Bogon Flux - A peek through the cracks in the dominant paradigm

Hollywood 2.0

2012-01-21T12:05:00.001-09:00

YC has declared war on Hollywood.....sweet.

If ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it is the media content industry. Don't get me wrong, disruption is underway, as clearly evidenced by the industry's spastic power grabs and hysterical fits. They know their days are numbered, and they just want it to go back to the way it was, before the VCR.

Ironically, the solution is simple. We don't even need copyright reform to fix it. A new licence for media content needs to be developed (or may already exist) that allows exclusive use for say, 10 years, with clear provisions for allowing the remix culture, broad fair use, and reverts to a creative commons licence after a fixed period. Other ideas, to reduce piracy issues would be concurrent free release licence at a lower resolution or frame rate, so that "cam's" would be irrelevant, or other similar limited free release provisions.

Make the licence as convenient as possible for content users, and provide a simple, inbuilt mechanism for upgrading the free content to full versions for a reasonable price.

With a good shot of investment capital, start alternative recording and film houses that release their works under these licences. Leverage technology and lean principals to reduce the cost and fixed overhead, and make sure that the artists are compensated better and retain more rights than in traditional models.

Distribute through traditional (theaters) and digital channels like Netflix, iTunes, and similar paid content services. Provide promotional services to aid fledgling stars.

You get the picture: Use 2.0 paradigms, a reasonable licence, and treat creators well. Lower the barrier to entry, choose a role of highway builder rather than gatekeeper for content. By treating the producers and consumers of media like human beings, and creating channels rather than barriers, entertainment 2.0 will prevail.

Viva la evolution!

MPAA's Chris Dodd publicly threatens congress in temper tantrum - Support the petition to launch an official inquiry

2012-01-21T08:41:00.000-09:00

Bribe:

The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties.

The expectation of a specific voluntary action in return is what makes the difference between a bribe and a private demonstration of goodwill.

Chris Dodd, in the wake of shrinking support for SOPA / PIPA in Washington:

"Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,"

Could this be an admission of bribery ?

It seems close enough that a reasonable person would understand Dodd's statement as a clear quid pro quo.

If you find the idea that our laws should be written for the highest bidder objectionable, you can take action on this at whitehouse.gov, where there is a petition to investigate Dodd and the MPAA for bribery.

I urge you to sign the petition - it is time that we said enough is enough. We all want vitality for business and the economy, but the United States of America is a Democratic Republic, not a Corporakleptocracy. The blatant purchase of legislation has to stop, not only in the entertainment business, but in all segments of industry. An investigation, even if unsuccessful, will send a strong message to lobbyists: You can tender favor, but you cannot buy legislation.

sleep deprived airport rant....

2012-01-18T16:37:00.000-09:00

Chicago, Ohare.....

As I sit patiently awaiting my flight, a cascade of ignorance pollutes my thoughts... Wave after wave of meaningless drivel bleats down upon me from the overhead monitors, the caricatured faces feigning emotion in the teleprompted ritual that is morning television. I feel as if my eyes are going to bleed. Issues of grave importance are homogenized with the trivial in a soothing rhythm of hypnotic oration, a translucent veneer of humanity bluntly imparted by the flesh puppets speaking through curiously adhesive cakes of cosmetic filler and paint. The paint, I am reminded, is to simulate a sexual flush, in an attempt to capture my attention, while the filler hides imperfections in texture or shade that might be construed as disease or a less than ideal genetic compliment.... but this morning, the monkey within is unusually numb to this type of subtle manipulation.

Today I am pondering the difference between understanding and information. In artificial intelligence, this critical divide forms the focal point of study....but in organic intelligence the distinction is too often ignored, at our collective peril.

Watching television, for example, informs me. Because I am aware that I am being informed by a source that is projecting a manifestation of its financial agenda, I understand what i am being told within a context of bias, and consider the information accordingly.

Similarly, In the context of my role in security theater, I also am informed that ionizing radiation damages cellular structures, including the critical code for cellular replication. This information is backed up by repeatable observation and theoretical analysis. I consider it to be reliable.

I am informed that backscatter x-ray technology uses 'soft' x-rays that reliably impact organic structures instead of x-rays that pass through soft tissue, mainly revealing bony structures and dense masses. I know this because I understand the theory of operation of backscatter x-ray imaging. I consider this information to be credible by virtue of demonstration of a functioning apparatus based on the theory.

Because I understand these things, I can calculate that the entire dose of radiation received by a person from this machine would be concentrated within about 1kg of dermal tissue....making the common dose / body mass calculation that is given to support the safety of the devices off by two orders of magnitude....so, I choose not to voluntarily receive a radiation dose of 100 airline flights into my dermis over a 1 second period. (if the quip about being equal to the in-flight dose is to be believed)

Knowing this, I wonder how many people around me have anything more that an opinion about this, given to them by someone that they accept, having failed to consider, as a reliable source.

I fear for humanity, lest we be overcome by the stupid, wafting forth from every imaginable media orifice, engineered to sooth us from away from the impulse to think, to examine, to carefully consider.

For many, who do not make a habit of forming their own opinions, this is a succulent nectar of security, of effortless knowing, of wonderful clarity and simplicity. A sickly sweet mixture, like aspartame, 1000 times as sweet as any naturally occurring sugar, but decomposing into toxic byproducts -- the soothing cadence of teleprompted bobbleheads is insidiously hypnotic.

This is not some giant media conspiracy. This is merely the natural product of commercial entities, furthering their commercial agenda through the production and distribution of their product. This is not evil...this is what we want .... or at least what we are choosing with our dollars.

In the shadow of this false ambrosia of half-truth, the uncomfortable uncertainty of examination, the struggle of analysis, of careful and critical consideration, these bittersweet products of knowledge -- simply cannot compare. Like processed food, preprocessed information, pre-opinionated and reconstituted in commercial form, is, for some, simply more compelling.

It bears remembering that, by definition, about half of the population is in the possession of cerebral equipment of sub average performance. It truly falls to those of that are able, to think with efficiency, accuracy, and clarity, not only on our own behalf, but for the entirety of humanity. We ignore this burden at our peril.

Our task is not simple, nor easy. It is a fundamental flaw of democracy that one only needs to convince the simplest 40 percent of your audience, as the middle ground will be divided, so that even if all of the brightest see with clarity, idiocracy will prevail.

There is no danger greater than laziness of mind.....those who do not exercise their right to think, understand, analyze and choose risk loosing the right of voluntary action, not only for themselves, but for all of us.

Something to consider.

Testimony on internet piracy?

2012-01-12T09:57:00.002-09:00

(Spoiler alert....if tl;dr, at least skip to the bottom!)

Mr. VALENTI. I am merely coming to start off by talking about the American film and television industry, not as an economic enterprise, but as a great national asset to this country, to the U.S. Treasury and the strength of the American dollar. And I am not just talking on behalf of people whose names are household words, like Brad Pitt and Megan Fox. I am speaking on behalf, as he is, as he will no doubt tell you on behalf of hundreds of thousands of men and women who without public knowledge or recognition, who are not besieged by fans, but who are artisans, craftsmen, carpenters, bricklayers, all kinds of people, who work in this industry, not only in this State but in the 50 States where American films are shot on location. And they deserve no less, Mr. Chairman, than the concern of the Congress for the preservation of their industry.

But more than that, which I think is paramount to the national interest, the preservation of a huge trade asset. American films and television dominate the screens of the world and that just didn't happen. It happened because of the quality and caliber and the imagination and the way people construct fragile imaginings that we call the American film.

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the Internet and its necessary companion called the computer. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. The Internet threatens profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.

Now, my first card, Mr. Chairman, deals with what I consider to be one of the essential elements that you cannot ignore and, indeed, you must nourish. The U.S. film -- and I will read this -- "The U.S. film and television production industry is a huge and valuable American asset." In 2009, it returned to this country almost $12 billion in surplus balance of trade. And I might add, Mr. Chairman, it is the single one American-made product that the Chinese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or to displace or to compete with or to clone. And I might add that this important asset today is in jeopardy. Why?

Because unless the Congress recognizes the rights of creative property owners as owners of private property, that this property that we exhibit in theaters, once it leaves the post-theatrical markets, it is going to be so eroded in value by Internet piracy, that the whole valuable asset is going to be blighted. In the opinion of many of the people in this room and outside of this room, blighted, beyond all recognition. It is a piece of sardonic irony that this asset, which unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds -- a piece of sardonic irony that while foreign industry are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by promoting and profiting from Internet piracy......

.... Nothing of value is free. It is very easy, Mr. Chairman, to convince people that it is in their best interest to give away somebody else's property for nothing, but even the most guileless among us know that this is a cave of illusion where commonsense is lured and then quietly strangled. That is what it is all about.

Now, these file-sharing websites are advertised for one purpose in life. Their only single mission, their primary mission is to copy copyrighted material that belongs to other people. I don't have to go into it. The ads are here. Here is the Pirate Bay, advertising a million free downloads.

Now, Mr. Chairman, how many people would go to these file-sharing websites if there weren't any copyrighted material on it. The site would be useless and this is what the Ninth Circuit said. They advertise their site blatantly and deliberately saying the way to use it is to copy somebody else's copyrighted programs. ..........

.......The permission of the copyright owner is required for the use of their programs in all markets. Now, I those markets include theaters, cable, pay cable, pay television, network television, syndicated television, video discs. Every one of those markets is going to be competing for Mr. Cruise's new film "MI4" They are going to license that film at a negotiated price.

Now, we cannot live in a marketplace, Mr. Chairman -- you simply cannot live in a marketplace, where there is one unleashed animal in that marketplace, unlicensed. It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in and labored over......

......Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk <that a film will not recoup its investment at the box office alone>, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that Internet piracy is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace.

Now, is this all? Is it going to get any bigger? Well, I assure you it is. …...... We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of the Internet.

Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the Internet. One of the Internet lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the Internet-- well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don't know. He certainly is not MGM's lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the Internet is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.

I say to you that the Internet is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Now, for a reality check...., everything in bold has been changed from the original text. Where it says Internet or Internet user, put in VCR or blank tape. For download, substitute record. For file-sharing website, put in VCR manufacturers. For China or foreign industry, put in Japan. For a date, put in 1982ish. For star 'x' put in Clint Eastwood and co. For 12 Billion, put in 1 billion. It would appear that the VCR didn't hurt their growth that much....

The certain destruction of the entertainment industry and the loss of countless american jobs, circa 1982

You see, this is a redacted, but not otherwise edited except as noted above above subset of a hearing before the house on the Home Recording of Copyrighted works, circa 1982. That bill didn't pass, and there was no VCR apocalypse. They are using the same tired arguments, but this time to wreak havoc on an economically critical industry infrastructure that brings in hundreds of times their revenue, not just pesky Japanese VCR makers.

It would be such a sad commentary on the state of the union if these same, rehashed arguments succeeded this time, when so much more is at stake.....Do your part to fight SOPA/PIPA!

Obama Administration to close Guantanamo bay, end extrajudicial detention!

2012-01-08T07:07:00.000-09:00

Oh, wait....that was before he got elected.

"A lawful nation, especially in a contest against the lawless, must act within the law, and to the greatest extent possible, be above reproach. To do otherwise is to lose the war, even as we win our battles. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the world."

"ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. ...." excerpted from NY Times, follow the link to read more of this alarming cautionary tale of justified injustice...

Undoubtedly, some of the most wanted, heinous criminals from the losing side are in, or were in detention at Guantanamo Bay. Undoubtedly, some of these people are guilty of countless killings, and crimes against humanity. Undoubtedly, they should not be set free.

However...there are also, undoubtedly, people in detention that are innocent, or guilty perhaps, of much much lesser things. These people also will not be released....about 90 of them, whom we (the USA) have cleared for release, but because of the stigma of Guantanamo bay, or the political status of their country, or some other extrajudicial reason, can not go home.

The problem here is the very existence of extrajudicial detention. Regardless of the circumstances, once the fight moves off of the active battlefield, we must observe some kind of well conceived due process, to operate within a transparent framework of law. To do otherwise is to abdicate our responsibility as a proponent of human rights, a lawful state, and a protagonist on the global stage.

The end does not justify the means - thousands of years of history bear this out.

Facebook Hates People with Disabilities?

2012-01-08T06:07:00.000-09:00

Apparently in an effort to get their new years resolutions off to a good start, Internet giant Facebook took a stand against people with disabilities and elderly, asserting that a helper program that assisted people by minimizing the complex (and sometimes painful) clickthroughs required to play many of their online games violated their terms of service.

One saddened user comments:

"Thank you for running this as long as you could. Makes me sad it has to stop. I won't be playing any FB games anymore, I have serious typing injury and every click hurts, you saved me so many clicks. FGS was the only reason I played any games still and even dropped $5 here & there on them sometimes."

A volunteer who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal against her Facebook account, commented:

"I work with differently-abled clients on a daily basis, and the Friendly Gaming Simplifier was instrumental in our technology exposure activities. Many of our clients just won't be able to play now, and an important part of the services that we offer will be hampered by this shortsighted policy. I even had this set up for my grandmother at home, she has really painfully arthritic hands so it's hard to use the mouse, but with the Simplifier helper, she really used to enjoy social games.... she lives alone, you know."

More reports of people with disabilities or chronic pain are rolling in...:

"I also am disabled & FGS has been the only way I could advance in this game without spending lots of real money which on my limited (SSD) income I can't do. All that clicking is just too painful & I am too slow in my reactions to collect most stuff anyway. I think Zynga doesn't realize just how many disabled & homebound are on their sites. Taking FGS away will more than likely make many of us quit. I've loved the game & made many wonderful friends around the world. Why punish us for being longterm players who needed the gift that Flies has given us?"

.....
"In my personal experience, the browser extension offered by "Flies" has been the mitigator of tendonitis pain, among other things. It has also allowed me to participate in the game(s) in a fair and equitable manner, given the number of "neighbors" required to proceed in these games."

To make matters worse, Facebook even banned the talented developer of this groundbreaking accessibility work from developing any more Facebook applications, or even signing into facebook - ever.

Wow, Facebook.

Edit:

"disabled" and "handicapped" replaced with "people with disabilities" , more testimonials added

De-spinning the NDAA

2012-01-03T10:07:00.002-09:00

KA CLUNK, KA CLUNK, KA CLUNK - thats the spin cycle, getting a little out of balance...read on....

So we all (hopefully) know that the NDAA has been signed into law....but the spin would have you believe that the Obama Administration was reluctant to sign the bill due to the provisions on indefinite detention (aaaawwww...isnt that adorable!)....but that is really only a fraction of the story. If you -read- the official Obama Administration response to the NDAA, you would probably come to the same conclusion that I have...which is that the administration was hesitant to pass the NDAA as written, not because it codified indefinite detention (which has already been made de-facto legal, as shown below) but rather because it specifically classifies these detainees as “Military Detainees”, thus giving them Geneva Convention protections.

Excerpts from the administrations response :

(STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY S. 1867 – National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2012 ):

“Section 1031 attempts to expressly codify the detention authority that exists under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) (the “AUMF”). The authorities granted by the AUMF, including the detention authority, are essential to our ability to protect the American people from the threat posed by al-Qa'ida and its associated forces, and have enabled us to confront the full range of threats this country faces from those organizations and individuals. Because the authorities codified in this section already exist, the Administration does not believe codification is necessary and poses some risk. ”

“The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects. This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President's authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals. ”

To their credit, the administration goes on to raise questions about the military detention of American citizens, which by my reading of the bill is pretty shaky anyway, though it does carry provisions for citizens engaged in hostilities in concert with Al Queda / et al (pretty vauge, really - not good) .

As stated in the Administrations response, the concern is that the Geneva Convention will restrict the handling (or mis-handling) of these detainees, and the protections could hinder the techniques that we have become accustomed to using (extraordinary rendition, anyone?), and would also bar things like summary execution, which was being pushed for earlier in the case of confessions, as a way of dealing with the "what do we do with them now?" problem. Also, Military detainees can only be held until the “end of hostilities”, not forever, which means that if / when we end the “war on terror” we would have to set them free. Also, the holding of inmates would have to meet specific conditions, and could be subject to international scrutiny....so, check it out, and decide whether or not you have been spun!

I have a copy of the administrations response here : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3595202/saps1867s_20111117.pdf

Please Dl it and read it in its entirety for yourself!!!!

I also addressed NDAA Issues here before the bill was signed, so follow this link for more analysis and information...

Citizens legal 068

2012-01-01T09:20:00.001-09:00

....What every person should know before graduating high school.... But very few of us do.

Set aside a little time and watch this video. If you do, you will problably learn something...and may save yourself or someone you know a great deal of trouble someday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6wXkI4t7nuc

The surveillance state of social networking

2011-12-30T07:36:00.001-09:00

Social networking sites and tools, are above all, surveillance tools.

You use them to surveille your friends, and in exchange you agree to be surveilled by them and the service provider, and whomever that they share your data with.

This has changed the social landscape from a world of closed doors and drawn curtains, into an age of glass houses, and transparent thoughts. This unprecedented, pervasive surveillance is proving to be a boon to corporate america and government, and has the potential to both increase and undermine our freedoms. the question is, who is driving this train, anyway?

Barring a satisfactory, reassuring answer, I would encourage my readers to look carefully at their social networking decisions. We now have the tools to own our social networking existence, as well as our data. Check out http://diasporaproject.org/ .... they even have Facebook integration, to ease you into self ownership until you can decide to throw away the chains for good.

With Diaspora, you own your profile. You choose where to host it (for free) or you can host it yourself even! You own your data. You can download, store, archive and delete your data, and it is actually gone if you delete it. You can move it to another country (mine is in the Netherlands on http://pod.orkz.net , check them out) , but it doesn't matter where it is at, all the "pods" act as a single social network.

Diaspora is alpha, so there are bugs....but this is our best shot at taking back our privacy, and we need to vote with our feet, so to speak - the more users they have, the more strength they will carry forward.

Join me in instantiating social self ownership, and vote against pervasive surveillance - Join Diaspora, and if you are a Facebook addict, use diaspora's Facebook integration to access your Facebook friends.

The product....

2011-12-30T07:13:00.002-09:00

The product....is you.

People that know me know that I started saying this when the web was young, and it has never been more true than it is today.

I am speaking to the users of free web services - services like Facebook, Google Plus, and to a lesser extent blogger, gmail, MSN, and any of thousands of others for which there is no user paying revenue model. (yes, this includes me).

One thing users of these services need to understand...you are not the customer. You are the product. You, your content, your relationships, and your surfing habits, your history, your purchases, your discussions....this is the stuff that millionaires are made of. This should not be big news for many of my readers, but what we often fail to ask ourselves is, what is the real cost of being the product?

Lets look at some generalizations that apply, in varying degrees, to some popular "free" web services

Value propositions:

Utility - email sure beats sending a letter, and checking your wall is an easy way to check up on what your friends have been doing.
Entertainment - Who doesn't like to play a game now and then?

