2015: WebEverywhere

As I have stated before, GPS-aware portable always-on internet gadgets are coming, and they are gonna change everything. Imagine this for an invention: a pair of glasses that use the already-existing technology of transparent displays to superimpose all kinds of data onto your field of vision. Now, imagine an accelerometer (like the one in the hugely cool nunchuk controller for the Nintendo Wii) built into the glasses that allows software to figure out which way you’re pointing your face. That, combined with GPS integration, allows the glasses to look exactly what parts of the world you are looking at, and from which angle.

Now, simply super-impose hyperlinks onto different objects using the transparent displays. Looking at an old cathedral, for instace, will automatically and seamlessly superimpose stuff like where a red marker where the entrance is, which way to when inside and clickable infoboxes on the stain-glass windows.

Clickable? Sure! A small webcam in the glasses records your gestures and translates you pointing at a link in your field of vision into a command to follow the link. The upshot of all this is you get to walk around and have info all over your world, which you can point at in a completely intuitive manner and get more information. It is the Completely Ubiqitous Web.  Imagine getting information abour specific products in a supermarket by clicking a box of cereal and allowing the picture recognition software in the glasses do the rest. Or point at a wall and change its color to see what it would look like. Have an online Counter-strike style game add virtual players into the real world, ducking behind objects and running down real streets. The possibilites are endless.

Just to give a more concrete example of what this kind of technology is capable of, imagine The Ultimate Sniper Rifle. It is wired up to the Web 3.0  and this is how it works: You look through the gunsite as usual, but the gunsight is actually a small LCD screen which has adjusted your aim, so you’re actually aiming at what you’re going to hit. The rifle takes the wind into account (downloaded from real-time weather reports), the direction you’re aiming (from the GPS and accelerometer) the distance to the target (acquired by bouncing off a ultrasound wave, or, if you’re cool, by wirelessly hacking into the target’s web 3.0 gadgets and getting their GPS position), the elevation needed, the humidity in the air, the coriolis effect, bla bla.. there isn’t a factor the rifle wouldn’t be able to take into account. All these factors are fed into the sight and used to adjust the image so all you need to do is line the cross-hairs up and the bullet hits the mark every damn time.

See what this can do? I say 2015 and we’re there.

Criss Angel: heralding a new style of magic?

If he is indeed ushering in a new era of magic, Criss Angel is doing no-one a favor. His style of magic is everything I hate about the world of magic shows: big special effects, ornate misdirection and very little actual skill.

When I was growing up, magic was synonymous with David Copperfield, the guy who not only got to screw Claudia Schiffer but also was the epitomy of 80’s magic. I remember being dazzled as a young boy watching him walk through the Great Wall Of China. What is more obvious to me now is that Copperfield relied on a heavy arsenal of TV special effects to do anything. The actual illusionist skill involved was at best mediocre, even if Steinmeyer and others had some clever ideas.

That’s why I love David Blaine as a magician (even though he’s a bit of a jerk as a person) because he did to magic shows what Steve Irwin did to wildlife programs: changed the rules and made them fresh and appealing again. Blaine is a skilled prestidigitarian (word of the day calendar…) and performed his tricks right in front of real people. Their reactions made the tricks much more real to us, the audience. And they were actual tricks that anyone could do with enough practice.

Now, enter Criss Angel. He takes the gigantic set-ups of the Copperfield Era and places them inside an environment that looks exactly like David Blaine’s reality. But it’s all smoke and mirrors, right down to the stunned reactions and the bleeps from his stooges. It may look amazing to the untrained eye, but to me it’s just a rather sad mockumentary-style version of a special-effects movie.

The way he bamboozles viewers is new and interesting, but I hope that actual, really talented magicians who don’t feel the need to win cheap approval with such easy trickery will still always find a way on to my TV screen.

The illusion of paradigm shifts

This graph by Ray Kurzweil illustrates his law of accelating change. which basically states that the time interval between paradigm shifts is decreasing. This idea has alarm bells ringing in my head. Surely we see the recent past with a higher resolution than older times, and therefore more paradigm shifts will be visible closer to today than a long time back. Furthermore, things that happened in 1300 which seemed revolutionary and paradigm-shifting in 1320 may seem meaningless today. Who’s to say that the impressive-looking graph isn’t simply the result of these results?

Well, me. I do believe that there is an objective reason to think that such an acceleration is taking place; but simultaneously, I think the concept of paradigm shifts is over-rated.

Allow me to introduce a metaphor. Each tiny little step of progress in the combined field of human knowledge is represented with a single grain of sand, falling into a large box. The box itself is simply our world-view at a given time - our current paradigm. The grains that fall outside the box make no sense to us and the flow of those grains will dry up pretty quickly (if they occur at all). The grains that fall inside the box slowly fill the box up.

