GENOMICON

Sitting out in the car at the moment, on account of being locked out of the house. It’s the suburbs. Blowing a hurricane as well, though you probably can’t tell from the photo:

So what about that Hurricane Sandy eh?

In six months time this will seem as… forgotten… as the Iranian Twitter Revolution seems now – but for future ref, yes we just had the annual “once in a lifetime” disaster, and it trashed New York. It also trashed Cuba and there’s another killer hurricane raging right now in Indonesia… but neither of those places have a self-obsession industry quite like America’s, so we don’t get to hear about them.

So with increasingly cartoon like predictability came the usual flurry of photo-ops and political positioning… people everywhere using it as an excuse to dust off the axe they were grinding this time last week… whether it be nutter Christians blaming it on homosexuality, or George Monbiot on the edge of his seat, rapier-fast at shutting down anyone who dares criticise Nuclear Energy…

… and an argument/discussion blew up between Vinay and George, in which George concluded that Vinay was a very dangerous individual, but not for the reasons he’d initially thought (that he was a Pentagon spy).

I’ve got a bit of a soft-spot for George. Before the internet he was one of the ONLY voices (that actually got published) that was actually on our side. These days though, he’s got about a 50/50 chance of getting it flat wrong… and I think the Vinay discussion kindof highlights why: he’s not a programmer, and Vinay is, and we appear to increasingly be confronted with scenarios that do actually need the sort of thinking that programmers tend to do, namely:

- programmers get exponentiality – and the ramifications thereof.
- programmers get modularity, redundancy, scalability, loosely/tightly coupled systems. YAGNI, etc etc.
- programmers get abstraction, (laissez-faire/dynamic) modelling, and layered architecture.
- programmers get recursion.

Which isn’t to say normal, well-adjusted people don’t get them as well… it’s just they’re part of programmer’s mental DNA. They’re that fundamental… they represent sub-grammatical patterns of meta-modelling. Or something. They’re also patterns that tend to show up under the influence of psychedelics, oddly enough.

(into the era of disaster continuity…)

In the 90s, corporate IT support came down with a strain of the political-correctness bug, and “Disaster Recovery” was quietly renamed to “Business Continuity”. IT support isn’t really programming though – “business continuity” is ALL about redundancy, but it’s kindof linear – it doesn’t have the same distributed/viral vision that a programmer would tend to bring… where redundancy isn’t a backup sitting somewhere, but is actually part of the architectural/functional philosophy that dictates *why* the system is being built in the first place.

Now – a lot of the programmer traits above, are kindof fundamental to understanding how environments work which ought come as no great surprise, as environments (aka: platforms) have been the core business of web programmers for about the last 10 years. It’s all about taking something small and simple, and designing it so it can exponentially scale, tribble-like, to fill every iota of available space (and more often than not, every last syllable of recorded time)… and do it as fast as humanly (or not) possible… and this process is needed to roll anything out on a large scale. It also works for small.

To put it in a nutshell… if you want to put plumbing into your house, you need a plumber. If you want to put sanitation into a town you need a civil engineer. (and some plumbers). If you want to roll sanitation out to a million people who don’t have access to proper roads then you need a programmer. (and at least one plumber, who can teach).

Which also works for a single house.

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If you had a really big time-machine – you could take the Roman Army from the height of the Empire… and plonk it almost anywhere in Europe, any time in the following 1000 years and it would knock spots off any army that happened to be around at the time.

Why? Because the Romans could do logistics. Not just building a bridge over the Rhine in 10 days, then marching 40,000 people over it, having a fight, then marching back, taking the bridge with them; not just doing a full days march, then building a fortress at the end of it – every day; not just laying siege to a city by building a fortified wall around it… then building a fortified wall around that, facing outwards to fight on two 360° fronts at once… not just those, but also maintaining and managing supplies and local resources to live in the field for years. Anyone can learn to build and use a crossbow… medieval tech-advances would be assimilated in a matter of days… but being able to put 100,000 men in the field without losing 1/2 of them to disease? That takes an entirely different set of skills.

The Romans were really good at this stuff. Good at plumbing too.