The price:

The privacy cost, personal -

You can expect that someone, somewhere, has access to a profile of most of the sites you visit, for how long, and what you do while you are there. This data will be used for marketing, then aggregated, warehoused, and sold. Security research shows that although your data may have been "anonomized", it is a trivial exercise, given a large block of data, to personally identify users, even out of multiple users on a single computer. Given a month of "anonomized" web history data from most household PC's, I can likely easily extrapolate how many users, their names, their approximate ages and sex, their home address, their individual preferences in a variety of things, their political views, their social status, their work habits, and often much, much more. I can say that from personal experience that with "anonymized" web history alone, I could make a pretty good play at blackmail with a significant fraction of users. As anyone who has done tech work on home computers can attest, TMI is a regular work hazard.
Banks, insurance companies, employers, and law enforcement organizations have been keen to harness the power of this new information source. It is now a common policy to review social networking content prior to approving loans, paying out claims, underwriting patients, and hiring new employees.
Harnessing this trend are a new breed of surveillance aggregators that build personal profiles in advance (kind of like a social credit score) identifying health, risk, market, or and behavior data, attaching that data to a personal profile that includes tax and other public records, and proactively selling this information to marketers, employers, investigators, insurers, and lenders. Yes, it is on your permanent record. No, it doesn't matter if it was deleted, it has been cached. All your base are belong to us.

The privacy cost, public-

Do we value our privacy? The bar for privacy is ever pushed downward by the normalization of total disclosure. The problem with this is that when any of us does this, it pushes the bar down for everyone - sort of like littering, a personal action that has public consequences.
Trivializing privacy normalizes pervasive surveillance. Is this really what we want for our future?

Opportunity cost, private-

We are all painfully aware that each of the 365 days of the year carries 24 precious hours. Of those, about 10 are needed for rest, hygiene, and eating. You may work or go to school for 8 hours - add the commute, and that leaves maybe 5 hours a day for discretionary activities. A recent study of social networking users shows that 95% of social network users who logged in at least once a day used the site for 1 or more hours, with nearly 20% using the site for more than 4 hours a day. What type of value was generated for these users? What else could they have been doing in the social, personal, or educational realm that might have yielded more tangible results? What is the social "payback" of chats and wall posts Vs. a cup of coffee with a friend, or a even a well thought out email?

Opportunity cost, public-

While the enhanced networking facility of computer facilitated social networking certainly makes connections in the world of commerce and governance easier and more transparent, what are the costs to society of this type of connection versus traditional friendships? It certainly is possible to maintain a brood of internet buddies, while failing to establish any real friendships.
Friendships are an important part of our social fabric, literally the glue that forms a cohesive society. These social contracts, especially the implied, unwritten ones, are what makes the world a basically friendly place.
What is the collective cost, as a society, of investing our emotional currency in ethereal, relationships, event though it may be with people we really know? If it weren't for social networking, would we chose to spend that much time writing to distant friends and relatives? Shouldn't we rather be visiting, talking to, or sharing activities with nearby, real-world friends and neighbors, who provide us with our real world support network?

Please think this over, and leave any relevant comments or feedback below....

New developments for Daruino.....

2011-12-11T13:02:00.001-09:00

A new product and new boards...head on over to the Daruino blog to see what's new!!!

National defense authorization act...Torture Much?

2011-12-09T07:02:00.001-09:00

Daily life in extralegal detention,
circa 2003, Abu Ghraib detention facility

It seems that the senate has passed s.1867, a bill that would, according to the ACLU, give the government the power to detain US citizens accused of (yes, just accused of) "beligerent acts" indefinitely, without any sort of due process.

I, frankly, do not see how that can be read from this bill, and that rather extreme interpretation has me a little baffled, although I do agree that some of the language is dangerously vague and subject to mis (or dis) interpretation.

Read it (the controversial section) for yourself:

SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.

(a) In General – Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.

(b) Covered Persons – A covered person under this section is any person as follows:

(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

(c) Disposition Under Law of War – The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:

(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111-84)).

(3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction.

(4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.

(d) Construction- Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(e) Requirement for Briefings of Congress – The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be ‘covered persons’ for purposes of subsection (b)(2).
SEC. 1032. REQUIREMENT FOR MILITARY CUSTODY.

(a) Custody Pending Disposition Under Law of War -

(1) IN GENERAL – Except as provided in paragraph (4), the Armed Forces of the United States shall hold a person described in paragraph (2) who is captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.

(2) COVERED PERSONS – The requirement in paragraph (1) shall apply to any person whose detention is authorized under section 1031 who is determined–

(A) to be a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda; and

(B) to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.

(3) DISPOSITION UNDER LAW OF WAR – For purposes of this subsection, the disposition of a person under the law of war has the meaning given in section 1031(c), except that no transfer otherwise described in paragraph (4) of that seciton shall be made unless consistent with the requirements of section 1033.

(4) WAIVER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY – The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security of the United States.

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens -

(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS – The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS – The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

It seems to me that this states that :

Persons involved in the 2011 WTC attacks, specific organizations, and their affiliates are subject to detainment in military custody, if they are not US citizens or legal residents.

Military custody is imprisonment subject to the protections of the Geneva convention. If anything, this bill offers greater protection to foreign combatants, but does not extend this privilege to citizens and residents engaged in belligerent acts connected to specified acts and organizations: but maybe I read it wrong?

(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

Notably, I notice that no broad new classes of persons are made eligible for detention under 1031, except that citizens and residents to which 1 or 2 above apply may find themselves in a legal vacuum.

Interestingly, the Obama Administration has stated in this policy letter that they do not support the bill, but this is not a happy warm fuzzy Obama is protecting the nation moment.

The letter text makes clear that the administration does not want to be hobbled in their ability to perform indefinite, unsupervised, unlimited detention and "interrogation" (Torture much, Mr President?) that clearly would not be permissible under the Geneva convention.

I would like to make it abundantly clear at this point that I am a firmly against state-sanctioned torture. Torture should always be illegal, and if performed, performed under the duress and urgency of the situation for which the torturers are willing to risk their freedom or lives to perform. If discovered, perpetrators of torture should be subject to severe punishments in federal criminal proceedings, possibly including the death penalty. I believe that this is the only way that this monster can be kept in check. I also believe that indefinite detention without any framework of charge, legal recourse, review, or appeal is certainly torture, in itself.

That said, I can see the argument against affording terrorists the protections of the Geneva Convention, as this international treaty assumes a context of nation vs nation warfare within the context of other treaties on the conduct of war. Clearly, terrorist organizations do not adhere to these treaties themselves, and arguably then, should not be protected by treaties to which they themselves do nod abide.

Nonetheless, if the United States is to stand for the rule of law and the right to peaceful existence, then we must not openly hold anyone, no matter how despicable, in absence of a valid legal framework that we would endorse for global use. We must publicly renounce torture in all of its forms.... and we should keep our secrets secret.

The order of things.....and where is ET, anyway?

2011-12-08T20:26:00.001-09:00

Second Order

First order organisms: Organic or artificial organisms that either evolved or were constructed, more or less as they are. In so far as they may undergo changes over the course of generations, these changes are neither intentional nor directed.

Earth is a planet of first order organisms. We are first order organisms. This is about to change.....

As a species, our comparatively high intelligence has only fueled a desire for more intelligence, better decisions based on more complex analysis, and an ever increasing thirst for higher and higher cognitive resolution.

It is, of course, not strictly required, to efficiently process information about your environment to survive - plants, trees, and an ocean of phytoplankton bear silent witness to this obvious fact. Nonetheless, there is a benefit accrued by those creatures who would assimilate and calculate based on environmental information. Sensors of various types evolved along with the first mobile creatures suggesting that information about ones surroundings only carries benefit insofar as one can react to that data, or perhaps suggesting that the ability to act without useful information is pointless.

We are perhaps twenty to one hundred years away from the capability to endow ourselves or a creature that we create with the capacity to perform significant intentional self modification, resulting in a new or improved species. It is very likely that such optimization will center around intelligence, as it is intelligence that will permit further success in self modification.

At this point we will have either become or created a second order life form - one capable of intentionally engineering itself or its offspring.

Second order life forms are likely to undergo a period of recursive acceleration - exponential increases in intelligence, right up to the point where some physical law steps in to say that more improvements are impractical (or perhaps unnecessary). This could easily result in a ten order of magnitude (or more) improvement in our data processing capability, such that an organism so endowed could conceivably experience centuries of man-thought-hours in every passing second. (Of course, this type of improvement would not likely be possible within the limiting framework of organic biology - we will probably need to incorporate other types of technology)

A creature of this nature would be as dissimilar to us as we are to ants - both able to process information, Turing complete, so to say..... but we could literally have nothing of interest to say to such a being, as even in finishing our first sentence, they would have experienced a the passing of mental millenia.

It is interesting to note, that this evolution or genesis will have transpired within 5000 years of the dawn of modern civilization, and within 500 years of the first complex machines. This is a tiny slice of time, even by mere geologic scales.

In the timescale of the universe, such a period is hardly worth mentioning. If our situation is representative of intelligent life forms, such that they might quickly develop ways to reduce or transcend their limitations, then by far the most likely creature to find at large in the universe will be a second order, intentionally evolving being.

This begs a walk down the rabbit hole, where we might field some interesting questions.

If we assume that:

Our level of technological prowess is a very short, fleeting stage in the evolution of intelligent, technically oriented species, that will quickly be eclipsed entirely as we move on to second-order existence, unless we suffer a cataclysmic setback.
Planets capable of supporting advanced life forms number it the trillions within the observable universe
Advanced, intelligent first order organisms are a predictable outcome of evolution on at least a significant fraction of these planets
A significant fraction of technologically oriented first order intelligences will be driven towards the development of or the incorporation of second order feature sets
The sweet spot for life varies from system to system by a few billion years

Then we can infer that:

Civilizations at our level of technological development have a high probability of evolving into second-order creatures before they manage the complexities of "superluminal" interstellar travel
There are probably countless civilizations that have moved on to or generated second order life forms, which have had ample opportunity to spread throughout the universe, but relatively few civilizations at our exact level of development.

So where are they?

First, we have no clue as to what a fully evolved second order creature would be like. We can guess that they might be quite small, as the speed of light will constrain the size of their brains, at least at first. We can guess that they will probably be both very efficient and highly consumptive, at least in bursts. (my back of the napkin calculations show that a foreseeable human enhancement might dissipate 15kw + during fully loaded thought)

They might predictably be energy oriented, and well adapted to life in space, where resource acquisition is less problematic than a quickly exhausted planetary resource.

Second, how will we know one if we see it? Well, since we are just now coming to terms with the high intelligence of octupi and dolphins, it is clear that we are highly biased to assume that intelligent = similar to us. This, of course, is rubbish. Remembering that a second order being would have centuries of thought for every human second, it is useless to imagine that we would have any meaningful interaction with a second order life form, much less that they would exhibit anything but an infinitesimally fleeting curiosity about us.....if curiosity as we know it is even a trait of a second order being.

They could be so small as to be hard to detect, and they could operate on quantum principles that would make them seem, to the observer grounded in particle - land, as inert objects, upon first observation.

So, in short, we might see them (if we even notice them) as being enigmatic creatures with extraordinary capabilities, but we are very unlikely to directly recognize any evidence whatsoever of their intelligence. We could not hope to comprehend or interpret the thoughts or actions of millenia over the span of a few seconds. We could literally be surrounded by them and have no clue, except that maybe they could do things that seemed impossible, if we even noticed them at all.

Furthermore, such beings, if they exist, might not be concerned at all with place, much less have need of a home-world. It seems to me quite likely, that space around all the stars could be inhabited already. I naively imagine them like space - jellyfish....infinitely intelligent by our standards, impossible to "kill" in the conventional sense, yet easily (if temporarily) disintegrated by a passing sweep of a hand - if they permitted it.

hmmmm...

At any rate, it is worth an introspecive moment.......

-Fin

Please, wikipedia, please......make it stop!

2011-11-30T04:40:00.001-09:00

I can't get any work done. My sides ache, and I have fallen out of my chair twice. It never gets old. Please, Wikipedia, Make it stop!

Please move the picture to the other side of the frame, for the love of all that is good, and world productivity....For every day this is up, the world loses at least a billion dollars of production....soon, the lights will go dim, and all will be lost....

How to look for carrier IQ rootkit on your Android phone

2011-11-30T04:26:00.001-09:00

CarrierIQ can be seen on your Android handset by installing an app from the Market called AnyCut. Create a new shortcut, select activity, and you will be presented with a list of applications, including the hidden ones on your device. Look for IQRD and IQAgent, which are both parts of the CarrierIQ system.

Carrier IQ is not limited to android phones. It can be found as well on blackberry devices (rumored, not confirmed on Iphone) and some other smartphones.

More information (technical link)

Please post in comments if your phone (carrier, region) has it....

ACS (Alaska) reports not found (so far)....

ATT (Alaska) reports not found (so far) (ATT confirms that they do deploy CIQ)

Quantum waves real? SOPA reality distortion field?

2011-11-18T03:36:00.001-09:00

Eugenie Samuel Reich
17 November 2011
www.nature.com

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted onlineon 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

read the full article below....

http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-theorem-shakes-foundations-1.9392

It is interesting to note ... what is SOPA were law today?

If the author of the above quote (or someone claiming the intellectual rights, no actual proof required) filed a complaint with the domain holder of blogger.com (Google) that I had exceeded their intellectual property guidelines, and Google failed to respond within 5 days by removing my post (quite possibly not enough time to investigate the legality of the post or the 1st amendment ramifications), the filer could have the domain blogger.com banned in the USA, administratively, without judicial review, and with no process for reinstatement.

Wow, that's good business sense.

Note: in this case, I am abiding by the intellectual property guidelines of the rights-holder, who's online payment calculator determined that I was liable for 0.00 cents to republish in this way.

RIAA lobby tries to hold internet hostage, darkweb squishes out between toes...

2011-11-18T03:26:00.001-09:00

A Secure, Alternate, Anonymous, P2P DNS.....http://dot-bit.org/Domain_names

this + bitcoin + tor hosted services / or other layer 7 applications = economicaly viable darknet...bye bye oversight, hello stupid!

This is where the USA, now benefiting from defacto control of the internet, loses its grip, and any tiny nation that wants to be the next global nexus steps up and says "internet freedom, we love you!" and gets all the interwebs. bye bye trillions of dollars, hello oops, we didn't really mean it, really! We are still interwebs friendly! really! come back! hello? Helllooooooo......o.....o.....o.....o?

But, the internet doesn't forget...the internet is operated, at its core, by millions of nerds....with good memories, and a lifetime of pent up nerdrage....and the collective intelligence to apply their will, backed by trillions of risk-averse dollars whose collective motto is burn me once, your fault, burn me twice, my fault.

All because Lars cant get a new gold shark tank?

Excerpted from South Park:

Detective:	Shiut up!! [the boys jump in their seats, then look down, chagrined] You downloaded a lot of songs! Says here you even downlaoded Judas Priest? That's hard time you boys are lookin' at. You got anything to say for yourselves?
Kyle:	[rubs the table a bit] We d-didn't think it was that big a deal.
Detective:	[pissed off] Not a big deal! You think downloading music for free is not a big deal?! Put your couts on! I'm gonna show you something! And I don't think you're gonna like it!

Detective:	This is the home of Lars Ulrich, the drummer for Metallica. [they approach a bush] Look. There's Lars now, sitting by his pool. [he's seen sitting on the edge of a chaise longue, his face in his hands, softly sobbing]
Kyle:	What's the matter with him?
Detective:	This month he was hoping to have a gold-plated shark tank bar installed right next to the pool, but thanks to people downloading his music for free, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it. [a close-up of Lars sobbing] Come. There's more. [leads them away. Next seen is a small airport at night] Here's Britney Spears' private jet. Notice anything? [a shot of Britney boarding a plane, then stopping to look at it before entering] Britney used to have a Gulfstream IV. Now she's had to sell it and get a Gulfstream III because people like you chose to download her music for free. [Britney gives a heavy sigh and goes inside.] The Gulfstream III doesn't even have a remote control for its surround-sound DVD system. Still think downloading music for free is no big deal?
Kyle:	We... didn't realize what we were doing, eh...
Detective:	That is the folly of man. Now look in this window. [they are at another mansion, and they look inside a picture window] Here you see the loving family of Master P. [He's shown tossing a basketball to his wife while his kid tries to catch it] Next week is his son's birthday and, all he's ever wanted was an island in French Polynesia. [his mom lowers the ball and gives it to the boy, who smiles, picks it up and drops it. It rolls away and he goes after it]
Kyle:	So, he's gonna get it, right?
Detective:	I see an island without an owner. If things keep going the way they are, the child will not get his tropical paradise.
Stan:	[apologetically] We're sorry! We'll, we'll never download music for free again!

Never fear, SOPA is here!

Stop SOPA?

2011-11-15T16:41:00.001-09:00

(or don't, that might actually be more interesting)

After all, rights that you have because the government lets you have them aren't rights at all, just privileges....

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/stop-sopa-save-the-internet.html

http://theagilepanda.com/2011/11/15/us-bill-creating-the-great-firewall-of-america/

Harvard Business Review:

http://m.hbr.org/12763/show/f65ad9a9e645042d10726120a295d528&t=35rqt0rgb8nl64snpre9cl5qp4

Send a physical letter to congress:
https://sendwrite.com/sopa/

or, let it all come crashing down, and then....

...how about a new network layer, that provides for encryption, persistence, and anonymity, with a creative commons / open source / specifically limited copyright TOS for all content transmitted into public spaces with it......and we build a new web on top of that....so we have a "free" darkweb, (still can run adverts and charge for services), with a p2p decentralized DNS so that DNS is not a weak point.... hmmmm...lots of work, but we may need to head that way if congress has its way.

...from a comment on boingboing...

Here's the congressional money trail from SOPA supporters in entertainment and publishing.
How will they vote?

Top recipients for ALL supporting interest groups

Name
Amount Received

Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV]
$2,335,183

Sen. Charles Schumer [D, NY]
$2,016,955

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand [D, NY]
$1,650,251

Sen. Barbara Boxer [D, CA]
$1,163,223

Sen. Michael Bennet [D, CO]
$767,772

Sen. Patrick Leahy [D, VT]
$737,110

Sen. Robert Portman [R, OH]
$714,176

Sen. Mark Kirk [R, IL]
$471,721

Sen. Ron Wyden [D, OR]
$423,313

Sen. Patty Murray [D, WA]
$413,000

Rep. Howard Berman [D, CA-28]
$454,598

Rep. Bruce Braley [D, IA-1]
$360,989

Rep. Michael Capuano [D, MA-8]
$320,580

Rep. Patrick Meehan [R, PA-7]
$249,800

Rep. Allyson Schwartz [D, PA-13]
$243,319

Rep. Eric Cantor [R, VA-7]
$239,300

Rep. John Barrow [D, GA-12]
$218,080

Rep. Gary Peters [D, MI-9]
$216,748

Rep. Nancy Pelosi [D, CA-8]
$213,550

Rep. Carolyn Maloney [D, NY-14]
$209,610

Just in case you were under the impression that politics was primarily about government, not just the money....

Operating Manual for Children

2011-11-12T09:30:00.001-09:00

this is an attempt to distill my life'sexperience with children down to a list of bullet points and relateit to tangible situations.....

This post does not include "conditioning" which is actually quite effective below 3 years of age, but gives diminishing returns thereafter, and actually runs contrary to the ultimate goals of parenting if overused. (assuming your goal as a parent is to nurture into existence a self regulating, decision making cultural entity, and not a circus animal)

I apologize for the technical writingstyle, I'm afraid it is the only pen I possess today. I have italicizedwhat I see to be the key elements to startle you out of theinevitable sleep that this style seems to induce, not in anattempt to make any specific point, although if you take them all outand put them together backwards they probably do say “WorshipBeelzebub , Embrace Anarchy”.

