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August 25, 2003
AKMA’s back and reflecting on topics roiling his church. Fascinating.
In the comments, Jonathon Delacour asks if students are arriving in seminaries knowing less and less about Scriptural issues, then what is it that they know more and more about?
July 8, 2003
The ubiquitous Joi Ito has initiated an IRC chat that has lots of people on it. Start up your IRC client, got to freenode and join #joiito. See you there.
Freelists.org is in bad shape. A lightning bolt on July 4 melted its server. They need hardware and money. Freelists has provided sophisticated mailing list services for free to tech newsletters (including mine). If you use Freelists or just want to support some Good Guys of the Net, check their home page to see what you can do.
Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google, looks like he may be giving the same talk he gave at O’Reilly Emerging Technology, in which case I have already blogged it here.
Preemptive blogging!
Q: What about image search?
A: Most image search engines just look at the text on the page. The ability to recognize objects in images isn’t ready for prime time.
Q: What about Blogger?
A: (Sergei Brinn) We’ve been focused on getting the new release of Blogger out. You’ll see more innovation.
Clay begins by reminding us of the French “green screen” system, Minitel. When it was created, it was the right answer. The Internet made it the wrong answer that “cost them an enormous cycle of innovation.” “Our Minitel is twisted pair” and is all the policies that say that it’s a good idea to run a circuit-switched, metered, analog, voice-optimized network.
The situation is dire. But why aren’t more people up in arms about it? One reason: our habitual techno-optimism. Engineers see two entities: the network and the things plugged into it. We have incredible PCs and unimaginable lengths of fiber. But politically we are in a three entity world: netword, edge, phone company (i.e., “the people engaged in monopoly rent extraction for the twisted pair that goes into your basement”). The separation between local and long distance has created a gap: a “creamy” core of fiber and a “crunchy” shell of copper going to your house. We have a zone of high speed connectivity in the home (e.g., plug your camera into your PC) and a zone of high speed connectivity in the core connected by a thin line of copper.
Why do the phone companies stifle innovation? They’re just responding to business conditions. Clay uses Vonage (a voice over IP system) and three months later cancelled his long distance carrier. The erosion of voice traffic is a death knell because they lose $2 of voice revenue for every $1 of IP they sell a customer. Clay says he thus disagrees with Reed: the incumbents can’t be protected.
What to do about this? Clay doesn’t know. As long as IP is the third rail — as soon as the phone company touches IP, their revenues fall faster than costs because vboice revenues are artificially high — the phone companies will fight innovation. “If we do nothing, nothing will happen”: nirvana for incumbents.
There are only two ways out of this, says Clay. 1. Functional competition. 802.16, powerline Internet, municipal fiber to the home, etc. Clay isn’t optimistic about any of these within 5 years. 2. Change the regulatory environment, which is tough in this company. “We’ll let shoe stores fail. We’ll let drugstores fail.” But we won’t let agriculture fail and we can’t imagine a country in which the telephone company fails. “Challenges to the phone companies are viewed as scams.” They should be force to account on replacement value.
There’s always option 3: stagnation. We are below #15 in growth of high speed access. We are fallling behind because we don’t have the political will to connect center to edge directly. The political shape (3-entity) is more important than the engineering shape (2-entity). We aren’t going to get there soon because twisted pair is our Minitel.
Q: Multi-terabyte storage changes everything.
A: Yup.
Notable quote: “You run into a restaurant and say that you’re going to get French fries off the menu. You’ll call them ‘freedom fries.’ But you forget that it’s still called a ‘restaurant’ and it’s still called a ‘menu.'”
July 5, 2003
Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport, is going to spend $1.5M wifi-ing three terminals of the airport. From the article in the Globe, it sounds like this will be pay-per-hour for airport passengers. (I read the article quickly so I may have gotten this wrong.)
Why does it cost so much to do wifi the terminals?
Glenn “Where’s the Wire” Fleishman answers the question.
July 2, 2003
I’m going to be on the first hour of The Connection on Thursday morning, talking about spam. The show was prompted in part by a commentary by Adam Hanft – who is also going to be on the show – on Marketplace, which you can listen to here. I disagree with it a lot, although I am firmly uncommitted on its main call for action: whether spam should be legislated against or left to the market to handle.
