It's been a while since I wrote anything for reasons other than school work. While it's definitely fun to write for the lifelong dreams of understanding the complex systems we collectively refer to as life, I can definitely feel the effect of writing rather dry academic stuff all day and night. It's a slow and subtle process that will one day burn me out. Kind of funny considering just how beautiful the systems in nature can be, I guess it's one of the facets of the human psyche that I just don't understand very well... One day I should really think about this...
It's a weird process that I can only describe as drying out, just like lush forests slowly drying out into a desert. Sometimes everything I do, including the studies of sciences and the essential acts of reading, listening, and sleeping are all just my life's automatic attempt at trying to hold back the inevitable tide of desertification of the mind... The imagery saturated with sand inevitably bringing into my mind the vision of sand castle being built on the beach against incoming tides. Two sometimes opposing elements help me against such natural tides into inflexibility and forgetfulness. Singular obsession in action and variety in life. The more I live singular, almost obsessive dedication to something in life is essential in maintaining one's human quality, through ceaseless pursuit of truth, understanding and change of the status quo. However any decent human being tend to be supported by pool of experience that are at once more varied and detailed compared to the generation's norm. Obsession I fulfill with science, and variety I try to fulfill through act of reading. And writing... Well this is my equivalent of eating junk food. Something I just 'do for fun' to vent out the inevitable stresses of life. Two of the most recent books n my memory are 'The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier and 'Tokyo Vice' by Jake Adelstein. Both are books I'd recommend any adult to give a chance, though Tokyo Vice can get a little graphic at times in its depiction of sex and violence, and is quite frankly not much of a literary masterpiece (the book was written under a duress that should be understandable to anyone aware of the back story... I'm not going to spoil anything for you). The Bottom Billion was one of the most, if not the most compelling and rational analysis of the very peculiar 'bottom billion' world we live in right now, with some very insightful suggestions as to how we might be able to change it for the better. Bottom billion in the sense of the book refers to more than a simple collection of 'poor people'. It refers to a collection of nations and its people that are caught in economic and political traps of decline, much like wells and traps of physical systems certain elements of the system just cannot escape from. The world in economic sense is expanding. It keeps on getting bigger and richer (in a sense). Even the poorest nations in the world are subject to some level of growth. However, there are certain groups of nations in this world that seem to be stuck in unnaturally low, almost zero growth rate, and they all happen to be situated in the African continent.
The best part of this book for an economics layman like me is the clarification and classification of the problem that had been haunting this world order for past few decades. It's incredibly simple to simply talk about 'poor people' and'poor nations.' While most of us might have best of intentions in discussing world issues using such loosely defined terms, the end result of such discussions just end up being something so obvious and meaningless, a philanthropic equivalent of discussing how many angels can sit on top of a pin.
The freak accident of the modern world is that people can immediately identify just what geographical region of the world is the poorest on the Earth, and by extension, what kind of people. It might be impossible to eliminate human misery from the world, but allowing certain geographical region to fester with the lowest, most miserable conditions of the human world is something that's 1)Inhumane
2)Irrational
3)Wasteful I don't believe for a second that current barrier between the so called 'developed' and 'developing' world that allows members of the developed nations to live their entire live without thinking about the consequences of their nation's international dictates will last. Either it will implode with catastrophic consequences, or be intentionally maintained with heavy price in terms of commodity, human lives, and human future. In the book 'The Bottom Billion', Paul Collier is successful in providing the reader with two things in regards to the issue of the bottom billion. Clarification and analysis of the problem through rational thinking, and suggestion of possible solutions based on actionable items. Compelling, is the word to describe the book, and if you are a young college student who might be thinking of changing the world, this is a book to read whether to agree with the author's specific analysis or not. I will write up another post on Tokyo Vice later on. It's getting a little tough to type up entire blogposts on my mobile handset.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Importance of hackability
This is something I wrote down on my blackberry during one of those sleepless nights.
As I huddle in the darkness of my room with my Blackberry in my hand, listening to the mp3 rip of the Deus Ex soundtrack, and reading Cory Doctorow's the Makers serialized on the web, I am inevitably reminded of a question that had been plaguing me for a long time.
I read about the greatness of the old computer systems all the time, being something of a retrocomputing enthusiast. I read about all the wonderful stuff people did with their first Apple computers and Spectrum ZX, making and running crazy things on 128kb of memory. I also read about the demoscene where people squeeze old retro hardware to it last reserves of computing power to create fascinating works of pop art.
And then I look at my handset. I remember my old nokia running symbian, which is a modified version of linux fitted to run on mobile platform. I scrounge through the apps on my blackberry. Any modern handset I can remember using, and I can remember other people using is vastly superior to most of the retro hardware that are remembered so fondly. Even my older model Blackberry can kick the pants off the old Apple computer in terms of hardware spec, and it has much more sensors to boot, allowing it to communicate with the world through its eyes (camera) and location awareness (GPS). I'm not even going to talk about the always-on data connection because it's a given on any working handset.
Yet despite the reserves of computing power and amazing array of sensors available on this little buggers, they just don't seem to be able to inspire that same level of awe and creativity the first generation of personal computers did for its users. Just what happened? What is the difference between modern handsets and first generation PCs other than how superior many of the modern handsets are in terms of spec?
The answer I think, may have to do with the hackability of the handsets compared to the first generation PCs. First generation PCs were intended as computers. They had moderately sized screens (though the resolution was mostly worse than even the poorest smartphone out in the market today) and a full complement of input device you can use for extended period of time (just a full sized keyboard really, though it does make a difference). Yet these are still superficial hardware differences that can be made up for quite easily. Most high end Nokia phones support connecting to tv screens and what not, and most bluetooth equipped smartphones can interface with a bluetooth keyboard. Can, but not allowed to.
The biggest difference, perhaps the only difference, between the old first generation PCs and current handsets seem to be the software. The PCs were intended as computers meaning you were provided with the tools to develop new content for that platform, usually in form of BASIC implementation for the given system. It was possible to code in assembly and such if you were good enough. The best memories of the old systems and their wonders are almost always linked with the entry level development for the system.
You can't find that on handsets. Even Google Android doesn't yet provide a suitable platform on top of the mobile that can be used to manipulate the machine fully. There is a zero chance that a user of a blackberry handset would be able to run a code on the handset itself, and even linked to a full scale PC the road is usually long and confusing.
Granted, modern smartphone hardwares are complicated which necessitates (really?) the need for complex development environment. Yet, what if the mobile OS itself just gave the users just a slight bit more control to their own hardware? What if we can bring the modern BASIC equivalent like python onto the mobile OS, capable of interfacing with, and controlling the hardware?
Would it lead to another wave of developers and tinkerers world wide to create things that were completely unexpected?
As I huddle in the darkness of my room with my Blackberry in my hand, listening to the mp3 rip of the Deus Ex soundtrack, and reading Cory Doctorow's the Makers serialized on the web, I am inevitably reminded of a question that had been plaguing me for a long time.
I read about the greatness of the old computer systems all the time, being something of a retrocomputing enthusiast. I read about all the wonderful stuff people did with their first Apple computers and Spectrum ZX, making and running crazy things on 128kb of memory. I also read about the demoscene where people squeeze old retro hardware to it last reserves of computing power to create fascinating works of pop art.
And then I look at my handset. I remember my old nokia running symbian, which is a modified version of linux fitted to run on mobile platform. I scrounge through the apps on my blackberry. Any modern handset I can remember using, and I can remember other people using is vastly superior to most of the retro hardware that are remembered so fondly. Even my older model Blackberry can kick the pants off the old Apple computer in terms of hardware spec, and it has much more sensors to boot, allowing it to communicate with the world through its eyes (camera) and location awareness (GPS). I'm not even going to talk about the always-on data connection because it's a given on any working handset.
Yet despite the reserves of computing power and amazing array of sensors available on this little buggers, they just don't seem to be able to inspire that same level of awe and creativity the first generation of personal computers did for its users. Just what happened? What is the difference between modern handsets and first generation PCs other than how superior many of the modern handsets are in terms of spec?
The answer I think, may have to do with the hackability of the handsets compared to the first generation PCs. First generation PCs were intended as computers. They had moderately sized screens (though the resolution was mostly worse than even the poorest smartphone out in the market today) and a full complement of input device you can use for extended period of time (just a full sized keyboard really, though it does make a difference). Yet these are still superficial hardware differences that can be made up for quite easily. Most high end Nokia phones support connecting to tv screens and what not, and most bluetooth equipped smartphones can interface with a bluetooth keyboard. Can, but not allowed to.
The biggest difference, perhaps the only difference, between the old first generation PCs and current handsets seem to be the software. The PCs were intended as computers meaning you were provided with the tools to develop new content for that platform, usually in form of BASIC implementation for the given system. It was possible to code in assembly and such if you were good enough. The best memories of the old systems and their wonders are almost always linked with the entry level development for the system.
You can't find that on handsets. Even Google Android doesn't yet provide a suitable platform on top of the mobile that can be used to manipulate the machine fully. There is a zero chance that a user of a blackberry handset would be able to run a code on the handset itself, and even linked to a full scale PC the road is usually long and confusing.
Granted, modern smartphone hardwares are complicated which necessitates (really?) the need for complex development environment. Yet, what if the mobile OS itself just gave the users just a slight bit more control to their own hardware? What if we can bring the modern BASIC equivalent like python onto the mobile OS, capable of interfacing with, and controlling the hardware?
Would it lead to another wave of developers and tinkerers world wide to create things that were completely unexpected?
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Alan Kay applied to synthetic biology... And other late night notes.
I always find it very hard to blog. Even when I have the time to write something, not necessarily sitting in front of a laptop, mind you (I'm rather known for writing stuff that needs some word processor access and sending it in straight from my handset). It's only that I always feel that whatever I'm writing or trying to write at the moment just doesn't feel exciting or important enough. Which is why I keep multiple blogs around the net, each serving as a rant template for the other. Something would begin as a rant template on place A only to be edited into another form for place B, to place C, so on and so forth before the same yet radically altered post ends up as a follow up at the place of origin.
I know I should be writing about some other things as well, like how the diybio nyc might be amazingly close to getting a real lab space, or how I'm prepping to stop by for this year's iGEM jamboree. Oh or the pictures from this year's major diybio nyc event, where we set up a stall on the green market and extracted dnas from the natural produces with common household material (with the city people of course). Each of those things would probably make for some lengthy and interesting reading, and the list goes on (my life's actually kind of exciting right now). Yet whenever I find the time to write something down, nada. Nothing. My mind just shuts down and nothing I can commit to paper or the keyboard seems good enough.
Tonight though, aided by my weird bout with insomnia, I'll just write something down I've been meaning to say for a long time. I'm not even spellcheck this thing (god save my soul).
I've been looking into the history of computing and computer languages recently. I've always had some level of interest in computers, not just the spiffy brand-new muscle machines but in what most people would refer to as 'retrocomputing' (I once ended up practicing some AIDA because of that. Ugh), which is a story for another time. It's not that I think old ways of computing were better than others. It's just that it's much easier to trace the evolution of the concept of computing when you see beyond the immediate commercial products.
Synthetic biology is effectively a pursuit of engineering biological organisms. Biological organisms are based upon very singular information storage and processing system that has quite a bit of parallels to computerized systems. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to predict the future development of synthetic biology by looking at how computer programming languages evolved (because they deal with information processing systems applied to physical counting medium). Maybe it might even be able to predict some of the pitfalls that are inherent in developing any kind of complex programmable information processing system that will apply to the synthetic biology in the future. Maybe it would be possible to bring a conceptual framework to the synthetic biology that would have taken decades if left to mature naturally within mere years.
While I was rummaging through the texts in both real life and the web (with many of the promising links on the web leading to dead-ends and 404s) I ran into a programming paradigm and environment I was only superficially familiar with before. Smalltalk and Squeak, respectively, both the brainchild of the computing pioneer Alan Kay.
Here's an excerpt from Alan Kay's biography I found on the net (I can't find the website right now. I swear I'll edit it in later, when my brain's actually working!)
“Alan Kay postulated that the ideal computer would function like a living organism; each “cell” would behave in accord with others to accomplish an end goal but would also be able to function autonomously. Cells could also regroup themselves in order to attack another problem or handle another function.”
This is the basic philosophy behind smalltalk/squeak and object oriented computer programming paradigm. It is no coincidence that Alan Kay’s vision of the ideal computer language and computing environment would take to a biological allegory, since he came from molecular biology background.
While I’m reading through the history of different computing paradigms for the purpose of figuring out how it might be applied to understanding and usage of synthetic biology, there’s something else I found awesome and perhaps a little heartwarming. Alan Kay throughout his life as a computing pioneer held onto the belief that the ideal computing platform isn’t a platform capable of crunching the numbers the fastest, but a platform that can be integrated into the educational function of the user through ease of manipulation and control. Ideal computing platform should be hackable because it makes logical sense to do so.
Can we say the same of synthetic biology? Perhaps not. The direct comparison of a complex biological system to computerized circuits and cathode ray tube projections can only take us so far. Yet I can’t shake the nagging feeling that synthetic biology might be looking at some very unique opportunities for change precisely because it is different from regular electronic systems, with documents of the early days of computer and programming already here for our perusal.
A good, elegant system that allows programmable extension must be at the same time easy, or at least logical to learn. And there are systems that both run and learn better compared to other systems. This might become something of an issue of how synthetic biology parts/devices/systems are put together in the future as the capacity of the synthetic biologists to handle complex systems increase.
I think it might be able to pursue this idea further. As it stands this is nothing more than an interesting parallel in concept without substantial scientific reasoning.
Which is why I should get myself to learn smalltalk/squeak sometime in the future. Maybe I should knock on the hackerspaces in the city, see if anyone's willing to mentor me.
Now, it's about time for me to get some sleep.
