Here’s a chart I generated from data from Nielsen//NetRatings as reported by the Center for Media Research. It shows the growth of Internet usage (US) from Sept. 01 to Sept. 02 according to household income.

For the left-brained among us, here’s the text version from the Center’s coverage:

US households making annual salaries of between $100,000 and $150,000 represent the fastest growing income group online, rising by 20% between September 2001 and September 2002. Following close behind, reports Nielsen, is the income group of those making between $150,000 and $999,999, increasing by 14% over the same period of time.

It is important to note, however, that Nielsen finds the income group with the largest unique audience online is actually that with annual household salaries between $50,000 and $74,999, with roughly 37.3 million people as of September 2002.

NOTE: John Walkenbach over at the J-Walk blog has vastly improved my visual display of this quantitative data. And he’s provided notes explaining exactly why mine sucks. Nice job.

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David Reed has written an insightful insightful short piece on the limitations (and inevitability) of scientific metaphors. For example:

Most radio engineers work in a particularly inapt metaphor – but they don’t know it. That metaphor still includes the essence of the idea called the luminiferous aether (except they call it the “spectrum”). The metaphor includes the idea that a “bit” is a unit of energy (rather than what Shannon defined it to be – which is something that represents correlated probabilities among parts of a system). This confuses the thing (bit) with one possible instance of the thing (a coded pattern of energy or matter).

Communications regulators work in an even more inapt metaphor…

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Bryan Field-Elliot of NetMeme responds to some bloggery about Stephen Wolfram by pointing us to an article by Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic) in Scientific American that wonders why Wolfram is getting far more attention than an equally implausible-sounding theory from James Carter.

…[Li]ke it or not, in science, as in most human intellectual endeavors, who is doing the saying matters as much as what is being said, at least in terms of getting an initial hearing.

Science is, in this sense, conservative and sometimes elitist. It has to be in order to survive in a surfeit of would-be revolutionaries. For every Stephen Wolfram there are 100 James Carters. There needs to be some screening process whereby truly revolutionary ideas are weeded out from ersatz ones.

Enter the skeptics. We are interested in the James Carters of the world…

Yet the article has already pointed to the screening method: Feynman called Wolfram “astonishing” and Wolfram was the youngest person ever to win a MacArthur “genius” award, whereas Carter “has beeen an abalone diver, gold miner, filmmaker, cave digger, repairman, inventor and owner-operator of a trailer park.” That doesn’t mean, of course, that his theory of “circlons” is wrong. But the screening process is probably working pretty well: Carter published and no one paid much attention. If you’re going to pay full attention to every publication, you don’t have much of a filtering system.

What Shermer is talking about is probably better called a “second look,” and they’re important, too. (And, inevitably, this discussion should send us scuttling back to Kuhn who shows that “conservativism” in science isn’t a political choice but a requirement for there to be science at all: science can only proceed within a paradigm.)

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My son Nathan, 11, yesterday asked:

Why can you sell your soul to the Devil but not to G-d?

He worked out an answer, but I enjoyed the question more. As did he.

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Adina Levin makes the case that a sufficiently usable search engine that has indexed a sufficiently large text base — i.e., Google — in effect is a KM system.

Yup. In short: If you know where things are, you don’t ever have to clean up.

(One caveat: This works when you know exactly what you’re looking for, but browsing a taxonomy is helpful when you don’t.)

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A Mini-Bogus Contest: Now that Tivo has taken over our home — last night it deposed our atomic clock, frog-marching it out the door — how might this jealous god recast old programs in its image? For example:

Leave It to Tivo

Tivo Knows Best

I Love Tivo

Get Tivo!

Tivo in Charge

Tivo’s Heroes

Your Tivo of Tivos, starring Sid Caeser

And while we’re on the subject, what’s up with “I Love Lucy” as a title? Doesn’t that imply that Desi Arnaz thought he was the star? How pathetic is that!

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Michael Fleming responds to the article in my newsletter about leeway with this quotation:

“Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

Grant Gilmore, THE AGES OF AMERICAN LAW 110-111 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Lovely. Thanks.

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I’ll be talking on the radio today about why I want to have hot monkey sex with Google. This is the first of what I hope will be a continuing series of tech commentary for WBUR’s “Here and Now,” carried by 44 stations. My piece will be on at 12:20pm. Come listen to me make a fool of myself. Again.

