WhoIsBramStoker?

What next? A body transplant? 

 

Notes on BreakPoint – by Jeff Stibel –  An inspiring book appropriate to vanguard ideas on how the mind works and why the Internet is a mind in the making. Literally.

Computers, at least so far, are not intelligent. The Internet because it is a network will achieve intelligence first.

Here are some notes taken from the book

• The overwhelming majority number (99.999+ %)of species inhabiting the earth are gone. But 99.9% of all networked species are still with us.
• There is a creepy analogy between the workings of an ant colony and the workings of the brain. No single ant has a clue why it is doing what ever it does to support the colony just as no single neuron can possibly explain intelligence. Ant hill populations mature in about 6 years well below peak numbers achieved earlier on. Over sized colonies get confused. Similarly the neuron count in a mature human brain is approximately an order of magnitude below its peak in childhood (100 trillion vs 1000 trillion). A culling is necessary to achieve wisdom.
• Intelligence comes from the networking of neurons – Networks gain intelligence beyond the sum of the parts
• The human brain is 2% of body mass but consumes 20% of total body energy! Our physical size is the absolute minimum that could support such an energy hog brain.
• The Internet currently consumes 2% of all energy.. Cisco predicts 50 billion devices on line by 2020 and that will go bring Internet energy up to the 20% mark
• The Anternet: ants use a TCP like rate control mechanism. The bigger the food supply the more olfactory chemicals they exude as they forage which leads to more ants joining the march.
• We will have the “connectome” of the fruit fly completed within 10 years. This means whole brain simulation of the FF.
• The author states that learning to cook food is the number one reason humans came into being. Not only did this reduce parasites, it also considerably shortened the amount of time needed for foraging and feeding.
• Human nurons actually misfire 30-90%. The brain is highly fault tolerant.
• Hyperthynesia – perfect memory – a condition suffered by people like Jill Price who could not forget anything. The condition made if very difficult for her to learn. In order to learn we have to forget.
• The average westerner is now spending 70 minutes a day on the web. The web is changing how we think.
• The web has gotten too big for any organizational scheme to handle. Type in anything to google and you typically get hundreds of hits. Several billion pages of content are added to the web every day
• The web could benefit with two way links
• Neurons have weights to links.. the Internet should do the same
• Google search algorithms mimic neural nets.. Larry Page’s academic advisor was Terry Winograd who was a brain expert
• 150 relationships is the most we can handle (called Dunbar’s number).. the average Facebook account has 262 friends!
•  The sea squirt uses its brain to locate a permanent home. Once that is done it will eat its brain. Never confuse survival with intelligence.
• The economics of “free” have changed the business model of the Internet. Even a price of one cent will deter many potential customers.
• Sometime back in the 80’s thanks to a grad student entering a primate lab eating an ice cream cone, a monkey with a wired brain showed an uncharacteristic neural blip. Predictive neurons were discovered. These neurons are tasked with running “what if” scenarios.
• We have discovered that language of the brain is universal and independent of any spoken languages. This is how universal human communications will be accomplished. 
• The homo brain has been growing for 2 million years but began to shrink 20,000 years ago. As a consequence of agrarian communities, we have been able to sustain larger and larger numbers of simpler minds. It does not take a lot of brain power to till a field
• Evolution is concerned with survival. Brains are costly.  Technology is doing more and more of our thinking for us.
• Telepathy is a fact- there are more than a dozen computer-brain interfaces marked today. An ESP chip is on the way which will allow the brain total Internet immersion. Check out the cat ears
• Meditation has been linked to the slowing of brain loss with aging
• If we create AI there will be nothing artificial about it.
• Re ants and humans – the solitary ant is almost void of intelligence, not capacity to survive alone. Similarly, no single modern human could even build a simple pencil from scratch.
• The Internet is about tight knit webs where humans thrive.. this was something lost in the industrial era.

Quite simply, they – the Conservative party of Canada – have NO VISION.

At a time when humanity is tumbling out of control, an abyss of change ahead. At a time when reasoned, fair, trusted, strong world leadership is in critical demand the ruling government of one of the world’s most privileged Countries is obsessed with crime, terrorism, tax cuts, privatization, military adventures and steadily morphing Canada into a petro-state.

Even as the Chinese and American right wingers are coming forward and acknowledging the ominous perils of climate change, Harper’s Conservatives persist in gagging federal employees from even discussing the issue. Federal scientists have been muzzled and laid off. At the same time Harper has had one vision, to see Canada evolve into a Christian Saudi Arabia. At every turn this government has inveighed for the expansion of the tarsands, one of the dirtiest sources of oil on the planet.

