The bb asked kids to come up with newsworthy gadgets which to receive stories via - my idea is to have a bunch of people re-enact the news via a real=time, generated screen play - the remote news feed will give them the script and stage directions via smart phones (internet audio for the hard of thinking, and pictures and so on for the less smart ) and the group of kids will then interpret the news in their own local physical way - e.g. they will show and tell how the queen greets the king of saudi, and how the suicide bomber in iraq was funded. they can replay with graphic detail the effect of the failed negotiations about sudan, and the treachery of the janjaweed, whilst showing the imact news has on young people that is hidden when we merely let them see it on TV in between Blue Peter and the Simpsons, and in between walking home from school scared of somali gangs in north london, to play Halo 3 on their Xboxes.
Now that would be an interesting device and experience.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
file sharing versus piracy
there seems to be some serious confusion in the UK government, and I think the ISPA shoudl http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7059881.stmadvise them better - in a recent quote (and it may be a misquote) on the bbc, a
spokesperson said that they dont want to come down on 14 year olds file sharing ,but they do want to stop people making money out of piracy. So one of the glaring errors in this is that people who are doing a lot of UPLOADING from P2P systems are NOT MAKING money - if they were it would be easy to prosecute them as there would be evidence of this from a payment system (bankaccounts receipts etc) and often they'd probably also not be paying tax (e.g. VAT etc) and could also be done for that - the problem is that frequent uploaders are just downloaders with LOADS of uplink capacity (e.g. students) and often have no money.
If they had a means to do DRM and Payment, then they would also have a means to make LOADS OF MONEY like the record companies, because if someone had a cool way to do online music distribution for profit and not just fun, they'd LICENSE the technology to official record companies to replace the RUBBISH DRM currently around.
Fact is there isnt a decent system, so the ONLY reason for a government to clamp down is to
a) protect unreasonable profits from music business (which is dying)
and
b) delay people working on solving this lack of a decent technology which protects
only Big Record Companies, and not indies or artists, and doesn't actually protect consumers or large numbers of artists or create a platform for innovation.
If the government wants to get in on the loop on piracy, follow the money is sufficient - you don't need special laws. they only serve to delay a better world.
You heard it hear last.
spokesperson said that they dont want to come down on 14 year olds file sharing ,but they do want to stop people making money out of piracy. So one of the glaring errors in this is that people who are doing a lot of UPLOADING from P2P systems are NOT MAKING money - if they were it would be easy to prosecute them as there would be evidence of this from a payment system (bankaccounts receipts etc) and often they'd probably also not be paying tax (e.g. VAT etc) and could also be done for that - the problem is that frequent uploaders are just downloaders with LOADS of uplink capacity (e.g. students) and often have no money.
If they had a means to do DRM and Payment, then they would also have a means to make LOADS OF MONEY like the record companies, because if someone had a cool way to do online music distribution for profit and not just fun, they'd LICENSE the technology to official record companies to replace the RUBBISH DRM currently around.
Fact is there isnt a decent system, so the ONLY reason for a government to clamp down is to
a) protect unreasonable profits from music business (which is dying)
and
b) delay people working on solving this lack of a decent technology which protects
only Big Record Companies, and not indies or artists, and doesn't actually protect consumers or large numbers of artists or create a platform for innovation.
If the government wants to get in on the loop on piracy, follow the money is sufficient - you don't need special laws. they only serve to delay a better world.
You heard it hear last.
