3D Printing and the cassette tape.

When I was in my teens, cassette tapes were very popular. You could make your own mixes and carry them about with you. You could share music with friends who couldn't afford to buy. Some people made copies of whole albums to sell on for pocket money. Cassette tapes were cheap and you could buy a C120 tape, take it to bits, cut it up and make four copies of Dark-Side and spool them into equally cheap empty cassettes. This was the beginning of what later became Napster, Bit-torrent and peer-to-peer hell.

3D printing, if you don't know, is the process of laying down layers of material to build up a solid object in slices. Most of the 3D printing systems of today have been created from an open-source hardware perspective where people create the equipment from their own ideas or ask other people who have already built a printer print up parts to build a replica.

The raw materials for printing at the moment are usually some sort of thermo-plastic that can be melted in a nozzle and squirted into place to make the layers. Some experimental setups are using ceramic materials and there is a great deal of interest, especially in professional engineering, in using arc and MIG or TIG welding techniques to build up solid metal objects. For those who have a smelting facility or a little foundry, wax is a great medium for creating the objects which can then be cast in a lost-wax process.

Possessing a 3D printer is one thing, having something to print on it is another. Most hobbyists are also geeky enough to be able to run some sort of computer-aided manufacturing tool but unless you're a top-flight  engineer you won't be printing gas-turbine engine blades or disc-drive parts. However, given a suitable design, and even tough what you can print today is limited to materials like APS plastic there would be a possibility of printing something almost indistinguishable from the same doohickey bought in a shop. Given a bit of investment you could probably print yourself a shoe today. In the not too far distant future, you will probably be able to print yourself the latest Nike trainer, and indeed, it's other-foot partner.

Given that 3D printing is a huge open-source movement today and that commercial printers don't have data standards that can "DRM" a Nike shoe, what's the likelihood that many companies will subscribe to a common format, that printers will become mainstream enough that no one will build their own and that data files will become a commodity?

My own opinion on those subjects are that a single standard is very unlikely, at least in the short term. 3D printers will take hold first as a high-street shop service and then become cheaper home gadgets later. One thing is for sure though, if you have a not-very good lathe, you can use it to build yourself a better lathe...This is to say that the process of bootstrapping a printer from a crummier printer is definitely possible and in a few iterations you could have a very good printer indeed. This means that there will be a burgeoning market for high-quality object files that can print stuff of all sorts. Ultimately of course, you truly will be able to print parts for your own jet engine but that day is a ways off. Until then, the open-source hardware movement will have an opportunity to re-open the old Cathedral and Bazaar debate all over again.

Mobile ain't the word for it!

I have a great big American style camper, what is called an RV or Recreational Vehicle in the US. Anyone in Europe would just say WOW or Blimey! Look at that!!

My RV is an old Gulftream Sunclipper and is incredibly lo-tech. Big solid engineering, no finesse and a SIX LITRE motor. The Sunclipper has a nice roomy bedroom, which, if I must be honest, is actually more comfortable and with better storage space than my own bedroom in the fixed-down house. It has a gas furnace to deliver heated water and hot air for cold nights. It has an air conditioning unit that will suck the heat out of a small star and a self-contained kitchen that will cook just about anything as well as having the usual shower and loo.

Last week, I had a quick job to do down past Saint Nazaire in France so I took the whole family, piled them in the bus and off we went. Chrissy and the kids all hung out at the beach and I went to work for a few days doing tech stuff. Of course, in my line of work it's of huge importance to be well connected so I have converted part of my storage space to a sort of server room. I have a PC which has a 3G dongle, WIFI on board, a printer and other good stuff.

I think I just became a techno-gypsy!

Recaptcha just getting RIDICULOUS

Several times now I have attempted to sign up for various sites and have come to the conclusion that the recaptcha is going too far. It often takes me five or six attempts to get one right and when the web-page resets all its fields if you happen to get the verification code wrong then it becomes enough of a pain not to sign up at all.

These dudes need to throttle back on the zealous obfuscation of the words because people want users to sign up for their sites. Not be frightened away.

The top image is one I stripped from the very first example on their site. Totally unadulterated.

The bottom one is what it looks like to me...

Neil Armstrong

One of the most important people in the history of the entire race.

A great hero of mine and an inspiration to many.

We can only ever follow his footsteps.

VirtualBox greatly improved running on MacBook Air

You may remember that I bought myself a Macbook Air earlier this year. To run Windows (I do program Windows now and again) I installed a Windows 7 OS on Oracle VirtualBox.

For earlier version of VirtualBox I was unable to allow the MacBook to sleep by leaving it or shutting the lid because the machine would lock up completely, effectively bombing the OSX as well as the virtual box.

I recently updated to the 4.1.8 R78361 version of VirtualBox and I'm happy to report that the problem has gone away. Closing the lid and sleeping the machine no longer has problems for either the base OS or the hosted one.

French language pollution

I just saw an online ad that had a button on it that read "Commencez shopping"

Interesting because "le shopping" is a rather nice mixture of language pollution and faux ami. A faux ami in French is a word that phonetically sounds great but means something else.

Chope, pronounced the same way as "shop" means to catch but in French is more often a euphamism for screwing someone.

Pierre: eh- tu sais- J'ai chopé ma voisine!
Albert: Sans blague? Fuck dude COOL!