Here is subtle way that the mindset works. With so many important legislative issues before the federal government – bills on terrorism and surveillance for example – an idiotic flyer from the riding conservative MP (David Sweet) arrives at my door. It asks me a series of yes or no questions regarding senior citizens. Do I value them? Do I think they should be allowed to live in dignity? Should they have to sell their aging organs to pay for pharmaceuticals?

What a wasteful “feel good” distraction. Do you think Mr. Sweet is really looking for policy direction from his constituents here? Is it possible that the good people of Hamilton West have had enough of these blood sucking seniors? Or is Mr. Sweet pandering to the senior vote?

This is dumb-ed down government. Beat the drums, avoid the real issues, everybody gets an A plus for standing up for the seniors.

No vision. No leadership.

We Canadians used to expect more of ourselves. Romeo Dallaire, Stephen Lewis, Pierre Trudeau, Bethune, Vanier were not one off prospects – they are a reflection of our DNA; our history, demographics, geography, climate and prosperity have conspired to make us a people who really give a shit about the world at large.

We really do sincerely care and we really are modest about it. And though others believe in us to do the right thing, our only major fault may be that we sometimes lack faith in ourselves. Which may itself be a good thing.

Briefly, how did we get here?

We are smaller both in population and GDP than California.

Despite what a map may convey we are shaped like a strip of ribbon. 85% of our 35 million population live inside a 9000 x 200 kilometer strip of real estate running along the US boarder. “America” – aka “the yanks” intrigue and scare us. We are in awe of their wealth and scale but really can’t understand for the life of us why they don’t have medicare. Beyond the ribbon where most of us live, there is the massive northern territory. A colossus of land and tundra that extends almost to the pole. We have more fresh water lakes than the rest of the world combined. Almost void of humanity but for scattered resource towns and indigenous “reservations” few Canadians have ever seen the North or even think of it. Overall its the second largest land mass on the planet. Oh, another fact. About 20% of we Canadians are foreign born, one of the highest figures in the world. But we are silent but deadly good at assimilation. We smother with disarming politeness and no matter  your origins, after a couple of brutal winters and a few years in our public schools, you’ll be saying “eh” like the rest of us. Burka , female circumcision or whatever other medieval remnants may have arrived when you declared refugee status at Pearson airport will freeze and drop off like a cryogenized wart after a winter in Winnipeg.

The vast majority of Canadians will dismiss any differences between ourselves and the yanks. Ignorance is bliss. The differences are best illustrated by an old joke.

“Two lobster fishermen, one Canadian (New Brunswick) and one from Maine are hauling up their lobster traps side by side on the Grand Banks. The Maine fisherman is throwing his lobsters into a hole in the deck so they don’t escape. The Canadian is just tossing his lobsters onto the deck where they scramble about seeking freedom. Hey! says the Maine fisherman to his Canadian colleague, “yer goin to lose them lob-stas”. The Canadian surveys the situation and promptly shoots back, “they’re not going anywhere, they’re Canadian lobsters!” Noting the confusion on the yank’s face he adds “if any of ’em tries to escape the others will just haul him back into the boat”

Canadians are like that. It goes back two hundred years to the loyalists and even before. We stayed loyal to the King, the idea of leaving the crown was totally unreal. How could the Yanks do it? We were appalled but secretly impressed when they revolted from the English. But they came after us and we did not like that at all. That was the war of 1812 when we burned down the White House and sent them home with a good kick in the arse. Well, alright, it wasn’t just our courageous spirit that sent them packing. Our friend Jack Frost  delivered the coup de grace. In more ways than one, old Jack has played a role in what we are.

Anyway, for years after this terrible separation many of us Canucks were tempted by the pull of America for opportunity and a better life. And, out of necessity, Canadian society developed a defense against this “brain drain” to the south. We acquired a way of looking down on the yanks – loud, conspicuous, obsessed with money. We Canadians pulled back, just like the lobsters. “Don’t go down there” we’d say “them yanks will corrupt you!”

How does this tie back to our obligation to the world? Well you see its important to understand why Canada exists and how it continues its redefinition even today as a nation. Because really, we should not exist. And we could not exist without our Yankee cousins to the south having first betrayed us and later defended us against the Russians.  Russians that we may wag a consternating finger at their excesses.

More to come ……………

Selling the wheat board in April!

Sanctify science, fight global warming, promote environment, legalize pot, retain a humanitarian role in the middle east, promote the middle class and social mobility, discourage becoming a petro state with associated currency risks,

In short, cultivate an atmosphere that would attract progressives from around the planet..

This time its our privacy that’s being handed over to the corps and spooks.