I know I should be writing about some other things as well, like how the diybio nyc might be amazingly close to getting a real lab space, or how I'm prepping to stop by for this year's iGEM jamboree. Oh or the pictures from this year's major diybio nyc event, where we set up a stall on the green market and extracted dnas from the natural produces with common household material (with the city people of course). Each of those things would probably make for some lengthy and interesting reading, and the list goes on (my life's actually kind of exciting right now). Yet whenever I find the time to write something down, nada. Nothing. My mind just shuts down and nothing I can commit to paper or the keyboard seems good enough.
Tonight though, aided by my weird bout with insomnia, I'll just write something down I've been meaning to say for a long time. I'm not even spellcheck this thing (god save my soul).
I've been looking into the history of computing and computer languages recently. I've always had some level of interest in computers, not just the spiffy brand-new muscle machines but in what most people would refer to as 'retrocomputing' (I once ended up practicing some AIDA because of that. Ugh), which is a story for another time. It's not that I think old ways of computing were better than others. It's just that it's much easier to trace the evolution of the concept of computing when you see beyond the immediate commercial products.
Synthetic biology is effectively a pursuit of engineering biological organisms. Biological organisms are based upon very singular information storage and processing system that has quite a bit of parallels to computerized systems. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to predict the future development of synthetic biology by looking at how computer programming languages evolved (because they deal with information processing systems applied to physical counting medium). Maybe it might even be able to predict some of the pitfalls that are inherent in developing any kind of complex programmable information processing system that will apply to the synthetic biology in the future. Maybe it would be possible to bring a conceptual framework to the synthetic biology that would have taken decades if left to mature naturally within mere years.
While I was rummaging through the texts in both real life and the web (with many of the promising links on the web leading to dead-ends and 404s) I ran into a programming paradigm and environment I was only superficially familiar with before. Smalltalk and Squeak, respectively, both the brainchild of the computing pioneer Alan Kay.
Here's an excerpt from Alan Kay's biography I found on the net (I can't find the website right now. I swear I'll edit it in later, when my brain's actually working!)
“Alan Kay postulated that the ideal computer would function like a living organism; each “cell” would behave in accord with others to accomplish an end goal but would also be able to function autonomously. Cells could also regroup themselves in order to attack another problem or handle another function.”
This is the basic philosophy behind smalltalk/squeak and object oriented computer programming paradigm. It is no coincidence that Alan Kay’s vision of the ideal computer language and computing environment would take to a biological allegory, since he came from molecular biology background.
While I’m reading through the history of different computing paradigms for the purpose of figuring out how it might be applied to understanding and usage of synthetic biology, there’s something else I found awesome and perhaps a little heartwarming. Alan Kay throughout his life as a computing pioneer held onto the belief that the ideal computing platform isn’t a platform capable of crunching the numbers the fastest, but a platform that can be integrated into the educational function of the user through ease of manipulation and control. Ideal computing platform should be hackable because it makes logical sense to do so.
Can we say the same of synthetic biology? Perhaps not. The direct comparison of a complex biological system to computerized circuits and cathode ray tube projections can only take us so far. Yet I can’t shake the nagging feeling that synthetic biology might be looking at some very unique opportunities for change precisely because it is different from regular electronic systems, with documents of the early days of computer and programming already here for our perusal.
A good, elegant system that allows programmable extension must be at the same time easy, or at least logical to learn. And there are systems that both run and learn better compared to other systems. This might become something of an issue of how synthetic biology parts/devices/systems are put together in the future as the capacity of the synthetic biologists to handle complex systems increase.
I think it might be able to pursue this idea further. As it stands this is nothing more than an interesting parallel in concept without substantial scientific reasoning.
Which is why I should get myself to learn smalltalk/squeak sometime in the future. Maybe I should knock on the hackerspaces in the city, see if anyone's willing to mentor me.
Now, it's about time for me to get some sleep.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Babelfish Twitter
As all my friends know, I'm something of a twitter addict. I regularly spend certain amount of time per day on it checking other people's tweets and I tweet almost everywhere I am, thanks to Blackberry dataplan and a number of wonderful twitter clients available for that platform like ubertwitter and twitterberry (I have both. Don't ask why). Contrary to some of the popular opinion on twitter being unnecessary time-waster I find it an interesting tool to keep in touch with academic communities and enlightening people around the world. If anyone cared to look, they'll find surprising amount of meaningful conversation on variety of topics like artificial intelligence and synthetic life taking place on twitter time to time. They are the kind of conversations normal mortal like you and I won't be privy to if it weren't for twitter or its very close cousin friendfeed... Who knows, maybe some of the people on twitter or any other number of social network platform out there got the chance to hear the conversation between future Einstein and Tagore... I should definitely do a post on the development and practices of science in the internet age sometime soon.
As a bilingual one of the more interesting thing about twitter is how so many people outside traditional U.S. internet service sphere of influence seem to have no trouble picking up twitter and turning it into part of their daily routine. So far I believe I saw about seven different languages on twitter with their own little communities, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, a bit of Arab, and a number of languages I don't quite recognize. This is quite surprising that traditionally it's very difficult for a web service from one particular nation to break into other cultures/nations due to variety of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.
So here I am, thinking how would we be able to use this growing database of all sorts of different languages and cultures? How would twitter community and the twitter administrators be able to encourage such diverse usage demographic so that we have more people speaking multitudes of languages on a single network? My American friends might be unable to understand this but the fact is, despite the presence of the internet as an international unifying medium people from different cultures and languages tend to be locked into their own proprietary communications service protocols within it. For example, vast majority of internet users outside of America don't really use facebook. And vast majority of people outside America don't use Google as their default search engine. Likewise people in each respective internet ecosystem tend to use their own service that none of us have ever heard of. Twitter, for some odd reason, seem to be able to transcend that traditional barrier for some odd and as of yet unknown reason...
Would first step in such a venture be building a type of sorting engine into twitter capable of differentiating between different language input? And gradually grow that system into something capable of translating one 140 character snippet into another language of equal substance? The 140 character limitation might impose some interesting mechanism on the whole computer based automatic translations service.
... There seem to be something incredibly awesome at the end of this tunnel, but at the moment I seem to be rather incapable of figuring it out...
As a bilingual one of the more interesting thing about twitter is how so many people outside traditional U.S. internet service sphere of influence seem to have no trouble picking up twitter and turning it into part of their daily routine. So far I believe I saw about seven different languages on twitter with their own little communities, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, a bit of Arab, and a number of languages I don't quite recognize. This is quite surprising that traditionally it's very difficult for a web service from one particular nation to break into other cultures/nations due to variety of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.
So here I am, thinking how would we be able to use this growing database of all sorts of different languages and cultures? How would twitter community and the twitter administrators be able to encourage such diverse usage demographic so that we have more people speaking multitudes of languages on a single network? My American friends might be unable to understand this but the fact is, despite the presence of the internet as an international unifying medium people from different cultures and languages tend to be locked into their own proprietary communications service protocols within it. For example, vast majority of internet users outside of America don't really use facebook. And vast majority of people outside America don't use Google as their default search engine. Likewise people in each respective internet ecosystem tend to use their own service that none of us have ever heard of. Twitter, for some odd reason, seem to be able to transcend that traditional barrier for some odd and as of yet unknown reason...
Would first step in such a venture be building a type of sorting engine into twitter capable of differentiating between different language input? And gradually grow that system into something capable of translating one 140 character snippet into another language of equal substance? The 140 character limitation might impose some interesting mechanism on the whole computer based automatic translations service.
... There seem to be something incredibly awesome at the end of this tunnel, but at the moment I seem to be rather incapable of figuring it out...
Monday, August 31, 2009
Imagine Science Film Festival
Just a quick note before I doze off for tomorrow's work.
NYC, befitting its status as one of the more interesting places to live in around the world, is the host to this amazing event called the Imagine Science Film Festival. Now I'm nuts for all things science, but I especially love this festival in comparison to other science-y things to see and do around the city (with possible exception of DIYBio-NYC).
I personally believe that arts and sciences go hand in hand and that current division between the sciences and the 'humanities' is something of a temporary cultural aberration that we'll all look back and laugh at. And the kind of works I saw at last year's Imagine Science Film Festival events showed me a glimpse of what a future with sciences and humanities intermingled together might look like. It's not so much as the specifics of the individual films but the overarching theme pervading through the atmosphere of the whole festival itself that caught my attention. Perhaps it's the passion of the event organizers rubbing off on others watching the films. Perhaps it was just me realizing something I already had inside me through the mirror of projector screens.
If you're in the NYC area, make sure to check out the webpage for the imagine science films and mark the dates on the calenders (there's a screening benefit program this September 9th). Last year most of the screenings were free and I get a feeling that it will continue to be that way this year as well. If you're not in the NYC area, feel free to donate in return for some cool t-shirts ;) You'll be supporting a worthy cause.
And here's the festival trailer for your viewing pleasure.
NYC, befitting its status as one of the more interesting places to live in around the world, is the host to this amazing event called the Imagine Science Film Festival. Now I'm nuts for all things science, but I especially love this festival in comparison to other science-y things to see and do around the city (with possible exception of DIYBio-NYC).
I personally believe that arts and sciences go hand in hand and that current division between the sciences and the 'humanities' is something of a temporary cultural aberration that we'll all look back and laugh at. And the kind of works I saw at last year's Imagine Science Film Festival events showed me a glimpse of what a future with sciences and humanities intermingled together might look like. It's not so much as the specifics of the individual films but the overarching theme pervading through the atmosphere of the whole festival itself that caught my attention. Perhaps it's the passion of the event organizers rubbing off on others watching the films. Perhaps it was just me realizing something I already had inside me through the mirror of projector screens.
If you're in the NYC area, make sure to check out the webpage for the imagine science films and mark the dates on the calenders (there's a screening benefit program this September 9th). Last year most of the screenings were free and I get a feeling that it will continue to be that way this year as well. If you're not in the NYC area, feel free to donate in return for some cool t-shirts ;) You'll be supporting a worthy cause.
And here's the festival trailer for your viewing pleasure.
ISFF 2009 Trailer from Imagine Science Films on Vimeo.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Pi Cubed, the iPhone app
Just a little post on an awesome app I found on the twitter.
The application is called Pi cubed, and it's basically a calculator on iPhone that utilizes the touch interface. The description I'm giving here sounds depressingly simple, but you need to see this application in person in order to understand how cool it is, and how relatively mundane act of calculation can be made fun and interactive simply through some interface change.
Here is a video of the application in action via http://theapppodcast.com site.
As you can see, this isn't the kind of calculator designed to help you out with your pocket change. The support for formatting the equations of increasingly complex form to pdf or text output through email means that the application is aimed at students and possibly professional who might have some great ideas for equations on the go (though in that case the absence of LaTeX formatting is a little jarring). This application is obviously aiming to be a type of mobile Mathematica.
I'm a huge supporter of scientific apps on mobile platforms. I think the market for scientific applications on the increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets is a huge opportunity and is one of the things that might actually help in changing the world for the better by bringing the lab out of the universities and corporations. So the whole Mathematica-mobile aspect of this application, and inevitable coming of even more sophisticated mathematics/sciences packages for mobile platforms is exciting to me.
I just have one problem with this though. Why iPhone? iPhone isn't open. If you want to develop for an iPhone you need to clunk down for a computer capable of running OS X natively, and you use Apple proprietary toolset that no one else in the industry uses. The draconian app approval process and anti-competitive behavior at Apple had been making the headlines in tech communities lately. I guess this is just a market issue, but I find myself keep hoping for a decent Android based replacement for iPhones that developers can distribute their work for.
The application is called Pi cubed, and it's basically a calculator on iPhone that utilizes the touch interface. The description I'm giving here sounds depressingly simple, but you need to see this application in person in order to understand how cool it is, and how relatively mundane act of calculation can be made fun and interactive simply through some interface change.
Here is a video of the application in action via http://theapppodcast.com site.
As you can see, this isn't the kind of calculator designed to help you out with your pocket change. The support for formatting the equations of increasingly complex form to pdf or text output through email means that the application is aimed at students and possibly professional who might have some great ideas for equations on the go (though in that case the absence of LaTeX formatting is a little jarring). This application is obviously aiming to be a type of mobile Mathematica.
I'm a huge supporter of scientific apps on mobile platforms. I think the market for scientific applications on the increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets is a huge opportunity and is one of the things that might actually help in changing the world for the better by bringing the lab out of the universities and corporations. So the whole Mathematica-mobile aspect of this application, and inevitable coming of even more sophisticated mathematics/sciences packages for mobile platforms is exciting to me.
I just have one problem with this though. Why iPhone? iPhone isn't open. If you want to develop for an iPhone you need to clunk down for a computer capable of running OS X natively, and you use Apple proprietary toolset that no one else in the industry uses. The draconian app approval process and anti-competitive behavior at Apple had been making the headlines in tech communities lately. I guess this is just a market issue, but I find myself keep hoping for a decent Android based replacement for iPhones that developers can distribute their work for.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Synthetic Biology on KQED QUEST
Here are two videos on synthetic biology. The first one is a short introduction to synthetic biology produced by the wonderful people at KQED QUEST program, which goes into some level of detail on what synthetic biology is and what we are doing with it at the moment. Certainly worth some of your time if you're interested in this new exciting field of science.
QUEST on KQED Public Media.
QUEST on KQED Public Media.
The second video is the extended interview with Drew Endy available off their website... While the field of synthetic biology in the form we now know and love probably began with the efforts of Tom Knight at MIT, Drew Endy is certainly one of the most active and clear thinking proponents of the scientific field of synthetic biology.
QUEST on KQED Public Media.
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm really big on synthetic biology. I think it's one of the most exciting things happening in the sciences today, not just for biologists but for mathematicians and physicists in that synthetic biology might one day provide a comprehensive toolset for studying the most complex physical system known to humanity so far... That of complex life-like systems.
