“ideas”
61 posts under this tag.
In the spirit of Little Brother I’ll post about a password stealing idea I’ve worried about for a while now: using email addresses as login names. It’s now a very widespread practice among webapps and the reason is they’re a convenient way to eliminate having to come up with and remember a unique identifier and in the process they make you give your email address away, which is a boon for marketing and for easily authenticating you. In itself there’s of course nothing insecure about the practice but the problem is that they make registrations so simple and straightforward that suddenly they’re everywhere and you don’t think twice about them.
And the true problem is that a lot of people use one password everywhere and the chances are high many will choose the same password for the webapp du jour as for their lifelong email account.
So imagine an unscrupulous webapp maker who creates a popular webapp requiring registration and doesn’t hide from himself user passwords (there’s absolutely nothing but his own conscience preventing him). It is now a simple matter of running a script to test each email address password pair for him to coolly break a good bunch of email accounts.
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
Charles S. Peirce has been called by Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.
And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.
Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:
“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”
and anime’s general stance towards piracy:
“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”
Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry’s biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.
Frustrated record companies have responded by trying to get their artists to spend more time promoting records and less time touring and endorsing products, says Jeanne Meyer of EMI, another big record label. “Sometimes you’ve got a tug of war going on,” she says. Yet the more labels spend on marketing pre-recorded music, the more they raise their artists’ profiles and boost their other, more lucrative, sources of income. Pre-recorded music, no longer the main cash cow, increasingly serves merely as a marketing tool for T-shirts and concert tickets. The best seats for The Police’s world tour this summer cost over $900; the group’s entire catalogue on CD costs less than $100.
The shift away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.
The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.
I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)
To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodificationWP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.
“I’ve always accepted my groggy mornings because they come with my glorious nights.”
anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!
Glorious, thought-drunken night.
Remember that wacky koanELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?
Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.
Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.
Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.
I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.
According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.
That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.
Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux TapestryWP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)
I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.
(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—,  )
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