The God Delusion

I just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and without question I would add this book to the list of books I feel all human beings should read ASAP. Richard puts all of his ideas into such an easy to understand context all while being extremely elegant. This book will make you laugh and then cry.

Richard was preaching to the choir while I was reading his book, but despite already being an atheist and having read a decent amount of material on the topic, I was able to learn a whole lot of new things. Hopefully, this book will find its way into the hands of people on the fringe. It might be asking too much for it to find its way into the hands of fundamentalists though. Personally, I try to read books that I know contradict explicitly with my current beliefs.

Xbox 360 Wireless Headset

I'm going to go right ahead and declare this the worst peripheral device for a gaming console of all time. After getting this thing and playing around with it I am forced to conclude that the design team was smoking massive amounts of bananas. First, there is this weird rubber ear loop. Now I had to take a few minutes to figure out exactly how to put this thing on, and I'm still not sure I've got it on right. It doesn't fit over the whole back of your ear. Instead it sort of hangs like a cybernetic van Gogh lobe xmas tree ornament on the top corner of your ear. It flops around if you move and is crooked even when you keep your head still. If ever there were something to make you look even more ghey while playing online video games and dissin' n00bs, this is it!

So how about performance......TERRIBLE. Most of the reviews I read were annoyed at how sensitive the mic was, thus picking up every bit of ambient noise and driving others crazy. I guess Microsoft took note and decided pull back on the sensitivity a little. And by a little, I mean a lot. Now my clanmates are in a tizzy that they can't hear me.

The sound coming in is ok, and it syncs up pretty nicely though. I just wish I could use any other sanely designed bluetooth headset, but nope, Gill Bates ain't havin' that.

The Law of Modus Pwnens

Sam Harris

I've been watching some of Sam Harris' talks on various television programs and conferences and find him to be a very eloquent and capable spokesman for atheism. His points are so clear and he backs them up with real life examples so well. I haven't read his books yet, but I plan to soon. I am greatly looking forward to deeper elaborations on all of his points. For a quick summary of his thinking check out this video from Idea City 2005. Make sure to play it to the end. The comment the presenter makes was exactly what I was thinking in my head.

Gmail Trick

So I recently learned of a neat little Gmail trick that will come in handy. You can use the "+" character after your real email address to add any other characters you want to display. The most obvious application of this would be to use it to identify a site where you are giving away your email address and then you will be able to track if they have sold your info to advertisers. So it would look like this: YourEmailName+websitename@gmail.com. Then when you get an email showing you how to Enl4rg3 your sh00rt d!ck w/ V1111agra11!, you'll just know where it came from.

Ideas That In Retrospect You Just Can't Live Without

It's amazing how quickly we start to take things for granted. It's only in a rare bout of retrospection that we realize just how much an idea or technology has changed our lives. There are the big ones that most people know about, the industrial revolution, the automobile, computers, the internet, etc and lots of smaller ones that get less attention but collectively contribute vastly.

So how about looking forward? What are the imminent disruptive technologies that people 20 years from now will look back in awe at how we ever lived without it? It's going to happen. It always happens.

One thing that I think people soon won't believe that it didn't always exist is the ability to record every moment of your life and store it. This ability would vastly change the way we lived yet it is currently completely possible with the technology we have. It won't catch on until the ability is seamless and easy, but that's how it is with everything else. Imagine having the ability to instantly search through any moment of your life and play it back. Think of all the things that you could do. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who has always had this ability and imagine us in 2006 as we live our lives and lose so many of our precious memories forever (until they are simulated after the singularity or worst case at the omega point).

This is definitely something people won't be able to comprehend living without. Any others that you can think of?

Greg Egan: Best Sci-Fi Writer of Recent Times?

Greg Egan is the man. So far I've had the pleasure of reading Permutation City, Diaspora, and just recently, Distress. These books are full of so many mind-bending ideas each that it makes most other books you read a bore. Very few authors that I've read have the ability to take advanced (and pretty accurate) math and physics and mold them into genuine stories with deep character development. So many times I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "Come on man just take this idea to the extreme. What do you have to lose?" Greg Egan takes ideas to the extreme and makes them work. If you are interested in math, physics, technology, computing, and the far future, pick up some Greg Egan and thank me later.

