2003-04-24 Rolling ETCon notes From IRC, this book recommended [13:30] Eric Bonabeau's book 'self-organization in biological systems' kicks ankos to the curb (ankos == Wolfram's A New Kind of Science) More Alan Kay notes http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/001441.html Damn, there was a good conversation at lunchtime about VR and 3d environments. I need to remember that... It was something about 3d environments being immersive, about storing information in a different way: all the virtual media we're used to now are more like books. Not immersive, not completely. Oh, and there's no sense of focus. But what if we could have a virtual reality radio instead? What would that look like? Something else... Atlantis, Mayans, Egypt, etc. What if the constant cycle of civilisations is just a giant army ant mill, over a complex topology, and what *we* view as progress/science is actually the constant accumulation of dead bodies? > SEMIOTCRACY < god i hate stupid new words, but i'm going to carry on using this until someone punches me. ps, it's a good thing, this is the kind of world we're trying to make. but it has to be cross dimensional. Talking about mobile phones with Chris anti-mega: Making money out of 3G is going to be difficult. The percentage they want to make is hard to get, and might cannabilise the other services -- but if they opened the ecosystem at least they'd get *some* money, and they'd save on R&D. So things to do to make the ecosystem better. Don't charge for bandwidth, that doesn't necessarily map to utility. Charge for computation! Set up enormously powerful central computational facilities. Let people write apps like facial recognition, really difficult things. And charge people per MIP. That's something that people can't get access to in any other way, and it's something you'd . *want* on a phone, because the data is high bandwidth: it's voice and images . *not want* on a normal computer, because the data is narrow: it's Word docs and stuff you've inputed (and the input on a computer - unlike a mobile - is narrowband: keyboards, mouses). Okay, so another thing the mobile company could use. When a user browses to a website, send in the HTTP headers a key to request user information. When the website backend pings the phone to request user information, the user is asked "do you trust these people?". And that user information is *location*. Open the ecosystem! Oh, and Chris said something really cool when we were complaining about laptops taking up too much power: "You're just playing on a big resistor here!" -- which is such a great way of looking at it. Battery, electricity through resistor. And forcing it through that enormously complicated turbine makes pictures on screens, etc. Linkdump: http://www.brainoff.com/geoblog/ -- the world as a blog, via anildash [wow] http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/mt/archives/000561.html -- Hydra as a telepresence tool http://geourl.org/mt.html -- adding GeoURL support to MovableType http://www.whitelabel.org/archives/000429.html -- Stef on visualising UpMyStreet Conversations http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=402 -- how does the web change with time: '"Large documents are more likely to change by a large portion than small documents. This starts to kick in for documents that are about 8 KB. They change with the probability of over 60 percent week over week. That's remarkable. We don't know why that happens yet."' http://www.worldtrans.org/pos/infinitegames.html -- Finite and Infinite Games, via kottke, as mentioned in Stewart Butterfield's talk http://space.frot.org/rdf/tubemap.svg -- jo walsh's london tube map as SVG, as taken from the coordinates in mudlondon: http://space.frot.org/mudlondon.html (I can only get it working on the Mac with Safari and this plugin: http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/ which crashes Camino for me.)