Spareink

November 10, 2006

Is the Singularity a Religious Eschaton?

"Live long and prosper" or "Be fruitful and multiply" that is the choice of our times.

Randall Parker argues that improvements in health and longevity technologies are changing the environment to select (darwinistically) for those humans most interested in reproduction. Simple exponential math tells you that relatively small differences in fertility lead to large differences in population over time.

Right now, the biggest apparent determinant of fertility is religion. So as technology improves, unless the "live long and prosper" folks are really good at converting "be fruitful and multiply folks" to their view, it will be the later who will rapidly come to dominate all aspects of society.

Wikipedia describes Jewish beliefs about the eschaton as follows:

Tumultuous events will overturn the old world order, creating a new order in which God is universally recognized as the ruler over everyone and everything. One of the sages of the Talmud says, "Let the end of days come, but may I not live to see them", because they will be filled with so much conflict and suffering.

Sounds a lot like a technological singularity dominated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. More wikipedia:

Islam teaches the bodily resurrection of the dead, the fulfillment of a divine plan for creation, and the immortality of the human soul; the righteous are rewarded with the pleasures of Jannah (Heaven), while the unrighteous are punished in Jahannam (Hell)

Immortality of the human soul is definitely something promised by the tech folks (backup your brain onto silicon etc.). The difficulty is that it will be very difficult (and perhaps immoral?) to keep the life extension technology out of the hands of the be-fruitful-and-multiply crowd.

All of these religions (and hindu as well) have some model in which evil people will be damned to hell and only the good will persist. In a world where the power to destroy all increases with Moore's law, the need to restrain evil will become a top priority. Only the good will survive and history will come to an end.

Posted by Alex at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 01, 2006

Where should I be blogging?

I've been feeling motivated to blog again lately, but am not sure where do be doing so. I abandoned blogging at alexjacobson.com when we stared blogging here, but no one has blogged here in a while.

If I start bloging again here and no one else does, it will effectively be just my blog and perhaps it makes more sense to do that on alexjacobson.com especially as I give @alexjacobson.com addresses out as my email. That being said, I really like the name spareink and would like to be part of a group blog.

Matt isn't blogging here anymore because he has a consistent singular narrative to explore. My planned blog entries are less linear and make more sense in a group context like this. Perhaps I should blog at alexjacobson.com and we convert spareink into an aggregblog using haloscan to maintain a consistent commenter community accross all sites?

Thoughts?

Posted by Alex at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 27, 2006

and now for something completely different ... world champion laugher

Laughing Yoga
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp-oJhBxn6o

Posted by Matt at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

self help top 10 list

Some refreshing things one may occasionally want to do:

1) drink plenty of water. go on a new diet or exercise program or
earlier) sleep routine.

2) begin daily private meditation (stretch your body, observe each
of your senses and their imaginative powers, initiate deep abdominal
breathing and quiet observation of your thoughts, have a pen and
paper handy to record your insights about previously unseen issues
and unseen solutions afterwards) and/or individual and/or group
prayer (emphasizing gratitude & desires),

(Note: avoid religious fanaticism or dangerous cults.)

3) listen to the music you like until you can hear it in your head
even when it's not playing. Ideally sing a song each day. And
dance wildly to it.

4) write 1-year goals for various areas of life. Write which is
your chief goal among them.

(Process Caveat: Note that some people reasonably argue that we can
often have too many goals or take them too seriously and that our time is better spent enjoying the process of our life.)

5) prepare a statement of what you will have manifested, and read it
aloud with full visualization and emotional faith of having
successfully manifested such, to yourself in the mirror, while
listening and watching yourself as if you were second or third person, for 10 minutes in the morning. For more power, repeat in the evening before bed (but you don't need the mirror then), and perhaps even mid-day too.

(Process Caveat applies.)

6) compose a set of daily routines, such as drinking plenty of
water upon rising, morning exercises, daily goal setting, meditations
to manifest particular spiritual energies, time for cleaning, a time
limit for news reading, blog entries, a required but time-limited
frivolous procrastination or new adventure time, a required but
time-limited new-skill-learning time, etc.

(Process Caveat applies.)

7) maybe you're not challenging yourself enough! find a new hobby or
skill to pursue excellence in: art, a martial art, a book group or
other class or study group or support group or mastermind alliance, or regular random adventures, such as bike rides to other cities, or some charitable or entrepreneurial endeavor.

8) take a document or book that's meaningful to you (or write it
yourself, even a statement of identity) and read it aloud with full
visualization and emotion, to yourself in the mirror, while listening
and watching yourself as if you were second or third person, for 10
minutes in the morning.

9) a workshop such as Landmark Forum, a Franklin-Covey seminar, a
communication, motivation, or sales seminar, a coach or therapist.

