The SmartS Club

Justin Bieber falsely correlates with Influenza

2012-02-02T12:29:00.000+01:00

Just now we got aware of a scientific paper by Aron Culotta (2010) evaluating data from The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Influenza Like Illnesses (ILI) and specific influenza-related keyphrases on twitter (flu, cough, headache, sore throat...). The correlation of twitter-based predictions of ILI-devlopment (after a training-phase to optimize the algorithm) with real data is amazing, giving proof to the concept of data-mining from social-media streams. While for a variety of analyzed phrases the results were comparably good, there is a word of caution from the authors These results show extremely strong correlations for all queries except for fever, which appears frequently in ﬁgurative phrases such as “I’ve got Bieber fever”.
Besides the beauty of the demonstrated algorithms the paper gives a helpful overview of fundamental literature in this young field.

Pasta - e basta!

2012-02-01T18:12:00.001+01:00

Let's forget what we just learned (it is the carbohydrates, not the fat that makes us (them) fat.

Wonderfully explained in the infographic of the day on fastcodesign).

Pasta is not bad for you at all!

The unrivaled Maria Popova from www.brainpickings.org just circulated a breathtaking review of 'Pasta by Design' - an extremely ambitious and obviously beautifully illustrated book analyzing with rigor the geometrical shapes of almost 100 different types of pasta.

(and I was proud of being able to identify eight!)

Most importantly it is stated already in the introduction that pasta is made of durum wheat flour and water. Pasta!, um, Basta! The designers would never even attempt to touch any of these egg-infested derivatives or supposedly ecological or healthy experiments with rye or spelt flour (yes, I had to look this one up).

To the trained cook and passionate gourmet it is clear that different shapes of pasta serve different purposes: the intake of sauce, the bite, the haptic ... all depends on the correct shape.

While the book then goes on to classify that amazing variety of noodles by following the science of phylogeny (building a family tree based on morphological similarities), the highlights are the mathematical descriptions of the individual species. Their simulation and graphic representation side by side with food stills of simple beauty.

To some the juxtaposition of mouthwatering food and scary mathematics might be too much to bear but some could get an inkling of what mathematics is doing when employed in natural sciences: far from claiming to accurately describe nature or to even break down nature into something cold and constructed, it illustrates the desire to find words for observations that go beyond "oh nice!", the sensation of mimicking nature. And maybe one or the other non-mathematician gets the flavor of what scientists are talking about when they describe a model or a theory as 'elegant', 'beautiful' - and thereby more probalby 'true' than others.

Write a book!

2012-01-30T16:01:00.000+01:00

As the second highest authority - the pope - is now fiddling with social media and feels competent to give advice (see "you don't have to be brain-dead to give advice" and the comment "but it helps"),
it might be good to step back, look at all the soc-med-mess, take a deep breath and ask yourself:
is this what I wanted to get involved in, am I gaining something? Anything? Am I wasting my time?
There are studies in abundance showing how much intellectual potential is blocked by wading through the net in search of information, people and networks.
Since most of the air-brained blog-posts out there were written with the hope to get attention, build a following, and to get heard: written to build a reputation, it looks a lot like a big room full of kids yelling, jumping, kicking and scratching to get noticed. But while they all scream their lungs out - this information-inferno is just numbing.

This is where intelligent filtering sets in.

We look for content. Original, 'manufactured' content. Something that is an intellectual, artistic, emotional output of a real author. Social Media still have that scent of snake-oil around them, because they were highjacked early on by sales- and marketing-people. In the beginning there was all this trading of followers, the SEO of blogs, manipulation, trickery, pure magic and, yes, snake-oil, to get as huge a footprint as possible on the net.
The discussion about the future of classical publications, printmedia, cinema etc. helped rethinking content again. The difference between journalism and googling becomes obvious.
I was thrilled to read the testimonial for rock-solid content by one of the seniors in the pond of social-media-sharks, James Altucher, who manages to attract and entertain a huge crowd by delivering unique content and skillful marketing. His latest entry summarizes pretty well what counts in the struggle for net-reputation: if you want to get noticed and *stay* noticed, produce real value.
Write a book! (damn! - as James would add)

Augmented depression

2012-01-10T22:08:00.001+01:00

If you are about to wallow in a moment of tearful self-pity, I highly recommend enhancing the experience by this little sound-track: "Why me?! - Again!"

- enjoy.

The mining of crowd-sources

2012-01-10T21:57:00.000+01:00

While some are wondering why scientists appear not to appreciate tools like Twitter to communicate , there is more proof for the value of the meta-information that can be plucked from the stream of micro-utterances.
Roughly two years ago we speculated about possibilities to extract (useful) crowd-information. Increasing mentioning of umbrellas/rain - together with localization -, for example, could give valuable input to the weather forecast. As we put in 'Meta Mining':"If the noise of individual utterances will be systematically analyzed for overlying macro-structures and for phase-transitions from the purely random to the organized, there will be more information gained than individually and knowingly put in. The sheer boundless chatter of Twitter and alike corresponds to the cells, the web is the organism." We were encouraging to step back and look at structures rather than the individual tweets.
In a recent report in "The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene" that is reviewed in Nature, scientists show how analysis of Twitter-messages would have been a quick way to detect and track the deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti - simply by looking at the number of 'cholera' posts on Twitter. They found a stunning correlation between the official number of cases and the volume of chatter related to that.
This is only one more - scientifically proven - example for the potential of the data deluge.
It is a matter of time until publicly available analysis-tools mine crowd-sources like twitter (or even de-personalized sms…) for real-time input to forecasting tools.

