names and power and magic, lack thereof

why is the nanoscience center on the edge of cambridge, not in the center, and why is it so big?

why does the Gates Building only have doors and windows and no white picket fence?

why is the CAPE building 40Km from the sea?


why does the Vet School no fish?

The Path to Software Adapation: Intelligent Design or Evolution, and also, Virtualiztupid

We know that there are many species of software - whenever a branch is made in the development, we get (eventually) specification (or is that a specious argument) - but the real question is: is this by design, or is it just random? Does the Xen Master play Dice? Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster Code better, or worse, than IBM's 10 lines a day of commands meant?

meanwhile, also, what is better or worse, intelligence (see the short story by Bruce Sterling about the short term survival value of intelligence) or stupidity?

virtualisation is a way to avoid making decisions (the ultimate random branch, if you like) since you just continue to run all old and new versions....however adapted they are (indeed, if enough of you do this, you effectively run all the eco-systems in history - i.e. world 0.1 alpha thru world 2.0 beta, in parallel universes (if oprah is anything to go by, at least as far as the Onion claimed today...)

so its clear that the virtualization thing is virtually stupid - it allows multiple isolated types of stupidity to co-exist, without learning from one another. This is a good thing (spreading stupidity is a Bad Idea) and a bad thing (clueful people would find easier to recognize all the stupidity if it was all isolated in one place rather than N places). Also, with remus, stupidity is now hilghly mobile and hard to eliminate with Denial of Stupidity attacks. Indeed, SANs (Stupidity Area Networks) with virtualisation mean that stupidity will come to dominate the cybersphere, if it hasn't done already. This, unfortunately is in line with many grand challenges such as Sustainable Stupidity, and Curatable Stupidity.

I am thinking of starting a project on CAS (no not compare-and-swap - Clutching At Straws) - campaign against stupidity
but I suspect I would just get stuck in dom0 an ignored by all the Guest Operating Stupids

Virgin Neutrality is a Load of Pollocks

So the head of virgin media says net neutrality is

a load of thingummybobs

Good for him. So as anyone will say, if you run a zero sum game, you better come up trumps. So if he intends to give more to people that pay more no matter where they go to, he better be prepared to explain why he is giving less to others. An alternative model of the world is to simple give people what
their line rate indicates they should get as a proportion of any current bottleneck,
like you get (mostly) today with TCP and the current IP world. Then there is the server side - I suppose virgin (like AT&T threatened to ) are goign to ask Google and Yahoo and CNN and BBC to cough up lots otherwise they'll throttle their traffic, and oh dear, where did all their customers go....

Of course, if you want to grab headlines, then making claims based in fantasy is great, but why not have a modicum of basis for them?

How about: "Virgin will give discounts to customers whose traffic was treated worse today"...?

that might take some business off of other ISPs...

what is humanist for "thanks"?

traveling europe (as I am right now) i notice that most peole have a word for
"thanks" which derives from christian belief (thanks be to god, grazie/gracias/grace of god, or greek: EuXpharisto) - this begs the question: what did pagans and pre-christians
say? maybe nothing?
what would/should a humanist say (should they say anything?:-)

10^10 arms, wow, thats entanglement!

so according to a recent article in memory of the BBC micro (which sold 1.5M, about 10,000 more than they expected), the ARM processor shipped its 10,000,000,000
sometime in 2008

thats pretty awesome for a small UK company...

things any good (CS) lab should do

1. encourage almost ALL phd students to go on internships to industry labs at least once and possibly twice

2. have a really wide net for visiting talks which is broad church (include industry and social aspects)

3. involve PhDs in teaching and paper reviewing

4. take students and post docs out for dinner from time to time, and to the pub a lot

5. teach phds about processes (papers, PCs, conference management systems, grant applications) viz
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/jon-cfip.ppt

piety - irrational numbers and social network rganisation

pi is an interesting number - so is that fact that social groups are structured around tiers of trust, centered on each person with nearest trust group being kith and kin, and then
close friends etc...the degree of this graph is something like 3.x (e.g.
3.1415957...)
somewhere at 5 hops (3.x^5) you reach the limit of human's ability to infer intentionality

this tells us that a social networking tool (TM) should be built around making levels
and group at each power visible and should change how it supports people outside of 5 hops and groups larger than 150 or so...

