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SpagbardCeline:
Anything submitted to intermittens@gmail.com will come to me, and be posted here.
SpagbardCeline:
Assassination
Attack
Domestic Security
Drill
Exercise
Cops
Law Enforcement
Authorities
Disaster Assistance
Disaster Management
Time for us to bug out.
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
National Preparedness Mitigation
Prevention Response Recovery Dirty Bomb
Time for us to bug out.
Domestic Nuclear Detection Emergency
Management Emergency Response First Responder
Homeland Security Maritime Domain
Time for us to bug out.
Awareness National Preparedness Initiative
Militia Shooting Shots Fired
Evacuation Deaths
Hostage Explosion
Time for us to bug out.
Police
Disaster
Medical
Assistance
Organized crime gangs national security
State of Emergency Security Breach
Time for us to bug out.
Threat Standoff SWAT Screening
Lockdown bomb squad or threat
Crash Looting Riot Emergency
Time for us to bug out.
Landing
Pipe bomb
Incident
Facility
Time for us to bug out.
Hazmat nuclear chemical spill
Suspicious package device toxic
National laboratory nuclear facility
Time for us to bug out.
Cloud
Plume
Radiation
Radioactive
Leak biological
Infection or event
Chemical burn
Biological Epidemic
Time for us to bug out.
Hazardous material incident industrial
Spill infection powder
White gas spillover anthrax chemical
Agent exposure burn nerve
Agent ricin sarin north korea
Time for us to bug out.
Outbreak contamination
Exposure virus
Evacuation bacteria
Ebola recall
Food poisoning foot and mouth
Avian H5N1 Salmonella Flu
Small pox plague human to human to animal influenza
Center for Disease Control Drug Administration
Toxic public health agro terror tuberculosis
Listeria agriculture mutation symptoms
Antiviral pandemic resistant wave
Water borne air borne sick swine pork infection
Quarantine vaccine strain tamiflu
H1N1 Norvo Virus World Health Organization
Viral Hemmoragic Fever E. Coli Epidemic
Time for us to bug out.
Infrastructure Security
Airport Airplane and derivatives
Chemical fire electric failure or outage
Bart Marta port authority black out brown out
Port Dock Bridge Delays Cancelled Collapse
Power lines service interruption
Smart Grid Power Body Scanner Transportation Security
Biosurveillance integration center telecommunications
Critical infrastructure
National infrastructure
Metro violence
Drug cartel
Amtrak gang
Fort Hancock San Diego
Gunfight trafficking
Heroin kidnap
Cocaine border
Narcotics Juarez
Meth lab drug trade drug war mexican army
Yuma Tucson Tijuana
Sinaloa Consular El Paso Sonora
Execution shootout
Los Zetas Familia
Time for us to bug out.
Terrorism terror attack Iraq
Iran Agro Afghanistan
Pakistan environmental eco terrorism
Target conventional weapons grade dirty bomb
Enriched nuclear chemical weapon
IED FARC IRA ETA PLF PLO AQAP AQIM TTP plot
Nationalist recruitment pirates extremism
Home grown somalia yemen hamas
Emergency hurricane
Tornado twister
Tsunami Earthquake
Tremor flood
Storm crest temblor
Forest fire brush fire
Cyber security ice botnet
2600 stranded stuck
DDOS spammer phishing rootkit
Hacker china conficker worm
Mud slide or mudslide
Erosion power outage
Brown out warning
Blizzard sleet
Social media
Phreaking scammers
Brute forcing mysql injection
Cyber command
I’m not Kenneth, and this has not been the CBS evening news with Dan Rather. Good night, and have a great weekend.
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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/
SpagbardCeline:
It has been more than a hundred years since the fundamentals of quantum theory have been discovered. Why haven’t people internalized it yet?
People talk about it. It still gets a lot of press, and it is still treated as though it’s new. (It, along with relativistic physics, was wrapped into the name “new physics” in the 60s, when it was merely 50 years old instead of 100.) But, their comments (even the ones by physicists) tend to come down to: “it’s strange and I don’t really get it.”
Fuck that.
We have devices that work based on the principles of QM, and we use them daily. Solar cells? QM. 3d movies? QM. Transistors? QM. Cathode ray tubes? QM. How the hell are we going to continue to make basic technical advances when we keep telling ourselves that nobody can develop an intuitive feel for the part of science upon which our basic technical advances have been built since the 1920s?