Many times, I think, we think we are teaching, when in fact we are not – we are giving information that would be useful to a properly motivatedadult, but is useless or sometimes even destructive to a child,who is motivated differently.

It is necessary to keep in perspectivewhat children are, and are not.

Children are: submature humans with an incompletely defined sense of self, incompleteassimilation of the culture and language, a highly variable sense ofsocial responsibility, and a less than fully formed cerebral cortex.

Children are not:little, stupid defiant adults, though it can be very very difficultto fully retain this distinction (at least for me), as they mimicabout 90% of adult behavior, especially the least desirable aspects.

It serves me well to keep in mind thatlearning a coveted skill (riding a bicycle, sheet and tiller sailing)is self motivational and intrinsically rewarding, whereas learning anunvalued skill (doing the dishes, cleaning your room, rules of theroad) may not be.

Motivation in children comes from 3main avenues, I think:

M1: Fear.

M2: Desire to bepraised or socially reinforced

M3: Intrinsicdesire, usually motivated by 2. (not sure if this is really separate,but it seems to be)

Fear isineffective at motivating behavior, but effective at preventingbehavior. It has the significant disadvantage that it isconditional on the presence of the fear inducing element, which canbe bypassed in very young children by making them believe that youare omniscient / omnipresent, or even for older children and adultsby creating a dependence on an omniscient being (god).

Desire for socialreinforcement is a strong positive motivator to create behavior. Itrequires the presence of a reinforcing entity which the child loves,or upon which they are dependent for a significant physical, emotional, or social need.

This entity can be an individual or a peer group on which the childdepends for affection, food, security, a source of positive selfimage, or social status / standing.

Intrinsic Desire,is, I think, mainly desire for positive reinforcement in the secondperson. It is created by the child imagining themselves as thepossessor of an ability or possession, and imagininghow this will change the way they perceive themselves, throughthe reflection of the perceptions of others.

“if I was adoctor / had a car I would be respectable”, as opposed to “Myparents like it when I get good grades / my social standing increaseswith the trappings of wealth”

Often, thesemotivators are false, but serve nonetheless (I.E. as a teen I thoughtthat having a pilot's license / airplane would make me more desirable(get me laid). It did not)

Note that Ifthe entity (person) providing the social reinforcement fails toposition themselves as a provider of one or more of these needs,their input, positive or negative, will have a minimal impact unlessit is somehow connected to an M1, M2, or M3 source. (“be good orI'll tell your parents” invoking M1,M2 - or “If you learn tosail better upwind you'll win the regatta” invoking M2, maybe M3)

As a person charged with teachingchildren, it helps me to remember one thing which has proven to beaxiomatic, at least for me: When dealing with children below the ageof self realization (perceiving themselves as a mature culturalelement) I either have credibility or I do not. If Ihave not established credibility (easy in western culture, harder inthis one) I will be largely ignored as an unsafe source ofinformation.

Once you have established credibility, one must remember what thatmeans:

Unless you say something which destroys your credibility, you willbe believed, often quite literally.

So, If you saythat they are doing a good job, they believe it.

If you tell themthat they are so incompetent that after several months they still donot know how to set up boats, they will believe it, with theundesired consequence that this will make them unable to set up boatsafter several months of training.

A statement, positive or negative, about performance or behavior doesnot in itself motivate improvement in a child, it merelybuilds a belief. Go backto motivation, to motivate.

This leads us into criticism, which isnot motivational, and is often only effective if not taken literally!

To Accept and utilize un-buffered, rawcriticism, one must be able to differentiate between truestatements of past performance and expectations of futureperformance. Most children, unless specifically schooled ininterpreting criticism and using it, are unable to do this. Theidea that past observation is a predictor of future events isaxiomatic in the natural world and is the default interpretation ofcredible information. (I failed = I cant do it)

Motivation throughdirect criticism requires an element that is barely (if at all)present in the target audience – a mature capacity for selfdiscipline. An ability to reflect on past action and analyzeperformance to build a plan to improve results. This is an advancedskill that presupposes a sense of professionalism and pride in onesaccomplishments, or a strong desire to have pride or professionalism,or at the very least extensive instruction and practice in the deconstruction and analysis of critical review.

Rapid, externallyimposed creation of this “professionalism” can be achievedthrough careful manipulation of environmental and social factors, butthat manipulation is well outside of the scope of my desires andabilities. (The military has a few small books that outline how to doit in a way that is about 50% effective, they call it boot camp)

Outside of that,“professionalism” arises in most people when they master a skillto the point at which it becomes an important part of their selfvaluation and social position. At this point, protecting / enhancingtheir skill and reputation is motivated by social reinforcement,making criticism potentially useful information to be analyzed andacted upon. This, I think, is one of the main goals of character development.

When dealing with children, rememberthat you will probably be literally believed....

Itis important to carefully state your guidance, so as to be teachingwhat you actually want them to know..

X! So,if you say they are doing X wrong, they will believe you.

This will probably not influence their behavior.

!=X On the other hand, if you say that they don't know how to do X,they will also believe you, and will be resistant to believing theopposite, which is that they can know how to do X, which will besupported in further observation when they again fail to achieve X,and are told again that they do X poorly. After a while, they justcome to accept that they indeed can not do X.

X → Y If you say “when you do X like that (or fail to), itcauses Y” (undesirable consequence), they will believe you.Furthermore, If they personally find Y to be objectionable,they might self motivate to modify their performance of X, butit is well to keep in mind that many things which we think of asundesirable are neutral or even positive in the eyes of children.(I.E. getting to the beach late - if they are afraid of not doingwell, are enjoying themselves at the dock, etc - might be seen as adesirable effect)

X → Z Or, if you say “if you do X like this, it will achieve Z”(desirable effect) you will once again be believed, and if the effect Z is seen as desirable by the child, then they maychoose to “do X like this”.....However, they may also expect thatZ will occur without “doing X like this” (magical thinking orpast experience), so it is uncertain that this will provide astructure for motivation.

X1 → Y ; X2 → Z → ZZ Or, if you say When you do X1 , it causesY (undesirable effect), but when you do X2 , it causes Z(desirable result), and you will achieve ZZ (motivationaleffect) , you will again be believed.

This time, by showing that X1 leads to negative, and by saying thatliterally “when” (not if) they do X2, it leads to a desirableresult Z, and furthermore, that desirable result leads to apersonally motivational desirable result ZZ, you achieve many things:

1: you clearly define the problem X1 → Y, and a specificalternative behavior X2.

2: you assert that they are casually capable of achieving X2

3: you assert that X2 will lead to Z

4: you connect Z with ZZ, which should be a personally motivatingeffect M2 or M3 as defined above.

5: you have created a direct path from what you want to what theywant.

Assuming you have their confidence and have not confused them, thereis a high probability that they will tentatively attempt X2,likely without success. This is where their belief in X2 → ZZ mustbe externally reaffirmed , or you may lose their confidence. Thisis critical.

X1→ Y ; X2 → Z → ZZ , (and variations) is the most effectivecommunication pattern with children, and will endear you to them, asthey will see you as a source of help for them to obtain their M2-M3needs. This willposition you as an M2 provider,and will make motivating them much easier.

Well, thats it – About all I'velearned in 30 years of dealing with children as a moderately matureentity – But there's actually a lot in there, if you can keep fromdozing off in the technical presentation.....

Global Village Construction set

2011-10-30T16:56:00.001-08:00

How to say "I care about the future of humanity as a whole:"

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/622508883/global-village-construction-set?ref=category

Power to the people!

2011-10-30T14:22:00.000-08:00

Ever since I started messing with microcontrollers over a decade ago, I have been hooked. The Atmel ATS1200 was one of my first big my first adventures, which I programed (with varying degrees of success) using a command line basic compiler (as I recall the first project was to make a Hollywood style “flashing computer lights” display for a friends workstation, an array of a few tens of LED's that would flash in ominously powerful patterns as the hard disk was accessed...)

Oh how I yearned for more power in those days....then Atmel came out with the ATmega8 – A wonderful chip with 8k of flash and 1k? Of RAM!!! (that was more memory than my first computer, an Ohio Scientific C2-8P!) and all those kewl new instructions!!! Hardware multiply!! So, Naturally, I did what any sensible person would do, I wrote Dope Wars for it. Then Sub Hunter. All Playable in glorious ASCII through any VT100 compatible serial terminal.

Then, I started dinking around with controlling stuff in the real world (so called physical computing). I Built a pump controller for my boat. A battery temperature alarm. Then my wonderful wife and helpmate (and business manager and our lead tech on our current IT contract) suffered a catastrophic washing machine failure, far from any hint of the Maytag repair man. I proceeded to build a controller for all functions of the little washing machine, and once again the Carribean was filled with the joyous sounds of the spin cycle from the deck of our boat...punctuated by a nice long square wave beep when it was done.. It works great, to this day.

Somewhere about this time, a talented team in Italy put together a wonderful open source platform called Arduino, using my very favorite chip. It seems that I was hardly alone in my obsession with control, after all.

Recently I have been building controllers for a veggie-oil furnace system, a smoke detection and safety-lockout for the same system, as well as a generic industrial sensor and control system that uses a human readable control protocol over an RS485 bus so that the system can be logged into, queried, and controlled by a meat puppet from a serial terminal for testing or emergency service.

If anyone is interested in these projects (doubtful, I know) I will be happy to provide source code, although these were not developed using the Arduino IDE.... And, having learned my lesson today, I am adopting a resolution to publish my work from today forward, so that others may wonder “why?”

But now, I hunger.

I hunger for power (using less of it).

I hunger for more program memory, for denser code, faster clock speeds and performance that only a 32 bit system can provide. I yearn for the gigantic libraries for absolutely everything, free for the taking. I long to write code that I know will work with minimal porting on a chip I buy 10 years from now (CMSIS). In short, I long to have the same advantages that industry has, that makers of ARM based products have enjoyed for years.

And, I want to share.

Now, Don't get me wrong, you can start out in ARM pretty easily. It just costs a bit. You see, nobody makes ARM in a nice easy DIP package like the ATmega328 (Arduino), so you can't just solder in a socket and get on with it, or plug it into your solderless prototyping board. You need to make, then solder, a double sided (usually) board with a .4mm lead pitch, then solder your chip to it. (easier than it looks, but a lot harder than I wish it was) Fry the chip? Too bad. Start over. And, you cant just plug the little 48 pin LQFP into a breadboard and play, you have to design, build, then play. Make a change? Make a new board. Not exactly garage friendly.

Typical 8 Bit vs 32 Bit development systems...you can see the price difference from space.

Of course, there are solutions, like the wonderful M-Bed...exactly what I want in an MCU...lots of space, 32 bit ARM architecture, DIP Package, but $60 a chip. This puts the garage innovator at a sharp disadvantage to industry players, who buy the very same chip in a less convenient package for $5.57.

So, What to do?

"Same thing we do every night, Pinky...Try to take over the world!"

How about this....Put a 50 Mhz ARM Cortex M0 , with 128k of flash, 16k of RAM and a plethora of peripherals on a tiny daughterboard, and make it pin compatible for most applications with the Atmel 328PA. Make it open source. Sell it for less than $10.

My hand soldered < $5 arm prototype vs the AT328 chip it will eventually replace in my Arduino board... Obviously, I am going to need to power up the shrink ray. Good thing I have one.

Then, plug it into your Arduino project or solderless breadboard, and wallah, Industry leading performance at innovation encouraging prices and timeless ease of implementation.

In review, the hardware hacker gets:
A jump from 20 to 50mhz
4x cycle (math) performance (32 bit vs 8 Bit)
4x the code space (128k vs 32k)
2x the code density, so like having 8x the code space
8x the RAM (16k vs 2K)
Nested interrups
Superginormous free libraries
better, faster, more flexible peripherals
A free toaster (use your old 8 bit chip to supply the heat)

All for <$6 more per chip in the prototyping stage, and $1-$2 less per chip in mass production.... astonishingly, these 32 bit powerhouses cost less than many of their more sedate competitors, thank you very much economy of scale.

Honestly, I think I should sell these on Home Shopping Network....

Then, some follow through:

Curate (or better yet find someone to curate) an open source community to build libraries to make Arduino's Processing sketches work with little if any modification, and then you have dragged the microinnovators of the world into the 21st century, no kicking or screaming involved.

Not only will experimenters and students be playing with the real stuff, the innovations that make it to the market will benefit from the same perks for which entire industries have changed their product infrastructures to get – better code reuse, longer hardware life-cycles, lower power, and cheaper parts.

So anyway, this is what I have been working on.... I call it Daruino. Come Join the Evolution!

Want one? I am going to launch this project on Kickstarter...when I get it launched Ill put a link *here*....

Most Important news of the century?

2011-10-30T11:25:00.004-08:00

Among a healthy (even acrid) dose of skepticism, Engineers Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi just completed a customer test of a 1MW LENR (low energy nuclear reactor)..... The test is being billed as successful, which marks it as either the most important development in technology since the semiconductor, or an extremely elaborate fraud.

It is worth noting that other, independent engineering firms (BlackLight Power) and scientists (most recently US Naval research Laboratories) have reported success (excess energy or possible fusion byproducts) within the last few years, long after the disgrace of "Cold Fusion" researches Fleishmann and Pons, who were (perhaps prematurely) discredited when other scientists were unable to replicate their work.

Over ten years later, the US NRL (which continues work on LENR to this day, still based on the Pons-Fleishmann style electrolytic cell) reported that anomalies in the electrode composition appeared to be responsible for the duplicatability problems, although aside from reporting neutrons, they have been largely silent on calorimetry.....

It is worth noting that the main movers in LENR are engineering firms, not scientists in the academic sense of the word. Theory and publication are not primary goals here - actual energy production, regardless of whether we know exactly how it works, is the goal. (how many years did we use fire, before we knew about oxygen?)

If Rossi's (and BlackLight Power's) claims turn out to be true, it will be a stunning indictment of our scientific institutions, and the general paranoia of academia, a bold illustration of failure through fear.

Time will tell, but things are getting interesting in this disruptive infant field.

http://tommytoy.typepad.com/tommy-toy-pbt-consultin/2011/02/two-new-revolutionary-technologies-are-being-developed-that-could-change-our-planet-are-they-related-to-each-other-fundament.html

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/30/believing-in-cold-fusion-and-the-e-cat/

http://www.american-reporter.com/

.......

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/06/e-cat-cold-fusion

http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3303682.ece

http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/10/what-did-the-e-cat-test-achieve/

http://ecatnews.com/

http://energycatalyzer3.com/

Kurzweil's Singularity, and the Ascension or Fall of Humankind

2011-09-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

Edit....Keeping in mind that this is a blog post, essentially an opinion piece, only minimally referenced and not intended to be an exhaustive treatise by any means....but nonetheless may be of interest to some, please read on....

In the scrutiny of the advancement of computing machines and the coevolution of human created intelligence engines, the conclusion that the "development of human-class AI is not merely a significant possibility, but rather nearly a certainty within the century or even in the next few decades." is one shared by many of the foremost minds in the field.

The advancements in successfully modeling complex animal brain structures, and the resulting knowledge that functionality significantly follows form, bring me to the conclusion that as the mapping of the human brain continues we are closing significantly with the goal of true, “sentient” AI.

Recent commercial announcements (whose veracity have been called into question by critics of IBM's Neural networking adventures 7 ) herald the availability of new hardware, purpose-designed for modeling neural structures which could ultimately yield a 200,000% increase in power and size efficiency over previous efforts to model these networks on conventional Von-Neumann architectures.5,6,7 These advances bring the possibility of creating a human-class intelligence inside of a cubic foot of space, and consuming less than 10kw of power within the temporal scale of a decade or two. Applying Moores law, this could bring us affordable, PDA scale, human-class AI (HCAI) within the next ten to thirty years.

While this accomplishment alone would be very significant, it bears remembering these scales are based on a paradigm of mimicking the mammalian brain 1:1 in speed and construction. If we can begin to scale these networks to current CPU clock-speeds, this could enable the creation of a human class AI that would experience 1 to 100 years of human thought with every passing second.

Synthetic AI might also posses other systemic advantages over biological structures. <<< segment redacted>>> further multiplying the power of synthetic neuron (synthon) structures over their biological counterparts. Between speed and structural enhancements, multiple order of magnitude scaling might be possible with very little additional innovation, and could happen in less than a decade after the advent of the first HCAI. Scaling would likely be accomplished recursively, with advances in scaling being applied to the advancement of further scaling.

In this way, a single, advanced AI applied to this problem might exert thousands of man-years working on the problem within the first year, and thousands of man years per day within the second year, until the physical limits of semiconductor computing technologies were reached, or an entirely new integration paradigm was developed. In this way an AI could rise to parity or surpass the sum total of human intelligence, becoming a RCAI, or Race-class AI.

This explosive technological scaling is commonly referred to in the AI community as the “singularity”, the origin point of the explosion of a new, hyper-intelligent sentience onto the scene of terrestrial evolution. A problematic if foreseeable consequence of the rise of hyper-intelligence would be the rapidly increasing irrelevance of organic human thought. It is doubtful that a human would have anything of value to say to an RCAI, who might experience 5 human thought-centuries while its human counterpart is forming a single sentence.

It bears plentiful, if bitter fruit to consider the statement “evolution is little more than the victors word for genocide” 1, as well as the conspicuous absence of living examples of our archaic human ancestors sharing the waterfronts and valleys of the world with us in tranquil coexistence.

For those who would have argued with me that AI "has no soul and therefore no free will", so would be "benign to humanity", I would like to point out that neither do ants have a "soul", nor "Free Will", but nonetheless a species of human sized, preternaturally intelligent ants with a totally intuitive understanding of all things technological would likely pose a significant problem for humanity....not only that, "soulless" grizzly bears, great white sharks, cholera, and HN-51 are hardly benign within their scope, either.

A rising hyper-intelligent sentience would likely find us intellectually mundane, with more intelligence contained in our biological machinery than in our feeble, irrelevant minds. This alone neither dooms us to extinction nor improves our standing as a rightful heir to the earth, but it certainly could firmly remove our fate from the domain of our own control.

Under the assumption that the loss of our nominal standing as the controlling sentient entity of the solar system, is at least an undesirable result, I would propose that an impact mitigation strategy would not be wasted effort, and might prove to be critical to the survival of humanity in any form. Possible strategies could include: (I am making no attempt to be particularly unbiased here)

1: Universally agree to not develop HCAI in the first place

2: Implement AI in a friendly, non-polymorphic form

3: Keep AI contained in a secured environment

4: Integrate AI into ourselves, in an effort to evolve ourselves, rather than a distinct entity, to achieve hyper-intelligence.

5: Do not attempt to intervene, let market forces and politicians decide the course and applications of hyper-intelligent AI.

Firstly, allow me to address proposal 5. I know of no rational, informed argument supporting the idea that market forces or government oversight will reliably steer the evolution of artificial intelligence toward a goal that benefits humanity as a whole.

