Thoughts / Memories
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Apple’s Tablet a game console?
January 19th, 2010
Apple Tablet conceptWith Apple’s tablet ready to be announced this Wednesday, I thought I would put in my thoughts. The tablet is sure to revolutionize the way we read, watch, and communicate, but unless they do something truly special I don’t know many people that will spend $800 or up on what will likely be their third or fourth gadget (next to their iMac, MacBook, iPod, etc.)
I’d like to take a look at a potential feature that isn’t getting a lot of recognition and that might explain how Apple is going to make the tablet as big as the iPhone. The tablet is likely to be considerably faster compared with even the next-gen iPhone and it’s graphics core should be able to output high definition video and graphics. This seems to me an ideal platform for a game console. Just hook it up to your HDTV and connect to the tablet via your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you don’t have an HDTV, that’s fine, just set your tablet in a dock and it becomes the display. The phone that you’ve been using for a year or two has suddenly become the ultimate game controller with far more features than a Wiimote. And with rumors that the 4G iPhone will have a touch sensitive back casing, your fingers won’t even get in the way of the screen.
Imagine the possibilities: Trivia, board games, emulators, and my personal favorite D&D. The dungeon master holds the tablet and sets up all the rooms and monsters, and each member of the party controls their actions via iPhone. These are just off the top of my head so it’s not a stretch to imagine that game developers are going to really blow our minds. And it was revealed today that Apple has already invited many members of the gaming industry to it’s Wednesday the 27th event.
Even if my speculation is incorrect, I’ve got my fingers crossed for a major gaming push from Apple. Several blogs will be live-blogging the media event including Gizmodo and Mac Rumors . So if you share my mind numbing affinity with all things Apple, I’ll see you in cyberspace next Wednesday.
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How the Internet Shapes our Minds
January 12th, 2010
“When I do long division or even multiplication I don’t try to remember the intermediate numbers. Long ago I learned to write them down. Because of paper and pencil I am “smarter” in arithmetic. In a similar manner I now no longer to try remember facts, or even where I found the facts. I have learned to summon them on the Internet. Because the Internet is my new pencil and paper, I am “smarter” in factuality.
But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet’s extreme hyperlinking highlights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts. Some anti-facts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. You can’t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and countervailing anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous anti-factors.”—
“We don’t really know what dreams are for, only that they satisfy some fundamental need. Someone watching me surf the Web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a day-dream. Today, I was in a crowd of people who watched a barefoot man eat dirt, then the face of a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my day on the Web this morning. The trance-like state we fall into while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste of time, or like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious in a way watching the directed stream of TV, radio and newspapers could not. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on.”
-Kevin Kelly
Read the rest of Kevin Kelly’s fascinating look at how the internet is changing our minds on his website kk.org
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Difference
July 15th, 2009
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Want a Following?
May 20th, 2009
This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about recently for inspiration and motivation. If you want people to follow you and your work you need to become a specialist in some field. Once you’ve established yourself, being a leader is a natural step.
I keep this in mind not because I expect to become the leader of my field, but rather to focus on the short term goals that will lead me in that direction. For me I see the need to specialize to establish a unique image for Sidearm. To find a set of themes and styles that makes this place unmistakably different. Leadership is not the goal, it is the result of the insight gathered through countless hours of hard work in persuit of specialization.
View larger images on flickr
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The Value of Technology
February 28th, 2009
He’s got a valid point here: technology has made life for many people amazing, but they still aren’t happy.
However, some of that unhappiness seems to come from our ability to be more vocal about the way we feel. Fifty years ago, a project like We Feel Fine (an aggregate of the phrase “I feel …” from millions of blogs) would be impossible. Vocalizing our unhappiness is the first step in changing it.
We’ve also been increasingly exposed to the horrors of life for those living in the poorest nations. It wasn’t that long ago that we would live our lives without any knowledge of what was happening in the rest of the world. Our ignorance was bliss. With the exposure we have now, we should be unhappy, we should be discontent, as long as there are starving children and preventable diseases. I think this move toward full disclosure is a healthy and productive one. Let’s get all the crap out on the table and start having a reasonable, worldwide discussion with the goal of solving our most pressing problems. Let’s use our technology to turn our unhappiness into positive action. And let’s start valuing the amazing tools we’ve been given.
