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Showing posts from 2010

World Wide Mobbing

Everything is said about Wikileaks (and one face behind it). We know now: they are the incarnation of Evil - or the saviour of free speech. No shades of gray. The debate is pure hysteria - on both sides. Imagine a second platform for whistleblowers popping up. That platform, let's call it TheNakedTruth (TNT), co-publishes wikileaks data. It gets tremendous media-attention as it then goes on to reveal a treasure trove of classified cables on international business-connections that some anonymous insider compiled - with rich personal detail on well-known business leaders, evidence for dark paths into government... and documents demonstrating the manipulation of the western free press by shadowy interest groups with ties to rogue states in the east. Just imagine! Some would be shocked, others less surprised by the revelations. But what a discovery! What a public service! A victory for free speach, a glimmer of hope for democracy! Let there be a thousand Wikileaks! All becomes s...

Chessboxing

Now to something completely different... Being proud of your brains? Got muscles too? Did you ever think of chess-boxing? The inventor, Iepe Rubingh, performance artist, boxer and a chess-player with an impressive ELO rating of 1850 will 'perform' on Saturday, November 6th 2010 in Berlin . Probably worth a view - and it certainly puts a new spin on the notion of "cultural impact"...

What the heck is Nano?

You know it - nano are these strange, probably evil, tiny little thingies, well, yes? No? Maybe? Ask a chemist and he will talk about particles on the nanometer scale (0,000000001m), a pharmacist might emphasize how these nanoparticles can permeate through your skin, the physicist, meanwhile, thinks of semiconductor-structures as you have them in your computer-chips. So, what the heck is Nano? The European Commission is asking you (and me and your neighbour plus some friends - literally everybody) to find a definition of the term "nanomaterial" that the European Commission may use as an overarching, broadly applicable reference term for any EU communication addressing nanomaterials. Any ideas? You may discuss them with us here, or go directly to the EU website. You might help prevent "Nano" from bearing any bias like "Atom" or "Gene".

Smartass now open for comments

The times of one-way entertainment are over at Smart-S. We give in to the pressure and open the possibility to comment to everybody. There is a brief review-process to reduce the amount of automated SPAM - so publishing of your input may sometimes be delayed a bit. Don't panic.

The binary beer

What do you think of when you see your empty beer-glass in front of you? Right: it could be full. This is ok with me, you seem to be no techie. Would you have taken up the essence of the binary world through your umbilical cord, your first response would be: Beer=1, noBeer=0 - hey, what a great way to exchange messages in a bar! Rows of full and empty beer-glasses representing zeroes and ones, a wonderfull virtual world! No, I am not drunk - yet. While building a computer out of lined-up beverages might be a bit off mainstream, expensive and a never acceptable misappropriation of digestible goods, some tech-kids made the youtube-charts with a presentation of their computer built from stone and dust in the virtual world of minecraft. As Wired Magazine reports , some geek called Ben Craddock (or theinternetftw in his world) built a computer entirely out of the virtual matter redstone. When redstone is destroyed it forms redstone dust, which itself can be used to build wires with two pos...

What is the commercial value of an idea?

Ideas are floating around in the gazillions. Most are irrelevant, some are cute, others nifty and a few might even be good or extraordinary. But what commercial value does an idea have if it is not followed up? If I had friends and if they had any creative brains I am sure many would rant about ideas stolen from them for commercial gain. Well, maybe not many, but some - certainly scaled with the rate of alcohol-intake. Ideas like the one to set up a tool for easy sharing and showing of likes and dislikes in the form of picture, sounds, data and relations over the internet that we know as Facebook. What commercial and social impact would Facebook have today if the alleged thieve (Marc Zuckerberg, if you believe the plausible plot of the movie) would not have cared to steal it? Would Facebook be such a tremendous success if Marc Zuckerberg wasn't around to push it? Would it be around at all? What about all those mini-facebook lookalikes? Those platforms for special interest groups,...

It is not about the money - but it doesn't hurt

David Gelernter's company "Mirror Worlds Technologies" was way ahead of her time. Developing software that makes access to computers easier and more intuitive was a nice idea at the beginning of this century, but less than enthusiastically received by the market. Based on ideas layed out in Gelernter's book "Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox... How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean" the company brought only one product to live: "Scopeware" (2001). Scopeware displays a stack of registry-cards on screen, where the user can thumb through, bringing their content (fotos, emails, webpages...) to the focus - a technique well known today from Apples "cover flow". While Mirror worlds was disbanded in 2003 because of the lack of revenue - Apples sleak and intuitively interfaced devices are tremendously popular must-haves. A federal court in Tyler, Texas awarded $625.5 million to Gelernter for patent violation by...

Computers produce virtuality only - no way they show consciousness

A computer, no matter how fast and complex it might be, will at best simulate consciousness and imitate intelligence since - by the way a computer is constructed and used today – the computer is a generator for objects and states in a virtual reality. Virtual reality adds to but does not overlap with the physical reality (corporeality) of our everyday life. Intelligence and consciousness are products of corporeality and are therefore separate from the virtual world computers produce and play in. The border between these realities is sharp and clear and can not be transcended. As long as a computer is the medium for a simulation, imitation, visualization it will produce objects well within the virtual world. It will never produce intelligence or show consciousness. But is the computer doomed to be a medium only? No. Aren't our brains also just media for the play of sensations, thoughts, feelings? No. The difference lies in the way of operation. Todays computers have separat...