I also believe that abstraction driven synthetic biology cannot manifest without a reasonably sized community of beta-testers willing and able to use the new parts and devices within original systems of their own creation. Computer languages like python and ruby needed efforts of hundreds of developers working in conjunction with each other for a multiple years to get where they are today. Complete operating system like Linux took longer with even larger base of developers and we still have usability issues. Synthetic biology must deal with systems that are even more complex than most computerized systems, so it's not unreasonable to think that we'll be needing an even wider deployment of the technology to the public and active community involvement in order to make it work as engineering capable system.
So I am a little dismayed, along with legions of other people who were initially excited by the promises of synthetic biology in conjunction with diybio community, to find that access to BioBrick parts and iGEM competition is severely limited against any amateur biology group operating outside conventional academic circles.
You see, unlike computer programming, constructing synthetic biology systems require BioBrick parts from the registry of standard biological parts. Right now it is next to impossible for diy-biologist interested in synthetic biology to get his or her hands on the BioBrick components through proper channels. The DIYBio-NYC group alone had quite a few number of people lose interest because of uncertain future aspects of being allowed access to the BioBrick parts and talking to people from around the world on that issue I'm beginning to think that there are a lot more of such cases. So far the major reasoning behind the restricted access seem to be the safety issue, but considering that the regular chassis used to put together BioBrick parts is based on academic strains of E.Coli that are even more harmless than your average skin cell I can't see much wisdom in restricting access to the parts on basis of safety.
The bottom line is, the state of synthetic biology and BioBricks foundation at the moment is forcing a lot of people, some of them quite talented, who are enthused about contributing to a new emerging field of science to back down in either confusion or disappointment. Considering that the very structure of synthetic biology itself demands some level of public deployment to stress-test and demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of its individual parts and devices (with creation of those individual parts and devices left to the highly trained professionals at up scale laboratories) this is highly unusual state of affair that is not motivated by science behind synthetic biology. I might even go as far as to say it has the distinct aftertaste of political calculations of public relations kind.
The field of synthetic biology will never achieve its true potential unless the BioBricks foundation and iGEM administrators come up with some way for people outside traditional academy settings to participate in real design and construction of synthetic biology systems.
QUEST on KQED Public Media.
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm really big on synthetic biology. I think it's one of the most exciting things happening in the sciences today, not just for biologists but for mathematicians and physicists in that synthetic biology might one day provide a comprehensive toolset for studying the most complex physical system known to humanity so far... That of complex life-like systems.
I also believe that abstraction driven synthetic biology cannot manifest without a reasonably sized community of beta-testers willing and able to use the new parts and devices within original systems of their own creation. Computer languages like python and ruby needed efforts of hundreds of developers working in conjunction with each other for a multiple years to get where they are today. Complete operating system like Linux took longer with even larger base of developers and we still have usability issues. Synthetic biology must deal with systems that are even more complex than most computerized systems, so it's not unreasonable to think that we'll be needing an even wider deployment of the technology to the public and active community involvement in order to make it work as engineering capable system.
So I am a little dismayed, along with legions of other people who were initially excited by the promises of synthetic biology in conjunction with diybio community, to find that access to BioBrick parts and iGEM competition is severely limited against any amateur biology group operating outside conventional academic circles.
You see, unlike computer programming, constructing synthetic biology systems require BioBrick parts from the registry of standard biological parts. Right now it is next to impossible for diy-biologist interested in synthetic biology to get his or her hands on the BioBrick components through proper channels. The DIYBio-NYC group alone had quite a few number of people lose interest because of uncertain future aspects of being allowed access to the BioBrick parts and talking to people from around the world on that issue I'm beginning to think that there are a lot more of such cases. So far the major reasoning behind the restricted access seem to be the safety issue, but considering that the regular chassis used to put together BioBrick parts is based on academic strains of E.Coli that are even more harmless than your average skin cell I can't see much wisdom in restricting access to the parts on basis of safety.
The bottom line is, the state of synthetic biology and BioBricks foundation at the moment is forcing a lot of people, some of them quite talented, who are enthused about contributing to a new emerging field of science to back down in either confusion or disappointment. Considering that the very structure of synthetic biology itself demands some level of public deployment to stress-test and demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of its individual parts and devices (with creation of those individual parts and devices left to the highly trained professionals at up scale laboratories) this is highly unusual state of affair that is not motivated by science behind synthetic biology. I might even go as far as to say it has the distinct aftertaste of political calculations of public relations kind.
The field of synthetic biology will never achieve its true potential unless the BioBricks foundation and iGEM administrators come up with some way for people outside traditional academy settings to participate in real design and construction of synthetic biology systems.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Whole Foods CEO on UHC
UHC, of course, refers to the universal health care, which seem to be the hot topic these days. There are lots of arguments flying around on both sides of the health care reform and universal healthcare in America, some of them more reasonable than the other.
Well, I just though I'd share an interesting article I read on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial on the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, the CEO argues that the constitution does not make guarantees on the life and health of the individual citizens, so it's not the business of the government to get involved in health care. He alternatively suggests that people buy and eat from Whole Foods market for preventive health care.
Now mind you, this is a blog post by a college student (with our infamous liberal leanings) with a bitter memory of childhood torn by his father's kidney transplant surgery. So yes, I'm all for universal health care. It wasn't' easy watching my mother trying to pay $4700 per month hospitalization fee during my father's dialysis period, and it wasn't easy selling practically everything we owned to pay for his surgery.
There's something really odd when I hear people talking against universal health care. What's exactly bad about it? Most other developed countries in the world have it like Sweden, Japan, and Germany, and they seem to like it. I experienced it first-hand when I lived in South Korea, and I liked it too. With the billions (if not more) the U.S. government's already spending on health care insurance companies, it should be possible to run some form of universal health care in this country as well... And yes, you're reading this correctly. The U.S. government already spends quite a sizable amount of money on health insurance companies. In fact, U.S. government spends the most amount of money on health care out of all the developed nations in the world, and has the least number of people covered with least life expectancy out of all the OECD nations. Something a lot of those people at the 'town hall meetings' seem to conveniently ignore.
But that's not all. If it's a simple matter of getting the data out most people out there should be proponents of universal health care system by now. If they were actually interested in providing good health care, whether private or government mandated, they should be combing through the proposed health care reform bill pointing out excesses (I'm sure there are some) in the list and pointing out improvements. But it's not happening. The most extensive combing-through of the health care bill done by its opponents so far concentrated on the clause on hospice care counseling, labeling it as 'death panel.' Well from what I'm seeing the same hospice care counseling is included as a part of standard employee coverage package from many private insurance companies (in this episode of the Colbert Report, the UHC proponent Jonathan Cohn points out that employees of the Colbert Report show are all covered by contracts with the so-called 'death panel' clause).
The opponents of the health care reform seem to be against the 'idea' of any kind of change made by the Obama administration regardless the real benefits or disadvantages resulting from the change... However, do they truly believe that low confidence in certain regime and certain political characters is enough reason to reject a bill that might end up saving thousands if not millions of lives in this country? Are human lives so fickle and worthless that they can be thrown out for the sake of political rhetoric?
Then there are people like John Mackey. The kind of people who believe that government has no business ensuring the well-being of its citizens. Such arguments usually go hand-in-hand with the kind of low-brow, thinly veiled suggestion that people who cannot afford conventional health care, notably the ones in lower income bracket, are probably not worth helping. While such notion might work with running a corporation, it would be a mistake to think such attitude scales to the level of national governance. Maybe Mr. John Mackey leaves mess around his house. Maybe Mr. John Mackey like to target practice in his personal property. Such behaviors are perfectly legal in his own personal microcosm. However, if Mr. John Mackey applies that same behavior to public properties by leaving garbage around the City Hall offices and performing target practice in the crowded Times Square... The results would be disturbing.
If there's one thing I've learned during the history courses through my high school years, it's that nations come and go. Contrary to some popular belief there is no natural law that states the United States of America will exist regardless of how its members treat each other. This nation only exists because there is a united will and cycle of trust and responsibility. If a national government that collects taxes and enforces its codes of law cannot take care of the very basic well-being of its citizens, why should they be loyal to the country? Never mind the capacity. If the government does not even have the will to safeguard its citizenry why should they be loyal to that government? Why should they go out to wars and die to protect that country? It's a very simple matter of loyalty. If the government itself insists on not providing for its citizens certain level of amenities required for the very basic act of survival (we're not talking about luxury condos or spa vacation here, folks. Just staying alive), the said government cannot possibly expect the same citizenry to follow its rules of law, perhaps except through application of force. Sensible people usually call that oppression. Sensible people don't kill people and rob stores because they are scared of getting hurt in the process. They don't do it because it's morally objectionable, and because they have faith in continuation of the society in which they are members.
I am profoundly disturbed by some people coming out of the woodwork for the universal health care debate, by their blatant lack of respect for human dignity and lack of concern for the well being of their fellow human beings... And in the case of Mr.John Mackey, the horrible financial sense in suggesting that buying overpriced groceries is a replacement for genuine health care system.
Well, I just though I'd share an interesting article I read on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial on the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, the CEO argues that the constitution does not make guarantees on the life and health of the individual citizens, so it's not the business of the government to get involved in health care. He alternatively suggests that people buy and eat from Whole Foods market for preventive health care.
Now mind you, this is a blog post by a college student (with our infamous liberal leanings) with a bitter memory of childhood torn by his father's kidney transplant surgery. So yes, I'm all for universal health care. It wasn't' easy watching my mother trying to pay $4700 per month hospitalization fee during my father's dialysis period, and it wasn't easy selling practically everything we owned to pay for his surgery.
There's something really odd when I hear people talking against universal health care. What's exactly bad about it? Most other developed countries in the world have it like Sweden, Japan, and Germany, and they seem to like it. I experienced it first-hand when I lived in South Korea, and I liked it too. With the billions (if not more) the U.S. government's already spending on health care insurance companies, it should be possible to run some form of universal health care in this country as well... And yes, you're reading this correctly. The U.S. government already spends quite a sizable amount of money on health insurance companies. In fact, U.S. government spends the most amount of money on health care out of all the developed nations in the world, and has the least number of people covered with least life expectancy out of all the OECD nations. Something a lot of those people at the 'town hall meetings' seem to conveniently ignore.
But that's not all. If it's a simple matter of getting the data out most people out there should be proponents of universal health care system by now. If they were actually interested in providing good health care, whether private or government mandated, they should be combing through the proposed health care reform bill pointing out excesses (I'm sure there are some) in the list and pointing out improvements. But it's not happening. The most extensive combing-through of the health care bill done by its opponents so far concentrated on the clause on hospice care counseling, labeling it as 'death panel.' Well from what I'm seeing the same hospice care counseling is included as a part of standard employee coverage package from many private insurance companies (in this episode of the Colbert Report, the UHC proponent Jonathan Cohn points out that employees of the Colbert Report show are all covered by contracts with the so-called 'death panel' clause).
The opponents of the health care reform seem to be against the 'idea' of any kind of change made by the Obama administration regardless the real benefits or disadvantages resulting from the change... However, do they truly believe that low confidence in certain regime and certain political characters is enough reason to reject a bill that might end up saving thousands if not millions of lives in this country? Are human lives so fickle and worthless that they can be thrown out for the sake of political rhetoric?
Then there are people like John Mackey. The kind of people who believe that government has no business ensuring the well-being of its citizens. Such arguments usually go hand-in-hand with the kind of low-brow, thinly veiled suggestion that people who cannot afford conventional health care, notably the ones in lower income bracket, are probably not worth helping. While such notion might work with running a corporation, it would be a mistake to think such attitude scales to the level of national governance. Maybe Mr. John Mackey leaves mess around his house. Maybe Mr. John Mackey like to target practice in his personal property. Such behaviors are perfectly legal in his own personal microcosm. However, if Mr. John Mackey applies that same behavior to public properties by leaving garbage around the City Hall offices and performing target practice in the crowded Times Square... The results would be disturbing.
If there's one thing I've learned during the history courses through my high school years, it's that nations come and go. Contrary to some popular belief there is no natural law that states the United States of America will exist regardless of how its members treat each other. This nation only exists because there is a united will and cycle of trust and responsibility. If a national government that collects taxes and enforces its codes of law cannot take care of the very basic well-being of its citizens, why should they be loyal to the country? Never mind the capacity. If the government does not even have the will to safeguard its citizenry why should they be loyal to that government? Why should they go out to wars and die to protect that country? It's a very simple matter of loyalty. If the government itself insists on not providing for its citizens certain level of amenities required for the very basic act of survival (we're not talking about luxury condos or spa vacation here, folks. Just staying alive), the said government cannot possibly expect the same citizenry to follow its rules of law, perhaps except through application of force. Sensible people usually call that oppression. Sensible people don't kill people and rob stores because they are scared of getting hurt in the process. They don't do it because it's morally objectionable, and because they have faith in continuation of the society in which they are members.
I am profoundly disturbed by some people coming out of the woodwork for the universal health care debate, by their blatant lack of respect for human dignity and lack of concern for the well being of their fellow human beings... And in the case of Mr.John Mackey, the horrible financial sense in suggesting that buying overpriced groceries is a replacement for genuine health care system.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
How to change the world Rev.
This is a minor revision of the how to change the world post I made a while ago.
I still think most of the stuff I've written here are quite relevant. The importance of science and access to science for the general public in the coming age will decide the path of the future. And reliance on computing intensive coding for things that should not be computing intensive in the first place would be IT equivalent to driving a Hummer to a grocery store 3 blocks away.
The information superhighway is more or less in place. It's upto us to decide what that infrastructure will be used for.
This is a bit of rant post on something I thought of after watching bunch of old hacker-themed movies from the Hollywood. It continues to amaze me how I can participate in all sorts of crazy things even with the summer studies and jobs I need to keep up with. I guess that's the benefit of living in place like NYC.