(Here’s a link. You’ll need the Real Player to hear the piece.)

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Yes, I’m on the road, but in about as anti-Kerouackian way as possible — fly in at night, stay at a Sheraton, watch TV, give a talk, leave the next morning. I don’t think this qualifies me as a Dharma Bum.

I just gave a keynote at a conference on integration (think KM, portals, XML) put on by the Delphi Group. The conference is in Reston, VA, and has drawn people from around the country and even overseas, yet another anecdotal indicator that the conference business may be springing back. (Since I make much of my living as a speaker, this is of more than academic interest to me.)

Delphi surprise-inducted me this morning into their League of Honorees (I didn’t quite catch the name of the group). I was in a post-speaking Zone of Confusion and missed the details, but I think we get capes and fight crime. (No, but seriously, I appreciate the honor.)

Anyway, it will be a Day of Light Blogging for me because I’m traveling. Do carry on.

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Let there be no doubt: In Kate Bulkley’s excellent article in The Guardian about blogging and wifi, I am Mr. Laptop.

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Jon Udell uses my blog about the phone number trick at Google to talk about what happens when what used to be public but obscure becomes public and easily accessible.

He also mentions the IETF ENUM initiative “which seeks a mapping between telephone numbers and the DNS.” The official IETF white paper on usage scenarios of this mapping says:

In a pure IP environment, ENUM will allow end users to be identified by a commonly used name (i.e., their telephone number) for a variety of applications. … [E]nd users can change IP service providers without having to change their destination identification. For example, an end user can change their underlying e-mail address from john@abc.com to john@xyz.com but, with ENUM set up to handle e-mail … still be reached by having ENUM-enabled mail clients send mail addressed to their ôtelephone numberö (e.g., mailto:+1-973-236-6787).

For voice services, ENUM will allow the easy end user identification described above as well as interworking between terminals [phones] on the PSTN and on the IP-based network. It may also allow for the implementation of more advanced services, such as find-me. For voice communication starting on an IP-based network, ENUM can be used on each call to determine the preferred type of destination based on the priority of the network termination available. For voice communication starting on the PSTN, ENUM is more likely to be used where at least one of the destinations of the call exists on an IP-based network.

I don’t know enough to have an opinion. If you do, lemme know.

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Frank Paynter responds to my blog about designing a new peace symbol:

In the age of hip-hop, local students didn’t want to associate with the super-annuated ND semaphore signal. The symbol we adopted isn’t as easily sketched, but it makes a nice logo. Here’s what we came up with, after heartfelt discussions last winter (logo is in upper left corner)

Nice connecting of peace and freedom, but I think the new symbol does have to be scribblable by people who recently ingested 100-250mgs of hallucinogens, just as a practical matter.

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Fox proposes televised coverage of arms inspectors in Iraq so “Viewers could decide for themselves if the inspectors are being allowed to do their jobs”?

A pyramid scheme for “Women Helping Women” sweeps the nation?

A movie featuring stupid, gross stunts is #1 at the box office?

Please, people, this is what we have the Web for!

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I’ve published a new issue of my free newsletter:

Contents Digital ID: Four lessons from the DigitalID World conference, including: IDs are nice but not the center of the universe The Need for Leeway: It’s the only way we manage to live together, and computers are eating away at it Educational Leeway: A Personal Addendum: Grading kids sucks Hope on the copyright front: Multiple news items actually offer some hope. But don’t get your hopes up about hope. Notes and Disclaimers Pertaining to the Above Material: Covering my ass when it comes to using words How to Become a Guru: Ten steps to financial freedom. Why Google Totally Sucks! Really!: Nah, not really. Misc.: Misc. The Anals of Marketing: Jumping the Loan Shark and Yahoo the Censor Walking the Walk: Timex finds the Web changes time Cool Tool: Picasa organizes your pictures What I’m Playing: Grand Theft Auto 3 – reprehensible but so damn much fun Internetcetera: Broadband vs. cell phone adoption rates Links: You send ‘em, I run ‘em Political Links: Hey, you get ready to start a war, you get a few links Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs: Where are you bastards? Bogus contest: My brain on the Net

Free subscription, no ads, no spam…you know, it wouldn’t kill you to sign up for it.

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Eric Norlin responds to the article in my newsletter on the DigitalID World conference. [Note: Eric reports that he's having trouble with his permalinks.]

