...more recent posts
Here's a link to the Foresight Institute's Engines of Creation 2000 Confronting Singularity conference page. The conference is happening next weekend. The page outlines some of the thinking behind the event. Here's a blurb:
In the next one-to-three decades we expect to see these capabilities:
"strong" nanotechnology
genetic engineering of humans
the end of aging
advanced machine intelligence (call it what you will)
encrypted private currencies
thorough surveillance and sensing, able to detect what you ate,drank, and smoked last night
bio/chem/nano weapons of mass destruction
human civilization expanding into space
Such a future is so different from human history that we can barely imagine it. Some call it a "Singularity" beyond which our best projections are useless...
Heady stuff from some very well respected researchers.
I am having some email problems today. Try my inch account if you need to get me.
Apparently, the U.S. had plans to detonate a huge nuclear explosion on the moon in the late fifties in order to demonstrate their military power, and one-up the successful Soviet space program. In an effort to cut down on my ranting I'm not going to say anything more about this one (except that some of these people are still in power, and they need not to be.)
I bought David Chalmers book "The Conscious Mind" when it came out in 1996. It was right up my alley, but frankly, just a little too hard. A lot of the science got pretty technical, and my schooling was all on the philosophy side. But Chalmers is a philosopher, and those parts of the book where he actually makes his argument (especially the concluding chapter) really made a huge impact on me. Still, I was always a little frustrated at not being able to digest the whole thing. A few days ago I found this link to a paper he wrote that is like a shorter version of the book. All the philosophy, without all of the backing scientific examples. Now, don't get me wrong, this guy is out of his mind smart, and he's very deep into a highly specialized field full of jargon, so I can't exactly recommend this as a quick read. Probably it's not even interesting. But if you happen to like any of the more popular people in the field (like maybe Daniel Dennet) then Chalmers is where to go from there. He is laying the groundwork for the type of thinking that will be needed to tackle the questions our technology, and especially our information processing systems, are going to present. And oh yeah, I found the link through a review on Hedweb in which the reviewer finds him both lazy and facile. Well, I wonder what he'd make of me, because I think Chalmers is hard at work on something very ambitious.
Another security hole exposed - this time in Navigator. Apparently, the way Navigator validates SSL sessions is not totally secure. It's not generally as bad as the IE cookie problem, but it's a problem nonetheless (and possibly it's worse in a very circumscribed set of circumstances.) It's not as bad becasue a) it is very difficult to exploit this problem and b) the problem is already fixed in the latest 4.73 version of Navigator. If you use Netscape (especially when making secure e-commerce connections over https:,) go download the latest version!
Free software philosophy trying to sprout geo-political wings. I don't know if it will fly, but I like the sound of this.
Outrage in the Blogger world. Apparently it's true. Mattel is going to try to take this domain away from Matt Lavallee. When I first heard this I absolutely did not believe it. Not the kind of did not believe it like "oh my god, I don't believe it" but the kind like, "that can't be true, I'm not going to fall for that put on." How can a company Mattel, sue a person over an obviously personal, non commercial site because the url is mattl.com? Especially since that's his name: Matt L. So evidently, by Mattel's reasoning, copyrights cover all similar sounding words or phrases, even when used in contexts where no possible confusion could occur. As Matt himself said: "...put simply:OMFG." He promises to post the text of the cease and desist letter tomorrow.
I've been saying it for a few months: wrist watches are almost getting good enough. Here's the latest. Very Dick Tracy. (via, cockybastard, where I had never visited, but since he won the webby for best personal site, I gave him a look see.)
It's anti-microsoft day at barbelith and whatever they say goes (if Grant Morrison hung out on your site, I'd believe what you said too.) Although, actually, I haven't been reading barbelith every day, so I nicked this from rasterweb (which I do read every day.) Anyway, I'm joining in.
So there.
Today's photo is a shot of the mir space station in orbit. The Russians are preparing for a spacewalk in which they will try to patch some exterior cracks with some sort of glue. Story and photo from the BBC. Not much of a story really, but I love the way the American media always refers to mir with a little snicker, like it's some antiquated bucket of scrap metal floating around up there. And while it is true that it is very old, and most of us have more computing power on our desks than it has in total, the mere (mir?) fact that it's still up there is an amazing testament to some seriously quality engineering. And on an unrelated side note, what is that line in Dylan's Visions of Johanna that always sounds to me like: "She's delicate, she seems like the (Mir?)/ but she just makes it all too concise and too clear/ that Johannas not here..." I know it's not 'Mir' but I always think of it that way.