i think such a tool could be called piety since that has PI in it and should be easy peasy to use

ageing (churn in friendship groups) could determine when fols are evicted from the close circle of friends into the outer darkness of cyberspace (or facebook:) and
frequency and duration of contacts (including email/IM, co-location) can be used to include people in...

coud make a nice startup:)

references for money, and conference reviews for fun

1. so here's my idea of reference writing

I only every write 3 references - the person asking me for one as to pick one of my pre-canned references, and I will only sign if it what they pick matches my belief about them - oh, and i charge 1 euro (stable currency of choice)

2. here's my idea for conference reviewing and PC management

we have PC meetings after all the reviews are written - how about we haver the meeting just after all the papers are submitted and (modulo conflicts) the pC meet to choose who reviews what - this
a) calibrates them
b) socialises them
c) load balances (from each according to her needs, to each according to his means)

then we dont need another meeting - everything else can be done online

3. choosing PCs - easy - ask potential PC members (mostly from pool of PC members from this or related conferences in previous years) to furnish th PC chairs (and conference organising ctttee if there is one) with 2 or 3 example reviews of papers accepted in previous years - these are used to judge if the potential PC members understand the job (fairness, accuracy, etc).

4. alternative, use my reference scheme above - there are only really 9 different kind of reviews (7 if you are in CS theory) so we publish those, and authors submitting papers pick which reviews they think it, and the PC reviewer signs it if she agrees, and doesn't if he disagrees.

More on Mobile Social Networks

so lots of people think social networks are worth lots of money

and lots of people think mobile phones are worth lots of money

what can you do with a mobile phone in terms of social networks

1. obvious (I wrote this ages ago) is run a browser (flock) on yr smart phone and go to a social net site
2. obvious (everyone wrote this a zillion years ago) - run a location service and map people's geo-relationships to each other or to locations or both (see MIT reality mining, Intel's project doing location service using just about anything a few years back etc etc)
3. do pocket switch net and decentralised link discovery (non obvious, but we did it in pre-haggle project work about 4-5 years back) and build temporal graph in a distributed way, then use it for
i) establishing relationships (co-lo duration and frenquency above some threshold)
ii) to actualyl forward info (person to person or pub/sub, via percolation, gossip, epidemic, but filterered by relevance (e.g. interest/tags), and by trust/tribal/dunbar/closeness etc) to get efficient delivery and focus...

This is gonna be the topic for the Million People project, and is discovery (not invention) and therefore not patentable:)

clever algorithms to make it work relaibly are more interesting though...

patention deficit disorder

Just been reading (prompted by last months CACM article) about peer to patent:

http://www.eupaco.org/
and
http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/

seems a fairly sensible movement, but really lacks teeth ...there's some
big company guns behind more large scale US federal changes

Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/mar05/03-10PatentReform.mspx

and Cisco:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/gov/markets/patent_reform.html


viz...costs keep mounting just to fight the mountains of nonsense...
and there are some recidivists
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025841

Kind of old news...but I am catching up....

for me, the key thing is that
a) software patents are silly - we have software copyright, and algorithms are discoveries and should be in the public domain as they are knowledge that underpins many things as in mathematical theorems, whereas the effort lies in turning them into useful computing products and that is supported adequately by copyright for software and patent for hardware
b) all patents should have
i) use it or lose it clauses based on reality check - does someone intend to
do something other than hold other people to ransom with their invention?
ii) lifetimes that reflect the domain of activities typical time to product, service, and profit - for example, in Internet time, this might be about 5 years - in Big Pharma, maybe 10. In vacuum cleaners, perhaps 7.

c) Clearly patent applications need testing properly by motivated experts - one trick would be to tax patent lawsuits (say 10%) and use the tax to allow the patent office to hire patent reviewers (see peer to patent above).

d) intellectual property is not a good - it has some rather different flavour; as with spectrum, and other new aspects of 21st century life, we need the law to move on from simple notions of property and commons to some wider range of notions....

to be continued... ... ...

squeezy throbbing phone skins - new idea for staying in touch

So phones vibrate - so do game console controllers - but what if they provided a "remote touch" mechanism? how hard could this be?

one end simply senses a few "pressure points" - the other end turns this into
the opposite force - a first cut at such a system would be a phone that you could "squeeze" and the phone at the other end of a call just expands a bit - so if someone has the phone in their hand, it "feels" like the remote person is squeezing their hand.
A more complex system would put the phone in a glove and have full on remote robot glove controller sensor and motors (actually you just need motors - in reverse, they work as sensors so it is really really simple to build) - there's a little bit of concern about feedback and the amount of force so the system would need to be sloppy
but that isnt too hard to design.

