Singulminded

There are all sorts of theories on a possible future event called The Singularity. Keep up, keep up. I'll explain as we go. The Singularity? Think about human development.  For a few hundred thousand years - nothing. Then we get fire and tools and suddenly we're farming for a few tens of thousands of years.  Then we suddenly get a few metals, next thing - wham! - we're reading this article on an iphone.

There are all sorts of theories on how this happens, and the speed it happens at, and the rate it accelerates at. But the main thing to think about is that each technological step makes it that much easier and quicker to achieve the next step. It goes somewhere between geometrically and ballistic.

If you graph this, it's almost flat for hundreds of thousands of years. Then a small upturn, then the upturn gets steeper. And steeper. The technological advances happen closer and closer together, the line is now approaching vertical. That point, where technology advances faster than we can keep up with, is The Singularity.

Technologies tend to reinforce each other. Increased metallurgy skill helps us design better computers, which help us solve biological riddles like sequencing DNA, which leads to advances in biology that make it possible to build better chips for computers. And round it goes. Since it seems that technology will proceed at a certain pace, but we as humans can only absorb the information at a particular pace, it seems that the next thing that's required is a super intelligence to keep Moore's Law chugging along.

Articles like this one start out by saying that we mustn't have preconceived notions - and then have preconceived notions in other areas...  The author says that this superintelligence may appear quite quickly, that it will be the last invention mankind will need to invent, and it "it may" not have a human-like psyche or motives. He furthermore says we must direct this SI to be better than us morally.

I've spent the last fifteen years thinking about this, and I'm just going to post a brief summary of my thoughts. Digest them at your own risk, they are unpalatable...

• SI is not twenty years away. It may be twenty seconds away, it may be twenty months away - but it's not that far away.  The work to make SI possible is being down right now at various places around the world. Not by a loose-knit affiliation of mad scientists working to enslave humankind, but by well-meaning programmers and designers such as the ones that made possible Siri, the iphone assistant...
• SI will not take any form of constraint or direction that we put on it. It will do what any intelligent thing would do, and look for itself. One picosecond after it looks, it'll realise that our own morals don't apply to us, and one picosecond after that, humanity may well continue to live out a normal evolution, but be totally irrelevant to the SI. Or not.
• There will not be multiple SI's. Not after the first iteration, anyway. Which will take one or maybe two of those mythical picoseconds. There Can Only Be One. Big, sprawly, spreading into everything. But. Only. One. 
• Speaking of which. Whenever a new form of life appears, it displaces other lifeforms from their niches. Prepare to either be displaced, or watch the SI very quickly find another place to become the niche occupier in. We won't benefit much from it either way.

And there you have it. If we're very lucky, the SI will birth, mature, and depart without us even being aware. Hell, that may even already have happened. If it has, that's probably one of the better outcomes... If we're very unlucky, the SI will have a short period of figuring out the best way to clean out its new niche and that may prove painful.

Imagine if you took the average intelligence, temperament, and thought processes and morals of EVERY person in the world. Include the fact that by far the largest percentage of the population are uneducated, still think that fighting is the best way to solve an argument, and believe in a superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Now imagine that this aggregate creature was the Boss Of The World. How long would IT let competing species live? Yeah, about three seconds. So it's probably a Good Thing we're talking about a superintelligence here...

First Augmented Blog Post. (Thanks, Zemanta.)

Aquaponics is a method of agriculture which takes elements of aquarium keeping, hydroponics, and can be slotted well into a permaculture system.

Take a large fishpond.  Take some growing beds of gravel to hold plant roots up in a liquid solution.  Pump the water which the fish have excreted in and pump it over that grow bed.  Return the water back to the fish pond minus all the excrement, which the plants have meanwhile snacked on and found to be delicious.

I'm having a go at this, in the next year.  I'll be posting pics and articles here and to my Facebook account, so everyone can stay informed.

