“predictions”
7 posts under this tag.
Interesting times for rarefied, elite education in America: in a move that paralleled and extended Harvard’s, Stanford announced a couple of weeks ago that students whose families earn < $100,000 a year won’t be charged tuition and those whose families earn < $60,000 will also be exempted from paying room & board—in other words, they’ll pay nada.
Harvard and Stanford, btw, have multi-billion dollar endowments that are respectively the 1st and 3rd largest in the world (Yale, with the 2nd largest endowment, has announced similar moves). With other big pocketed institutions forced to follow suit and with endowments’ double-digit increase rates it isn’t farfetched at all to imagine that soon enough most top-tier universities will simply dismiss nickel & diming altogether.
Which will be a fascinating and unprecedented landmark for the service industry.
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.
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Series Blenders
With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.) What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web
 I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).
The device I envision is about the size of an iPod video, has a minimal, ultra-fast and responsive OS (mere scaffolding for the browser), a 100+ GB harddrive, a huge screen (say, 4X2.5 inches), and, most importantly, an updated, vastly more capable interface that is still as brilliant as the clickwheel. I only hope Apple has the vision to try it (soon).
Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.
Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,
and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.
I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…
I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since:
Because computation underlies the foundations of everything we care about, from the economy to human intellect and creativity, we might well wonder: are there ultimate limits to the capacity of matter and energy to perform computation? If so, what are these limits, and how long will it take to reach them?
Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?
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