I've been watching some old hacker movies lately. And I just can't believe what kind of cool things those movie hackers were able to pull off with their now decades-old computers and laptops. Computers with interfaces and hardware that exudes that retro feel even across the projector screen. I know a lot of people with brand-spanking-new computers with state of the art hardwares and what they usually do, or can do with those machines aren't as cool as the stuff on the movies being pulled off with vastly inferior hardware and network access. Of course, like everything in life it would be insane to compare the real with the imagined, and Hollywood movies have a bad tendency to exaggerate and blow things out of proportion (I'm just waiting for that next dumb movie with synthetic biology as a culprit, though it might not happen since Hollywood's been barking about indecency of genetic engineering technology for decades now). Even with that in mind, I can't help but feel that the modern computerized society is just way too different from the ones imagined by artists and technologists of the old.
Ever heard of younger Steve Jobs talking in one of his interviews? He might have been a rather nasty person but he certainly believed that ubiquitous personal computing will change the world for the better. Not one of those gradual, natural changes either. He actually believed that it's going to accelerate the humanity itself, very much like how Kurzweil is preaching about the end of modernity with the upcoming singularity. Well, personal computing is nothing new these days. It's actually quite stale until about a few months ago when people finally found out glut-ridden software with no apparent advantage in functionality were bad things, both in terms of user experience and economics. Ever since then they've been coming out with some interesting experiments like the atom chipset for netbooks (as well as netbooks themselves), and Nvidia Ion system for all sorts of stuff I can't even begin to describe. And even with the deluge of personal computing in the world we have yet to see the kind of dramatic and intense changes we were promised so long ago. Yeah sure, the world's slowly getting better, or changing at least. It's all there when you take some time off and run the real numbers. It's getting a little bit better as time goes on, and things are definitely changing like some slow-moving river. But this isn't the future we were promised so long ago. This isn't the future people actually wanted to create.
We have engines of information running in every household and many cellphones right now. Engines of information meaning all sorts of machinery that can be used to create and process information content. Not just client-side consumption device where the user folks money over to some company to get little pieces of pixels or whatever, but real engines of information that's capable of creating as well as consuming using all of the hardware capabilities. It's like this is the Victorian Era, and everyone had steam engine built into everything they can think of. And nothing happened. No steam cars, no steam blimps, no nothing. The world's rolling at the same pace as before and most people still think in the same narrow minded niches of their own. What's going on here? Never had such a huge number of 'engines' responsible for creating an era in history been available to so many people at once. And that's not all. Truly ubiquitous computing made available by advances in information technology is almost here, and it is very likely that it will soon spread to the poorer parts of the world and remoter parts of the globe traditionally cut off from conventional infrastructures.
But yet again, no change. No dice. Again, what's happening here, and what's wrong with this picture? Why aren't we changing the world using computers at vastly accelerated rate like how we changed the world with rapid industrialization (not necessarily for the better, of course)? That's right. Even compared to the industrialization of the old times with its relatively limited availability and utility of the steam engines we are falling behind on the pace of the change of the world. No matter what angle you take there is something wrong in our world. Something isn't quite working right.
So I began to think during the hacker movie screening and by the time the movie finished I was faced with one possible answer to the question of how we'll change the world using engines of information. How to take back the future from spambots, 'social gurus', and unlimited porn.
The answer is science. The only way to utilize the engines of information to change the world in its tangible form is science. We need to find a way to bring sciences to the masses. We need to make them do it, participate in it, and maybe even learn it, as outlandish as the notion might sound to some people out there. We need to remodel the whole thing from the ground-up, change what people automatically think of when they hear the term 'science'. We also need the tools for the engines of information. We need some software based tools so that people can do science everywhere there is a computer, and do it better everywhere there is a computer and an internet connection. And we need to make it so that all of those applications/services can run on a netbook spec'd computer. That's right. Unless you're doing serious 3D modeling or serious number-crunching you should be able to do scientific stuff on a netbook. Operating systems and applications that need 2GB of ram to display a cool visual effect of scrolling text based documents are the blight of the world. One day we will look back at those practices and gasp in horror at how far they held the world back from the future.
As for actual scientific applications, that's where I have problems. I know there are already a plethora of services and applications out there catering to openness and science integrated with the web. Openwetware and other synthetic biology related computer applications and services come to mind. Synthetic biology is a discipline fundamentally tied to usage of computer, accessibility to outside repositories and communities, and large amateur community for beta testing their biological programming languages. It makes sense that it's one of the foremost fields of sciences that are open to the public and offers number of very compelling design packages for working with real biological systems. But we can do more. We can set up international computing support for amateur rocketry and satellite management, using low-cost platforms like the CubeSat. I saw a launching of a privately funded rocket into the Earth's orbit through a webcam embedded into the rocket itself. I actually saw the space from the point of view of the rocket sitting in my bedroom with my laptop as it left the coils of the Earth and floated into the space with its payload. And this is nothing new. All of this is perfectly trivial, and is of such technical ease that it can be done by a private company instead of national governments. And most of the basic the peripheral management for such operations can be done on a netbook given sufficient degree of software engineering and reliable network connection. There are other scientific applications that I can rattle on and on without pause, and there are plenty of people out there much better versed in sciences who can probably come up with even cooler ideas... So why isn't this happening? Why aren't we doing this? Why are we forcing people to live in an imaginary jail cell where the next big thing consists of scantily clad men/women showing off their multi-million dollar homes with no aesthetic value or ingenuity whatsoever? Am I the only one who thinks the outlook of the world increasingly resembles some massive crime against humanity? It's a crime to lock up a child in a basement and force him/her to watch crap on T.V., but when we do that to all of humanity suddenly it's to be expected?
We have possibilities and opportunities just lying around for the next ambitious hacker-otaku to come along and take. But they will simply remain as possibilities unless people get to work with it. We need softwares and people who write softwares. We need academics willing to delve into the mysterious labyrinths of the sciences and regurgitate it in user-friendly format for the masses to consume, with enough nutrient in it that interested people can actually do something with it.
This should be a wake-up call to the tinkerers and hackers everywhere. Stop fighting over which programming language is better than others. Stop with the lethargic sarcasm and smell the coffee. Learn real science and hack it to pieces like any other system out there.
Get to work.
Change the world.
I still think most of the stuff I've written here are quite relevant. The importance of science and access to science for the general public in the coming age will decide the path of the future. And reliance on computing intensive coding for things that should not be computing intensive in the first place would be IT equivalent to driving a Hummer to a grocery store 3 blocks away.
The information superhighway is more or less in place. It's upto us to decide what that infrastructure will be used for.
This is a bit of rant post on something I thought of after watching bunch of old hacker-themed movies from the Hollywood. It continues to amaze me how I can participate in all sorts of crazy things even with the summer studies and jobs I need to keep up with. I guess that's the benefit of living in place like NYC.
I've been watching some old hacker movies lately. And I just can't believe what kind of cool things those movie hackers were able to pull off with their now decades-old computers and laptops. Computers with interfaces and hardware that exudes that retro feel even across the projector screen. I know a lot of people with brand-spanking-new computers with state of the art hardwares and what they usually do, or can do with those machines aren't as cool as the stuff on the movies being pulled off with vastly inferior hardware and network access. Of course, like everything in life it would be insane to compare the real with the imagined, and Hollywood movies have a bad tendency to exaggerate and blow things out of proportion (I'm just waiting for that next dumb movie with synthetic biology as a culprit, though it might not happen since Hollywood's been barking about indecency of genetic engineering technology for decades now). Even with that in mind, I can't help but feel that the modern computerized society is just way too different from the ones imagined by artists and technologists of the old.
Ever heard of younger Steve Jobs talking in one of his interviews? He might have been a rather nasty person but he certainly believed that ubiquitous personal computing will change the world for the better. Not one of those gradual, natural changes either. He actually believed that it's going to accelerate the humanity itself, very much like how Kurzweil is preaching about the end of modernity with the upcoming singularity. Well, personal computing is nothing new these days. It's actually quite stale until about a few months ago when people finally found out glut-ridden software with no apparent advantage in functionality were bad things, both in terms of user experience and economics. Ever since then they've been coming out with some interesting experiments like the atom chipset for netbooks (as well as netbooks themselves), and Nvidia Ion system for all sorts of stuff I can't even begin to describe. And even with the deluge of personal computing in the world we have yet to see the kind of dramatic and intense changes we were promised so long ago. Yeah sure, the world's slowly getting better, or changing at least. It's all there when you take some time off and run the real numbers. It's getting a little bit better as time goes on, and things are definitely changing like some slow-moving river. But this isn't the future we were promised so long ago. This isn't the future people actually wanted to create.
We have engines of information running in every household and many cellphones right now. Engines of information meaning all sorts of machinery that can be used to create and process information content. Not just client-side consumption device where the user folks money over to some company to get little pieces of pixels or whatever, but real engines of information that's capable of creating as well as consuming using all of the hardware capabilities. It's like this is the Victorian Era, and everyone had steam engine built into everything they can think of. And nothing happened. No steam cars, no steam blimps, no nothing. The world's rolling at the same pace as before and most people still think in the same narrow minded niches of their own. What's going on here? Never had such a huge number of 'engines' responsible for creating an era in history been available to so many people at once. And that's not all. Truly ubiquitous computing made available by advances in information technology is almost here, and it is very likely that it will soon spread to the poorer parts of the world and remoter parts of the globe traditionally cut off from conventional infrastructures.
But yet again, no change. No dice. Again, what's happening here, and what's wrong with this picture? Why aren't we changing the world using computers at vastly accelerated rate like how we changed the world with rapid industrialization (not necessarily for the better, of course)? That's right. Even compared to the industrialization of the old times with its relatively limited availability and utility of the steam engines we are falling behind on the pace of the change of the world. No matter what angle you take there is something wrong in our world. Something isn't quite working right.
So I began to think during the hacker movie screening and by the time the movie finished I was faced with one possible answer to the question of how we'll change the world using engines of information. How to take back the future from spambots, 'social gurus', and unlimited porn.
The answer is science. The only way to utilize the engines of information to change the world in its tangible form is science. We need to find a way to bring sciences to the masses. We need to make them do it, participate in it, and maybe even learn it, as outlandish as the notion might sound to some people out there. We need to remodel the whole thing from the ground-up, change what people automatically think of when they hear the term 'science'. We also need the tools for the engines of information. We need some software based tools so that people can do science everywhere there is a computer, and do it better everywhere there is a computer and an internet connection. And we need to make it so that all of those applications/services can run on a netbook spec'd computer. That's right. Unless you're doing serious 3D modeling or serious number-crunching you should be able to do scientific stuff on a netbook. Operating systems and applications that need 2GB of ram to display a cool visual effect of scrolling text based documents are the blight of the world. One day we will look back at those practices and gasp in horror at how far they held the world back from the future.
As for actual scientific applications, that's where I have problems. I know there are already a plethora of services and applications out there catering to openness and science integrated with the web. Openwetware and other synthetic biology related computer applications and services come to mind. Synthetic biology is a discipline fundamentally tied to usage of computer, accessibility to outside repositories and communities, and large amateur community for beta testing their biological programming languages. It makes sense that it's one of the foremost fields of sciences that are open to the public and offers number of very compelling design packages for working with real biological systems. But we can do more. We can set up international computing support for amateur rocketry and satellite management, using low-cost platforms like the CubeSat. I saw a launching of a privately funded rocket into the Earth's orbit through a webcam embedded into the rocket itself. I actually saw the space from the point of view of the rocket sitting in my bedroom with my laptop as it left the coils of the Earth and floated into the space with its payload. And this is nothing new. All of this is perfectly trivial, and is of such technical ease that it can be done by a private company instead of national governments. And most of the basic the peripheral management for such operations can be done on a netbook given sufficient degree of software engineering and reliable network connection. There are other scientific applications that I can rattle on and on without pause, and there are plenty of people out there much better versed in sciences who can probably come up with even cooler ideas... So why isn't this happening? Why aren't we doing this? Why are we forcing people to live in an imaginary jail cell where the next big thing consists of scantily clad men/women showing off their multi-million dollar homes with no aesthetic value or ingenuity whatsoever? Am I the only one who thinks the outlook of the world increasingly resembles some massive crime against humanity? It's a crime to lock up a child in a basement and force him/her to watch crap on T.V., but when we do that to all of humanity suddenly it's to be expected?
We have possibilities and opportunities just lying around for the next ambitious hacker-otaku to come along and take. But they will simply remain as possibilities unless people get to work with it. We need softwares and people who write softwares. We need academics willing to delve into the mysterious labyrinths of the sciences and regurgitate it in user-friendly format for the masses to consume, with enough nutrient in it that interested people can actually do something with it.
This should be a wake-up call to the tinkerers and hackers everywhere. Stop fighting over which programming language is better than others. Stop with the lethargic sarcasm and smell the coffee. Learn real science and hack it to pieces like any other system out there.
Get to work.
Change the world.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
NASA proposal to move the planet.
Scientists at NASA are discussing an interesting theoretical exercise in cooling off the Earth, by moving it further away from the Sun. According to their calculation it is possible to move the Earth to another orbit through controlled impact with a few meteors, which will end up prolonging the useful lifespan of the planet by about six billion years, effectively doubling it's life.
Sure, the bit with meteoric impact has me wondering if anything will be alive in that cooler planet, but still, this means that it is possible to work out the numbers for artificially engineering an existing planet's condition. It's all theoretically possible, and not at all far fetched.
Me, I'm interested in seeing this idea applied to other large masses floating around the solar system. Maybe sometime in the distant future we'll capture an asteroid the size of a planet, like the one as large as the Earth that recently impacted against Jupiter. Maybe we'll slam other large masses at the asteroid through careful application of rockets and mass drivers, putting it into a synchronous orbit around the Earth. We'll mine the asteroid for its rich minerals and other natural resources, gradually turning it into a habitable planet with its own wonders and mysteries.