Moving on, I would characterize solution 1 as being unreliable due to its basic incompatibility with human nature, and it's counter-incentive aspects. Solution 2 might work, but a hyper-intelligent sentience would probably be capable of circumventing our safety measures, and might take these security precautions as an indication of hostility, with disastrous results. Solution 3 suffers from much the same problems as 2, (ed - conveniently) leaving 4 to further scrutiny.

Despite the many possible problems, ethical objections, unforeseeable externalities, and chaotic possibilities, I see the purposeful, magnanimously managed self evolution of our species into hyper-intelligence as the most likely of these options to result in an acceptable outcome.

The vexing problem of how this might be accomplished looms large of course, so allow me to enumerate the possibilities that I have identified.

Firstly, we could attempt to achieve superior intelligence through genetic engineering or a eugenic breeding program. Using these means, I would postulate that over ten generations it might be possible to enhance our IQ to 200+ range, but probably not much higher. Certainly, there exists no genes, recessive or otherwise, for intelligence characteristics exceeding 9 orders of magnitude over our current averages, which is what we might expect to achieve with synthetic means.

To transcend our gene encoding through pure genetic design, it would probably require a total redesign of cerebral capacity and cranial support, probably eliminating any possibility of non-surgical childbirth – our biological hole card - among other unforeseen problems. It would also create a clean break of new and old style humans, with the old relegated to obsolescence or possibly worse by the new.

Alternatively, we could embrace non-biological prosthesis, connecting auxiliary neural networks surgically to our bodies, or somehow tapping into them remotely. Although this approach presents a Frankenstienian aspect with which I am not comfortable, the cyborg approach may be a valid paradigm, and is arguably the best developed path at this point. The weak point is, as I see it, that the divide between the organic and the electronic is clear. There is minimal “integration” of the technology, but more of a supplementation or modification that might be easily transcended - leading almost inevitably to an offshoot of all-synthetic beings with no grounding in or allegiance to conventional humanity.

edit - An interesting idea that bears more investigation would be the "remote neural net" idea, where we are connected to our AI cortex via wireless connection...sort of like having an AI symbiant ... some positives and negatives there, certainly worth looking into.

An elegant, if perhaps fanciful, improvement to the cyborg concept, proposed by Ray Kurzweil 2 (and possibly others) is to infuse our bloodstream with neural networking chips, wirelessly networked and fueled by biological power sources in our bloodstream. This approach brings manifold advantages, including the retention of our normal human form. The chips would possibly be coated with a silicon – protein interface layer so as to mimic native cells, and could also (one day) be improved to enhance oxygen carrying and immunity functions, with dramatic consequences for lifespan and accidental mortality. This wireless network of “synthons” would then be distributed throughout our bodies, forming an extension of our minds in an arrangement that could be both redundant and resilient.

Presumably, some chips would bind to cerebral and spinal neurons, extending our existing neural framework. We could then absorb the use of the additional resources over time, adapting to our increased cognitive power at a growing rate as our capabilities grew.

The "smart dust" might be integrated into the food supply, and mothers, possibly, could pass the enhancement to their infants en utero, so that the process would become a natural part of our reproduction, albeit requiring an external manufacturing facility for the synthon “smart dust”.

While surely not without problems both existential and technical, as well as being a cornucopia of unforeseen externalities, this approach may offer a uniquely flexible supplemental approach to human evolution, and brings benefits of scalability, resilience, and inherent humanity not present in other options.

The Problems

There are some significant technical hurdles to be overcome to implement AI within this paradigm, including a workable silicon-protein interface layer, femto or pico-watt wireless communications with the required bandwidth and signal immunity, as well as scaling neural processors, power sources, and communications interfaces to the .008 mm scale. (ed - which would put an ARM - Cortex processor, a small amount of memory, an SDR, and a power source on a blood-cell scale device, assuming the future possibility of 3-d integration)

Chip scaling challenges may not be insurmountable using anticipated fab technologies – a 8nm fab capability would be required to place sufficient computational power on a .008mm disc, and 8nm fab is expected prior to 20204.

Silicon-protien interface are seen in nature en masse in diatoms, and significant strides have been made in interactive structures as well 8, so there is a reasonable expectation that meaningful progress can be made in this area.

Biological power extraction is problematic as well, with the best examples of electrical generation in nature only providing a mere 4.7x10-9 watts per mm33, where projected 8nm tech might require 4-6 orders of magnitude more power density to operate continuously.

Power scaling and thermal limitations are perhaps a more vexing obstacle, as for example a 100 million synthon array might consume 16KW+ of power at 100 mhz, causing us to become spontaneously incendiary, or at least to have a voracious appetite for sugary carbonated beverages 9. Clearly, here we are up against some of the classical evolutionary constraints of intelligence. Perhaps heat dissipation issues might drive us toward the poles, or even to colonize frigid planets to better meet our thermodynamic needs?

A disruptive technology

Regardless of whatever technical solutions remain to be found to support the Kurzweillian vision of human enhancement, one thing is certain: to succeed in this type of integration, we must achieve these technological goals prior to the singularity....that is, if we are to have any certainty of evolving with our technology instead of being left behind by it. It follows then that we must pursue these technologies with all due gravity, in order to ensure that they come to fruition before the advent of independent, polymorphic AI.

Though unlikely to succeed, it may become desirable to slow the development of AI research in order to ensure that the preparations are in place, as although we can always put off HCAI a few more years, once the singularity occurs there will not likely be any way to turn back the tide.

Another problem we may face is that even with the technological foundations laid and the preparations complete, it would be possible and not at all unprecedented for a select few to hijack the technology for their own benefit, without any intention of an en-masse evolution, but rather to use the technology to seize power for their more base purposes.

Yet another potential danger is that even with the best intentions, we may find ourselves unprepared to wield such a powerful tool, and the peace of society could be destroyed by superhuman struggles for control of the new technology.

The many divergent and dystopian possibilities of humankind's transition to hyper-intelligence point to the need to carefully plan our progress, and to select and prepare the early adopters with exquisite diligence. At the least, it would seem to me an utter abdication of our most grave responsibilities to leave these most important developments to chance, greed, or happenstance, as the first to successfully receive and learn to use Race-Class synthetically enhanced intelligence would in effect serve as guides, whether benevolent or not. Ideally, they might be selected and prepared to bring humanity through this transition with equity, peace, and order so that we may embark on the next phase of our existence from a position of ethical prosperity rather than moral poverty. Ironically, those most qualified to guide us may not have to be unusually intelligent to start with....hmmm......

To this end we may wish to create an organization, to foster research into the necessary technologies, monitor the state of the art in AI, study the ethical and humanitarian externalities, and to teach and prepare a cadre of preternaturally ethical and humane “cybernauts” to lead the way into a new age of intelligence.

I would like to add here a segment on a model of the conscious mind, an idea that I like to think of as the "we are our own imaginary friend" hypothesis...

with this type of synthetic mind extension, we may find that it is possible to extend consciousness into other biological or synthetic (will there be a difference?) entities, and our human form may lose its importance – but what is important is that we may have made the transition with our humanity intact, even though we might hardly be recognizable as human.

This opens up many interesting possibilities....would we need to check before trimming a bush, to make sure that no intelligences had "taken root" within? Would we extend our awareness into our pets, communicating with the "smart dust" that we feed them over "mind-fi?" (802.?) Would IPV6 support all the synthons? (I think it might...)

I, for one, would like to be a flock of sparrows, although I think that it would be well advised to initially extend ones seat of consciousness into one bird at a time – a thousand eyes would be a bit jarring, at first...

Sources:

1. Jaron Lanier, “The Future,” http://www.jaronlanier.com/topspintx.html.

2. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York:
Penguin Books, 2005)

3. ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) reports theoretical power densities at .0003w in 64mm3 in electrocyte based artificial cell stacks.

4. Intel states 8mm process expected prior to 2020, solid road map to 11nm, with 20nm coming in 2012, 14nm in 2014, and 11nm in 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_nanometer

5. R. Colin Johnson http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4218883/IBM-demos-cognitive-computer-chips?pageNumber=0

6. Douglas Fox http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/extreme-machines/4337190

7. Henry Markram: http://news.discovery.com/tech/cat-brain-computer-hype.html

8. Ressine A, Marko-Varga G, Laurell T. Porous silicon protein microarray technology and ultra-/superhydrophobic states for improved bioanalytical readout. .Biotechnol Annu Rev.2007;13:149-200

9. 100 million devices, each operating on 160 microwatts, roughly 20 times the efficiency of current processors. (ARM Cortex-M0, 100mhz) . The catch here is how many neurons could a 100mhz M0 complexity machine emulate, and at what frequency? Here I am postulating just one, including the communications and encryption (important!) overhead, at a functional rate of 1mhz, giving rise to a potential 100,000x HCAI (a sentient being that experiences 100,000 thought-seconds per second)

Deep thoughts from XKCD.com

2011-06-10T07:25:00.002-08:00

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Image and text from xkcd.com , one of my favorite social commentaries

..hades in a handbasket....

2011-06-08T09:51:00.006-08:00

Appalling spy machine gets appalling new functionality, Obscure blogger deletes account in protest and blogs about it in the third person... No one notices, (no one even reads the blog post, until now) inadvertently supporting the bloggers heretofore untested hypothesis that social networking services as popularly implemented are more oriented toward self gratification and social autoeroticism than meaningful social interaction.

Semi-stable, Quasi-Islamic state thumbs its nose at non proliferation treaty, proceeds to increase weapon-usable uranium production. "Allah is pleased," non-crazy people deeply concerned.

Have a nice day!

Google, Apple, Web, Privacy.

2011-05-24T08:24:00.002-08:00

With all the recent ruckus over Google and Apple location tracking on their respective mobile OS's, I feel reluctantly compelled to add my two bits.

Wow.... Really?

It is hard to imagine that people are all up in arms about this. I honestly thought that nobody cared - and I think that maybe Google and Apple were caught off guard in this respect as well. With all the information sloughing off from the average web user, who would have thought that anybody cared about a little location logging?

I had no idea that the apathy was mostly ignorance or denial - it seems that people are concerned about privacy after all, but are totally ignorant about the real, omnipresent threats to their personal information online.

So, to enlighten those of you that are not counted among the Digirati.....

Did you know that when you visit most commercial websites, tracking cookies are installed on your computer that make it possible to monitor what pages you view, to send you targeted advertising based on your surfing habits?

Frequently this information is tied to a unique identifier that specifically identifies you, the real person, along with your approximate location, home address, neighborhood demographics, and property tax information.

This info, along with your IP address (and physical connection point to the internet) is all hoovered up and stored on servers all over the planet, sold around to various marketing companies, and has virtually no regulatory oversight.

Make no mistake, any time you are online, from laptop, cellphone, or your home / work machine, there are a handful of companies that know exactly where you are and what you are doing on the web, and this information they use and sell as they please.

Then there are social networking sites like Facebook, where not only your information is exploited but also the information about your relationships, friends and social networks too.

Let me show you scenario number one, a very simple and altogether too possible example of how this knowledge about your relationships can be exploited and sold:

When Brandy visits her favorite social networking (social spying) site, Spybook.com reads the tracking cookies that indicate that she also spends a lot of time chatting at hot singles.com. Spybook.com also knows that she is married to Tim.

(edit - see comments for more detail on technical aspects of this)

From this information, they send Brandy advertisements on how to meet hot single guys in her area, and where to buy stunning, discounted lingerie. Ok great....

But....they also send targeted advertising to Tim (also a happy spysite user) about how to know if his partner is cheating (is she suddenly buying a lot of new lingerie?), how to track a cheating partner with a button sized GPS tracking device, and an introduction their selection of local divorce lawyers.

It is worth noting that Spybook.com also knows that Brandy has surfed the web from a local super 8 hotel during lunchtime, while Tim was online at the office....but Spybook.com doesn't even know that they know this yet. Some other company will notice this five years from now when they buy the data from Spybook.com to look for things that they find to be of interest.

Really.

Just like that.

Then, when the Spybook.com tracks Tim visiting the divorce lawyers pages, they start with the "hot singles" in his area too, along with promoting infidelity paranoia among his male friends, who will be doubtlessly looking a bit more carefully at their own relationships....one can see where this starts to cross the line from opportunistic exploitation to vague social manipulation.

Before you write this off as paranoid (ok, it is a -little- paranoid) ... ever been to a website that had ads that were eerily appropriate, even if in a caricature of real life?

The Facebook 'like' button is another good example of this technology. Any time it exists on a webpage - any web page - it is sending back to the Facebook.com database that you, the registered Facebook user, are viewing that specific page, at that specific time from that specific machine, at that specific location.

And no, you don't have to click on anything for this to happen... but, if you do, well, what a goldmine!
If you click 'like' then the article or comment becomes part of your dossier, to mine for information that can be used to further understand your most basic motivators and marketing vectors.

Now imagine what can be done with this information, along with your geographical habits, spending history, and all those tagged photos of you....did you know that any of them taken from a cellphone may also have date, time, camera direction and GPS location imbedded in the meta-data?

Now, of course, all of this information is also available to government agencies, investigators, and anyone else with a budget or the ability to obtain the information, whether legitimately or not.

To make matters only slightly worse, if your computer or browser gets infiltrated by spyware then it can extract even more information.

In my experience as an IT professional, I can safely say that more than 75% of the computers that I encounter are carrying spyware of some kind, usually knowingly installed by the user .....browser toolbars, anyone?

Information usually collected by spyware, besides browsing history, includes your web searches (Google, Bing, and Yahoo already do this anyway, of course), and in the case of black-hat spyware, all your keystrokes and browsing history, credit card numbers used online, etc.

With so many of us intentionally or unintentionally giving away the most intimate of details to the highest bidder (and to that hacker guy in eastern Europe), I find it curious that the Android / Iphone tracking issue raised such an alarm....it really is the least of our worries.

That said, it would be a good thing, I think, to set standards for the collection and protection of personal information, and to require specific, plain language opt - ins for the use of such information. Plain language, instead of the legalese never-read "terms and conditions" that we are all so familiar with.

An opt-in that you had to approve, prior to any website collecting personally identifiable information, (especially to any 3rd party) would be a powerful tool for consumer protection. Perhaps an opt-in that popped up every 10 times it collected your information, which you could then make permanent for one year - or something like that.

Of course, you can just turn off cookies, but that will eliminate a great deal of the functionality that we have come to expect from the modern web.

Maybe these suggestions are foolish or poorly thought out....please feel free to post your suggestions.

Facebook responsible for judgement day failure?

2011-05-23T10:35:00.005-08:00

Well, I'm back from my brief hiatus in the mountains of Brazil awaiting the rapture, and although deeply humiliated at not being among the chosen, I find that I am in good company.

As a matter of fact, it seems that almost no one has suddenly vanished, ascended, or otherwise risen to the holy of holies.... which leads me to question, was judgement day yet another failed experiment?

Enduringly, if not endearingly, intractable - humanity has a long and tumultuous history of disappointing our creator.

At first, we were dealt with pretty heavy handedly. Cast out of the garden, victimized in history's single most famous act of genocide, and wandering around in the desert for two generations should have taught us something, or at least one would think so..... but self preservation has proven to be an insufficient motivator, and it seems that pragmatism began to creep into the plan.

As part of the new deal (apparently arrived at after a significant period of anger management therapy and new age books) dramatic, if somewhat grisly, but still cryptically generous overtures were made, and slowly but surely some of us started paying attention.

For the next two millennia, one could get the sense that a certain entertainment value was lacking, or perhaps the embarrassment of failure kept us in the celestial closet, but for whatever reason interactions with the Creator have been pretty low key for a while.

Even though we haven't had any good laughs or even any good fights recently, we have always known that the clock was ticking, that the time to clean the fishbowl was coming. We have persistent reminders everywhere we turn that life is fragile, that one swipe of His mighty hand doth smite but good, whether it be earthquakes, tornadoes, or asteroids. So it is written. We will know the year and the season, but not the day .... until now.

Apparently due to a clerical error on His part, despite admonishments that we would not know precisely when the last act would open, one of us ever pesky humans figured it out, and not only the day, we got it down to the exact second. Apparently, 15 times 1000 plus 412 divided by Jesus works out to 6:00 PM EST, but to no avail.

It seems that no one was qualified. What does this mean? Has He lost interest? Car trouble? Has He become obsessed with Facebook, to the point that He no longer has time for other hobbies or real relationships? (you should see His Farmville Farm - HO-LY SHIITE!)

Could this somehow be related to Sony's PSN outage, and could Anonymous have had a hand in this (or at least some fringe members?) Why wasn't this in the Wikileaks release? Could this have been some kind of a government conspiracy to stop Judgement Day? The lack of any allegations of WTO involvement in the "mainstream media" is pretty damning, if you ask me.

The nagging spectre here that nobody seems to want to talk about is that maybe the numbers just weren't good enough. After all, what would His friends say? Ten? You got Ten? 4 Billion years, unlimited resources, and Ten? Here, let me try! He would never be invited to any of the good parties after that.

....better just to take a deep breath, reassess the options, and put it back in the closet. There has to be a way to make this work. Fun pets, pfft. In your own image - right! Sea monkeys were better than this.

Still, one is inclined to wonder, is this bad news or good news, and where do we go from here? Will we get another chance in 2012? So many questions, so few good answers.

PROTECT IP Act : A win for lawyers, epic fail for I.P. holders

2011-05-19T16:36:00.004-08:00

Sen. Patrick Leahy's PROTECT IP act is an excellent example of what happens when someone (or worse, a group of someones) tries to solve a problem that they do not understand.

The private litigation aspect will create a mountain of frivolous lawsuits, keeping the lawyers happy, while real Intellectual Property protection will suffer irreparable damage, and piracy will advance to a whole new level.

The problem is that this bill, and any like it, are based on the idea that the government controls the internet. Unfortunately, it would be more true to say that the government controls the government controlled internet.

Efforts to take down offending websites have already met with new, game changing tools that allows web surfers to browse "taken down" websites as if nothing happened.

This incremental loss of official control of the WWW namespace came as a direct result of ignorantly crafted policy, and it represents an unprecedented and irreversible loss of centralized control.

This is a critical trend that we are likely to see more of, and could ultimately result in a web space that is not controllable by any central authority, and is a much more secure and efficient tool for IP infringers, while dealing a critical blow to companies operating on the "official" WWW.

Regulators and litigators would be much better off not forcing their adversaries to go underground, because once down the rabbit hole, construction will begin in earnest on the darknet, and there will be no way to put that particular genie back in the bottle, short of shutting down the internet in its present form.

Websites promoting infringing content are just the beginning - there already exist anonymous payment systems, distributed, anonymous data stores, and more - they have just not grown much because the above ground versions worked for just about everything.

With increasing pressure to the namespace and supporting services, the corresponding underground alternatives can only grow in popularity, functionality, and efficiency, not only making cybercrime safer and less traceable, but also directly hurting legitimate services.

Unfortunately, many politicians are more interested in appeasing special interests than in learning about the subject matter that they are attempting to govern, so we will probably continue to see these counterproductive, lawyer friendly "solutions", instead of intelligent, insightful leadership and policymaking.

I guess it all boils down to the fundamental problem with confronting asymmetrical situations with a symmetrical mindset : Asymmetry.

I for one, for lack of a better idea, intend to sit back and smile while the idiocracy builds the high speed encrypted cyberpunk internet, using the talented, endless labor pool of rebellious youth and eastern European hackers.....

