Somewhere/sometime in an office move I grabbed a Southwest Technical Products Corp. Computer Products Catalogue out of a trash pile. Yes, I am a pack rat. I’ve been meaning to scan it and put it on line for some time now and finally did so. You can see the results by clicking here or on the image below. There’s more SWTPC doco here (I didn’t see my catalog, so I don’t think I’m duping info that Mr. Holley has already made available).

Now this is a printer! (and in keeping with the era, “!” is pronounced bang):

T-Rex and Pluvialis teamed up this morning and caused me to guffaw, then reminisce a bit. The laughter you’ll have to take on faith; unfortunately, I’m going to subject you to a couple ‘way back when’ stories. I first played Adventure on a Honeywell DPS6 or DPS8 – I’m not sure which hardware we were running at that point. I do remember the model number of the glass teletypes we used – the usual Honeywell suspect – VIP7814s (VIP = visual information processor, I believe). The system software used to control and communicate with the terminals was the time sharing system (TSS – everything must be reduced to initials).

The systems software person was an wonderful guy named Jack. At one point he was fighting with a really gnarly bit of mis-configuration; stuff that absolutely should have worked and absolutely did not. One night during this struggle, he had a work nightmare. As he told it, for a grand finale, he sat bolt upright in bed, yelling “It’s time sharin’! It’s time sharin’!” His wife, who obviously was awake at this point, turned to him and asked (with the look that causes all men to start looking for a means of egress), “So… Who the f*ck is Sharon?”

There was a legendary systems programmer in the General Electric/G200/Honeywell world: Guy Wayne. He apparently liked his cigarettes and his coffee; this was back in the days when one could smoke just about anywhere – an exception being a raised-floor computer room with Halon fire suppression equipment. So, if Mr. Wayne had not finished his smoke, but needed to go into the computer room, he’d carefully put the cigarette out and pocket it to be finished later. One day he came back out of the machine room and got into a conversation with someone. After a few minutes, Guy was informed that there seemed to be smoke coming from his jacket pocket. Without missing a beat, he took his coffee cup and poured his coffee into the pocket. Problem solved.

An interesting article in the NYT got me thinking… The story is about a paper written in 2003 by Nick Bostrom, entitled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” The abstract:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

So – if humans (or our weakly godlike AI progeny) survive long enough and the predictions of continuing computing power increases are true AND the entities with access to the computing power decide to run any significant number of evolutionary simulations, then we’re very likely to be living in one of those simulations (1 ‘real’ world, large number of sims – not a bet I want a piece of).

This is not a new observation – a reader on BoingBoing pointed to a 1995 interview in Wired where Hans Moravec waves off the idea as obvious. Charlie Stross has incorporated the idea of simulations into more than one of his yarns; in “A Colder War” Cthulhu runs simulations on the people it absorbs.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we are indeed living in a simulation. Are there implications for how we should behave or live our lives? Not that I can think of – if I hurt someone, their experience of pain is not diminished or mitigated by being perfectly simulated rather than real. There are a couple things that I have been thinking on though – one serious and one not as.

The less serious consideration could be classified as belonging to the Turtles All The Way Down group of speculations. We’re sims, our simulation navigates the posthuman transition successfully and we start – yes, you saw this coming – running evolutionary simulations. How deeply are we nested? Would we run into hardware constraints back in the real world?

The big question – and one I’ve been thinking about for quite a while – is how should we treat software entities? I code up a high fidelity version of a housefly’s nervous system. Then I run in the same signals from the sensorium that a fly would experience when it’s wings were pulled off. Why? I don’t know – why do folks pull wings off real flies rather than just smushing them? Calm down, it’s just a simulation of a fly, you say. Okay, a couple years pass and I code up a puppy… Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth… implemented in software. When do we cross the line from disturbing silliness (I googled ‘the sims torture’ and found this pretty quickly) to real evil?

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

In a recent post I alluded to my fondness for the normal distribution, sometimes known as the bell curve. I use it as a filter through which to view big – especially apocalyptic – claims. Now comes John Robb with a post contrasting the bell curve with the long tail.

Historically, Gaussian [bell curve] expectations for most events derived from human systems were usually correct. In that world, dampening factors dominated within relatively sparse and simple systems, driving events towards the mean. Over the last decades, however, systems have shifted towards towards ever greater levels of complexity and information density. The result has been a shift towards Paretian [long tail] outcomes, particularly within any event that contains a high percentage of informational content.

