Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Moors law - alternative history from the Free Plotware Foundation

what if Islam had invented computers (not a crazy idea given they did zero:)

We could have fundamentalist wars (jihads) about bigendian (Sunni) and littlendian (Shia)? would we have search engines, inshallah? or enlightenment engines?

This would make a neat SF novel I think (although one might have to be a bit careful:)

Monday, September 29, 2008

The wisdom of dead crowds

bill thompson just wrote a nice article on eternity on the web, and namechecked a talk by steven johnson about the superb book, Ghost Map, which relates the history of Snow and Whitehead and their seminal comprehension of the cholera epidemic and its progress through voronoi diagrams of people's from houses with and without victims, walking distance from infected and uninfected water pumps. Johnson coined/modified the term
"the wisdom of dead crowds"

of course, being pedantic, I'd point out that the good doctor and reverend were smarter than that - they used both the living AND the dead to do the maps thus making this one of the most elegant pieces of scientific research I have ever read of.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I fought the internet law and the internet won...

web 2.0 ungovernance was what i spent monday doing - then I hopped on an easyjet hop to Nice to review Eurecom activities in researching the future (i.e. the law and the reality in one day:-) Interestingly enough a lot of the folks at the law thing seems to understand that reality is increasingly unreal...

to find out more,
read or listen here

Monday, September 22, 2008

internet of food - making it real - not just alice in wonderland:)

so imagine we have
1/ the semantic web
2/ edible RFID
3/ a complete food ontology

we should then be able to build an internet of food - as you eat something a search engine or rss feed or twitter will say, ah now, to go with that you really need
such-and-such a smoothie, or i wouldnt have anything else than sorbet for 6 hours
or ... ....

the semantic food web, embedded in reality!

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Saturday, September 13, 2008

what if...

the earth is just a library for aliens, and humans are just books they borrow to read

what would that do for your blue-eyed soul, mr death?

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

information leakage in the 21st century internet

one of today's big problems is information leakage - it is all around us - it leads to loss of privacy, identity, safety and many other rights and privileges. the big problem is unplugged Ethernet cables - every unplugged Ethernet cable can lead to 100 million bits per second of data being sprayed out willy nilly all over the shop. Indeed, an unplugged cable represents two sources of leakage - the cable and the empty socket.

one of the principal causes of cable unplugging is wireless Ethernet - people think that 11Mbps without being tethered is so much better than 100Mbps of indentured slavery. However, wireless Ethernet leads to another 11Mbps of leakage even if someone is receiving your bits. I blame data networking experts - if they'd listened to the telephone, they'd have realized that circuits are so much more secure, because everything goes around and then comes around, in a circuit - no leakage.

Clearly, one can see why there is so much misinformation and noise in the world - the immense growth in the outernet (leakage from the Internet) has completely overtaken the actual intentional transmission of meaningful information.

So that now, we are swamped with letters and phonecalls and blogs, just like this one.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

humans are just gating functions controling flow between...

I sit here staring at my laptop screen and occasionally typing - on the right of the screen is a power cable (electrons in) and on the right is an ethernet cable (electrons out).


All I do is occasionally allow some electrons in on one side, to cause some to go out on the other, depending on what the screen says and what my state is.

or thats what it might look like to some people - of course, the reverse is also true...

Friday, September 05, 2008

intensional networking....new idea?

so we have a LOT of examples of people doing stuff on the net (whether fixed or mobile, web or games) - could we not codify the patterns of use and then just optimize the hell out of the common cases - a bit like robot car painters (which are basically playbacks of tapes of humans) -

in the mobile case, for example, if you see someone's journey is the same as one of a small set of previous journey's by themself or other people, then all the congestion control, routing, handovers and radio signal stuff could just be replayed from those journeys in all the routers and switches and hosts...

mapreduce on the protocol stack...with cache prewarming:)

meanwhile, I was wondering if one could do IP over chattering teeth (i.e. people blue with cold, signalling IP packets by clicks) - blueteeth?

Thursday, September 04, 2008

why do americans write to me with a return address without USA?

indeed, why do US university and business headed notepaper not include +1 on phone/fax or USA at the end of addresses? is this arrogance or stupidity, or just that they treat these channels (like many treat email) as write-only?

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home