Microsoft's New DVR Patent

In an effort to balance my karma a Microsoft bashing post is needed. It seems Microsoft has patented a DVR application that will ensure advertisements with time sensitive information can be seen by viewers. In other words, they want to put new commercials into old shows you've recorded.

Uhhhhh Double You Tea Eff, Mate? Are they serious? They must know one of the biggest reasons people buy a DVR is to skip ads entirely. I guess they are banking on advertisers coming up with ways to beat this, whether it be commercials with fun content, fast-forward viewable ads, or legislation, I do not know.

Microsoft DVR Patent (Engadget)

I've always thought a better idea would be to make advertising truly specific. TV commercials do ok basing content on location, likely demographics for the show, and such. Adsense is obviously working to a degree though it suffers from click fraud and the possibility that the content of a site someone is viewing isn't something they are in the market for. Why not have people declare things they are interested in and then let companies compile information and send it off in exchange for programming content, etc. I guess various instances of such a system are already in place.

Hey, companies. I'm in the market for a DVR (ironic), a surround sound system, and some Xbox games and accessories. Get the hell to it.

Intelligence Amplification (IA) Vs. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the past I have thought that a safer singularity would be brought about through the use of intelligence amplification, loosely defined as the merging of biological and machine/silicon intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence. The logic being that a human who has undergone IA and reached godlike powers will remember his humanity and remember it fondly.

Will there really be any difference between a human with extremely powerful IA and a straight up strong AI? Once either being reaches the level of intelligence and power where they hit the explosive curve of exponential growth I don't think that it will not make a difference. Their intelligence will have come so far that the origin of it may be insignificant.

However, I also tend to believe that a super intelligence will be inherently benevolent.

Went Out for a Wii Came Back With a 360?

I got an inside tip that the local Circuit City was getting a shipment of Wiis this morning. Unfortunately, waking up early on weekends isn't my forte. I got there at 10:15am, 15 minutes after opening and was greeted with a large Wii Temporarily Sold Out sign. I went in to survey the scene anyhow and found the Wii aisle looking like the canned good section of a supermarket before a hurricane. Games, controllers, wires.....gone.

What is a rabid, techie consumer to do? That's right buy something else equally or more expensive than the original planned purchase. As it turns out Microcenter is having an Xbox360 sale; premium console for $299. This is the cheapest they have been available, and I snatched one along with Gears of War. If you would have told me a week ago that I would be an owner of the 360 I would have told you that you were a crack monkey.

So the 360 is pretty large. It doesn't fit on my TV stand shelves. It's also a little loud. The fan goes on full speed immediately after powering on, not really a big concern when I'm blasting games. The power brick is colossal and that's not a word I throw around often. Otherwise, I'm pretty impressed with it. I like the xbox live setup where you have a single name and stats are available across all of your games. Initial setup was fast and easy.

Gears of War looks pretty sick. The graphics are really good but nothing terribly mindblowing. Game play is fun, but I'm more interested in the online play and haven't gotten that far yet.

So Nintendo and Sony, look what you have driven me to. I had no plans in hell to buy a 360 but your low numbers have driven me to your most feared competitor, who I really don't even like much.

Muslim Haxx0rz

This was the image that popped into my head when I heard a terror alert had been issued to American financial institutions regarding a rumored cyber attack on stocks.

Marvin Minsky in Wired

Wired has been coming through with some pretty good articles lately. Articles that it takes some balls to print and happen to be things that hold a great amount of my interest. Rarely does one read about these topics elsewhere in the ink on dead tree world. Last months cover was devoted entirely to Atheism, with interviews with people like Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This month was a much smaller article in the Play Print section about Marvin Minsky's new book, "The Emotion Machine," his much anticipated follow up to The Society of Mind.