(Stay clear on and stick to your agenda, and same caveats about religious fanaticism, dangerous cults, etc. apply; resist dependency, fanaticism, or excessive loyalty to the person or program.)

10) new drugs, such as caffeine pills or herbal or prescription
stimulants, or an antidepressant.

(Note: Obviously, only under proper medical supervision, and be
careful about contraindications, addiction, side-effects, developing
tolerances, etc.)

What do you think?

Posted by Matt at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

June 14, 2006

Paying For Quality

David Isenberg replied to my "Against Net Neutrality" post with "Welcome to the Stupid Internet". He quotes Senate testimony from Internet2 researchers at Bell Labs claiming that with enough bandwidth you don't need to prioritize packets and that it is cheaper to add bandwidth than it is to add QoS.

If we assume that is the case, then we have to ask why the ISPs would object to laws requiring net neutrality and why people like David worry that telco's might choose to implement QoS rather than simply provision more capacity. David and Russ Nelson in the comments to my prior post argue that the ISPs are only doing QoS because it allows tem to take maximal advantage of limited competition to extract money from content providers that they can't get from their users.

So they must believe:

end-users are willing to purchase only a finite amount of bandwidth at a given price to reach content providers.

content providers are willing to supplement end-user payments for additional bandwidth.

In other words, the total amount of bandwidth on the system is the sum of the capacity for which end users are willing to pay and the capacity for which content providers are willing to pay. That means that the only way to achieve maximum Internet bandwidth is if content providers pay for some of it. Since the content providers are only willing to pay for QoS bandwidth and Net Neutrality laws would ban the sale of that sort of bandwidth, Net Neutrality laws will result in less Internet bandwidth. Since more bandwidth is good, net neutrality must be bad. Q.E.D

Note 1: I am not taking a position on whether the ISPs are extracting monopoly rents. They may very well be doing so. I am only observing that regardless of whether they are doing so, it is clearly the case that net neutrality laws will result in a slower internet.

Note 2: If ISPs really are monopoly then there may be legitimate concern that they will extact monopoly profit from content providers and that the absence of net neutrality will mean that we are trading a faster internet for a lower quality one (as profits to content providers decline). I don't buy this argument because at the head of the power curve, I think Google, Disney, Microsoft, et al or more than able to defend themselves. In the long tail, distribution costs are too small a fraction of total cost and profits are rarely financial. There is perhaps an argument here about the middle, but the regulatory hassle from Net Neutrality would be equally bothersome so it seems like a wash.

Posted by Alex at 06:43 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

June 13, 2006

Sound Only for Young People

The British developed a sound that, in general, young people can hear and older people can not. It was originally intended to be used as a technology to annoy young people and to keep them away from storefronts in Britain, without bothering older people. It is being adopted by young people as a cell phone ringtone that only they can hear, for use in situations like getting text messages in class. Here is the ringtone itself. I can hear it in both ears, although it is clearer with my right ear. Also, here is an article about it.

Posted by Lonne at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

June 12, 2006

Against Net Neutrality

The supporters of Net Neutrality believe that bandwidth is inherently plentiful so the only reason anyone might charge different prices for different traffic is because they are taking advantage of some local monopoly position.

This assumption of plenty was especially valid in the late 1990's when last mile bandwidth was very limited, people used the internet primarily for web surfing and email, and the Internet bubble was paying for companies to provision what seemed like huge amounts of bandwidth at the backbone.

Today however, the last mile has improved enough for people to download HD quality video to their home.... as long as not that many other people are doing so simultaneously! In other words, the era of bandwidth plenty is over. There simply is not a enough bandwidth for everyone to download their own HD quality video feed over the Internet simultaneously.

The standard answer provided by economics for dealing with the problem of demand exceeding supply is called pricing. Consumers who pay more are favored over those who pay less. So the question on the table is how do people or companies pay more for their traffic to arrive in preference to that of others.

There are four basic choices:

Overprovisioning: You pay $1000 to ensure that you always have enough bandwidth for whatever you need. Even if most of the time, your bandwidth is idle, you still pay.

Different classes of Internet end-users: If you pay more per month, your traffic will block someone else's. Even if you don't actually need that particular file ASAP, you still pay more.

Recipient pays for different classes of content: You transact with a web site to download a video you want and then you transact with your ISP to decide what quality of service you want for that particular download. You suffer from having to do two transactions for every thing you want to download, you have to understand at great technical level the bandwidth requirements of the particular action you want to perform, and you have to suffer through whatever poor UI your ISP offers for this activity.

Server pays for different classes of content: You transact with the web site to obtain the video. The web site pays your ISP for the quality of service you expect. Advertisers can subsidize your Internet use. You save money and time.