Like much legislation these days, bill S4 is is one huge ugly center with a sugary outer coating.

The ugly center – bill S-4 proposes that:

“an organization may disclose personal information without the knowledge or consent of the individual… if the disclosure is made to another organization and is reasonable for the purposes of investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province that has been, is being or is about to be committed and it is reasonable to expect that disclosure with the knowledge or consent of the individual would compromise the investigation;

Effectively it means that carriers and ISPs can keep records of our network activities and then pass these to anyone (read – corp or gov) requesting them under the thinnest of legal pretense. A Chinese entertainment group could demaind private info on you from (say) Telus claiming movie theft.  They can do this without your knowledge and you CANNOT sue them even if you can prove that you were innocent.

Who are these Conservative legislators serving?

Not you and I.

 

If an algorithm wrote this how would you even know?

Will human language be commandeered by computers?

Will computers be able to speak perfect “human” eventually making our own voices dull by comparison.

Very probably yes.

In fact it seems that we are almost there, computers are on the cusp of disrupting our languages. The implications to interpersonal communications are unfathomable.

In March 2015 we are seeing a “hockey stick transition” into a world of computer generated language. A sudden uptick where more and more of what we are reading and hearing is language originating in computers and not in people.. or more accurately, originating in the ever more intelligent algorithms our computers are running.

Siri, google are the first wave, as are the financial and sports pages of a growing number of print media.

The algorithm is evolving but here is an outline..

1. Obtain question or topic from audience
2. Provide the question to a language algorithm for analysis – i.e. understand the question!
3. Locate an appropriate data set for finding an answer (Wikipedia, google, facebook, etc.)
4. Mine out “the facts” pertaining to the answer from the data set
5. Identify the meta data needed to build a framework and subtext for the answer
   1. Target audience
   2. Commercial spin: sponsor messages
   3. Marketing spin: linguistic nuances like voice gender, age, accent, delivery cadence, regional expressions, metaphors, sound effects, etc. etc. etc.
6. Finally, feed the facts and the meta data to an AI expert language system which will convolve them into human language – text, speech or other.

Question: how long before these algorithms exit the orbit of human linguistic traditions and begin to explore entirely new “computer generated” language frontiers. Speaking in previously unheard accents, structuring one language with the syntax of another, applying rhythmic or other poetic structure, words chanted instead of spoken with or without complementary music, adding sidebar commentary or animations, etc. etc. etc. Language will never be the same.

Question: and so how long before we get to the point where another human being is just not as interesting as “Her”.

Aside from millions of letters sent to the FCC defending NN and the support of google, facebook, microsoft (the progressives), there is this quirky comic rant that is said to have swayed opinion… John Oliver

Remarkable how good the models are.

Watch the jetstream at the 23:15 mark in the video.

Pretty much what we are seeing this year and last.

While much of the continent (except west) is well below average this winter, the high arctic is well above average it appears (this was the case in 2014).

 

I don’t know, I’m not surprised.

Meditation lets you keep your mind longer.

Meditation, something along the lines of learning how to silence the internal chatter and putting the mind into an aloof state of wizened self wonder.

 

And the lesson would be ———> excessive noise is as bad for the mind as it is for the ears.

 

You would think that “conservatives” would be the first to defend the natural order. To conserve and not squander our greatest source of wealth, nature.

But in Canada, as in the US, the “right” is angry with science – especially environmental science.

Want proof?

From a 2013 Pew Research pole in the US: percentage who felt that protecting the environment was a top priority: Democrat’s 69%,   Republicans 32%

More or less the same thing up here in the great white north. Our federal Conservatives are progressively dismantling  government research into climate change and other environmental areas.

I really can’t understand the thinking of these people. The angry and often affluent right wing. What are the odds that the guy driving the Escalade is a liberal?

Tough times for science teachers and climatologists  – here

• The NSA center in Utah has a utility bill of approximately $3.3 million a month – transforming coal into computronium for enough laser driven zeros and ones to fry those fuckers in North Korea eh?
• At present, about 2% of all global energy consumed is going into the web and computing – and that number is moving upwards quickly
• Still, this is an order of magnitude less than the brain, which consumes about 20% of body energy
• US CEO to average worker compensation in 1982: 42 to 1, in 2012: 354 to 1
• Proops is Hungarian for fart
• Have yachts and have-nots: the richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 50%
• IMHO, a lesson for our times, “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming“, Rod Dreher
• There are more expat US dollars than domestic dollars
• Climate change refugees are already an issue in New Zealand where the issue has gone before the NZ supreme court.
• According to Barrons (13 Oct 2013) there are $4620 US dollars in circulation for every ounce of gold in US reserves