Google's personalized ads kill my relationship

2012-01-01T22:10:00.001+01:00

As I sit cheek-to-cheek side-by-side with my wife, we both working on our very own projects at our very own computers and she starts telling me about some coding-trick she just discovered, I hiss "could you, pleeze!, let me work on my stuff - I am busy!!" - and as she glances over she sees that personalized ad on a financial website I just sift through: some voluptuous, smiling girls and the line "looking for an exciting date?". AHA! You are busy, huh?
Damn! What can I do about the Ads google pushes there?
Oh, she is not stupid, types the same URL in her identical browser and at the position where I have that click-for-chicks-Ad she gets a cute little advertisement on health-food. :/
I reload my site. "time for nature - discover marokko" - ha! She reloads "investment-strategies", I "cars"…. and on we go, fortunately diving deep into randomness. So, obviously, our privacy-settings are good enough to feed us not-so-personalized advertisements. And so we go on working on our projects … while I reload the site some more times to get another glance at the dangerously attractive first ad.
Thinking about it, personalized advertisements are not bad after all.
When you happen to live in Berlin and have shown interest in theater, isn't it better to get some commercial suggestions on upcoming shows in your neighborhood than annoying stuff about cruise-ships and wellness-hotels? The unease results from the background data-collection and complex evaluation that google does while you use it's browser. It does not only help them target you for ad-campaigns. Who knows what else they might be interested in.
The good thing: you have a choice. You can opt-out of the personalized ad service from google - and supposedly the data-collection is stopped then.
Find a quick 'how-to' here:http://www.reputation.com/how_to/how-to-opt-out-of-googles-ad-preferences/

You don't have to be brain-dead to give advice on the net

2011-12-30T14:34:00.001+01:00

In one corner of the web somebody quotes somebody euphorically as giving "4 signs of a culture of innovation" (google that complete phrase and enjoy the list of cut-and-paste-authors that make you call for intelligent filters)
The four signs? We get that dull list of standard soft-skills that no less than every serious company in the civilized world subscribes to - twice!:
1. Development of the employees
2. Concern for employees' progress
3. Respect for everyone's contribution
4. Teamwork and collaboration
That was it. "4 signs of a culture of innovation" - Those four lala-points! To make things worse the list is supplemented by some bullet-points highlighting unmistakeable signs for 'un-innovation'(! snake-oil anybody?):
a. Emphasis on sheer talent
b. Categorizing by ability
c-f. some modes of harassment that no employer, who isn't completely insane would ever subscribe to.
Girls, boys, listen. 1-4 are the most commonly accepted soft-skills. But they alone don't carry any company. We need some hard skills. An accountant who really learned her job would be nice. Some guy with communication skills, that engineer, who actually *makes* something, the PR-person who gets her facts across much faster than anybody - we call it talent and ability. And we categorize by that - because the accountant should do accounting and the PR person should do PR. Nothing bad about all that. Filing it under 'un-innovation' is nothing short of plain stupid (excuse my french).

Happy holidays

2011-12-23T23:36:00.000+01:00

and the best wishes for an exciting, interesting, stimulating new year!
click here for a soundtracklet for today ;)

3 things you should never forget

2011-12-15T16:32:00.001+01:00

These days I checked the net for bloglisting services to break loose from the shackles of blogs I usually read - and find some new ones.
It was scary.
Most of the high-ranking blogs seem to be platforms for advice. Everybody apparently insists on giving me hints how to improve my life in any conceivable aspect. Who needs that? Who believes that? Who wants to know? And who makes THEM the experts to tell ME "How to Negotiate in Three Easy Lessons"?
There is this humunguous number of 'how-to'-advices combined with the 'n steps to become...(a successful rocket-scientist/a top-rated womanizer/jobless)' workings that obviously catches on. If the advice is packed into catchy phrases, numbered, spiced up, then it will inevitably make your blog one of the more clicked ones out there.
Did anybody ask for this flood of advice? Don't I stand a chance to die dumb?
James Altucher will not like it when I say that his site is on the shortlist of those I return to whenever I want my Adrenalin-level to go up. And up it goes - again and again.
why?
Because *he wants it so*. Believe me, it is handycraft. Read (if you care to) the "33 unusual tips to being a better writer" . It is actually quite entertaining (and very good advice in parts!).
But what drives a person to increase the click-rate on his site - at any price. It must be a marketing-thing; something from the flesh and bones of those sales-persons who initially designed and (ab-)used the ill-labeled 'social media'. Only a few years ago it was imperative to collect as many followers or friends as possible within all of those networking-tools. You could actually buy followers by the thousands from companies skilled in that trade. And then you were told that those numbers show your impact - and impact meant importance, of course! Ten thousand followers make you a thought-leader. 50 followers only - you are a dweeb.
At the core it is about 'social branding'. People want to be known for something. They want to be experts on something. Which is ok. But it ends up as a fight for high ranking in google searches. And this is recognition substituted by SEO-skills. It is reminiscent of the misperception of the word 'respect' in the dark and iffy side-streets of american big cities. Those scary folks out there demand 'respect' and substitute it by 'fear'.
The seo-optimizing blog-scene hopes for recognition and substitutes it by page-rank.
This is a smoke-screen. Reality works the other way around: reputation, respect, skill, trust prove themselves again and again to be among the most valuable currency in human interaction, no matter by which medium. This currency buys you an audience, followers - even friends. There is no substitute for the real thing.

And the "3 things you should never forget"? Only you know.

It was 'free will' - not 'free Willy!'

2011-12-06T15:01:00.001+01:00

Almost the day when SmartS got it's remarks on emergence out, the follower-crowd got interspersed by a significant number of psychoanalysts and 'quantum-esoterics' guys.
While we happily welcome every lost sould searching for wisdom also in our utterances, I, personally, get scared.
Not because of the psychoanalysts. I actually might need them. But because of the scientoid babble of the others. The guy who delivers his revolutionary thoughts in 7MB chunks to the mailbox is easily complimented to the door of the spam folder (even though the subject-line is somewhat mouthwatering "polarities cosmic physics are contrary to the physical plan of expression of earth. Cosmic physics in the positive attracts positive and negative attracts the negative"). But some not-so-asked-for wisdom strains the patience of even the most diplomatically trained reader:
In one mail I had to endure some lecturing about the *free will* of photons (!) (yes! PHOTONS!).
Photons *obviously* are endowed with free will as they *decide* whether to behave like a particle or a wave, the author wrote. I don't want to sound rude, but could some rocket-scientists, please!, consider mounting a spam-filter right in their outbox?
(thank you)

Don't Count on Emergence!

2011-11-28T00:12:00.001+01:00

You want to know why a single ant is not even a nuisance, while a whole bunch of them gets your attention and a vast number finally builds a complex society? Need an explanation how those few synapses you use to navigate yourself through a bar-conversation becomes a conscious something by sheer numbers? Ever tortured that brain with the question how to overthrow THE world financial system?
Emergence is the answer. Emergence develops to the catch-phrase of the occupy-movement as well as the mantra of some proponents of the network-first!-cooperators. Increase the number of actors (cells, fish, occupiers, collaborators…) and something awesome will happen. How? It will emerge!
The basic idea is good, the concept, however, not really understood. Emergence does not deal with the self-organized creation of something awesome. Emergence at its very roots describes the upscaling of complexity by increasing the number of participants. Thereby the 'language' necessary to describe the system increases with increasing complexity.

