GENOMICON

Been away for a while. Shit’s been getting complicated. Not sure what this post is about yet. Meantime, here’a a picture.

and a video

I’m quite pleased about this one, because this critter has been around for ages… a printable microcopter… and usually what happens with cool inventions on the web, is that they get a lot of blog traffic, and then nothing happens ever again. Like all good robotic advances that are cool, but not immediately useful, this one is (bless) going to be used for search and rescue.

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But that’s not what this is about.

1) Talking to my friend the other day about why I haven’t posted in a while. When I started this blog there would be some new thing to write about every couple of days. Then a year or two ago it was about 5. Now it’s hundreds. I’m not that interested in merely echoing… I try to make meta-observations, and those are harder to do, because the rate with which my observations become irrelevant is speeding up.

2) Cody the 3D Gun printing guy (who has something of the Unibomber about him… ie: he’s swapped out his empathy/compassion software, and replaced it with MS-DOS era game-theory)… Cody the 3D printing guy has just developed an entirely 3D printed gun that is probably less safe than the stamped metal single-shotters they dropped over France in WWII

The fact that Cody has also seen fit to call his gun “The Liberator”

is probably not a coincidence… but is growing out of the warped (goebbels-like history-rewrite) that sees socialists as nazis, and that America is about to turn into a Muslim communist dictatorship. People who like to throw the word “Liberty” about are deeply suspect. It’s a word loaded with snow-blind right-wing spin… just like it was back in the 18th/19th Century when it was used to justify slavery.

So now these particular files have been “seized” (which is like going down to the beach and seizing the seashells) by the State Dept.

This gun is not really a gun though. It’s symbolic feint and counter-feint. Guns are kindof retro. Imagine this is 1913… 100 years ago. WW1 and WW2 (tanks, planes, radar) and Communism and the flu epidemic and lego and television and the internet… the explosion of technology that was the 20th Century haven’t happened yet… but people will still have talked about “the 20th C” as though they knew what they were talking about. I have forebodings about history repeating… because a lot of the ideological utopianism of that period is being faithfully re-enacted by people who think history is dates and battles… to be fan-ficked to suit “beliefs”. Mix that with Austerity and we’re right back where we were in 1913. 1932.

And it’s speeding up. Tech has changed more since the 1960s than it has in the last 1000 years. My dad learned to read using slate and chalk. Today kids “aren’t taught” how to use iPads… partly because by the time they leave school this tech will be obsolete anyway.

So guns are retro – if anything, the weapon here is not the gun, but the printer.

3) Talking to another friend about Zombie targets that really bleed being sold at an NRA conference… and one of the 15 different models was female, so the feminists found an excuse to cry “sexism” – which is utterly ridiculous… here they all are – does that look sexist to you? Personally I felt sorry for The Germans… or the fact that terrorists look like Religious Arabs or that the “straight” zombies look kindof gay. Just wheel out the same axe you were trying to grind last week. The world is a mirror that bites your arse.

What this (actually) is, is someone bringing video-games into actual reality… video-games growing from movies, which grow from books, which grew from folklore etc… when google-glass gets underway, reality is going to have fantasy mixed with it even more… and as we speak, Americans sitting behind screens in Nevada are playing video-games that kill real people in Pakistan.

It’s not just that “the internet of things” is allowing the internet to escape into actual-reality (my parents now have a car, with a computer… that “won’t let you do things”)… the entire collective insanity of human culture is increasingly blending into reality… and if you think this is going to be limited to “billboards coming to life” a la Minority Report, then you’re still in 1913 (opining about the 20th Century as though you know what you’re talking about)

4) Where the fuck is Craig Venter? His TED talk about gen-tech saving the world by making synthetic oil was 5 years ago and fuck-all has happened. The only sign of the gen-tech revolution that sees 100 new “breakthroughs” in the blogosphere every day, that I can actually buy (and that is the “photos or it didn’t happen” litmus test) is a recent kickstarter project making glow-in-the-dark-plants – that has pulled down $300,000 already

(this video has nothing to do with that)

5) Quantum computing.

A while ago I was going to write a blog post about this – because the numbers are truly mind-boggling… because as you add “transistors” you get an increase that isn’t exponential, but is “factorial” – an increase based on permutations and combinations – and if I’ve got this right, if you managed to make a device that has the same number of transistors as CPUs in 2013… billions… then you’ve got a device capable of making A LOT of simultaneous calculations… and by A LOT, I mean if you attempted to make a (10px font, 3 digits per cm) decimal representation of this number it would literally be about 50 miles long. It’s a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe.

Now… this isn’t storage, it’s calculations. If it were possible to store numbers that big, then we could simulate our entire universe. We could big-bang it, and let it unfold in a test-tube. We don’t have storage for this… but we’re getting closer to creating a CPU that could handle the maths.