Via Kevin Kelly
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Thoughts on Learning
February 24th, 2009
Just as a thought experiment, let’s consider how Natural Selection might “learn” in a similar way to how our brains learn.
How do humans learn? Humans can learn by trial and error, from experience, from habit, from conditioning, or from playing or tinkering. The common thread for all learning is behavior coupled with feedback. By behaving in a certain way and gathering feedback about that behavior, we learn. Positive feedback reinforces and refines behavior, while negative feedback lets us know when behavior is wrong. Any system with behavior, feedback and the ability to apply that feedback to behavior, will learn. (Notice the cyclical aspect of this kind of system.)
Natural Selection initially determines behavior through random mutation. New genes come about by slight copying mistakes (essentially typos) in the genetic code. Since the mutations are random, the behavior will be random — at first. Then, positive feedback is given for behavior that helps, and negative feedback for behavior that hurts. Natural Selection actually collapses feedback, and the application of that feedback to behavior, into a binary step: either the gene survives and passes on the accumulated feedback and behavior, or it dies and collected feedback and behavior are lost. In the brain, when negative feedback is received, it is used to change the brain, where in Natural Selection negative feedback is death. Nature makes up for this inefficiency by distributing this win/lose game over a massive network of animals. Only a very select few survive, but they have a 100% positive feedback rating. Every single ancestor of theirs was a survivor. The large network of animals acts like a distributed brain and has the appearance of learning.
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The Authors of Reality
February 22nd, 2009
When I was younger, my father and I played a computer game called Myst. In Myst you take the role of an unnamed character that discovers a book containing a world. By touching the image on the first page you are transported into the world described within that book. Throughout the series of games (and subsequent novels) you learn that an ancient society developed the ability to write worlds into books with a special language that made words into reality. I remember when it first occurred to me that the authors of this video game had accomplished the same feat that the ancient race had — the ability to create worlds.
I soon learned that I too could make worlds that were only limited by the scope of my own imagination. The tool for building these worlds was a computer and a programming language. I wanted to become a maker of worlds for a video game company, but soon found that the tools were difficult to acquire and even more difficult to learn. So, I looked for a way to build up my knowledge and found HTML and CSS — languages for websites. I couldn’t produce 3 dimensional worlds, but I could create very useful 2 dimensional ones. This is what I still do today. I’ve watched and attempted to catch up with all of the progress that computers have made since my early days of web development. What I and many others have noticed is that it doesn’t stop, it gets better, and it gets better faster.
Our ability to create virtual worlds with pure information and increasing complexity, resolution, and speed, ultimately leads us to some questions:
- What can we do with these virtual worlds?
- Will we be able to make worlds or characters that are indistinguishable from real ones?
- Is it possible to manipulate reality with pure information, in the same way that we do with virtual realities?
The best I can do is make educated guesses about these questions, but there are three paradigms likely to happen in the near future that could shed some light on them.
The first paradigm is augmented reality. In the near future almost every product will have a computer in it. Soon after that, all of those objects will be hooked up to the internet. We will use this internet of things in combination with virtual reality programming to create an augmented reality with additional information about the world overlaid seamlessly onto it. It’s useful while considering this to imagine your computer screens are windows into a virtual world. Now take away the screen, but leave all of the information. While walking down the street, you will be able to see or know what your coordinates are, or where the nearest coffee shop is. This isn’t surprising, we already have these capabilities in our cell phones. Augmented reality takes that two inch screen, blows it up full size, and disappears in the process.
