sent2null space

In a recent interview, computer scientist Jaron Lanier expresses his view that the social internet has not been a benefit to human society. In particular the open software movement upon which much of it is based is for him mostly a negative for human society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIwikI7IVYs&feature=youtu.be&a I think he is missing a critical aspect of what is enabled by the internet and in general communication technologies as they have developed in human societies (predating even homo sapiens sapiens) that aspect is the democratization of an asserted "voice" as explained below. His attack is more than just on web 2.0 , he has this view that there has been no beneficial social impact to the internet. He couldn't be more wrong, if it were not for the internet, for the hyper connected real time web of communications and the fora of discussion that are made available on the social networks that he called "packs" the following incidents of the las...

"And I am very much a skeptic in regards to technology being able to save us from killing ourselves as a species." A recent email exchange with a new friend contained the previous quote from my friend. It inspired me to finally write out what I'd been saying in bits and pieces to people on Facebook for quite some time. As for the question, will technology be our saving grace? I am still somewhat ambivalent about it myself, the current time of rapid developments in genetics and biology have me terrified and amazed. Terrified because as a software and hardware engineer I am well aware of the history of change that attended certain technological developments in both areas in the past and how those changes revolutionized human productivity in two phases. The first was the invention of the semiconductor transistor in 1947 by Shockley and Bardeen. The second was the invention of the integrated circuit and soon after photo-lithography that led to the astounding miniaturization o...

I am a believer of the BOOK, though there is no Supreme Fascist as it's author. Before I should die, I would have several epsilons, though now is not the time as I have no boss as other slaves do. I do wish to be captured however, before those epsilons come as is custom and in my view, only the right thing to do. Having been captured I should not be liberated as my choice of boss will be a careful one, as any proof should be. I have no plans to ever leave as science quickly unravels the mystery to that disease. Despite this, I occasionally partake in poison in doses sufficient to enjoy but prevent my leaving. Though under the influence of poison I must admit to dying temporarily. Often I listen to noise but never while my mind is open. I enjoy the act of preaching though in engineering and art but yet mathematics, excluding instruction to my sisters little epsilons at which time I often take great joy in torturing them. My brain is open! ;) Links: http://geekvarietees.spreadshirt.c...

The following is excerpted from a comment to a friends Facebook wall post concerning humanities pending control over life itself. (Recent announcement of synthetic life being created) I advocate the view that if we do not learn to embrace the sanctity of all life and in particular human life before the costs of weilding this power come down we may end up destroying ourselves. We have already seen the distal effects of empathy in averting what would otherwise have been great tragedy just by the hyper connected communication streams we share today. What would have happened in the former Yugoslavia if our communication technology were still morse code? Total extermination of Bosnian Muslim by Christian Serb, and the world wouldn't have known until far too late and then not really cared. "Those slavic people who are they ?" What would have happened in Georgia when Russia decided it was going to invade and take over Abkhasia? More massacre, and we would not know about it ...

Languages have also been a very fascinating subject in my life. For one , I feel as if I should be able to speak more languages than I do. My parents are Haitian but I was born in Brooklyn, I speak English fluently (without a Brooklyn accent) but my Haitian creole is halting, my French is halting. I'd need some serious practice in both to be truly fluent. However, the similarities between the Latin languages allows me to figure out maybe 30% of spoken Italian, Portuguese, Spanish if the speaker speaks slowly enough. My facility with spoken languages would improve if I had the practice but the last few years have been spent getting around the problem rather than attacking it directly and it has a fascinating history that I will detail below. The history of the formation of languages is something I've done a lot of reading on, the other reason for my interest is that I am a software engineer and program in several different computer languages: c++,java,xsl,javascript,css,xml a...

J. Craig Venter announces the boot up of the first artificial genetic sequence: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html Regarding the ethical issues of doing this now, he is right for TODAY... but when the costs come down dramatically in the next 10 years (as they did for pc programming) as the knowledge continues to be refined with bulletproof techniques... as GDE 's(genetic development environment) are developed to allow a high level genetic language syntax to be used to build organisms using an abstraction (like coding applications but with a "maker" step) there will be a huge potential for trouble as any "gene kiddie" (analog of script kiddies today) will be able to tinker together something "for fun" that I don't know, invades all pigs and causes their intestines to shut down, or causes cows to die on the field after eating grass...who knows...as varied and nefarious as malware methods and vectors are in software coding, expect t...

This posts builds on a response to a thread started by a mutual friend on facebook that I thought merited exposition here. I am a firm proponent of the methods of science having been trained in them and employ them in my work and life, but I have no faith. The collections of data that form the theories posited by science are not accepted by what they will predict they are accepted by what they have predicted...this is a subtle difference that makes assertions of all scientists having "faith" as some define it a fallacious one. I have no faith that any of the systems which have succeeded at answering questions about the workings of the world will continue to do so, I have only past evidence that they have. This is the difficulty of scientists...of falling into the "I believe this will happen." trap instead of asserting the "In the past, data of this sort was explained by this process." in the first, "faith" and "belief" are implicit...in...