And maybe there is no storage. Maybe the whole thing is just generated on the fly – maybe that is why matter appears to only go to the trouble of actually existing if it’s observed.

6) There are murmurings out there from the world of physics, that the universe can be modelled as (or is behaving like) a neural network.

If the universe is actually behaving more like a creode-system than a Newtonian clockwork billiard-ball game… ie: if the laws of nature are actually not fixed, but are habits… probabilities that grow in a dimension of possibility… then… there’s a whole swathe of ridiculed pseudo-science (eg: homoeopathy) that loses some of it’s ridiculousness because what it is, is a type of ritual-magic. And what science itself is, is a type of ritual-magic… but one based on stronger morphogenetic patterns – so it doesn’t have to exist in some shadow-plane of inherently untestable placebo.

7) I’m not the only one who finds fractals terrifying.

(this one is understood to be real… ie: not generated by a computer – though you are just looking at a digital representation of a bit-pattern right now)

Not sure why – but it’s got something to do with vertigo. If you look deeper, eventually you expect the detail to stop… you know… like it would if it were a simulation rather than a generative process.

9) Scientists are about to test whether or not we’re a simulation – sitting inside someone else’s quantum computer.

10) that’s enough for now.

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So… various people have talked about The Rapture Of The Nerds… emergent consciousness growing out of more complex networks, and computers self-building smarter versions of themselves in a feedback loop that leaves human intellect back with the trilobites…

… as though it’s a good thing. It’s only (possibly) a good thing if you survive it. I see all these pieces coming together… unstoppable information (3d printed guns, human organs, drugs, thunder)… godlike computing power… reality escaping into the real… humans-out-of-the-loop automated generative art as creativity. The acceleration into complexity… into boundary dissolution. Ego-loss is the final self-defence mechanism.

I think we’re creating a massive hallucinogenic trip. I think that’s what The Rapture of The Nerds (if it ever happens) will resemble. The Garden of Earthly Delights – with a giant AI (like google) hooked into a global network of bio-tech capable fabrication devices… just making shit up. What happens when The Free Spaghetti machine starts making Spaghetti Monsters. Stuxnet meets spam meets fabricators. More than a single imagination can draw a circle around. The dissolution of the boundary between inner and outer space… and meantime, the forces of “control” are losing their minds, going down to the beach, trying to seize the seashells.

If linear time is a useful navigational aid, but essentially an observational fallacy… and what we actually have/are is some great big “thing” with a big-bang at one end… and something else at the other… just floating in some higher-dimensional space… then what is “the other”? Hard to say – but something we do know about it, is that information-density and complexity are accelerating exponentially… possibly factorially… and we’re starting to get into an era where our controlling institutions are going insane.

And it’s only 1913.

This post is about a collision of two tech-tectonics, recent instantiations of which are:

1) Google Glass

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2) Talk of Iceland attempting to ban internet porn.

Firstly,

Porn

1) I was raised on a farm. My parents were matter-of-fact about sex, how it worked, what it was for etc. People who feel they need to “protect”their children by lying to them about sex, need to go live on a farm FFS.

2) Internet Porn is damaging… and it appears to be more damaging to children than adults. I’m not talking about the participants (where it may or may not be), I’m talking about the users… where signs are, it can be.

I’m not talking about morality, I’m talking about dopamine-trigger addiction.

3) “Porn” is impossible to define. At one end there are people literally being tortured and killed. At the other, there are entire genres that are indistinguishable from family photographs, and the only thing that makes it porn is the context. So who decides what is/isn’t porn? A bunch of old people? We’ve tried that, and they always censor art first.

And in between is every gradient of “lifestyle choice” you can imagine. Google “wool fetish” and look at the pictures. Is that porn? Who gets to decide?

Iceland’s pro-censorship politicians seem to think that porn is all violent… which isn’t true… I’m willing to bet that other forms of entertainment (games, movies, books) have a bigger % of violence than porn. It’s the sex they’re getting hung up about, not violence… and while there may be some merit in looking closer at the how porn affects people’s brains, pretending it’s about violence is dishonest.

4) Anyone advocating “censoring adults to protect children” needs to be sacked on the spot.

5) Any government deciding that it needs to take on parental duties on behalf of the general public, needs to be sacked on the spot.

6) Any government attempting to legislate morality needs to be sacked on the spot.

7) You cannot censor the internet without owning the root… and therefore functionally breaking it, and creating the digital apparatus for police-statehood.

In a nutshell, no matter how bad internet porn might be, it will never be as bad as governments using it as an excuse to try to control the internet.

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So… I think there needs to be much clearer understanding, and more research into the neurochemical effects of porn… and for this to be widely and honestly communicated to the public. A bit like the opposite of what was done with the failed war on drugs. We need honesty.