A small series of pictures might be instructive. Look at a single ball in an unrestricted space (a). This particle is there, has some properties that might be describable. Add another ball (b). These two fellows can be seen in relation to each other (close, far, beside…). But if you add a third marble (c), there emerges a principally new feature: order. These three elements can be ordered (in a line, a triangle…) or disordered. Order is a property that emerged with increasing number of players. And this order will become more and more complex with more balls in the game - but which order locks in is not predetermined. The complexity emerged, the potentiality emerged, maybe even some capacity… but whether a huge chunk of cells is just that (a huge chunk of cells) or develops into a liver or a brain … this is not warranted by the sheer number.

Finally

2011-11-27T22:59:00.003+01:00

Visualizing science

2011-11-17T15:21:00.003+01:00

The fascination of complexity is one big force that drives curiosity. It appears that the mind is getting utterly excited when a sensoric impression is neither completely predictable, symmetric or repetitive nor random. Pure symmetry and repeated patterns might sooth the aching brain - but boredom is not far away. Complete randomness, on the other hand, is quickly masked as 'background' or noise, unable to keep our attention for too long - equally rapidly discarded from our attention-span. It is the broken symmetry on the one side (the nearly perfect crystal-structure, the flaw in a symmetric image, the spot in a beautiful face...) and the structured randomness (seemingly repetitive patterns in the noise, almost symmetrical structures in an otherwise random system) that catches the attention of artists and scientists alike.
Both, it appears, are looking for tools or 'languages' to extend the space of what is describable, in this sense understandable, and to build something like 'safe terrain' to walk on in the humming chaos. While the arts are clearly more free in what languages they chose or devise, the comprehension-expanding but rather strict languages of science (as incomprehensible as they may appear to the untrained observer) make them less ambiguous and the insights conveyable to more.
Creativity acts in both worlds, but the ironclad rules of the scientific grammar (mathematics in most cases) allow for a less ambiguous communication of new-found understanding between those speaking the language than the arts could ever achieve within their babylonian conversation. Art often appears to indulge in the quest for new forms of expression - therefore new grammars - to the gain of creativity and expressive richness, but at the expense of comprehendability and generality.
The science-artist Tim Otto Roth is one of the most active figures in the quest for the visualization of the scientific world. At the American Museum of Natural History in the very heart of NYC he just opened a show of his recent mapping from the language of science to the poetry of art. The untrained observer - speaking neither in the tongues of science nor arts - feels the vegetative reaction of his organism to the brain's struggle for comprehension and the search for structure - something that would be impossible for the public without the artistic transliteration. Tim Otto Roth by this means opens an emotional door to the sciences that is usually rather tightly shut. He takes the complementary approach to Pythagoras, who described cosmic principles with musical analogues. Roth uses the complex harmonics of nature to compose his dynamic art. As Martin Kemp put it in a review of another installation of Roth's "we stand as witnesses to the chaotic drumbeats of cosmic radiation."

Left Brain, Right Brain

2011-11-04T11:49:00.006+01:00

At a wonderful summer night I was lying in the grass, my little son beside me. We were staring into the dark sky, debating infinity, other planets, the origin of everything, observing falling stars that were whizzing through the atmosphere at a delightfully high rate. Why did we see so many of them that night? What are falling stars? What are comets. Why do comets return and when?
The air was clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon was lingering lazy in the trees across the river. Some fireflies were having a good time, switching their glow on and off rather randomly - in one group they seemed to synchronize but then it was random again. It reappeared: a few bugs were flashing simultaneously at first ... it started to expand, it was getting more. A whole cloud of insects was flashing in tune. Are they doing this on purpose? Do they have a will to turn the light on and off? How do those fireflies communicate? And why? Do they communicate at all? My son pointed at a field of clouds that were passing the huge silhouette of the moon. Why was the moon sooooo big? Weren't there ripples in the cloud-structure? A very regular hatching. How do the clouds 'know' how to organize? Do the droplets communicate? We both were excited by the regularities. He said he will figure all that out when he grows up. I knew he felt the urge, the drive that I experience so often as a scientist: the delight of looking at the world in utter amazement and the heartbeat when something appears not completely random. The moments when there appears to be a big hidden meaning of it all.
Another evening I was at an opening of a wild underground art show in Berlin. Electro-Music pressed into the sparsely lit room of the hopelessly overcrowded gallery, too many people were pushing, dancing. The humidity was high, the sound physically hurting - we immersed in the crowd. The backdrop of the DJ was a fast, intense, complex video - the central piece of the exhibition. It hammered a coded message. The code was to be unlocked in each and every one of us.
What a contrast to the morning when I was reading 'The conductor' by Sarah Quigley while listening to Shostakovich's seventh symphony! My heart beating rapidly, my mind wandering; carried away by the images and emotions of the story and the emotions of the music.
What do these scences have in common? In all of them the interaction between the individual and the world is sensual at first. Some sight, some sound, the smell, the heat ... they trigger strong emotional reactions that clearly lie in the deep archaic parts of our brain. But then curiosity sets in: what is the meaning of all this? Is there pure randomness? Is there a structure? This accounts for the richness of those experiences: they span from the almost vegetative reaction of the body and mind to the sensory experience all the way to the curiosity-driven structure-seeking questioning and delight of the almost inquisitory analytic brain. No doubt does the symphony or the piece of art trigger emotional reactions (of most diverse kind, depending on circumstances, experiences, mood...) - but the access can be much more: a musician can understand the harmonic intricacies of the work, can smile about some tricks of the master. A historian will point at the political influence on the composer that can even be seen and felt in the score of his masterpieces. The VJ implanted some messages of recent sociological debate into her visual stream.
The gratification of approaching the world on both levels - the immediate, vegetative and the inquisitory, analytical - is much higher than it would be if one of the sides was excluded.
It would do the piece of art no justice if it was only to be perceived 'vegetatively', as a simple 'wow' - neither would nature be fully enjoyed this way. And of course it would be a pale, wrong caricature of science if only the analytic part would be emphasized.
But seeking the sensory, vegetative approach to science too often results in crippled, touchy-feely science-babble instead of emphasizing the deep emotional impact of the omnipresent human curiosity, the desire to find structures in the chaos and the sometimes fiery emotions related to that.
Reducing art, nature, even emotion to a purely vegetative phenomenon is as wrong as reducing science to cold (de-)constructivism. The origin is a clear misunderstanding: the immediate, sensory reaction, the vegetative interaction alone is too often perceived to be equivalent to emotion. But those deep, original, archaic and fundamental reactions of the human species are enriched by the ability to derive additional emotional pleasure (and distress) from the curiosity and analytic desire of the active, conscious brain.
(see also "Wissenschaft ist keine Kunst" (in german) by Daniel Rapoport and me in Gegenworte - and look at the longer post on "the divergence of thought" by Chris Jones)

