Moors law - alternative history from the Free Plotware Foundation

what if Islam had invented computers (not a crazy idea given they did zero:)

We could have fundamentalist wars (jihads) about bigendian (Sunni) and littlendian (Shia)? would we have search engines, inshallah? or enlightenment engines?

This would make a neat SF novel I think (although one might have to be a bit careful:)

The wisdom of dead crowds

bill thompson just wrote a nice article on eternity on the web, and namechecked a talk by steven johnson about the superb book, Ghost Map, which relates the history of Snow and Whitehead and their seminal comprehension of the cholera epidemic and its progress through voronoi diagrams of people's from houses with and without victims, walking distance from infected and uninfected water pumps. Johnson coined/modified the term
"the wisdom of dead crowds"

of course, being pedantic, I'd point out that the good doctor and reverend were smarter than that - they used both the living AND the dead to do the maps thus making this one of the most elegant pieces of scientific research I have ever read of.

I hate this song

but I like the sentiment

I fought the internet law and the internet won...

web 2.0 ungovernance was what i spent monday doing - then I hopped on an easyjet hop to Nice to review Eurecom activities in researching the future (i.e. the law and the reality in one day:-) Interestingly enough a lot of the folks at the law thing seems to understand that reality is increasingly unreal...

to find out more,
read or listen here

internet of food - making it real - not just alice in wonderland:)

so imagine we have
1/ the semantic web
2/ edible RFID
3/ a complete food ontology

we should then be able to build an internet of food - as you eat something a search engine or rss feed or twitter will say, ah now, to go with that you really need
such-and-such a smoothie, or i wouldnt have anything else than sorbet for 6 hours
or ... ....

the semantic food web, embedded in reality!

This has to be true....

web -2.0 ?

back to telnet-like-it-is!!

what if...

the earth is just a library for aliens, and humans are just books they borrow to read

what would that do for your blue-eyed soul, mr death?

information leakage in the 21st century internet

one of today's big problems is information leakage - it is all around us - it leads to loss of privacy, identity, safety and many other rights and privileges. the big problem is unplugged Ethernet cables - every unplugged Ethernet cable can lead to 100 million bits per second of data being sprayed out willy nilly all over the shop. Indeed, an unplugged cable represents two sources of leakage - the cable and the empty socket.

one of the principal causes of cable unplugging is wireless Ethernet - people think that 11Mbps without being tethered is so much better than 100Mbps of indentured slavery. However, wireless Ethernet leads to another 11Mbps of leakage even if someone is receiving your bits. I blame data networking experts - if they'd listened to the telephone, they'd have realized that circuits are so much more secure, because everything goes around and then comes around, in a circuit - no leakage.

Clearly, one can see why there is so much misinformation and noise in the world - the immense growth in the outernet (leakage from the Internet) has completely overtaken the actual intentional transmission of meaningful information.

So that now, we are swamped with letters and phonecalls and blogs, just like this one.

humans are just gating functions controling flow between...

I sit here staring at my laptop screen and occasionally typing - on the right of the screen is a power cable (electrons in) and on the right is an ethernet cable (electrons out).


All I do is occasionally allow some electrons in on one side, to cause some to go out on the other, depending on what the screen says and what my state is.

or thats what it might look like to some people - of course, the reverse is also true...

intensional networking....new idea?

so we have a LOT of examples of people doing stuff on the net (whether fixed or mobile, web or games) - could we not codify the patterns of use and then just optimize the hell out of the common cases - a bit like robot car painters (which are basically playbacks of tapes of humans) -

in the mobile case, for example, if you see someone's journey is the same as one of a small set of previous journey's by themself or other people, then all the congestion control, routing, handovers and radio signal stuff could just be replayed from those journeys in all the routers and switches and hosts...

mapreduce on the protocol stack...with cache prewarming:)

meanwhile, I was wondering if one could do IP over chattering teeth (i.e. people blue with cold, signalling IP packets by clicks) - blueteeth?

why do americans write to me with a return address without USA?

indeed, why do US university and business headed notepaper not include +1 on phone/fax or USA at the end of addresses? is this arrogance or stupidity, or just that they treat these channels (like many treat email) as write-only?