We need to treat all drugs as a health issue rather than a criminal issue… and I’m rapidly coming round to the idea that internet porn could well shape up to be a drug-like health issue as well.

Think you’re not addicted? Try giving it up for a month.

Google Glass

Nothing so unstoppable as an idea who’s time has come?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if google bungled this one. They’ve bungled a lot of their bright ideas in the past. Right now the glasses are chunky, and likely to provoke Segway Syndrome… as in “Look at me everybody, I’m a dork”… but this will change. There are already contact-lens variants in the pipeline.

If they don’t bungle it though… or if someone comes along and does the same thing, only better, then it’s potentially a really big change. What it is, is… powerful sensory augmentation. It literally creates photographic memory in it’s users… and potentially, the ability to see at resolutions or lighting conditions that are beyond normal human capacity, and to focus on things in peripheral vision. I think the augmented-reality aspects of it will be secondary to this… though they might make us even more “Always On” than we already are, and that’s already pretty toxic.

There are a couple of ramifications to this:

1) fuck google “owning” (or even storing) people’s visual memories. I’m not using these things if that is the requirement… and it’s likely to be something they try to foist on us. Unless our data is completely private, and out-of-bounds for ANY authority, then we’re all turning into little CCTV cameras.

2) The universal panopticon just took a massive swing (in fact probably THE massive swing), in favour of The Blue Spaghetti Monster. Bottom up sousveillance.

I read recently that the reason the reason for the proliferation of dashcams (in Russia and elsewhere) is as a check against police corruption. This potentially gives everyone an always-on dashcam. It has serious ramifications for corruption.

I think that’s potentially one of the biggest ways this technology will be disruptive. It upsets power-gradients. It upsets authority.

3) It’s going to be used for porn.

It just is. Letching at girls/boys is going to become (for a while) a money-spinner for some people, and a hobby for a lot of others… and who can honestly say they won’t rewind to take another look at that girl/boy they saw this morning? Everybody will do it – it’ll become the ultimate tool for unrequited love, and like porn, it will be impossible to delineate between what is sexually-voyeuristic, and what is not.

For a lot of people, this will be The Reason, they buy this technology.

4) We’re going to need new etiquette surrounding privacy. New forms of politeness.

I’m pretty sure that if someone finds out that someone is wearing these things, they’ll stop talking to them. That’s kindof what happens now if you shove a camera in someone’s face. People freeze up. It’s not entirely impossible that these things will fail because their users become ostracised. This technology could fail because people simply don’t like being around people using it… their friends at least. Authority will love it… until they find that it’s being used back at them, then they’ll flip out.

5) Bars, brothels, courtrooms, cinemas etc etc will try to ban them, but if they’re the size of contact-lenses, they won’t be able to for long. Corporations and government institutions will simultaneously love and hate them – as I say, they upset power gradients.

6) “IP”?

LOL.

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And so on.

Mainly though, I can see a major collision between google glass, and hysteria about child-porn… which people are already pretty hysterical about. American teenagers are finding themselves on sex-offender registers because they have naked photos of themselves. In the UK, it is illegal to look at sexually violent pencil/pen drawings. Different jurisdictions throughout the world have different ideas about what is/isn’t “allowable”… but the internet has pretty much rendered all of that moot. Then there’s child-porn, which is being used as a political tool, and the public horror/fascination with which is cynically used to sell advertising in tabloid newspapers and television. It’s the witchcraft of today. Simply to be accused is to be found guilty… which isn’t to say the damage isn’t real, but the reaction has been hysterical, and (like “IP”) is being used as a trojan-horse for state surveillance and censorship.

With Google Glass, regardless of intent, people are suddenly going to find themselves with images of other people’s kids… and the only thing that’s going to separate that from the more voyeuristic genres of child-porn is the context. If you walk down a street wearing Google Glass Goggles, it’s going to happen, and there ain’t a whole lot anyone, including you, can do about it. You can’t stop other people doing it; you can’t stop your glasses doing it yourself.

It’s something we’re going to need to get our heads around… fairly soon. And I would suggest growing the fuck up. Taking photographs is not the same as capturing people’s souls… I will concede it’s tricky though. On the 6pm News here in NZ tonight was a “story” about someone using a micro pen-camera to take photos up schoolgirls skirts… and yea, that should be illegal… but where do you draw the line? to say that privacy (or whatever) has been breached? Before the act of taking a photo can be said to have “a victim”?

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Here’s a point of principle: It should never be illegal to look at pictures. If the pictures are of something illegal… then they’re evidence. The crime they’re portraying should be illegal; looking at the evidence should not be.