And that is why The Pentagon likes Vinay’s hexayurts. Although the military is (as it was in Roman times) prey to the machinations and greed of corrupt old men (causing them to (among other things) waste so much money that it costs them their empire), they do have a gut-feeling for good logistics when they see it… and that is what hexayurts are about. They’re Programmer-POV logistics – logistics 2.0… ie: they’re about exponentiality, loosely-coupled systems, modularity… all the things above, including abstraction – going-meta… ie: they’re also a “way of working”, that can be applied to other areas of need. If you want to roll sanitation out to a million people within a period of time that you don’t wind up with a cholera epidemic, you ain’t going to do it with civil-engineering. You’re going to need Network-era thinking. You’re going to need (ironically) virality

Oh yea – nuke power stations are NOT network-era thinking. Sorry George.

So there was a degree of post-sandy huffing/puffing about the lack of cellphone-coverage post sandy. And yup – I kindof know what they mean. If NZ got cut off from the internet, the only way of finding out what was going on, would be to ring someone up in another country… and (probably) get them to see what Twitter was saying. If your phones and internet are down? Ham radio? Paper? Pigeons? A population without twitter is an isolated population.

And the stupid thing is – we’re all sitting on a great big, near-planetary scale mesh-network of personally-owned wifi routers. It really would not take much more than the collective decision to do so, to turn this into an internet that could never be shut down… and you could run the thing on batteries FFS.

It’s almost a national-security situation – in fact about 5 years ago, Reed Hundt was trying to sell web-connectivity as a national-security situation… but was advocating buying up TV spectrum radio… which is a whole lot stronger (I think) than the wifi spectrum.

But while that would be good for blanketing an entire town/region etc… real resilience has got to be modular, scalable, redundant, and virally deployed. We’ve already got the infrastructure – sitting in the car here I can see about 20 (locked) routers… all we need is a special sort of virus. Not to hack the machines… but to convey to the owners of the routers, the power of sharing.

Which sounds like it should be the title of another post. But not today. No… not today.

Cool

If this does what I think it does, it will “become” the internet… especially if it can be combined with the 60 mile radius wifi thing I was on about the other day.

Not quite there yet though… New Zealand is still at the mercy of two wires… One to Aus, one to the US. We’re still at the mercy of those single points of failure. The video goes on about power and node outages… entirely benign and non-threatening, but let’s state the obvious here – we need to do this because our governments, and the corporations that are increasingly running them are neither honest nor competent enough to control the flow of information.

We specifically need free information to protect ourselves from our own institutions.

That said, the funding seems to be corporate – I instantly distrust anything “philanthropic” (we covered the morality of that one about 100 years ago… though people seem to have forgotten), and I definitely distrust anything with the word “Foundation” in the name.

Still, the internet was largely invented by the military, so what do I know. It looks like they’ve got code here – I’ll try to figure it out later… see if I can get it to go.

So anyway, after reading this thing from Thingverse, enthusing about the number of things in a hardware shop that could be rep-rapped… I was thinking how few of our 3D manufactured objects are actually unique enough (at this stage) to warrant it.

And looking around, I couldn’t see any – I could not see one single thing that was unique.

Then I realised I was missing the biggest thing in the room… the room. The house.

I’m quite interested in this because I think the way we (as a culture) are organising housing is seriously stupid. Why is it that it takes the average non-already-rich person most of their adult life to get a place to live? Who benefits? Banks? Fuck them. As far as I can see, the way land/housing organised is THE thing that traps us into class-systems.

We’ve got this weird situation where everything is mass-produced with powerful drivers forcing down the prices… except the one thing that we waste 1/2 our lives paying for.

So I’m interested in cheap, but cool alternatives – and there have been a load of these recently, eg:

Which I think is beautiful – although the million dollar views that it’s designed to have don’t hurt. I wonder how much it costs? I’ve gotten to be a little cynical about hotels etc that are “designed”… at least partly on account of their looking like they’re made for and by web-designers, but the prices are more than the fucking Ritz – even the capsule hotels at Gatwick in London look like they’re cheap but they use that classic sales-person weasel-pitch “from £n.99″ but they’re charging in 4 hour units, so they’re much the same price as a local hotel.

What’s needed is not (only) new design, it’s a whole new business model so people aren’t being systematically, systemically screwed.

There are a load of quite cool and possibly over-produced examples here

Something that does spring to mind as a possibility – boats. I lived on one recently and I don’t know if New Zealand is like everywhere else in the world, but the regulations and costs that turn housing into such a quagmire don’t exist for boats. There isn’t even the MOT/WOF things that cars have.

Whatever. Idly speculating. Whatever new economic system is evolving, we’ve got to sort housing so it serves us and not vice-versa.