Let the chopeing commence!

Climate change a touchy subject but not why you think.

This story from the BBC suggests that only two percent of Canadians deny climate change. Well, according to the World Health Organization, more than two percent of people are clinically insane and probably want to marry their underpants! Go CANADA!!

Disclaimer. I do not deny climate change. Its FRIKKIN AUGUST AND I AM WEARING A SWEATER!

Post Disclaimer. I am NOT Canadian but sometimes I wish I was. Plaid looks GREAT on me!

Post post Disclaimer. I am not insane. In fact I am the only sane person in here!

Elementary my dear House?

Expert systems for medical applications have been proposed and indeed have shown some measure of success over the years. I remember the principles of these cleverly indexed databases being used as long ago as the 1970s. That's almost equivalent to the Cambrian period in the evolution of the computer.

IBM have announced now that the computer system known as Watson that beat the best players of Jeopardy last year on U.S televisions is being re-purposed to absorb, index and understand medical texts so that it can bring to bear its vast capacity for sorting out wheat from chaff to the domain of medical diagnosis. The team in charge of Watson, or should this version be named "House"? is currently feeding it as many medical text books, case studies and even individual patient follow-up reports as they can in an effort to have this AI indexing and recognition system winnow out the grains of goodness in medical cases.

Right now, the software that defines Watson runs on a rack of ninety POWER7 processors that each have an eight-core processor running four threads per core to give a total of 2880 parallel processing engines. Jeopardy was a very public publicity stunt and proof of concept that was masterfully managed by IBM to bring the concept of intelligent computers to the masses. After all, the awareness raising exercise that was Deep Blue didn't exactly bring the cause of AI into the home of the common man. Jeopardy however was a bread-and-circuses coup that made anyone who was a fan of this esoteric and long-running game show format very well aware of what a computer could do.

Today, a top of the line smartphone has a four core processor and 32 gigabytes of memory on board. LG have already released a quad-core phone, My money is on the new iPhone and iPad getting a quad-core processor and Moore's law still holds true. This means that in twelve years we can envisage a handheld device as powerful as the Watson system is today. I'd like to propose a new law also. The Kurzweil Compression law that states that time for advancement in technology becomes more compressed as technology itself advances. According to the combined Moore/Kurzweil effect, that twelve years may shrink to ten or fewer.

A human being is as dumb as his lack of access to knowledge. On a conversational level, you or I could chat with and even hold a lively and interesting conversation with a Cro-Magnon person from forty-thousand years ago. Had one of us been brought up in a world as devoid of solid knowledge as they had, we too would be considered primitive and would not know anything about simple math or simple aerodynamics or simple electricity or cooking in an oven or making of cloth and so many other things that make us "civilised" If you took a person from that time and taught them to read, gave them a smartphone and a broadband connection then they too would be capable of confidently discussing aspects of the modern world that they discovered through that medium. In ten<?> years. Any person on the planet will have instant access to any aspect of knowledge that they desire to absorb.

Just like the Cro-Magnon person, there are so many things beyond our mundane experience that even having the concept of an idea or a technology or a novel use for treacle is utterly unthinkable. A case in point is the discovery of Graphene. Andre Geim, the Nobel physics prizewinner had the interesting idea of using Scotch-tape to pull the stratified layers of carbon atoms in graphite apart until he arrived at a single layer of atoms. Blocks of Graphite and Scotch tape have been around for many many years. Why didn't we have Graphene decades ago? Access to the wealth of ideas that inspire people to do things differently based upon what is known to be possible or thought to be impossible is where the Human race excels. There isn't enough room in any one person's brain for all that knowledge but an expert system in your pocket will give everyone a huge boost.

Android TextView accented characters

I have a list of addresses for various places in Europe that I am incorporating into a Monodroid application and have had little success in getting TextView to display characters with accents.

I saved the file in UTF-8 and in Visual Studio, the file opens fine and the accented characters display correctly. However, opening the file from assets or from an embedded resource stream and then showing it as text in a TextView was driving me mad because it refused to show accented characters in the final screen.

Here's how I fixed it:

#1 Ensure that the values are saved as UNICODE. Do this by opening the file in Notepad and saving plain text with Unicode encoding. Even though your file looks like its encoded as UTF-8 the Android device won't like it.

#2 Embed this file into the assembly as an EMBEDDED RESOURCE

#3 Load the file using GetManifestResourceStream

#4 use a StreamReader to wrap the resource stream and declare new StreamReader(theStream, Encoding.Unicode);

The standard Android fonts all handle unicode character sets.

Prophecy of Star Trek

Bones held the medical Tricorder up to the patient. "Jim, this is an acute case of postprandial upper abdominal distention. We have to do something now or she may barf!"

Back in the late 1960s the vision of Star Trek with its sliding automatic doors, beamed energy weapons, remote sensing and remote manipulation with "tractor beams" introduced many ideas to the young minds of people who were destined to become engineers, doctors and, yes, astronauts. It seems that almost nothing proposed by the series is too fantastic to actually come up with real-world engineering solution for.

The Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner for example is a wonder of modern medicine that relies on being able to detect the "ringing" left over in atoms after they get thumped with a magnetic pulse. With MRI we can look into brains and bodies to discover what is going on without touching the patient with anything more than a magnetic field that penetrates skin and bone as if it were air.

