reflex

interesting discussion with david evans just now about
how you learn a reflex

started with me saying how hard I find it to make a pot of coffee correctly
until I've had a coffee

he then said how the physio people at addenbrooks had made much of the fact
that it is so hard to figure out how you "learn a reflex"

this bootstrapping problem is made all the weirder
when you ask people about "simple" things like
learning to ride a bike
learning to do vibrato on violin/guitar
learning to programme
add your experience here...

there's the skills/technique thing which is incremental and easy to see
then there's some transformative/phase shift somehow (dodgy bogo-science metaphor there) in the brain - would be wonderful to do functional MRI on someone
learning to stop falling off a bike
and see if this is so!

almost steampunk come true - making broken ipod useful via antiques

so i have an old ipod nano which has a broken stereo out head socket and
thought about throwing it away

but then i realize i also have a device in my car which is one of the 21st centuries most awesome hacks - it is so baroque as to be worthy of a song or something out of some
bruce sterling/william gibson/neal stephenson 10 page eulogy or even a threnody

which is to say i have one of those gizmos for 10 quid which
plugs into a cigarette lighter to charge, and then has an FM transmitter
and then you dock your pod-u-like into it
using the awesomely apple-uber-scart-like moron designed docking socket thing
and lo, your ipod tunes arrive on your car speakers
via your FM car radio
and electronics replenish the power in the i-pod
via the gadget for setting fire to cancer-stick

how weird is that?

turning broken ipods into useful sources of soothing sounds
by means of multiple obsolete tech!!!!

what's not to like?

I'm so Bored of the Future Internet

today I am going to BIS to talk about the Future Internet
this is Yet Another Initiative which is the
Future Internet Strategy Board of the UK.

The Internet has a great future behind it, of course. However,
my thesis is that the
Future Internet is about as relevant as
Anthropogenic Global Warming
It is not necessary to invoke all the hype and hysteria - it
is both necessary and sufficient to talk about
sustainable energy (c.f. David Mackay)
and
good technical communications research, develeopment, deployment and operations -
What we really don't need is yet more climatologists
(or ethnographers studying internet governance) - we do need some solid engineering
to address a number of problems the Internet has - but this is happening and wouldn't stop happening if the entire Future Internet flagship was kidnapped by aliens.

we don't need no government agency doing top down dictats about what to do when -
it won't work and it will be a massive waste of time, energy and other resources - i.e.
like AGW, it will be a load of hot air:)

my slides are linked off my home page in the usual way...

There are a number of deeper lessons from the Internet architecture which might prove useful in other domains, and in my talk I give examples of these (applying the Postel and End-to-end principles to transport, energy, government information/servies)

telco-mpare.the.research.com

{AT|B|D|F|I|T}telco-mpare-the-research
i.e. what are thre relative merits of
AT&T research
BT Research
Deutsche Telekom (t-labs)
France Telecom research (actually telecom paris tech:)
telecom italia
telefonica

ask me in a pub:)

did you know vint cerf is...

vint cerf...only 3 years older than Patti Smith

now reading Just Kids about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, who took that iconic pic for the cover of Horses....awesome - a true 20th century (and 21st) Rimbaud....

Jesuit 2.0

I'm trying to reason about religion

doh - time to acquire
jesuit 2.0
and see how it stacks up
against
islam 1.7

I don't know, but maybe it was the roses

the internet: the death of distance and the price is poverty

the internet is sposed to bring the death of distance

but on the internet, content is king
and content is zipfian

so popular content is, in all liklihood
from far away

yet content is about somethign real - a band, a play, a beach, a cause

yet if the band don't play near you, the play is in a foreign tongue, the beach is washed by tides from a different ocean, and the cause is not yours to wonder why
then it impoverishes you - it does not enrichen.

the internet is going to be the greatest cause of poverty since
the church burned people for translating and printing the bible

Free Plot Device - what if #2701?

what if
humans were the only creatures in the world
unable to timetravel,
and the fact is that
every other creature
on earth,
and in other worlds
can travel, freely, not just
like Billy Pilgrim,
unstuck in time,
or the time traveller's wife's husband
but just like you and I
can travel in space - forwards, back, up, down, left, right

so this is the answer to Fermi's paradox:- we havn't met the aliens
because we were always
too late
or
too early

wouldn't that be sad

why is government so slow...?

this is the age of the interweb, but government (and its cloud) move like a geriatric patient with arthritis - there don't seem to be any parties (or peope in their associated think tanks) who realize what the problem with having a time constant that is geological is when faced with novel problems like religios fundamentalism revivals, climate warning (or not), and a population suffering from post traumatic stress due to the pace of technology change (telephone to internet to web to myspace to facebook/buzz on an iphone; walk to horse, to car, to electric car; illiteracy to newspapers to books to ebooks; certain death to antibiotics to vaccination and immunisation to diet and lifestyle control; the church and the king to the aristos, to the middle classes to the working classes being educated; etc etc)

all the systems of government are still modelled as if there was no sigificant difference in any of these areas since before the industrial revolution (roughly).

its pathetic - and don't talk to be about socialism:)

The story that won't go away

so I think there's a new dynamic (social opinion dynamic) in the 21st century

basically, we will never get consensus ever again on anything - viral stories that are wrong will remain with us - there's a process at work where it starts up a gain
(even if to say - "ah, if htis story is false, how come it wont go away") - so even now we have the finding
about the MMR doctor that he was not only wrong but also unethical.