People say it’s counter-intuitive So what? Plenty of people believe plenty of counter-intuitive things. For instance, you may have heard that the earth is round, and it is moving through space. Plenty of people believe counter-intuitive things that aren’t even held up by evidence (transubstantiation, the trinity, the hollow earth, the principle of homeopathy, the myth of progress, the coming of the eschaton…) People are perfectly capable of adopting, and then operating within the framework of, counter-intuitive models of the world, and QM does not involve the kind of evidence-filtering and umwelt-warping that far more popular world-models do.
People say it’s mathy. Well, so what? Every time you play tug of war, you are operating on a learned intuition about the behavior of force vectors. Every time you take a step, you are operating on learned intuitions about the acceleration of objects toward earth, and the forces necessary to counter that, and the side effects of having those forces at various angles. We do a lot of math intuitively, and QM is not fundamentally harder. (There’s probability involved. So? You decide whether or not to leave your house, or cross the street, or buy a new cell phone, based on estimations of likelihoods and their interactions.)
I suspect that people avoid QM because they are convinced that it is much harder than the rest of physics, and that they believe this because they have heard things said fifty to a hundred years ago by physicists who hadn’t finished internalizing it. The new generation of physicists who really comprehended this stuff in their gut never came.
If you care about technological progress, avoid telling people that QM is impossible.
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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/
SpagbardCeline:
A Rant
It’s 2012. Our cars do not fly, are not self-driving, and are powered by fire.
Even though there were personal robots in the american consumer market in the 1980s capable of:
1) Speech recognition (including voice authentication *and* voice command)
2) Goal-oriented programming
3) Real-time procedural generation of original narratives
4) Fairly nuanced navigation and area-mapping, including self-charging, without vision or navigation beacons
the most advanced personal robot on the american consumer market at the moment (barring kit robots like PINO and the PR-2) is the Pleo, which has support for only #4.
Our computers almost universally depend upon a user interface invented in the early 1970s by XEROX and popularized in 1984 — a user interface now so common that people feel as though no other user interface is possible.
No one has been on the moon since 1971.
The space shuttle is limited to the technology that existed when it was designed (with some exceptions, provided interoperability) in the early 1970s. As a result, at the time of the program’s closure, the space shuttle computers still used core memory.
The general design adhered to by tablet computers was created initially by the dynabook project in 1968, and variants on it can be seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The much-advertised SIRI is based loosely on an SRI AI project of the same name. However, Apple’s version is not significantly more complex than Eliza or ALICE.
In 1997, the World Wide Web was clearly a simulation of paper under glass, with the occasional hyperlink or animated GIF for distraction. In 2012, most of the web is still clearly a simulation of paper under glass, but elaborate hacks involving abuse of self-modifying code and incredible wastes of bandwidth trick some fraction of the web into instead poorly simulating the 1970s XEROX user interface inside of itself.
In the 1980s, Steve Mann invented a wearable computer that could detect billboards and replace their content with content of his choice. In the early 1990s, the MIT Media Lab worked on a wearable computer that was context-aware and selectively gave reminders and suggestions via subliminal text display when a complete focus shift would not be advisable. In 2012, Google announced that it would work on a wearable computer project, hiring people from the 1990s MIT Media Lab wearable computer projects. Judging from other Android devices and Google’s other products, this augmented reality project seems like it will probably involve inserting advertisements where none previously existed, rather than removing them (as Steve Mann’s device did).
Whether or not a hyperlink is broken on the web still relies entirely upon the maintenance of the page pointed to, despite all hypertext projects prior to the 1992 Berners-Lee project having solved this problem. Hyperlinks on the web still point to whole pages, or at best single points within pages (given the foresight of the original author to place labels at appropriate points), whereas some pre-1992 hypertext projects supported bidirectional links between spans of content (including multiple overlapping links).
The portable digital music player was invented in the mid-70s. Aside from major storage increases and the occasional feature like video support, portable digital music players have remained largely unchanged in design.
In 1978, a brain-computer interface allowed a blind man to see with the use of a low-resolution digital camera. In 2002, sixteen other subjects had the treatment. It is still not commercially available.
Between 1966 and 1972, MIT developed a mobile robot named SHAKEY that was capable of goal-based reasoning, route planning, environment mapping, obstacle avoidance, object detection, and limited forms of object manipulation.
In 1982, a patent was filed on the use of optical fibers as bend sensors. This was used in a number of ‘wired gloves’, which use bend sensors and accelerometers to report the state of hand movements to a computer. In 1987, Nintendo commercialized a product similar to these devices as the PowerGlove. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a device used by people who could not afford a PowerGlove (or its more technically advanced brethren), which took the form of a hollowed-out 8-ball full of accelerometers with several buttons on the bottom and a couple infrared beacons. This technology was revived recently as the WiiMote (with the infrared beacons moved to the ‘sensorbar’ and the cable removed).
