...more recent posts
IBM, and Altavista have combined on a web mapping project. One of the more cartoon like results is featured as today's picture. Here's a short explanation from the IBM site:
Our analysis reveals an interesting picture (Figure 9) of the web's macroscopic structure. Most (over 90%) of the approximately 203 million nodes in our crawl form a single connected component if hyperlinks are treated as undirected edges. This connected web breaks naturally into four pieces. The first piece is a central core, all of whose pages can reach one another along directed hyperlinks -- this "giant strongly connected component" (SCC) is at the heart of the web. The second and third pieces are called IN and OUT. IN consists of pages that can reach the SCC, but cannot be reached from it - possibly new sites that people have not yet discovered and linked to. OUT consists of pages that are accessible from the SCC, but do not link back to it, such as corporate websites that contain only internal links. Finally, the TENDRILS contain pages that cannot reach the SCC, and cannot be reached from the SCC. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that the size of the SCC is relatively small -- it comprises about 56M pages. Each of the other three sets contain about 44M pages -- thus, all four sets have roughly the same size.
O.K., I finally read that feed piece about weblogs. Dave and Alex both told me to, but I guess we all take our own time. Right on, though, I think.
Very interesting piece at the EETimes about the cable industry adopting MPEG-4 as their streaming media standard (over closed proprietary systems from microsoft, real and apple.) Sounds like some good thinking. I like this part: "...with channels 1 to 300 dedicated to broadcasting digital TV programs and channels 301 to 3 million [reserved] for streaming high-quality video on demand." I can hear it now, "Please tune in to channel one million seven hundred and fifty thousand four hundred and twenty three..."
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.