Fast forward another thousand years, and such planetary system building exercise had become so trivial that you can take a course in universities (assuming they're still around in some form) for planetary systems engineering. Maybe people will even begin to see it's utility beyond resource and land grabbing. People will begin to construct large stars held together by the bonds of gravitation, slowly turning the universe into a large architecture, with myriads of different cultures and ideologies dwelling within its arches and bases.
What will happen to nationalities and histories in such a world?
Sure, the bit with meteoric impact has me wondering if anything will be alive in that cooler planet, but still, this means that it is possible to work out the numbers for artificially engineering an existing planet's condition. It's all theoretically possible, and not at all far fetched.
Me, I'm interested in seeing this idea applied to other large masses floating around the solar system. Maybe sometime in the distant future we'll capture an asteroid the size of a planet, like the one as large as the Earth that recently impacted against Jupiter. Maybe we'll slam other large masses at the asteroid through careful application of rockets and mass drivers, putting it into a synchronous orbit around the Earth. We'll mine the asteroid for its rich minerals and other natural resources, gradually turning it into a habitable planet with its own wonders and mysteries.
Fast forward another thousand years, and such planetary system building exercise had become so trivial that you can take a course in universities (assuming they're still around in some form) for planetary systems engineering. Maybe people will even begin to see it's utility beyond resource and land grabbing. People will begin to construct large stars held together by the bonds of gravitation, slowly turning the universe into a large architecture, with myriads of different cultures and ideologies dwelling within its arches and bases.
What will happen to nationalities and histories in such a world?
Meteor Shower tonight!
According to the information gleamed from the twitter, tonight is the night of the biggest meteor shower of this year.
The meteor shower will be visible starting around early evening lights of 9~PM, peaking at 1 AM. I'm certainly looking forward to staying up late and checking out the shower of the stars. It's only feels like yesterday that I checked out the solar Eclipse and first private rocket/satellite launch through web feed, it's good to finally get a chance to check out the spatial event with my own eyes.
I just hope all the light pollution from Manhattan doesn't get in the way too much...
The meteor shower will be visible starting around early evening lights of 9~PM, peaking at 1 AM. I'm certainly looking forward to staying up late and checking out the shower of the stars. It's only feels like yesterday that I checked out the solar Eclipse and first private rocket/satellite launch through web feed, it's good to finally get a chance to check out the spatial event with my own eyes.
I just hope all the light pollution from Manhattan doesn't get in the way too much...
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Lectures and Presentations
Long time no see on the blogosphere. I've been busy during the summer with all the usual stuff, mostly learning and working. I'm glad to say that I've almost finished the Exploring Complexity: An Introduction
book during the summer, and I was even able to get some of the mathematics out of the way. I think I was able to model a pretty neat animation on some of the methods demonstrated in the book, and I'll try to post it soon.
I've also been saving up for going skydiving before the summer's over... I've always dreamed of the skies (my first choice in college education was majoring in aeronautics, never quite made it though), so it's only natural that I do something that involves full-contact with the air up there. Living on the student budget means that I have to work some extra jobs for that though. Some a bit more crazier than the others.
And of course, there's always the DIYBio NYC. I've been trying to come up with some decent ideas, but everything I can think of at the moment mostly revolves around the kind of project that would require some sort of dedicated labspace. All I can do at the moment is to prepare for that inevitable day when we'll obtain access to a labspace through independent studies. Some of the things I've talked about the members during a recent meeting regarding the state of the group and the processes that are involved in constructing artificial vesicles were very enlightening, and I intend to do a full-length post about that some time in the near future.
On to the main post...
During today's twitter and identi.ca browsing I happened upon some interesting resources for scientists and potential scientists.
The first one is a collection of links and documents on how to prepare a scientific presentation. I haven't had the time to read through it yet, but I know some of the posts on the list, and if the rest are like the ones I know, they are definitely worth a read, especially for an aspiring scientist like me. It's amazing just how many things are involved in preparing a half-way decent presentation, and how most people are just plain terrible at it. I've sat through my share of lectures/symposiums/conferences and there's nothing more painful than a horrible presentation with irrational powerpoint.
The second resource I want to share with you is osgrid. It's a virtual environment tool like the second life except that it's opensource. It's relatively simple to download the environment and run it off your own servers, though it also means that you 'need' to run it on your own server for the whole thing to work. I'm really interested in finding out how this environment can be used for scientific research. Perhaps virtual laboratories running off university computer clusters? Open educations tool like a virtual university? A method for scientists to interact with their own 3D datasets in clean and intuitive manner? There are plenty of possibilities out there.
... I can also think of a few ways to utilize some of the stuff for the DIYBio community.
book during the summer, and I was even able to get some of the mathematics out of the way. I think I was able to model a pretty neat animation on some of the methods demonstrated in the book, and I'll try to post it soon.I've also been saving up for going skydiving before the summer's over... I've always dreamed of the skies (my first choice in college education was majoring in aeronautics, never quite made it though), so it's only natural that I do something that involves full-contact with the air up there. Living on the student budget means that I have to work some extra jobs for that though. Some a bit more crazier than the others.
And of course, there's always the DIYBio NYC. I've been trying to come up with some decent ideas, but everything I can think of at the moment mostly revolves around the kind of project that would require some sort of dedicated labspace. All I can do at the moment is to prepare for that inevitable day when we'll obtain access to a labspace through independent studies. Some of the things I've talked about the members during a recent meeting regarding the state of the group and the processes that are involved in constructing artificial vesicles were very enlightening, and I intend to do a full-length post about that some time in the near future.
On to the main post...
During today's twitter and identi.ca browsing I happened upon some interesting resources for scientists and potential scientists.
The first one is a collection of links and documents on how to prepare a scientific presentation. I haven't had the time to read through it yet, but I know some of the posts on the list, and if the rest are like the ones I know, they are definitely worth a read, especially for an aspiring scientist like me. It's amazing just how many things are involved in preparing a half-way decent presentation, and how most people are just plain terrible at it. I've sat through my share of lectures/symposiums/conferences and there's nothing more painful than a horrible presentation with irrational powerpoint.
The second resource I want to share with you is osgrid. It's a virtual environment tool like the second life except that it's opensource. It's relatively simple to download the environment and run it off your own servers, though it also means that you 'need' to run it on your own server for the whole thing to work. I'm really interested in finding out how this environment can be used for scientific research. Perhaps virtual laboratories running off university computer clusters? Open educations tool like a virtual university? A method for scientists to interact with their own 3D datasets in clean and intuitive manner? There are plenty of possibilities out there.
... I can also think of a few ways to utilize some of the stuff for the DIYBio community.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Synthetic Biology interlude
This blog is currently underconstruction, since I wanted to port all the posts on my previous blog on livejournal over here before I wrote anything new (a tiresome process since Blogger only allows 50 entries per day, and I have about 280~300 posts that are waiting to be imported).
Well I'm afraid I'm going to have to break the rule here because I found something that's really just too awesome to wait.
There's a six hour lecture/presentation by George Church and Craig Venter on the Edge website right now. It's about the most rigorous introduction to the field of synthetic biology on the net in continuous video format at the moment, given by two of the most brilliant minds in the field. If you have even a modicum of interest in synthetic biology, you should run and watch the video right now... I'm trying to find a way to download the vids so I can watch them on my iPod.
This is a refreshing change of pace from all the synthetic biology stuff on the net targeted at broader audience, most of which tend to focus on conceptual sides of synthetic biology instead of the technical background that makes it so alluring.
Abundance of educational data on the net these days is staggering, compared to the days of my prepubescent web surfing days when everything revolved around telephone modem connection and American Online services actually mattered. If only I had access to this caliber of information during those days.
Well I'm afraid I'm going to have to break the rule here because I found something that's really just too awesome to wait.
There's a six hour lecture/presentation by George Church and Craig Venter on the Edge website right now. It's about the most rigorous introduction to the field of synthetic biology on the net in continuous video format at the moment, given by two of the most brilliant minds in the field. If you have even a modicum of interest in synthetic biology, you should run and watch the video right now... I'm trying to find a way to download the vids so I can watch them on my iPod.
This is a refreshing change of pace from all the synthetic biology stuff on the net targeted at broader audience, most of which tend to focus on conceptual sides of synthetic biology instead of the technical background that makes it so alluring.
Abundance of educational data on the net these days is staggering, compared to the days of my prepubescent web surfing days when everything revolved around telephone modem connection and American Online services actually mattered. If only I had access to this caliber of information during those days.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Morning
It's a sunny morning on Thursday, and like before I haven't caught a wink of sleep. Will I be able to look sick enough to get out of work early today as well? I don't know. At least I finally manages to be productive in this particular insomniac binge.
I'm in a very complex love-hate relationship with my laptop. I like it for being retro in a strangely stylish way. I like it's awesome keyboard that's actually a step above pratically all the competition out there. I like how the thing had been running on battery power since one in the morning and now it's... 7:30 in the morning. Pretty darn durable for a laptop with dedicated graphics card.
But then there are some serious issues with this machine. Like the irrational behavior of some of the lenovo patched drivers in sleep-wake cycle. Or how my wallpaper disappears whenever I use the battery stretch mode. Most of all, I hate how flaky the ATI driver for the dedicated graphics card on this machine is. It gave me two BSoD last night due to amdkmp driver crash (that Lenovo's been 'working on' since last year at least) and another one as a sort of graphics driver related cascading failure showing the dreaded NMI/memory parity error. The same exact BSoD message I received before my last dell's motherboard fried to a crisp due to faulty die casting of the GPU. I never get any errors when I'm using the intel integrated graphics mode which probably uses 4500HD chipset, but why should I settle for the crappy integrated chip when I paid good money for dedicated graphics solution? If I wanted a laptop that will just run off of intel IGP I would have bought much cheaper, and light laptop... Though to be fair cheap/light laptop with 1440x900 resolution is a rarity these days for some reason. The manufacturers including Apple are still sticking with crummy 1280x800 resolution for ~13in screen solutions. Way behind the times those people.
Ok, I'll be honest. This laptop's still pretty good running on intel IGP. Things I do for work don't usually need dedicated GPU unit with separate ram. They need processing power, and this 2.5GHz core 2 duo machine packs enough wallop to blast most consumer class desktops out of the water. I'm just pissed that I can't play any games on this machine without risking the whole OS going down in blue flames... To be fair I haven't been playing much of anything these days, and I certainly haven't been playing anything that would actually need the punch offered by a dedicated graphics card, but still, I'd like to keep my options open. In fact, only three reasons stopped me from purchasing a new Aluminum MacBook instead of a thinkpad. Screen resolution, lack of SD card drive, and dedicated graphics solution. Well since the macbooks coming out right now have much better GPU with SD card drives to boot, not to mention phenomenal battery life estimated at around 6~7 work hours, the only thing Thinkpads have going for them is the screen resolution, something that can be managed if you're an external monitor kind of person.
With the unstable graphics card giving me grief, I keep on thinking about bringing another gadget into my life. Maybe a new netbook (the ones on the market today lasts for upto 10.5 hours per charge). The 701's getting really old and it's a real pain to type up a full report on that keyboard. I can manage, but it makes my fingers feel like I've been playing on the piano for hours. While a new netbook would certainly be nice (especially since even the worst netbook out there can run starcraft on it, thus satiating some of my entertainment needs), I'm not sure this is a good time to buy a new system though. The Nvidia ION is just around the corner and there is the disturbing rumor of the Apple tablet coming out as early as September or possibly this winter season.
Oh yes, the Apple tablet. People had been dreaming of it for a few decades now, ever since the Newton died. If Apple pulls it off there's a very good chance that I'll end up with one of those things, especially considering the wealth of science applications on iTunes Store at the moment. Some of the applications like the Papers are a godsend to anyone in academic profession. And I know for certain that Drew Endy et al are planning an iPhone-OS based mobile version of the biobuilder platform, which is a beginner friendly yet heavy duty synthetic biology CAD program that integrates into regular computer based distributions... Yeah, even speaking without gadget lust there's a good chance I'll get a touch or a tablet in the near future, since my professin almost seem to require having it for some reason these days. Kind of understandable when you think about it. The last time academic profession saw some mobile platform that was reliable and consistent enough for field/lab deployment was close to ten years ago, when the term PDA was new and Palm ruled the Earth.
On the other note (what are rant posts without multiple number of topics to dazzle the readers' minds?), only 95 days until Nanowrimo. I'm definitely participating this year, with my trusty laptop and all. I even have most of the rough draft and settings lined out in clean text based wiki format. I didn't expect myself to be able to come up with such awesome ideas, but I think I might have hit the real jackpot. I haven't read anything even remotely close to it for years. Very hundred-years-of-solitude-y. With some undeniable influence from all the Japanese light novels I've been force fed over the years.
I'm really looking forward to it.
Well, time to get to work!
I'm in a very complex love-hate relationship with my laptop. I like it for being retro in a strangely stylish way. I like it's awesome keyboard that's actually a step above pratically all the competition out there. I like how the thing had been running on battery power since one in the morning and now it's... 7:30 in the morning. Pretty darn durable for a laptop with dedicated graphics card.
But then there are some serious issues with this machine. Like the irrational behavior of some of the lenovo patched drivers in sleep-wake cycle. Or how my wallpaper disappears whenever I use the battery stretch mode. Most of all, I hate how flaky the ATI driver for the dedicated graphics card on this machine is. It gave me two BSoD last night due to amdkmp driver crash (that Lenovo's been 'working on' since last year at least) and another one as a sort of graphics driver related cascading failure showing the dreaded NMI/memory parity error. The same exact BSoD message I received before my last dell's motherboard fried to a crisp due to faulty die casting of the GPU. I never get any errors when I'm using the intel integrated graphics mode which probably uses 4500HD chipset, but why should I settle for the crappy integrated chip when I paid good money for dedicated graphics solution? If I wanted a laptop that will just run off of intel IGP I would have bought much cheaper, and light laptop... Though to be fair cheap/light laptop with 1440x900 resolution is a rarity these days for some reason. The manufacturers including Apple are still sticking with crummy 1280x800 resolution for ~13in screen solutions. Way behind the times those people.