Monday, October 22, 2007
more diamond age wizradry
there's a nice piece in the Diamond Age (neal stephonson) about aerial nanotech defensive systems - one throwaway remark about them is that the attacks they have to withstand are from more nanotech distributed nodes, and so any system cannot operate an "impermeable shield" (shades of star wars) but instead must "hack the mean free path"
and its left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what this means (basically, the defensive net has to be long enough that for a set of random walks (c.f. Einstein: Brownian motion) the probability of any attacking node making it through the defensive nodes (i.e. the number of variances of the path length) is vanishingly small - like
Hiro Protagonists "usual car chase" in Snow Crash, this is a masterpiece of minimalism...
another interesting point is the throwaway remark about forensic geeks carrying cards to help identify which "species" of cookie cutter has been used on a victim, by looking at the arcs of intersection of the shockwave (circular, or part of solid angle intersecting a sphere?) with the skin, leaving a set of curves - given the shockwave does most its damage at a fixed distance from the two "epicenters", this means the radius of curvature of the intersection with skin is fixed, so you can tell the initial velocity (assuming its largely mass independent - I suppose the slowdown is dependent mainly on the size of cookie cutter fragments and viscosity of humans, rather than the interital mass:)
doesn't really bear close examination near breakfast:)
and its left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what this means (basically, the defensive net has to be long enough that for a set of random walks (c.f. Einstein: Brownian motion) the probability of any attacking node making it through the defensive nodes (i.e. the number of variances of the path length) is vanishingly small - like
Hiro Protagonists "usual car chase" in Snow Crash, this is a masterpiece of minimalism...
another interesting point is the throwaway remark about forensic geeks carrying cards to help identify which "species" of cookie cutter has been used on a victim, by looking at the arcs of intersection of the shockwave (circular, or part of solid angle intersecting a sphere?) with the skin, leaving a set of curves - given the shockwave does most its damage at a fixed distance from the two "epicenters", this means the radius of curvature of the intersection with skin is fixed, so you can tell the initial velocity (assuming its largely mass independent - I suppose the slowdown is dependent mainly on the size of cookie cutter fragments and viscosity of humans, rather than the interital mass:)
doesn't really bear close examination near breakfast:)
Monday, October 15, 2007
london dungeon is genuinely quite scary!
not that it has much to do with the internet...but I thought it was rather fine - the useof mix of son et lumiere/live actor, and smelly "underneath the arches" locale was very good - the actors were very nice to kids and did the whole mockney/interaction thing very well - i guess the nearest link/seguay would be conspiracy theory - there were a lot of those in the stories they tell, and, of course, we all know that the Internet was only put in place to support consipracy theorists:)
anyhow, the dungeon is a fine place, and almst all politicians should be sent there.
anyhow, the dungeon is a fine place, and almst all politicians should be sent there.
Monday, October 08, 2007
riaa outrage...hm - so why do music biz behave the way they do?
It is often said that one should be quicker to suspect human stupidity for certain classes of corporate and government behaviour, than conspiracy - so right now, lotsa people expressed amazement at the fine levied a poor file sharer in the USA, but then the backlash starts - then there's the backlash, then there's the not quite so simple meta-para-backlash...
Andrew Orlowski writes that instead of whinging, we should get behind proposals (of which he mentions quite a few very plausible looking ones) to change the face of the music business = the claim is that, if only they could see, they would make more money "our way" (cue Frank Sinatra singing that music).
Well, while the proposals sound good, I'd assert that if they did work out right, several people would have just done it (oops, did i just infringe some footwear sweatshop's trademark?:=)
So given the power of shareholders, not A&R men, is what determines the behaviour of big business mostly, one has to ask "why havnt they done it yet?".
I don't have an answer (and I've spent a large part of the last 5 years looking at disruptive technologies and how they alter business, so I am qualified, but stumped!
I guess just maybe, just maybe this once (cue Liza Milleni Cabaret toon)
it is a conspiracy after all!!!
So here's another thought - I think this is a classic tipping-point type situation - shareholders have their eye on the bottom ine each year, but only have a horizon of 1 year - disruptive technologies (think IP breaking PSTN, or VOIP on WiFi breaking cellular) like mp3 on the net instead of CDs in the shops, grow from small beginnings - the growth is mirrowed by a fall in sales of CDs but until the scale of the business falls below a certain point, it is worth the incumbent industry (legacy technology)_ spending more and more on defending itself against the newcomer - at some point, the cost of defense exceed the revenue, and Madonna resigns and Radiohead say they will only charge people what they want to pay, and people start to ship albums for free on myspace etc etc
so the point when this happens can be in less than 1 year, and the only outcome can be bancruptxcty for the traditional business - repalcement (e.g. subscription or
listen for free but you have to see these **** adverts*** o nthe web page when you download (e.g. facebook and google's revenue models) work fine - but only when the old guys DIE is this gonna stop being fought tooth and nail. but they will die very sudddenly (other exampls I give above like VOIP on wifi or on IP on 3G, have already happened).