I’d draw a line a paying for photos of a crime though… if in so-doing, you’re creating a market for the crime… in a sense, paying for the crime to take place. But just looking? No… that’s just a whisker away from having “Illegal Ideas”. It’s not up to the state to tell us what we can/can’t think; what we can/can’t say; what we can/can’t see.

It’s only a matter of time though… before there’s a news story that goes “The killer was found to have thousands of images of the victim that he’d collected using google glass”.

Watch this space.

(ps:

“Pictures Escaping From Behind Glass” is a reference to the way computer interface has developed… Google Glass combined with Leap Motion and Occulous Rift could completely revolutionise interface… but “voice commands” probably aren’t going to happen. That’s just silly.
)

Nerds, meet feminsits; Feminsts, nerds.

So you’ve got one group of people who have (more often than not) a fairly serious charisma-deficit, and have spent their entire lives being rejected by women. They’ve internalised this rejection and now pretty much every aspect of their outward personality grows from this. This is amplified by:

a) behind-computer-screen-bravado
b) male-bonding with people who suffer from the same affliction
c) chronic dopamine receptor depletion brought about by internet-porn, gaming-marathons and lack of positive feedback from normal human activity (see vid below)
d) gravitation towards fields of expertise that not only do “normal” people not understand, but they’re openly proud of not understanding… further ostracising the already socially-inept

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The other group are running a massive confirmation-bias, so everything that can possibly be attributed to sexism, is. At it’s most extreme it holds that:

a) all men are rapists
b) all rapists should be castrated
c) the definition of rape should be broadened as widely as possible
d) men accused of rape are guilty until proved innocent

Other than that, feminists are almost always entirely (or at least partly) right – although any guy who’s found his head tied in knots in a domestic argument will recognise a tendency to dissolve the distinction between “imply” and “infer”, and then treat the result as fact.

Put the two together; get popcorn.

Me? I’m with Asherwolf on this one I think… not because I have the slightest idea what is going on, or what went on, but because I think maybe she’d be more fun to get drunk with.

You can get glow in the dark toadstools from Amazon

Only if you try to import anything biological into NZ, you go to prison, so you can’t get them here, which is sad and bogus, because I’d like some glow in the dark mushrooms.

Which might be a fairly moot point before long… as genetically-engineering things to glow in the dark seems to be a fairly standard “hello world” in DIY bio spheres... a bit like getting an LED to blink if you’ve got an arduino. GFP they call it. You can get different colours

Anyway, we saw that “Day The Earth Stood Still” the other night – it’s got Keanu in it, who we like on account of being “our Keanu”.

Anyway, the massive orb thing turns out to be a bit like Noah’s Ark – in that it collects a version of every species on earth… which I’ve long thought was a good idea – store a bit of the DNA of every species so if they go extinct, we can get them going again… which probably betrays a misunderstanding of “what it’s all about”, ie: it’s about conserving ecosystems rather than individual species…

… but it has kindof crossed my mind, that if we get really good at combining/coding DNA… and basically learn how to make pretty much any combination of traits you can imagine… then even if there’s not a massive Cambrian explosion of species, there IS a massive Cambrian explosion of possibilities… and while keeping examples of naturally-evolved versions is worth doing from an archival POV… the whole thing takes on a bit of a different spin… if there are zero-limitations on what it’s possible to make. Sticking to old species is a bit like only using web-safe colours when you have access to the entire spectrum. In analogue.

Is an animal just a physical instantiation of a code?

Would it be possible (then) to auto-generate every possible combination – like a rainbow-table or The 9 Billion Names Of God? Is that what the Earth/Universe already is? A combination generator?

It’s crossed my mind that maybe complexity is a dimension… like time or possibility. It certainly seems to be something that’s acting in the opposite direction to entropy, and from where I’m sitting, it’s not looking linear. It could be that the Kurzweilian singularity isn’t to do with machine intelligence – although that’s part of it… it could be that it’s more to do with complexity… somewhere between being able to create any organism/thing imaginable, and having direct access to our own brain-chemistry.

It’s a jungle out there.

Well, it hasn’t gone away, has it.

No it hasn’t.

All sorts of “economists” said it was doomed etc… and who knows, maybe it is. But not today, no… not today.

Today it’s clocking in at over 1 per $13 – back from the crash of last year… it’s been a long, slow (but incredibly fast by the standards of normal currencies) climb. I sold mine pre-crash at about 1btc : $20 – I’m going to start buying $100 worth a week I think… regardless of exchange rate.

Anyhoo… couple of things have happened of late…

1) Bitcoin now has a proper bank bank.