compareyourparents.com

new social network idea for kids - forget bebo; forget upyourstreet; forget freindsreunited; this is for kids to find out whether they ar e being shortchanged in the chores/pocketmoney stakes compared with their peers - fully anonymous, but culture/location are all taken into account - i think this'd be a must have for all 10 year olds:)

One Laptop Per Soul, proposal

we propose that there should be one laptop per soul - persons not carrying a laptop
shall be deemed to have no soul, and therefore can be terminated at anytime.

personas with more than one laptop may operate as terminators

persons termianting persons with laptops will have there laptops shutdown, and maybe subject to
a kill -9 at any time.

persons with non-sugar GUI laptops will be sent to bootcamp to learn better ways.

persons with laptops running any variant of Mac OSX or Windows shall be subject to
15 years kernel hacking in Siberia.

[* any similarity to an idea by Philip K. Dick, the UnPersons, is entirely intentional]

social net/recommendations, and turning tests

here's an idea

a turing test (like a capcha) should be based on whether someone can recognize a joke that a particular other person would find funny

oldcastle....in southwest crete - well networked...

i've been going to various parts of greece since 1967 - most recently, though, a frequenter of crete - way back when, we had a number of network projects and the Institute of Computer Science in the University of Crete (Heraklion and Chania but also a lab called Forth - chap called Stelios) as they had a technical clue - this shows up today as internet access on Crete is extremely good and seems to survive even power outages (the commercial ISP they started is forthnet:) - coz of this, people find time to have web sites and blogs about all sorts of news and views
and foods in a fave summer spot we are heading for in just 1 week - only worry this year is being blown away by the
current reported high winds - on the other hand, maybe we can go to some different drinking, swimming, walking and eating (not necessarily in that order) places because of this...

pointless networks

so i just upgraded my mac and now I have a bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard on my desk - great - 2 less wires:-)

but then I have to reboot the mac whenever the batteries go flat and i replace them, coz it can't auto-rediscover the devices:(

so the uni just upagraded the entire phone net to cisco VOIP kit - and now instead of 1 wire on my desk fro mthe phone, I have 3 wires - what is worse is the phone is now inline in the ethernet between my mac and the department's switch, which means if it fails, my net access breaks.
what is worse still is I cannot "login" to the phone and upload/download my address book (or synch the address book between my cell phone, my email and the voip phone.

progress? I think not.

reasoning about intentions, in communications protocols

so we've seen a lot of work on trading packet headers for protocol state. indeed, we've also seen predictive state (for compression or estimating retransmit timers etc) based on past data.

and in mobile systems, we have seen work on predicting mobility based on past location or proximity or even mobility patterns of a set of nodes (related or otherwise by organisation or by transportation/geography)

but what about the next level, intention? nodes can publish their intentions easily (say in a tuple space or even in the mobile tracking service) - hence a car or phone with GPS/satnav, can publish its intended route - this means we can do not only geo-routing, but we could pre-plan handovers, retransmit timers and even radio power.

it would be interesting to generalise the idea of intention-based communication over other domains too -

webcam, webmike, and webprivacy?

so dominic and i were shoooting the breeze in burham overy staith, and
thoght to ask why are there so many webcams but almost no webmikes?
why do people regard being seen as less of an invasion of privacy than being
over (or under) heard?

eh?

gene pool diversity and stuff of all kinds

so cycling into the computer lab today i noticed that there are
no two bikes the same in the cycle rack outside. this is remarkable. indeed, I noticed in gatwick airport last week that (aside from little old couples of american tourists traveling around) there were no two bags the same on the whole carousel.
then I relaized that on 5th avenue last week in NYC there were no two tourists with the same camera!

And yet I notice in the conference that almost all the laptops were from a gene pool of 3 (macbooks, ibm thinkpads, and dells).

then thinking back a couple of weeks, i recall that there were no two tents the same in glastonbury.

why is that, peg, I pray? what makes laptops special??? eh?

his facebook fell on an eyewateringphone

so today I notice "11 of my friends have added the face book applcation to their iphones"

amazing - so 11 people i have as "friends" on faceboo kobviously just bought iphone 2s and there's a sucker born ever hour:)

cool