Tip, tip, tip: don;t by shares in EMI, don't buy shares in people making a noise at BPI or RIAA, they are the people about to lose big time: prediction: most music will be subscription or paid by adverts and other stuff (as in live gigs making money on T-shirts) by 2010. no, 2009. no wait, 2007.
Andrew Orlowski writes that instead of whinging, we should get behind proposals (of which he mentions quite a few very plausible looking ones) to change the face of the music business = the claim is that, if only they could see, they would make more money "our way" (cue Frank Sinatra singing that music).
Well, while the proposals sound good, I'd assert that if they did work out right, several people would have just done it (oops, did i just infringe some footwear sweatshop's trademark?:=)
So given the power of shareholders, not A&R men, is what determines the behaviour of big business mostly, one has to ask "why havnt they done it yet?".
I don't have an answer (and I've spent a large part of the last 5 years looking at disruptive technologies and how they alter business, so I am qualified, but stumped!
I guess just maybe, just maybe this once (cue Liza Milleni Cabaret toon)
it is a conspiracy after all!!!
So here's another thought - I think this is a classic tipping-point type situation - shareholders have their eye on the bottom ine each year, but only have a horizon of 1 year - disruptive technologies (think IP breaking PSTN, or VOIP on WiFi breaking cellular) like mp3 on the net instead of CDs in the shops, grow from small beginnings - the growth is mirrowed by a fall in sales of CDs but until the scale of the business falls below a certain point, it is worth the incumbent industry (legacy technology)_ spending more and more on defending itself against the newcomer - at some point, the cost of defense exceed the revenue, and Madonna resigns and Radiohead say they will only charge people what they want to pay, and people start to ship albums for free on myspace etc etc
so the point when this happens can be in less than 1 year, and the only outcome can be bancruptxcty for the traditional business - repalcement (e.g. subscription or
listen for free but you have to see these **** adverts*** o nthe web page when you download (e.g. facebook and google's revenue models) work fine - but only when the old guys DIE is this gonna stop being fought tooth and nail. but they will die very sudddenly (other exampls I give above like VOIP on wifi or on IP on 3G, have already happened).
Tip, tip, tip: don;t by shares in EMI, don't buy shares in people making a noise at BPI or RIAA, they are the people about to lose big time: prediction: most music will be subscription or paid by adverts and other stuff (as in live gigs making money on T-shirts) by 2010. no, 2009. no wait, 2007.
Friday, October 05, 2007
de-face book application idea
here's an idea for anonymity in facebook - for why, see
this spoof ad or cory doctorow's article on googlevil...
So the defacebook ad is basically a Chaum Mix plus Onion Routing applied to the social net - what you do is for each person running the application:
a) create a whole bunch of fake people
b) create a set of communities by mixing interests, groups, affiliations from other people running the application, with a deliberste plicy of skewing the statisitcs away from the small worlds in the "true" data (Max entropy is your friend, just like Max Headroom used to me)
c) build an overlay of links with obfuscation/crypto hops, to keep the "real" relationships (note average "path" will be way longer but thats ok:) its not internet time we are working on here) - the beauty of this is that facebook encouragem nay, even PAY you to write apps!
and bob is no longer your uncle - in fact, he has plausible deniability that he ever met your aunt.
Ho ho!
this spoof ad or cory doctorow's article on googlevil...