From the forum thread:

• Our user’s funds will actually be held at the Credit Mutuel under the user’s name, they will be separate from Paymium’s funds (on the other hand, all of other exchanges funds for example sit in the same account, and are considered by their bank to be their corporate property)
• Our user’s accounts will be protected by the “Garantie des dépôts” which is the French equivalent of the American FDIC (the insurance cap applies to each account individually, and not to the sum of all user balances, so unless your EUR balance exceeds 100kEUR your fiat is 100% insured by the French taxpayer)
• Each account will in a few months get its very own IBAN number, users will be able to use it as any other bank account, have their salaries and pensions sent there and have them automatically converted to Bitcoin if they so wish)
• Each user will soon be able to order its own debit card that will use their EUR and BTC balance to honor purchases and cash withdrawals
• We’ll have direct access to the banking networks which will let us 100% automate all incoming and outgoing transfers
• Corporations will have an actual financial institution talking with them if they wish to start accepting Bitcoin and be safe from a regulatory point of view
• Paymium will have a much better legal standing and a much higher attractivity for second and third-round investors
• Paymium will be in a much better position to make its vision become true : make all our transactions, be they denominated in crypto or fiat currency, flow through the pipes of the Bitcoin network

This is being trumpeted as very big news – considered to be a major step towards legitimacy… which is to say it has been “accepted” by mainstream economics (or whatever you call it).

I have this vague misgiving though.. that the whole point of bitcoin is that it isn’t monitorable by “mainstream economics”, which is in itself illegitimate. The whole point of it is to stop govts and corporations tracking our every move.

So maybe that isn’t the point.

Income I make from Bitcoin I declare anyway (it’s only illegal if you don’t declare income to the IRD). I declare it because I gladly pay tax, so if my neighbour gets sick, he doesn’t lose his house. Everyone in my street does the same – it’s a nice street. Nice town. Nice country… and everyone contributing their share is what makes it a nice country. People that don’t, quite rightly go to prison. If you don’t like it, fuck off to some country without public infrastructure… but choose carefully, because I’ve seen countries like that, and they’re fucking horrible – and ALWAYS wind up costing you more.

2) Iran.

Iranians are (apparently) using bitcoins as a hedge against a currency under attack by the US.

This is The New Protestantism. It’s all fun and games until someone needs to divorce a Catholic.

Sooner or later, these bête noires of top-down control, become the life-or-death possibility of some outlier, and then the world changes. I’m expecting something of the sort to happen with Corporate-Information-Monopolies (otherwise known as “IP”) and generic drugs. Somewhere like India or Brazil is going to reject corporate-information-monopolies, because not to do so will result in the deaths of millions of their people.

If this is what is happening with bitcoin in Iran, then I think it’s significant – not so much because of the outcome or the scale, but because of the underlying tectonics that are driving it.

Someone, somewhere, said “there’s no such thing as fate, just demographics”… and apropos of “location*3″…

tectonics
tectonics
tectonics

3) Iceland are talking (at least) about scrapping fractional reserve.

So there you go.

In 1984 George Orwell described a machine for creating lite-entertainment… The Versificator – it also automatically generated “News”, which consisted entirely of Sports, Crime and Astrology.

Now I’ve been hating on TVNZ News for years now – because all it produces is a “show” which is largely made up of sports and crime… with astrology replaced by a type of “serious” celebrity gossip… ie: all politics is treated at the level of celebrity gossip. Our last election had the lowest turnout since the 1800s because the 6 O’clock News, which is watched by about 1/6th of the population, spent 3 years saying the leader of the opposition was unelectable.

So this has been bothering me for a while… and then the other day, I had another look at this Led Zep interview from 1970

Which I’m particularly fond of, because of the culture-clash – fusty old beeb types talking to prototypical rock-gods (who are scrupulously polite middle class boys). Anyway… they have a round up of “News to come”… and it’s Crime and Sports. It is EXACTLY the same fucking news that they show every night on NZ TV… in black and white, with different heads.

But it’s exactly the same – crime, (bonus-points if it’s against children (MSM News is more obsessed with pedophiles than pedophiles are with children))… the same sly sneaking in of a sports story… and then onto a chat with some “stars”. Sports Crime and Astrology, if you’ll forgive the semantic twist.

This is not news. This is not what was happening in 1970. This was not what was important. When later historians describe the arc of history, none of this shit will be in it.

I think maybe it’s easier to spot because of the Oxbridge accents… but it is as clear as day that that what is happening here, is that TV viewers (gently morphing from citizens to consumers) are being fobbed off with a faux-serious entertainment package, that’s designed to keep them a) placid and b) angry and distrustful of each other, rather than the people running the place… so the people who are running the place can get on with it, without criticism or interference.

And the same thing is happening here in NZ. Every night, we’re given this entertainment package (which is at the moment, sponsored by The ANZ, a foreign bank (proud sponsors of the Olympic team (sports being another vector for fascism)))… it’s not news… and we really, really, need it to be news because our future is being pissed up the wall for the benefit of… fucking “lenders”. “Investors”.