Lets look at something for a minute:

The War on drugs : An in demand physical substance that must be transported by actual people across actual borders, with guns and stuff. In the 40 years of the official WOD, the market has increased, drugs are stronger, cheaper, and more pure than 40 years ago, and adolescent drug use is exactly where it was in the 1970's.

In summary, in the WOD, we have spent roughly $2.5 Trillion dollars* training our adversaries and perfecting their systems, turning a persistent social problem into a persistent social problem promoted by a multi billion dollar criminal enterprise with its own armies. Yeah Team.

Now, How about a war on piracy**, or should I say a war on copies of music and movies: An in demand, costless product that can be moved invisibly , undetectably, and uninterceptably around the world in seconds, can be hidden with mathematical perfection in encrypted data streams and on free, hijacked repositories worldwide, and it moves on its own through existing transfer mechanisms, no guns required.

The only downside is that there is not very good security on the consumer side, and the distribution mechanisms are still a bit clunky - but not to worry, the US government is about to launch into a multi-billion dollar program to train the distributors, improve the quality of their software, and refine their systems.

Oh, good. Finally, my tax dollars advancing the plight of humanity - I haven't felt this good since we started hiring community college dropouts to grope 12 year olds in the airport - Bad Touch, TSA!

Did that seem cynical to you?

* (over $1T directly, not including jail time for personal possession or funds to other governments like Columbia and Mexico for their drug interdiction (distribution?) efforts)

** not a war on REAL piracy, because that wouldn't get campaign funding from special interest groups like the RIAA...

See these stories for recent tragedies in the real war on piracy:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41715530/ns/world_news-africa/t/four-american-hostages-killed-somali-pirates/

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/01/pirates-hijack-danish-yacht-with-three-teens-aboard/

Intellectual property rights holders do the wrong thing … Again.

2011-05-06T08:19:00.004-08:00

The digirati among my readership might well read this as: Is the Mafiaa Fire browser plug-in a signpost on the road to croudsourced DNS decentralization?

While the RIAA should read : Bumbling idiots, lawmakers, and ICE fail to understand the basic nature of digital distribution, further erode control of intellectual property rights in the process.

There is a sea change underway, and it is not just starting.....time to read the writing on the wall.

Digital intellectual property rights management requires a new paradigm to understand. The old ideas about distribution will not work, traditional ideas of copyright are unenforceable, and attempts to maintain the status quo ultimately will prove to be economically nonviable.

Before I wax ad nauseum on this subject, let me first explain that I am fundamentally pro intellectual property rights, and fundamentally pro information freedom.

IP rights fuel innovation, make creativity profitable, and are a cornerstone of the technological age.

Without intellectual property rights as a valid paradigm, most of the really cool innovations since the 1950's would only exist in the smoke clouds of a hippie drum circles, “hey maaaan, wouldn't it be cool if.....”, because everyone knows that all of the really good ideas actually originate in hippie drum circles....

...And, well lets face it, without IP rights making profitable distribution possible, very few ears would have listened to Bob Marley, Cheech and Chong, the Grateful Dead, or any of the other great founts of hippie inspiration, which arguably lead directly to the invention of potato chips, cellphones, the Internet, military grade encryption, and stealth fighter aircraft.

The problem for the current IP rights paradigm is this:

1. Digital distribution makes creating infinite, exact copies costless, and distribution through croudsourced mechanisms is similarly economical.

2. Encryption is breakable, or irrelevant, when one has access to both the encoded and unencoded data streams, such as in the case with DVD's....they are encrypted, but to play them one must be able to decrypt them – so, in the end, the decryption becomes trivial, because the end user has access to both the encrypted and unencrypted stream. This makes copying a straightforward technical problem unhindered by the main benefit of encryption, namely the mathematical asymmetry of encrypting vs breaking encryption.

3. Encryption makes distribution of legitimate and illicit digital goods effectively invisible and untraceable. Strong encryption is as effective at securing communications as is gravity for keeping things from floating off into space. In either case, a herculean effort is required to defeat them in any meaningful way, and the cost of dropping an object or encrypting a data stream is nearly infinitely less then the cost of lifting the object or decrypting a stream without the key.

This stands in stark contrast to the old paradigm, in which:

1. Physical, analog distribution requires significant investments in infrastructure and transportation. Copies made from copies invariably suffer loss of quality.

2. Physically securing the product in such a way as to prevent its theft is trivial and well understood.

3. The transport of stolen, counterfeit, or unlicensed material is observable, traceable, and interceptable, and will lead to the likely apprehension and incarceration of those involved

It is easy to understand that failing to change ones basic ideas about distribution mechanisms, business models, and security measures would be disastrous in any industry facing this type of problem (opportunity) , but for some unknown reason, this extreme shortsightedness is exactly what we are seeing in Media Distribution.

These death thrashes of the Ould Guard would perhaps not be so bad, as so goes the evolution of creatures, both creatures of flesh and creatures of commerce, but the damage that is being done on the way down is what both concerns and delights me. (One small, dark corner of my heart leans to the anarchistic side)

The problem (opportunity) is this:

Industry organizations, such as the RIAA and their ilk are effective at causing policymakers, lawyers, and government agencies to do stupid things that in their net effect will be a clear detriment to their own best interests, and to the interests of all who would benefit from a functioning Intellectual Property system.

Thanks to the these shortsighted organizations, we have better mechanisms and an entire global subculture dedicated to the easy, efficient, untraceable distribution of unauthorized copies of digital goods.

It goes something like this:

In the beginning: BBS, Dump sites, FTP - Only the technically literate were involved, awkward and risky to use.

Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!!

Community response : P2P file sharing – Easy to use, low barrier to entry, more difficult to control.

Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!!

Community response : Bit-torrent – Easier to use, low barrier to entry, no centralized structure to control. Higher performance, more secure, made distribution nearly free.

Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!! Sue the file sharers! (except a few, like Netflix, who figured out that this would kill them if they did not find a way to compete with free distribution, which they have done quite effectively)

Community Response: Use peer blocking and encryption to make themselves difficult or impossible to track....Development of completely new anonymous networks such as Darknet, which exist one layer below the regular “interwebs” and could, if pressed to improve, become a complete alternative webshpere.....

Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, Shut down their (the file indexers and search engines) websites!!! Aha! Now we have DHS (ICE) on our side!!

Community response: Alternative, community based DNS, (Mafiaa Fire)..... effectively taking control of the webspace itself away from centralized authority.......This is the first step toward croudsourced namespace administration, without a traditional centralized authority, that can work alongside the existing infrastructure. This is a viral technology / ideology, make no mistake – If the “idiots that be” keep censoring domains, soon only people with these additional namespace protocols will be able to access the uncensored Internet, and any computer, browser, or software that does not support this will be seen as being cripple-ware.

Probable Industry Response: (insert shortsighted, ineffective measure here)

Inevitable Community Response : Decrease centralized network control, improve security and anonymity, improve distribution efficiency, etc.

The pattern here is this... Industry applies an ineffective measure, which is in turn answered by an improvement in the illicit distribution infrastructure, which as it offers more and more value and access, becomes more and more mainstream, further fueling innovation within the sector.

This is not a battle that can be won within the dominant paradigm. The fundamental mathematics underlying the problem are making the moves, and math is really difficult to argue with.

The current dangerous precedent of taking down (popular) domains via name service suspension will, if continued, result in a viable alternative namespace system which will be impossible to control. Similar attacks on this system in turn will be answered with increasingly sophisticated technical measures, which could ultimately result in an entire alternative webspace, possibly fully encrypted and inherently anonymous, which would then serve as a viable competitor to the primary webspace. This could be the death knell for even forward looking business models such as Netflix.

There will always be bright, unemployed programmers looking to make a name for themselves. This inexhaustible, free labor resource, with an extremely asymmetrical mathematical advantage on its side, will not likely be defeated by an entity without literally unlimited financial resources, except by complete network censorship and the end of the Internet as we know it....which would likely result in an entirely croudsourced physical layer......

Ideas are impossible to put back in the box. Adapt or perish.

Dead Canary.

2011-04-25T17:17:00.005-08:00

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25?dist=countdown

Pre-rantal Advisory: Explicit scenarios:

This post contains opinions of a dramatic, inflammatory nature, which cannot be cured by preparation H. The opinions in this post in no way represent the actual opinions of the author, who is way more paranoid than this, and regularly sleeps in a metal box to keep out mind control radio waves (ok, metal boat, water - but still)

The canary is not doing so well.

It seems to me that this is pretty much the wake-up call... the tipping point of a new economic reality is being reached, and the plans that seemed perfectly reasonable 5 years ago are no longer even relevant. Enjoy it while it lasts, and study Chinese....but most of all, focus on the potential big wins, and leave the little financial opportunities alone, they will not matter.

We would do well to leverage these next few years to secure a future not dependant on systemic stability. Food, shelter , relative security first, then an all out drive to secure a strong economic foothold.

Nothing less will likely work, as within a decade or so the buying power of a us citizen will likely be on par with chindia, so that only the wealthy will maintain what we think of as a middle class lifestyle, barring an -actual collapse- of the dollar, in which case we will just be totally screwed.

If you look around at economies that are dependant on the dollar to prop up their currencies, you can see that the real value of the dollar is falling so fast that soon less than a million a year won't do. Do you really think that gold is actually $1500 in anything close to 2006 dollars? Or maybe it could be that the worlds second (soon to be first) biggest currency is so far undervalued that it is hiding the actual weakness of the dollar and euro....hmmmmmm.....

So the probable reality is that when they take the pressure off the Ren, we will wake up to find that western currency dropped 30 to 50 percent in one day, and it will not likely stop there. The US would instantly be in default on foreign debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the de facto trade currency, with the average Joe groping for balance like the TSA screening a cheerleading squad.

...look to the history books to find out what happens next. It wont be pretty for most of us in the west, though a few will do quite well. One thing for sure, Betting on the status quo is very unlikely to succeed. We have only to look at Russia to see what it looks like when a sprawling industrial power has the rug pulled out from under it.

Ah, but we're their best customer, surely they need us!!!

Weeeeeelllllllll that seems to make sense at first glance, but...Well......... it's one for the money, Two for the show, Three to get ready, Now go, cat, go....

On the off chance that that was a little abstract for some of you, let me elucidate a few salient issues, and draw some not too radical conclusions from them....

They are selling off Tbills at a rate that within 3 years they will own none....that pretty much says it all. They have pulled off the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the world by depressing their currency for so long, and when they have what they can get (which, it seems, will take them about 3 more years, by their reckoning), they will move to the second phase of a now nakedly obvious (to paranoid people such as myself) plan - the property transfer phase.

First, the money. Then, once western currency is cheap in real terms, and buying starts to drop due to the depleted economy, they take the pressure off the Ren, and wallah, their fortunes double overnight, at the same time as our currencies drop like middle eastern protesters.

Step 2 is to buy companies, property, and infrastructure at fire sale prices, and basically they will own enough of America ( and western Europe) that we will never pose an economic or strategic threat. Next, move into production with highly skilled and newly cheap US (and western European) labor, and wallah!! Total success.

But, on the upside, the job market will be great, especially if you can understand and speak a little Chinese.

If i had to guess, which, unfortunately, we all do - This could be where we're headed, everything else is watch the hand......

Hopefully, we have a super secret economic plan brewing somewhere in the dank depths of the obamocracy, but....I think that is stretching the limits of optimism just a bit.

Happy birthday!

2011-01-03T14:23:00.003-09:00

Remember when you were five years old and people could screw you over royally and you couldn't do anything about it because you were a blissful, runny-nosed five-year-old?

Happy 5th Birthday in the age of the new Corporakleptocracy!

But wait theres more! You will not only recieve a complimentary buggering, you will also recieve $10 a gallon gasoline, (check europe) and skyrocketing food prices to go along with your date, and all within the next few years!

Hooray for government by and for the corporation! All hail the stock ticker!

Enjoy the ride.

Energy, labor, and humanity – Past present, and future

2010-11-20T12:56:00.005-09:00

Preface on accuracy:

No, this is not properly referenced. Yes, I did attempt to ascertain reliable values, expending considerable effort in research. Some of the numbers (the global cost of WWII, for example) are essentially WAG's, but by people who should be as qualified to make them as anyone. Many numbers are industry averages, some are from specific projects, where the age of the technology does not allow time proven averages.

Financial figures were adjusted to 2010 US dollars except where noted.

I would give +/- 15% (a 30% range) as a good estimate of the average accuracy of figures in this document, with certain historical parameters being much more accurate. Feel free to do exhaustive referenced research on any area represented, and I will gladly incorporate such data into future versions of this document.

If you find something to be grossly in error or misleading, please comment and provide counterpoint information and references. If you simply disagree, but do not have specific information, please find specific information supporting your point of view, if possible, prior to commenting.

First lets define some very basic concepts and their interrelations as they pertain to us in our current cultural context:

Labor

Labor is a transformational process performed using human, animal, or mechanically supplied energy. Wealth is a symbolic representation of labor, embodied in valuable goods or symbols representing valuable goods. It follows therefore, that wealth is a symbolic representation of applied energy (labor).

Energy

Nearly all energy on the earth is either derived from thermonuclear fusion or heavy nucleus fission, either directly or indirectly.

Most abundant are the various forms of solar energy, which is actually remote thermonuclear energy. It is expressed in sunlight, wind, and the non tidal movement of water. Sunlight can be chemically harvested as food or biofuels through photosynthesis, converted directly to electricity through photovoltaic processes, and used as a heat source for heating or motive power through thermal cycle engines. It is most widely used in it stored form, as coal, oil, or natural gas – all fossil biofuels.

Also available is energy from nuclear fission, as both nuclear energy in power plants and in geothermal energy sources, which rely in fission processes deep within the earth. There may have also been rare natural occurrences of nuclear fission reactions at the earth surface.

Tidal energy, which is residual kinetic energy left over from the formation of the solar system, can also be utilized as an energy source.

There may be other forms of energy available to us as our understanding of physics progresses.

Solar energy energy is of primary importance to man and most multicellular creatures as the motive power in sustaining life, either directly or indirectly, through photosynthesis.

Energy is further used by civilized man as a source of motive power (labor) in the production of food and goods. It can be used directly as heat in a transformational process (cooking, cooling, heating of metals or plastics, etc) , or in the form of mechanical labor which is provided through thermokinetic conversion by engines or motors. Other uses of energy are chemical and atomic processes, but these energy uses are of relatively minor significance today, though they may one day grow to become more important.

From a socioeconomic perspective, energy directly applied (solar, geothermal, etc) to a transformational process replaces the labor required to (a – perform the process without the additional energy) or (b – gather fuel to supply the energy to perform the process), and in this way can be represented as a form of mechanical labor.

Either way, energy is applied to raw materials as labor (human, animal, or mechanical) to perform a transformational process. Labor may be again applied to further transformations until the desired end product is produced.

I will refer to fossil fuels as free stored energy. This is due to the fact that no investment is required to produce them, only extraction as a raw material, transportation, and processing is required. The amount of energy available from fossil fuels is grossly out of proportion to the extraction investment when compared to other forms of real time energy harvesting, such as solar power and farming. This is due to the extreme time concentration inherent in their use – millions of years of biological energy harvesting is being extracted in a span of just a few years. Concentration exists in other energy sources as well, such as hydropower, where the evaporative solar energy of an entire region is funneled into a single point of a single river or stream.

Materials

Fundamentally, all raw materials are free (ownerless) under current social systems (licensing agreements for resource extraction is an exception from this paradigm, but is still relatively rare, and usually benefits another party who has not paid for these resources). Labor is required to extract minerals from the earth through mining or farming, but the minerals themselves are freely available. As coal, oil, and natural gas are physical resources, they fall into this category as well.

Land is not free, but “land” is actually a license to use land, not the land itself. It is a payment for the labor involved in securing and maintaining stewardship, and for the potential value that that stewardship might bestow, in the form of resource collection, food (energy) production, or the collection of labor or goods or symbols representing labor (vassalage). Land value can also be speculative, in that the value may be derived from anticipated increase in value, but ultimately there must be resource extraction, energy harvesting (farming, geothermal, solar / wind / hydro power collection, etc), residency, or vassalage from the land to extract value.

In any rate, any value will ultimately be extracted in a symbolic representation of labor.

Now, for perspective, let us examine some rough estimates of our historical energy use:

Hunter gatherer

Per capita energy consumption limited to accessible environment, human food intake, and some animal food intake.

No significant excess production of food.

Social Structures following biological patterns – Clans, tribes

Toolmaking and physical technologies are our most powerful tool.

Significant hoarding of energy or energy symbols limited to nomadic raiders

Distribution of energy principally dependent on environmental factors

Human exploitation mainly limited to enslavement of captives

Average caloric use roughly 2000 - 5000 kcal / day

Primitive Agricultural society

Active collection and concentration of solar energy for food.

Energy consumption rises with animal husbandry and an increasing amount of animal motive power.

Refined and processed foods add to caloric cost of food production

Significant excess (food) energy production leads to a second class of humanity, those who derive their energy primarily from the energy gathered by others. This leads to the need for widespread symbolic representation of energy (wealth), which leads to the capability to hoard these symbols.

Collective effort (Government) becomes more critical to protect fixed assets and arable land, taxation begins. The need to keep records strengthens symbolic technologies, making further expansion of government practical.

Distribution of energy principally dependent on social factors

Average energy use 10,000 – 14,000 kcal / day

The dawn of empire

Social organization technologies become our most powerful tool

Significant amounts of animal, hydro, and wind energy used to process foods and transport goods.

The widespread acceptance of energy symbols (money) leads to the capability to govern, wage war, and exploit through vassalage. Nations, Empires, Global trade, and warfare as we understand it all result from this excess energy and its distribution.

Empires grow, and the technology of vassalage becomes refined. Significant portions of the energy consumed by most of humanity is confiscated to expand empires through conquest and to enrich the ruling class. Enormous energy is wielded by an elite few.

Global trade sows the seeds of financial rather than political empire....the East India trading company rises as the first significant corporakleptocracy.

Distribution of energy principally dependent on socio-economic factors

Average energy use 24,000 – 30,000 kcal / day

Steam – the mechanization of motive power

Science and technology become our most powerful tools.

Energy of combustion harnessed for motive power, per capita energy use rises sharply in the industrial world. Coal marks the beginning of significant stored carbon release from fossil fuels.

Mechanization begins to replace human and animal power as a primary motive power source.

The advent of mechanical labor creates a new social force – industry. The excess labor (energy) available from combustion is exploited to concentrate wealth for non-governmental entities. The rise of enterprise begins in earnest.

Demand for combustible materials quickly outstrips renewable supply in many areas. Vast reserves of coal are recognized as a more economical alternative to easily depleted forests. The transportation of energy rises as an industry unto itself. This huge source of stored energy, free for the taking, produces a paradigm shift in energy management.

The excess availability of stored free energy (labor) results in rising standards of living in many parts of the world.

Excess energy spills over from industry to domestic life in much of the civilized world. It becomes customary for enterprise to reap the entire primary benefit of free excess energy, with the population enjoying only the secondary effects with the exception of the industrial elite.

Using laws primarily drafted for public facilities (towns, bridges, etc), commercial entities begin to enjoy the rights of individuals, enabling them to transcend direct human ownership.

The meme of unlimited growth through the concentration of resources is widely accepted and idealized.