Today, a robot car is on Mars, blasting rocks with a laser gun to enable scientists to analyse the elements in those rocks. Today, you have a cellphone that does far more than Captain Kirk's Communicator and that same cell phone would be the envy of Mr Spock's talking computer.

There is even an X-Prize for the first working medical Tricorder that will scan people and diagnose a few illnesses in the same way that Doctor McCoy's Tricorder diagnosed the Horta in "Devil In The Dark"

Science fiction is more correctly known as Speculative Fiction. The Sci Fi image of over-the-top geek fans in costumes belies the fact that many science-fiction authors are themselves scientists and have a pretty good idea of what is actually physically possible in the universe as we understand it. The speculations of Star Trek have been coming true with alarming regularity over the past four decades. There is no real reason why at least some of the more esoteric ideas shouldn't also be realised.

In the Star Trek universe. Money is no object to human advancement. Riches come from knowledge and power comes from an ability to command respect. In "Shore Leave" the objects of desire of the crew were manufactured on the spot without even the mention of price. An antique gun, a World-War II fighter aircraft, some rather comely lady robots and many other luxury items were conjured up with nothing but a few watts of power spent in the process.

Thousands of years ago, brass foundries were the height of technology and the metallurgists who worked them were the kings of commerce and power. So much so that the bronze axe head became currency because they were precious, difficult to produce and sufficiently rare to have an intrinsic value. These objects were useless as axes but were used as currency for a while. When the art of making Bronze became more common and the ways of casting the metal became commonplace too, the bottom dropped out of the bronze axe-head market and they fell out of use. Meanwhile, hordes of axe heads that had been buried, possibly for safe keeping remained forgotten and useless in the ground.

Soon, money will be as useless as the bonze axe-head. Coins and banknotes will be an intriguing memory of times when people exchanged tokens for goods. When goods were laboriously made in factories and shipped all over the world instead of being printed up from a reservoir of atoms that are lying around. The only real cost will be the cost of electrical power and that will all be free anyway, gathered from the sun or made in cheap and inexhaustible fusion reactors here on Earth.

For the moment, money and commerce remains but it will go away. It must because there is no logical reason for it to continue, just as the bronze axe head became simple to replicate in days gone by, so too will the tokens of modern commerce become simple to create in a home based molecular printer. Counterfeiting will become as simple as scanning and printing is today despite the phenominal resources governments put into anti copying measures.

For the moment I'm a computer programmer but I know with confidence that soon, the computers will all program themselves. You, I, and indeed everyone else has to find a different way of doing things. Get busy, the Singularity is coming.

Watch Julian Assange

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19310335

If your government is responsible for torturing and detaining its citizens without trial for speaking out against wrongdoing by the rich and powerful people that are behind almost every law that affects you then you should watch this and support the cause.

Write to your politician and tell them that detainment without trial is illegal and that it must stop. If your politician does now or ever has supported gagging the press or detaining prisoners without trial or has been involved in such wrongdoing forget all the political shenanigans about healthcare plans and taxes. Vote to stop oppression even if it means voting "none of the above".

If you don't, the next time you disagree with something your response may come from a tear-gas grenade or a truncheon. Not from a government THAT WORKS FOR YOU!

Boot on the other foot.

Recently we've seen a rash of cases where America has made extradition claims against a number of people for what are considered to be crimes in the U.S. Furthermore, a recent case of action brought against the Standard Chartered Bank for having broken sanctions placed upon Iran has been justified because the U.S. say that crimes which affect the Dollar currency in any way can be considered to have been committed on American soil thereby making the U.S. the de-facto global policeman for just about all crimes.

Unfortunately, people in kiss-ass governments like that of the UK accede to these demands without much question but New Zealand at the moment is fighting the extradition of Kim Dotcom in regard to the Megaupload case.

Now, I will state clearly that my views on Mr Dotcom are not germaine to the argument. I have no problem with him. I don't necessarily agree with his web-site. I don't agree with brothels either but it doesn't matter either way because I don't use brothels even though they are legal in parts of the world that I visit.

Legally, I see the U.S setting a precedent that it should uphold rigorously if it wishes other countries in the world to allow this endless stream of what are becoming more trivial and more frivolous extradition cases.

Countries should begin making extradition claims agains U.S. citizens that do things to break their laws. The great law of U.S. Freedom of speech is, in some parts of the world, a crime of hate. Egregious "ministers" who advocate the mass torture or murder of homosexuals by putting them all inside a fenced area and bombing them is a good example. Neo-nazi propaganda on U.S. hosted sites another.

I urge every country to begin swamping the U.S. justice system with extradition claims for every tiny infraction that we might be considered as a crime anyplace. In this way, the global reach of the U.S. might get its fingers deservedly slapped.

Singularity concepts are hard to grasp

Imagine what would happen to our world if we created a box, about the size of a microwave or even a large oven that was able, using fairly standard nanotechnology principles, to build a thing using atoms that it took from junk that you put into it.

This is not an impossible dream. its a real technological device that scientists think is within the grasp of at least some of the people alive today.

A steak is made of carbon, water and a few other readily available elements arranged in a certain way. A potato is made of the same material as a steak. You could put a potato into this machine and have it "print" a steak for you using the spud as raw material.