Also, you don’t want to miss his response to my peacenik blog.

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Stanton Finley has sent a message to a bunch o’ bloggers and others asking us to re-design the peace symbol.

The old peace symbol represents the letters “ND” in semaphor language. Since Nuclear Disarmament no longer tops the peacenik agenda, we could indeed use a new symbol.

I am refraining from suggesting my proposed “Forgive me” hand gesture, but I have no other ideas. Suggestions anyone?

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Stan also asks us for a “manifesto” of peace. Here’s mine. (Prepare for Hippie Resurgence Syndrome.)

All people are created equal. We all have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All people are created different. There is value in that difference and we need to preserve it.

All people are connected. We are connected by geography and responsibility, and, if we would let it, by love.

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Jock Gill, Clinton’s original tech advisor, has posted a column on a piece he thinks is missing from Paul Krugman’s essay.

Jock agrees with Krugman about the economic divide: the top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of the nation’s wealth in the past 30 years, while the median income has grown only 10% in the same time. But he disputes Krugman’s claim that “Gilded Ages and Gilded Plutocrats, not relative middle-class income equality, are the norm in American life.” Not before the Robber Barons, Jock says, because there weren’t yet corporations that “never die and do not vote, yet have the full legal and constitutional rights, and wealth that never dies even when the humans do.” The result is a corrupt political system that favors the rich.

Here’s why I’m depressed: We don’t care. We somehow believe we’re in an economy of abundance so the fact that the top 1% have the wealth of the bottom 40% doesn’t matter to us so long as we feel ok about ourselves. And when was the last time you heard a politician talk about the poor as anything except a burden to the rest of us? Or look beyond our borders to see the effect of our life on others, much less accept a moral responsibility to help raise up the world?

Except when Paul Wellstone spoke.

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Speaking of Big Lies, Brad DeLong does a ripsnortin’ job on Chuck Grassley’s letter to the editor in the NY Times. Ironically, the letter purports to set the record straight about who gets what in the Bush tax cut plan, but Brad exposes the letter is a pack of untruths. (Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.)

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Kevin Werbach has a terrific article on decentralization at news.com:

Centralized systems are failing for two simple reasons: They can’t scale, and they don’t reflect the real world of people.

This is the theme of his upcoming Supernova conference. (I’m going.)

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Peter Kaminski responds to my neologizing “Google URLs” (“A search query that puts a page at the top of Google’s returns list”):

“Google URLs” are the same as the mechanism behind Robust Hyperlinks (For a joke intro, start here.)

Robust Locations there is a pretty cool trick, too.

You make a page robust, according to this paper, by running their free, open source software that adds a “lexical signature” about five words long, a hash of your document content. People can find your page by searching for its signature, so even if you move the page, Google (or whatever) will find it for you.

The problem is that the signature isn’t necessarily memorable. For example, the signature of www.cluetrain.com is “html intranetworked uznajut happytalk stemmens” whereas its Google URL is “cluetrain.”

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Norm Jenson points out that (as I’d blogged) when you search on your phone number at Google (in quotes, no hyphens) and it finds your address and gives you a link to a Yahoo! map of where you live, Yahoo also lets you generate code you stick on your web page to take friends and burglars to your site.

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Seth Johnson points out that two senators, on this sad day for that institution, “are starting to show some truly helpful cluefulness” :

“Digital media simply shouldn’t be more restricted than other copyrighted items,” [Ron] Wyden [D-Oregon] said. “Digital technology is a great step forward, and it would be a shame to take a big step backward on consumers’ rights when it comes to using this material.”

He and Chris Cox (R-Calif) are sponsoring a bill to make this idea all legal and everything.

(For the record, my wife and I went door-to-door a couple of times for Wyden during his first political campaign. We thus feel, in a Stallman “Gnu Linux” sort of way, that the bill really ought to be referred to as the Wyden-Cox-Weinberger-Geller Law.)

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Senator Paul Wellstone’s death has narrowed our
political vision yet further. We’re down to
about what can be seen through the sights of a gun.

He was a mensch.

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MIT Technology Review just posted a column of mine on why we should be scared of Microsoft Palladium.

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I was at the Newseum, a site that thumbnails newspaper front pages from around the world. (Thanks, Dan Pink.) I clicked on the Australia’s Courier Mail and saw their tag line:

For readers who expect more from life

Unfortunately, I freudianly misread it as:

For readers who expected more from life

Two letters can make the difference between marketing and truth, eh?