Blushing

2011-11-01T22:53:00.000+01:00

Of course we are impressed by increasing click-rates, see our vanity pumped by your mails and indulge in being mentioned in relevant blog-lists.
But we'd feel utterly flattered if you flattr us using the well-placed buttons on this page or other...
(and please excuse this selfish propaganda)

My guinea pig wants beer!

2011-10-23T23:19:00.003+02:00

Rather involuntary train rides (especially long ones, going to boring places for a boring event) are good for updates on some thoughts lingering in the lower levels of the brain-at-ease.
My latest trip (from Berlin to Bonn) unearthed the never-ending squabble about the elusive 'free will'. Neuroscientists make headlines proving with alacrity the absence of free will by experimenting with brain-signals that precede the apparent willful act - by as much as seven seconds! Measuring brain-activity way before the human guinea pig actually presses a button with whatever hand or finger he desires, they predict with breathtaking reproducibility the choice to be made.
So what? Is that the end of free will?
I am afraid that those neuroscientists would accept only non-predictability as a definite sign of free will. But non-predictability results from two possible scenarios: a) a random event (without a cause) b) an event triggered by something outside of the system (but caused).
Free will arguably is never compatible with randomness but should be reconciled with cause. Why should a random event (like white noise, the result of a lottery, the number of bubbles on my beer…) be a sign of free will? This line of thought (along with David Hume) is called compatibilism - and I haven't heard a convincing argument against it - yet (the comment-function is *on* :) ).
But if a free decision has a cause - how could we distinguish it from an inevitable, compelled decision? (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/what-makes-free-will-free/)
It seems inevitable to pull consciousness into the game - as both appear to be intertwined. Accepting an event triggered by something outside of the system does not mean accepting a force outside the material world. An event triggered unconsciously would suffice.
It feels right to claim that a free choice is a choice that happened consciously.
A free decision must have an origin, a cause, that is consciously set (a trigger inside the system). Everything after this initial trigger must be non-random and predictable - as we ruled out noise. So, the interpretation of the experiments hinges very much on the *report of the individual* about when she became consciously aware of the trigger.
As long as the time when the trigger was conscious depends on 'reports' of the guinea pigs, the experiments don't help much.
The conscious act will have to be defined by some measurable quantities (which would allow to actually *prove* if a real guinea pig has a conscious self, experimentally!). Only after that experiments on free will can be devised in a meaningful manner.
And as long as free will is not defined, the experiments proving or disproving its existence are meaningless in any case.

Being good - talking at bankers

2011-10-09T23:24:00.006+02:00

Recently I enjoyed following a presentation at Platoon/Berlin on Alternative Currencies. It was a great pleasure to hear that very smart guy Gabriel Shalom introducing his video "The future of money" - and the video itself was a nice treat.
But I felt increasingly at unease listening to the narrative about the presentation of the video at SIBOS, 'the worlds biggest banking conference'. There was some sound of pride in the voice of Gabriel and giggling in the audience when he reported that after the 7.5 minute short video there was absolute silence, no questions, no comments, nothing… "we dropped the evil-bomb", he said to the amusement of us folks. My problem was that common-sense in the room (well, it was a tent at Platoon): *they* are the bad guys *we* are the good guys.
To phrase it drastically - even though I never dug too deep into the history and concept of money myself there was really nothing unexpected, scary, chilling, thrilling or excitingly new in that video. It was nice, well-done, well thought through. But I believe any open mind would put together those thoughts on a good evening communicating with equally alert friends - even if these friends are bankers. But at the same time there was this notion of moral superiority and the clear cementation of a separating wall between 'us' and 'them'. Gabriel often repeated that he had the feeling the message of the video was too revolutionary, too unconventional for the banking-guys - and that's where the silence supposedly came from. I haven't been at the conference but I have the feeling the silence resulted from the talking AT bankers, not talking TO them.
I am afraid that the pleasure of being minority, the desire to be revolutionary actually slams some doors shut which are standing wide open. And the slamming noise is seen as proof of concept for some.
It is wrong.
A good moderator after the video, an open mind also on the side of the 'revolutionaries' would certainly kickstart a great discussion even with bankers - to the gain of both sides.
But the urge to define oneself as underdog, not mainstream, etc. that drives so many in the community, appears to be one of the big stumbling stones on the way to really new thoughts, concepts and, ultimately, principles.
(See Platoons report on the event here)

Scientoid Babble

2011-10-03T20:46:00.002+02:00

that guy is simply -
a clown at a site of charlatans:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38681
If taken serious Michio Kaku is threatening the reputation of science.
I know, such scientoid babble defends itself as being visionary.
It is not.

Relativity remains relatively unchallenged

2011-10-02T00:11:00.003+02:00

Have I mentioned my personal 'affinity' to those bubble-brains at bigthink.com? I guess I have - their poster boy physicist Dr. Michio Kaku regularly d-explains the world by oversimplifying some piece of natural sciences. Some might smile about it, others yawn - I think it is actually dangerous.
Well, here it is.
The recent piece is tied to a freshly published paper about some accelerator-experiment in which some particles seem not to obey the speed-limit.
In his article "Breaking the speed of light and contemplating the demise of relativity" Dr. Kaku states that the scientists reported that they have recorded particles appearing to travel faster than the speed of light. Um, maybe. Maybe not. The scientists explicitly stated that they publish their data to stimulate a wider discussion as they wish to figure out what makes those particles to *appear* to be faster than light.
All is based on the measurement of time - done by a synchronization via GPS signals. Some speculate about possible errors there. It is a very solid and open way to do science: discuss possible sources of error.
Dr. Kaku is not interested in that.
He is interested in the smoke, the bang, the glitter, the gut-feeling of science.
So he reminds us of special relativity - and does it wrong. No, GPS-Satellites don't get the position wrong because of their speed. The dominating effect is the low gravitation - and so *general relativity*. Funny, that GPS with all its relativity-corrections to the clocks is used for time-synchronization of this experiment? Dr. Kaku turns Einsteins concept upside down. He asks "So why is light speed the maximum speed in the universe?" and answers "as you approach the speed of light… time stops…"etc.
It is the other way around: Einstein *assumed* that the speed of light is maximum - and looked for the consequences.
What about his 'contemplating the demise of relativity'? Nothing exciting there, just "all textbooks have to be rewritten", etc., and "what a headache!". Sure. How boring can science be?
I believe the original presse-release is so much more exciting and elucidating than that science-babble. It shows how real science works.
http://public.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