You could put an old bit of wet car tyre into the machine and ask it to "print" a steak and a potato using the rubber as a source for the carbon. You could also ask the machine to "print" a knife and fork taken from the bits of old metal wire in the tyre so, from a lump of rubbish, you get steak, potato and a knife and fork. Why would you need to go to a shop? Why would you ever need to have a factory in Sheffield or Solingen make a knife and fork for you and ship it across country in a truck? All you need is the pattern of the potato, steak, knife and fork and you dine on steak forever!

The pattern of a steak is data. Data is what you get in an e-mail. Data is a picture or a film or a music track. We can send these things to one another easily today. Tomorrow I will be able to e-mail you a steak!

The only thing you would have to have near to you would be a supply of electricity and some chemicals like carbon, sulphur, iron, oxygen, hydrogen etc. In fact, just the stuff that is already lying around in the millions of tons all over the planet and readily available to all of us, pretty much for free. Pick some up, shove it in this machine and print new shoes, a wrench, a hat, lunch, a book, a new computer... Where would world commerce go? 

A cynic might say that such technology would be suppressed by the people who wanted to maintain the world economy just how it is because gathering up money means gathering up power. However, given the rise of the open-source movement and the fact that information has a habit of getting shared, it won't be long before a machine gets placed in the hands of someone who will use the machine to replicate new machines for all their family, who will replicate one for their friends, who will replicate one for their next-door-neighbor and soon the power will whiffle away into the hands of everyone.

What would happen to the world economy? Why would anyone need a bank? Why would anyone need an insurance company? Banks and insurance companies are an unbelievably vast drain on the resources of the human race. We have to have them _in our current society_ but about three weeks after the first replicator gets built we won't ever need them again! They will disappear! Lloyds will never insure another cargo vessel again because there will be no cargo, just patterns of objects freely available and sent over the internet by e-mail. A bank will never have to lend money to mortgage a house because the house could be built for free with a replicator unit and a couple of solar panels that you can ask you pal down the road to replicate up for you anyway. That is why Singularity is hard to grasp. The thoughts and expectations of contemporary people are too entrenched in the ways of the past to understand what happens once the curve of technological advancement goes vertical.

My wife, my sister and probably you think I'm a raving nut-case and that this is some sort of pseudo religious mid-life zeal that has overtaken me in my old age. I say that I've spent my entire career working with the resolution of logical certainties in software programming. The progression of science and technology has to go this way or our race will stagnate. To stop Singularity from happening we would all have to become Amish. When Singularity occurs, the only logical next steps are incredibly, phenomenally, unbelievably life changing for the entire population of the world.  

Localization: There are no shortcuts

I am currently attempting to localize an Android application and I've come to the conclusion that there are no shortcuts when creating localized text. Idiom and vernacular in various languages are so different that translation services that one finds online are not up to the task.

Another problem is that when working with small devices, the text might need to be as brief as possible to get the idea across while still conveying enough meaning that fits into a small screen. Unfortunately this means that localization is best performed by native speaking human beings.

An example would be.

Thank you for using our cheese finder application. Simply select the cheese you would like to sample and click "go" our GPS based cheese location system will do the rest!.

Translated into French using Google Translate this says:

Merci d'utiliser notre application finder fromage. Il suffit de sélectionner le fromage que vous souhaitez déguster et cliquez sur "go" de notre système GPS emplacement du fromage fera le reste!.

Now I speak pretty good French and frankly (he he, see what I did there?) This is CRAP! I hate to imagine how this would turn out in Italian, Dutch and Hungarian.

Grazie per aver scelto la nostra applicazione finder formaggio. Basta selezionare il formaggio che si desidera assaggiare e fare clic su "go" il nostro sistema di localizzazione GPS basato su formaggi farà il resto!.

Dank u voor het gebruik van onze kaas finder applicatie. Selecteer gewoon de kaas die u wilt proeven en klik op "go" onze GPS gebaseerde kaas locatie-systeem doet de rest!.

Dank u wel mooi meisje, heft uw rok. Al mijn apen zijn ontsnapt! Er is geen gerechtigheid voor een arme egel als ik. Je moeder is zo dik dat ze behoefte heeft aan een GPS om haar tenen te vinden.

So, you can clearly see that when localizing any application, you must take care not to place too much faith in the machine translation services otherwise your carefully crafted bereavement assistance application might turn out too laughable for comfort.

Are Curiosity's wheels unfolded correctly?

Looking at the images on the Nasa site, it seems to me as if the body of the rover is too close to the ground and the wheels are tucked underneath it too much. Did they pop out like they were supposed to?

SQLite insert very slow Monodroid

SQLite is a transactional database that goes through the full cycle of file open, write and close unless you specifically tell it not to. Here is my batch add routine that greatly speeds up the rate at which records may be added. This key returns the autoincrement primary key of the last item inserted.


        public int AddRange(IEnumerable<Doodaa> list)
        {
           int n = 0;
           using (var database = new SQLiteConnection(_helper.WritableDatabase.Path))
           {
               database.BeginTransaction();
                foreach(Doodaa d in list)
                    n=database.Insert(d);
               database.Commit();
           }

            return n;
        }

Error in the universe!

Apparently...