I wonder if there's anything out there one could adapt to this right away?

Small Worlds and Flat Earths

Reading Flat Earth News which is much better than yesterday's guardian review would have it, but not perfect - one interesting item was the use of plagiarism detection software to track where news items came from and how many of them were basically direct or close transcriptions of wire feed (AP, Reuters) stories - would be Interesting if Google were to build on this - some stories come from PR, some from real reporters, some from the public - a tool that provided a provenance tree for online information should be something easy to knock up - sort of a backwards in time, patient-zero finder, that allowed you to see if somethign was cooked up by a government Press Officer, a company
publicity dweeb, or had some basis in the real world (or even more than one).


This would also obsolete reportage:_

You could call it "newsrank", since basically it is just souped up pagerank....

feel free to pay me a small royalty for the bad idea

SybillRus - a new idea for anonimity in online social networks

oh, ok, so it aint that new an idea, but I think there is a business case for a company that provides ready-made identities (in large numbers) that look plausible, have existing interest, group membership, friendship groups etc, and slot in to facebook or myspace or any of the other social networking environments (cyberspace, we used to call it:) - recently I noticed from some friends that their facebook pages had inaccurate birthday dates -this turnbs out to be deliberate on their part (a mechanism to mitigate identity theft).

So sybilRus.com would provide lots of these - then the bad guys wouldn't know who was real and who was virtual

This idea, or something like it a lot, is also in Ben Elton's latest SciFi novel, Blind Fait, (in my opinion, a return to form by this amusing, contentious, but thoughtful satirist)...it also has some very funny reality-tv extremism...

Tiling Docking (Real and Virtual) of iPhones/Touch screen gadgets

So here's an idea I don't want anyone to patent, so I am publishing it right here, right now.

If you have a household of n people all with mp3 players with displays and phones with displays, why not have a dock for them that tiles them?

so the idea is you have n areas on a panel, and people drop their devices in their area - when all the devices are there (esp. if they are say htc tuch or iphone) you have a larger continuous area of (touch) screen - actually quite high resoluton too - so it could be your tv too...or your computer display...

you could coordinaet this either via the mirousb, or wifi or bluetooth....

it could work approximately so crowds of people could hold up their iGadget at a sports event and do a mexican wave without moving...

google crime wave

an interersting feature of large systems run by large organisations is that, somewhere, sometime, someone is going to turn out to be bad - an argument used by the security research group in cambridge against many systems that share too much data (e.g. children's data base in UK, the HMRC fiasco, the NHS patient record spine).

So to date, we havnt seen any massive abuse of google (or yahoo or hotmail) huge repository of personal data evidenced by large scale misbehaviour - why is this? the penalties for someone accepting bribes, or being blackmailed would be no higher than those for someone working for a UK government agency that abuses their access to private data.

I don't think the procedures employed by the large scale search engine/mail/socal net systems are inherently immune from misuse of power by an insider especially more than the UK governemtn's "transformational" systems - by the way, what a great phrase
transformational government is ! given what most of the attempts to federate government databases have achieved, there has surely been a transformation
from Blair to Brown....but it has largely been one of rapidly increasing entropy, as the pathetic IT-consultant-ignorati that they contract to for these giant projects screw up again and again...oh well. maybe thats it - maybe most people in yahoo and google are paid well and enjoy doing a good job too much to do a bad thing:)

virtual libraries and french literary criticism

Just finished the awesomely clever-clever, witty
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard ...

far from being a naff "self-help" "make-good" type book, this is a witty and ingineous dissection of the different ways society reads, avoids reading, and discourse about books - it could well apply to the way the scientific community works on reviewing papers too (indeed he talks about academics reviewing each others academic books). and to films, and music and so on.