And while we’re discussing news about news, J.D. Lasica has asked various digeratti what they read for news. For extra fun, try to guess the answers the ecelebs give; I bet you won’t be far wrong. (Kudos to Henry Jenkins for mentioning TheOnion as a news source.)

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Adina Levin, having read my ramble about Stephen Wolfram’s presentation at PopTech, recommends Kurzweil’s appreciation of him, which she has summarized here. The Kurzweil piece is well-written and leave us humanities majors behind about a third of the way in.

There’s also a good article — again only two-thirds beyond my comprehension — by Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

Steve Yost writes pithily about reading Wolfram. He says:

The repetitiveness of Wolfram’s style led me to think that near the end he’d reveal that the book was generated using his main thesis as the initial condition of a CA algorithm. Now that would be a substantial example.

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1. Go to google.com
2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks
3. When it finds your name and address, click on “Maps”
4. You are here.

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I’ve posted a review of Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” over at BlogCritics.org. I found the movie entertaining and righteous but willing to sacrifice coherence for the sake of a good stunt.

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The debate continues over how to solve the DNS mess. The mess exists because there are more people than there are names. So, who gets davidweinberger.com? (Hint: I didn’t.) Not to mention who gets Disney.com, Schwarzenegger.com, and PamelaAnderson.com.

Dan Gillmor a few months ago said that Google had solved the problem, at least for now. If I want to find my pal Bob Smith, the Mulholland furrier, I google him with a query like “bob smith furrier mulholland.” Very likely, Google will get it right.

So, why not build on this? Google could enable us to fill out a standard form with fields for name, email, web pages, parents, town, high school, college, jobs, employers, hobbies, publications, summer camps, etc. Then add a tab to Google.com called “People.” Weight the form very heavily when searching for names, so that if you searched for “david weinberger herricks,” the Google engine would notice that “herricks” is listed on my personal form as my high school, and thus would move my web pages (the ones I’ve listed on the form) way up the list. No one besides me would ever see my form itself.

Google has the heft to pull this off. If you know someone at Google, wanna pass this along? Alternatively, you might want to point out the gaping hole in my logic that makes this idea not just implausible but actually humiliating.

Either way, thank you.

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Proposed neologism:

Google URL (n) A phrase sufficient to bring a desired Web site to the top of the returns list at Google. E.g., “My real address is weird, so I gave him my Google URL: ‘Locke die cast’”; “I couldn’t remember the dictionary’s web address so I used the Google URL ‘American Heritage’”

[Note: Vernor Vinge gave out Google URLs in his talk at PopTech, as reported, but didn't use the term itself.]

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Dan Bricklin has a touching appreciation of his aunt, Hinda Gross, who died last Friday. It’s a reminder of how remarkable we can make our lives if we choose to.

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Scott Kirsner writes in yesterday’s Boston Globe about two Boston-area companies coming out with anti-spam products. The founder of one of the companies, Spamnix, was one of the founders of the other company, InterMute. (InterMute is best known for AdSubtract.) Even though the Spamnix guy signed a non-compete, he claims it only pertains to ad-blocking software, not spam. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine InterMute suing, if only to slow the launch of competitive software.

Nah:

“We’re both attacking spam because we both hate it,” Jaspan says. “There are a zillion people using e-mail, so there’s room for lots of [anti-spam] products. If I do pretty well or they do pretty well, maybe one of us will acquire the other.”

“My passion against spam is even greater than my competitiveness,” says Paul English. “I think there can be lots of good solutions, and I wish him luck.”

Now, that’s the way it ought to be.

[Disclosure: Paul English at InterMute is an old friend of mine and a sometime business partner. I've been a beta for his upcoming spam product, SpamSubtract.]

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A bunch of netty women and men have sent a letter to FCC Chair Michael “Son of” Powell. The basic message is: When the telecommunications industry goes bankrupt, don’t try to resuscitate the corpse. Let it go. Its infrastructure and the business model based on it are obsolete. It can’t be fixed. Instead, let the market bring forth a new era of innovation and connectivity, let a hundred flowers bloom, let the moon enter the house of Aquarius, etc. The alternative is that we sink billions into companies that are doing everything they can to prevent telecommunications – the whole schmear of telephones, cable, broadband and the stuff we haven’t invented yet – from doing what it wants to do: go digital, go IP, go everywhere.