So I think we need to build our own news networks.

Twitter is pretty good – it’s basically replaced CNN… the fact-checking can be a little iffy, but if you want to know about something fast, twitter is the best place to go. It’s lacking in a couple of areas, eg:

1) it’s highly balkanised
2) fact-checking can be iffy (although it eventually does happen – but the “facts” come out before the checking, not vice-versa)
3) the level of analysis is limited with only 140 chrs and as we tend to follow people we agree with… so, what analysis there is, is balkanised. It’s still better than MSM News though.
4) there isn’t high-quality video (yet)
5) it isn’t collated into stories.

Why that matters I’m not sure. It does though… maybe because the best way of understanding what “news is”, is to look at the effect it has. Like Terrance McKenna on UFOs… “the best way of understanding UFOs is to look at the effect they have”.

Anyway… those are the short-comings of twitter as a news outlet… possibly too many for it to be called a news outlet…

… but at least it’s relevant. At least it isn’t outright lies, or sly distortions… “the official version”… the official version that basically allows 90% of the shit going on in the world today, to happen.

Here is a pie-chart of peer-reviewed articles on climate change

And yet NZ has just torn up the Kyoto Agreement. Why? Because the News Media has decided to go along with the narrative created by Oil Company PR… that the jury is still out. That there’s still “disagreement”. They’ve played along with the disinformation… that’s when they bother reporting it at all. Can you imagine Neanderthal News… right at the beginning of an ice-age, and they talk about anything except the ice-age.

Speaking of which, look at the google search for “neanderthal iceage”… two entries from a “newspaper”, The Daily Mail

The linked articles even have the same photos. This is given to us as news.

Terrance McKenna opines that the purpose of UFOs (ie: what they are) is to undermine faith in science. I’d say that goes for the MSM news as well – it’s just that the Daily Mail, being a specious tory rag, is a little more blatant about it. But not as blatant as Fox News.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing from people who’s opinions I respect over the demise of journalism and print media… but to me it’s like Gandhi on Western Civilisation: “It could be a good idea”. Likewise journalism – that could be a good idea as well… but the people we’re relying on to do it, aren’t fucking doing it.

We need to do it ourselves. Not sure how – but I’m a fairly proficient web dev. If anyone can figure it out, I’ll build it.

This is a really round about way of soliciting advice from the BNM list, who are my only friends.

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One of my friends here in NZ, is an artist, and his Dad is a sort of wizard… with a tremendous beard and fierce blue eyes. He is a learned man etc. He’s been in the family for generations.

So… one year, at the annual art-gallery Christmas event, where I bought this…

…I was chattering away to him, and told him that I was going to write a book.

“Yes”, he said… eyes infinitely scanning some invisible horizon, beyond the realms of mortal perception… “neither am I”.

That was 4 years ago.

I haven’t written a book.

What I have written though, is about 900 posts on this blog, about 500 on my other blogs, various blatherings on facebook (which is a pretend, cartoon version of me that I seem to have made up, and who I am gradually turning into) and about 22,000 tweets, each and every one a pearl of wisdom etc.

I could conceivably scrape together enough to “write a book”, but apart from kudos, why would I want to? It would be blogging-round-a-theme, but without any videos embedded, or clickable links etc. A book is a crippled blog. Maybe one day kindles or whatever will get to the point where you can embed videos, but… you can already do that with iPads etc, so why bother? A kindle is just a crippled iPad, which is (in turn) a crippled computer.

So… The Great Work is a work in progress… but the one, really big problem with it is… link rot.

One of the primary traits of the era we’re currently living in is boundary-dissolution. “A Book” is a clump of information with a very clearly delineated boundary. A blog isn’t. A blog has links and embeds and comments and pingbacks etc… a blog has context outside itself. A blog exists outside itself.

And the trouble with that is that the links and embeds go away. If this is The Great Work… we’re fucking it up, because we’re not backing up context. You can back up your images, back up your database… but your links will mean nothing, and your video-embeds won’t work.

So here’s the question:

Is there a thing (ideally a wordpress plugin) that can be used to scan a blog page, and screen-grab linked pages, and download, and store locally, youtube (etc) videos?

Maybe automatically show the backed up versions when the originals die?

Because otherwise most of us are writing stuff that will be, by the end of the decade, broken.

So what to you reckon? Is there a fast, easy way of doing this? A distributed way-back-machine?

So I read the internets in the morning… “Ooh, that’s interesting” I go. I’ll come back to that…

… and so I wind up with a load of open-tabs, that sort of semi-relate, but don’t… and don’t have an overarching theme, or even a point… but…

… anyway, here they are:

1) Bitcoin Nordic.