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Still, forget about that and check this out:

(via)

Which is a 3D printed thing the size of a… well, house, almost.

I find this absolutely fascinating to watch for some reason.

Arthur C Clarke’s laws of Prediction state:

1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There is so much technology today that is to most people just that – magic. Even something as rudimentary as a vacuum tube. It’s just a “thing” that “does something”. It’s something that always bothered me… that I didn’t know how to make Coke cans. If I was transported back in time to the 14th Century, Coke cans would be just as magic to me as the dragons and wizards and so on that were alive back then. I know (at least I think I know) that aluminium is something to do with bauxite and you extract it with electricity. That’s it. How to get it that thin, how to seal it, how to rivet the ring-pull, how to get the paint to stick… the entire thing is… well, magic.

Our entire civilisation is based upon the skills and knowledge of very few people… technocrats. The rest of us are waffling fluffers.

Still, at least you know how to make a vacuum tube now.

Flickr.com has turned into an amazingly good search engine… I noticed it the other day when I was looking for photos of Pomanders (and who ever does that?). There’s a group dedicated to them… or photos of them.

I read recently that Youtube is the second biggest search engine on the web (in a blog that I’ve now misplaced) by one of the funders of Twitter, who was saying that Twitter was a threat to google because it delivers more up to the minute information… a notion roundly bollocked by the hoards of commenters etc.

Twitter is a pretty good search engine for what people are talking about on any given subject right now though. Want to know what people think of IE6? Search for it on Twitter. Hating IE6 is an international language.

Facebook is an excellent search engine for people. I’ve found people that I thought I’d lost forever.

Digg/Reddit and co have fucked it up. They’re not good search engines for news.

Instructibles.com is rappidly turning into a really good site for searching for “how to build things”… and that is its destiny methinks… but it’s not quite there yet.

There are probably good sites for searching for music… MySpace? Lastfm? I imagine that the backward facing copyright analists have/will interfere with that one… I use youtube for music searches and they interfere with that all the time.

So there you go. Web 2.0 is turning into Search 2.0. Who’d a thunk it?

And in a way it makes sense, because although google is utter genius, it’s also a bit crap because (like digg, reddit etc) it’s an exercise in Rewarding Beaten-Paths. Sure the long tails are there… but if you want to find an honest review of a camera say, you have to wade through about a million pages of people trying to sell them. If you want authenticity, you need to go to Amazon (a search engine for not just things to buy, but reviews) or some other site that specialises in reviews (and there are a fair few of those, but I’ve not found them to be terribly convincing) … where the focus is small enough that the interests of long-tails are genuinely served.

It’s classic AI – and quite possibly/probably how wetware brains work… every time you click a link, you increase the likelihood that it will be clicked again. Beaten-Paths are rewarded, but beaten paths are not always right, and can be (and are) gamed.

It doesn’t always work. It’s not always fair… in fact the bigger it gets, the less likely it is to be fair. Oligarchies of Influence are formed. It’s almost like (and this is an advantage of twitter/facebook) that classic AI isn’t that good for delivering authenticity… for that you need small networks of small-degrees-of-separation of white-listed people. “People you know”, or “who know people you know” or “who no people who know people you know”, but not much beyond that. You’re not guaranteed an answer though.

Another problem – a concern I have with the way these things are shaping up, is that this system encourages monopoly. The major filtering systems of the internet are specifically, systemically architected to encourage monopoly. It’s not democratic… it’s sold as democratic, but it’s not democratic.

I’d be a lot happier (for example) with some sort of P2P version of Flickr… so once something is uploaded into the Universal mind, it doesn’t get lost… but it doesn’t have the lack of resilience inherent in monopolistic systems. We’ve already seen the drawbacks of monopoly with Youtube… embedded a video recently? Chances are it will have been pulled by WMG – and your site will now have a dead link.

I think any P2P system will need to run in parallel… a bit like the distributed SETI system… where chunks of the Universal Mind that live in precarious silos like Youtube or Flickr are automatically backed up onto individual PCs… I think there are already sites that try to backup every single youtube video onto their own servers… but this is kindof replacing one problem with… well, the same problem.

This is probably already being done, but I don’t know about it.

Here’s a picture of a penguin

Apropos of nothing.

I’m also increasingly seeing the web as (you guessed it) The Universal Mind. It’s becoming a creature in its own right, with its own patterns and behaviours, and its own emergent moralities… but more of that later.