My Thoughts Exactly:
Grey goo, coming soon to a planet near you!

Grey goo is what happens when little machines convert everything-there-is into manifold copies of themselves.

Now the nice scientists in England — All-the-England-there-is — are hastening the day!

Well, good show old chap, I must say! Just make sure that they’re British self-replicators and once again the sun shall never set (on the British Empire, &c &c, ).

My Thoughts Exactly:
Transition States

I went to the theatre last night. At the Vineyard Playhouse, Dr. Yukevich did three short dramatic readings — one story by Joyce, one by Poe and one by his own self. This last was a Monty Pythony tale, and the good doctor, whose regular job is emergency room medicine, proved to be something of a John Cleese. The last time I had seen him it was 11:30 PM at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and he was treating my younger daughter for what turned out to be whooping cough.

I’ve been to the playhouse several times over the last year or so (ever since I got ‘volunteered’ to be an usher). I never want to go but always end up enjoying it, and of course ushers get in for free.

Anyway it got me to thinking. About how a story on the printed page is and is not the same thing as the identical story when acted out by a man in a costume. The words are the same, but what was a story has now become a play. It’s the same thing but it isn’t. Similarly, consider in what ways sheet music is the same as the music performed. You see where this is going. . . unless one snaps out of it, one is going to spend the next N hours lost in idle ontological daydreaming.

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Inventing the Future:
welcome Joshua!

<%image(20050317-josh-gimped.jpg|400|400|Josh)%>We are excited to have a new developer joining us on Croquet at U.Wisconsin. Joshua Gargus is moving to Madison all the way from Atlanta, which is quite a big step for such a young man. And he and has wife had just bought a house in Georgia! Both my boss and I have moved our families cross-country for new jobs, including a period where our wives had stayed at the old house, and we know it’s not easy.

Joshua has already clearly dedicated his work to highly interactive applications on the cutting edge of technology. A haptic controller that lets you physically mold “digital clay,” including the ability to pull the molded surface out as well as merely pushing it in. (Think about it.) A sketchbook that recognizes individual strokes (not bitmaps) on a timeline for playback, annotation, and hardware rendering in various styles. Much of his work has been in Squeak, done at the leading centers for Squeak development. (Croquet is built on top of Squeak.)

I’ve looked at some of Joshua’s code, and I’m excited that we’re getting such a talented developer. Coming up: what we’ll both be working on…

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
A Big Win in TX, But It's Just Round One

SaveMuniWireles.org, a group opposed to the anti-muni bill in TX, reports that the anti-muni provisions of the legislature’s gift package to SBC (the local baby Bell) has been stripped. But hang on to your seats folks, because it goes to the floor next week and SBC is fighting hard.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Crass Commercial Anouncement

Crass Commercial Announcement

The bill for Wetmachine’s hosting is coming due pretty soon. Sure would be nice to sell a few books to help pay the freight! Why not take this opportunity to buy one!

The wonderfulness of same is attested to not only by me, but by the following reputable(!?!?) sources:

Acts of the Apostles:

Salon

Slashdot

Kuro5hin

Geek.com

SFSite

BioInformatics.org

Newstrolls

and many more about which Google can inform you.

Cheap Complex Devices:

Slashdot

Kuro5hin

And Google. . .

Don’t forget that you can try before you buy. The complete sources of both books are available for free download — gust glance to the left side, under “read my books” and follow the links. The all important “buy my books” section is just below that.

Wetmachine will resume its regularly scheduled programming as soon as Harold or Gary or Peg or Howard or Bremser gets around to posting something to push this story down the page.

Inventing the Future:
Inventing the Future: connectivity and freedom

My dear friend John, whose generosity and interests drive this site, has said something in comment to this entry, which I just have to call him on:

“The more everything ties together the more we are open for invasion. But the Paris Hiltons of the world seem to embrace the great borgification, the assimilation into the overmind, in which notions such as autonomy and privacy are not so much quaint as incomprehensible.”

Whoa, there buddy! You’re going to have to explain why tying stuff together makes it more open to invasion. Ever try to invade a strawberry thicket? There’s good design and bad design (with respect to various desirable or undesirable effects), but I see no reason that a good interconnected design is any more pervious then a bunch of isolated stuff. In fact, in my admittedly limited understanding of military and tech. security history, the concepts of “defense in depth” and “divide and conquer” suggest to me that interconnected stuff (if done right) may be inherently safer.

Besides, I’m touchy-feely enough that I just plain like the idea of interconnectedness (done right) being not only safer, but freer and more open and enabling, not more oppressive. Croquet architect David Smith just attended the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid. They have produced a document that begins to articulate how I happen to feel. It is called The Infrastructure of Democracy.

I had a conversation with someone at the University here about architecting Croquet – or a class of Croquet applications – so that the infrastructure can be centrally controlled. By the University, by a consortium of universities or what have you. “This is wrong,” I thought. If you design it so that the whole thing – the very infrastructure — can be controlled by you, then it will be controlled, but not by you. Either Croquet will be a success or it won’t, and if it is a success, then the Elephant in the Hallway, Microsoft, will come along and control their version. Or some government, or terrorists, or whatever bad guys haunt your anxiety closet.

I’ve recently learned from some folks in the tech security community that security is weakened when you rely on prohibiting that which you cannot prevent. Systems fail, so design your system to fail gracefully. Connectivity is abused, so design your systems to respond to it. Openness and interconnectivity are powerful tools for dealing with the attacks we cannot prevent.

My Thoughts Exactly:
On teh internets

I guess they really do know if you’re a dog.

Bringing to mind (per usual) the quavering voice of David Crosby’s over-the-top histrionic paranoid manifesto Almost Cut My Hair: “It serves to increase my paranoia, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a PO-LEASE car!”

However, it would have made me feel worse had this been discovered when I thought of myself as human. Now that I know I’m a robot, somehow it’s easier to take.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Quick Take on FCC 3650-3700

The FCC decided the 3650-3700 Order today. You can find a link on the FCC Home page.

As is customary, the Order is not yet released, so we have only the press release to go on.

My first take is below. I know a lot of people are going to be upset that it requires licensing, but it is not a “licensed” regime anymore than a truly “unlicensed” regime. We need to keep an open mind and wait for the actual order to come out.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
The Meme meme

“There’s no such thing as a meme. Pass it on.”

I don’t know when I first encountered the word “meme”; I suspect it was sometime around 1997. In any event I disliked it enough to lampoon it in a little thing called “Notes on the Source Code”, which I wrote during one frenzied all-nighter in the spring of 1998 (“notes” later morphed into the astonishing hallucination known as Cheap Complex Devices, the most brilliant book I ever wrote. But I digress.)

Suddenly “meme” was everywhere. It was like fractal redux, ten years later.

I didn’t like “meme” because I thought it added nothing to the perfectly serviceable word “idea” and was just a lot of newfangled pseudo pscientific poppycock. I’ve changed my mind since then, even to the extent that I see much human activity as the mere playing out of memes in meat substrate.

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