each time you choose a book, you leave out 18M other books - in your life, you read a small fraction (infinitesimal ) of the available literature of the world. When you skim, you make rapid interpolations and extrapolations. once you finish reading a book, your memory plays tricks. You may remember reading books you have not read and don't even exist - indeed, I was disappointed that his discussion of imaginary books cited
I Am a Cat by Soseki Natsume, which actually does exist, rather than creating a fake book for the purpose - especially since he deliberately gets several details of other books (and films) such as The Name of the Rose and The Third Man subtly wrong to prove a point about imperfect recall, and "desired" or even "screen memory books".

everyone, especially geeky nerdy computer scientists with a literary bent, should read this...it is a hoot....ever so slightly cynical (all the examples are chosen to maximise relevance to a general argument, but then the argument is claimed to apply to everything when only extremum example are used - clearly the "norms" of reading and of virtual, screen, private, shared and other types of libraries are not the same as the extremes.

Also, annoyingly, he uses several arguments which are extremely clearly illustrated more amusingly in the Library of Bable by Jorge Luis Borges (indeed, whose is namechecked by Eco since the blind monk in the Name of the Rose - jorge of borgos- who is the crucial part of the argument about talking about books you havn't read (Aristotle's lost volume of poetics on comedy, of which Wiliam of Baskerville deduces the existence and content, and then debates with jorge, who is blind so hasnt read the book for decades and only, possibly falsely, recalls the contents).

Other Lacunae exist, where, if this was a paper submitted to a scolalry journal, I would have to ask for minor revisions...

I give this a SB++

peer assisted power over DSL

for today's lesson in green networking, I'd like to consider the problem of
heat dissipation in the PoP, and a radical new approach.

YOu;ve heard of power over ethernet? You've heard of broadband over powerline?
You've heard of Peer-assisted TV?

Well, now we propose: Peer-assisted power over DSL.

Here's how it works.

Take away power from the DSLAM from the exchange building, and provide it from the consumer side - 900 consumeers per DSLAM should be plenty to run the whole thing - as in the old days, when telephones were powered by the exchange, we can certainly run
20 milliamps at 25 volts over a few hundred meters, per consumer - easily enough.
We then put sails and solar panels on peoples houses, and voila,
entirely electrically self-sufficient broadband.

If there is a drop in wind, or a cloudy day, some users can get on an excercise bike.
others can walk up and downstairs. Others can just reduce their downloads.

By decentralising the power suply, we make it more robust, and we make it much greener as we dont have to dissipate all that heat in one place, but it is naturally dispersed by the wind (in the sails)

We can even load balance power and data - it might be possible with AC to network
code the different components in the power too, together with multipath routing of power

multihoming would have to make sure that they got the polarity right (perhaps a BGP
option could be added to convey this?)

mad world...

no, not tears for fears, or donny darko - no, the sci fi story i just remembered after someone commented that URI's have feelings too - fred pohl (I think) once described a future where science was based on electron psychology....mainly so he could get away with saying how impossible it would be for someone from the 20th century to understand. of course, we are from the 21st century, where nothing is incomprehensible, and everything is accelerando...

frankly, my pohl, after string theory, I am prepared to believe in electron fenh shui, if it passes occam's razor...

combat reductionism! [1]

bl**dy g**gle are banin on about capturing all of human thought in things called "knowl"s - obviously meant to sound like atoms of irreducible knowl-edge - but, as we all know, much really useful knowledge is holistic, and therefore not reducable to some sort of lego ball and spoke trivial model

i dunno, really!

[1] after the Marx paper, Combat Liberalism, a rant about how all liberals turn into bourgeois irrelevances)

spam from pluto

I recently gathered a large body of spam recently and sent it into the SETI@home project, and it turns out, you know what, it is from an extra-terrestrial source. Yes, Asimov was right, but not about jokes. Spam is from approximately 100 light years away - it turns out friendly aliens heard Marconi's early broadcast SOS message across the Atlantic
and realized that earthlings needed help, and so they cooked up lots of useful things like viagra and low cost loans of 25M pounds of gold from Sierra Leone, and sent off messages immediately on how to get these

the only reason that people don't get the thing they want, when they reply to spam, is that we havn't connected the internet to the Intra-Galactic Internet yet....real soon now, when the Interplanetary Internet reaches Pluto, we will be able to respond to the right email addresses and web sites - then the health and welath of the planet will be assured for the unforeseeable future.

Then you will here "this is the voice of the mysterons" coming over your skype connection loud and clear.