quixotic literary equilibria

2011-09-09T15:01:00.002+02:00

Those blogs at blogspot.com (as the one you are glued to right now) sport a nifty little navigation thingy in the very top row, allowing you to navigate, randomly as they promise, to the 'next blog'.
As it turns out the thread of 'next blogs' is eagerly woven from the keywords in the title of the last blogentry - can you follow me? So, naively, I had named a contribution "The love of science" - and guess what: clicking on 'next blog' carried everybody through a flood of pages of marriages, personal religious or pseudoreligious confessions, decorated with clouds, sunshine and eerily smiling elderly women... Don't get me wrong! Nothing against personal beliefs, religious orientations, feelings. But I dont expect to be dried out in intellectual wasteland just because I use the wrong words in the headline of a post of my own blog!
So I changed the title. The blogpost is now named "fascinating science". Everybody who bookmarked a link to the original will be lost in nirvana (there we are again!), but the 'next blog' thread drags us through some science and education pages.
Well.
Let me think about a useful headline for this one...
I guess I found one. Let's see what the 'next blog' will be now :)
KKK4YNU5G8JQ

Fascinating Science

2011-08-23T21:33:00.002+02:00

At times I dig the website edge.org - at times I am grumpy … a bit like in a real relationship, I believe. As a constant I am at unease with their narcissistic appearance and the almost audible smack, when they believe they have said something really earthshaking - which is about every time they update their page. But, well, I come back almost daily...
So I was eagerly waiting for the latest oeuvre in classical print "Future Science, Essays From the Cutting Edge" - edited by Max Brockman (Vintage Books), son of John Brockman the legend; tore open the package the minute I fumbled it out of the mailbox and started reading on my way back up to the apartment.
The book comprises of eighteen essays from eighteen obviously brilliant, young researchers. Essays on their work and their plans.
The author list seems absolutely random to a European scientist and there might be a long list of equally impressive minds around, but, hey, this is a nifty little booklet!
As a physicist I would never have expected to get excited about "the coming age of ocean exploration" (Kevin.P.Hand), the empirical findings on human altruism ("Children's helping hands" - Felix Warneken) or "Molecular cut and paste…" (William McEwan). But I was! I read article after article, one by one - without the desire for a pause, feeling a heartbeat that I recognize whenever I encounter real science and real scientific enthusiasm.
Those fellows are scientists in the very best sense - they love what they do and they make you feel that!
(a drop of water in the wine is the preface by Max Brockman, who apparently has difficulties to fill the three pages he was allotted and unfortunately does nothing to draw the reader into the text).
If you look for a present for a scientist-friend: buy this. If you look for a present for yourself, don't wait until somebody get's the idea: buy this.

Sechzehneichen

2011-08-02T18:41:00.003+02:00

finally I managed - zero hits on this site yesterday. That is a drop of undisputable 100% compared to the average, the highest high, the lowest low. Simple, clear 100%. Pure silence for 24 hours. No annoying clicking sound in the web, no widget started, no counter moved.
Definitely: vacation even for my virtual self.
I am reminded to stretch out on the farm, let kids and pigs rush by and enjoy the silence of the mindless vacuum inside my eerily smiling skull.
Giving room, however, to the darker thoughts of an overstrained summer-brain. Thoughts that are usually safely absorbed by the omnipresent beach-novel dealing with murder, love and murderers in love.
Lacking any of these divertions here, I simply wonder: that little village behind the woods - was it called Sechzehn Eichen or rather Sechzehn Leichen?
I will go and check - tonight!

Utterly uninspired, but shamelessly overhyped

2011-07-18T17:35:00.002+02:00

There is no lack of sites web-wide the authors of which believe "modesty" must be a talibanesque expletive. Guys (mostly) who smack their lips too shamelessly in total complacency of their writings buy themselves some chunk of electro-space and install a website called Smartass or the like. If you are *certain*, however, that your brilliance will enlighten the world, go call your site bigthink.com . Then, no name, no topic seems too big to tackle and to comment on.
I have to disappoint you, however, bigthink.com is already taken.
Those big talking folks at bigthink just published a collection of 'visions' by so-called experts and ask us (yes, me, you, the plebs!) which one of those visions might influence 'the world' the most. We are allowed to cast our vote. The visions come in handy in easily understandable little video-clips. Just in case we are too stupid to read.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/39160
Those 'visions' are stunningly unimaginative: eternal life, robots, fusion, extraterrestial life,...
It is hard to continue watching (or reading the computer-transcripts that no human eye has ever bothered to check) after you sat through the utterances of Ray Kurzweil trying to sell his book-series by claiming that a nutritional supplement of 150 pills a day made him come out close to 40 on a biological aging test, while his passport shows he is 61. Well, watching the video - with no additional information I would have guessed he is, ummm, 60 or older. A combination of food supplements, genetic engineering and, finally, nanorobots in every cell, he believes, will give us a dramatic extension of longevity.
Who out there is willing and able to go through a major part of the soundbites and lend a hand to us vision-impaired? Any lucid (or acid) comment is very welcome.

Smart-SPresso

2011-07-14T18:05:00.000+02:00

The new format 'Smart-SPresso' will start shortly - delivering lucid as well as tartly formulated comments on web-wide utterances.
Stay tuned.
And be prepared to comment vividly!

The Internet Does Forget

2011-07-04T16:24:00.002+02:00

Do you know the feeling that just when you return to a website to get a screenshot of an incredibly incredible post you realize that it has been taken off seconds after you got there? Instead of cursing and cussing and calling 'liars' those smart-s'ess amongst us who always claim that 'the internet never forgets' you should dig up the archives of waybackmachine.org and thumb through history.
Even though I failed to excarvate my favourite from the german weekly "Die Zeit" of May 10, 2005 I am confident that one or the other embarassingly useless piece of historical document is stored forever somewhere in California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive). My favourite?