So the defacebook ad is basically a Chaum Mix plus Onion Routing applied to the social net - what you do is for each person running the application:
a) create a whole bunch of fake people
b) create a set of communities by mixing interests, groups, affiliations from other people running the application, with a deliberste plicy of skewing the statisitcs away from the small worlds in the "true" data (Max entropy is your friend, just like Max Headroom used to me)
c) build an overlay of links with obfuscation/crypto hops, to keep the "real" relationships (note average "path" will be way longer but thats ok:) its not internet time we are working on here) - the beauty of this is that facebook encouragem nay, even PAY you to write apps!
and bob is no longer your uncle - in fact, he has plausible deniability that he ever met your aunt.
Ho ho!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
INRIA PhD on Securing Coordinate Systems...
Yesterday I attended Dali's defence of a very nice thesis on securing internet coordinate systems (viz, ACM SIGCOMM 2007 paper he has on it for a good summary:-).
Meanwhile, I had some very nice food, firstly in a place in Antibes called (I think) Brulot, where I had a great Soupe de Poisson and a very nice moules farcie, and then in a place near Sophia called Le Bois Dore, where I had a really great salad (see photos) and an excellent pintardeau (argh, sp? - guinea fowl, in english)
One of the salads looked a bit like Dali's algorithm, see if you can guess which:)
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
poor excuse for online banking servie
Some pundits have explained the options for banksto avoid their service crashing under load and rightly point out that this can be done with dynamic provisioning, which is commercially available (e.g. via virtualised servers in data centers) but does take some money (which usually banks aren;t exactly short of ironically:)
I'd just point out that for all every hit the Northern Rock site took, the BBC must have taken 100 - ok so the BBC doesn't run a transaction service, but it does have a b**dy good response time - and it is a public service - so a Bank that can't be bothered to provision its online business properly deserves to lose. Frankly, even the guys selling Led Zeppelin tickets did better (and that IS a transaction service) logging 20M registrations in a day. Northern dodo doesn't haev 20M customers.
yrs, not impressed frankly. I suppose Egg and HSBC might suffer a bit if they were hit bigtime by a run, but I am guessing that (given egg especially, but also First Direct) prior experience, they might actually cope a bit better - my feeling is that in the 21st century, we have a right not only to demand money from our bank branch from our current account (sneject to suitable ID proof of course) but we ought also to be able to demand our moeny from any online bank's service to accounts with the same conditions (yes, i understand many of the northern doodad's customers had deposit accounts which don't give the same guarantees or response and thats fine as that is how stability and interest rates are meneat to operate).
I'd just point out that for all every hit the Northern Rock site took, the BBC must have taken 100 - ok so the BBC doesn't run a transaction service, but it does have a b**dy good response time - and it is a public service - so a Bank that can't be bothered to provision its online business properly deserves to lose. Frankly, even the guys selling Led Zeppelin tickets did better (and that IS a transaction service) logging 20M registrations in a day. Northern dodo doesn't haev 20M customers.
yrs, not impressed frankly. I suppose Egg and HSBC might suffer a bit if they were hit bigtime by a run, but I am guessing that (given egg especially, but also First Direct) prior experience, they might actually cope a bit better - my feeling is that in the 21st century, we have a right not only to demand money from our bank branch from our current account (sneject to suitable ID proof of course) but we ought also to be able to demand our moeny from any online bank's service to accounts with the same conditions (yes, i understand many of the northern doodad's customers had deposit accounts which don't give the same guarantees or response and thats fine as that is how stability and interest rates are meneat to operate).
Sunday, September 02, 2007
cones of intersecting sounds of silence
so we see people talking across a crowded room using cell phones or mikes - if we had phase array speaker and microphone system, one could have overlapping sets of people having conversations in the same physical volume!
that'd be cool!
that'd be cool!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
turning japanese, I think so
I think I'm turning japanese - visiting tokyo and kyoto for
sigcomm 2007 has been a wonderful experience. Starting with NTT labs, and hanging out in Shinjuku area of Tokyo, then moving to Kyoto to check out Ashai Dry (a bar as well as a beer), some amazing Eel dishes, a japanese beer garden with Geishas and an eclipse of the moon, and the temples at Nara (giant climb thru buddhas) and Kodaiji, with spooky Shakahuchi flute music and a fabulus garden. Doing Karaoke with mad PhD students from all around the world! really, generally, quite awesome - I know prefer Miso soup for breakfast and a bowl of Ramen last thing after dinner by the river!