Wired writer David Pescovitz is interviewing Dennett and Minsky when he asks, "What would a machine that worked this way (like a human basically) look like?" Dennett answers by interpreting Minsky's initial response as, "It's too early to build the big model." Minsky replies, "Actually, I could quarrel with that. I think the architecture described in The Emotion Machine is programmable. If I could afford to get three or four first-rate systems programmers, we could do it"

He goes on to say that it's unfair something like the DARPA Grand Challenge gets millions to be worked on when something like this project receives, presumably, little to no money from outside sources. At the lest the Grand Challenge is related to AI. I would take that a step or two further and say that it makes you wonder why we pay actors millions of dollars to make 1.5 hour films about crap and pay sports stars million of dollars to run into each other 200 times in the course of an hour, but we can't muster up enough money to pay a couple programmers to code for, I don't know, a year or three. It's the difference between a few hours of entertainment versus reaching humankind's destiny within our lifetimes and very few people even know or care about it.

Slaughterhouse-Five

I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five yesterday. I enjoyed it very much, covering the 224 pages in two sittings. I try to give my reading rotation a variety of selections. I enjoy sci-fi the most, but I throw in non-fiction, educational, and out of my norm books as much as possible. This book satisfied what I will call my classic requirement.

It was absolutely depressing as hell while at the same time it had me laughing hysterically. I guess you are supposed to walk away from the book with an anti-war, anti-violence, things happen for a reason and you can't change it type of message. While I agree to some degree with the anti-war and anti-violence, at least in the main context of the book which is unnecessary war and violence, I couldn't help but feel frustrated with Billy's lack of motivation to try and change the negative things in his life. The only action he took to try and do something useful with his situation was to tell other people about it. He does spin it off in a positive light, stating that even when a person dies, they are still alive at some other point in time and always will be. That just doesn't cut it for me. I would have tried to change things every time I could for the better. Instead, Billy shrugs and goes on in his indifferent sort of way. I suppose this shows how much war can break a man's spirit.

Anyhow, it was a good read, very different and entertaining. I'll certainly be giving some more of Mr. Vonnegut's works a go. I leave you with a quote from the book, the scene is Billy being given a female to mate with in his cage on an alien world where he is a zoo exhibit: "Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one."


So it goes...

Space and Time

You are never in the same place twice, and you never know exactly what time it is. Let me explain:

You are never in the same place twice when you state your position from an absolute fixed point in space. The Earth spins on its axis and revolves around the Sun, the Sun revolves around what is thought to be a super massive black hole, and the Milky Way galaxy itself is moving at around 300 km/sec. While you may be in the same place on Earth, from an imaginary, immovable point in space you are in a new location every second of the day.

You never know exactly what time it is ever. You do however get to know what time we think it was a month ago to a certain resolution. You never know exactly what time it is ever because the atomic clocks we use to keep track of the passage of a single second are not perfectly accurate. Furthermore, the exact time also depends on your altitude (gravity) and speed. With looser margins of error you only know what time it was a month ago. There are many atomic clocks and groups of atomic clocks that keep time very accurately. When all of the data from the world's clocks has been compiled and weighted the BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures) releases the final numbers for the previous month.


Thoughts?

The New iPod Shuffle

I'm officially back on the bleeding edge of iPod with my new Shuffle.

First impressions:

• It's small and light. Yeah.
• Still manages to seem pretty sturdy. I won't be scared to take it to the gym.
• Belt clip is strong, which is was one of my biggest concerns. Even if it does fall off, it's so light that the headphone connector doesn't unplug nor does it even pull the iPod buds out of my ears. I wish it was a wee bit stronger though.
  
• Clipping vertically as on your belt, the forward button points down, etc. I don't like that. It means it was designed more to be clipped horizontally, something I doubt I will do. Not really a big deal.
• Songs transfer a little slow, a few seconds each, through the USB to Headphone Jack converter. Not a problem for just a gig. Well worth the size reduction moving USB off device.
  
• Oh, one more thing. It's freaking sweeeeeeeet.

That Seals the Zipper on My Wii Wii

I've been math debating about having two separate game systems. Up until now I've been a one console kind of guy. Do I really want to have to buy games for two consoles and have all the paraphernalia associated with it lying around my room? I am certainly buying a ps3 and certainly not buying the xbox360, but the Wii does intrigue me. Every other interactive controller gimmick I have had though has been a novelty, not a win. So I've been on the fence with the Wii, not sure whether it will break the mold or if it'll be fun for 10 minutes and then get stupid. Then I saw the video for Red Steel. Nintendo / Ubisoft advertising departments, give yourselves a pat on the ass. I'm sold.

