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Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.  And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation. I believe it’s a historic moment and could not let it pass unmarked.
Just watched Obama’s start speech. It was long. At parts founding-father-ish, stodgy, bombastic, God-alluding, and over-collectivistic. Talk about modern immigration was absent (or was I looking for it too hard?). The remarkable thing, though, was how good it was. Great even, at parts. Astoundingly evenhanded. My distrust of democracy and my bitter goodbye to America made me uninterested and outright antagonistic to politics in general, America’s in particular. Still am. But you got to grant it, it ain’t perfect, but I know of no country with a better dream of what it wants to be. America’s back.
Edge’s 2009 Question is out!: What would change everything?. The list of answers by some of the most interesting individuals in the third culture individuals out there is as inspiring and thought provoking (and atrociously designed, interface-wise) as ever. Kevin Kelly’s answer my favorite so far:
It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We’d use artificial intelligence the same way we’ve exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we’d plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.
Great stuff—it’s people like Kelly that make me miss California ;)This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it. Jeff Bezos had remarkably similar, equally inspiring ideas at a recent TED talk, comparing the web to electricity but Kelly pushes it further, to ”intelligence as electricity”
We will all be wearing something like this in no more than 5 years. Seriously, it’s positively awesome, just look how silly happy I look. Your brain is uncannily good at patching your vision so you can eerily “see thru” the screen—soon enough the feeling of obstruction disappears and it just floats magically along. The tiny screen is good enough for text to read and you can apparently browse the web too. You control it through some controls at the headphones. It’s already for sale at some very reasonable $700 here in Japan (online only). So Mannfred Macx!
  
Ever since I’ve had a digital camera I’ve noticed a strange use of it: I’ll often snap stuff —whiteboards, signs, text, documents, maps, ads, book covers..— for practical, remember-or-consult-it-later purposes (as opposed to “leisure” snapping of people, events or cool stuff). Since I got my awesome new camera this use has only intensified, with two interesting new twists: First, since the image quality is now unbelievably and consistently good it’s painful to look at other camera’s), pretty much anything is recorded at the same (or higher!) fidelity than the real thing. So I can now confidently snap pictures of intricately detailed maps, computer screen text, faraway signs (with its awesome 10x zoom) or whatever.Second, since the screen is now unbelievably good and big (3”!), and since browsing has gotten so much faster and responsive (not there yet but close), most of my later reviewing now is done right at my camera. It’s a very different, much more personal and portable experience than being anchored to the desktop. Also, since memory is now so mindboggingly cheap I can just keep these reference photos on the camera (that is, with me) for as long as I need to. So a typical use of my camera now is getting some directions or reading an interesting review of some place at my laptop and just snapping it for later, in-place reference. It’s so fast and convenient. I don’t have everywhere web in my iPhone now but if I did I think I’d often still do it this way instead of fiddling with it (and of course I’ve long stopped stooping to printing stuff—are you kidding me?).It’s really starting to feel like a prostethic (photographic) memory module and my guess is that this use will become more and more prominent, to the point that some 5 years from now it could be cameras’ main use (mostly because we’ll be saturated by “leisure” photos of people, events or cool stuff). My camera actually reflects this and one of its 5 main modes is actually the cleverly titled “Clipboard” mode, designed only (!) to keep photos of “maps, timetables and other travel info” (reference photos!) at hand (a special mode shouldn’t be necessary once the interface gets there). 
When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found it was too difficult, so I tried to change my country. When I realized I could not change that either, I began to focus on my town. I could not change even that and being older, I tried to change my family. Now being old, I realize the only thing I can change is myself. Suddenly I realize that if long ago if I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the country and I indeed could have changed the world.
Or as Harry put it
As you view any situation in which you have a goal, there are basically two types of alternatives available to you. I call them direct and indirect.
I’m gonna be Switzerland. Mind my business. Be my own man. Neutral. Flexible. Pragmatic. Quiet. Living my own, happy, private life. Free in an unfree world.
A direct alternative is one that requires only direct action by yourself to get a desired result.An indirect alternative requires that you act to make someone else do what is necessary to achieve your objective. Once you’ve seen the positions and attitudes of the other people involved, a direct alternative requires only that you make a decision; an indirect alternative requires that you change the attitude of one or more other persons so that they will do what it is you want.The recognition of the two types of alternatives is one of the most important keys to freedom. Most people automatically think in terms of indirect alternatives — who must be changed, how people must be educated, what others should be doing. Consequently, they spend most of their lives in futile efforts to achieve what can’t be achieved — the remaking of others. In any situation, a free individual immediately looks first at the identities of the other people involved and appraises the situation by the simple standard: Is this what I want for myself? If it isn’t, he looks elsewhere. If it is, he relaxes and enjoys the situation to the maximum — without the problems that most people take for granted. He automatically thinks in terms of direct alternatives. He asks himself, “With things as they are, what can I do by myself to make things better for myself?”