Ok, I'll be honest. This laptop's still pretty good running on intel IGP. Things I do for work don't usually need dedicated GPU unit with separate ram. They need processing power, and this 2.5GHz core 2 duo machine packs enough wallop to blast most consumer class desktops out of the water. I'm just pissed that I can't play any games on this machine without risking the whole OS going down in blue flames... To be fair I haven't been playing much of anything these days, and I certainly haven't been playing anything that would actually need the punch offered by a dedicated graphics card, but still, I'd like to keep my options open. In fact, only three reasons stopped me from purchasing a new Aluminum MacBook instead of a thinkpad. Screen resolution, lack of SD card drive, and dedicated graphics solution. Well since the macbooks coming out right now have much better GPU with SD card drives to boot, not to mention phenomenal battery life estimated at around 6~7 work hours, the only thing Thinkpads have going for them is the screen resolution, something that can be managed if you're an external monitor kind of person.
With the unstable graphics card giving me grief, I keep on thinking about bringing another gadget into my life. Maybe a new netbook (the ones on the market today lasts for upto 10.5 hours per charge). The 701's getting really old and it's a real pain to type up a full report on that keyboard. I can manage, but it makes my fingers feel like I've been playing on the piano for hours. While a new netbook would certainly be nice (especially since even the worst netbook out there can run starcraft on it, thus satiating some of my entertainment needs), I'm not sure this is a good time to buy a new system though. The Nvidia ION is just around the corner and there is the disturbing rumor of the Apple tablet coming out as early as September or possibly this winter season.
Oh yes, the Apple tablet. People had been dreaming of it for a few decades now, ever since the Newton died. If Apple pulls it off there's a very good chance that I'll end up with one of those things, especially considering the wealth of science applications on iTunes Store at the moment. Some of the applications like the Papers are a godsend to anyone in academic profession. And I know for certain that Drew Endy et al are planning an iPhone-OS based mobile version of the biobuilder platform, which is a beginner friendly yet heavy duty synthetic biology CAD program that integrates into regular computer based distributions... Yeah, even speaking without gadget lust there's a good chance I'll get a touch or a tablet in the near future, since my professin almost seem to require having it for some reason these days. Kind of understandable when you think about it. The last time academic profession saw some mobile platform that was reliable and consistent enough for field/lab deployment was close to ten years ago, when the term PDA was new and Palm ruled the Earth.
On the other note (what are rant posts without multiple number of topics to dazzle the readers' minds?), only 95 days until Nanowrimo. I'm definitely participating this year, with my trusty laptop and all. I even have most of the rough draft and settings lined out in clean text based wiki format. I didn't expect myself to be able to come up with such awesome ideas, but I think I might have hit the real jackpot. I haven't read anything even remotely close to it for years. Very hundred-years-of-solitude-y. With some undeniable influence from all the Japanese light novels I've been force fed over the years.
I'm really looking forward to it.
Well, time to get to work!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Rainy day
Thanks to the wooziness induced by the late night last night, I was able to get off from work way early today. If this can keep up with my schedule I might as well sleep late every day. It's good to be outside and free when the sun is shining, except that it's not quite the case right now.
After days of half-formed rainstorms that only lasted an hour or two, damning the whole of the city into the pre-rainstorm humidity and heat that would make Tokyo proud, it's finally pouring down. I don't know whether to feel happy or sad about this. Certainly I've been waiting for a decent rainstorm for a while now, with thunder and lightning. But why does it have to be the day I could have taken my laptop out to the park to get some personal workspace? The world works in really strange ways.
With the rain, and with my brain still a little soggy from lack of sleep and rest, I just came back home right away instead of hanging around the city to do whatever. I could have spent some much needed (and decidedly cooler) time in bookstores in the area, but I didn't feel up to it. Maybe it's the weather.
So now I'm sitting in the sofa in my room, looking out the window being riddled with raindrops, wondering what to do with this unexpected freetime. I've already read most of the books in my personal library a few times. There might be movies in hard drives that I could be watching but I don't like being so passive when I'm feeling tired and under the weather. Yes, I'd rather act opposite of my mood and condition. Otherwise there's no end to the depths I might fall to.
Maybe I can try playing some games? I've already burned through my collection of Deus Ex mods couple of times before, so that's rather out of the question. I don't feel like exploring synthetic biology right now, since while I'm looking for something involved, I don't want to wreck my brain over other stuff, just not right now. Maybe I can look into some mmorpg options? Like one of those free to play games that are all the rage these days.
Online games are one of those interesting things in life that has just so much potential to be awesome, but never is. It's like looking at a seed that continuously ends up dying instead of blooming into the amazing flower we were all promised. Take a look at the .hack// franchise on the playstation consoles for example (actually now that I think about it they only came out for PS2, with final one being promised for PSP). Now THAT's how the mmorpg games should be. Except that .hack// games aren't mmorpgs. It's what they call a simulated mmorpg with simulations of real people populating a virtual server that exists within the game. The game even has a virtual operating system with virtual web browser and virtual email client, with unreal people sending you email during your virtual off-time. The premises sound weird, but it works well in practice, and the franchise continued for close to a decade with one awesome anime series acting as prequel to the game (the game spanning 4 DVDs, with sequel of 3DVD lengths) with not-so awesome other things populating the marketplace (actually, one of the light novels based off the franchise is quite good. AI BUSTER 1 and 2, I personally prefer the second one). Maybe the whole faux-mmorpg setup only works precisely because none of the stuff is real. They are all made-up, make belief people living in make-belief world (oh wait, did I just describe the heart of 'real' mmorpgs as well?).
As Bernard Shaw himself have said before, hell is other people's company. This game can probably better explain the Japanese fixation with androids than any number of academic thesis out there.
Well, I think I'll stop writing for a moment and seek out some interesting mmorpg to waste time on.
After days of half-formed rainstorms that only lasted an hour or two, damning the whole of the city into the pre-rainstorm humidity and heat that would make Tokyo proud, it's finally pouring down. I don't know whether to feel happy or sad about this. Certainly I've been waiting for a decent rainstorm for a while now, with thunder and lightning. But why does it have to be the day I could have taken my laptop out to the park to get some personal workspace? The world works in really strange ways.
With the rain, and with my brain still a little soggy from lack of sleep and rest, I just came back home right away instead of hanging around the city to do whatever. I could have spent some much needed (and decidedly cooler) time in bookstores in the area, but I didn't feel up to it. Maybe it's the weather.
So now I'm sitting in the sofa in my room, looking out the window being riddled with raindrops, wondering what to do with this unexpected freetime. I've already read most of the books in my personal library a few times. There might be movies in hard drives that I could be watching but I don't like being so passive when I'm feeling tired and under the weather. Yes, I'd rather act opposite of my mood and condition. Otherwise there's no end to the depths I might fall to.
Maybe I can try playing some games? I've already burned through my collection of Deus Ex mods couple of times before, so that's rather out of the question. I don't feel like exploring synthetic biology right now, since while I'm looking for something involved, I don't want to wreck my brain over other stuff, just not right now. Maybe I can look into some mmorpg options? Like one of those free to play games that are all the rage these days.
Online games are one of those interesting things in life that has just so much potential to be awesome, but never is. It's like looking at a seed that continuously ends up dying instead of blooming into the amazing flower we were all promised. Take a look at the .hack// franchise on the playstation consoles for example (actually now that I think about it they only came out for PS2, with final one being promised for PSP). Now THAT's how the mmorpg games should be. Except that .hack// games aren't mmorpgs. It's what they call a simulated mmorpg with simulations of real people populating a virtual server that exists within the game. The game even has a virtual operating system with virtual web browser and virtual email client, with unreal people sending you email during your virtual off-time. The premises sound weird, but it works well in practice, and the franchise continued for close to a decade with one awesome anime series acting as prequel to the game (the game spanning 4 DVDs, with sequel of 3DVD lengths) with not-so awesome other things populating the marketplace (actually, one of the light novels based off the franchise is quite good. AI BUSTER 1 and 2, I personally prefer the second one). Maybe the whole faux-mmorpg setup only works precisely because none of the stuff is real. They are all made-up, make belief people living in make-belief world (oh wait, did I just describe the heart of 'real' mmorpgs as well?).
As Bernard Shaw himself have said before, hell is other people's company. This game can probably better explain the Japanese fixation with androids than any number of academic thesis out there.
Well, I think I'll stop writing for a moment and seek out some interesting mmorpg to waste time on.
Late night or early morning?
This isn't good. It's four in the morning and I still can't get to sleep. I'm currently running some good lounge music in the background with the evil alchemy of the internet radiostation, courtesy of the smoothjazz. Thinking about things like diybio, synthetic biology, artscience and upcoming nanowrimo competition, which I plan on participating this year. Only 96 days left to go. I'm thinking of telling bunch of my friends to register just to see if they can actually do it. Yes, even the ones that can't write artsy-creative stuff to save their lives.
The filter for the ac might have gone bad. My throat feels sore, but if I open the window the room will get hot again, meaning more sleepless agony for me. Listening to the music and looking outside the window at all the blinking buildings in the main city down the broadway, the whole scene reminds me of setup for many classic Japanese scifi-futurescapes, of the kind that can be seen in the games like the snatcher (if you haven't played it yet, don't call yourself a gamer) and its sequel policenauts, both my favorites.
Picked this picture of an apartment in Seattle from a blog of one of my favorite otakus on the web. How long will I have to live to be able to have a view like that outside my own apartment window? Hopefully this science gig will work out better than it is now... I've never been much of a home person. I prefer cool apartment in high places surrounded by pretty lights of the city over any house any day of the week. There's some quality about those architectures that's really appealing to me... The prices of the apartments in the city are dropping across the board. Maybe I should shop around for the time when I finally get my degree and become a more or less productive member of the society.
It's always interesting that the impression I get from such semi-futuristic landscapes tend to be nostalgia of some sort.
I'm nostalgic about the future.
The filter for the ac might have gone bad. My throat feels sore, but if I open the window the room will get hot again, meaning more sleepless agony for me. Listening to the music and looking outside the window at all the blinking buildings in the main city down the broadway, the whole scene reminds me of setup for many classic Japanese scifi-futurescapes, of the kind that can be seen in the games like the snatcher (if you haven't played it yet, don't call yourself a gamer) and its sequel policenauts, both my favorites.
Picked this picture of an apartment in Seattle from a blog of one of my favorite otakus on the web. How long will I have to live to be able to have a view like that outside my own apartment window? Hopefully this science gig will work out better than it is now... I've never been much of a home person. I prefer cool apartment in high places surrounded by pretty lights of the city over any house any day of the week. There's some quality about those architectures that's really appealing to me... The prices of the apartments in the city are dropping across the board. Maybe I should shop around for the time when I finally get my degree and become a more or less productive member of the society.
It's always interesting that the impression I get from such semi-futuristic landscapes tend to be nostalgia of some sort.
I'm nostalgic about the future.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Another workspace pics. And other things.
As usual my blog is running a late night double feature, like how the old theaters used to do it. Or will it be a triple feature?
Here's a link to another collection of workspaces, this time workspaces for science fiction writers. All of them are quite well known. Some of them are even known to me. Although I'd have loved to be able to see actual workspace of William Gibson/Neal Stephenson/Warren Ellis with their computers as well. For reasons explained elsewhere I really dig that kind of stuff. I think Neal Stephenson is the person who taught me to take the Apple platform seriously way before it was cool to be Apple (writing this takes me back. In the past there was a time the Mac OSes were horrible systems with windows based computing platforms being the operating systems of the future. People would always get into a fuss about how the public school system was failing the children by letting them use Apple based products while the rest of the world ran on windows. They were so naive back then).
Like I guessed, writers certainly live in a whole lot of clutter. Most of them are surprisingly clean though, even when counting the fact that most of them probably cleaned up a little before the scheduled photoshoot... It's the same with research labs actually. Kid, I'm speak this from experience, so listen up. While everyone out there will tell you that a well-organized workspace/rooms etc are essential for productivity you should see the workspaces/rooms of the most brilliant people in arts and sciences. Trust me, none of them are capable of maintaining a clean room on their own. There's always some kind of mess, some kind of clutter. Ever looked at desktop of Albert Einstein? The thing is like a maze. And, I too have some clutter issues when I'm running large private projects that span months at a time. It's only that I try to clean everything up and keep them clean when I don't have anything long-term running out of my own place (I once covered a whole wall with post-its for notes and plans/numbers for my thesis (of sorts). My then-room was in a truly crazy state back then). However, despite the clutter the workspaces of people who actually work on things tend to have some weird method to their madness. For example, it's rare to see actual 'filth' among the clutter. Sure, there are notes, pieces of papers, books and gadgets everywhere. If the person is in laboratory oriented profession perhaps even some reagents. But never filth. No half-eaten food rotting away, no weird yellow/brown stuff of mysterious origin. All the clutter is information, all of them information vital to whatever he/she is doing. Food isn't information and it's not vital to finding out some new law that governs high energy plasma. Or writing science fiction. Or designing proteins to save human lives. So yeah, if you walk into a work/room of a person and smell rotten food all over the place, the chances are he/she isn't working. Just being lazy and wasting time. But if you walk into a work/room and find crazy amount of papers and scribbled pieces of stuff everywhere, don't touch anything. Those people get stuff done.