The letter is posted at http://www.netparadox.com. The issue is important because the existing industry is going to use every weapon it can find, including the blunt instrument of “It’s the only way we can defeat the terrorists” in order to maintain its grip. So, wanna help spread the word?

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I learned a lesson from Ernie the Attorney at PopTech.

Which should you bring to a conference if you want to be incredibly popular?

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More than a couple of people noticed me and Ernie the Attorney blogging next to each other from PopTech. “Why?” they asked. “Why are you so focused on blogging the conference?”

Durn fine question to which I have less than durn fine answers.

1. I blog conferences for the same reasons that I blog in general: I don’t know.

2. blogging forces me to pay attention, just as note-taking in general does.

3. Insofar as I’m engaged by what the speakers are saying, I want to be talking with them. Since conferences insist on maintaining a distinction between “panelist” and “audience member,” blogging lets me participate. Best of all, I always get the last word.

But why real-time blog since post-session blogging enables me to reflect on what was said and write more thoughtfully? But post-session blogging means that after a full day at an intellectually intense conference like PopTech, followed by an intellectually intense dinner, followed by an intellectually intense dessert, I have to go back to my hotel room and write a @#$%!-ing blog entry. So, real-time blogging is better for me but worse for my readers.

And, dear readers, isn’t that really what it’s all about?

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[From PopTech] I’m supposed to blog an hour with Wolfram? Ay caramba!

I’m going to write some general comments, and then I’ll post my running notes.

Comments

I haven’t read Wolfram’s book and I am in no position to evaluate the truth or usefulness of what he said.

I hear what he says through a couple of filters. His general thesis – that structures as complex as the universe itself can be generated from incredibly simple rules – resonates. It’s the basic claim of chaos theory. And, for me it helps get around my lifelong discomfort with the nature of scientific laws. The idea that the universe is governed by laws is too clearly an application of the governance paradigm to the physical universe. And, while Wolfram’s theory gets us past this, in the same way, of course, Wolfram applies the computer paradigm to the universe. And the fact that his paradigm maps to the paradigm of current technology isn’t just a coincidence.

Wolfram’s presentation was surprisingly clear. I followed more than I’d thought, although I certainly got lost as he went on. Unfortunately, I got lost as he got more and more interesting. I hate when that happens.

Ultimately, of course, the question is the extent to which the rules describe the universe or generated the universe. Not having read the book, I strongly suspect the answer is that the question is phrased entirely wrong. I’m definitely gonna buy the book and pretend to read it.

Anyway, on to the running notes…

[Ernie the Attorney's take on Wolfram is very funny.]

Notes…

John Benditt began by summarizing Stephen Wolfram’s idea: “The entire universe is the output of an algorithm the size of a four or five line computer program.”

Wolfram physically looks a bit like Jason Alexander, but that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. He’s British and, of course, some type of genius.

He came to his idea while writing programs that try to break down into primitives the things humans want to do (e.g., Mathematica). Suppose you could do the same for nature. What kinds of computer programs might be relevant? From writing mathematical programs, he thought it would have to be quite complex. But suppose you look at very simple programs, one line of code, even chosen at random. Pick the simplest programs and see what they do. So, he looked at “cellular automata.” A simple starting point and a simple rule can create complex patterns.

There are 256 simple (8-bit) ceullular automata, so he decided to look at all of them. With rule 30, truly random patterns result. Very simple things go in and very complex things come out, which is against our normal intuition.

So, he decided to point this new “telescope” at other phenomena. The same behavior occurs in a “vast array of systems.” It wasn’t noticed before because you need computers “and tools like Mathematica,” and because it goes against our intuition.

Why does the phenomenon happen? You need a new conceptual framework to explain that. All natural processes can be viewed as computations. Sometimes you know what the output will be ahead of time, e.g., with cellular automaton designed to do squares or to find primes. But there can be universal cellular automata that emulate other, dedicated automata, by being given different input.

The principle of computational equivalence: Any system whose behavior doesn’t look obviously simple to us will turn out to be performing a computation similar to any other.” [I may have blown that. The pool is getting over my head.] That is, if you look at a system with only simple rules, it will show behavior that’s simple and regular. But if you make the rules for the system just a tiny bit more complicated, you jump to having a system that is as sophisticated as any other.

This principle yields predictions: A system like this should be able to do universal computation. And it can.