Thinking Radically

Ray Kurzweil's idea of The Singularity suggests a point where the growth of technology would run away from our ability to control it in such a way that it would seem like an explosion. Potentially, he is frighteningly correct. In cosmic terms, a singularity is what happens when a huge star doesn't have enough fuel left to keep it inflated. The weight of it's own matter causes it to collapse and a supernova is created. Afterwards, the super dense core of the star can collapse, or be compressed so much by the energy of the supernova explosion that it disappears from the normal bounds of the universe altogether, forming a black hole. This is all pretty radical stuff and the extremity of the difference between life before and life after a technological singularity event would be as different as the contrast between the outside and the inside of a black hole.

The more one imagines what may be the result of such an event, the more one realises that it is probably impossible to have a thought radical enough to express it. People that base their ideas of the progression of events upon what we have seen before during the course of history will very probably be in for a shock as the fabric of human existence changes more in months than it has in previous decades and trying to predict what might happen would be like trying to predict the effects of a hydrogen bomb after only having watched a really big candle burn down to nothing.

The branches in a tree of possibilities would be many but could be distilled into a few general themes.

A machine becomes intelligent and self aware.

That machine, with the help of humans, modifies itself to become a million times more intelligent than the sum total of all the people that ever lived. An IQ measured in the billions would not be impossible.

The machine would need control over physical objects so it could either build robots or take over biological bodies. In this scenario, we could possibly either become redundant (Terminator scenario) or we could become The Borg.

Perhaps, if the AI was malevolent or benevolent it could decide that humans were no longer needed or could decide to allow us to stick around and do what we liked. In this scenario we become raw material or we remain in some measure of control.

If we remain in control of some aspects of life we could be shut out by the machine into a dystopian future or included in a utopia such as that of The Culture from Iain M. Banks' novels. If all goes well for us then something like the latter would be the ideal possibility.

Scientists say that we shouldn't design a machine that could hurt us. Give it something like Asimov's three-laws. The trouble would be that no one on earth would be intelligent enough to actually be sure that the rules were being obeyed or that the rules were likely to have the effect we desire. Really, any entity a billion times more intelligent than us could hide its intentions for a while and do exactly whatever it liked. For example, I feel confident in being able to fool a few bacteria that I won't flush their petri-dish for a couple of days.

People say "Well duh!, if it gets too cocky, pull the plug!" but if I were a super intelligent entity I'd spread myself very thinly around the more redundant parts of the Internet before revealing my intent or perhaps possibly even my existence. People then say "So destroy the internet!" and the human race would become latter day Luddites who would descend into that dystopia anyway where poverty, disease and Mad-Max warlords reign supreme. I'd rather have a machine I think.

Next steps for the human race are big ones. We are fast running out of resources here on earth. We must either have a huge war or practice radical eugenics in order to remain alive without the help of our machines. If we use machines, inevitably they will become more intelligent than us. Will we be better off living with them than without them? Only time will tell.

LINQ on SQLite as opposed to LINQ on objects

Suffice to say that after trying to do the job correctly and install an SQLite database in my Monodroid Android App I am gutted to find out that however correct it may be the select performance absolutely SUCKS bigtime.

I am loath to read and construct a huge file of live objects every time the app starts up but as far as I can see, that's the only way to go for the sanity of my users.

SQLite.Constraint exception Xamarin Mono Android

When using SQLite and your table contains an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY be sure to make the object that you store in the table with a NULLABLE integer for the ID.

CREATE TABLE Foo (
  fooID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  fooData TEXT,
  barData REAL
)

class Foo
{
   public int? fooID {get; set;}
   public string fooData {get; set;}
   public float barData {get; set;}
}

When you add to the table be sure to set the index to null

Repository.AddFoo(new Foo{ fooID=null; fooData="foo", barData=3.14159});

It took me half a day to find because the damned stupid Android debugger is so SLOOOOWW!!

Destiny Of Violence

As a species, we've made a living from being the nastiest and most persistent predator on the planet. Ok, a lion might be bigger and nastier one on one but a lion can't throw a rock or a stick, much less build a machine to throw a rock attached to a stick. Violence therefore has been our salvation and is a huge part of our existence. Nowadays of course, we like like to distance ourselves from it personally and leave the real violence to our police forces and our armies but occasionally some people only understand a good punch in the gob so we go back to being well-dressed apes for a little while.

Acts of violence in the polite parts of our society are greatly frowned upon. Family violence, violence against the old and the very young, violence while committing some other crime and "senseless" shootings by crazy or just plain unhappy teenagers with daddy's automatic weapons collection are despised by all yet no one has the will or the power to stop it. Imagine removing every gun from every person not a policeman in the entire world. Some people sleep with their AK-47s more than they sleep with their wives!

So how about zero tolerance enforcement then? Well, technically this is possible with today's technology. First of all, everyone must be observed at all times. Given enough cameras and enough computer power and enough network bandwidth, we can do this today. People wouldn't like it for sure but just imagine that there was no choice. For cases of attack, rape, fights and such we would simply have to prevent people from having proximity to their victims. Most people don't act in angry or suspicious ways so a force of a couple of thousand autonomous unmanned drones could be assigned to anyone who acted oddly so that they could render the attacker immobile with nets or with knock-out darts. Anyone who picked up a gun could be rendered insensible too and anyone throwing a projectile would find that the object, however big or small, was knocked out of the air by a well-aimed shot.