Beyond overlaying virtual information, there are potential ways to create physical objects with programming. Cellular biology and engineering — the second paradigm — each study the relationship between DNA (the program) and the cellular components (the hardware). Cells are programmable constructors — they build physical parts from information in the DNA program. In computer terms, that would be like writing a program, burning it onto a CD, and then watching the CD build a computer around it, autonomously . DNA programs can be written and then executed in a similar way to computer programs, but the results are physical (and incidentally alive). As we speak, scientists are reverse engineering the mechanics of thousands of life forms. Research into genetic programming is well underway, and we are already starting to see the possibilities of coding for physical construction.
The cellular engineering revolution will give us a leg-up on the third paradigm, nanotechnology. As mentioned above, we are reverse engineering the parts built by millions of years of evolution to make our own molecular machines. However, the real breakthrough will be creating our own nanotechnology from the ground up. (I won’t go into it here, but there are some serious doubts about the viability of some nanotechnologies.) If we can overcome the inherent dangers and difficulties of nanotechnology, we will have the ability to transform reality with pure information. Nanobots will be able to recreate almost any object with raw material and information to atomic precision. This is possible because a nanobot is simply an atom mover. It can pick one up here and put it there. When atoms can be rearranged with information, virtual augmented reality and actual reality will intermingle and become indistinguishable. Software and hardware will merge.
It’s difficult to predict when these advances might happen. Computer programming of virtual realities is already possible. Current desktop computers can create very convincing special effects that can quite easily pass the scrutiny of the average human eye. The genetics revolution is in it’s infancy but is already showing enormous promise. It would be wise to watch genetic engineering closely as it’s advances will tell us much about the timetable for advancements in nanotechnology.
We are in a unique position in history. We have the power to create worlds, and our powers are increasing exponentially. Consider how lucky we are to be given that privilege. Computer programming is becoming the language, and we the authors of reality.
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Evolution by Natural Selection
February 11th, 2009
Almost 150 years after the publishing of The Origin of Species, the theory of evolution by natural selection has come a long way. We now have supporting evidence not only from the vast fossil record, but from the genetic code written in the DNA of all Earthly life. The evolutionary process has been harnessed by pharmaceutical companies and software developers to make better medicine and solve complex problems. Evolution has given us a new understanding of our place in the universe.
Many of the theories of science — relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution — must , in some sense, be true because they make precise predictions that are verified by experimental evidence. It has been said that quantum mechanics (physics on the atomic scale) makes predictions so precise that it is equivalent to measuring the width of the United States to one width of hair. The discovery of DNA and the rapid sequencing of genomes have both further supported predictions made by evolution. Darwin knew that evolution could only work if traits were passed on from parents to offspring, but he didn’t know what the mechanism was for passing those traits on. The answer was DNA, but the link between heredity and DNA wouldn’t be discovered until 1952. 50 years after that the genetics revolution began, and for the first time we were able to see the fine detail of our genes. We can now compare directly the sequence of code that makes us with that of other animals. The proof is in the code: all life is related .
While we continue to learn more about evolution from biology, at the same time we are applying that knowledge to some of our most difficult problems. Pharmaceutical companies now use the principles of natural selection to produce better medicine. Software developers, scientists, and even artists are applying genetic algorithms to breed better and better solutions to problems. For a scientist a genetic algorithm might look for the best solution to climate change or the most efficient design for a solar cell. A genetic algorithm might be used by an artist to find the most pleasing aesthetic, or the best readability. If 10% of the power of biological evolution can be harnessed by this kind of artificial evolution then the big breakthroughs are probably yet to come.
Darwin’s idea shatters our anthropocentric tendencies by showing us our true place in the universe: we are one of millions of animals, all of which share a common ancestor. We should be humbled by our smallness, but also be optimistic about all of the possibilities for our species. We are the only intelligent, self-aware species that we know of in 100 billion galaxies! And someday, if we survive, we will have all of the galaxies to explore.
Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday. In honor of this great thinker and doer, I would like to suggest that you take 15 minutes to read about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Consider what it means about life and why we are here. The wikipedia entry is a good start. You might also enjoy this lecture series by Prof. Richard Dawkins titled Growing Up in the Universe were he explains evolution in detail with lots of real world examples and visuals. It’s entertaining at the least.
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