Population reaches 1 Billion, doubling in less than 1000 years.

Average energy use 70,000 – 90,000 kcal / day

Oil – concentrated chemical energy becomes nearly free.

Coal is replaced by refined crude oil and natural gas as the favored source of free stored energy. Petrofuels make possible the internal combustion engine – a portable, potent source of mechanical labor.

Concentrated, portable, free energy combined with the internal combustion engine feeds an exponential increase in energy consumption - pervasive use of mechanized motive power in industry, transportation, and food production immediately follows.

Synthetic fertilizers boost food production by a factor of three per land unit. Irrigation of previously non arable land becomes pervasive – agriculture now largely dependent on non – solar energy sources for support. Population reaches 6 billion as a direct result of increased food availability, seeing a sixfold increase in only two hundred years.

Mechanization further decreases human involvement in food production. Food production surplus is met with spiraling populations in undeveloped nations, largely dependent on non indigenous agriculture.

Industry grows exponentially, fueled by the store of excess energy (labor) embodied in fossil fuels. Corporations now wield more power and wealth than most nations. Transnationalism erodes national and cultural loyalty of corporate entities. As stock prices, rather than sustainable business models, become the primary feedback mechanism for corporate governance, profit becomes a moral justification in itself.

Distribution of information becomes increasingly centralized, and is largely operated by corporate entities.

Universal ownership of natural resources re-emerges as a valid paradigm, but is largely ignored as corporate industrial interests continue to grow financially and in their political reach. Improvements in lifestyle, attributed to industry, placate the majority of the civilized world as a validation of the corporakleptocratic meme.

The obvious fact that finite resources cannot be infinitely amassed is ignored, even made heretic in working class social circles. The idea that resources could be finite is depreciated as a valid paradigm.

Society at large accepts these fallacious memes, and consumption grows unchecked, fueled by the illusion of unlimited abundance created by the availability of free stored energy. Indications that resources are in fact limited are largely ignored because they are not accommodated within the dominant paradigm.

Outright denial that infinite consumption is not sustainable becomes a social value in parts of the western world.

Environmental damage becomes pervasive, food supplies in the oceans begin to fail.

Excess CO2 release from fossil fuels, and methane from intensive agriculture thought to be a contributing factor in rapid global warming.

Deforestation and ocean sterilization progressively decrease the ability of the ecosystem to release oxygen from CO2 and to fix carbon back to the soil and oceans.

Average energy use 200,000 – 250,000 kcal / day – this means that in the industrialized world, each of us consumes enough energy on a daily basis to feed 100 men, women, and children.. A family of four depletes energy resources at a rate equal to a good sized early agricultural village.

Post Fossil fuels – the next step

As the excess energy available from fossil fuels decreases, where will the wealth of industry and nations come from? What source of labor will be employed? What will happen when industry cannot simply prosper based on free concentrated wealth (energy) that can be pumped from the ground and easily transported and used?

Based on what we have seen in recent economic shrinkages, the portion taken by the ruling class (industry or government) is not likely to decrease, right up until the point of collapse. If that is to be the case, from where will the labor / cost shortfall be filled?

Global food supply barely outstrips demand, and additional room for agriculture comes at the cost of forest depletion or energy intensive irrigation. Since 70% of our current food production capacity is dependent on fossil fuels which are quickly being depleted even as populations continue to grow sharply, how will we provide sufficient food in the near future?

2008, for reference

Daily Food energy available per capita globally – roughly 3300 kcal

Daily Non Food energy available per capita Globally 51750 kcal

Post oil energy availability based on present infrastructure

Daily Energy per capita available (current capacity) without fossil fuels (but including coal) : 21550 kcal

Daily food energy available per capita without the use of excess energy (fossil fuels): 970 kcal

Percent of the population required to be directly involved with food production without the use of fossil fuels to produce that amount of food: roughly 60%......this is a huge logistical problem, because much of the population is very distant from the most productive agricultural areas.

Sufficient hydrogen production for the manufacture of synfuels, either from electricity or IGCC coal plants would make this situation much better. In order to have an uninterrupted food supply, we need an uninterrupted fuel supply, and we need fuels that will work in existing infrastructure.

Because of the high population, postindustrial man will have access to similar energy quantities as were used by early empire Man, but without the food availability, if we do not take drastic steps to change our energy conversion and consumption strategies.

Now lets look at some of the social issues associated with our present production – consumption paradigm:

Conservation

In the USA, nearly twice the energy per capita is used as in other industrialized nations with a similar standard of living (Japan, Germany). Clearly, there is room for progress. A 50% reduction in energy consumption in the USA would result in a 12% global reduction, a very significant gain.

While conservation has been a buzzword for a long time in western culture, it has been more about appearances than substance. Real progress has been made in energy efficiency of homes and vehicles, but much remains to be done.

Despite modest gains in energy efficiency, product consumption has continued to spiral upward, and there is substantial resistance to slowing this trend – it is inherently anti commercial. The culture of commerce has become parasitic in many aspects, encouraging wealth so that more can be harvested, effectively farming consumers to collect, and then spend, more energy, and enriching corporate coffers in the process - often with questionable benefit to the consumer themselves, and certainly at a detriment to the environment from which this energy and materials have been harvested.

If a true ethic of conservation can become a valid meme, or better yet, can be made to provide direct benefit to the conservator or a commercially interested second party, then we may begin to make significant strides in conservation.

Depreciating conspicuous consumption

It is easy to ignore that significant energy is tied up in the manufacture of goods – for example, medium technology density manufactured goods (appliances, cars) use approximately twice their weight in oil to manufacture, high tech goods much more (a cellphone requires nearly 20 lbs of oil to make).

As long as we continue to attach social value to the unmitigated acquisition of manufactured goods, it will be very difficult to mediate energy consumption and environmental impact. New memes of successful living need to be created and promoted, and unsustainable habits need to be reattached to negative social connotations, as these behaviors have a negative impact on us all.

Distributed energy production – the real benefit ?

Aside from the minuscule energy contribution that most home AE installations provide, there is an important social element. The homeowner comes to understand energy production and use, and gets a more accurate idea of the finiteness of an energy resource. It is hard to think of electrical energy as a finite resource when it comes from the wall in apparently unlimited quantities, even if you do have to pay for it. Neighbors are encouraged to think in terms of production and use, and awareness of energy as a resource increases.

The key factor - the tipping point, if you will – of distributed energy, will be when tangible quality of life improvements result from the application of renewable energy technologies. This could be in the form of subsidies, social aspects, or direct economic benefit.

Microagriculture

Perhaps the greatest potential benefit lies in microagriculture. It is low cost, energy saving, nutrition (or wealth) providing, and helps to secure the global food supply.

Microag has the potential to make people less dependent on the inefficient commercial food supply chain and reap the direct benefit of their access to solar energy without having to divide their earnings with corporate industrial interests.

Rather than put a solar panel on the roof for $5000, people all over the planet can put up a plant box and harness solar energy in the form of calories. 1000 Square feet of rooftop can create 1000kcal per day or more using strictly conventional growing techniques – and that can be doubled with advanced horticulture. Since traditional (industrial) food distribution averages 7 kcal / delivered kcalorie, 1000 square feet could yield 14000kcal / day in savings or – about 16KWH, almost exactly what a solar array of the same size would produce given a good sunny location – the main difference being that a 1000 square foot solar array costs close to 30 thousand dollars, and requires very little maintenance, where a 1000 square foot farm can be made for a few hundred dollars and will need daily TLC.

Additional annual benefits of 1000 square feet of intensive rooftop agriculture include : 250 - 500lbs of carbon fixing (a carbon free road trip!), 200 - 400lbs of oxygen released (enough for you to breathe for one or two months), and 30,000,000 BTU's of cooling, potentially decreasing the cooling load of the building itself by as much as 20%.

Outside of the urban rooftop environment, microfarming can easily supply the dietary needs of an entire family in a small space. ¼ acre (roughly 10,000 square feet) is easily sufficient to provide the basic caloric intake for a family of four in a good growing environment, using conventional growing techniques. This is not only practical, it is a sustainable template for global food production – even at 13 billion people, we will still have more than two acres per person available.

Technological improvements to make microfarming less resource intensive, yield more and a higher quality or variety of usable foods, require less time, and be more resistant to failure would be very well invested. In most socioeconomic environments, effective microfarming should yield sufficient direct and social benefit to become a self sustaining paradigm, given effective initial education support and meme shaping.

The pervasive presence of microfarming could significantly bolster global security in a famine threatened environment, both by providing food resources directly and by providing a template to increase food supply.

What can be done to address the effects of diminishing reserves of oil? How will we produce the energy that we need to support our growing population base? What are some of the potential problems associated with different energy sources?

Currently only coal, wind, nuclear, and solar power generation are definitely capable of meeting global demands into the foreseeable future.

Hydropower could be developed to meet nearly 10% of 2008 global energy use, but with significant environmental and social impact.

Global coal reserves could provide for the next 100 – 200 years, but in the environmental costs may be unacceptable if not carefully managed.

Based on economically recoverable uranium reserves, nuclear power could sustain current global consumption for only 5 years without breeder reactors, or roughly 200 years with breeder type plants – but this would involve the processing of very large quantities of plutonium and other weaponizable products, and would present an ever present environmental threat.

Both coal and nuclear technologies might provide a bridge solution while more sustainable technologies are rolled out. A system of incentives and tariffs may be required to ensure that transition ensues.

Geothermal is a difficult topic to research, and the answers often change depending on who you ask. The earth’s heat content is estimated to be about 10^31 joules. This is conducted to the surface by at a rate of about 45 Terawatts (Tw) and is fueled by an estimated 30 Tw of natural nuclear decay. This is clearly more than the 15 Tw required to maintain current production, but much of the energy is too diffuse to provide a useful resource for power generation. It is estimated that 2 Tw of production might be possible with sufficient investment. On the other hand, an MIT study in 2006 indicated that, using enhanced geothermal technology that includes energy stored by heat pumps and solar heating of the earth, it might be possible to provide for the entirety of global energy consumption, although the cost of doing so is not clear.

Wind and solar power are both technically more than capable of meeting global energy demand. At this time wind power appears to be the more cost effective option – but still unrealistically expensive for a short term implementation, and wind and solar power both suffer from intermittent output, requiring significant investments and improvements in energy storage and distribution technologies.

Replacing local combustion engines with distantly generated electrical power will raise some infrastructure problems of its own, but with modern hydrides, fuel cells, and hydrogen based synthfuels, they need not be show stoppers.

Some basic numbers for a sense of scale

$194.5 trillion = Global personal wealth, 2009

8.3 trillion dollars = US money supply, 2009

$14.3 trillion = US GDP, 2009

4.8 billion ounces = global gold supply, 2009

$1.9 trillion = annual global oil production, 2009

$.88 trillion = Annual US military spending

(total military related expenses, DOD only is $.68T) , 2010

Global cost of WWII, 2010 dollars $27 trillion (US Cost $5 trillion)

Total US cost of the Cold War (over 43 Years) $21 trillion

An overview of possible Replacement energy sources

Wind power, the most likely renewable energy contender

Cost to deploy wind turbines in the USA – $1.4Million per Megawatt

global energy consumption 15,000,000 megawatts,

less coal output at about 5,000,000 megawatts

=10,000,000 Mw to generate in order to replace oil and gas

0.33 availability factor gives 30,000,000 megawatts of installed nameplate (rated 100% output) capacity, or 20 million large turbines

at 1.4 million per megawatt, installed (in the USA) = 42 trillion dollars

Current global nameplate capacity is 158,000 Mw.

Turbine production would have to be ramped to 3,000,000 Nameplate Mw a year in a very short time frame. A 2x Cost expansion based on resource and production scarcity from accelerated schedule and remote location requirements can be expected. Large investments in additional power transmission and storage facilities would also be required.

Production / Demand timing is a limiting factor for wind power when it becomes more than 15% or so of the production capacity. Effective energy storage systems would have to be developed to utilize wind as a primary storage source. There could be very significant technological barriers to implementation, and costs could rise considerably from these estimates.

This project would directly employ approximately 5 million people for 10 years, including turbine manufacture.

Ongoing maintenance would require 500,000 employees to maintain the turbines.

$120 - $84 trillion

An overview of coal as an interim alternative

Approximately 3,000 each 4000 Mw Plants to be built to make up needed capacity

This would employ roughly 3 million people for 10 years in the direct construction of the plants, not including equipment suppliers. Global coal consumption would triple. Environmental damage would result from mining, but if carefully managed this could be mitigated down to short term effects.

Carbon release is potentially a more difficult problem, but carbon sequestering technologies could eliminate 90% of carbon emissions, potentially reducing CO2 releases to less than half of current global levels with the replacement of some of the oldest existing plants.

Coal Options

“Clean Coal” (IGCC 90% carbon sequestering), zero sulfur.

$6m per megawatt Capacity, 100% availability factor (this may drop considerably, even to below $3 per watt)

$96 – $33 trillion

“Clean Coal” IGCC , zero sulfur.

$2m per megawatt Capacity, 100% availability factor (this may drop considerably, even to below $1.5 per watt)

Atmospheric CO2 pollution would increase significantly.

$22 – $16 trillion

Conventional Coal

$1m per megawatt capacity, 100% availability factor, standard emissions scrubbing.

Atmospheric CO2 pollution would increase significantly, and other pollutants would likely create significant secondary effects.

$11 trillion

Nuclear power to the rescue?

Nuclear power generation costs are similar to coal, with a higher infrastructure cost. Breeder reactors would be mandatory for a long term solution. A very very rough estimate of initial infrastructure costs would be:

$20 - 30 trillion

On a global scale, providing effective security and defense of these operations (lots of weaponizable plutonium kicking around) would probably exceed the cost of power production and would present a very significant, ever present security and environmental threat.

Geothermal a possibility?
Primary geothermal production capacity is estimated to be about 2 Tw. Assuming that the other 8Tw required could be made up by secondary sources as suggested by the MIT study, then Geothermal might come in at
$34 - 75 Trillion
Depending largely on the cost of the secondary sources. Large investments in distribution systems would also likely be required.

Unprecedented global investment will likely be required to avert collapse of the current system

Obviously, a huge investment is required for all of the possible solutions to maintaining energy output levels. Investment on this scale, if even a realistic possibility, is probably not possible without severe widespread economic effects, and although I am not an economist, it seems to me that the likely effect would be extreme global inflation.

Where would this money come from?

Some ideas that could fractionally contribute:

1.A 100% tax on all oil – energy revenues, with a corresponding 100% tax credit for renewable or clean coal infrastructure investment by companies affected by this tax.

2.Tax reduction for investors, employees, and executives of companies which invest more than 70% of their revenues into renewable or clean coal infrastructure investment.

3.Tax free bond issues for renewable or clean coal infrastructure investment

3.Conferring overflow tax benefits for investors holding more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in RE/CC infrastructure

3.Provide a 100% tax credit, up to taxes owed, for all energy related businesses, credited for RE/CC infrastructure..

7.Place a tarriff on electrical power, funding a credit for micro AE installations. Balance this tarrif so that property owners who install effective AE systems will be tariff neutral.

8.Tax credits for agriculture – windfarm colocation, to provide an incentive for free siting of wind turbines.

9.Tax credits for microagriculture food production, reflecting the energy savings

More Ideas needed.... please comment!

On Constants....

2010-11-14T13:02:00.001-09:00

When we seek to explain the values of constants, we pick constants which are just plain numbers, because the ones tied to units (like the speed of light, a distance over time) are inherently intractable in their stubborn relationship with the units in which they are defined. Examples of unit-less constants would be the ratio of the masses of the muon and the electron, and the fine structure constant. But why are these constants constant, and why are they what they are?

One uneasy possibility is that physical reality contains domains with all sorts of different values for these constants, but that nobody is around to ask about them except in the rarefied subset of domains where they are just right to allow complex life to exist.

This is known as 'anthropic' reasoning (somewhat of a misnomer) , or more specifically in this case, as the “weak anthropic principle”, combined with a corollary assumption of the existence of other possible universes.

It is a postulate to which I subscribe, perhaps as much for my own entertainment as for any really good reason, but within which I find remarkable avenues of exploration and even occasional glimpses into the inner workings of the observable universe.

Of the many possibilities that this hints at, one of the most interesting is that we may not in fact be observers of a single universe, but rather of a narrow spectrum of possible universes that support our “continuity of consciousness”.

Continuity of consciousness is a concept I find useful to differentiate between three distinct types of possible universes:

1: Those in which we cannot exist at all

2: Universal states in we might be able to exist in a certain time or place, but which might not have supported our coming into existence in the first place, or support our existence from inception up to an arbitrarily short termination point, or support conditions favorable for existence only in an alternate frame of reference in space time, perhaps arbitrarily constrained.

3. Universes or universal states which support our existence end to end.

One interesting ramification of this is that at different moments or places (locations in space-time) we may be able to observe a slightly different spectra of universes, momentarily including those which specifically support our existence only momentarily.

I find it interesting to note the vague yet tangible connection between this idea and many of the less intuitive elements of quantum physics, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the interference pattern of single photons with themselves, “spooky action”, and many other small hints.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle illustrates, among many other more important things, the fact that for an arbitrarily short period of time (directly related to the mass of the elephant in question) we can not be entirely sure that we are not sharing the room with an elephant, and that we can even detect the presence of this virtual elephant in the pressure that is exerted outside of two objects spaced closely enough together to exclude the elephants wave-function.

What is perhaps even slightly more troubling is that even when we can see, touch, and smell said elephant, we cannot be so sure of his exact position in any given instant so as to completely exclude the possibility that he is, at least in part, on the far side of Io, in orbit around Neptune.

This is very tantalizing fodder for thinking in terms of a spectra of universal states, and as good an excuse as any for not going into work in the morning. After all, no one can really prove that you are not actually at work, at least in any given instant....

But I digress....

There are other possible ramifications of this that can be imagined... such as the possibility of (ever so slightly) influencing the spectra of observable universes by our physical state, our actions, or maybe even our thoughts......And what about all that dark matter and dark energy.... Could it be that things beyond our space-time event horizon can be observed in an expanded spectra, due to their inability to influence our existence? If the observable spectrum of universes becomes more permissive as it becomes distant in space or time, wouldn't that have energy, and therefore mass?

There are countless philosophical, cosmological, and even potentially theological implications for this idea, which can also be expanded into alternate “interpretations” of universal states, but that gets so far into philosophy that it almost becomes pointless to discuss except to push back the limits of dark knowledge, that which we do not yet know that we do not know.

Hmmmmm.

A idea of mind...

2010-09-15T08:36:00.003-08:00

This is raw, and hard to read. sorry. Some day I will clean it up. Or not.

v Animal level function (subconscious)

Ø Instinctive behaviors

Ø Learned behaviors

§ Scripts

· Written by action, and in the case of humans (other high mammals?), imagination

· Automatically queued for execution based on simple sensory and situational cues

¨ At least in suitably equipped creatures, these cues can come from the imagination

¨ Automatic selection of a specific script is reinforced or suppressed based on conditioned response and reinforcement

Ø Positive reinforcement

§ Reinforces application of an instinctive or learned script in response to specific stimulus

Ø Negative reinforcement

§ Causes a desire for avoidance of (flight from) the stimulus set , in lieu of running the script that caused the negative

· Flight often leads to the formation of a new script, and a decrease in the “suitability for circumstance” rating of the script that created the flight situation

¨ New scripts created this way are essentially collections of microscripts executed in response to stimulus received during a flight response, in the absence of an appropriate preexisting macroscript.