One Step Closer to Contact Lens HUDs and Super-Vision

Well, hello, serendipity. My name is Tay. I found these two articles right by each other on KurzweilAI. The first [technology review] is about a group from Northwestern who have developed some cheap, high performance, and transparent transistors using indium oxide at room temperate that could be used for displays. The second [newscientist] is about a UPenn / Stanford tag team that has developed an implantable silicon chip that mimics the neural workings of a real eye.




Edit: Serendipity strikes again. Look closely, they run firefox!

E-Ink Reader

As a bleeding edge technophile, (leading edge now, damn you sweet, sweet core 2 duo macbook pro) who also loves to read, you would think I would be pitching a pant tent over all these new e-readers coming to the market. I want to like them and part of me wants it just to play with it as well as for the few situations it might actually be useful. Unfortunately, I love the physical qualities of books, especially the way they smell and the way they look stacked up on a bookshelf.

I am very worried about the possible DRM restrictions that may be imposed. Will there be rampant book p2p-ing when e-readers are more ubiquitous and won't burn your eyes out? I'd like to believe people who read a lot of books and grow to love certain authors would want to support them, but easy five fingered discounts are always enticing. I think publishers are going to preempt the wait and see method and just hit us with crippling DRM that won't be interoperable and will force you to buy and re-buy content that you should already own. Then you will get the same backlash that you get from true music fans who refuse to be encumbered with DRM, which DECREASES the value of the file, who use p2p or torrents to get a more featured "product."

Eventually, the wave that is technology will overcome the paper book as it does to most obsolete things, but I am interested to see how fast it catches on in the meantime.

Firefox 2.0

Well, Firefox 2.0 is out to go along with every other version 2.0 in the world today. I got to thinking, there really isn't much I want from my browser. I want it to be clean, secure, and fast. That's what I like about Firefox. It comes with the base configuration and let's you choose how much extra crap you wanna load on. For me that consists of Stumble, Delicious, and Adblock Plus. Anyway, 2.0 is nice in sticking with this tradition. So, thumbs up here.

November, Best Month Ever

In the world of rampant consumerism, November is shaping up to be a stellar month. I will even go so far as to say it is going to be the best month ever. I'm a young, single yuppie, and I love me some electronics (and some other things). This post will serve as a list (in no particular order, not even chronological like you might think) of all the awesome things that are due out soon:

1. Playstation 3 - November 17th: I won't even be trying to get a first run PS3. I'll let the bleeding edgers flush out the bugs and spend a night or two sleeping outside on a line.

2. Nintendo Wii - November 19th: I'm on the fence with this one. It's cheap, it could be fun, and my TV has 9t9 trillion inputs and I want to have something plugged into every one.

3. Apple iPod Shuffle - Listed ship date of October: I don't know if these babies are shipping already but other products that are get listed as ships within 24 hours. These things are so small and cheap, I'm going to get two and clip one to each of my nipples whilst at the gym.

4. Socom: Combined Assault (PS2) - November 7th: Let's face it Socom 3 sucks, a mere shadow of its predecessor. Being that CA will be playable online with S3, well, I'm reserving excitement.

5. Tony Hawk's Project 8 (PS3) - November ??: I've heard rumors that this is coming out in November but a quick intrasnets search is telling me probably not. The Tony Hawk series is one of my favs. American Wasteland was a bust though. Will the new platform offer unparalleled game play or merely pretty graphics?

6. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - November 1st: This is my first deviation from electronics, but this movie looks too funny to not include. My name ehhhhh Borrrrat, your name please?

7. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind - November 7th: In his much anticipated follow up to The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky gives us his updated thoughts on AI. The future of the world is at stake here, for reals.

8. The Jennifer Morgue - November 1: Charles Stross is the man. Accelerando was the best sci-fi book of 2006, "IMHO." I haven't got around to reading Glasshouse yet as I've been taking a brief stint into neurology and philosophy lately. Once that's over, it's Stross time.

Well that is all I can think of for now. I'll update the list as I remember things or new word gets released down the Internet Tubes. Get excited.