half baked ideas

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.?