In 1991, HP released the HP95LX. It was the size of a modern PDA, had the capabilities of a (low end) stock PC, and ran a stock version of MS-DOS off ROM. It is possible to run Windows 3.x on these.
In 1990, NewTek released the Video Toaster, a piece of hardware that (when attached to a Commodore Amiga) allowed consumers to perform linear video editing, including real time 3d animation.
In short, there are a lot of very cool ideas that have not been implemented, have not been commercialized, or have not been commercially successful. Some of them are very old but still very cool. All of them are still possible. Remember this the next time you are trying to choose between Drupal and Ruby on Rails for your social networking site for iguanas.
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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/
SpagbardCeline:
Speculative Fiction and Novelty
I’ve wrestled for a while with the idea that “SF is the genre of ideas”. I have argued on both sides, and eventually come to the conclusion that SF really refers to a plethora of very different genres with very little in common. Recently, I’ve grown fond of Neal Stephenson’s statement that SF is defined by the fact that the characters behave competently and intelligently (even if this is lacking in verisimilitude — after all, the real world is arguably better-defined by accidents and screw-ups than by intelligent and informed choices). Nevertheless, the plain fact is, some SF is truly mind-bending and the rest of it simply isn’t.
What I think it all comes down to is novelty, and novelty concentrations.
We’ve talked about novelty on this blog before. Novelty is Shannon-information. It’s the unexpected. It’s the data point that changes the model. It’s the punchline of a funny joke, or the reveal that retcons all of continuity. The only thing that is mind-bending or mind-expanding in of itself is novelty, because everything else you’ve seen before.
Novelty is not a renewable resource. Not within a single skull, without some major memory problems. Novelty is exhausted immediately upon consumption. Luckily, novelty is not the same as originality. At the time of publication, patents are deemed novel to the patent clerk who approved them, and many patents are for improvements that are obvious in retrospect. Good novelty (or useful novelty) has that funny quirk: it’s obvious in retrospect and entirely unexpected beforehand.
Novelty can be gotten cheaply, in relatively small quantities, under circumstances of isolation of social groups. The character of the yokel shocked by the character of the big city is representative of this, as is the culture clash between European explorers and indigenous Americans during the sixteenth century. But, now that the internet makes large quantities of information easily transferred, the only large caches of naturally (which is to say unintentionally) produced novelty are those things completely undocumented and those things intentionally blocked. People who subscribe to their ‘Daily Me’ and limit their information intake to their filter bubble can still have their mind blown by the ideas of people in different filter bubbles, but such people are rarely habitual novelty-seekers.
For habitual novelty-seekers, the reality tunnels of other people are interesting until exhausted. Speculative fiction comes in at this point, and in this sense it often is the genre of ideas.
Novelty can be generated in different ways. Some of them are fairly mechanical. Burroughs had his cutups, and the Surrealists had their exquisite corpse. Various mind-altering drugs and habits of thought like Dali’s paranoiac-critical method can be used to do to the mind what cutups and the exquisite corpse do to text. These methods are much like taking a computer and banging it with a hammer in the hope that it will become an automobile, and they are successful only to the extent that the brain is a wonderfully adaptable machine capable of making sense out of any sort of noise. A more directed and less wasteful but still fairly mechanical method is to take an existing memeplex, find a likely crux, and reconnect or recombine it. This is more like what glitch musicians do, or what gametes do in sexual reproduction. This happens to be the core of speculative fiction, and what many of the better writers start out with.
Take a model of the world. Zoom in on one piece. Twist until mind blown. Spew the resulting model onto paper, with a narrative glued to it in a bag on the side. Rinse and repeat.
What you get is a synthetic reality tunnel. Speculative fiction authors don’t just write about robots and space ships; they mutate their view of reality systematically to manufacture new ways of modeling the world that are internally consistent but that nobody really subscribes to yet.
The important part is ‘yet’.
Highly popular pieces of speculative fiction get widely read. The model of the world in these stories gets incorporated into the world-models of other people. The novelty seeps away as cultural osmosis sets in.
Many people, for instance, have a view of evolution as guided progress toward a pre-ordained goal. This forms the basis of works as far-flung as 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Starseed Transmissions,Childhood’s End, Altered States, and The X Men. Of course, this model is bullshit, and does not describe evolution at all. Few people realize that it came from a handful of science fiction stories in pulp magazines during the first two decades of the twentieth century, most notably The Man Who Evolved.
Certain ideas are no longer novel at all, purely because they were initially considered extremely novel and therefore reached maximum saturation much more quickly.
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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/
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