Here's a July system guide from Ars Technica aimed at building gaming machines. Even the 'value' gaming machine on here (~$900) is effectively futureproof. You'll be running contemporary games four years from now on with that kind of machinery. you can add some more oomph with careful attribution of either 4 or 8 core processors into the machine, with 16GB RAM or more. But then that would be overkill. Not only would such machine be future proof, it will be on equal standing with some of the heavier single semi-supercomputers in some labs, the kind used for rendering in-house protein calculation. Of course, machine like that will guzzle electricity so anyone who can run that kind of machine for four years is probably very rich or don't pay his/her own utility bills.
Despite the fact that most of my computing needs these days run around mobile solutions systems like that are very tempting to build. Just imagine the things I would be able to do with a graphics card with 1GB DDR3 dedicated memory with all sorts of crazy shader appliances. Not just games, mind you. With upcoming frameworks like CUDA it would be possible to offload computing intensive processed to GPU instead of running them straight out of CPU, in fact turning them into mini suprecomputers, at least compared to the puny units of our current generation. Even laptops might be able to run some serious number crunching once the system's perfected.
Here's a link to another collection of workspaces, this time workspaces for science fiction writers. All of them are quite well known. Some of them are even known to me. Although I'd have loved to be able to see actual workspace of William Gibson/Neal Stephenson/Warren Ellis with their computers as well. For reasons explained elsewhere I really dig that kind of stuff. I think Neal Stephenson is the person who taught me to take the Apple platform seriously way before it was cool to be Apple (writing this takes me back. In the past there was a time the Mac OSes were horrible systems with windows based computing platforms being the operating systems of the future. People would always get into a fuss about how the public school system was failing the children by letting them use Apple based products while the rest of the world ran on windows. They were so naive back then).
Like I guessed, writers certainly live in a whole lot of clutter. Most of them are surprisingly clean though, even when counting the fact that most of them probably cleaned up a little before the scheduled photoshoot... It's the same with research labs actually. Kid, I'm speak this from experience, so listen up. While everyone out there will tell you that a well-organized workspace/rooms etc are essential for productivity you should see the workspaces/rooms of the most brilliant people in arts and sciences. Trust me, none of them are capable of maintaining a clean room on their own. There's always some kind of mess, some kind of clutter. Ever looked at desktop of Albert Einstein? The thing is like a maze. And, I too have some clutter issues when I'm running large private projects that span months at a time. It's only that I try to clean everything up and keep them clean when I don't have anything long-term running out of my own place (I once covered a whole wall with post-its for notes and plans/numbers for my thesis (of sorts). My then-room was in a truly crazy state back then). However, despite the clutter the workspaces of people who actually work on things tend to have some weird method to their madness. For example, it's rare to see actual 'filth' among the clutter. Sure, there are notes, pieces of papers, books and gadgets everywhere. If the person is in laboratory oriented profession perhaps even some reagents. But never filth. No half-eaten food rotting away, no weird yellow/brown stuff of mysterious origin. All the clutter is information, all of them information vital to whatever he/she is doing. Food isn't information and it's not vital to finding out some new law that governs high energy plasma. Or writing science fiction. Or designing proteins to save human lives. So yeah, if you walk into a work/room of a person and smell rotten food all over the place, the chances are he/she isn't working. Just being lazy and wasting time. But if you walk into a work/room and find crazy amount of papers and scribbled pieces of stuff everywhere, don't touch anything. Those people get stuff done.
Here's a July system guide from Ars Technica aimed at building gaming machines. Even the 'value' gaming machine on here (~$900) is effectively futureproof. You'll be running contemporary games four years from now on with that kind of machinery. you can add some more oomph with careful attribution of either 4 or 8 core processors into the machine, with 16GB RAM or more. But then that would be overkill. Not only would such machine be future proof, it will be on equal standing with some of the heavier single semi-supercomputers in some labs, the kind used for rendering in-house protein calculation. Of course, machine like that will guzzle electricity so anyone who can run that kind of machine for four years is probably very rich or don't pay his/her own utility bills.
Despite the fact that most of my computing needs these days run around mobile solutions systems like that are very tempting to build. Just imagine the things I would be able to do with a graphics card with 1GB DDR3 dedicated memory with all sorts of crazy shader appliances. Not just games, mind you. With upcoming frameworks like CUDA it would be possible to offload computing intensive processed to GPU instead of running them straight out of CPU, in fact turning them into mini suprecomputers, at least compared to the puny units of our current generation. Even laptops might be able to run some serious number crunching once the system's perfected.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Late night. What to do?
Every so often I'm faced with a conundrum.
It's late night, and either I have something I need to finish before the sun rises, or I'm midst of some strange problem that just won't let me sleep, both mentally and physically. I would normally get some work done in situations like that, but for some reason I can't. There's something in my mind that just stops me from functioning normally, as if some pebble got caught between the cogwheel of my mind. I can feel the urge to do something building inside myself but I can't channel it to something more useful, the energy just disappearing like anything else that follows the course of slow, painful thermodynamic dissipation in this universe. (that makes me think. It would be so interesting to be able to come up with a model that describes human creativity as a function of the thermodynamical mechanism in the universe.)
When I'm faced with such difficult situations I usually try to do something that doesn't require much coherence yet still need some kind of input from myself. And over the years I've found writing (and sometimes drawing) to be the perfect solution for those late night blues... I also play a bit of violin (just picked up a new one a few weeks ago, in fact), but that's a difficult hobby to have in the city where the walls between the apartments are usually thin enough to be punched through (though it isn't nearly as bad as the situation in Japan).
I've picked up a few useless skill over the past few months as well. Did I ever write here about how I never learned to touchtype and how my friends were always giving me weird eye (living around geeks and geekettes have that side effect)? Well I've learned to touchtype about a few weeks ago, roughly around the same time I got my new violin. It only took me about a day or two to memorize the layout of the keys, only to be expected I guess. Considering how I lived with a computer for half my life. The rate at which I got used to writing on the keyboard without using the hunt&peck approach surprised myself a bit however. Right now I'm writing this without looking at the screen. That''s right. I'm writing this while I'm looking out the window of my room, without looking at the screen or the keyboard. Who would have thought it? Learning to type completely blind in course of a week or two.
I still need to get used to the keyboard though. I still make some odd typos and my wpm isn't all that high. Average at best. It's something I really need to work on considering the volume of writing I do on everyday basis, both for pleasure and for work.
When I'm writing things like this, all alone in my room sitting on my couch, I always play some kind of music. In fact, I can barely remember the last time I went on without playing some kind of music around me. The ipod is plugged into my ear practically every single moment I'm outside, and whenever I'm home I play a music on the speakers on my laptop or when it's late at night I use wireless headphones that plug in to the speaker port of my computer (I only use bluetooth for syncing my cellphone with my computer for some reason). Of the terabytes of data I'm sitting on vast majority of the space is taken by music from all over the world, across all sorts of genre. I have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, all representing their own era. I have some rock, some of them the harder variety. I also have crazy collection of jpop compilations and singles, and I have many of them in form of original cd sitting in some storage space in the city, since it was way too impractical to bring them with me in my frequent moving binge. I regularly buy musics from promising bands and composers, like the OST/inspired album for Neotokyo. It makes me look like some sort of freak in this day and age where people my age doesn't quite seem to buy anything if it's available in digital format.
Music must be one of the most fundamental invention of the humanity. Perhaps the invention of the music is the event we can clearly mark as the moment of divide between human the homosapiens and human the semi-ape. It's logical, yet impulsive. It's formless, yet the sytem that makes music come true can be observed all across the world, across the universe in weirded places, like the shape of galaxies, pulses of the stars, or patterns of moss in a forest. Music is very mathematical in that regard, and it is probably no surprise that expertise in one usually accompanies the other... There are some people who say arts are too different from the sciences for them to coexist together, but I tend to think it's only a method to cover for their own incompetence. All the greatest artists in the human history had been scientists in one form or the other, and this pathetic division that forces a child to choose between a path or arts or paths of sciences is a freakish accident of social nature that had nothing to do with the arts or the sciences themselves. I say this a lot these days, but really. One day, the future generation will look back at the state of arts and sciences today and laugh or be horrified at how crazy and irrational it all is...
Well I think I'm through venting for now. Gotta get back to work for the day ahead.
It's late night, and either I have something I need to finish before the sun rises, or I'm midst of some strange problem that just won't let me sleep, both mentally and physically. I would normally get some work done in situations like that, but for some reason I can't. There's something in my mind that just stops me from functioning normally, as if some pebble got caught between the cogwheel of my mind. I can feel the urge to do something building inside myself but I can't channel it to something more useful, the energy just disappearing like anything else that follows the course of slow, painful thermodynamic dissipation in this universe. (that makes me think. It would be so interesting to be able to come up with a model that describes human creativity as a function of the thermodynamical mechanism in the universe.)
When I'm faced with such difficult situations I usually try to do something that doesn't require much coherence yet still need some kind of input from myself. And over the years I've found writing (and sometimes drawing) to be the perfect solution for those late night blues... I also play a bit of violin (just picked up a new one a few weeks ago, in fact), but that's a difficult hobby to have in the city where the walls between the apartments are usually thin enough to be punched through (though it isn't nearly as bad as the situation in Japan).
I've picked up a few useless skill over the past few months as well. Did I ever write here about how I never learned to touchtype and how my friends were always giving me weird eye (living around geeks and geekettes have that side effect)? Well I've learned to touchtype about a few weeks ago, roughly around the same time I got my new violin. It only took me about a day or two to memorize the layout of the keys, only to be expected I guess. Considering how I lived with a computer for half my life. The rate at which I got used to writing on the keyboard without using the hunt&peck approach surprised myself a bit however. Right now I'm writing this without looking at the screen. That''s right. I'm writing this while I'm looking out the window of my room, without looking at the screen or the keyboard. Who would have thought it? Learning to type completely blind in course of a week or two.
I still need to get used to the keyboard though. I still make some odd typos and my wpm isn't all that high. Average at best. It's something I really need to work on considering the volume of writing I do on everyday basis, both for pleasure and for work.
When I'm writing things like this, all alone in my room sitting on my couch, I always play some kind of music. In fact, I can barely remember the last time I went on without playing some kind of music around me. The ipod is plugged into my ear practically every single moment I'm outside, and whenever I'm home I play a music on the speakers on my laptop or when it's late at night I use wireless headphones that plug in to the speaker port of my computer (I only use bluetooth for syncing my cellphone with my computer for some reason). Of the terabytes of data I'm sitting on vast majority of the space is taken by music from all over the world, across all sorts of genre. I have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, all representing their own era. I have some rock, some of them the harder variety. I also have crazy collection of jpop compilations and singles, and I have many of them in form of original cd sitting in some storage space in the city, since it was way too impractical to bring them with me in my frequent moving binge. I regularly buy musics from promising bands and composers, like the OST/inspired album for Neotokyo. It makes me look like some sort of freak in this day and age where people my age doesn't quite seem to buy anything if it's available in digital format.
Music must be one of the most fundamental invention of the humanity. Perhaps the invention of the music is the event we can clearly mark as the moment of divide between human the homosapiens and human the semi-ape. It's logical, yet impulsive. It's formless, yet the sytem that makes music come true can be observed all across the world, across the universe in weirded places, like the shape of galaxies, pulses of the stars, or patterns of moss in a forest. Music is very mathematical in that regard, and it is probably no surprise that expertise in one usually accompanies the other... There are some people who say arts are too different from the sciences for them to coexist together, but I tend to think it's only a method to cover for their own incompetence. All the greatest artists in the human history had been scientists in one form or the other, and this pathetic division that forces a child to choose between a path or arts or paths of sciences is a freakish accident of social nature that had nothing to do with the arts or the sciences themselves. I say this a lot these days, but really. One day, the future generation will look back at the state of arts and sciences today and laugh or be horrified at how crazy and irrational it all is...
Well I think I'm through venting for now. Gotta get back to work for the day ahead.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
It's almost annoying-- And pretty pictures
I keep on writing double topic posts on this blog for some reason. I think it has something to do with how it's ridiculously difficult to concentrate on something these days, with the weather, the financial situation, and very weird family matters I shouldn't even be worrying about at this age.
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How hard it is to blog properly these days. I mean, sure it's easier than ever to type things up either using my notebook or the blackberry and publish it all right to the net, but it's just way too difficult to write a blog post with properly thought out reasoning and half-decent grammar. The problem is coherence. It's getting more difficult to write things that are coherent. Without coherence within reasoning behind the writing I might as well let my python script do the talking by linking together random words from a dictionary (now that I think about it, that might be fun. Should try it on another blog).
Due to the difficulty of writing lengthy yet coherent pieces of writing I've missed a lot of opportunities for some good posts. New developments in technology like growing of a whole rat from its iPS cell culture from another adult rat (with some issue, but that's only to be expected), or protein-induced pluripotency within cells (the actual paper I have yet to read), or even the hypothesis that emergence of life might be hardwired into the complex system that is the universe (which is something I've suspected for a long time, but this is probably the first time it's been capitalized in a popular science publication). Don't even get me started with the plethora of amazing TED talks out there that I'm just dying to share with you all.
This is one of the most annoying thing in maintaining a personal blog. Am I a content creator or am I just copy-pasting cool news of other people's accomplishments into a digital medium for further copy-pasting, like how it is with most tumblr accounts (with some notable exceptions)? I always to try to write my own stuff but then the product of such creative exercise rarely if ever looks as exciting as the discovery of quorum sensing, new take on complexity sciences, or new developments in synthetic biology...
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On the other note, here are some interesting pictures of other people's computer workspaces. I think I should post my multiscreen setup here sometime in the future as well.