In the OO session last night, I played (thanks to Kenjiro Cho, for loan of lovely silent clasical guitar) (and spoke) this tune and someone asked me to post the modified lyrics:
Apoligies to Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter:
AbM7 DbM7
Everytime
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
we submit to sigcomm
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
I die a little
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
Everytime we submit to sigcomm
DbM7 F#7
I wonder why a little
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
Why the gods above me
Ebm7 Ab7 DbM7
Who must be in the know
Dbm7 Cm7
Think so little of me
Bdim Bbm7 Eb7/9
but yet they allow your papers to go, in.
AbM7 DbM7
When it's near
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
There’s such an air
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
Of spring about it
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
I can hear a berkeley grad student somewhere
DbM7 F#7
Begin to sing about it
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
There’s no conference finer
Ebm7 Ab7
But how strange the change
DbM7 F#7
From scott shenker to paul francis
AbM7 Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7(b9) AbM7 DbM7
Everytime we go to sigcomm
( I transposed it up a semitone as Am is a whole lot easier than Abm :)
The T-Shirt was a reference to the brilliant "Blink" episode of Dr Who in the last series.
Mark Handley took some wonderful pictures of the
Kodai-Ji temple where the conference banquet event started later that evening! quite a few others
also took pix
sigcomm 2007 has been a wonderful experience. Starting with NTT labs, and hanging out in Shinjuku area of Tokyo, then moving to Kyoto to check out Ashai Dry (a bar as well as a beer), some amazing Eel dishes, a japanese beer garden with Geishas and an eclipse of the moon, and the temples at Nara (giant climb thru buddhas) and Kodaiji, with spooky Shakahuchi flute music and a fabulus garden. Doing Karaoke with mad PhD students from all around the world! really, generally, quite awesome - I know prefer Miso soup for breakfast and a bowl of Ramen last thing after dinner by the river!
In the OO session last night, I played (thanks to Kenjiro Cho, for loan of lovely silent clasical guitar) (and spoke) this tune and someone asked me to post the modified lyrics:
Apoligies to Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter:
AbM7 DbM7
Everytime
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
we submit to sigcomm
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
I die a little
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
Everytime we submit to sigcomm
DbM7 F#7
I wonder why a little
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
Why the gods above me
Ebm7 Ab7 DbM7
Who must be in the know
Dbm7 Cm7
Think so little of me
Bdim Bbm7 Eb7/9
but yet they allow your papers to go, in.
AbM7 DbM7
When it's near
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
There’s such an air
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
Of spring about it
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
I can hear a berkeley grad student somewhere
DbM7 F#7
Begin to sing about it
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
There’s no conference finer
Ebm7 Ab7
But how strange the change
DbM7 F#7
From scott shenker to paul francis
AbM7 Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7(b9) AbM7 DbM7
Everytime we go to sigcomm
( I transposed it up a semitone as Am is a whole lot easier than Abm :)
The T-Shirt was a reference to the brilliant "Blink" episode of Dr Who in the last series.
Mark Handley took some wonderful pictures of the
Kodai-Ji temple where the conference banquet event started later that evening! quite a few others
also took pix
Friday, August 24, 2007
ninja cats and quantum computing
i just heard the best explanation so far for how quantum computing will work - its like ninja cats in manga making clones of themselves - if you've seen the movie Next, with Nicholas Cage, you'll get the idea
awsomeless!