Now, the amount of grains being produced has something to do with the amount of questions that can be asked, and the amount of work put into finding an answer. Both these amounts increase with each falling grain of sand, because humanity’s desperate need to communicate is leading to ever-more efficient scientific work – and it’s a well-known principle of science that each answer invariably gives birth to new questions (switching metaphors, the old image of knowledge being an inflating ball in the dark void of ignorance, the surface of the ball, which represent the questions that can be asked but we don’t have an answer to, grows as the volume of the ball grows).

 The flow of sand, thus, increases over time, creating a genuine “accelerating knowledge” effect. And what happens is that as the box begins to get filled up, more grains start spilling over outside the box, hinting at something larger than our world-view, until the box is completely buried and we encase the entire system in a new, larger box. What happened here is that we, seemingly instantly, revised our fundamental world view, which is exactly what a paradigm shift is. But there is something rather inevitable about such a shift because the box will fill up sooner or later. The shift itself may be very noticable, but it is a symptom of our limited ability to create world-views rather than something deep and important.

This means, in conclusion, that paradigm shifts will probably appear to happen faster and faster as time goes by, giving the Kurzweilian “accelerating change” effect. But far more interestingly to me is the “accelerating knowledge acquisition” which causes the change. This is where we need to be lookin’.

How To Export Democracy Properly

The western world, it seems, seems duty-bound to “show less developed societies the way” and foist the grand scheme of democracy upon them. The problem is that usually, it doesn’t work – peoples given the new right to vote for whoever they wish generally vote despotic rulers into office who prompty take the rights away again. Why is that? Why is democracy such a hard sell?

It may be difficult for us Westerners to appreciate, but the idea that all adults have a say in running the country is not universally revered. In fact, regarding people as having rights just because they are people is not the way many countries do things. And I’m not talking evil leaders here; I mean the people themselves don’t see their compatriots as deserving rights. It certainly wasn’t the Western way of doing things until the Enlightenment. In feudal times,  your responsibilities were directed straight upwards to your boss, and so on, up through the hierarchies and ending in the king. You had no expectancies or responsibilities to people on the same level as yourself. In such a society, why should anyone give other people on the same level any automatic privileges? It only is a detriment to yourself to do so.

If you have such a society, there is no way democracy will take root. A prerequisite for democracy is the IDEA that people have human rights. And how does such an idea take hold?

It will take hold, I believe, if there are enough people susceptible to the idea .One enlightened soul in a Dark Age society will achieve nothing, but if there is enough reason in the population at large, the idea will take hold and spread, causing a gradual shift to Enlightenment-style values.

So the whole problem of democracy-seeding comes down to determining if a population is ready for the idea that humans can have rights. And how is this done?

Here’s my suggestion. I propose that people will be ready to make the shift from subservience to Enlightenment when their dependencies to other people change. Cynically speaking, if other people have no value to you as a person, you won’t care about their rights. If, on the other hand, the well-being of other people is directly connected to your own, you’ll be acting in your own self-interest if you supported the other people’s rights.

Imagine a society, society A, where every citizen is placed in a strict top-down hierarchy. The ultra-feudal society. In society A, there are no lateral dependencies, and a citizen will be prone to consider other people as meaningless to his own existence. Drawing a diagram of Society A would look something like an upside-down family tree, with the king at the top, and branching out from there.

Now imagine society B, where the dependencies between people is completely decentralised. Everyone is connected to other people, but there are no “bosses” as such, and no chains of command. In this society, every citizen is highly dependent on lots of other people in a variety of ways. The diagram of society B would look more like the internet connection diagrams, but even more interconnected and web-like. (The linked diagram clearly has heirarchical structures).

Based on my hypothesis above, society A would have no interest in an Enlightenment, and society B would be incredibly eager to embrace the idea. Let us imagine an Enlightenment Index (EI) which assigns a number value to a society, which measures the extent of non-heirarchical connections within the society. Society A would be given an EI of 0, and society B gets an EI of 100.  There will be some sort of EI “magic number” where enlightenment ideals will suddenly take hold of a country, driving forward a revolution, and ultimately, democracy.

How to measure the EI of a given society in practice? Luckily, the sociological science of social network analysis combined with the mathematical ideas of graph theory already provides all the tools for this sort of numerical analysis – they just need to be combined. As a very simplistic idea, one could count the number of truly independent job providers in a society, i.e. “the bosses who work for no-one but themselves”. The more of those a society has, the less heirarchical it must be. Similar analyses could be made on service providers, market saturation etc. etc. I’m just trying to show that this is not a completely pie-in-the-sky idea.