Liking David Friedman’s Hidden Order a whole lot. Not trivial reading, but rewarding. Through intuitive graphs and simplification he comes up with some interesting economics theory (with my math background the hand waving and naivete of the presentation’s obvious but I’m still rather unconvinced of a formal, math-based economics). But perhaps the part I liked most is this inspiring little quote, awfully important in an age when technology allows contracts to make the dreams and nightmares of both sellers and buyers to come true, from DRM to discography torrents.
Suppose you are a businessman or an attorney negotiating a contract. It is tempting to go through the contract term by term, trying in each case to get whatever term is most favorable to you or your client.
But a more profitable strategy may be to go through looking for the contract terms that maximize the combined gain to both parties. Only when you get to the final term—the price—do you shift back to trying to make it as favorable as possible, thus collecting as much as possible of the gain produced by your well-designed contract. Most of your job is maximizing the size of the pie. The bigger the pie, the bigger you can make the slices for both sides.
In what is to date the biggest purchase of my life (my obscene former desktop was a gift), I just purchased the bulk of my travel for the next year or so. Check out my itinerary and start planning on visiting or bumping with me! 27 October 2008Mexico City MEX to Tokyo NRT (via London) for 4 months, 22 days of Japan! 20 March 2009 Tokyo NRT to London LHR for 4 months, 29 days of Europe! 17 August 2009 London LHR to Toronto YYZ for a month of Canada! (ticket back to Mexico to be purchased) All the flights are with British Airways. All for $1,852, which still amazes me—BA is a great airline, flights are incredibly main-airport and nonstop (can’t stop in the US). It’s all beautifully simple, better than I dared hope. Past week has been a Kayak and travel agency blur but it was worth it. So, so exciting!
The cover article of this week’s Economist brings the stem-cell cancer hypothesis to the mainstream. This is over 3 years after Eva Vertes talked about it at TED in one of my favorite video pieces ever. And is very, very exciting.  ..just occasionally, a finding revolutionises the field and cracks open a whole range of diseases. The discovery in the 19th century that many illnesses are caused by bacteria was one such. The unravelling of Mendelian genetics was another. It now seems likely that medical science is on the brink of a finding of equal significance. The underlying biology of that scourge of modern humanity, cancer, looks as though it is about to yield its main secret. If it does, it is possible that the headline-writer’s cliché, “a cure for cancer”, will come true over the years, just as the antibiotics that followed from the discovery of bacteria swept away previously lethal infectious diseases.The discovery—or, rather, the hypothesis that is now being tested—is that cancers grow from stem cells in the way that healthy organs do.
The Economist, The root of all evil?
The plan is to travel, to go places for a year or so, to live for some 2-3 months each time, in Tokyo, Barcelona/Madrid, London, and Toronto (in that order). Both Spain and Canada beckon with legal, short paths to free agency. The goal shall be to find out which city I like better as my fulcrum for the decade, but mostly to learn, to start projects, and to swallow the world. I didn’t expect to like working remotely so much, as I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, but I’ve loved the freedom, the flexibility, and the discipline it imposes. Most important of all, it allows for freedom of place and having been kicked out of the U.S. I might as well look around. So I’m looking for some sort of remote job, failing that savings and odd jobs would have to do, but having an unhinged fixed job would accelerate and catalyze everything.There is, still, the possibility that there will be no place for me like Silicon Valley. If that’s so, then I’ll try to get a tourist visa again within a year and give de facto (ilegal) free agency another shot. I doubt, though, that they’ll grant me a visa, but there are many other, safe, if somewhat expensive means, to get inside. And once inside de facto free agency is not far fetched at all. I’m heartened by the sanctuary San Francisco itself always was for me (as opposed to the dastard federal gov’t). But that’s just one possibility. Just having done that scenario planning comforts me and sets me free. The world beckons and Japan has always been, after America, the country I’m hungriest for. I’ve always wanted to try the sink or swim approach to learning a language! It’ll take me a month or two to get there, but just you wait Tokyo! |
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