Most of all the species that have ever existed are extinct and it is certain that human beings will also one day be extinct, or our current cultural history lost through a Dark Age, most probably accelerated by our own doing.

In the spirit of the Internet Archive and the Long Now project, perhaps we should look at mothballing human knowledge somewhere very safe - like on the Moon. A reverse of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ - where we put a monolith on the Moon for others.

It seems like a text only archive would be around 30 Terabytes which could be stored in solid state form in a space the size of a large chest.

I wonder how much this would cost, what the requirements would be to protect against radiation and whether a solar powered transmitter could be built to last for an extremely long time?

I would certainly contribute to such a project.

Internet Archive

Lee Smolin’s answer to this year’s Edge Question: ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’ is my favorite, touching on something I’ve been thinking and reading about for the last year.

Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin

1. All systems leak - so they are fuzzy and relative.
No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate ’system’ and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous to a ‘frame of reference’ since at some level, on the one hand, clear boundaries between systems are impossible and on the other any ‘observing’ system will only be able to perceive boundaries relative to itself.

2. All systems interact over time, and there may be emergent patterns in these interactions creating defined periodic cycles as with living or growing things.
If this is so, why should biological theories of evolution apply only to biological systems of systems made by living things, such as economics? What I mean by this is that evolutionary ideas apply to iterative systems that teeter on the edge of chaos (i.e. crystals presumably only evolve very very slowly) - but what if all interactions between systems tended to become iterative. Only recently has science begun to look quantitatively at the rules governing iterations between systems as over time. i.e. algorithms rather than formulae. I suspect that any all encompassing theory of evolution applies to any set of interacting systems (living or non living)

My dangerous idea is that Darwinism can be expressed in terms of physics, in terms of patterns in entropy flow between systems and more specifically in terms of a new and relativistic look at thermodynamics.

I suspect there may be a relativinstic view of thermodynamics and that a fourth law of thermodynamics may include an extended idea of natural selection, defined in terms of the physics of interactions between systems, where all linked systems tend to become either linked, or ‘iterative’ over time.

T-mobile suck

Here’s an idea - if everyone added the tag: badrank ragerank and a company name to weblog posts about sucky customer service, you could aggregate complaints in one place and also Google bomb them.

Update: ragerank is a better tag name.

I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to T-mobile to try and get a refund on the fees they charged me to reinstall their service because of an error at their end. Unfortunately it was impossible to talk to a human being that wasn’t reading from a script and then the line cut out - because its a T-mobile one and therefore sucks. Ha!

I figured that its easier to give them some bad Google juice instead.

BADRANK RAGERANK T-MOBILE

Anyway, did I mention that T-Mobile suck and just fined me for their own incompetence.

Poor Service - T-Mobile Sucks TMobile sucks T-Mobile bad service T-mobile complaints Tmobile dropped calls

Looks like the pressure will continue for the Chinese Yuan to revalue. In true stupid amateur punter mode, am looking at a few possible investments.

Maybe I should be reckless enough to buy stock in a dotcom like Ctrip.com (CTRP), a consolidator of hotel accommodations and airline tickets in China.

They would benefit from Yuan revaluation in the short term if they don’t buy too many Aeron chairs or hire people who used to work in enterpise software.

Q&A: what price the yuan? - Markets - Times Online

Andrew Orlowski writes:

“A new study conducted at Cornell University suggests that we think in analog, not digital. It’s a bold claim which, if true, threatens to make thirty years of linguistics and neuroscience metaphors look very silly indeed.”

The fact that our cats can calculate the required muscle flex and velocity to leap onto a table with food, but don’t understand the meaning of ‘no’ and can’t do simple arithmetic has always puzzled me.

However it makes sense that any system based upon learned statistical reaction to sensory input would create sophisticated responses without understanding them. In this instance ability to extract logical rules would be based upon a enormous amount of analog input that produced binary certainty as an emergent phenomenon.

The Reverse Turing test or ‘captcha’, usually contains a noise filled image of a password with warped fonts is used to filter humans from computers, to stop spam. In this instance a very simple digital message is encoded in a very analog way.

As captchas have become more sophisticated, in an arms race against algorithms designed to crack them, humans often make errors reading them. The fact that these errors become pronounced may indicate that we use statistical responses to patterns rather than an internal algorithm for reading captcha’s - this would tend to indicate that our brains work in analog mode.

In other words, if we had an algorithm for reading captchas then it would be likely that we would either be entirely able or unable to decode any captcha created with the same algorithm, there would not be a statistical chance of failure.

The interesting thing about a captcha image is that it does not compress very well, while retaining fidelity - in other words the ratio of bits required for the analog message to the equivalent digital message is very high.

Current SETI searches assume that a signal would not have deliberate noise - that it would be separated from natural phenomena by its ‘artificial’ simplicity. One of the problems with this is that we have to look in areas that are naturally quiet, it is difficult to differentiate between a signal caused by a known or unknown natural phenomenon such as a quasar pulse or WOW signal and a deliberate message.

But what if someone were to try a Reverse Turing Test on us?

Are brains analog, or digital? | The Register

The Internet allows you to protest directly against unethical advertisers by clicking on ads you don’t like.

Traditionally people have protested against hate media such as Michael Savage’s radio show by encouraging people to boycott advertisers on the show. The problem is this is indirect. Without direct penalties, shows like Savage’s actually rely on the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ phenomenon of having large audiences of people who listen just to be outraged. Advertisers gravitate towards low end brands where negative feelings against them are outweighed by the fact that some percentage of overall listeners will convert to buyers.

It occurred to me that the Internet allows you to do something much more direct, to penalize advertisers by clicking on text ads and not buying anything. This doesn’t just lower revenues it actually costs the advertiser directly. The ‘all publicity is good publicity’ goes away.

One could go one step further and encourage people to gang together and click on certain ads in the manner of an ad busting flashmob.

For example, Steve Rhodes emailed me today to point out that Michael Savage:

“came back from his vacation early to rant on his show that not one penny should go to the tsunami victims. He also implied it might be punishment by god of Muslims along with men who went to Thailand to have sex with children.” (Steve said he will post a transcript on his blog)

Now Amazon know that Michael Savage’s book sold a reasonable number of copies, so they bid on the phrase ‘Michael Savage’ on Overture and link to his book.

If enough people were to search for Michael Savage on Yahoo, click on the Amazon ad and not buy anything then Amazon would soon drop the ad.

Of course, I would not encourage anyone to do this now.

Here’s a thought, regularly I pick up second hand vinyl LP’s for $1 from the wondrous Amoeba records.
So why do I have to pay the same per track for MP3s to avoid getting legal action from record companies? What is to stop me buying or selling MP3 tracks ’second hand’ for 10c.?