¨ This sequence then may become 1^st generation macroscript that will subsequently be pruned or reinforced based on its effectiveness at producing goal achievement or negative consequences.

· The subconscious does not record the -lack of- negative stimulus

¨ To modify behavior scripts or action tables, a positive or negative stimulus is required

Ø Intensely goal focused

§ Has difficulty with or is incapable of using the logical symbolic operator “NOT”

v Higher Consciousness

Ø An artifact of a highly evolved imagination

Ø Distinctly Separate

§ In an observational, predictive, and supervisory role

· See experiments in conscious self determination, free will (references)

§ Observably separate

· Simple experiment

¨ Next time you are eating, watch closely. How often did you consciously choose to make an action, versus the times that you observed it happening autonomously and approved or cancelled it?

Ø Imagination

§ an evolved tool that gives us decision making advantages and extreme adaptability

§ Benefits from a narrator, a constructor, a second voice

· We are the narrator

§ Allows true symbolic re-presentation, as opposed to cause and effect, which is not abstract

· Enables language

§ The act of narration

· Requires a highly evolved imagination, capable of manipulating very complex symbolic constructs

· Developed and was extended by culture

· Useful for defining new scripts through methodical imagination of circumstances, scripts, and outcomes

Ø Language

§ Facilitates narration

§ Forms the optional facile boundaries of imaginary constructs, which can be transcended with effort

§ Enables the codification of culture, a sort of genome so that flexibility is limited and replication is more exact and modular

Ø Viral in nature

§ Enculturated higher consciousness is the result of infection by a viral information set that propagates in the imagination space of higher animals.

· Evidence can be found for this in the relative failure of unenculturated feral children to adjust to enculturated consensual reality and behaviors, as well as the moderate success of forced enculturation in great apes. (Coco) (references)

Ø Culture

§ a viral set of symbolic constructs that at once defines and explains our social and physical circumstances

§ defines and is defined by our experience of existence

· In the case of enculturated individuals, is framed within a viral information set that has been provided to us in some form by other infected individuals

§ Not universal

· Just as words sometimes cannot be translated, culture can contain frames of reference unique to that culture (or even individual).

¨ There is no universal –consensual- reality, though there may (or may not) be a universal physical reality

§ Arguably not a requirement of high consciousness, but a capability enhancing toolset that enables the processing of increasingly complex data structures

· Note – just as a computer is fully functional with just the basic operating system, and can be tasked with basic tasks as such, its functionality is greatly enhanced by additional software. For us this software is culture, and this forms the framework for complex abstract data sets, or knowledge

v Useful Abstractions

Ø The Sentient

§ The conscious mind is “the Sentient”

· Observes the objects of conscious observation only

· Frequently has minimal interaction with the Companion

¨ Frequent descriptions of this isolation

Ø on “autopilot”

Ø in “a different world”

Ø “distracted”

· Can be tasked with a much higher degree of activity than is frequently employed

¨ Living in the moment

¨ Intentional observation

· Is normally present when learning new tasks (writing new scripts) before they become “automatic”

· Has veto power over scripts chosen by the companion

· Can Create new scripts (NLP focuses on this idea)

· Can be suspended under extreme stress

· Without training, has very little direct control of the body

¨ (try flexing just one muscle)

Ø The Companion

§ The subconscious mind is “the Companion”

· Manages everyday body functions

· Alerts the Sentient of dangers, and opportunities

· Quickly chooses and executes scripts based on limited information

· Goal oriented

· Can take over completely under extreme stress if the Sentient is not well disciplined

· Is the subject of hypnosis

· Is expert in the control of the body

¨ Is distributed beyond the brain and into the spinal column (“muscle memory”)

· Well suited for navigating simple 1 layer cause and effect situations and survival tasks

¨ Does not “make decisions”

¨ Acts on a cause-effect conditioning model

Ø Behavior scripts and Action Tables

§ Scripts are a model for a sequential set of actions in response to stimulus or initiated in the context of a higher level script or supervisory command

· Scripts are nested, and at the lowest level are very basic (taking a step, raising an arm)

§ Action Tables are a model for the selection criteria used to select scripts based on stimulus

v Classifying the Whole: Sentient – Companion symbiosis

Ø The relationship between the Sentient and the Companion can be classed as symbiotic

§ Like having a really reliable idiot savant chauffer, a close friend who is not that clever but is really, really effective.

§ The sentient is in a observation / idle role by default

· When a script is terminated and a high level decision is required, the Sentient may experience an “Interrupt” (ok, why did I come over here?)

§ Left to its own devices, the Companion will automatically seek resolution for first tier biological drives (freedom from immediate bodily harm, food, social status, comfort, sex, roughly in that order) within the scope of existing scripts, and will modify behavior based on the success or failure of this seeking process.

· The companion can be directed by the Sentient to apply this seeking process to other goals as well, by intentional or unintentional invocation of the constructed goal as a required step to a first tier goal.

¨ This is the purpose of most sales advertising, to displace or influence the Sentient in such a way that the purchase of a specific product is given to the Companion as an intermediary goal for the fulfillment of first tier goals.

Reflections on an engineered tragedy – 9-11

2010-09-13T07:25:00.002-08:00

As we approach the ten year anniversary of the human created disaster that is now known as 9/11 (that only leaves 364 good days left) it is, perhaps time to reflect.

The fall of the twin towers (and more specifically, the aftermath of the event) arguably made Osama Bin Laden the most successful asymmetrical war fighter in the history of mankind. It is time that we acknowledge this unpleasant fact, so that we can stop adding to his success.

While the 9/11 events were certainly spectacular, they were in and of themselves utterly insignificant on a strategic scale. The tragic loss of life and small loss of property (in proportion to the US GDP) in no way directly hindered the ability of the USA to continue to thrive, to grow, and to be the beacon of liberty and hope and freedom that so infuriates zealots and enemies of personal liberty.

The measured initial US response was effective and prompt, and sufficient to display that we would respond in kind to attacks on our soil.

Have we gone beyond that initial sensible response, playing into the hands of those who would deprive us of our liberties?

The goal of asymmetrical warfare (AKA terrorism) is to leverage the resources of the enemy against itself. This is done by utilizing the publicity and outrage that inevitably follows attacks on the typical target of terrorism – civilian infrastructure.

When a car suicide bomber “earns his 72” Instant global publicity is the most important secondary effect of the blast. For $500 of explosives, the well chosen attack may harvest $50,000,000 in publicity. The fact that the attack is denounced by the media is irrelevant –potential supporters will only see this as a sign of the strength of the group responsible.

As nice as a 50,000,000% return on investment might be, if the perpetrators of an attack are sufficiently brilliant in the choice of their target and managing the resulting media, that is just the beginning.

If they are especially clever, or their adversary not so, the attack might manage to lure the victimized organization into a disproportionate response. This will multiply the dividends reaped from the attack in the form of high economic losses , skyrocketing military expenditures, and reduced efficiency of the victim organization due to increased security overhead.

I think it can be safely said that the 9/11 attacks have succeeded in meeting these goals and more.

Through our reaction to the attacks, we find ourselves a changed nation. We have incrementally reduced our quality of life and our expectations of personal liberty. We have spent trillions of dollars. We have cast ourselves in the passive role of the victim, who must act, not by calculated measures, but rather in gross dramatic gesture.

I do not think that the perpetrators of 9/11 could have hoped for a better result.

Perhaps it is time to put this behind us and move towards a progressive, non reactionary policy. We must recognize that our enemy is not a government, not a religion, not a band of renegades, and not a well organized terrorist organization – it is an ideology of hatred and violence.

An ideology cannot be destroyed by violence, unless we are willing to engage in genocide against the entire culture that harbors it. This tactic has been effectively employed historically by almost every major military power in history up until recently, but we seem to have come to a consensus that we are more enlightened now, and that this type of thing is no longer acceptable.

We must continue to vigorously protect our nation and proportionally respond to attackers. We must make it exquisitely uncomfortable to be associated with an attack on the USA, with minimal visibility and effect on uninvolved people, and while not putting excessive resources or manpower in harms’ way. We must make no concession in our way of life, and give no quarter to the enemy through sacrificing excessive time, energy, liberty, or mindshare.

Security cannot be assured. We all accept that risks are unavoidable when we drive, and that the costs to eliminate these risks are too high to accept (a 15mph universal speed limit?). The same goes for security within our borders.

We must learn to combat virulent, destructive ideologies with a proportionate response both militarily and ideologicaly, reducing the asymmetry of asymmetrical warfare so that our greater resources become our strength and not our vulnerability.

Fellow Americans, let us move on, and stop paying dividends to Al Qaeda. There are only 365 days in a year – if we marked each of our tragedies as a day on the calendar of our culture, we would live a life of perpetual grief.

Each time we remember that fateful day with anything more than sadness, we make a small deposit in the mindshare bank of Osama mutual… a deposit that given the opportunity, the purveyors of hate and fear will be more than happy to cash in.

Experimental Film

2007-09-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

My latest experimental film, 'Transmitter' .

It was shot, editied, and rendered exclusively on my Nokia 6110 phone. Working within the limitations of the medium was tricky, but I am pleased with the result.

Dolphins not so smart on land, new study suggests

2007-09-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

From the Onion:

GAINESVILLE, FL—Although dolphins have long been celebrated for their high intelligence and for appearing to have a complex language, a team of researchers at the University of Florida reported Monday that these traits are markedly less evident on dry land.

Enlarge Image

A dolphin performs poorly in a University of Florida land-based locomotion test.

According to study researchers, a group of 25 bottlenose dolphins removed from their holding tanks failed 11 exercises designed to test their basic cognitive abilities and reasoning skills.

"The dolphins were incapable of recognizing and repeating simple gestures," said study co-author Dr. Scott Lindell. "Their non-verbal communications were limited to a rapid constriction and expansion of the blowhole, various incomprehensible fin motions, and heavy tremors while they lay prone on the lab table."

After capturing the dolphins from the ocean, Lindell and his colleagues tagged them and placed them under the intense, high-wattage lights of a moisture-proof lab. The researchers then administered an extensive battery of tests designed to measure everything from the dolphins' self-awareness to their aptitude for writing and reading comprehension.

"Dolphins have a popular reputation for being excellent communicators," Lindell said. "But our study group offered only three types of response to every question we posed: a nonsensical, labored wheezing, an earsplitting barrage of unintelligible high-pitched shrieks, and in extreme cases, a shrill, distressed scream."

Even the dolphins' proven ability to navigate through a form of sonar called echolocation was ineffective on land.

"The military has claimed great success in training these mammals, utilizing their echolocation skills to detect mines that have been placed underwater," said Lindell, who conducted a similar experiment in a concrete parking lot. "We were unable to replicate this finding ourselves."

Lindell added: "In most cases, the dolphins succeeded in finding land mines only when we placed them directly on top of the mines."

In another test, several pounds of mackerel were placed on the ground, separated from the test dolphins by only 20 feet of concrete. The dolphins were unable to reach the food and feed themselves.

Despite their failures in the initial series of tests, the animals were given further opportunities to demonstrate their intelligence on land. The dolphins were unable to display novel behaviors, use a map to pinpoint their location on campus (spatial reasoning), or complete a simple obstacle course and wall climb.

"Their learning curve was actually negative," Lindell said. "The more time we gave them to complete basic land-based tests, the more pitiful their efforts became, with many of them opting to bask in the sun rather than perform a simple task."

"In some cases," Lindell added, "the dolphins appeared to be looking directly into our eyes, as if pleading with us to help them perform better in these tests."

Many scientists believe these findings may help to explain why dolphins, for all their vaunted intelligence, have never developed technology or agriculture, or harnessed the power of fire—skills still exclusively in the domain of Homo sapiens.

Said Lindell: "Their failure is a great disappointment to all of us who once felt an intelligence-based kinship with these majestic animals."

Refugees from the anthill

2007-08-05T00:41:00.000-08:00

I have just made the startling discovery that many people view themselves as integrally part of society, and not really separate from it at all.

Now, I realize that this will not be a shocking revelation for most, but I had simply never considered that most people do not view themselves as being inherently outside of society, a participant in instance only, not an inseparable member.

I had this epiphany watching ants, trying to imagine myself as one. An ant cannot survive as an individual, and ultimately neither can humans. So, as an ant, I would interact and participate in whatever ways met my needs, and allowed for my continued participation, but would also pursue my own, separate agenda. But I could not live in this way were it not for the other ants, dutifully following orders from the queen, so I realized that essentially that made my ant counterpart a symbiont at best, parasite at worst.

And so it is with me. I interact with society as meets my needs, and I contribute as I desire, but view myself as essentially separate - A refugee from the anthill.

I realize that this paradigm has its dangers -it is essentially sociopathic in nature. I think that if one were to study criminals, politicians, and leaders in business and industry, one would find a high occurrence of this or a similar worldview.

hmmm. food for thought.

If there are any other refugees from the anthill out there, I'd like to hear your views on the subject, so please comment.

Request for discourse

2007-08-05T00:38:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have stumbled here.... I ask:

Can a state exist without a monopoly of coercive force?

Can a state exist within a state?

Can a state exist without any coercive force, other than social?

Please comment intelligently.

Ouroboros

2006-12-12T20:50:00.000-09:00

....From my post on Sailfreespirit ......

My vision precedes my steps, and I exist mostly in the time to come. My body yearns to be reconciled with my sight in the tasks ahead; my hands ache to grasp the tools with which I will chip away at the domain of fortuna, plowing chance asunder where the stones allow the planting of favorable crops.

These anxious thoughts bring me to ponder their roots. It is the domain of life to be an organizing force in a world of essential entropy. It is from the chaos that our power is drawn, yet this power is focused by all life forms to create and maintain order. Without entropy, there can be no life, no energy, yet entropy itself is the nemesis of all life, forever bound in a circle of order and chaos, the Ouroboros.

With the knowledge that all things exist in all places and in all times to varying degrees (the essential lesson of quantum physics), it is left to the other laws of physics to constrain the potentialities to a perceivable subset. Without constraint there would only be the infinite energy of chaos itself; no organizing (observing) force could exist. The universe is forged from this sea of random motion by limiting probability so that “impossible configurations” do not occur to an observable extent. Self organizing constructs and life forms further manipulate probability within their ability to create and maintain themselves, and to interact with their environments. The purposeful manipulation and management of probability is the essential force of life itself. It is the cornerstone of existence, expressed at the subatomic and every scale above. One ignores this basic fact at their peril. Those that manage the manipulation of probability prosper accordingly, and those that fail suffer; often greatly. To actually master probability would be to transcend the plight of the mortal through to deity.

OK… here’s where I go way out in left field. If the potentiality to -approach mastery- of probability exists within us, it likely lies not within our hands, but within our minds. Perhaps the act of perception is more powerful than any other force which we recognize. Suppose the existence of the observer is the ultimate criterion for the limits on chaos set by what we call the “laws of physics”. They are what they are so as to accommodate our existence. Certainly we could not observe in any set of conditions in which we cannot materially exist. Perhaps, in this way, changing the act of observation, or the nature of the observer would bear fruit in the form of a changed consensual reality. Thoughts are things? Perhaps. Do not all actions begin with intention?

Food for thought….

Afternoons and coffee spoons, unabridged

2006-09-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

As I sip my breve here in the '10 Speed Coffee Shop ' up here in the Hood River Heights, I ponder the nature of life, the universe, and everything. I'm Reading "A Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe" A recommended read for anyone who cares (dares) to ponder such things.

On the smaller scale, this is Sep 11, the anniversary of the destruction of the WTC towers. On this note, I would like to mention another book I have recently finished, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Anyone who wishes a more comprehensive understanding of September 11 or of foreign policy in general would do well to read this book.

It is an insider 'tell all' book on international trade and extortion, and if you wish to understand the news behind the news, the information contained is critical and hard to find. For those among us who are a bit paranoid that the corporo-kleptocracy is watching, buy it cash at a bookstore. Wear a big hat.

John Perkins was instrumental in brokering the post oil embargo Saudi Development Deal with the House Of Saud, as well as many, many other economic development programs around the world. The importance of his insight and experience to understanding recent and current events is on a par with that of Robert S. McNamera. Read it.

If you haven't already, see The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara .

Then take out your copy of "Fahrenheit 911" and burn it.

Michael Moore is exactly the type of self agrandizing greedy bastard that he likes to make his mocumentaries about. He distorts and makes a grotesque mockery of important questions for cold, hard cash. You don't see him donating the proceeds to his movies to the Flint town Hall, now do you? His assumption that the audience will see him as a benevolent hero is a vulgar insult to our intelligence, a profanity of arrogance.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Contemporary Philosophy : Creation vs Creation

2006-05-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

I find it amusing if troubling that there are so many otherwise brilliant souls caught up in the "creation vs. evolution" conflict.

First, things like this are articles of faith. If you choose to adopt the 6000 year planetary age as an article of faith, so be it. That is your choice. End of story. Same deal if you choose to adopt a different theory of genesis, as an article of faith. Now, keep your faith, and keep it to yourself.

On the other hand, from a point of view of investigation, view the empirical (not faith-only) evidence, and draw your conclusion based on the evidence. If you think that this conclusion might conflict with your faith, either forgo the investigation, or revise your faith.

Simple. You have no more right to shove your article of faith down my throat than I have to shove mine down yours.

Now - about school.....

Public Schools, being publicly funded, should be inherently secular. They should not actively interfere in any way with the practice of any religion, so long as its practice does not interfere with the teaching of the students.

The school should teach the ideas and the theories that are best supported by the proponderance of the physical evidence, without regard to political or religious considerations, including any articles of faith. An article of faith is retained by the holder in the face of contradiction, or it was never an article of faith at all. If a religion teaches that the sky is orange, but the preponderance of the evidence supports that the sky is blue, the school shal not yield. Likewise with other scientific observations and theories. If this conflicts with articles of faith - as it surely will - then those who hold those articles should be prepared to face these challenges, quetly keeping their article of faith alive and to themselves.

If the prevailing science turns out to be wrong, as it often does, that truth will become known in due time. Such is the nature of science and the act of observation and learning. Simple. Students must not only learn their faith (at home) but also the primary scientific theories, and also, perhaps most importantly, to tolerate others points of view and their non disruptive worship or practice of faith. Thus, a prayer is tolerated by the atheist, a student bowing to mecca is tolerated by the christian, and so on. If it does not concern you, leave it be.

On the other hand, if you do not wish to send your child to a secular school, send him or her to a private one, or teach them yourself. Schools cannot be expected to teach multiple, often opposing viewpoints on articles of faith. Teach your children as you choose, and if you have done a decent job then they will not lose their faith just because they encounter an alternate point of view. Too poor to afford private school? Teach better at home. Too dumb to teach at home? Maybe your child is better off being taught elsewhere. If your faith is so strong, why are you being overcome by a tiny problem such as this? Faith indeed!

As for the Christians, and our articles of faith, I have the following to say:

As a Christian, I cannot fathom why no one seems to know that this debate (over the creation) was already put to rest around 400AD, long before it started, by a scholar of scripture and philosophy known as St. Augustine.