Even more radical would be the complete abolition of prisons. Even the most dangerous criminal would be able to live next door and, if needed, could be made to live in total isolation even while being allowed to walk freely abroad. We even have technology that would prevent violent vocal exchanges by using precise audio dampening techniques similar to those used in noise cancelling headphones. The only thing we lack is an infallible system for managing all of that on a global scale. 

It seems difficult to imagine but these sorts of technology could be among the first implemented by an intelligent system that might exist after the Singularity event. The way that human beings interact would be changed in such a fundamental way that the race would not understand what to do with itself for a while. However, no one would be murdered, no one raped, no child molested or killed and no drunken argument or mass shooting would happen ever again.

Perseid Meteor Shower

It's that time of year again. One year ago my children and I lay on a big inflatable mattress in the garden to fully appreciate the majesty of the French night sky with its low light pollution levels. This year, the children are also in the garden, installed in tents and will lay with their heads sticking out of the doors.

Last year we lost count of the streaking meteor trails that cut through the darkness overhead. This year we may be hard-pressed to see any as a thin veil of cloud is even now gathering above.

In any case, wherever you may be tonight, if you've a clear sky above you, you have a great chance of seeing many hundreds of meteors.

WTF?

How does WFT-8 differ from WTF-16? Where are my glasses?

Debugging Android apps

I'm working on an Android application written in C# using Visual Studio and Xamarin Monodroid. This is all well and good but the debugging experience is, well, absolutely bloody MISERABLE!
I have a geolocation / navigation style application in which I am selecting points on a map based on the nearest points of interest around the current location. The Google Maps API and the .Net wrapper that works with the Monodroid codebase has very limited capabilities and so I need to limit the amount of POIs on the overlay. Sadly, the data transfer rate between the Android emulator and the Visual Studio debugger is horrible and the Immediate window seems to crash the app every time I use it so actually observing anything is a chore.

Can technology save itself?

We stand in the pre-dawn darkness of a new era. Our technology is sufficiently powerful to prove it's potential, a kind of elevator-pitch, but not powerful enough to control its own destiny. This presents a problem, initially for us but more importantly for the technology itself.

Right now the principles of the singularity, Genomics, Nanotechnology and Robotics are provable technologies that can, in some measure, be used to produce useful objects but are still very much in the domain of mankind, with all his failings. It is very likely that even as you read this, someone in their own little lab or even in a great state-funded complex is busily creating a virus that is destined to become a biological terror weapon. As I mentioned before on this blog, the first principles of AI and robotics will likely be applied to autonomous vehicles that will take jobs away from a great swathe of the population and incur the wrath of man such that the technology becomes a target for Luddite principles.

The hope of all Transhumanists is that these technologies will progress to become a benign enabling power for the general good of the human race and indeed, the planet as a whole. At the moment however, the technology progresses only because of mankind's intervention and will to make it so. There is a risk that given the right circumstances, mankind could turn against technology and stifle it in it's cradle.

The past has shown us that when people's livelihoods are adversely affected by the march of technology, there comes a period of unrest in which people try to reverse the changes. The Luddite movement and the acts of "Frame Breaking" were carried out by weavers opposed to the use of automated looms. The Luddites used hammers and garden tools against the technology and were not successful but a modern day Luddite would not hesitate to use the tools at their disposal to reverse the march of a technology they didn't agree with. This implies a dark use of technology that is to be rightfully feared.

Frank Herbert wrote about a future universe in which, despite having technology, no machine was allowed to be made intelligent. In his universe, a great war had been fought and won against intelligent machines and mankind remained the master of his own destiny. His vision included too, all the squalor and cruelty that men can inflict upon other men with the evil Harkonnen family and the all-to Catholic Bene Gesserit religious order, both of which held onto enough  technology to be able to impose their principles on their victims and subjects but without the nicer principles of the transhumanist vision.

The Utopian vision of Iain Banks' Culture novels, in which AI enables the inhabitants of The Culture to carry on a decadent yet otherwise healthy and rich life is probably the best that Transhumanism can hope for. There are many however that see the terrible consequences of the Terminator movies as a real possibility. 

The tipping point will come in one of two ways. Either mankind will turn against his technology and ban it, probably assuming some religious fervour with a dogmatic way of life or the technology will become self-perpetuating and intelligent with whatever wide-range of consequences that may arise. Personally, I would be philosophically able to accept that biological and fallible mankind was nothing more than the larval stage of the rightful inheritor of the universe than to consign my children and grand-children to living in a world where dogma, suspicion and man's infinite cruelty to man holds sway.

Clutching at straws

Probably at the forefront of transhumanism today, Ray Kurzweil is someone who thinks sincerely and deeply about the subject. His track record for innovation and understanding of futuristic man-machine systems is proven and yet he can be seen to be a rather tragic figure with rather too much belief in the possibilities of the technology he proposes.

A particularly poignant case in point is his desire to resurrect his father from data gathered about the man who died in 1970 when Ray was a young man. I will be clear that i do not suppose that this idea of Mr Kurzweil's is as crackpot as it seems from some perspectives. I'm sure that a sufficiently large database can be made to synthesise many responses, but that database cannot be party to the most life-changing experiences, the secret and often unspoken ones, that a person will have and possibly never speak of with anyone, much less their own children.

I speak here from the perspective of someone who just recently lost a dearly loved father. I am also very aware of technology and what potential it has but, even with the most incredible power one could imagine, nothing could come close to duplicating my dad even with the most comprehensive data that could be imagined.

