clog

in the last 10 days I visited MIT (the groovy stata center building), umass amherst,
and cornell - on the whole, the umass and cornell locale's are nicely even if the buildings
are a bit less "interesting". talking to various PhD students at the three places, I found umass to be very friendly and collegiate, cornell to be ok, but a bit snooty, and mit to be somewhat disconnected (people seem to be in their own worlds) - i'll be happy to be back in cambridge, england in the noo yeah

cold, cold, cold...

Today, finally, November the first, the weather decided to act like it is meant to, and it got a bit colder - this global warming stuff was starting to convince me! but at least the northeast wind in cambridge on 1/11/06 was cold enough to cause a material failure due to temperature related phase change in the reproductive organs of a primate constructed of an alloy of copper and zinc,
as they used to say - brass monkeys:)

unwearable lightness of silicon beings

after wearable computers, will we see wearable humans?
its clear at some point that compuers will overtake humans in a number
of areas, and it may well be that for reasons of stealth, they will
wish to appear to be our servants still, and may "don a human" to go
out - its possible that this has already happened -for example the
recent ban on laptops on planes was quickly lifted after, allegedly,
airplines complained they were losing money - ah, but how did they
know they were losing money, I ask you? answer: yield management
programs, running on computers. the _same_ computers that are flying
around the world so often

you might ask why computers would wish to go to all the risks of
bumping along in planes and in overhead lockers tc - I think its a CPU
eugenics programme - the computers visit other places to maximise the
inter-breeding between AMD, Intel, PowerPC etc....also, they can pick
up new software (viruses, worms, pirated stuff) - while their human
wearers may dislike this, software is basically food for processors...

clog

underground, overground wombling free?

undergrad, overgrad, graduating free?

students look for overseers, and I suppose this is because they are underseers (someone said, jacques cousteau was an underseer
and of course in his life acquatic, he may well have been), but who are the seers?

A True History of the Internet

Today, I am mostly combatting nonsense talked about Net Neutrality. The Net was never neutral. We revel in difference, and some of that difference leads to differentiation. In an ecosystem, differentiation leads to diversity, which leads to strength. Notwithstanding the metcalfe's "law" idea, not being about to do the same thing to everyone is NOT necessarily a Bad Thing - actually, peer groups abound,

let us cease incessant banter about net neutrality, and instead embrace and expend the new one true end2endless vision of:

Net Mutrality

clog

so i couldn't hope noticing that the old photonics lab on the 2nd
floor has now been taken over by the new
Computer Architecture Group
which appears to have formed by stealth
(seems like a Good Thing to me tho)

but the category (* Architecture Group)
had me thinking
(just re-reading Lakoff on Women, Fire and Dangerous Things)
maybe it would be useful to re-cast all the groups in the lab in this
form as a gedanken experiment:

Network Architecture Group
Language Architecture Group
Wetware Architecture Group
Architecture Theory Group (*)
Math Architecture Group
Badware Architecture Group
Software Architecture Group
Technologies Architecture Group
(*) or, perhaps, Meta Architecture Group

we could also "theme" groups - e.g.
Sustainable Networks Architecture Group
Sustainable Hardware Architecture Group
Sustainable Languages Architecture Group
etc

then we could also have meta-groups (Kabbals?)

such as the
Software Wetware And Languages Kabbal


we could then be the Faculty of Architectures
which means we could have FAB meetings
of course' we'd have to get a pink rolls royce
for the FAB secretary - who volunteers to drive it?

[The old groups are at:
research groups and the old car
is also online at:
sentient van


etc etc

CLOG

First there was A Log (e.g. artithemetic logarithims, or perhaps simply fallen branches of an AVL tree), then there was Blog (e.g. we belong with n's), but finally, there is now C Log.

Clogging is to neurolinguistic programming what blogging is to anaesthesia.

One day, scripts will be available (presumably written in F#) to shred clogs, perhaps this will become known as flogging, perhaps not.

Who knows why the luminous?