Consciousness - an emergent property

A stone is dropped into a pond creating a perfectly circular wavefront that propagates radially away from the point of impact. The speed of wave-propagation, the amplitude and wavelength can easily be modelled by a wave-function - a computer can simulate the wave-pattern on the water and display a virtual lake with breathtaking similarity. But it remains a simulation. The lake does not solve a wave-equation in order to show a wave-pattern. The propagation of a water-wave is the consequence of an inherent property of the water itself. The description by a wave-equation - as accurate as it might be - is a model of the real thing, a simulation - not even an imitation. These are two completely different - and absolutely not comparable - paths to the image of a water-wave. The simulated wave shows the same imagery as the real one, the wave-propagation looks identical, the optical reflections will be perfectly similar, it might even be possible to predict some wave-behavior. But the simula...

Artificial Intelligence Revisited

On June 22, 2010 David Gelernter presented his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence - the capability of computers to show intelligent behaviour - in a talk on invitation by The American Academy and FAZ in Berlin. The title "Dream Logic, Software Minds, and the Poetry of Human Thought" gave a hint at what to expect. He went deep into his rather personal understanding of intelligence and consciousness. Gelernter attempted a definition of 'thinking' (as opposed to the simulation of thinking) by deep introspection and analysis of his thought-processes. The result was a rather romantic, very anthropocentric praise of creativity, dreaming and intuition. Something tightly connected to feelings, emotion and unpredictability - a collection of elements a computer does arguably not have. A thinking computer, he inferred, should 'know' or 'feel' that he is thinking - thereby connecting thinking to consciousness. But is this the right approach? David Gelernter...

The stuff in the web is not information - it is data

Thousands of blogs copy snippets from different sources, sometimes enrich them with comment (more often they don't), repost, redistribute, recycle. Twitter plugs up the net with autistic-looking short-messages and a seeming gazillion applications allow users to automatically cross-contaminate social networks with annoying status-messages. It is natural that many are  looking for ways to survive the 'information-tsunami' of the ever-growing web. While filtering for keyphrases is the usual way out, David Gelernter sees hope in exchanging the axis along which the web-babble should be ordered: let's use the time axis (see "Time to start taking the internet seriously" on edge.org). Reminiscent of twitters lifestreams, information would visually flow from future over present to past letting the reader focus on everything in the timewindow she chooses. Aside from the big questionmark (why would such a reshuffling make lifestreams easier to bear?) there is a major mi...

Meta-Mining

Some so-called 'internet-prophets' bemoan the increasing volume of web-babble, the deluge of chatter, the hollowness of the information-tsunami. Big words of cultural pessimism that are gratefully picked up by the media. Those web-critics have a serious problem: they try to *read* all that. Would they go into a library and start reading the very first book on the shelf? I hope not. When they open Encyclopedia Britannica (yes there are some printed versions around) do they start reading on page 1? Some try to survive in the web by suggesting a new order of information - an ordering according to the date of appearance - the life-streams ( see David Gelernter on Edge.org ) . This would be an order in time instead of 'space' (where data are conventionally mapped out in different 'locations' on your screen or hard-drive).This approach to clean the data-mess is reminiscent of the cleansing of Augias' stables by diverting the River Alpheus. It's an honorable...

You don't want an i-Pad? You are getting old!

The old tecchies recite their mantra of 'if you can't open it, you don't own it'. They lament that the i-Pad has no keyboard, no CD-drive, no printer connection - they miss the bundle of wires that make a computer a computer. "The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better", writes Cory Doctorow on boingboing.net " Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) ". Well, sure. We are getting old and we say what we hated to hear our parents say when they got old: "those were the good old days". You remember when you were able to repair your car by yourself - everything? When your telephone went silent - with a bit confidence and a drop of oil you could get it ring again. And the radio, yep, a flip against the coil, a resolute puff over the tunable capacitor, some dust-clouds - done! Todays devices are ...

One Culture

The distinction between ‚two cultures' is artificial and deleterious, as is argued in ‚ Wissenschaft ist keine Kunst ' („Science is not Art") by Rapoport and Hucho . Clearly, Humanities are concerned with understanding while the Sciences look for explanations – but the different focus can neither be reason nor excuse for a separation in disjunct categories of culture. The real difference obviously is the different public appeal, the difference in popularity. While humanities can be chatted about even without deep understanding – just as a piece of music can be enjoyed without any understanding of an underlying theory – this is impossible with science. There can be Pop-music, pop-Humanities but no Pop-Science.

The Third Culture

named after a book by John Brockman, The Third Culture (also known as The Reality Club) publishes transcending thoughts on issues of both cultures on www.edge.org . From their self-concept: "The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." "The third culture" tries to bridge the gap between humanities and science.

The Two Cultures

Charles Percy Snow's 1959 work The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , described the conflict between the cultures of the humanities and science. 50 years on - where are we? As a reminder, some quotes of C.P.Snow