Ocho cosas sobre mí

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Lex10 tagged me up with the ‘8 Random Facts’ internet thang – here goes nothing. First, the rules:

The Rules: Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules [done!] and their 8 random facts. Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

  1. I love limes. They can provide 2 (the toughest 2 to do well) of the 5 tastes: sour and bitter. Match with sweet -> limeade, Key Lime Pie. Match with salt -> “I’m so wrecked”. Match with umami -> ceviche.
  2. I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
  3. Two (realistic) places I want to see before they box me up: Barranca del Cobre and someplace in Central America (likely Costa Rica) where I can fish (tarpon and offshore), swim, herp-splore and birdwatch.
  4. I believe in normal distributions and in muddling through. Once-in-a-million events are just that – don’t be looking for miracles.
  5. Speaking of miracles, the problem of evil and powers of 10 are why I’m an atheist.
  6. Three more go go, eh? Oh, wait – now just two…
  7. I’m ridiculously cheap about some things and spendthrift when it comes to others.
  8. For my tenth birthday, a buddy and I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in a real movie theater (huge screen). ‘Nuff said.

If you want me to officially tag you for this, just let me know – otherwise I’ll be pinging folks over the next few weeks (with, of course, no expectation of anything other than instant email deletion).

Stross II

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Human memory is an odd thing. It’s not particularly accurate and it is often manipulated – by the memory’s owner and by other parties. Sometimes this is a bad thing – think about the satanic abuse hysteria of the 1980s and the whole ‘recovered memory’ controversy – and sometimes it’s a good thing. We’re not all saints (even the saints aren’t); not having to remember every time we’ve been less than what we think we are is a blessing. What are people going to be like when they have a detailed objective record of the world immediately around them and their interaction with same? Will we be better people – less likely to ignore the cry for help? Will we be the same ol’ folks, just closer to insanity as we get our noses rubbed in the disconnect between our internal model of ourselves and the real way we act? Or, will we photoshop the hell out of our recordings to bring them into line with our sense of identity?

Everything old is new again. From the comments on Stross’ transcript, let me highlight a couple of good points.

In some ways, it’s a step backwards to an earlier time. An average medieval peasant wouldn’t have had the same concept of privacy we do — he most likely lived in the same room as his whole family and some animals. All of his neighbors new what was going on, and he regularly confessed to his priest. He didn’t get lost, because he had lived in the same place most of his life. *

The qualifier (in some ways) is important – level of detail and public accessibility are important differences. In the Monty example, Mary Kalin-Casey is not objecting to peasant-level (walking by and seeing Monty in the window) loss of privacy – it’s the notion that he can be seen by anyone with an internet connection that bothers her.
On Stross’ self-driving car prediction:

Driverless vehicles were commonplace up until WW2; they were called horse-drawn carriages. I have relatives born in the Twenties who tell of napping while driving home from a party or something. *

True – and a hint about where things may be going on a slightly different front. Nanotech is a hot topic – the collision of nano and biology is where (I think) a lot of progrees will be made. After all, there are already molecular mechanisms – consider the mitochondrion.

Stross, Google Street Views and Privacy

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Recently, author Charlie Stross posted the transcript of a talk he gave to a tech consultancy titled “Shaping the Future” .  It’s worth reading in it’s entirety; if you click through please remember to come back – I have some thoughts I’d like to share.

A side trip on our way to the meat of the matter… Stross identifies bandwidth – the ability to move information from place to place – as a key variable. It’s one of those things that’s getting faster, faster (think exponential increase). I want to recommend The Victorian Internet – a book that looks at the beginning of the communications revolution. Before the telegraph, information moved at the same rate people did – as fast as a horseback messenger or a clipper ship. The telegraph was an enormous change – one that left fingerprints that we see to this day. Baud – the speed measurement applied to modems (themselves becoming obsolete) – is named for Émile Baudot, a pioneer in the field. There are other examples; I’ll leave the rest to The Victorian Internet.