Net Neutrality is basically a prohibition on option 4. Option 4 is obviously most preferable to end users. Therefore Net Neutrality is bad.

[Update: David Isenberg responded to this post in Welcome to the Stupid Internet. I replied to his response in "Paying for Quality".

Posted by Alex at 11:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 05, 2006

Soda, Pop, or Coke

A great color-coded map showing the generic names for soft drinks by county. I wonder if the the predominant soft drink name for a given county correlates with anything else meaningful.

Posted by Lonne at 02:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 03, 2006

Iran goes off Daylight savings

Having upgraded the Foxclocks plugin to Firefox, I read the changelog to see what had changed and I was shocked to see this among the changes:

It's worth pointing out that FoxClocks time zone updates are generally not corrections, but reflect very recent changes in time zone legislation; Iran ('Asia/Tehran' time zone), for example, announced on 19th March 2006 that it would no longer use daylight saving time;

Huh? Iran just went off of daylight savings time? This seems like a symbolic gesture--I don't see any practical value for eliminating DS--and this leaves me wondering: how come countries that fight tooth and nail against modernity and capitalism also fight against daylight savings? (See last year's craziness in Mexico City and its suburbs, too.) I have no strong feelings either way for or against DS; but, based on who is fighting to get rid of daylight savings, this makes me want to support it! The related question is: what is so fundamentally modern and capitalist about daylight savings? And also, why do so many people fight wars on the symbolic level, too?

It's also interesting how we learn about where countries are going via this small data points that we find in unexpected contexts.

Posted by Morgan at 05:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

May 29, 2006

"Heroin Man in Starbucks"

Who's in the market for a song parody? You still have to make the rest of the lyrics that rhyme with the lyrics of Sting's Englishman in New York. Any comedians out there?

Posted by Matt at 01:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

May 17, 2006

Residential Online Community

Do you have an online community for your building? Does your building want one? I sense a significant unfulfilled demand, and at least a social entrepreneurship opportunity lurking here. What's the state of the art in simple branded online community, aside from yahoo groups, ideally that facilitates real-time chat and perhaps transactions? Any ideas, suggestions, references, or business models?

Posted by Matt at 02:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Funky new chat site: gabbly.com

No download and no registration; just insert gabbly.com/ before the URL and you are both at the URL and in a (super-basic and limited) chat room. Apparently it even jumps the great firewall of china. Not popular yet, but it shows the way at least.

Posted by Matt at 02:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 10, 2006

Boy's Hat

An e-mail chain on a Park Slope, Brooklyn list-serv about a lost hat was recently written up in New York magazine. As described by Ben Mathis-Lilley:

A few weeks ago, a member of the Park Slope Parents e-mail forum who’d encountered a stray piece of winterwear in the neighborhood posted a notice to the group titled “Found: boy’s hat.” … [S]ubscriber “Lisa” went public with her problems regarding the gender-specifying description of the hat. Wondering how such a categorization would feel to a spiky-hat-wearing girl, Lisa wrote, “It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful.” A third member responded soon after, saying such political correctness drove her “up the wall,” and a heated discussion ensued. Lisa’s supporters questioned their opponents’ commitment to “the free interchange of ideas and questions” … while an opposing faction expressed facetious dismay that the original poster, who had described the hat as likely belonging to “an older child,” was not more considerate toward “younger children who happen to have large heads.” … [O]ne poster questioned the use of “hat,” asking if the object might be more sensitively labeled a “soft, porous bowl."

This description doesn't do justice to the intensity and comedy of the full list-serv exchange, however, which is on-line at Gawker here. The funniest post is the last one.

Posted by Lonne at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

April 05, 2006

Virginia has gotten rid of the common law!

This is a bad sign!

Posted by Morgan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 03, 2006

Yiddish in Australian?

While Googling to read about Yiddish, I found this article in The Australian about Yiddish in Australia, which includes this fact:

Yiddish has left its mark on colloquial Australian, too, with words such as cobber, motser and shickered.

Huh? Yiddish words that are obscure in the USA have entered the very day vocabulary of Australia? Funny how, when the same languages (English+Yiddish) mix in different locations, the result is different!

So what do these words mean? A quick Google search reveals that cobber means pal/buddy; shickered means drunk; and the most interesting is, motser (also spelled, "motza"), which means, "Motza is an Aussie slang term meaning a large amount of money or more specifically a large gambling win .. it can also refer to a 'certainty' that would ensure such a win" (according to this). Note the etymology: it is from matzoh, so it is literally "bread money" - note the connection between bread and money.

Posted by Morgan at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A plot to conquer the world. Or at least explain it.