You wouldn’t expect to find this in nature since human-made universal computers are highly complex. It suggests that there should be lots of systems in nature capable of sophisticated computation.

This explains why Cellular Automaton #30 looks complicated to us. Imagine a system and a observer who’s trying to decode what the system is doing. The PCE says that in many cases, the behavior of the system will be as complex as the systems inside the observer. That’s why #30 seems complex. This leads (somehow) to the Principle Computational Irreducibility. E.g., we can figure out where the earth will be in its orbit 1M years from now just by plugging nubers into a formula. But in some cases, the only way to work out will happen is to run the system, to do the experiment. That defines a limit from what one can expect to get from science.

For example: “The Weather has a mind of its own.” The PCE says there’s some sense to this in that fluid turbulence in the atmospher is doing as sophisticated a calculation as what’s hapening in our minds.

Q&A with John Benditt

Q: You postulate that there is a rule for the universe itself. That seems preposterous because the universe is enormously complex. Defend yourself.

A: I might not believe that had I not seen all that the programs I was studying could do. Physics gets more complex the smaller the object of study gets. But that doesn’t have to be the case. A very simple program might be able to produce all the complexity.

What might that program might be like? If the program is small, then the things immediately visible in our universe can’t be visible in that program. Also, there has to be as little as possible built into that program. Cellular automata already have too much built in: it has the notion of cells arranged in space and that the color of the cell is different from the cell itself. In the end, one doesn’t need anything except space. [This is so similar to Hegel's Logic which generates the universe simply from Being. "Sein. Reine Sein." and we're off and running.] I ultimately suspect one doesn’t need anything more than pure space to generate the universe.

But what is space? In traditional science you don’t get to ask that question. But my guess is that space ultimately is a collection of discrete points and all we know is how those points are connected to other points.

Q: Isn’t this at odd with common sense and 300 years of science?

A: Yes. Newton and Einstein both see space as a background without its own properties. Einstein explored the idea that space is all there is later in his life. Space is a collection of nodes where every node is connected to three others.

So how does time work? Traditionally, time has simply been another dimension. But when you think about programs, time operates very differently than space. I think time is much closer to programs. For cellular automata, every cell gets incremented in sync. But there’s probably no universal clock. So, maybe only one place in the universe gets updated at a time. It seems simultaneous because until I get updated, I can’t tell if you’ve been updated. Some known features of physics can be explained this way (e.g., relativity).

“What’s encouraging is that from so little one gets out so much.” So, if we go all the way, we may be able to define the universe in one small program. “It won’t be as exciting as one might think because when the universe ran this program, it took 10B years to run the program.” And the Principle of Computational Irreducibility means that we can’t catch up: you have to actually run the program.

Q: What is the experimental program that will let us find this program?

A: The core of my new science is a type of abstract science. If the rule is simple enough, we could just search for it. Search through the simplest one trillion rules. Some will be promising but, e.g., won’t have time. Many elaborate tools need to be buit.

Questions from the audience

Q: Is this falsifiable?

A: The core of what I’ve tried to do is more like mathematics than natural science. Falsifiability isn’t that relevant for mathematics. Math is tested on whether it’s useful in modeling the physical world. He expects there will be thousands of papers in ten years proposing very simple rules. Wolfram himself has proposed some models for fluid turbulence that are surprising.

Q: What effects does your thinking have on fields like philosophy.

A: There hasn’t been much time for people to integrate it into other fields. But his book does talk philosophy and is already making an impact on philosophy, e.g., the effect of computational irreducibility has implications for Free Will.

Q: What about the size of the initial conditions? In order to get universality, you can’t start with one bit on. What’s the number you need? Randomness is the most complex thing. When you come across complexity, you may be looking at it wrong and there may be a simpler way of looking at it. E.g., fractals may be complex and beautiful but result from a single line program.

A: The idea is that you can characterize the complexity of an entity only by looking at the complexity of the program that generated it.

Q: Count the amount of computer time you dissipate, not just the initial state, you can get complexity.

Q: You show that we see simple patterns at various scales.

A: Complex issue. Most CA are not on all the same scales. (Fractals are.) …[and here my attention and understanding ended]

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[From PopTech] Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who invented ecstasy, carefully creates new molecules and then more carefully ingests them on the grounds that there’s no other way to see the effect on the mind. He said wants to raise the question of the mind rather than the brain. But he never quite got to it, at least not explicitly. Shulgin does not believe that computers will ever imitate the mind, although they’ll be good at imitating the brain. “The mind process is what I’m primarily interested in.”

