No more daylog

I’m sick of this “daylog” thing and I don’t know low LJers can stand to do what they do. It’s a boring chore that I doubt anyone reads anyway. I’m gonna switch it to “Currently” which is what it was originally going to be, a little blurb about what I’m currently reading, watching, etc. that is updated as the situation warrants.

I’ll move all the current daylog entries into the “personal” section.

Calls for Blair to quit – Disasterous local council election results for Labour. MP Clare Short joined the attack, saying: “I think that the electorate is sending a message to Tony Blair. What we did in Iraq has brought disgrace and dishonour on Britain.

A common retort when people start taking about the risks of nanotechology (manipulating matter on the atomic scale) is saying something to the effect of:

Look at it this way – we have self-replicating nano-bots right now – they are called bacteria. Have they turned the world into gray goo in runaway exponential growth? Are we going to be able to make more efficient nano-bots than mother nature has done in the last 4 billion years?

The answer, of course, is yes. Here was the response to that Slashdot post, which was, unlike the parent, not modded up as “Insightful”:

We can build machines that fly faster and higher than any bird, that can travel over land and water faster than any animal, that can see and hear better than any living thing, that can survive higher and lower temperatures than any living thing, etc.

Yes, I think it could happen.

Your argument is stupid. Evolution is not about an intelligent attempt to create the best thing possible, it is about a random attempt to create something that will survive better then the things around it. There is a difference.

09 June 2004

Down time at work until Monday or so. Left early, sat around in the heat at home in a stupor. Eventually got up to go to Lizzy’s, but the elements worked against me, culminating in pouring rain as I arrived. Cleared up a few hours later and I went home. Chatted with the parents and read about the Tony’s before sleep.

Jane

Anyone here an Ender’s fan? So Ender Wiggin’s got this earring thingy with which he communicates to an entity known as Jane, an intelligent being trapped in a computer network, but, for our purposes, just another pseudo-intelligent computer system (today we call them AIs). Ender and Jane have discussions, she pipes in when he needs things — often pre-emptively, performs valuable functions for him like his banking, travel plans, and the like, and is all around a useful thing to have around.

But she isn’t around, is she? She’s off in the ether somewhere, in a computer network. Ender isn’t carrying Jane, he’s carrying a high-tech, always-on, super-sensing cell phone.

I haven’t talked about it lately, but for years I have been looking forward to the day of pervasive computing, generally embodied in the idea of the wearable computer. A completely personalized, customized, always-on, always-there personal agent that knows as much about you as you do yourself, that is completely patterned to your mental process, that senses where you are and what you are doing and why. It records your life, annotates, cross-references, and, just when you most need it (even if you don’t know it), it pops up with a perfectly relevent and important bit of information.

There is more to this vision, but that’s enough for now.

Does the wearable really need to be on your body at all? Do we need to worry about power usage, “personal networks,” distributed processing, and the like? Or does the advent if high-performance packet radio (i.e. cellular phone and data networks), coupled with WiFi, Bluetooth, and all the rest of it, give us an easier solution? Sure I still need the miniature sensor package, the heads-up display embeded in my glasses, the tiny clip-on video camera, and whatever other accessories I choose to use, but I don’t need the central unit to be anywhere near me. As long as I’m in range of some kind of radio network — and the system will be able to sense which, like a tri-band phone — I’m pretty much set.

Let’s make this a reality, folks!

I laughed out loud when I heard this on my radio stream this morning:

Morning Edition continues on KCRW, where more Southern California public radio listeners go to get their news

Gee, who could they possibly be targeting?

08 June 2004

Finished up some new web designs. Read about OpenACS. Spent a couple hours beginning to demolish a wooden kiosk. Ate some great barbecue chicken pizza. Ate some terrible chicken pesto pizza. Finished Cryptonomicon. Reviewed same. Felt very much at peace.

Witty worm is a big deal – This little-noticed computer virus managed to infect every computer in the world that was vulnerable in 45 minutes. Generally these type of viruses are written by amateurs and are not very good. Witty was written by a professional, and was nearly flawless. And the author has not been caught.

07 June 2004

Awoke early and spent time before work visiting with Student Life people, or that was the plan, but they were all out to lunch for Mike McKenna’s going away. Meeting about the web site redesign that was interesting. Fun in the office, followed by dinner at Olive Garden and Shrek 2 with Aaron and Nat.

Joyce McGreevy laments the fate of the poor SUV drivers in her latest column, and wonders why poor people are always upset:

People at the bottom have always had options. Every four to eight years some of us spend at least half an hour at the nearest charming little cafe, offering to register voters. It is truly disheartening to see how few poor people are willing to simply log on with their laptops, search out the right Web site, distinguish between a precinct and a district, take time off from their minimum wage jobs, pack up the kids, figure out which city bus connects with the gated community, guess the password, find the cafe, fill in a card with personal information and entrust it to a total stranger.

Some people just don’t care all that much about democracy.

Darn right.