Well, in Germany a notorious cannibal was sentenced to 13 years in prison. An apprentice at Die Zeit had a preliminary headline set free to the public, reading "13 Jahre Haft für einen Haps (okay okay das geht nicht)" (something like:"13 years for a mouthful (okay okay we can't use it)"). This headline was almost instantaneously substituted by the overly pc "13 Jahre Haft für den Menschenesser (sic!)" - but screenshots abide - albeit not in the wayback machine.

Ai WeiWei freed - finally

2011-06-22T17:19:00.002+02:00

The chinese dissident artist Ai WeiWei, who was detained nearly 10 Weeks ago for unspecified 'economical crimes' was freed on bail today. The chinese news agency Xinhua reports that he is freed after admitting his crimes, which are now said to be related to massive tax evasion of his company "Fake Cultural Development".
Artists in Berlin - among them the literary nobel-laureat Herta Müller - will read texts of Ai Weiwei, which were published in his blog but deleted by chinese authorities (Monday, June 27, Literaturhaus, Berlin). These texts will be published in german language end of July by Galiani as "Macht euch keine Illusionen über mich".

Schrödinger's cat is alive and kickin'

2011-04-26T22:10:00.007+02:00

After some remarks on my comment to Dr Kaku's (a popular figure from bigthink.com) overpopularization of physics one more comment on the wave-properties of an electron seems appropriate:
There is a famous experiment illustrating the consequences of the wave-description for the probability to find an electron at a given point in space.
If an electron-source is placed in front of a metal-sheet with two narrow slits, a recording-device behind this screen would detect a distribution of incoming electrons that is identical to an interference-pattern of waves passing through the double slit (as would be seen when shining coherent, monochromatic light (a laser produces this kind of light) on the two slits).
This interference-pattern shows up no matter how low the rate of electrons coming through. Even if only one single electron per hour would pass through the slits, there would, finally, be a distribution of detected electrons given by the well-known interference-pattern.
This experiment clearly demonstrates the wave-characteristics of the electron - or more precisely, it demonstrates that the probability to find an electron at a given point in space and time is given by a wave-function. It is this probability-distribution that passes the double-slit and, quite logically, results in an interference-pattern on the other side - giving the resulting probability-distribution for the position of an electron behind the double-slit. So the electron *is* no wave. It's position is given by probabilities *that are described* by a wave-function.

Compare it to casting a dice - twice: the probability for any number on the dice is equal. So if you plan a game (an experiment) where you win depending on a specific combination of the two outcomes, the probability of possible results will be a combination of all probabilities.
If you had some kind of dice with a huge number of faces (say: 1000) and the probabilities for these numbers to show up would be 'modulated' by a sine-function (a simple wave-like distribution), then the combination of casting the dice twice would be the interference-pattern of the two wave-functions that describe the probabilities for the numbers showing up...
So the probabilities of all events and the combination of these probabilities describe the possible outcomes of the game. The probabilities for all number-combinations in (number-) space are given by a wave-function.
The same is true for the electrons in the two-slit experiment. The possible position of the electron after passing the screen with the two slits is given by the probability-distribution that results from the wave-like probability distribution of the electron passing through the double-slit screen - either the left slit, or the right slit.
This does *not* mean (as is so often implied) that the electron is passing thtough both slits simultaneously. Just as it does not mean that your dice show all numbers simultaneously. It does not mean either that the electron is at every point in space at the same time. As your winning numbers are not all numbers on the dice.
No, the probability to find the electron at a given point in space and time is described by a wavefunction. The probability to have your winning pair of numbers showing up in the experiment with the dice is described by a probability-distribution, that we just constructed to be a wavefunction.
If the path of the electron is determined before travelling through one of the slits then, of course, the probability-distribution for the position of the electron is completely different: the position of the electron is known (within principal limits), the probability to find the electron at a different point is zero.
If you cast the dice and record the number, the result of this 'experiment' is known, the probability to get another number is zero.
If the electron continues it's trip through the double-slit experiment there will be no resulting interference-pattern behind the screen. This is not surprising at all, because the probability-distribution for finding an electron at a given point is no longer a monochromatic wave showing equal probabilities for either path through any of the slits. The wave-function is a strongly localized package.
No surprise here: also the result of casting your dice twice will no longer be described by a combination of all probabilities of the first cast and the second - since the first outcome was 'measured' and is therefore determined.
Nobody would dare to say the dice have wave and matter duality - the wave describes the probabilities for a given point in (number-) space.
The same for electrons, photons, anyones...
They dont have wave and matter duality. The probability-distribution is described by a wave-function. The electron in a box is not at every point at the same time - the probability for being at any point might be equal at any time. The probability for any number on a dice is equal at any time - until you check, you measure. Then the probability for exactly one result is one - for the others it is zero. Schrödinger's cat is not dead and alive. The probability might be equal - until you check. (Schrödinger himself, however, is most probably dead)

My Computer turns vegetarian

2011-04-25T18:44:00.002+02:00

We got some angry reactions and shows of disgust and sadness to our report on carnivorous computers, which get their energy by digestion of small animals. While that brilliantly despicable idea was merely a design concept with no proof of real functionality, another designer popped up to save our soul: vegetarian lamps! Marieke Staps http://www.mariekestaps.nl/?/Design/Soil-Lamp-2/ from the netherlands developed soil-powered LED lighting that, according to her words only needs some watering every now and then, just like her chicque and totally pc eco-watch. (a little closer look reveals some copper and zink electrodes which, together with water of the right pH, are nothing but standard batteries. Nice idea though.)

Thinking Big or Rather Big Talking?