He’s a charming presenter. Just when you think drugs have smoothed off the edges of his mind, he comes through with enough detailed chemistry to remind you that he is in fact a rigorous scientifist.

He gave a personal accounting of drugs he has known and loved, although he talked about them in their chemical names (“dimethoxyladida” is about as close as I can get) so it came out as a list without punctuation.

He railed against the “analog drug bill” that says that if a drug is “substantially similar” (vague enough for you?) to a schedule one drug (one with no medical use and a high potential for abuse), then it shall be treated as a schedule one drug.

He estimates that there are 200 known psychedelics. Given the growth rate, there will be maybe 2,000 in the next 10-15 years.

Now, he says, he’s ready to begin his talk. (The clock has run out.) When he first took mescaline he realized there were parts of himself he had not been in contact with. Then he took another drug with just a small chemical difference and found important differences; for example, the flower he’d meditated on when on peyote he now tore apart to see what’s inside. (He talks about drugs the way others talk about wines, I think on purpose.) A small brain effect can have a large mind effect.

He ended by describing a new molecule. “Here’s a compound that’s never been made. A whole new area of chemistry…I’ve not tasted it yet. I don’t know what the interesting properties are. … It doesn’t know me either.” So you have to do a careful introduction. “You start with a few micrograms. In case you make a mistake.” There’s an unlimited number of these. He finds this fascinating “and wants to do this for the rest of my life.”

Fascinating person. Needs more time, and maybe an interview format. (I heard him and his wife on Terry Gross’ss Fresh Air a few months ago, and she drove the interview masterfully.)

Soundbyte: “I found the 2,4,5 orientation superb.”

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[From PopTech] Vinge, the science fiction writer, talked about nutty stuff, presenting seriously insane ideas with the right mix of conviction and humor to suspend our disbelief.

Vinge began by giving us a Google URL, i.e., telling us to find a site by looking up “vinge technological singularity” in Google. That leads to a page about “the singularity,” the extropian notion that “…we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” What will life be like for those before and after the change? This lead him to talk, with only a glimmer of a smile, about life for the “early post-humans.”

“The surface of the earth may not turn out to be the best place to think.” Maybe we’ll have to seek out better places. (Better in what way? Better reading light?) Vinge points us to Hans Moravec’s “Pigs in Cyberspace” that suggests that we convert the universe into a place that computes. [What a lead in to Wolfram, who speaks in the next session.]

Now for the next step. Vinge suggests that the “principle of mediocrity,” along with Occam’s Razor and entropic rules, are ways of getting answers when you don’t have facts. The Principle of Mediocrity says that if you don’t know what’s going on, assume you’re an average case. E.g., the earth isn’t special, so the planets probably don’t revolve around us. Moravec’s conclusion is that the principle of mediocrity says that it is almost certain that we are ourselves living in a simulation. Says Vinge: “This is a moderately logical argment, especially if you are into this sort of thing” (i.e., if you’re a nutcase).

But is this an “operationally significant issue”? Vinge says we might actually be able to tell if we’re living in a simulation by “looking for the jaggies.” (The “jaggies” is the stairstep effect you get with straight lines painted in inadequate resolution.) Perhaps, he suggests, the jaggies are the quantum mechanical anomalies. Apparently there are physicists who take this seriously.

Great fun.

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[From PopTech] Sherry Turkle, who did the missionary work in the effect of social computing on the sense of self, talked on the psychology of artificial worlds. Brilliantly. In particular, she talked on the natuure of authenticity. The old concept, she says, doesn’t hold. “We need to take our new relationships on their own terms.” And these terms include accepting that the digital world’s perfection is teaching us a new sense of imperfect human perfection.

The number one question journalists ask Turkle is if children will come to love their objects more than their parents. Turkle instead is interested in how love might change. What kinds of relationships with technology are appropriate? What is a relationship? What models of the self, intention and emotion are suggested by our current technologies? What habits of mind?

Turkle said that we think about our minds as machines more than ever (as in robots and psychopharmacology). She’s concerned that with the shift to a computational model of the mind, there’s been a diminishment of our appreciation of ambivalence (i.e., holding more than one idea in your head). In artificial worlds, the rules are too clear. But resistance is coming from a changing notion of human pefection. We need richer language for talking about our increasingly rich relationships with artifacts. [This is a topic near and dear to me.]