The focus of Stross talk is the notion of lifeblogging:

Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money [ten euros]. fast-forward a decade and that’ll be 100Gb. Two decades and we’ll be up to 10Tb.

10Tb is an interesting number. That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I’m awake. All the time. It’s a life log; replay it and you’ve got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it’s actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)

Why would anyone want to do this?

I can think of several reasons. Initially, it’ll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it’d be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it’s a memory prosthesis.

Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it’s all indexed and searchable. “What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?”

Think of it as google for real life. *

We’re seeing the beginnings of something like this today. My blog is not the only way I share information about what I’m up to and what I’m thinking – there’s also my Flickrstream (interesting word that was invented to describe people’s photo repositories, eh?), Twitter (short term, ephemeral stream of consciousness stuff), del.icio.us (public list of my bookmarks), and email (more – presumably – private). Others may add YouTube or other video services to the list and I’m sure there are many other bits of software I’m missing; I have little or no MySpace/Facebook knowledge, for example.

All this is fine as I wander around documenting what I want to document, writing what I feel like writing. But (there’s always a but), here comes Monty! Who is Monty, you ask? He is the cat in the window. A new feature of Google Maps provides street level zooms for select urban areas – the Google folks have vehicles driving around cities taking pictures. When the Google car came by, Monty was sitting in his normal perch. Later, when Google rolled out the new feature, Monty’s owner took a look at her neighborhood, saw her cat in her window, and got a little – understandably in my book – freaked. Ms. Kalin-Casey – one of Monty’s owners – writes,

The question is, where do we draw the line between public and private? Obviously, the picture of Monty isn’t very good, but who’s to say whether tomorrow, Google’s camera’s won’t be a lot better, giving clearer pictures and more detail? I’ve already seen one post online where the poster’s only complaint about Google pics is that the pictures aren’t sharp enough. (He wasn’t commenting on my pic, but on a picture of his own home.)

The opposing argument claims that what’s visible from the street is public. By opening my windows for some much-needed light and air, am I granting permission for my living room to be broadcast worldwide? I don’t think I am. I think if I open my windows, my neighbors and passers by might see the cat in the window. That’s substantially different to me than realizing that everyone in the world can potentially see into my home.

It’s my feeling that we should know what kind of monitoring we’re subject to and when. Stores, airports, intersections, museums —there are security cameras everywhere. We’ve all seen overhead satellite photos for mapping purposes, but when does helpful mapping recon morph into home surveillance? When does it move from a grainy picture of the cat to a high-res image where you can see small details in my apartment? When do I have to choose between sunlight and unseen threats to privacy? *

Think about those sorts of reasonable concerns in a world where everything I see or hear, I record. I think jammer technologies will get hot, but regardless, our notions of privacy will need to be sharpened and thought through a little more thoroughly than they are today. I don’t have answers; I probably am not even seeing the real questions – we ought to start paying some attention though. As William Gibson said, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

The Macro’s Saga

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Every so often, the conditions are right and half the world’s population of internet users decide to go ape over the same silly thing simultaneously. As Prof. Harold Hill would say, “Mass-steria!” The shared memetic obsession this time around? Cat macros, also known as LOLCats or image macros (including the saga of the lolrus and the bukkit). The first rumblings were apparent as early as last Saturday – see the caption to the zombie picture on my AM cleanup post. The big seismic event, as far as I’m concerned, was on Wednesday when the LOLbots site went live. rstevens (the prime mover) on the rollout:

LOLBOTS.COM went up last night and promptly rode such a big wave of meme that we overloaded two servers. My admin Don got us back up and running and helped me optimize some code. The dude’s Bat-Man with a command line.

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Originally, I was just goofing on the concept of icanhascheezburger-style kitty macros from the perspective of someone prefers machines to animals. I didn’t really think it would catch on, but 40,000 visitors later we have almost 200 robots posted and a backlog of dozens more. In a word: Insane. *

The quotes above are from a post dated Friday, June 1st – 2 days earlier rstevens had an idea and sat down at the keyboard. The fun continues – it will be interesting to watch the meme-seismograph for aftershocks.

