...more recent posts
I cooked dinner again last night. That's four times this past week, which is quite a change. Very satisfying. And it's hard to beat the price. I'm going to try to keep this up. It feels healthy. Mentally. I'll probably start wishing for a garden soon. Somebody stop me....
I just got an email that consisted of an embedded voice message. I hadn't seen this yet. This companies technology was involved. The mail seemed to suggest I needed to download and install something (yeah, right) but it worked without doing anything in mail.app on OS X 10.2. Just click play.
This is one example of a larger and more complex issue: voice over IP (VOIP.) Clay Shirkey explains why the telecoms are doomed. I can't wait.
Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory is the coolest thing I've found in a long time. Maybe ever. It's defended by David Deutsch here, and that's probably as good a starting point as any.
The key discovery in the omega-point theory is that of a class of cosmological models in which, though the universe is finite in both space and time, the memory capacity, the number of possible computational steps and the effective energy supply are all unlimited. This apparent impossibility can happen because of the extreme violence of the final moments of the universe's Big Crunch collapse.In Tipler's theories, intelligent beings (like humans) are not epiphenomenon, but are instead required by the laws of physics. They are required so that the collapsing universe can be "steered" along the correct course to result in an approach to the Omega Point (singularity) in which the universe becomes an infinitely powerful computer.
The stabilization procedures, and the accompanying knowledge-creation processes, will all have to be increasingly rapid until, in the final frenzy, an infinite amount of both occur in a finite time. We know of no reason why the physical resources should not be available to do this, but one might wonder why the inhabitants should bother to go to so much trouble. Why should they continue so carefully to steer the gravitational oscillations during, say, the last second of the universe? If you have only one second left to live, why not just sit back and take it easy at last? But of course, that is a misrepresentation of the situation. It could hardly be a bigger misrepresentation. For these people's minds will be running as computer programs in computers whose physical speed is increasing without limit. Their thoughts will, like ours, be virtual-reality renderings performed by these computers. It is true that at the end of that final second the whole sophisticated mechanism will be destroyed. But we know that the subjective duration of a virtual-reality experience is determined not by the elapsed time, but by the computations that are performed in that time. In an infinite number of computational steps there is time for an infinite number of thoughts - plenty of time for the thinkers to place themselves into any virtual-reality environment they like, and to experience it for however long they like. If they tire of it, they can switch to any other environment, or to any number of other environments they care to design. Subjectively, they will not be at the final stages of their lives but at the very beginning . They will be in no hurry, for subjectively they will live for ever. With one second, or one microsecond, to go, they will still have 'all the time in the world' to do more, experience more, create more - infinitely more - than anyone in the multiverse will ever have done before then.Here's an interview from transhumanism.com. And here's his disinfo page with lots more links.
I think I'll need infinite time to understand all this suff.
MB did some graphic work for a fabric company and they sent us a mattress pad made out of a new material. It's called Outlast adaptive comfort.
Probably you won't believe me, as I wouldn't have believed anyone claiming that a mattress pad can change your life. But it's true.
You lay down on it, and for several minutes you can feel it pulling heat out of your body. But then it reaches temperature equilibrium, and it holds you there. All night. External temperature fluctuations be damned.
So what? Well, I didn't realize it until I started sleeping on this thing, but the main reason I would wake up in the middle of the night was to rearrange the covers because I was either too hot or too cold. But no longer. Seriously. I sleep right through now. And long. Twelve hours is no problem. This stuff is going to put a hurt on productivity like nothing since tetris. And I say bring it on.
Everybody can use good night's sleep.
You can watch Steve Jobs and his amazing reality distortion field today at noon eastern time.
This page isn't off to a great start in 2003. Neither am I for that matter, although I don't know what I have to complain about. I was melancholy in the days leading up to new year's eve, and despite that night actually turning out to be quite fun, I seem to have picked up where I left off once the party landed.
I need some sort of change. Not sure yet what this will entail. Luckily my life is such that making a change isn't precluded by too much. It's just making a choice that is difficult. Or assembling the choices. Or something.
One problem is that I spent an entire evening reading the development mailing list at the OSAF. This should probably get a whole post of it's own. But a quick statement of the result for me is that I should probably wait until Chandler ships (and I learn Python) before I move my personal software projects forward. If it turns out like I suspect there won't be any point in developing weblogging (knowledge management, personal info management, p2p information sharing, groupware, collaborative ware, etc...) applications that aren't built on Chandler.
So I think I'd like to turn my attention somewhere else for a few months and wait for that situation to shake out. I'm picking my head up a bit, and looking around, and hoping for some synchronistic collision with something other. I'd be interested if this didn't involve the web at all, but who knows? Probably I'll keep up some sort of lame infrequent stream of haphazzard posts here. This way, at least, you can be as confused about me as I am.
[update: I had the development mailing list link wrong. Fixed now.]
You've got blog. AOL ready to offer weblogging tools to their subscribers. Ev is a little skeptical:
My guess is that they will release something called blogs, or some derivative of the term, in a few months (not February), which won't seem like weblogs as most of us know them. They'll co-opt the term to rehash something they already have, with a new coat of paint. I'm not sure whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing.
The Wireless Commons Manifesto. This sounds like what I believe, although I wonder if leaving out some of the utopian language might be more effective? Still, I don't mind that sort of talk myself. I'll be watching where this one goes. The Community Wireless Definition is certainly right on the money.
Anybody else here those helicopters all night? Nothing in the news today...