Interesting stuff – when combined with Charlie Stross’ observations on changes in transportation speed, we’ve got three models to worry about:

• normal distribution – things are going along as they usually do
• power law curve – OMG, it’s the singularity!!1!
• sigmoid curve – things will change quickly, until some higher level constraint is reached

The devil will be in deciding which model to apply to a given trend – regardless, if you’re passing out tracts and wearing a sandwich board proclaiming the eschaton, I’m going to avert my eyes and scurry by.

For a variety of reasons, I use the Firefox browser. This morning, thanks to a post on LifeHacker, I discovered two plugins – one I’d categorize as nice-to-have; the other fills a major hole.

The nice-to-have plugin (thanks to a comment three links deep on LifeHacker – dumb luck on my part) is Tab Mix Plus. I think that tabbed browsing is the best thing since sliced beer; don’t know how I could browse without it. TMP gives you additional control over tabbing behavior and shows the load progress bar on the tab itself. You can click a link, pop over to another tab and see on the first tab when the page has completely loaded. Essential? Heck no. Nice? You betcha.

The killer plug-in is called How’d I Get Here. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article for the Atlantic monthly entilted “As We May Think“. In the article Bush proposed what he called a memex – a system that in some ways anticipated the web. A feature of the memex that the web didn’t originally have (though this is less the case today) are associative trails – the ability to assemble sequences of pages, with markup, and publish them.

The closest analogy with the modern Web browser would be to create a list of bookmarks pointing to articles relevant to a topic, and then to have some mechanism for automatically scrolling through the articles (for example, use Google to search for a keyword, obtain a list of matches, and then use “open in new tab” in your browser and visit each tab sequentially). Modern hypertext systems with word and phrase-level linking offer more sophistication in connecting relevant information, but until the rise of wiki and other social software models, modern hypertext systems have rarely followed Bush in providing individuals with the ability to create personal trails and share them with colleagues – or publish them widely. *

Something else that associative trails give you? The ability to backtrack. Way too frequently, I’ll find an interesting bit on the web, bookmark it in del.icio.us and move on. Days later, I’ll think of something I saw as I was clicking through to that bookmarked page – can I find the intermediate page? Hell, no. How’d I Get Here helps plug this hole. It keeps track of your clickstream; days later you can go to the bookmarked page, click the HIGH icon and walk backwards.

A couple caveats. I have no idea what HIGH will do if I find 2 different paths to the same page. I’d guess it would use the most recent backwards path, but I haven’t tested it (yet). If you’re paranoid, having this data on your machine may give you the willies. If it does, I’d suggest you are not paranoid enough. I’ve read persuasive arguments that true secrecy/paranoia involves measures like running all software from CD (so that when you turn the PC off everything goes away), always using open wireless access points, never using the same access point repeatedly, never being physically near the AP (think across the street with an antenna), etc. If you really need this level of stealth, you don’t need my advice. If you just think you need it, you may also want to look at a nice tinfoil hat *wink*.

Update – I found the post I was referencing above re: paranoia – it’s here. An example:

You need a false flag connection to the Internet. In other words, access the Internet via someone else’s open wireless router, preferably from great distance. Lots of organizations, businesses and individuals provide free, wireless Internet access; on purpose, believe it or not. Ideally, you would use a cantenna or a high performance parabolic antenna to authoritatively distance yourself from any surveillance cameras that are likely saturating your local coffee shop or other business that provides free Internet access. Hitting the base station from hundreds of meters away would be nice.

If you were to carry the paranoia to an extreme level, you would assume that They would show up at your access point and use direction finding equipment to spot your physical location. “Tinfoil!” you say? Keychain WiFi access point finders have had crude DF capabilities for years. Then you have civilian grade WiFi network engineering stuff like the Yellow Jacket. Direction finding is as old as the hills and trivial to do. If you do happen to attract the wrong kind of attention on an anonymous base station, pinpointing your location would be a simple matter.

Solution? If you are playing this game as if your life is on the line, don’t use the same open base station twice. Hey, this post is going out to those of you who send me the paranoid emails. You wanted to know, I’m telling you! I mean, it would suck to look toward your friendly anonymous WiFi provider with a pair of binoculars and see a guy in a suit looking back at you. Hint: if you see a van with several antennas arranged in some geometric pattern on the roof, that would not be a positive development. But that was 1980s era technology, the last time I dabbled with DF gear with a buddy of mine.