This is how to acquire bitcoins if you’re in the UK (or EU, or anywhere), but specifically the UK, because the site that I used to use now says “By invitation only. Don’t ask for an invitation”. So a massive fuck-you with bells on to you then.

2) Bitpay

An ecommerce thing for bitcoin. Not sure how (or if) it works… possibly like paypal, possibly not… but the main thing is if the transactions are going through someone else’s central server, then it does kindof defeat the entire point of bitcoins. ALL of the “scandals” involving bitcoin have been down to the failures of gatekeepers. The parts of the system where things stop being distributed, and all funnel through a single point. As above, so below.

3) Realtime Machine Translation

I bet it doesn’t do Scottish.

This is (more accurately) real-time speech recognition… a technology that’s been a loooooong time coming, mainly because you can’t talk and think at the same time… the way you can with typing. I like this thing though because it’s using neural networks… aka CREODES… which I’m really interested in at the moment because Terrence McKenna opined that they might be how “nature” works at a really low level. An alternative to Newtonian Physics etc. It’s a really interesting thing to think about on hallucinogens.

Because… if the entire universe is based upon creodes, rather than billiard-balls… then the entire universe is a giant AI. Not metaphorically, not in some vague airy-fairy metaphysical way… but in actual, knock-on-wood reality. The entire universe is literally an AI. Without the A. Think about it next time you’re out of your mind on drugs. You know I’m right.

4) Namecoin

A bitcoin-style network for the registration of domain names… which means the powers of old and ugly can’t take down your website. I think I’ll sign up for one of these just to see how it works.

Interesting from the perspective, that each node in the system has (holograph-like) a symbolic copy of the entire system. As above, so below.

5) Kim Dot Com’s new thing, Mega

Which is interesting because KDC is now something of a national hero in New Zealand, even though he doesn’t come from here… and one of the first things he did when he got here, was make a large donation to NZ’s most right-wing, and visibly corrupt politician. A great deal of “not recalling” has been going on over Captain Com… which must take quite a bit of doing, because he doesn’t strike me as being the kind of guy who’s easy to forget.

He’s also talking about putting in another trans-pacific cable, and bringing free wifi to all of NZ. This he could actually, conceivably do… it’s a project that someone else was working on, but couldn’t get the funding (or something) so it fell through. I suspect there might be an issue though because across the other side of the pacific… where the cable will touch ground, is the country that hates him most… the home of repressive corporate law. He’d be better off going in the other direction. Up to Korea or somewhere. Over to Hong Kong. I make it sound so easy don’t I.

6) A Mesh Network Project

Cool. These last 3 items come courtesy of Vinay Gupta… who points out that these 3 things put together could conceivably give us an internet entirely free from top-down control. He could be right… so what I’m going to do is get to “hello world” with all 3 of these services… just to… widen the creodic pathway, as it were.

7) An Internet for Machines

A data network in France for transmitting tiny blips of info, so machines can talk to each other with far greater efficiency.

8) Google Fibre Goes Live

That (at the time of writing) is fucking fast man. Here in NZ, I get this:

But the reality of it is, that the absolute maximum download speed is around 300 kbis… and more often than not, it struggles away in double figures… not that much more than the old dial-up systems.

If I didn’t have family in this country, I’d leave.

9) Another Mega Pedometer

With a couple of interesting interface innovations… although the video does have that oozily insincere apple-speak, dripping with marketing trigger-words (“smart, simple, elegant”)… and the whole thing reeks of “we believe in this; we believe in that”… attaching some sort of new-age religious fervour to things that they’re trying to sell. It’s creepy. Blandly creepy.

But don’t mind me, I came from the generation that found marketing to be bogus and manipulative so we rejected it. Apparently younger generations buy into the entire thing, like children main-lining sugar.

10) Foxconn has begun replacing it’s suicidal workforce with machines.

11) Pakistan is developing its own drone capability (and so it begins. The AK47 of Drones is just around the corner)

12) Getting desktop robot arms to work

A crowd-sourced Foxconn waiting in the wings. Maybe.

Looking at this thing, it occured to me that if these robots get any traction, the killer-app, is not the ability to do tedious, repetitive tasks, it’s the ability to do things at a precision that humans can’t… which is what the current triad of digital fabrications do. The triad being:

1) Laser-cutting
2) CNC-milling
3) 3D-printing

Which is cool, but if you want to knock a zero off your costs, you need to be building your own surface-mount electronics from individual components. And that is hard.

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So that’s about 1/2 the tabs… and I’ll stop here, because there is a kind of coalescing theme to the stuff above… which is to do with The Information Wars I guess. The War against Boundary Dissolution.

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Boundary Dissolution is the wellspring of creativity. Creativity itself is a process of crystalisation… to create new boundaries… because perception can only see edges. That’s why fish didn’t discover water.