Nevermind - but the story will go around and around - lik viruses in the ecosstem, and software viruses in the Interweb, this one just wont die.

THe only thing we can do is to automate the process of objecting to it (just like we automate virus protection systems in computers) - we need an agency that detects such bogus stories (liek the board of jewish deputies, only more scientific) and have it issue an autogenerated article (slightly different each time to combat polymorphic lies)

Not only does the graph in the article by the BBC linked above show the CAUSE of measles by reduced MMR protectionin the population, they failed to show that the incidnece of autism increased before the introduction of MMR, and went on going up after the reduction in uptake in MMR, statistically confirming that MMR is
a) not a cause of autism, and
b) this doctor has caused unnecessary misery blindness and death by his thoughtless, careless and immoral behaviour.

new surreality TV show pitch

Goth Factor:- this is a competition like X factor, only people have to behave like dead rock starts but crossed with their seperated-at-birht character from Twighlight (or Near Dark:)

Think Glee meets Shaun of the Dead - you thought those were pork scratchings? :-)

the programme opening music will show the evolution of michael jackson over is lifetime, backwards, proving that he was in fact a vampire, but living in a reversed temporal frame of reference - the hints are there (not just obvious ones like Thriller, but subversive references to his were-rat sister in the themesong Ben)

The programme will have innocent x-factor (pop idol) type people up against actual zombie/vampire/were-guitarists, who, when they win, eat the losers.

I guarantee it will be huge.

tough on childen, tough on the causes of children - my predictions for 2010

In 2010, it will be far too late for children to stay up and disappoint their parents. From now on, children will have to stay in bed for the next 7990 years. This will not disappoint them. And it will give their parents a chance.

risk and complex systems

yesterday I was in the Judge Business School whch is the only place in Cambridge that everyone sounds preppy (or like they went to british public school) - there was this workshop on complex systems and catastrophes - not bad...the building reminds me
of the library in the film of Umberto Eco's

T h e N a m e o f t h e R o w s
h
e
N
a
m
e
o
f
t
h
e
c
o
l
u
m
n

Ionic, or ironic? I don't know.

Anyhow, I decided the difference between complicated and complex
was best expressed By Donald Rumsfeld -
complicated is
known unknowns
but
complex is
unknown unknowns

easy, right?

4D printer - Maxwell's Angels....

so we've all heard about 3D printers, and pretty naff they are too - and soon we'll have 3D fax machines (poor man's matter transporter)

but what about a 4D printer?

This would basically extrude reality - it could be a nascent universe in a box, with an output being a stream of space time continuum - the settings (God's Dials?) would be quite complicated....perhaps the implementation would entail use of Maxwell's Angels (a bit like his demons, only without sense-of-humour failure).

alien consciousness (machine intelligence or extraterrestrial)

so reading What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink
Everything
by John Brockman , Brian Eno (Introduction)
Amazon Reference
I was struck by the similarity of arguments about alien and artificial intelligence - how do we know something is conscious? how can we make something conscious? what is society but the combination of the theory of other and a model of self?

meanwhile, perhaps Drake's famous equation, promoted by Carl Sagan, and dismissed by some because of lack of detection of any
other is because once you reach singularity, you become
dark matter, and society is simply dark energy.

there's a theory for you to munch on.

sci fi game on google sky map

would be neat to play a sort of
plan your sci fi plot game using google skymap o na bunch of smart phones -

basic model would be to take plot of any classic space opera SF book or film, and tag the journeys in it (most space opera is basically an adventure trail, challenge, journey -) on the skymap visiting relevant planets or stars and see who can get it most right....

3 masters 3

so in my life i've been lucky to meet
3 masters of trinity college cambridge

interestingly (imho)
one was afraid of women
one was afraid of men
one was afraid of god
as far as i could tell
but i'm not telling who or which

horizon is getting weaker

not a good recent edition of horizon - here's an idea for a decent edition

get ben goldacre (or someone similar)
to do something on
what is medical science?

what constitutes evidence and what constitutes grounds for
accepting a theory (or rejecting it)
and what constitutes waffle -

could start with historical perspective - e.g.
John Snow et al...and give some
homeopathic and placebo lessons
and explain
statistical significance
and risk, properly....

remember, the stuff those folks did has contributed more to human happiness/quality of life than just about anything else except the invention of the electric guitar and the football.

can 3D printers print 3D printers

and can they print robots that can turn off 3D printers?
and if not, why not?

cf. those of you familiar with Philip K. Dick's dystopic visions of consumer society will recognize the rogue post-war autofac meme, here

oribtals & flat earth and the ecliptic

you know i never could understand how people worked out all the orbit stuff when I was a kid - it was coz noone ever told me that all the orbits were in the same plane! - if you think of the planets goin round in arbitray planes, like hurts your brain....meanwhile so does xkcd
http://xkcd.com/658/