So let’s imagine that we’ve calculated EI for all the nations of the world. (Mapped with colors onto Google Earth for coolness, of course). The non-democracies with the highest scores will take the least amount of prodding and de-heirarchization by the Exporters Of Democracy to send them over the revolutionary edge.

And, in my book, that beats four years of stupid war any day of the week.

Terrible album covers

Imagine you’ve made an album. A lot of work has been put into writing, recording, mixing and producing it, and now you need the perfect cover to top it all off. Here is how not to do that.

How to build a working replicator

Imagine a world where it is possible to download a blueprint from the internet of whatever you wanted and have a Replicator print the object out for you, in a way where it is undistinguishable from the real thing.

This, I think we all agree, would be pretty cool. The Next Big Thing.

So, how would you do it? Well, first we need to assess how much data would be needed to form the blueprint. In order for the print to be perfect, it needs to be done with atomic-level precision.  Worst-case scenario, we would have to specify the correctly ionized isotope of every single atom in the doohickey we’re duplicating. Since anything interesting will contain in the order of at least 10.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 atoms, (1E23) these are our storage demands:

For simplicity, imagine that our thingumajig is a perfect cube consisting of 1E24 atoms, i.e. 1E8 atoms on each side. Each atom would be indexed with three coordinates, each ranging from 0 to 1E8. 1E8 is roughly the same as 2^27, so any coordinate will sit comfortably within 32 bits of information, or 4 bytes. The coordinates thus require 3*4 = 12 bytes plus another 4 bytes to store information about the atom number, isotope and ionization status. So, 16 bytes per atom and 1E24 atoms gives us 1.6E25 bytes or 1.600.000.000.000 terabytes of information.

Of course, this is uncompressed, and any reasonably efficient compression algorithm looking for crystalline structures etc. would probably be able to compact the information a LOT, but even by compressing to a billionth of the uncompressed size still leaves us with 1600 TB of data, just for a doohickey containing the equivalent of about 20 grams of carbon.

At a 4 Mbit cable internet connection,  this would take 3200000000 seconds or a bit more than 100 years to download.

Next thing we need is a way to rebuild from the data. If our printer is charged up with appropriate quantities of all elements, it’s just a question of nano-robots building the desired thing, following the blueprint. But this gives manufacturers a fail-safe piracy guard: build your hardware containing an abundant, but market-restricted element which costs a fortune for private people to buy, but not for the company.

To circumvent this pesky situation (and to make a replicator that doesn’t need filling up with hydrogen and silicium every other day) we need to make a cooler device: one which creates the nessecary atoms from energy. You thought 1.600 TB of data was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet!

To return to our hypothetical object with 1E24 atoms, let’s assume an average atomic weight of 10 units. This is probably being generous (that makes the object weigh less than 2 grams), but let’s assume. A combined mass of 0.00166053886 u corresponds to an energy requirement (using Einstein’s famous E=mc^2) of 1.49E14 joules.

A barrel of oil contains 6.12E9 joules, so we’re gonna need roughly 25.000 barrels of oil to create two grams of matter. At today’s prices, we’re talking about 2 million dollars worth of oil.

100 years of download time and 2 million dollars to create a small cube? It ain’t worth it.

Then again, the internet itself was exactly as implausible 100 years ago… so who knows?

How To Make P2P Filesharing Free And Legal

I propose a system, dubbed AHERO (because the world needs AHERO)

In the AHERO network, record companies, movie studios, TV networks etc, place their digital content for paid download.

Let’s follow a DVD movie for download and say, for the sake of argument, that the movie studio wants $10 for the movie. A person, Mr. X, pays $10 in AHERO credits and downloads this movie from the studio’s server. Once Mr. X has downloaded the movie, he makes it available for download to other AHERO users, P2P-style. Another downloader, Mr. Y, downloads the movie from Mr. X and pays Mr. X $10 in AHERO credits for the movie which Mr. X passes, automatically, back to the movie studio. Now, here’s the trick. Since Mr. X really performed a service for the movie studio by distributing the movie to an end customer by using his own bandwidth and electricity and thereby without using any of the studio’s resources, the movie studio can reasonably pay Mr. X a certain amount for performing this service. Let’s say that Mr. X is paid $1 for this distributing service.

In practice, all that happens is:Mr. Y pays $10, $9 goes directly to the content owner, and $1 goes to the person he downloads from.

Now, if Mr. X allows 9 more users to download the movie, he has earned $10 by selling his distribution service, and he can spend that money on buying another movie to distribute. As long as he uploads more than he downloads, he can download free, legal content.