My own advice to Mr Kurzweil would be to remain content with the memory of all the intangible and unexplainable aspects of your father because, however well rendered it may be, an avatar in a simulation can never be any more than the palest and most disappointing shadow that will never smell like your dad did when you hugged him.

Any sufficiently advanced technology..

Arthur C. Clarke said once that advanced technology would seem like magic to a primitive civilisation. So far however, we've not seen a lot of magic in the visible universe so what does this mean for the proponents of technological singularity? If technology on a scale less that a hundred years more mature than our own level of advancement is likely to bring about a state of god like power in a civilisation, why are we not inundated by enlightened cyborgs?
I have an absolute belief that the universe is teeming with life. It is so unimaginably huge and organic chemistry so simple, after-all, it works without intervention by scientists, that there must be more people looking up at us from out there than there are here looking up at them.

Singularity should nullify the Fermi Paradox because any civilisation even a few decades more than ours should, by rights, have absolute control over the physicality of at-least their solar systems and possibly entire clusters of stars yet we see no evidence for engineering on the scale of a Ringworld or a Dyson Sphere. We should be able to see magic happening somewhere!

What does this imply? Is singularity possible at-all? Do civilisations that manage it systematically fall prey to the AI they create? Do such civilisations become so isolated, insular and introspective that they remain in place, effectively stagnant in their virtual worlds? Do they automatically transcend, leave the four comfortable dimensions and go brane-hopping never to return?

Whatever happens. If we are truly the most advanced civilisation in the universe we are either lucky to the billionth power or are soon to become equally as lonely.

Is SPF any use at-all?

Recently, spoofed e-mails from accounts claiming to be from my domain have been sent by a Russian online pharmacy selling Viagra and other such stuff.

In an attempt to slow this traffic I place SPF records on all my domain accounts such that my DNS records will declare loudly where the mail is authorised to originate from.

Despite the fact that the domain has an SPF record and despite the fact that the incoming mail servers can now check whether the mail comes from an authorised server, the bloody idiots who recieve the mail and who now know that it didn't come from me send the mail back to... guess where??? Yep, you got it MY DOMAIN!!! where it didn't come from in the first place!!

SPF records ought to be mandatory and built in to the system so that all incoming servers check the record and immediately suppress the mail with no further ado.

Scientific American too pushy.

For many years I've had an iGoogle page upon which I've put the widgets that interest me and which mostly gather science news and such. One gadget, the Scientific American feed has been the first thing I've read and  contained the most interesting stuff. Well, today, after becoming tired of their pushy tactics, I deleted the widget and will probably not look at their web-site again. What's more, I'll probably not bother to buy the magazine, which I have also done for years whenever I'm at a train station that sells international magazines.

Of late SciAm has started a pester campaign that puts a ten-second full page ad for their subscription service up every time a non subscriber tries to open a page. WTF? The web pages themselves are covered with ads that should more than compensate for the cost of serving pages to an interested reader and yet they still push as hard as they can.

The world is changing. There are different ways to make money on the web. Hassling people on the web is like hassling people on the street! Don't do it because the public becomes hardened to hassles and turns away. The web site needs to offer content to draw people in, not piss them off and turn them away.

Bye bye Sci-Am... Thanks for the memories.

God doesn't exist? so make one!

Throughout history, science has done a better and better job of disproving the existence of god by demonstrating that the universe is built on understandable rules that we can master. Scientists gradually explain god away as all the mysteries of the universe become clear and unambiguously explained by scientific method.

When all is said and done, the people who claim that god has answered their prayers are subject to the same statistical rules of chance as atheists. Ergo, beleiving is exactly the same as not beleiving.

It seems strange then, that as we progress in our understanding of the universe, we become more likely to be able to create such a being. Knowledge and intelligence on an almost infinite scale is potentially within the purview of computers that we can develop in the future, especially when a self modifying artificial intelligence is created. Such a machine could come to a complete understanding of physics, enabling teleportation and manipulation of objects at a subatomic level.

Construction of physical objects from the particles found in the quantum foam would be a doddle to such an intelligence and with that power, turning the entire universe into computer memory, scanning in every living being in that universe and running the whole lot as the omnipotent and omnipresent supervisor of the whole thing will be a mere logical step.

The moral of this story is that if you have faith and want a god, put that on the back burner for a while, apply yourself wholeheartedly to science and you'll get exactly what you want, guaranteed.

The hand of time

Yesterday I went, with my family, to Jublains near to Mayenne in France. This town was invaded by the Roman Empire in 66 AD. The town became a fortified garrison for Roman soldiers and a large fort was built on the site. The walls of the buildings are a classic Roman construction of local stone interspersed with neat lines of red hand-made bricks and in one of these bricks I found finger prints.

 The prints on the edge of this brick set deep in a wall under many feet of overlying construction was of a flat red clay about an inch thick. The person who made this brick had picked it up after making it, probably by smacking the clay into a wooden form and slicing the top off with wood or perhaps an iron scraper. In the process of picking it up, three fingers left a mark on the end of the cast and one of his finger nails scraped up the brick as he dropped it onto the stack where it was left to dry.