awsomeless!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
vanishing cell phones: truly hands free (the walls have ears)
so why do we carry cell phones ? with iris recognition and fixed infrastructrue, the environment should be the phone - any device nearby that can pick up your voice, and has a speaker, should be enlisted as part of the phone net - we then just "speak into the air" and "listen to the voices"
it would look less loony than wearing those STUPID BLUETOOTH HEADSETs, and would be much cooler in terms of battery life:)
the walls have ears - even on a beach, this should work (suitable sub ocean woofers could modulate the remote speakers voice and generate the sound in the surf).
true ubicomp, like nature, will be made of 1 trillion weird hacks like this, just to get around the problems with recharging and pollution from nicads etc...
it would look less loony than wearing those STUPID BLUETOOTH HEADSETs, and would be much cooler in terms of battery life:)
the walls have ears - even on a beach, this should work (suitable sub ocean woofers could modulate the remote speakers voice and generate the sound in the surf).
true ubicomp, like nature, will be made of 1 trillion weird hacks like this, just to get around the problems with recharging and pollution from nicads etc...
Thursday, August 16, 2007
two internet ideas and a story
patrick is 9 - here are his internet ideas today:
1/ Internet Shower - you read your email while having a show - a laser projects a keyboard onto the shower water as it falls and projects a display too and detects your typing....very japanese, very cool, very keanu reeves (without the full length blacsk leather coat)
2/ the internet in a bag - get the very big bag and hold it over the internet for 5 hours, then quickly put a big plate on top to stop the web pagesfrom falling out, and voila -you have the internet, pret a porter...
3/ a story: when I was born, my writing was like I was clinging to a cliff top with a finger nail. then a finger, then later one hand, then finally to hands, and I pulled myself up to the top of the cliff and lay tyhere panting to see my pareents walking away. In the distance was shakespeare - he never fell off the cliff in the first place
patrick mckeever crowcroft, 15.8.2007
1/ Internet Shower - you read your email while having a show - a laser projects a keyboard onto the shower water as it falls and projects a display too and detects your typing....very japanese, very cool, very keanu reeves (without the full length blacsk leather coat)
2/ the internet in a bag - get the very big bag and hold it over the internet for 5 hours, then quickly put a big plate on top to stop the web pagesfrom falling out, and voila -you have the internet, pret a porter...
3/ a story: when I was born, my writing was like I was clinging to a cliff top with a finger nail. then a finger, then later one hand, then finally to hands, and I pulled myself up to the top of the cliff and lay tyhere panting to see my pareents walking away. In the distance was shakespeare - he never fell off the cliff in the first place
patrick mckeever crowcroft, 15.8.2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
look behind you!
The things in this blog entry are all behind you
-------------------------------------------------
Monday, July 30, 2007
I dont the best I can and now I want my blog back
Please mr google sir, can I have my blog back?
remember that awesome moment a while back when after a year of experimentally allowing the world to down load the ITU standards for free, there was this announcement on their website saying
"THE EXPERIMENT HAS FINISHED. NOW PLEASE RETURN ALL COPIES OF STANDARDS THAT YOU HAVE DOWNLOADED"
it was a moment that revealed the complete cognitive failure of the ITU to "get it" about the Internet.
Well, I've just had one of those moments myself. I have seen the light and I want my blog back here where I can change it not out there where you mr and ms google boss can
so what abaht it? like I can migrate my phoen (with number) to another telephone provider - i can even up and move my web site to another place, so lets say I want to have someone else run my blog but have all the links and alerts still work? why not
BLOG portability now - you know its fair
remember that awesome moment a while back when after a year of experimentally allowing the world to down load the ITU standards for free, there was this announcement on their website saying
"THE EXPERIMENT HAS FINISHED. NOW PLEASE RETURN ALL COPIES OF STANDARDS THAT YOU HAVE DOWNLOADED"
it was a moment that revealed the complete cognitive failure of the ITU to "get it" about the Internet.
