Category Archives: Science & Technology

End of the desk-top era

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I’ve had a computer on my desk at home since 1984. A lot of them. Zenith, Gateway, IBM, Dell and, most recently, a Mac Mini. No longer. I’m selling the Mini.

Oh, there are still lots of computers around the house. The MacBook Pro long ago became my main box (slab?). And there’s the iPad and the iPhone. But it felt like the end of an era.

This weekend I’ll replace my printer and scanner with a wireless all-in-one from HP and as I started making room, I was struck by how many usb hubs and power-strips were being relegated to a box in the closet.

Yesterday I had a chat with one of our IT guys about where things are headed from a business perspective. Are we getting closer to the day when a company tells a new employee they can use their own computer (any flavor they choose) and hook into the company content via the cloud.

I took a little further and suggested the device of chose would be some sort of tablet, not a laptop. Whatever shakes out, things are going to be much different for the users and the IT folks who support them.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (TED Talk)

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I finished Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants this weekend. I rank this book up there with Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in terms of importance. I won’t attempt to review the book, since I’m still try to absorb some of the mind-bending ideas. Like the evolution of technology:

Here are a few ideas that got some highlighter:

Technology and life must share some fundamental essence. … However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.” – pg 10

Technium – The greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. – pg 11

How many neurons do you need to have a mind? – pg 13

We can think of technology as our extended body. – pg 44

Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them. – pg 45

Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind. – pg 48

For most humans, for most of time, real change was rarely experienced. – pg 73

“What was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable.” — Simon Conway pg 126

There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. – pg 127

Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly loves technology

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The full quote (by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle) is: “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” I came across it near the end of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants. (More on that in a later post.) Mr. Kelly beautifully captures my own feelings about technology:

“I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the  web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo –a thing one plugs into– and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of hits human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smell like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.”

“In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown.” Who can ask for more.

COMDEX

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I found this convention badge on a closet shelf this morning and it brought back memories. First, a little background from Wikipedia:

“COMDEX (an abbreviation of Computer Dealers’ Exhibition) was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, and by many accounts one of the largest trade shows in any industry sector. The first COMDEX was held in 1979 at the MGM Grand, with 167 exhibitors and 3904 attendees.”

I don’t remember what year I first attended COMDEX. Sometime in the lates 80’s or early 90’s if I had to guess. It was my first exposure to geek culture and I loved it. Not sure how I persuaded Clyde to attend (or how I ended up with his badge) but he’s sort of a geek wannabe like me.

The move from the NAB Radio Show to COMDEX marked the beginning of my shift in interest and career path.

Scott Adams: “Editors are the chefs of the Internet.”

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Scott Adams points to Newser to illustrate what he sees as the future of the Internet:

“Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There’s some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That’s why I return so often. It’s a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site.

And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future.”

I don’t think I’ve ever visited Newser but I’m headed there now. Like thousands of others.

I’m back. And I wasn’t impressed by Newser but Mr. Adam’s point is a good one, nonetheless.

The Divine Code of Life

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According to the back flap on his book, Dr. Kazuo Murakami is “one of the top geneticists in the world and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, one of Japan’s leading research universities.”

In The Divine Code of Life, he makes his case for the idea that how we think can activate good dormant genes and switch off negative ones. Here are a few factoids that got some high-liter:

  • “For any one child, there are seventy trillion possible combinations of genes.”
  • “As far as we can tell, only about 5 to 10 percent of our genes are actually working; what the rest are doing remains unknown.”
  • “All living things use the same genetic code.”
  • “Imagine that you could collect all the DNA from the world’s population of six billion people. It would weigh only as much as a single grain of rice.”
  • “The information contained in our genes, if printed in book form, would amount to three thousand volumes each a thousand pages long.”

I can’t say that this was a fun read, but I like the idea that we can have some control over something as… basic? … as our genes. I suspect this is where some of the really big medical breakthroughs will happen. Are happening.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information

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I confess the title of this book hooked me. I saw an interview with Oxford professor Vlatko Vedral and was intrigued by the idea that everything (me and the universe) can be reduced to bits of information. (Wikipedia)

But I can’t say I enjoyed (or understood) most of the book. I suspect he knows his stuff but just isn’t very good at explaining it to non-phyicists. Better reads: Quantum Enigma; Biocentrism.