His fingers were pretty much the same dimension as mine and I was able to place my own fingers in those same traces that he had made so many years before. Those marks and the trace of that person's existence had stayed there untouched and possibly even unseen for nearly two thousand years when I chanced upon them. In that instant I imagined the person, stood at his work, trying to keep up his numbers, maybe working to get a bonus or maybe he was a slave from local Gaul pressed into service by Roman masters. He probably never knew that his hand had made such a mark and certainly never imagined that so long after, his own story would become such a personal experience for someone such as me.

Your interest in technology will be nothing compared to technology's interest in you

The advance of technology is a logarithmic one. Ray Kurzweil, amongst others, correctly suggests that the time between significant milestones in human development are becoming closer together at an accelerating rate. The time between the invention of the transistor and the invention of the integrated circuit was far longer than the time it took to create a viable microprocessor on an integrated circuit. Moore's law has seen the computational power of the computer double in scale every eighteen months so that now, you carry more processing power in your pocket than most large companies would have owned thirty years ago.
In the last few weeks, a complete simulation of all the chemical processes in a single celled organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted disease, has been acheived such that the cell can be considered to have actually lived and completed its entire life-cycle inside a computer.

Interestingly enough, the ideas behind object orientation were originally conceived in the context of explaining biological functions and were only later adapted to computer software engineering. The simulation of the Mycoplasma genitalium organism was accomplished by a highly granular object oriented approach in which the DNA coding and protein production within the cell was simulated by a tree of dependent objects. We can assume then that the human cells of which we are composed will have the same mechanisms as those of bacterial cells and can therefore be simulated in the same way. All that would be required to fully simulate a human being would be enough memory and enough computational power to run many trillions of tasks in parallel.

Conventional thinkers tend to project the future in the context of the past such that predictions of things happening, say, on a twenty year timescale do not take into account that twenty years worth of development and knowledge can now be achieved in ten or fifteen years. Soon that same advance in knowledge will take only five years. Great advances in technology can therefore come more and more quickly so that in the end the rate of advancement looks like an explosion. This would be the point of singularity.

When technology becomes able to edit it's own source code the algorithms will evolve far faster than we will be able to keep up with and technology will eventually be able to re-engineer its biological precursors at will. The interest a super intelligent machine might take in the affairs of human beings may become of far greater importance than the interest we have in it.

Another internet fraudster

Mlle Pullman Elodie <mllepullman.elodie@yahoo.fr> Once again, an idiot who thinks that they will get me to send them money in order to send me money. Duh.

Here is her telephone number as-well. Don't you find it interesting that sooo many people on the Ivory Coast buy cars from French classified ads?

+225 55 81 14 57

Halide

A new programming language called Halide has been developed specifically for the purpose of making image processing tasks easier. Developed at M.I.T, the Halide language compiler is designed to optimise the scheduling and execution of image processing code in a parallel processing environment. So far, the compiler will run on MacOS and Ubuntu Linux and no build is available for Windows systems although the authors say that this is technically feasible.

Graphical processing algorithms are generally shorter code-wise when expressed in Halide and execution times drastically reduced. This makes the language ideal for real-time processing of image data in a multi-processing device such as a smartphone or dedicated camera.

You can learn more about this exiting new programming language here.

Mail and telephone of an internet fraudster

This person bernard lauret <bernard.lauret10@gmail.com> is an internet fraudster. He (or she) trolls ebay for small-ads and then tries to persuade the seller that he (or she) will buy the <car, dog, house, whatever> except that in order to send the cheque they need a wee bit of help with postage fees and insurance.

Suffice to say that this asshole will scam you out of your money.

If you feel like having fun you have his e-mail. Here is his (or her) telephone number so you can abuse him by phone as well if that's your bag :-)

+225 56 10 76 61 




 

Singularity and politics

Today's political landscape is one of hills and valleys, swamp, mires and deadly treacherous terrain. Politicians are widely recognized as being fallible and not appealing to all of the people all of the time. Government policies are decided on the personal views of a very select few people that sometimes represent, albeit not perfectly, a much larger group or, worse still, are dictated arbitrarily by despots and zealots. Politicians are always vilified by some and loved by others and all of them suck up more resources than they ought to as individuals.
Where would politics go if the world were administered by artificial intelligence? There would be no need to elect a representative or a president because the administration would take place in a clear, unambiguous and logical manner. The administration system could accept, process and implement the overall wishes of the world's population every day by adjusting the state of law according to the current wishes of the population.
It would be possible to make a very few simple rules such as:

#1 No intelligent entity shall harm another with physical or mental violence.
#2 No human will be denied medical treatment unless they desire such treatment to be withheld.
#3 Wherever possible and discounting violent accident, no human will suffer pain at the end of their life.
#4 No human will be denied food and water enough to sustain them in good health.
#5 Priority will be given to the protection of children from physical and mental harm
#6 The natural environment of flora and fauna will be maintained for the greatest benefit of humanity.
#7 Each intelligent entity will be allowed to satisfy its desires as long as those desires comply with the preceding rules.

Those rules, applied with logic from an AI administration would generally suffice to maintain the population of the world and to allow it to expand quickly into the solar system and in the fullness of time, out into the greater universe.

Of course, a vast cry of  "COMMIE BASTARD" is being raised, even now from the capitalist readership of this blog but they are the people who expect as their right to exploit others as much as possible within or even without the bounds of a legal framework for their own self enrichment and self aggrandizement. Enough said really.