, governments, aid organizations, and so on.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004543.html
I found this bit fascinating:
OK. It didn't exactly melt, but read on:
.
I worked as a sales trainer / trade show roustabout for HeadStart, a division of N.A. Phillips, in 89-90.
One of its most hyped products was a compact "dorm room" XT clone called the Explorer. It was actually pretty neat-looking. Folded up like a laptop so it could slide under the monitor stand.
One of the accessories was a 40 MB hard drive. It came in a plastic case and slid into a bay in the side of the unit. The drive was never widely distributed, but all of the display units sent to appliance stores got one. It came loaded with a fairly neat animated demo cartoon.
Good enough. But while the stores all got drives for their demo units, they didn't all get monitor stands and . . .
. . . oh, did I mention that the Explorer didn't have a COOLING FAN? This wasn't a problem if there was no hard disk drive. But if there was, the top of the plastic case got really hot. Hot enough to soften . .
. . . when the store personnel set the monitor directly on top of the unit running the demo, it SUNK INTO THE CASE.
Eventually, the heat killed hard disk drive, but not before causing trouble for me, personally, because I had to visit all sorts of stores to do a reformat and reinstall the demo software.
Ah, those were the days.
[searing sarcasm]
If leakers are allowed to reveal to reporters how incompetent, corrupt, and dishonest our leaders are, the terrorists have won.
[/searing sarcasm]
Three-prong power sockets already look like scowling little faces.
How soon until those slits have little pupils that follow you around the room and feed live video to your local Homeland Security office?
I mean [REDACTED BY FALSE BELIEF FILTER. TRUTH MAINTENANCE SERVICES SPONSORED BY NEW BROCOLLI CHEESE HOT POCKETS.]
Also in the works are a miniseries based on the book "Chariots of the Gods"
Oh, Puh-LEEZE!
I was a gullible little tweener dweeb when Chariots of the Gods? was a hot paperback. It didn't take long to see that it was a crock.
Now, it's an old crock. (Heck, the idea was getting kind of corny when the first Battlestar Galactica series cribbed from it for their background.) There are tons of SF books that Sci-Fi could be adapting that would have better name recognition.
...
When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the questions 'Can man play God and still stay sane?' will lose of of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local dieties and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane , and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of use will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among the species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth.
...
The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million different forms."
-- "The Greening of the Galaxy," Freeman Dyson, 1979
Unless we start building household fabricators that can handle the demand, manufacturers of clothing, medical gear, and personal care products are going to have to come up with whole new lines to support each new model of human.
I mean, dang! Imagine trendy parents who have kids of four different models. Back to school clothes shopping would be a real bitch. "Oh, look Tiffany, Sextopodal Kids "R" Us is having a sale on those . . . RONALD! Get your hands out of your mouth this instance!"
Fur is high maintenance. It gets all over, has to be brushed a lot, harbors parasites, and makes it hard to keep cool.
n g_lo.JPG
My dog has a brutal time in summer:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/kira_grinni
Some dog owners just give their pups a full body trim in late spring.
Locust Valley High School, circa 1974 - 1980:
My "high tech" junior high and high school was wired for video. Most classrooms had a coax port on the wall . . . nor for "cable" TV but for local transmission.
As I recall, there were maybe four channels.
The A.V. room had a funky old rack unit with a patch panel and a couple of small B&W monitors. Feeding into this were three reel-to-reel video tape machines: Two half-inch, plus one giant 1" Ampex. (Near the end of my high school years we got a video cartridge machine; nothing you'd be familiar with. The carts were huge, pre-VHS and pre-Beta.)
There were also units on wheels we could trundle into classrooms that didn't have the connection. There were maybe three or four video cameras as well; these were not self-contained, and had to be plugged into a reel-to-reel unit.
There were no commercially available tapes to speak of. We recorded stuff off of the air, mostly from PBS. (There MIGHT have been a timer available, but maybe I'm imagining that!)
Now, the nerd pay-off:
One of the senior AV guys (Richard Salz?) figured out a neat trick. He connected a camera to VTR "A", and the patch panel monitor to VTR "B." He then ran a tape from the "source" reel of "A", past "A"'s recording head, across a foot of space, over "B"'s recording head, and into "B"'s "sink" reel.
He then pointed the camera at the monitor, creating a "tunnel" effect . . . monitors nested in monitors.
Bear with me.
When you waved a hand between the camera and the monitor, it appeared in the FIRST of the nested monitor images on screen.
A few seconds later -- the time it took for the tape to travel from the recording head of "A" to the play head of "B" -- the waving hand appeared in the next nested monitor image..
And so on, until you could see just a blur in the inmost-visible nested monitor image.
Um, OK, I guess you had to be there.
Let's have General Motors and Exxon pay the Association of Petroleum Geologists to do the research.
Then the Truthiness will Come Out.
From the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny) for neoteny:
"Neoteny describes a process by which paedomorphism is achieved, and is a subject studied in the field of developmental biology. In neoteny, the physiological (or somatic) development of an animal or organism is slowed or delayed. Ultimately this process results in the retention, in the adults of a species, of juvenile physical characteristics well into maturity."
The notion that longer-lived, highly intelligent, highly social species take longer to grow up has been around for quite awhile. To take a couple of examples from SF:
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, World Controller Mond tells a biology class touring a baby hatchery about experiments to create drudge-class workers that grow up more quickly. One of the failures hit sexual maturity at age six but are too stupid to even be broom-pushers.
In Stapledon's Last and First Men, an advanced race of humans takes decades to grow up.
I suspect, but of course can't be sure, that what we're seeing in the case of bright kids are marginally more neotenic humans. You might naively say that they are more evolved "humans of the future," except the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or in this case, the proof of fitness is in the cradle. Maybe being able to suck down toxic sludge or live in a sticky hot greenhouse climate will be a better guarantee of reproductive success than mere smarts.
Make the device look like a little anthropomorphic cricket that sits on the user's shoulder. Program it to whisper helpful hints:
"From the way they're starting to nod off, I suspect you may have talked for a little too long about your D&D character. Maybe you should stop."
"I could be wrong, but this guy doesn't look very interested in how parking meters are a form of statist Piracy. Maybe you should stop talking and let him finish filling out that ticket."
"From the way she's wrinkling her nose, I suspect she thinks you smell like cat pee. Maybe you should politely back out now and think about taking a shower."
To steal a line from a review Bruce Sterling wrote about Haldane's The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, the new BSG is . . .
"Totally lacking in comfortable bullshit."
Last week, when Sci-Fi started running Doctor Who, I actually felt a sense of relief at not having a new episode of BSG to watch at Ten. Not because I don't like the show, but because it is so damn wrenching. There's no feel-good sci-fi bogostity there. People die and suffer and doubt.
No kidding, look!
7 3cen042.html
http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/rockets/nostalgia/
http://www.dars.org/jimz/estes/k-42i.tif