Well, I've just had one of those moments myself. I have seen the light and I want my blog back here where I can change it not out there where you mr and ms google boss can
so what abaht it? like I can migrate my phoen (with number) to another telephone provider - i can even up and move my web site to another place, so lets say I want to have someone else run my blog but have all the links and alerts still work? why not
BLOG portability now - you know its fair
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
file sharing is communist, declares congress
http://news.com.com/Congress+P2P+networks+harm+national+security/2100-1029_3-6198585.html?tag=nefd.lede>p2p is unamerican and clearly must be suppressed, but the congressmen were dismayed to find that despite billions of dollars of subsidy to DARPA and BBN and Lockheed and so on, the Internet has no off button. The vice president has no clothes.
give away secrets? i dunno, perhaps they ought to pay us for inventing the web:-)
give away secrets? i dunno, perhaps they ought to pay us for inventing the web:-)
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
the internet of tings
so we now have a full fledged conference on
internet of stuff and i suppose there's probably on on the internet of nonsense too, but what abut the internet of tings - we had the Internet of Pings (planetlab) and the internet of nothings (well, ones and nothings), but what would the Internet of Tings consist of? or rather,
of what would the Internet of Tings consist?
a quick consultation with the OED and we find that a Ting is
. The sound emitted by a small bell, or other resonant body, as a thin glass vessel, as the result of a single stroke; a thinner or sharper sound than that expressed by TANG.
so then, the interne of tings would be somewhat musical - and could be accompanied by an internet of tangs, too.
next week, we'll take a look at the Internet of Mings.
internet of stuff and i suppose there's probably on on the internet of nonsense too, but what abut the internet of tings - we had the Internet of Pings (planetlab) and the internet of nothings (well, ones and nothings), but what would the Internet of Tings consist of? or rather,
of what would the Internet of Tings consist?
a quick consultation with the OED and we find that a Ting is
. The sound emitted by a small bell, or other resonant body, as a thin glass vessel, as the result of a single stroke; a thinner or sharper sound than that expressed by TANG.
so then, the interne of tings would be somewhat musical - and could be accompanied by an internet of tangs, too.
next week, we'll take a look at the Internet of Mings.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
RAND survey on self regulation for the internet
the RAND corporation, who have some claim to being the inventors of the internet (paul baran's report possibly predating al gore by some 30 odd years) are running a survey on internet self regulation which seems like a usefully tautologous thing for us to fill in:)
Saturday, July 14, 2007
complexity/diversity at multiple bio-scales
a lot of cosmology nowadays is about linking up between scale at quantum/particle, and galactic/cosmic, as well as very short and long time scales to explain the structure of the universe. this is where all the work on the standard model, and univifcation of the 4 forces etc is all coming into focus
meanwhile, i just read an interesting book on Life: An Introduction to Complex Systems Biology, and previously read Kaufmans's work on The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart A. Kauffman
so again, we see something similar , but not in the simplicity, as in the physical world, but in the complexity of biological systems - DNA appears to be a very crazy search engine, which finds literally millions of molecules/proteins to make us out of, and finds millions of different ways (species) to make out of these proteins - this is interesting as it implies that life is very easy to construct - it isn't as if DNA and natural selection is a subtle design - its a blunt instrument (although, admittedly, programmes are run for a very long time, and are very wasteful in terms of wrong outputs (things that end up dead and extinct), but it is also very succesful - i'd say somewhat surprisingly so....
yet another proof of the existence of 42?
meanwhile, i just read an interesting book on Life: An Introduction to Complex Systems Biology, and previously read Kaufmans's work on The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart A. Kauffman
so again, we see something similar , but not in the simplicity, as in the physical world, but in the complexity of biological systems - DNA appears to be a very crazy search engine, which finds literally millions of molecules/proteins to make us out of, and finds millions of different ways (species) to make out of these proteins - this is interesting as it implies that life is very easy to construct - it isn't as if DNA and natural selection is a subtle design - its a blunt instrument (although, admittedly, programmes are run for a very long time, and are very wasteful in terms of wrong outputs (things that end up dead and extinct), but it is also very succesful - i'd say somewhat surprisingly so....
yet another proof of the existence of 42?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
- jon crowcroft
- misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home