Inventing the Future:
Inventing the Future: learning the system

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Dear Diary,

I’m off to Japan Tuesday for the big conference. Better take a snapshot of what I’ve been doing, because I expect my world to change by the time I get back. My first six weeks on this radical Croquet project were spent with very general learning of what’s what. Drinking knowledge from a firehose. For the next six we’ve been prototyping some of the features from conference papers written by my boss, Julian, and his counterpart at U. Minnesota. We’re going to demo these at the conference, and we go on right after Alan Kay’s keynote address. Yikes. Good thing Julian gives great demos! I imagine the conference organizers know that and put him in that slot accordingly. (Cast of characters here).

[details below the fold]

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Tales of the Sausage Factory: Will the Last Powell Out Please Turn Off the Lights?

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Michael Powell has announced his resignation as Chair of the FCC. Hardcore libertarian fiscal conservatives — such as the Wall St. J. and the CATO Institute — mourn his departure. By contrast, most public interest folks celebrate and condemn his legacies. Industry people, always wary of burning any bridges, give carefully guarded statements. And, of course, everyone speculates on who will be next chair.

As for my views? See below of course!

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Tales of the Sausage Factory: ALERT! NEBRASKA PROPOSES TOTAL BAN ON MUNI SYSTEMS

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The incumbents go for speed over finese in this latest round. LB 157, just introduced in the NE legislature, proposes a flat out ban on municipal systems. Critically, this has been designated “emergency legislation” so that it can move through the legislature swiftly and with minimal debate. Apparently, the idea that citizens might have a say in their own governance is an “emergency” in Nebraska — at least if you are a legislator who is also a wholly owned subsidiary of the Telco and Cable lobby.

Here’s hoping the people of Nebraska find out what’s going on soon enough to act!

stay tuned . . . .

Neutrino:
Newsflash: Titan sounds like old Atari 2600 games

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Being somewhat of a space nerd, I’ve been following the progress of the Huygens probe mission for the last few days (besides, watching space press conferences streaming via the web is more fun than working, even if they are largely in French and German).

One of the instruments on the Huygens was essentially a microphone, and in addition to the pictures that look like they were taken with a first generation Logitech webcam, the ESA have released MP3s of sounds recorded through the microphone. I was anxious to hear what another planet sounded like… boy was I shocked to learn it sounded a lot like the bleeps and hisses that passed for sound in the old Atari 2600 game console from the 70’s and 80’s.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Feynman Nine

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In my technoparanoid thriller Acts of The Apostles (which you can download for free by clicking on the left), two characters named Dieter Steffen and Pavel Isaacs develop a nanomachine for rearranging human DNA. There are implications for Gulf War Syndrome, and hints of a plot to lure the Americans back to Iraq for a second war, where they’ll be beaten. (Acts was published in 1999). They call the machine Feynman Nine.

Recently sometime-Wetmachiner Ron sent me these links:

Feynman Nine becoming reality, and and one of the leading bioinformatics molecular biology researchers around is indeed named Pavel in real life. He’s working on algorithms for rearranging genomes.

At some point in the future I’m gonna compile a compendium of all the stuff I made up for that book that has since happened.

Or else I’ll get Ron to do it — he’s been sending me “Acts of the Apostles technology sitings” for years.

Inventing the Future:
Inventing the Future: players

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So, you join a university team that is in the middle of a project that is throwing away the models of how computer programs and interfaces work and starting again from scratch. Where do you begin?

There’s a nice outside review of the scope and implications of the Croquet project in
this person’s blog.

This is deep stuff — too deep for me to fully grasp in my first two months. So I started by sorting out the people and their projects.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
An obstacle to human progress

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So I decided to ego surf the google usenet archives the other day and was kind of taken aback to see that the first entry for “John Sundman” was this little nugget from comp.ai.philosophy:

John Sundman

People like “John Sundman” are obstacles to the progress of human knowledge and

deserve to be put out of their misery

It was a comment I hadn’t seen before in response to this story I wrote for Salon about artifical intelligence, or more precisely, about how certain AI types could stand to, y’know, lighten up a little! (Why, the nerve of me!). God, seeing that comment cracked me up, I must thay.

I was tempted to try to make some kind of extrapolation from that comment to Godwin’s Law, but I’m somehow not really all that motivated. So in closing I guess it’s only fair that I should remind you that you’ve just wasted half a minute of your life with an obstacle to human progress. Now, I want you to go off and think about that before you make any more foolish mistakes today.

Neutrino:
Home made high-altitude UAV

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One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.

Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.

A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Tales of the Sausage Factory: “Return of the Telco Legislation” Now Playing in Indiana

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Hardly has the new year begun when new legislation has been introduced to squash local municipal systems. This time in Indiana. Like any good nemesis, the incumbent telcos and cable cos have learned from the Pennsylvania fight and have “improved” this bill to include more noxious features and to try to hide them better. But fear not, gentle reader, all such machinations shall be revealed below.

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Inventing the Future:
Inventing the Future: Jasmine release

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Croquet is still being designed. Personally, I’d like to see something useable this summer, but that remains to be seen.

There is a “developer’s version” available now, called Jasmine, but there’s some confusion as to what Jasmine is in relation to the real thing. I’m going to try to straighten that out here.

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