san francisco dreaming

a former economist journalist, Wired editor and network dreamer from silicon valley:


the long tail

how life can be seen as software

very fascinating, Craig Venter:

transforming software into hardware = DNA

When in the ocean museum of Lisbon it was great to see a bath of medusa's swimming. Maybe one of the simplest life forms on earth so fascinating how simple structures create more complex structures.

passion for physics

very interesting writing style, views:

What is your relationship with time?

human are just story tellers

about interesting new technologies:

World telescope

about software technologies:

Alan Kay 1

Alan Kay 2

Playing chess = composing music

Interesting interview about the recognition of patterns in chess, that it is similar to recognize patterns in words, phrases in music, etc.:

How chess can sharpen your mind

Memories and joy

Children can play and play and play. Here in Europe prominent toys are coming from Lego or Playmobil that help us to explore space, time, social interactions. Probably the feeling that helps us fuelling our desire for play is joy. It is great to let our memories wander for a while and re-experience the joy that was acting like a friend helping us to learn more.

Objects and intentions

As I am learning more on object-oriented programming, I come again to the conclusion that in the design of algorithms it is helpful to take the intentional stance, i.e. what would the algorithm like to do, what believes do we assume the algorithm has, etc.

See more on this at: wikipedia on intentional stance

And when we mix objects, intentions and nature we maybe arrive at paintings like these

Bach as computer

there was a very interesting interview recently in the FAZ newspaper on Bach as a computer composing music. somehow it must be inspired by goedel, bach, eschenbach the mysteries behind algorithms. bach as taking the hand of the listener, guiding him in the universe of logic, to show the subtleties of our existence. bach computes incredible forms like einstein did with the laws of mechanics.

parallelity in computation - is the opposite of looping sequences. most programs today are looping sequences of some kind. parallel programs would be based on more different forms of symbols in time-space,

space, ambiguity, contradiction....

great isn't it?

meaning in business

from the macintosh lead engineer:

Guy Kwasaki

Shakespeare

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep".
(Prospero in the Tempest)

Free to Choose

about the fact that free markets help people to collaborate and have peaceful interactions. Milton Friedman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6vjrzUplWU&feature=related

Bernstein on music at Harvard

metaphor is the powerplant of music, names the unnameable und communicates the unknowable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VhzlcSuT0

Research and fun

A very inspiring lecture by computer scientist Ivan Sutherland on the usage of shared computer time, the invention of the currency "yen" for trading computing time, and doing science in unusual places and making friends by scientific intellectual interactions:

http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1125352335/

Micro activities

Well, it can be argued that markets caused and will solve our climate change problems. From Fred Pearce in "The New Scientist":


"We need markets and social systems that make the coices for us. Humans shouldn't have to be experts at everything. I want my drains to work and my computer to function without knowing the details of exactly how they operate. This is why a carbon tax would be good. In Denmark we have a 180 per cent tax on cars. That means I've never owned a car. I cycle everywhere - not because I am especially good, but the system encourages me not to buy a car. All the same, the solution will come in the main, not from carbon dioxide taxes but from smarter technologies."

dynamics in space

Lately, I saw on BBC world an interview with Steve Nash, an NBA basketball player on the importance of practice, practice, practice. Then, I went to see a video on youtube.com about his skills in action, and it was stunnning to see how much control he had about his body and the direction of the basketball. In the interview he also used a lot of mathematical terms, like "linear", "equation", "equilibrium". I conclude that his perception on movements and forces must have been very sharp. Whatever it is that controls our movements or allows reflection on it, our machineries to process laws of mechanics come back in many other realms as well, such as in economy (growth and output curves), thermodynamics (entropy and energy) or recently in collaborative systems.

Growing identity

In a video cast on TED, Steven Pinker argues that we humans have never lived in such peaceful times, i.e. that violence and aggression has been decreasing for many hundreds of years. Living in Europe, there are still many traces of the many wars between different "tribes" and this made me remember a conversation I had last weekend with a person that grew up imediatly after the world war. He was saying that their highest goal was to have a roof on top and something to eat. Now, our generation must be living in great times, he was arguing. I answered that nowadays the challenge is the quest for identity, as we can easily get lost in the sea of information, certainly in a global world where borders are vanishing. The hierarchy of roles is lowered, and who you want to be, what you want to do, what stories you are going to tell, maybe is equally challenging as finding a place to cover for the rainy days.

Knowing what and knowing how

It is common to ask two sorts of questions when we explore a new world: "What" do we see, feel, experience, know? (structural descriptions) And "how" do we know? (functional descriptions)

Minsky describes that better concepts to represent knowledge would be "actors", "situations" and "actions". Depending on a context (= situation), an actor can issue only a limited set of actions. (Furthermore there is the concept of negative expertise, i.e. know-how that we employ to avoid a paradox.)

It can be argued that knowledge results not so much from learning new skills, but from finding new ways to organize knowledge that someone already has. This is the point of Papert's principle: "Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows."

processing of information

I was reading in a very interesting article about the invention of the Dynabook and Smalltalk, that "hardware is just crystallized software"

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

Social algorithms

The concept of algorithm is really powerful to explain phenomenon related to minds. It might be possible to attribute desires and beliefs to the symbol-manipulating effects of algorithmic processes, and as such we can understand "virtual" algorithmic systems by using the vocabulary to describe own behavior. Daniel Dennett refers to our antropocentric views as intentional stance which might also be useful in many realms, to understand the complicated lives of our fragile ecosystem, or the miosis of cells by DNA programs, or the decision-making processes in our brains, the interactions in groups and societies, or the design of complicated artifacts.

Of course there is some resistance to the idea that minds or even the fascinating games of live might be seen as cold, mechanistic, algorithmic processes. I don't think so. I think the new point of view rather provides much more interesting ways to look at ourselves, very much similar to the joy of doing mathematics, as Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who gave the final resolution to Fermat conjectures puts it:

"Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of - and couldn't exist without - the many months of stumbling around the dark that precede them."

memes and beliefs

hello,

in daniel dennett's book on the causes and effects of religion there are quite some interesting insights that memes may have on groups. This is a bit related to the idea of functionalism, i.e. seeing a society of people in the form of an organism as was introduced by French antropologist and sociologist Emile Durkheim. And like in complex living organisms, different organs have different functions. It seems as well that religion has a certain function in societies, maybe with the main function of leveraging collaboration between people. Relgion as such is a collection of memes with having the most important meme of the god concept. Without god, there would be no religion. Dennett makes the point, a religion without god, is like going to a football games where there is no ball. Of course, the idea that god is the cause behind good and bad is very questionable. Like in the joke "First, I was praying to god to get a new bicycle, and nothing happened. Thus, I stole a bike, and now I am praying to god for forgiveness..."

Another point mentioned in the book "breaking the spell" are some good points on evolution of memes, i.e. ideas that replicate themselves in forms of tournaments. It is nicely explained on how memes take control of our brains, and that in principle we are helpless transmitters. In principle, because one important meme idea itself is to strive for the good things in life, and trying to avoid bad memes. As such, you also can see culture as a very interesting form of software, which need to get service packs once in a while to remove bugs.