During the Q&A she said that rather than asking about the effect of video games on kids, we should be talking about what habits of mind games inculcate.

Killer soundbyte: “Windows is a powerful metaphor for the distributed self”

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Eliot Soloway, the moderator, argued for giving every kid a palm computer as opposed to a PC because the palm is cheaper and because, unlike a desktop machine, the student can own it without sharing it with the rest of the school.

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[From PopTech] I’ve spent many, many hours playing the games Warren Spector has created. Deus Ex, for example, broke ground in providing an open, interactive playground. Also, things blew up real good.

Spector says gaming isn’t what we think. It’s not usually a solitary activity. And violent games aren’t just about violence but also about thinking, planning, acting and reacting. Finally, games are not apart from the real world but are part of the real world,

Spector says we’ll see more user-generated content. “Will Wright [The Sims] is the best game designer in the business.” And we’ll see more “virtual affiliation.”

Games, Spector says, can be art. His are commercial and reality-based, he says, but they can be art.

The exciting new trend is “shared authorship,” as opposed to games in which you decipher the single author’s intention. Spector finds Grand Theft Auto 3 “reprehensivle” in its content but the game play is revolutionary. “The negotiated narrative” is unique to games as a mass medium. Spector gets chills thinking about the way in which games will allow us to assume personae, interact and grow.

Plus, the screen shots from Deus Ex 2 look great.

Soundbyte: “Our tools are pathetic. Try having a character smile in a game. It’s insanely hard. We have four control points. Try getting a tear to role down a character’s cheek.”

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Amy Jo Kim is now at a stealth startup called “there.” “What’s going on in gaming today is what you’re going to see in the rest of technology in 3-5 years.”

She laid out the basics of online gaming and pointed out how complex and rich the social networks around online games typically become, including “self-organizing fan ecosystems.” She told us about the development of The Sims. Very interesting. For example, Maxi (the Sims’ creator) noticed that people started telling one another stories about their characters. So Maxi facilitated this by allowing users to upload their stories for sharing with others.

During the Q&A, moderated by Dan Gillmor, Kim and Spector disagreed over the future of fan sites. Maxi (The Sims) has encouraged fan sites and the degelopment of new content for their games. Spector thinks that as gaming brands grow, fan sites will increasingly be attacked by game makers.

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JD is blogging the conference here. And Ernie the Attorney (sitting right next to me) is blogging it realtime here – he’s doing a great job. Dan Gillmor is doing “running notes” here.

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[From PopTech] Alvy Ray Smith has won two Oscars for technical achievement and was the founder of Pixar. He gave a terrific presentation on a single idea: “The simulation of human actors will not happen at any known time in any known way.” Smith addressed the question in a far more interesting way than I’d expected. Yes, says Smith, there are technical issues that will be overcome via Moore’s Law. But, the more important issue is that acting is an art.

Using as his reference Antonio Demassio’s “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness”, Smith made the case that machines can’t have consciousness and thus can’t do what actors do. They therefore can’t generate graphical representations of convincing actors: There can’t be a “React to the De Niro character’s confession of adultery” subroutine that results in the good acting that Streep would do because that would require consciousness. Ray thinks that in his lifetime we will see a convincing feature film that’s entirely digital, but it will be done by digitally representing a live actor. (In fact, Pixar hires animators based on their acting ability.)

Killer soundbyte #1, on the assumption that we’ll build conscious machines: “It’s a leap of faith that many people here are willing to take, but I call it faith-based science.”

Killer soundbyte #2 on why Pixar has so far backed off of representing humans: “We have a word for almost human but not quite: It’s ‘monster.’”

Killer soundbyte #3: “Reality begins at 80 million polygons.” Per frame. Toy Story had 5-6M polygons per frame, and Toy Story 2 had double that. “Then you have to model reality and map it onto those polygons.” Woody had 100 controls in face. Al, the most complex guy in Toy Story 2, had a thousand. For an accurate human representations it might be hundreds of thousands.

This session alone (pairing Ray and Stookey) would make the conference worthwhile. The presentations and the Q&A session were thought-provoking, centered on issues that matter, funny and moving. (Kudos to John Sculley’s moderating.)

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