Just a thought etc.

The other day I learned about Dead Bug electronics

Which is from this thing about a BEAM solar tracker, which illustrates various concepts close to my heart, not the least of which is that the “artifact” is the documentation of the process, and the resulting object(s) is just an instantiation of one particular point in the process. Or in other words, the art is in the recipe book rather than in the pie.

But anyway, dead bug circuits are circuits where all the components’ legs are tangled/soldered together rather than using a circuit-board. And some of these are quite together looking…

… while others are works of art:

Which is a see-thru nixie-clock. Which looks like a skeletal cold-war era HAL… ignoring for the moment that HAL himself was a cold-war era HAL.

Which reminded me (kindof) of the see-through designs Apple suddenly started turning out before they became the enemies of humanity in the war on open-computing.

And it seeps from every pore now doesn’t it? Nary a day goes by without some new piece of evil flowing from the White Cliffs of NeoPaladium… whether it’s lying to its customers, egregious labour practices (including child slave-labour) and buying off EPEAT Execs… and that’s just the recent stuff.

And the EPEAT thing is over the latest macbook being the least fixable computer ever invented.

The most closed, the most secretive… basically just a massive lump of smart-stuff and glue… that you’re not allowed to open or fix yourself.

There is a pattern here.

A while ago I went on about VPBBAs – Vitamin-Part-Black-Box-With-API… which is basically (as Cory points out in the video I linked to above) more often than not, an open-computer, with malware already built-in. The trouble with VPBBAs, is unless they’re open, there’s nothing to say that it’s not going to spy on you. Betray you.

May not mean much right now, because you have nothing to hide right? Nothing to fear.

What the fucking fuckery fuck is that?

Not the drone… we all know what that is – it’s a police drone armed with shotguns, but capable of packing grenade-launchers. We know what that is. What the fuck is that behind it?

Those Dear Reader, are policemen.

Only they’re not are they? Those are soldiers.

I thought that was supposed to be illegal? A standing army on US soil?… But it’s happened by stealth – the police have become militarised. We’ve got the same thing here in NZ… with the Bin-Laden style raid where 75 armed police (in NZ the police don’t carry guns) with helicopters “arresting” a single guy who they’d been spying on (illegally… fuck the law right?) for months, so knew he was completely harmless.

These are what New Zealand military special police look like

Sorry – those aren’t police, those are soldiers… and they’re not just soldiers, they’re baddy soldiers (aka: hapless victims, fighting in the distributed Vietnam war that is “the war on drugs”). They’re deliberately dressing to intimidate. It’s like 3rd-World military police from the 80s without the mirrored aviator shades. This is theatre. This is design – and you simply do not get this sort “license to intimidate” without it being abused. As drugs go, power is akin to, but far far worse than, cocaine.

And like the transgressions of Apple, we get more stories of authoritarian-overreach every single day.

The latest? “Biosecurity officers” in New Zealand raided a scientist’s house this week on suspicion of harboring an illegal tree.“… a bit of back-story… “When the Government pushed through the Search and Surveillance Act giving police powers to upwards of 70 government agencies this year, not even the most extreme of doom mongers envisaged an outcome as Monty Pythonesque as the dawn raids last Thursday on two of Auckland’s most prominent plant experts. – from”

These laws are always “pushed through” always “rushed through”. These were (unless I’m much mistook) pushed/rushed through when the Rugby World Cup was on, and the utterly fucking useless Mainstream Media went on fucking holiday for a month… because “globally <airquotes> “important” </airquotes> sporting events” have become a vector for creeping fascism… whether it’s China or Brazil or London or New Zealand. Every time there’s a “big game”, basic rights are rolled back without discussion. They’re never put back. It’s shock-doctrine without the shock.

So anyway, back to plants… “Officers would not tell him what they were looking for”. “Mr Hobbs has been muzzled by the Auckland Council from commenting”. “the biosecurity police, for reasons they refuse to declare, have raided the nursery”

1) Secrecy As Default is THE hallmark of an institution that has lost its legitimacy…

… and it’s a global disease… everywhere you look from Obama’s persecution of whistle-blowers, to the UK Cabinet Office attempting to re-open the Star Chamber) to NZ’s PM “failing to recall” pretty much anything that ever happened to him, to dawn-raids on botanists.

2) Police dressed up as (and behaving like) stormtroopers is THE hallmark of governments that are losing their legitimacy…

… it is not the job of the police to intimidate the societies they’re there to protect. They’re not there to protect corporate power, or corporate copy-monopolies, or trade-barriers… they’re there to protect people. Period.

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All of which started out as observations on an electronic design… a thread of which I lost long ago.

It was supposed to be about designing for evil… and transparency… and so on…

… so I’ll just kindof trail off I guess…