Herewith, my faves from the frenzy…

If you know what the Camel Book is, you have – like me – spent too much time in front of a screen.

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You may have noticed that I like Schrödinger’s cat jokes – I love this one:

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And last, one that ties to another post currently floating around the wide-open spaces of my cranium – it will be a mashup of Google Street View and Charlie Stross (that’s a cat in Mary Kalin-Casey’s window).

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Credit where it’s due – the lolcats phenomenon was showing up on my son’s radar even earlier than it did on mine. I think he told me about memecats at about the same time I told him about “I can has brayn?”

Update – didn’t want to leave out creative powerhouse, Mr. Lex10 – he did some LOLPresidents for a fark contest early in the lolnomenon. You should blast over to the Glyphblog to check out the baseball cards; they are (as we say up here) wicked pissah.

Update II – c’est encroyable. The LOLCode version of Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Marlowe day!

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May 30, 1593 is either the day that Christopher Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer after arguing over who’d pick up the tab or the day he faked his death and was spirited off to the continent. I’m not a big one for conspiracy theories; they seem to me to have a lot in common with ‘not a sparrow falls’ religions – the desire for some kind of purpose underlying the random horrible (and wonderful) things that happen. That being said, you have to admit that the Marlovian’s theory is quite the rippin’ tale. Whether you like the theory or not, the connection to Francis Walsingham looks quite likely and from there it’s just one more hop to the preeminent cryptographer of the day, Thomas Phelippes. Rakehells, spies and code breakers – sounds like a reason to celebrate the day to me!

Take a deep breath and pause

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I read somewhere that in the reactor control area of nuclear submarines there is a long brass grab-rail. In case of emergency, submariners are required to grab the rail with both hands and count to ten before they do anything else. The story may or may not be true (I can’t find where I read it), but it does make a good point. When faced with a problem, our first instinct is often to do something, dammit! Taking a second to calm down a bit and then to actually look at the problem is time well spent. To remind myself, I posted a label on an equipment rack near where most panic situations are likely to occur.

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When in danger
Or in doubt,
Run in circles,
Scream and shout.

(I respond well to sarcasm)

Sighting

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My little breeding colony of Dendrobates ventrimaculatus “Iquitos Red” is getting a bit bolder – yesterday I saw 3 of the 4 frogs out in the open. Unheard of! Today I managed to grab the camera and snap a shot of one before he disappeared into the undergrowth. Apologies for the quality – speed was of the essence – it really is a point and shoot picture.

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Just to allay any concerns if you clicked though and read “Conservation status: Extensive captive breeding in the US and Europe has greatly decreased the demand for smuggled specimens, with the possible exception of the red and orange Iquitos morphs…” – these guys are first US-born generation from a captive breeding operation in Peru and carry registration numbers so that froggers can keep accurate records.

Lessons Learned

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It seems to me that a characteristic of a healthy decision making process is that it rewards good predictions and planning and penalizes bad work. In today’s media/policy landscape the entities producing the work can be government institutions, NGOs/thinktanks and/or individuals (either acting alone or working for an institution), but talking heads and the punditocracy – individuals – dominate the national discussion of big issues (though the blogosphere is becoming a bit of a countervailing force to conventional wisdom®). One of the things that’s amazed me, as the disaster in Iraq has played out, is how the folks who were consistently wrong have continued to command attention, while the people whose judgment time has revealed as more accurate are marginalized or ignored. Some recent events that really brought this home:

Via The Washington Note, Jeff Stein’s Congressional Quarterly article on Pat Lang’s encounter with Doug Feith.

In early 2001, his [Lang’s] name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.

“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’

“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’

‘That’s too bad,” Feith said.

Feith, who Gen. T. Franks famously referred to as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet” , is now teaching a course on the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policy at Georgetown. Seems like a course that matches well with his intelligence…

Wolfowitz’s latest follies at the World Bank are well known – who could have predicted that he might have trouble there, given his recent brilliant track record (that was sarcasm)?