Now, the amount of bytes uploaded and downloaded in total are the same, so some people will have to download more than they upload. These people simply buy AHERO credits and purchase the content as if it were a normal download store (except the network is massively distributed and hugely redundant, which means incredibly fast download times), The people who want free content simply pay with their upload bandwidth.

The content owner wins, because his content is hosted on a large-scale distributed network, so his stuff can be downloaded without him having to worry about server load etc.

The distributing user wins because he gets free and legal content.

The non-distributing user wins because the network is highly reliable and non-centered.

 I say we build this thing.

(By attaching a monetary value to each block of, say, 32 bytes, distributed swarm BitTorrent-style networks would work in the same way. You’d get paid a percentage of the distribution amount equal to the percentage of the file you’ve uploaded.)

  

Is there a racial difference after all?

First up: I am completely aware that the colour of your skin does not predetermine your personality or abilities in the slightest. We are all in possession of essentially the same brain, so you’re not going to hear me saying that there is ANY biological difference in our merit as human beings.

Any such difference would have to be cultural. And this is where I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate to the whole MTV-generation “we are all identical” ethos. I propose that there is a valid reason to view black people in the USA as a different sort of people than white people.

What? Has Coynil gone mad? Probably, but that’s a whole other post. For now, consider this: if you are a completely black person in the USA (i.e. with no non-african genes), both your parents were black, all four of your grandparents were black, all eight of your great-grandparents were black, etc. Now, since we are about five generations removed from the abolition of slavery, there has been 32 free black people and no-one else working to create you, the perfectly black contemporary US citizen.  

Is that a problem? No. But it does smack of “sticking with your own kind”. There are countless mixed-race americans, who are the offspring of interracial unions. But the 32 people involved in making our black citizen did not mix races.

My assertion is that somewhere along these generational lines, there must be a strong family sense of “being black” and “don’t mix”, which is passed from parent to child. Otherwise, there would probably be a white person somewhere in the 32. So, our black US citizen, through no fault of his own, has ended up in a family where he will inadvertantly learn to stick to his own race.

Contrasting this with a person of mixed racial heritage who most often is proud of his genetic diversity, I would say that, yes, there is a difference in the way that these two kinds of people can be expected to behave. Is it worth looking into, sociologically? I don’t know. It was just a thought.

Of course, I am being provocative by taking the black man in the US as an example. Any ethnic minority group can be substituted, and the argument still holds – scandinavians in Minnesota, Italians in New York, Kurds in Iraq…

 Anyway, please comment and convince me that I’ve overlooked something. I don’t really believe in this line of thinking myself, but I am compelled to put it out there and let it float.

Who would win in a fight: God or Allah?

I was asked this question today. My answer (“there is only one answer to that question”) got a highly charged reaction, and I was called everything from bigot to anti-islamist to “hater”.

Of course, there is only one answer to that question, but some people don’t seem to know it. So here’s a crash course in Ambrahamic Religion 101: God and Allah are the same entity. I don’t mean that in any vague “there can only be one God” way, I mean that scripturally, Allah *is* Yahweh, the god of the Jews and the Christians. Islam and Christianity are simply two different daughter religions from the Jewish religion.

Any muslim knows this, of course, since Abraham, Moses and Jesus are important prophets in Islam. But a shocking number of Christians seem to be completely unaware that Islam and Christianity are related in a way a bit like Catholicism and Protestantism – two versions of the same basic religion.

The sooner people realize this, the sooner it will dawn on people that the whole “my god versus your god” is ridiculous. It just gives the contrasting cultures in East and West more reasons to fight. Quit it.

Why islamophobes should build mosques

There is yet again a flurry of angry voices against building mosques in European cities. It really is hard for me to understand this. People are afraid of a radicalized muslim population living down the road, and who wouldn’t be? I wouldn’t like to share a postcode with Osama. But not building mosques is not going to keep that from happening.

Here’s the newsflash: muslims are living, meeting and praying in your local cities, right now. That isn’t going to change. It’s as if people think that if you refuse to build a mosque, the muslims will scurry away and leave you with an Aryan Homeland. Of course not. People also seem to think that all muslims are just itching to get fundamentalist and start spouting jihads. This isn’t true either.

If you are worried about turning muslims into terrorists, I would try to AVOID marginalizing them and forcing them to meet in secret prayer rooms where they can stew together over the intolerance of the west.

 Not accepting the actions of moderate muslims is a recipe for making fundamentalists. It’s as simple as that.

So build the mosques, get over yourself, and you might even learn to like the look of them one day.