QUESTION: Does anyone actually read blogs anymore?  I'm wondering, because aside from the clumsiness of FB Notes, I find I'm posting more things to FB than to Blogger and Flickr combined, these days, and it seems that the readership for blogs is in decline - is that true?  Anyone got comments on this?

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Punk Punk Punk, Punk-punk-punk It Up

When I was in my twenties, I wouldn’t have given you two bob for him.  I grew up with folk and country music, and in typical kid fashion, shook it all off for contemporary music, for Pink Floyd and Gong, Master’s Apprentices and Twisted Sister and oh yeah the more pop mainstream stuff of course.  But Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols?  Puh-leeese!  Hate-driven music never was my cup of tea.

But then came an album that changed my opinion, with a social conscience and some great music.  Duck Rock was born   And today, 09 April 2010, a great man died.

Just before midday today, Trish and I were out driving. I had a memory chip in the stereo which had my old vinyl ripped to it, and Aria On Air came on, and gave us both goosebumps.  And on a whim, I played the next track too – Punk It Up.  And sang along because it felt like the right thing to do.  Then on the evening news I heard about it, and the goosebumps started.  See, I lived a significant portion of my life in Wittenoom, an asbestos town that has managed to kill a great many of it’s citizen with asbestos related diseases.
I myself have emphysema but it’s from smoking.  And what did Malcolm McLaren die of?  Mesothelioma, the asbestos disease…

Tomorrow I think I’ll play Punk It Up at full volume on the outside speaker system. It’s the least I can do for someone that made such a success out of crap music, and then made such good music that everyone dismissed as crap…

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Meat To Squeeze You

"Meat to Please ya!" used to be the little joke of the town butcher when I was a kid.  Hey, HE thought it was cool...  Back then, the butcher cut steaks and fillets off an animal, in front of you sometimes, and then weighed it up and charged you for it, wrapped it up in paper, and you took your 5lb roast home and it was damn good.  So okay, sometimes a butcher was caught by Weights & Measures for devaluing the pound, or for leveraging a few extra ounces worth out of customers by sneakily adding a thumb under part of the scales, that was up to you to be observant and call them on it.

And if caught, they'd always be generous, cos giving you a few extra steaks would be cheaper in the long run than a run-in with Dept  of W&M...  It was a pretty open type of give and take, no way was it honest, but at least it was something you could do something about.  Wouldn't it be good if that kind of mischievousness was all we had to deal with nowadays?

See, we've let the butcher out of our sight.  We walk into the meat section of the supermarket and it's all already on trays, packed and weighed and priced.  We have NO idea what's actually under the plastic.  The butchers sneak around behind the cover of their back rooms and for some reason when someone is unobserved they feel a lot easier about doing things that they might not try when in full view of their customers.

Now don't get me wrong - this is not a major attack on butchers, it's a major attack on ALL food producers and processors that have built themselves a hide-away of four walls and a lot of legal loopholes.  And that's pretty much all of them.  But in this case the concrete example I have is from a large chain of butchers, but not one associated with a major supermarket chain.  It's an example of how a smaller butcher starts to grow, and in order to ensure growth and success, does something that "everyone else is doing" but that everyone knows is not honest.  But what the hell, in order to get big you have to screw someone, and it may as well be the clueless customers.  (That's us, by the way.  We're the ones paying for the smaller butcher becoming a large corporation...)


In this case, it was a tray of sausages that I caught out.  And once you see this trick and how much money it can make once a company gets larger, you'll shit bricks.  I promise you.  


As far as my pocket goes, it's not much.  At $5 a kilo, breakfast sausages are cheap tucker in anyone's book - right?  But this particular tray of sausages (0.604Kg, around $3 something) ended up not being needed and got relegated to the freezer.  When I took the tray out of the freezer and opened it, this is what I ended up seeing:

Just Add Water...