But first, lets take a look at what has happened to create the Church as we know it today.

The true irony in this story lies in the split of the Protestants from the Catholic church. Politics aside (and the politics were huge in this split) I agree in principle with the Protestants, that each man can read the scriptures and be enlightened, we do not need a Pope to act as go-between, and we are generally intelligent enough to not go running amok with The Book.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, idiocy crept in. Now we have entire branches of the church that have "forgotten" what the Bible is, and its context among the rest of holy scripture. The trend is towards extreme literalism that by ignoring the genesis of the Bible itself manages to take individual verses grossly out of context. They do this by ignoring the simple, irrefutable and provable fact that the Bible is a subset of scripture, that there are variances in translation form the original, and that parts of all modern bibles have been subject to manipulation and spin since they were first revised, approved, and made "official", most often by politicians! (king James ring a bell? Helloo-oo!!!!)

Compounding the irony, these rouge factions - and here I refer to mainstream U.S. Christianity as we know it today - only literalize the passages that they find convenient, passing other passages off as parable, not to be taken literally. So they then take the position of the Old Church, telling the common man how to believe, how to interpret, to the point that some 84.3% of church-goers never actually have studied the bible except in the context of being lectured in church. (+/- 3.3% potential sampling error) but unlike the Old Church, they do this outside the context of knowledge and study of the majority of our scriptural heritage.

I suppose it is the human condition to prefer that others do the work for you, and perhaps the Old Church and the New are not so far off considering that by definition half of the population has an intelligence below the average. (That thought scares the crap out of me on the highway).

Still I am thankful that I can read, study, and worship as I see fit without being hanged from the neck until dead, so for that I applaud the protestant movement, regardless of the eventualities involved.

Fellow Christians, Please try to remember that our holy scripture is a subset of a multitude of scripture thought to be most divine and most relevant. If you don't understand this or don't believe me, please educate yourself on this point before refuting it. Go see for yourself the scrolls, the tablets, the papyri written through divine inspiration. Only a tiny fraction ended up in the bible as we now know it. And that which made the cut has been massaged by kings, translated several times, and even the meanings of some of the -English- words have changed over the last century.

It is supreme testimony to His wisdom and divinity that despite the pruning, the forming, the translations and the omissions, the message remains wholly intact, undiminished in form or fact. Those who see only the words (which have -not- escaped the molestation of men) so often fail to see the message, so focused are they upon the fragile text itself. Classic Forest for the trees syndrome.

So they fight over which day is the Sabbath, what was meant in this passage or that, ad nauseam. So foolish, so childish - so very - human.

Anyway, Back to St. Augustine, tortured soul that he was.

Saint Augustine determined that based on his understanding of the writings, in Genesis, god makes all things in type in six days. That is, the archetypes, the divine ideas from which all things in fact spring were created in genesis. Remember, only a fraction of the divine writings made it into the bible - if it was all in there it would take twenty or so years to read it once through, and much of it has not been translated.

St Augustine came to this conclusion based only on what was put in front of him in scripture. There was no competing theory of evolution in 400 AD. Lacking the time or resources to duplicate his research, I see no reason to doubt it.

God authors not confusion. Things are as they appear, only more wondrous the closer you look. And we can look very, very close these days, with sophisticated instruments and powerful abilities to interpret information. Our knowledge dwarfs that of men only a few hundred years ago. God means for us to use our minds, to trust our intellects, to learn and grow in the glory of the Lord. He did not give us intelligence to deceive us, nor did he give us eyes but for to reveal the world to us.

Imagine a man, 4000 years ago, being told by God's messenger, about the creation - lets say, the big bang. First, there is no word for universe in his language. There is no concept of the solar system, the galaxy, or any of the many concepts we all understand. There is no idea for atom. nor particle, nor light (except for the perception of light) for that matter. Only through metaphor can it be described, so in metaphor it is written.

To take this verse or that, edited, translated, and written down by simple people -that lacked the cultural context to support that which was described to them- in total literal context is ridiculous folly at best, blackest of black heresy at worst.

Intelligent design...

To me, there is -no more intelligent form- of design than forming a universe from nothing, then adjusting the laws of physics so that the -inevitable- result is precisely what you desire - thus, you design without designing, for you have designed and created a universe that -designs itself according to your plan-.

And, just in case you aren’t totally prescient in the traditional sense, as a four dimensional being all you would have to do to make adjustments would be to nudge a few proto-atoms in the early phases of the "big kaboom" and the configuration of the fully formed universe would be drastically altered.

Got a problem species on your favorite planet? Go back to the beginning of the genetic line and nip it in the bud.

Got dinosaur infestation wiping out your favorites, the mammals? Easy fix. Nudge a few atoms twenty billion years ago to form a star that alters the eventual course of an asteroid that wipes them out, and the hardy mammals flourish according to plan.

To me, -that- is intelligent design.

It is the height of arrogance to assume that God must design as we design, build as we build, to think as we think.

It belittles the Creator to assume that (he) had to bother with all the details. If you are truly omnipotent, all you have to do is know the result you desire, and through your magnificently intelligent design of the universe, your will is expressed in fact and form, without having to bother with the details.

Like making seeds, instead of making trees.

Just my $.02 worth ;)

Dark knowledge

2006-05-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

I think it is safe to say that for all of our aquired knowledge, there is more that we do not know than that which we do know. If this is indeed true, It follows then that the bulk of all which can be known lies within the realm of that which we do not know that we do not know - that dark body of knowledge within which we are completely unaware even of of our ignorance.

Ouch. If that doesn't knock you down a couple of notches, nothing will. Perhaps our arrogance is eclipsed only by our ignorance.

Like the astronomer peering into the depths of the ancient universe, we can see that this knowledge must be there - we can see its effect within the cryptic machinations of the universe - yet we cannot see it. We cannot measure it. We cannot accurately describe, quantify or delineate it except by what it is not.

Unlike dark matter or its even stranger cousin, dark energy, dark knowledge is within our grasp if only we can break down our own memetic constructs to the point where the "holes" become apparent. The "holes" are the unthought thoughts, the missing concepts hidden in the gaps or falacies of our otherwise unexamined network of thoughts. Through this or other methods, exposed are the windows to all that lies truly "outside the box", to knowledge that cannot be arrived at only by building upon the knowledge within previous human experience. Dark Knowledge is connected to the trunk of all human experience only by some extensive branch that our ancient ancestors never explored, if it is connected at all.

To see through the window is not enough. To illuminate truly new knowledge, the window must be breached, the void traversed so that a bridge can be built to connect it back in to the trunk of cumulative human experience. This is precisely what Einstein did when he quantified his theory of relativity - he brought that knowledge out of the darkness by connecting his "vision through the window" to mathematical and physical concepts that were already understood. He had seen the answer long before he had the knowledge to substantiate his vision. He did not progress methodicaly from the known to the unknown. Instead, he grasped a truth well outside the box of previous human thought or experience and proceeded to build a bridge back to the known world.

It is thought provoking to note that civilizations may rise and fall, or simply vanish - and with them goes the threads connecting their knowledge to ours. In many cases, their "tools" (at least the ones we recognize as such) bear silent wisdom to this knowledge, effectively bridging the divide. But what of a society that develops an entirely different concept of tool, of technology? We could not hope to understand what we were looking at from an archeological perspective, and civilizations that may have been great, even transformational, could be easily dismissed as trivial if they did not leave behind comprehensible physical artifacts.

There is more to this than meets the eye.

2006-05-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

A potential case - in - point of dark knowledge follows, but first I ask the reader to assess their definition of the concepts known as "tool" and "technology". We have a very limited view of these ideas, and this in particular may be blinding us to a more complete understanding of our consensual reality.

The expansion of the idea of "toolness" may be key.

To what I will not yet attempt to convey.

_________________________________________________________

Quantum Honeybees

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

By Adam Frank
DISCOVER Vol. 18 No. 11 | November 1997 | Astronomy & Physics

Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret.

This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. I grew up thinking about bees, she says. My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee’s dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey. Her father kept his books on honeybees on a shelf in her room. I’m not sure why, she says. It may have just been a convenient space. I remember looking at a lot of these books, especially the one by Karl von Frisch.

Von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn’t been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb, which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a waggle dance, which in outline looks something like a coffee bean--two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.

It is easy to see why this beautiful and mysterious phenomenon captured Shipman’s young and mathematically inclined imagination. The bee’s finely tuned choreography is a virtuoso performance of biologic information processing. The central waggling part of the dance is the most important. To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down. One of Von Frisch’s most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer.

Direction alone is not enough, of course--the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food. The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes, Shipman explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle. The dancer will perform two alternating waggling runs symmetric about, but diverging from, the center line. The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs.

If that sounds almost straightforward, what happens next certainly doesn’t. Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the round dance. It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn. There are a number of variations between species.

Von Frisch’s work on the bee dance is impressive, but it is largely descriptive. He never explained why the bees use this peculiar vocabulary and not some other. Nor did he (or could he) explain how small- brained bees manage to encode so much information. The dance of the honeybee is special among animal communication systems, says Shipman. It conveys concise, quantitative information in an abstract, symbolic way. You have to wonder what makes the dance happen. Bees don’t have enough intelligence to know what they are doing. How do they know the dance in the first place? Calling it instinct or some other word just substitutes one mystery for another.

Shipman entered college as a biochemistry major and even spent some time working in a biology lab studying the hemolymph--the blood--of honeybee larvae, but she quickly moved her interest in bees to the side. During my freshman year, she says, I became more attracted to the beauty and rigor of mathematics. She switched her major and eventually went on to graduate school and to a professorship at the University of Rochester. For several years it seemed as though she had wandered a long way from her childhood fascination.

Then, taking an unlikely route, she found herself once again confronting the mysteries of bees head-on. While working on her doctoral thesis, on an obscure type of mathematics known only to a small coterie of researchers well-versed in the minutiae of geometry, she stumbled across what just might be the key to the secrets of the bee’s dance.

Shipman’s work concerned a set of geometric problems associated with an esoteric mathematical concept known as a flag manifold. In the jargon of mathematics, manifold means space. But don’t let that deceptively simple definition lull you into a false sense of security. Mathematicians have as many kinds of manifolds as a French baker has bread. Some manifolds are flat, some are curved, some are twisted, some wrap back on themselves, some go on forever. The surface of a sphere is a manifold, says Shipman. So is the surface of a bagel--it’s called a torus. The shape of a manifold determines what kinds of objects (curves, figures, surfaces) can live within its confines. Two different types of loops, for example, live in the surface of a torus--one wraps around the outside, the other goes through the middle, and there is no way to transform the first into the second without breaking the loop. In contrast, there is only one type of loop that lives on a sphere.

Mathematicians like to examine different manifolds the way antiques dealers browse through curio shops--always exploring, always looking for unusual characteristics that expand their understanding of numbers or geometry. The difficult part about exploring a manifold, however, is that mathematicians don’t always confine them to the three dimensions of ordinary experience. A manifold can have two dimensions like the surface of a screen, three dimensions like the inside of an empty box, four dimensions like the space-time of our Einsteinian universe, or even ten or a hundred dimensions. The flag manifold (which got its name because some imaginative mathematician thought it had a shape like a flag on a pole) happens to have six dimensions, which means mathematicians can’t visualize all the two-dimensional objects that can live there. That does not mean, though, that they cannot see the objects’ shadows.

One of the more effective tricks for visualizing objects with more than three dimensions is to project or map them onto a space that has fewer dimensions (usually two or three). A topographic map, in which three-dimensional mountains get squashed onto a two-dimensional page, is a type of projection. Likewise, the shadow of your hand on the wall is a two- dimensional projection of your three-dimensional hand.

One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three- dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The bee’s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the bee’s recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold, the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment dance. I wasn’t looking for a connection between bees and the flag manifold, she says. I was just doing my research. The curves were nothing special in themselves, except that the dance patterns kept emerging.

Delving more deeply into the flag manifold, Shipman dredged up a variable, which she called alpha, that allowed her to reproduce the entire bee dance in all its parts and variations. Alpha determines the shape of the curves in the 6-D flag manifold, which means it also controls how those curves look when they are projected onto the 2-D hexagon. Infinitely large values of alpha produce a single line that cuts the hexagon in half. Large values of alpha produce two lines very close together. Decrease alpha and the lines splay out, joined at one end like a V. Continue to decrease alpha further and the lines form a wider and wider V until, at a certain value, they each hit a vertex of the hexagon. Then the curves change suddenly and dramatically. When alpha reaches a critical value, explains Shipman, the projected curves become straight line segments lying along opposing faces of the hexagon.

The smooth divergence of the splayed lines and their abrupt transition to discontinuous segments are critical--they link Shipman’s curves to those parts of the recruitment dance that bees emphasize with their waggling and buzzing. Biologists know that only certain parts of the dance convey information, she says. In the waggle dance, it’s the diverging waggling runs and not the return loops. In the circle dance it’s short straight segments on the sides of the loops. Shipman’s mathematics captures both of these characteristics, and the parameter alpha is the key. If different species have different sensitivities to alpha, then they will change from the waggle dances to round dances when the food source is at different distances.

If Shipman is correct, her mathematical description of the recruitment dance would push bee studies to a new level. The discovery of mathematical structure is often the first and critical step in turning what is merely a cacophony of observations into a coherent physical explanation. In the sixteenth century Johannes Kepler joined astronomy’s pantheon of greats by demonstrating that planetary orbits follow the simple geometric figure of the ellipse. By articulating the correct geometry traced by the heavenly bodies, Kepler ended two millennia of astronomical speculation as to the configuration of the heavens. Decades after Kepler died, Isaac Newton explained why planets follow elliptical orbits by filling in the all-important physics--gravity. With her flag manifold, Shipman is like a modern-day Kepler, offering, in her words, everything in a single framework. I have found a mathematics that takes all the different forms of the dance and embraces them in a single coherent geometric structure.

Shipman is not, however, content to play Kepler. You can look at this idea and say, ‘That’s a nice geometric description of the dance, very pretty,’ and leave it like that, she says. But there is more to it. When you have a physical phenomenon like the honeybee dance, and it follows a mathematical structure, you have to ask what are the physical laws that are causing it to happen.

At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold’s presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what’s going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell.

Say a bee flies around, finds a source of food, and heads straight back to the hive to tell its colleagues. How does it perceive where that food is? What notation can it use to remember? What terms can it use to translate that memory into directions for its fellow bees? One way, the way we big-brained humans would be most comfortable with, would be to use landmarks--fly ten yards toward the big rock, turn left, duck under the boughs of the pine tree, and see the flowers growing near the trunk. Another way, one that seems to be more in line with what bees actually do, would be to use physical characteristics that adequately identify the site, such as variations in Earth’s magnetic field or in the polarization of the sun’s light.

Researchers have in fact already established that the dance is sensitive to such properties. Experiments have documented, for example, that local variations in Earth’s magnetic field alter the angle of the waggling runs. In the past, scientists have attributed this to the presence of magnetite, a magnetically active mineral, in the abdomen of bees. Shipman, however, along with many other researchers, believes there is more to it than little magnets in the bees’ cells. But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees’ response. Ultimately magnetism is described by quantum fields, she says. I think the physics of the bees’ bodies, their physiology, must be constructed such that they’re sensitive to quantum fields--that is, the bee perceives these fields through quantum mechanical interactions between the fields and the atoms in the membranes of certain cells.

What exactly does it mean to say that the bees interact with quantum fields? A quantum field is a sort of framework within which particles play out their existences. And, rather than assigning an electron to one position in space at one particular time, you instead talk about all the different places the electron could possibly be. You can loosely refer to this collection of all possible locations as a field smeared out across space and time. If you decide to check the electron’s position by observing it, the interaction between your measuring device and the field makes the electron appear to be a single coherent object. In this sense, the observer is said to disturb the quantum mechanical nature of the electron.

There is some research to support the view that bees are sensitive to effects that occur only on a quantum-mechanical scale. One study exposed bees to short bursts of a high-intensity magnetic field and concluded that the bees’ response could be better explained as a sensitivity to an effect known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or nmr, an acronym commonly associated with a medical imaging technique. nmr occurs when an electromagnetic wave impinges on the nuclei of atoms and flips their orientation. nmr is considered a quantum mechanical effect because it takes place only if each atom absorbs a particular size packet, or quantum, of electromagnetic energy.

This research, however, doesn’t address the issue of how bees turn these quantum-mechanical perceptions into an organized dance ritual. Shipman’s mathematics does. To process quantum mechanical information and communicate it to others, the bee would not only have to possess equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world; to come up with the appropriate recruitment dance, it would have to perform some kind of calculation similar to what Shipman did with her flag manifold. Assuming that the typical honeybee is not quite intelligent enough to make the calculations, how does the bee come up with the flag manifold as an organizing principle for its dance? Shipman doesn’t claim to have the answer, but she is quick to point out that the flag manifold is common both to the bee dance and to the geometry of quarks. Perhaps, she speculates, bees possess some ability to perceive not only light and magnetism but quarks as well.

The notion that bees can perceive quarks is hard enough for many physicists to swallow, but that’s not even the half of it. Physicists have theorized that quarks are constantly popping up in the vacuum of empty space. This is possible because the vacuum is pervaded by something called the zero-point energy field--a quantum field in which on average no particles exist, but which can have local fluctuations that cause quarks to blink in and out of existence. Shipman believes that bees might sense these fleeting quarks, and use them--somehow--to create the complex and peculiar structure of their dance.

Now here’s the rub. The flag manifold geometry is an abstraction. It is useful in describing quarks not as the single coherent objects that physicists can measure in the real world but as unobserved quantum fields. Once a physicist tries to detect a quark--by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator--the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks not as single coherent objects but as quantum fields. If Shipman’s hunch is correct and bees are able to touch the quantum world of quarks without breaking it, not only would it shake up the field of biology, but physicists would be forced to reinterpret quantum mechanics as well.

Shipman is the first to admit that she is a long way from proving her hypothesis. The mathematics implies that bees are doing something with quarks, she says. I’m not saying they definitely are. I’m just throwing it out as a possibility. And when she publishes her research, probably sometime next year, no doubt many scientists will be turned off by her dragging quarks and quantum mechanics into the picture.

The joining of mathematics and biology is a fascinating endeavor and is just getting under way, says William Faris, a mathematician at the University of Arizona. Connecting quantum mechanics directly to biology is much more speculative. I frankly am skeptical that the bee dance is related to quantum mechanics. The mathematics she uses may be related to a completely different explanation of the bee dance. This is the universality of mathematics. To venture into quantum mechanics may be a distraction.

Shipman isn’t the first scientist to go out on a limb trying to link biology to quantum mechanics. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University has postulated that nerve cells have incredibly tiny tubes that serve as quantum mechanical detectors, and other physicists have expressed similar ideas, but they are by no means widely accepted.

It is risky for a young scientist to take on a radical theory. Championing an unproved or unpopular idea is a good way to put your academic career on permanent hold. My thesis adviser was worried, too, says Shipman. He was happy to know that I am beginning collaborations with biologists.

However, Shipman is too excited about the ideas to care about the risk. To make discoveries that cross disciplines, someone has to start. I know there is always resistance to new ideas, especially if you are approaching the problem from a different perspective. Sometimes theory comes before discovery and points the way toward the right questions to ask. I hope this research stimulates other researchers’ imaginations.