Richard Smith, who tracked down the Melissa virus creator and caught the hands of Microsoft, RealNetworks and DirecTV in the privacy cookie jar, now has discovered that the Blair administration has been lying about how its Iraqi WMD info got, um, adjusted. The background, from Richard:
Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq’s security and intelligence organizations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.
As Michael O’Connor Clarke writes:
As you’ll probably recall – when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM’s office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.
The Blairies posted the document to the Web as a Word file. Smith looked inside and saw that Word had automatically tracked the changes made by four named users. As Michael says: “…as Richard’s excellent digging reveals – far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together.”
Michael’s done his own detective work on a different topic. Having noticed several sites that babble like a brook, he decided to check who owns them. He finds links to Scientology. Yikes.
This reminds me of the shortwave radio stations that do nothing but read lists of random-sounding numbers.
June 28, 2003
[Jason was a researcher on historical and philosophical topics for the NKS book.]
He starts by talking about what NKS says about Free Will. Wolfram isn’t claiming that free will is impossible or natural. It’s a much more limited claim than that, directed against the spontaneity position and the behaviorist position. Spontaneity: Will is uncaused. Behaviorism: There’s a simple scheme for representing what wills do. Both too easily conflate being free and being unpredictable. Wolfram’s found a wedge between determinism and predictability. Wills are more unpredictable than behaviorists think. But will’s unpredictability doesn’t mean that it’s undetermined. Unpredictability is built into the system because of the system’s complexity. One should read that section of NKS as arguing against those two positions more than as establishing a positive doctrine of free will.
As a person, Wolfram is committed to determinism. But he doesn’t think that he’s proven it or that it follows from NKS. He thinks NKS makes determinism more plausible but doesn’t prove it.
Q: [Me] If we’re computationally equivalent to Rule 110 and all other such systems, then what distinguishes intellligent systems?
A: Not their cleverness, but there are other factors.
Q: Then how can you talk about FW without talking about the factors specific to systems that have will?
A: Wolfram is making a more limited claim. He’s talking about one piece of evidence — unpredictability — that’s been used by various FW theories.
Q: Shouldn’t he be talking about subjective vs. objective?
A: Complexity is independent of whether you’re inside or outside the system.
Q: In a note, he mentions Augustine. Where’s God in this?
A: [I suspect that Jason wrote the note] Religions are heterogeneous when it comes to the FW question. He talks about Augustine because Augustine tried to put together FW and predestination. Augustine distinguishes between what’s knowable to us and to God. This lines up with what’s subject to computation; you get the same sort of seems-free-to-us vs. seems-not-free-to-God viewpoint.
Just as Wolfram has presented open problems in NKS, Jason has open problems in philosophy for us, particularly for philosophy of science.
Q: [Me] What about the scope of NKS? Is it an ontology? Doesn’t it seem tied to the happenstanace that we have computers and thus is simply a way of seeing the world, especially since Wolfram rightly says that a model always leaves something out and is something of a political decision?
A: He certainly likes to make heroic generalizations. Theoretical physicists like to stick their necks out and let others show them wrong. He has an ontology that says you can get everything as an emergent property of space. That’s his intuition because he gets so much from what’s simple. He has a philosophy of pure form. How can he know? He doesn’t much care.
Q: [Me] But doesn’t this prove that McLuhan was right and we see our world through our technology?
A: Sure, but when new tech comes along, we don’t throw out the previous insights. We still incorporate what we see through telescopes. [Yeah, but revolutions do occur that re-do the fundaments.]
Q: Does he avoid using the term “emergence” because thinks simplicity and complexity are the same? Because he thinks emergence implies the properties aren’t there at the beginning?
A: He thinks “emergence” is a buzz word. And it’s present in the system from the beginning of its complexity.
Q: When you think about philosophers, which one strikes you as being Wolframian?
A: Hmm. Plato, because of his focus on forms. But Plato thought the forms had to be less detailed and specific than their instances, whereas Wolfram is all about seeing the complexity of forms. [I think he’s more like Hegel in the Logic, deriving everything from the simplest of starting points.
I left the conference after this session because I have some family stuff and because the rest is almost all too technical for me.
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