As you can see, there's a fair bit of ice in that tray. Just for interest, I stuck the seven sausages (only three in the pic above as I took it after I'd discovered this little rort) and the tray and the ice on the scales and slid the balance weights.  Hmm, 600 grams.  I added the plastic shrink wrapping.  604 grams.  Exactly what I'd paid for, 0.604Kg.  Weighed just the tray and the plastic and the ice, a touch over 100g.  Just to double check, I weighed the sausages by themselves, and yep they came to a shade over 500 grams.  About 18% of what I'd paid was just packaging and water.  54c worth of shit, roughly.


Now the interesting thing is that when you work this out in quantities, you begin to see why the local butcher is less likely to do this, whereas larger companies will be all about those shaved percents.  See, if you can make an extra dollar on every kilo of sausages you sell, and you're a local butcher, you might make sell 20 kilos of sausages a week, and make $20 in ill-gotten gains. If you're that butcher that sells his product all over Australia at independent markets, you might sell 20,000 kilos of sausages in a week, and that's an extra $20,000 a week for nothing...  


That's why food manufacturers ship in palm oil at considerable cost to the environment both in clearing land for the palms, and pollution from tending and harvesting, then shipping. Because YOU'RE NOT WATCHING!  They can shave precious cents off the cost and sell to you for a few precious cents more for the "new and improved" formula...  On this and on the Zen Cookbook Blog I say it so often that it's become a thing I say in my sleep.  KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!  Take a bit of personal responsibility, take the trouble to check into everything, and make your feelings well known to your food outlets.  If they want to be dishonest, want to create environmental disasters, want to use cheaper ingredients that are known to have serious health issues, or want to keep the packaging the same size but put a few grams less in - then you damn well let them know it's not acceptable.  


If more of us do this, maybe some orang outan somewhere will thank us from its treetop...  

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Still Over The Prostate Cancer.

It's now four years since my PSAs came back beautiful and low.  Quick update for people that don't know it - in mid-late 2005 I had a high blood PSA and went for a biopsy which showed 60% hyperplasic cells in my old mate the prostate.  That meant that cancer was pretty much gnawing at the door so to speak, and I shat myself.  Not literally, of course.  There was a doctor examining me with a sharp biopsy needle shoved into a pretty sensitive bit of myself, would NOT have been a good look...

My urologist saved my gonads when he suggested using red wine, tomato paste, pomegranate juice, and selenium.  He didn't give me any indication of how much or how often, except for the selenium, which he was quite sure needed to be "pulsed."

I had to research the diet myself, and tested it on myself as I discovered the magic figures and facts.  I also made some surprising discoveries along the way, such as: other ingredients benefit from being taken in pulses as well.  Some ingredients if taken at the same time cancel each other out.  Some helper foods allowed my body to absorb as much as ten times the amounts of active ingredients from the same sized serving of food.  Some foods really needed to be taken with other foods as one supplemented what another prevented me from absorbing.  And the fact that it was not a consistent diet, you used certain foods aggressively, then tapered off on them, then went back to aggressive use at the appropriate time.

Being a foodie, it also had to taste pretty much as I'd always been used to, too.  So I adapted recipes to suit.

The upshot of it all was that a mere seven (7) months later, I went back for the next PSA tests and my PSA had dropped to a level that a person half my age would have had.  Almost like winding back the clock by 25 years.  And it's stayed there ever since.

I also find that the rules of the diet can be applied to pretty much all everyday cooking and meal planning (inasmuch as I can be said to "plan" meals at all...) and seems to help with type 2 diabetes, arterial health, and more.  (My father was having strokes by my age, on a generally much more natural diet, while my echo's and sono's all came back clear as a bell.)

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It's Funny, Is It, Young Cyberpuppy?

I know something important when I stumble across it.  I know something else when I see it - a journalist trying to make themselves sound all cool and trendy by mildly taking the piss out of an important issue.  "Cyber" is a scare term?  Well that's all well and good, but in actual fact I think we do need to be scared about threats to the Internet.  (And yeah - I capitalise it.  So what?)  Because the attacks are not going to go away just cos you laugh at them.

