Why your internet sucks

It was a privilege to vote for municipal internet in Fort Collins in 2017. So happy it passed. I now live in Blacksburg, VA and am feeling the pain of the Comcast Cartel as Hasan Minhaj describes it.

iNTERNET for ALL

Edward Snowden Appears at Flagship TED

Who runs the Interwebs?

This week's Freakonomics podcast with hosts Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt was so good I had to listen to it twice. A major highlight is Dubner's conversation with NYU internet scholar - Clay Shirky. In my mind Shirky makes soem excellent points about the absurdity of trying to regulate technology before it is born. This is playing out right now on kick-starter as the people who run kickstarter have banned people from offering home-made genetically modified organisms in the wake of the glowing plant project's success. Keep your eyes on this blog as I have glowing plant seeds on the way sometime next spring. I will write about my experience. In the mean time, have a listen to this week's incredibly engaging Freakonomics!

Introducing Google Nose (beta)

Vint Cerf, the Grateful Dead, and Flying Sea Anemones

"I am not a happy camper when I see the gridlock and I see the polarization and I see the increasing ad hominem character of what should be a deliberation leading to compromise. And I'm not fully capable of analyzing why that's all happening but it is inhibiting rational discourse. In my world cooperation and collaboration is very important because the kinds of things that we do are so signifigantly hard that you need a lot of help and you need people working together. It only works if they respect each others opinions and when they disagree it isn't because the other guy is stupid it's because the other guy is seeing it differently and may or may not be able to justify the position, but you listen and debate and discuss and persuade and try to come to some rational conclusion, believing that everyone's intent is positive and aligned. What we see in the current political atmosphere is that intent is not aligned at all."
  ~Vint Cerf

Listen to the rest of this phenomenal interview with Andrea Seabrook on one of my new favorite podcasts - DecodeDC.



If you have an hour and half to spare the following video discussion from the 2012 World Science Festival panel "Internet Everywhere" will blow your mind. If it doesn't blow your mind please contact me (see sidebar). Now, prepare yourself to see Vint Cirf on camera in all his dapper glory.



Video streaming by Ustream

Whoa! This is AMAZING!

Aside from neural implants I can not fathom a more intuitive web interface. Imagine what a Van Gogh of our age might do with this. Imagine designing recombinant proteins with this. Imagine sculpting in the cloud. My mind is running wild!

Paul Otlet predicts internet and iPad in 1934!

In this bit of historical futurism we can all be amazed at the eerie accuracy with which Paul Otlet predicted how people would access information in the year 2012.

On Air Hangouts - Google Game Changer

Kristopher Hite - New York

In the last several weeks I have watched various online companies scramble to get in on a new game changing technology - live On Air web video conferencing. The winner by a mile is Google. 

The newish free service is the ability to watch or participate in live video conferences with the greatest minds of our time. The inherent transparency is worthy of high praise as the service is now available to any person with a Gmail account. It is just a matter of time before the masses start coming online as I feel the service has come to a tipping point of sorts.

As it is currently set up there can be up to ten people participating in a live video conference. The speaker on the main stage is put there automatically when the sound of their voice is detected via their microphone. The whole set up takes about 5 minutes to get used to but quickly feels very natural.  

I predict the ubiquity of these conferences will grow exponentially in the coming weeks and soon change, once again, the way we interact with the world. Before this innovation most content on the web followed the old publishing paradigm. Content was static and came to us in distinct consumable packages. Now ideas are more malleable and participatory than ever. Anyone with an interest in a topic can weigh in if they have a good internet connection. 

Meritocracy rising. 

Though the web (blogs especially) have been an extremely dynamic medium of permissionless innovation, this new tweak of technology will usher in a new era. Now thought-casters will have more of their phenotype up on the web to work with. Mind, voice, smile, eyes. Those people who are good communicators will rise according to their talents more than just their luck at getting in the game early or knowing the right people in the publishing business.  I am so utterly enthused to see a new meritocracy unfurl.

From a publisher's perspective it will be the people who bring you the most timely lists of the upcoming On Air Google hangouts. Say a discussion of the Personal Genome Project (which I recently signed up for) with Jonathan Eisen, George Church, and Steven Pinker, or a discussion of the meaning of "Free Will" with Dan Dennet, Sam Harris, and Harold Varmus. These are fictitious live discussions I just made up but would be unbelievable to see happen.  I hope Tom Paine's Ghost can be a resource for you to find portals to these discussions and a forum for follow up discussions.

I am going to try and get in on the second-ever Pharyngula On Air Hangout this Saturday June 30th at 11 AM Eastern time. Bully to PZ Myers for embracing and popularizing this new feature of Google+.  If I am not a participant I can at least watch and comment and so can you. I do hope this sets a precedent and that these events become publicized! If you know any good resources out there already alerting us to the URLs and times of said events please leave links in the comments.

Cheers!

May the dialogue continue!

"Plato is right; thought is dialogue, people in lively discussion, not Rodin’s isolated Cartesian." 

     ~Bernard Rollin PhD

 

We were anonymous

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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SEND ME TO ICELAND!

‘We the people’ takes on a literal meaning for the people of Iceland this year as the government has reached out to the populace to help draft a new constitution. In the wake of economic collapse, and protesting, the government of Iceland has decided to script a new constitution. Brand new, unlike the original drafted in 1944 which is a tweaked version of Denmarks constitution.

This truly transparent new document is on the internet and citizens have a duty to examine it and send in their own tweaks, truly making it by the people and for the people. It can go without saying that everyone won’t get what they want, however if enough voices are heard on enough issues, the document will be the greatest example of democracy in the world.

The great communicator (internet) is proving to make leaps and bounds for this world in a very short time it seems. The people are able to come together, as we have seen in Tunisia , Egypt, Libya and others. I have hope that our species will persevere. Speak Out!

On the other hand… Back here across the water. Ego’s continue to get in the way…

Evolution of a line

"A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals is an online drawing tool that lets users do just one thing - trace a line. Each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves - kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process. A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals was first created as a tool to be used in conjunction with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - an online labor market. Mechanical Turk workers were paid 2 cents to trace a line."

Holy Wolfram Alpha!

Here Stephen Wolfram introduces a new kind of search engine.

The idea is to take all the math that has ever been conjured by humanity and build it into a search engine such that any person out there on the world wide web can type in any question and have this search engine send back a "search results" page with that question analyzed by all relevant mathematical tools.

In the introduction you can see and be mesmerized by some of the complex functions wolfram alpha is capable of.  Brilliant! To say the least.

It seems this is an attempt by Stephen Wolfram to answer Hans Rosling's call to action made at TED in 2006.

Why didn't this exist when I took P-Chem?
Thanks Nate for the heads up!