sent2null space

A friend on Facebook posited: The existence of other Earth-like planets depends on their microorganisms developing photosynthesis -- not a sure thing by any means. There are lots of chemical ways of making a living. So if only our bacteria evolved photosynthesis then Earth is the only planet in the 'verse with an oxygen atmosphere. I provided the following explanation of the subtleties that attended the invention of photosynthesis during Earth's history.... "The existence of other Earth-like planets depends on their microorganisms developing photosynthesis." That's mostly true, though it depends on how you classify "Earth-like" do you mean as it is now? Or as it was say 3 billion years ago when the atmosphere was devoid of oxygen, or a billion years later where it was very different from a billion before but still devoid of oxygen...or 300 million years ago when Oxygen percentages were significantly higher than they are today? But that's not

In a recent post on Facebook, a friend posited a question I have seen posed a few times in the last few years but usually answer individually. It is: " I wonder sometimes, how did Zuck think that this site of his would get so popular even if MySpace was waay popular back then? What made him keep doing things?" My answer is simple, it's based on historical knowledge of what was happening (or not happening) in the space circa 2004. It also is based on what had happened in the critical 5 years prior to 2004 that enabled the shift to a new type of social networking to be possible. My first answer was: "Novelty, what is scarce has inherent value....doesn't matter what it is. Find a piece of 20,000 year old fossilized human shit (coprolite) and you'll understand what I mean." To elaborate, there was nothing new concept wise about what Zuckerberg was doing....what was new was the technology he was using to do it. Almost every feature we have here on FB

Love that first question and I think it is very important, secondary to me is how we process sensory information ....the mechanisms for that are present from what we know about pattern recognition, we have simulated (using neural networks and more recently neuron-less statistical learning approaches) that part of brain function going back to the early 90's. We even have been able to do it virtually using computer programs but what of intention? drive? What unseen force drives the shift of thoughts? It is pretty obvious when we think backward in time, imagining that our homonid brains could be de-evolved with each second accounting for 100 years in evolutionary time. In 10 seconds we'd only be at 1,000 a.d. not much changed biologically, in 100 seconds we'd be at 10,000 years...still not a major shift, 500 seconds and we are at 50,000 years...now things are starting to get interesting....for we don't see any evidence of formal writing systems, 1,000 seconds in our trip a

I've made this argument before and to me it seems trivially true but alas... More or less people have a relatively fixed value scape. A value scape spans the total number of skills that one has that one can put to earning a pay check. It also includes being able to use those skills indirectly to pick winners in their space of expertise (such as an ex. engineer being better at picking companies in the space she once worked due to her expertise and knowledge of the space). We all tend to have our set of things we do well and don't expand them much through our lives. Now depending on how well we are doing one or another of these things (extracting value from the skill) we can come to earn wealth...which we deploy into providing for ourselves and our families and as well redeploy into either businesses (in the areas in which we have expertise) or just save away for a rainy day. What should be obvious is that as we gain more and more wealth from having deployed our talents and

The key advantages of action oriented workflow have been specified in this post and the identification of ways in which it can be used to both enable businesses using it to emancipate their workforce and as well enable the emancipated workers to maximize their value should be clear. A recent set of events have gotten me to thinking a bit more deeply about what role automated inferring systems should play in organizations. From the perspective of some it would seem that AOW based businesses will be responsible for the elimination of many tasks which currently are performed by several layers of humans in the organization who's task it is to run analysis on metrics gathered from their managed teams to determine how to redirect the execution of failing projects or direct the execution of planned new ones. This view is true in so far as such tasks are far more efficiently performed from the business perspective by an automated learning process. Such processes are able to behave in w