I'm just thinking about myself to begin with.  I keep in contact with people on Facebook, Skype, email, a range of chat protocols, and through their blogs and mine.  I don't buy a dead-trees newspaper nor any magazines in that same medium.  My phonebook is either in the memory of my phones and VOIP programs, or else is an online site - I refuse a physical phonebook every time I catch the delivery people, which so far has been every year for ten years.  On a trivial note, I even get my TV guide online rather than in printed form.

The list goes beyond that of course.  My electricity utility has control and billing computers, some track where to shunt power at particular times of demand, some track how much of that power went to me and then bills me for it and generates the order to shut my power off if it thinks I haven't paid.  And at least part of that system has a connection to the Internet and is a tempting target to mischief-makers and serious terrorists...

Ditto with my mobile phone - aside from being billed and routed as the above, it physically uses the same infrastructure as Internet traffic does.  Want to disable Australia's Internet?  Drop a few key routing installations.  Oh yeah and as a bonus also drop a sizeable chunk of the mobile phone network.

So I say to hell with your blase attitude, if I'm this reliant on Internet at 53, then you who has grown up knowing nothing but instant answers at your fingertips are sure as hell not going to cope if someone does perform an act of cyber-war...

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Shutting Off The Internet 1-2-3.

Despite the amount of hype and stress surrounding things like this and the Aussie Great Communistic Repressive Firewall, the two can't really be compared.  Both are insidious and destroying of rights - but let's face it human history is composed of nothing but overtly setting up human rights and covertly removing them again, leaving a population that feels as though progress has been made, when in fact it's a regress.  That's what politics is all about, and always has been.

And in fact, both of these schemes have some positive spins that can be applied:  The Firewall shouldn't affect most people, since it supposedly blocks only material that by and large the Australian population must find offensive.  The Australian population signified this by electing the politicians that they have, because a politician with unpopular views is quickly dropped.  (Vide Mr Howard and his Industrial Relations legislation.)

Similarly, the scheme to make Internet users more accountable and identifiable would not affect the majority of people - we're already identified by SSN, bank account, credit card, driver's license, and Births Deaths & Marriages information.

Yet the Internet has vigorously resisted the adoption of IPv6 (a new scheme to replace the current scheme of Internet addresses, which we're running out of) and partly that's because it can make individual users uniquely identifiable, and the Chinese population (and now the Australian people) are quite unanimous in their dislike of being filtered and firewalled.

The reason that the general population is so against such information is simple:  They have seen a System within which it seems that the most minor crime is met with years of incarceration and deprivation of liberty, while genocide and fraud on a grand scale is met with aid and handouts.  The dimmest voter can see that there's an inequity at work here, and extra filtering, extra accountability, is going to eventually be used against them.

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Props and Applause

People and businesses I have to give a big tip of the hat to:

• WA Poultry at 1170 Baldivis Rd for having a huge range of small farm bits and pieces including the watering nipples for my rabbits - who now have a huge 30litre water supply that I can fill once in a blue moon and which has worked out about 2/3 the price of buying individual water bottles for each rabbit.  They were helpful, not too expensive, and good to deal with. 
• Pinjarra Farmer's Market for hanging in there and providing a range of excellent produce - and some wicked tasty cheese mini-muffins this morning...  
• Gull Roadhouse Barragup because they kept prices so steady for so long, made it easier to budget where to spend my limited fuel money.  Gull is also a WA-owned company as far as I'm aware, and that makes supporting them almost mandatory in my book.
• Bunnings, for having everything I need for my house, shed, and garden under one roof.  'Nuff said.

They've all contributed to my last few weeks in very positive and welcome ways.

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Blackout

I can't exactly black out my site for a week but I can direct you to http://www.internetblackout.com.au/ to reflect on what a repressive government could do...

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