2011-04-15T15:54:00.004+02:00

Michio Kaku is featured on the website bigthink.com as a sympathetic elderly man able and willing to explain everything. On April 13 he tells us "why quantum physics ends the free will debate".
Well, sure.
I am very supportive of the idea to popularize big scientific thoughts and achievements so that the broader public gets a glimpse of what is being mulled over in the head of those big shots. But I am totally allergic to oversimplification at the expense of the real message.
Why does quantum physics supposedly end the free will debate? You guess it: because with Newtonian physics everything, every thought, every move you make every step you take was in principle predictable. The world was supposedly completely deterministic. You would just have to know all the parameters of the universe at the time of the big bang, then calculate and calculate until you arrive at your phase space of now and, voila, you could extrapolate into the future of your tremendously boring life.
Now quantum physics has added some dice to the system - much to the annoyance of Einstein - (Mr Kaku mentions Heisenbergs uncertainty relation), and with that you get rid of predictability, determinism is out and free will is in. According to Mr. Kaku, Heisenbergs principle tells us that an electron (for example) could not be pinpointed, it could be anywhere at any time. This sounds great but it is an oversimplification and wrong. Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities. It is not true that an electron is a wavefunction. The probability to find an electron at a specific point in space is *described* by a wavefunction. The result may be that the probability to find it anywhere in a given box is equal at any spot - but that does not mean that it is actually everywhere at the same time (the probability to win big in Lotto is equal for any combination of allowed numbers but that does not mean that any combination actually wins - you get it, I assume).
And even if you allow for unpredictability - why exactly does that explain Free Will? Is the lack of predictability equivalent to free will? Is white noise the same as free will? Is randomness free will? Is free will erratic? Is the concept of determinism in contrast to free will? It is very much likely that I will go and have a beer tonight - but I tell you this is my absolutely free will, albeit terribly deterministic.

(there is an anecdote on Mr Kaku's skills of drawing a giraffe that you should not miss)

Anybody seen Ai Weiwei recently?

2011-04-07T11:33:00.007+02:00

In our small universe the thought of supressing an idea, an ideal by simply locking up one person representing it, seems so very archaic. Nevertheless, this still is the approach of chinese authorities, who detained the internationally renowned and sometimes mercilessly critical artist Ai Weiwei on sunday. The voices for free speach became louder ever since.
Cultural Development folks at Platoon (www.platoon.org) suggest to print out this image of Ai Weiwei and display it everywhere in public. Read this: http://blog.platoon.org/home/3/viewentry/1233

Support your local rodent!

2011-03-22T13:29:00.004+01:00

Rats are suffering from bad PR. they are constantly misunderstood, mistreated, mistaken and misplaced if not murdered... The best that is said about them is that they make a wonderful energy-source in your bio-reactor-powered kitchen-table as designed by Auger and Loizeau, a bunch of brilliantly perverted product designers http://www.auger-loizeau.com (see our snippet on "my carnivorous computer").Those critters would be a sad bunch were it not for North Star Rescue who organized a massive bailout for thousand cutie-rats that otherwise would have been doomed. Listen:
A house-owner in San Jose, CA was driven out of his house by the exponentially proliferating rat-community that started with a single, female rat in a cage (well, you guess it, that lady was pregnant). The good old man was feeding his friends while himself abandoning his house and living in a trailer and everything would have been wonderful wasnt it for that annoying exponentiality inherent to uncontrolled, ummm, demonstration of affection between fertile species of opposite sex.... am I making myself clear here?
So, finally some neighbours got concerned when they where nibbled on. They called the pest control. Fortunately an organization called North Star Rescue intervened and moved every single rat in well heated comfy cages to a safe-haven where they were nurtured and entertained and,.... offered new homes.
The almost legendary independent eBook millionairess Amanda Hocking throws in all the little weight of her body urging everybody:"So, if you're an animal lover, and if you can, please donate or send supplies. And if you're nearby, I encourage you to volunteer or adopt a rat or hamster. They really do make excellent pets" ... and an excellent energy-source, as we know.

Every Monday I feed a little rabbit to my carnivorous computer

2011-02-09T21:18:00.003+01:00

It is exciting, albeit horrifying at times, to see the servos grab their prey and slowly pull it into the microbial fuel cell. The PC is powered entirely by the electrical energy gained from the biomass.
I try to keep my little girl, age 1.5, away from the scene - not only because the impressions might be disturbing to her, but also for her own safety.
You are right, you cant get that horrific machine at your local gadget-dealer, yet. But the idea of carnivorous robots is not that far from reality.
The design duo James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau has developed some prototypes of bio-energy powered devices like a watch, feeding from flies it catches with a sticky tape or a machine stealing flies from a spider's web. They call them Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots.
These guys might be creative, but they are definitely nuts. Or as the Treehuggers write in their review "Brilliant - completely disgusting, but brilliant!" Yep.

Twitter will accept only English tweets from February 29, 2011 on

2011-01-09T20:12:00.002+01:00

After the US ministry of justice has subpoenad Twitter to disclose records of and information on users who might be sympathetic to Wikileaks, Twitter decided to show full cooperation and volunteered to take this one step further. As the US intelligence agencies complain about the difficulties to quickly parse tweets in non-english languages, Twitter will - beginning February 29, 2011 - only accept tweets written in english. Programmers close to the company say they have implemented and tested the necessary parsing software and are comfortable with the speed and smoothness of operation. In a future upgrade it is intended to connect with Googles translation services so that non-english utterances can be transformed into acceptable language on the fly. Negotiations, sources say, are promising.

World Wide Mobbing

2010-12-08T15:50:00.002+01:00

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 strange, however, as TNT publishes evidence that the Wikileaks informant was manipulated, that parts of the diplomatic cables were omitted, altered, others completely made up. So, TNT has an agenda, right? Either their information is wrong, or Wikileaks stuff is indeed invented.
But wait, invented compared to what? What did we check the Wikileaks' 'information' against? Not even Wikileaks claims to have corroborated their facts (how could they?). They did not check the validity of their sources. Julian Assange believes "As long as they [the documents] are bona fide it doesn't mater where they come from". Well.
The hysteric reaction of the political caste lends some credibility to the documents. But is this enough? Will it be enough if destructive pseudoinformation is launched in a similar way by interest groups of various kind? The doors are open for world-wide-mobbing.
The validity of 'data' can not be deduced from it's popularity or click-rate. A fundamental difference between factoids and facts lies in the corroboration of sources and information. There is nothing like that in Wikileaks to date. While there is reason to believe that the wikileaks-folks are the 'good guys' if information is not validated there remains ample space for bad-guys to use selective and tailored information for their goals.

Chessboxing

2010-11-03T21:40:00.003+01:00

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?

2010-10-28T20:35:00.002+02:00

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

2010-10-18T20:28:00.001+02:00

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

2010-10-13T21:42:00.005+02:00

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 possible states: powered and not powered - voila! The binary code.