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help. *

The massive underestimation of the size of the occupation and nationbuilding tasks in Iraq – who could have guessed estimates were so far off? Dr. Conrad Crane at the US Army War College in February of 2003 for one. Via This Amercan Life’s excellent Lessons Learned show (here and here) – Crane and others produced Recontructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post Conflict Scenario (pdf link). Listen to ‘Act 1: Cassandra’ of the TAL Lessons Learned show – I’m still shaking my head.

If the war is rapid with few civilian casualties, the occupation will probably be characterized by an initial honeymoon period during which the United States will reap the benefits of ridding the population of a brutal dictator. Nevertheless, most Iraqis and most other Arabs will probably assume that the United States intervened in Iraq for its own reasons and not to liberate the population. Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international force. Regionally, the occupation will be viewed with great skepticism, which may only be overcome by the population’s rapid progress toward a secure and prosperous way of life.

What are my take-aways (lessons learned, if you will)?

  • Wishful thinking is appropriate if you’ve just bought a lottery ticket. It’s not the thing do do if you are planning for retirement. It is a horrible thing to do when other’s lives are at stake. Transparency – ‘show your work’ – is crucial when big issues are up for debate; standing around maintaining that things will go your way is not sufficient.
  • We need to get this right. I disagree with the “War on Terror” formulation (war on a tactic?), however there are specific state and non-state actors who wish the developed world ill. Figuring out how to neutralize these entities is not optional.

To hand-wave away the botched decision-making process in the run up to the Iraq war is not acceptable – a CF of this magnitude has a lot to teach. Our adversaries are learning from it – will we?

Our enemies are going to make us fight these kind of wars until we get them right. – David Kilcullen, quoted by Conrad Crane (TAL at approx minute 29)

Saturday AM cleanup

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Loose ends…

I’m having some fun with twitter – a microblogging tool (or a social networking tool, or a moblogging tool, or…). There’s it’s ‘as intended’ use, which is pretty darn cool; you can issue 140 character (maximum) status updates from a cell phone, IM client or the web. I love food updates and stray thoughts- good stuff. There are also people thinking about what else they can do with twitter – I’m following Zombie Attack – dispatches from the front line of the zombie wars.

Random synapse fires sympathetically – word of the day: zimboe.

Priority for the day: get this book.

Lastly, and yet again, hurray for Kathy and Red Eye R&B. (Hurray also for three day weekends and sunny Saturdays.)

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Update – A run to the bookstore yielded a copy of The Deep. Wow. Hooray for Beebe and Piccard for getting us started.

On the zombie front – Zombie Mob 2007 attacks the Apple Store in SF.

i can has brayn?

Blinded by science

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I walked into the classroom across the hall from my office this morning to water my plants and saw some objects that were begging to be photographed. The middle school science teacher/friend/coworker whose room this is lets me keep some of my orchids, bromeliads and carnivorous plants in a sunny window; I like going in to check out the latest projects in process – kids working on rockets or IDing dragonfly nymphs – you get the idea…

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Passion

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“I’m passionate about exceeding customer expectations every day as I greet people entering this lovely Wally-Mart”.

“Um, no.”

Passion is not enthusiasm. It is not love. It is not enjoyment, and it is not flow. Passion is an unstoppable overflowing of emotion that destroys in its satisfaction, that torpedoes lives and marriages and nations, that shoots husbands or coworkers or strangers in rage. It is the hot lava of the soul, and it burns what it pours over. It is not the positive team-building thing your sup­ervisor would have you believe. Passion causes wars and brutal killings and divorces, and has astronauts wearing Depends and the headmistresses of girls’ schools going to jail, and gets husbands run over in parking lots. To say that a bunch of software engineers or graphic designers are passionate about their work is to try to interject sex and confusion and addiction and desire into a kind of work that is essentially asexual, organized, left brain, and sober.

RTWT. via Bruce