While Craddock and others are building very basic prototypes of 'derivative-computers', it will get exciting, when more advanced material is entered into the game. It is not necessary, to rely on binary code alone - the analog computer is shadowed by the success of binary, but nature takes advantage of it's special properties - and built that still not replicated supermachine: the brain.

If the nerds in virtuality pick up on this and use analog signals (sound, wind, force,...) to build an operating machine ... and if the building blocks they design can be packaged, miniaturized and reused by others for even more complex meta-machines ... who knows, maybe one day something starts thinking or even feeling - on either side of the screen.

What is the commercial value of an idea?

2010-10-10T13:56:00.004+02:00

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, students, romance-seekers, political activists. Why does Facebook have so much more bang? Because of Zuckerberg.
You don't have to like him, you can even 'defriend' him. But his role as a catalyst for an otherwise unexplored idea is invaluable. (May anybody please call Marc and tell him of the brilliant concepts I am stashing away in my drawer?)

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

2010-10-07T11:16:00.003+02:00

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 Apple.
While Gelernter emphasized in an interview with the blog "Big Think" before the verdict was announced that "money is not the issue" - the sum might still send a smile on Gelernter's face.
(Apple is challenging the verdict)

Computers produce virtuality only - no way they show consciousness

2010-08-04T17:51:00.006+02:00

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 separated areas for data and programs. The software is mainly impressed from the outside and only little (if at all) altered by the flow of data coming from an internal or external process.

In the brain data and 'program' are intertwined results of 'hardware' and states. The homoeostasis of the system balances the relations between data-intake, output, flow and – mode of operation. The sensoric and operations- parts of the system are influenced by the data-stream. The whole system is a balance of states, where input and output are often not clearly distinguishable. There is no well-defined separation of software and data.

Consciousness - an emergent property

2010-07-05T12:22:00.005+02:00

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 simulation lacks wetness.
The simulation of intelligent behaviour might imitate quite well decision-processes, even the all so human fuzzyness (some might remember the 'humanize'-button on a sequencer of the eighties... a button adding some imperfection to the timing), but no matter how good this form of "Artificial Intelligence" is, it remains a simulation of intelligence. The processes leading to intelligence or artificial intelligence are inherently different. And so mainly the appearances we actively simulate will be found, the simulation still lacks - consciousness

Artificial Intelligence Revisited

2010-07-02T14:56:00.002+02:00

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 rejects anything that smells like solipsism. "if I see an animal with a head and eyes, I simply assume that what is going on in my head is also going on in it's head", he states in an interview with Berlin's "Der Tagesspiegel". His proof is: common sense. Although this might be satisfactory for a contemporary proponent of a romantic universal poetry, we actually do lack the ultimate test for consciousness and always end up with cozy attributes like feelings, emotions, awareness.
(see also: Der Tagesspiegel "Selbstbewußtsein ist ein Fluch", 27.6.2010)

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

2010-04-27T22:28:00.009+02:00

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 misperception underlying all this visionary shabang: the stuff in the web is not information - it is data.

If we stare at all the data we get blind. If we focus on information the web is a much nicer place. Information arises from the analysis of data, from their connection, processing. Of course, a tweet can contain information ("I am going out now"), but the web's information-content is more powerful than that. Tweets on the weather could be accumulated to support weather-forecasts. Chatter on holiday-plans might help airlines organize their resources. Of course, this analysis is already going on - mainly to extract information for targeted marketing. But wouldn't it be nice if the future interface to the web is not a collection of access-paths to multicoloured 'social' networks or chatterboxes but a configurable data-analysis tool that helps pull out the real information? Travel-tips would not originate in some backoffice of an agency with clear commercial interest - they would be the result of your individual correlation of web-babble with weather-information and flight-prices, for example. Updated life. News could be ranked according to clickrates, or coverage, or resonance in a monitored corner of the net that you define. You name it.
Not only would the data-flood of the net be easier digestible, information would again be decoupled from the commercial interest of information-providers. The web could continue as the anarchic place it once was - or it could at least pretend to.

Meta-Mining

2010-04-12T11:42:00.009+02:00

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 and classic approach - but does it solve the problem?
Let's look at Twitter. The deafening babble of tweets is already organized in life-streams. Read them live and you will drown.
The solution - besides filtering (friends, topics, lists, labels...) - can not lie in organizing the individual byte-series along one or the other axis (time, space, size, language...), the solution will rather be a mining of the meta-information. If a twitterer posts the unavoidable 'I am off to the loo, be back in a minute', this might only interest the one waiting for a response. If she posts that 20 times a day, we get some additional information: there might be the indication of a physiological problem.
Some meta-mining of tweets is approaching commercial relevance as reported by Jessica Guynn and John Horn in the LA times of April 2, 2010. Computer models based on Twitter chatter, they write, are stunningly accurate in predicting the box-office success of Hollywood movies.
If in the web to be the noise of individual utterances will be systematically analyzed for overlying macro-structures and for phase-transitions from the purely random to the organized, there will be more information gained than individually and knowingly put in. The sheer boundless chatter of Twitter and alike corresponds to the cells, the web is the organism.
If we continue looking at the lion through a microscope, we might get a pretty good understanding of his cells and the breathtaking number of them - but we might miss that we are just about to get eaten.

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

2010-04-08T11:12:00.006+02:00

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 different without being bad or evil.
The access moved to a meta-level. Go look at the way you do programming. In the (good, of course!) old days we hacked assembler-code, then moved to C (and still did some assembler-tweak), then C++. We started using Meta-languages like Delphi, created code by drag and drop, embedded libraries of code we did not even look at. We don't code the graphics-interface of our software anymore.
This transcending to the meta-level is happening everywhere. And it is good.
The i-Pad is a Meta-type of an access-device. The i-Pad is no computer and the i-Pad is no phone.

One Culture

2010-04-07T11:17:00.007+02:00

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.

Rapoport and Hucho describe two levels of access to both cultures: the emotional approach (which they call vegetative) and the learned, theoretical approach. While the hard sciences lack the first, popular culture is based on it. The consequence must not be to popularize the hard sciences to science-pop but to insist on the deeper levels of understanding also of art and humanities.
Otherwise what is meant with 'culture' tastes too much like 'pop'

The Third Culture

2010-04-06T12:05:00.002+02:00

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

2010-04-06T11:45:00.004+02:00

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

    I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, Have you noticed how the word "intellectual" is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don't y'know.

    A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

    I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.