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How hard it is to blog properly these days. I mean, sure it's easier than ever to type things up either using my notebook or the blackberry and publish it all right to the net, but it's just way too difficult to write a blog post with properly thought out reasoning and half-decent grammar. The problem is coherence. It's getting more difficult to write things that are coherent. Without coherence within reasoning behind the writing I might as well let my python script do the talking by linking together random words from a dictionary (now that I think about it, that might be fun. Should try it on another blog).
Due to the difficulty of writing lengthy yet coherent pieces of writing I've missed a lot of opportunities for some good posts. New developments in technology like growing of a whole rat from its iPS cell culture from another adult rat (with some issue, but that's only to be expected), or protein-induced pluripotency within cells (the actual paper I have yet to read), or even the hypothesis that emergence of life might be hardwired into the complex system that is the universe (which is something I've suspected for a long time, but this is probably the first time it's been capitalized in a popular science publication). Don't even get me started with the plethora of amazing TED talks out there that I'm just dying to share with you all.
This is one of the most annoying thing in maintaining a personal blog. Am I a content creator or am I just copy-pasting cool news of other people's accomplishments into a digital medium for further copy-pasting, like how it is with most tumblr accounts (with some notable exceptions)? I always to try to write my own stuff but then the product of such creative exercise rarely if ever looks as exciting as the discovery of quorum sensing, new take on complexity sciences, or new developments in synthetic biology...
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On the other note, here are some interesting pictures of other people's computer workspaces. I think I should post my multiscreen setup here sometime in the future as well.
There are more at this webpage. Looking at other people's workstation setup is always fascinating for me. I guess it's a kind of technofetishism/infornography that's so common these days. I know a number of people who maintain elaborate workstation environments and give them lavish names like 'the cathedral' and such (I'd much prefer the term temple or a library, but each to her own I guess). And while I don't operate anything as fancy as that except in my lab, which doesn't count since the hardwares in that place don't really belong to me (8-core with 16GB RAM, 3 screens, wowowiwa!), I understand what they are going for. With the society being built increasingly around the engines of information we call 'com-pu-ter' it's become an essential feature of any semi-viable household. All of my friends think that while it's possible to live without TV, it would be impossible to live without the access to the internet and some sort of computing device. Even the non-techie ones who can't tell the difference between Java and C++. It's a shielded environment where one can fulfill both the functions necessary to life (earning a living) and functions necessary to keep the mind alive. Through education, fun, contact with other people, and just plain-ol time wasting. So the swordsmen take meticulous care of their swords, providing lavish casing and decoration of highest materials for their tools of trade and mental compass. So many of us do the same for computers.
I would love to be able to set up a beautiful workstation like that in my own house, but it is a little difficult at the moment. I move around frequently, both in terms of going around the city for jobs and moving to another place of living for whatever the reason. So my main computer had been a laptop for a long time. And since I can't seem to completely give up the computer gaming side of myself (well, console gaming as well, with PS2 and NDS-lite, but haven't really played them for... Months) all of them were light-yet-workstation class machines with dedicated graphics solution.
Even with mobile computing, however, I still maintain something very close to what those people do with their physical workstation. In the real world I like to keep my desk area meticulously clean. Just some spare USB cables for my netbook/ereader/blackberry connection, my external HD solution totalling at close to 2TB storage space, a lab notebook (paper), and my laptop. That's it. The rest is white and wood. No carpet, no dust. It's really wonderful. You'd be surprised to know how much clean workspace contributes to productivity.
As for 'pimping out' it's usually all in the computer. Instead of buying new exotic figurines or lighting fixtures for workspace like some other people I stick with software side of things. I run custom theme that looks cool, clean, and eats through less memory than the default vista theme. I have personal organize software running on my sidebar as a separate application instead of running windows supplied sidebar, which is, while nice in functionality uses too much memory and is a possible security risk. I am also very careful about choosing my desktop background image. Being pretty isn't good enough to be chosen as my desktop background. It needs to have certain aesthetic quality that works with rest of the software platform. I'm currently running a 3D simulation of human brain neurons as my desktop background and it fits in with all the rest of the computer and my work applications perfectly. It's like the whole thing's made with each other in mind. And the desktop's just the beginning. I also pay significant amount of attention to my web browser, which is probably between the first and the fourth most used application on any computer I use. Choosing a web browser is a really complex, sometimes draining process. Not only should I be aware of the kind of aesthetic look inherent to a browser, I also need to consider their technical capacity and memory consumption. Since mobile computing is a big part of my life I really need to watch the memory and processor power consumption on all my applications. I can't have my machine run out of juice just when I'm about to deliver that paper I've been struggling with three months, you see. Web browsers serve all sort of purposes for me. It's a banking terminal. It's a programming tool. It's an entertainment machine and a terminal to a different world.
At the moment I run three web browsers on my computer. Opera 10b with Opera Unite service activated (more on that later), Firefox 3.5 with greasemonkey and all the necessities, and Google Chrome. I just can't seem to figure out which browser I like the best, but the default browser on my computer remains Firefox for its wider compatibility. Opera 10b is something of a mixed bag. I think I can write a few things that really needs to be improved with the browser but overall the build is very tight, with all sorts of different functionalities and widget availability that makes this browser feel like a separate operating system independent of windows vista it runs on. I'm also in love with the Opera Unite service that turns any instance of Opera browser into a personal webserver with configurable programs/services you can download directly off the net. I can see where this service is going and I like it. Google Chrome is something of an oddball. I liked the browser so much that I briefly used it as my default browser. It's the fastest one of the bunch and you can certainly feel the speed difference compared to all other web browsers. It's secure with the whole sandbox mechanism, perhaps even more so than other web browsers on the market. Google is working on all sorts of crazy projects to increase the functionality of the browser, and it already had significant amount of improvements built into it. Yet the interface remains minimalistic with most of the 'gears' hidden beneath the clean shell some people think is 'too clean'. I like it. It does everything I would ever want from a web browser, and it's open source with full might of Google standing behind it, meaning it's going to places with new and innovative technologies. The problem is with the memory and processing requirements of the browser. It slows my brand new laptop to a crawl when left on for a whole day or two, which is something I usually do with my computers. Opera and Firefox so far doesn't seem to suffer from that problem.
Writing about all these things makes me feel like a geek, or an otaku of sorts. Definitely vast majority of people out there usually don't bother with theming their operating system or figuring out the perfect color sheen of the desktop wall paper or worry about ACID3 test results on their browsers. I guess I am a semi-otaku of sorts. Otaku meaning person obsessed with information, may it be about newest anime or computer technology, biotechnology or robotics. Infornography seem to be the description of how otakus treat information... More on that later.
I would love to be able to set up a beautiful workstation like that in my own house, but it is a little difficult at the moment. I move around frequently, both in terms of going around the city for jobs and moving to another place of living for whatever the reason. So my main computer had been a laptop for a long time. And since I can't seem to completely give up the computer gaming side of myself (well, console gaming as well, with PS2 and NDS-lite, but haven't really played them for... Months) all of them were light-yet-workstation class machines with dedicated graphics solution.
Even with mobile computing, however, I still maintain something very close to what those people do with their physical workstation. In the real world I like to keep my desk area meticulously clean. Just some spare USB cables for my netbook/ereader/blackberry connection, my external HD solution totalling at close to 2TB storage space, a lab notebook (paper), and my laptop. That's it. The rest is white and wood. No carpet, no dust. It's really wonderful. You'd be surprised to know how much clean workspace contributes to productivity.
As for 'pimping out' it's usually all in the computer. Instead of buying new exotic figurines or lighting fixtures for workspace like some other people I stick with software side of things. I run custom theme that looks cool, clean, and eats through less memory than the default vista theme. I have personal organize software running on my sidebar as a separate application instead of running windows supplied sidebar, which is, while nice in functionality uses too much memory and is a possible security risk. I am also very careful about choosing my desktop background image. Being pretty isn't good enough to be chosen as my desktop background. It needs to have certain aesthetic quality that works with rest of the software platform. I'm currently running a 3D simulation of human brain neurons as my desktop background and it fits in with all the rest of the computer and my work applications perfectly. It's like the whole thing's made with each other in mind. And the desktop's just the beginning. I also pay significant amount of attention to my web browser, which is probably between the first and the fourth most used application on any computer I use. Choosing a web browser is a really complex, sometimes draining process. Not only should I be aware of the kind of aesthetic look inherent to a browser, I also need to consider their technical capacity and memory consumption. Since mobile computing is a big part of my life I really need to watch the memory and processor power consumption on all my applications. I can't have my machine run out of juice just when I'm about to deliver that paper I've been struggling with three months, you see. Web browsers serve all sort of purposes for me. It's a banking terminal. It's a programming tool. It's an entertainment machine and a terminal to a different world.
At the moment I run three web browsers on my computer. Opera 10b with Opera Unite service activated (more on that later), Firefox 3.5 with greasemonkey and all the necessities, and Google Chrome. I just can't seem to figure out which browser I like the best, but the default browser on my computer remains Firefox for its wider compatibility. Opera 10b is something of a mixed bag. I think I can write a few things that really needs to be improved with the browser but overall the build is very tight, with all sorts of different functionalities and widget availability that makes this browser feel like a separate operating system independent of windows vista it runs on. I'm also in love with the Opera Unite service that turns any instance of Opera browser into a personal webserver with configurable programs/services you can download directly off the net. I can see where this service is going and I like it. Google Chrome is something of an oddball. I liked the browser so much that I briefly used it as my default browser. It's the fastest one of the bunch and you can certainly feel the speed difference compared to all other web browsers. It's secure with the whole sandbox mechanism, perhaps even more so than other web browsers on the market. Google is working on all sorts of crazy projects to increase the functionality of the browser, and it already had significant amount of improvements built into it. Yet the interface remains minimalistic with most of the 'gears' hidden beneath the clean shell some people think is 'too clean'. I like it. It does everything I would ever want from a web browser, and it's open source with full might of Google standing behind it, meaning it's going to places with new and innovative technologies. The problem is with the memory and processing requirements of the browser. It slows my brand new laptop to a crawl when left on for a whole day or two, which is something I usually do with my computers. Opera and Firefox so far doesn't seem to suffer from that problem.
Writing about all these things makes me feel like a geek, or an otaku of sorts. Definitely vast majority of people out there usually don't bother with theming their operating system or figuring out the perfect color sheen of the desktop wall paper or worry about ACID3 test results on their browsers. I guess I am a semi-otaku of sorts. Otaku meaning person obsessed with information, may it be about newest anime or computer technology, biotechnology or robotics. Infornography seem to be the description of how otakus treat information... More on that later.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Wake-up call. Change the world.
Just a rough draft of something I've been thinking about a lot lately... It's good to be able to do some draft publishing before releasing things as full version. Normally I would do this kind of thing on my handset, but why type away on the miniscule keyboard when I can write in comfort of my own laptop, courtesy of the free wifi access points throughout the city? (which is truly marvelous. Not that many major cities in the world offer muni-supported wifi access points. Like Japan for example. Those people are obsessed with getting paid for letting people browse on their wifi spots)
As usual, I'm busy with all sorts of studying and jobs to keep myself alive. If I've realized one thing abut myself over the course of the years, it's that I count curiosity and pursuit of ever greater 'stuff' of the world to be an integral part of the human existence. I probably can't live without being able to learn more things and step closer and closer to the edge of the world. Sure, food and shelter are about the only things a human being needs to survive directly, but if that were the case the ideal lifestyle would be being locked up in municipal insane asylum, wouldn't it? Freedom of mind and body is just as integral to a living existence as much as immediate nourishments and protection from elements of the world. It sounds obvious when laid out like this but there are surprisingly many people who think otherwise. People with power who effect lives of other people. Goes to show how sane this world is, doesn't it?
I've been looking into more of the synthetic biology stuff, making use of the relatively ample free time made available to me during the summer. I think I'm beginning to come up with a tangible idea and time line for the impending DIY-bio artificial/synthetic cell project. I still don't know if the other members of the NYC group will approve, all I can do is to work on the stuff until it's just as realistic as getting off the couch and going out for an ice cream. As long as I keep the target relatively simple, like having functional DNA snippets within an artificial vesicle, it might work with standard BioBrick parts... Just maybe.
I've been watching some old hacker movies lately. Or should I say that a friend of mine had been having a screening of sorts for the past few weeks? And I just can't believe what kind of cool things those movie hackers were able to pull off with their now-decades-old computers and laptops. Computers with interfaces and hardware that exudes that old retro feel even across the projection screen. I know a lot of people with brand-spanking new computers with state-of-the-art hardwares and what they usually do, or can do with those machines aren't as cool as the stuff on the movies being pulled off with vastly inferior hardware and network access. Of course, like everything in life it would be insane to compare the real with the imagined, and Hollywood movies, especially the ones made during the days when computers were still new and amazing pieces of specialty gadget, have a bad tendency to exaggerate and blow things out of proportion (I'm just waiting for that next dumb movie with synthetic biology as a culprit, though it might not happen since Hollywood's been barking about decency of genetic engineering technology for over a decade now). Even with that in mind, I can't help but to feel that the modern computerized society is just way too different from the ones imagined by artists and technologists alike during those days.
Ever heard of younger Steve Jobs talking in one of his interviews? He might have been a bastard but he certainly believed that ubiquitous personal computing will change the world for the better. Not one of those gradual, natural changes either. He actually believed that it's going to accelerate the advancement of humanity in the universe very much like how Kurzweil is preaching about the end of modernity with the upcoming singularity of technologies. Well, personal computing is nothing new these days. It's actually quite stale until about a few months ago when people finally found out glut-ridden software with no apparent upgrade in functionality were bad things, both in terms of environment and the user experience. Ever since then they've been coming out with some interesting experiments like the Atom chipset for netbooks (as well as netbooks themselves), and Nvidia Ion system for all sorts of stuff I can't even begin to describe. And even with the deluge of personal computing and personal computing oriented changes in the world we have yet to see the kind of dramatic, real, intense change we were promised so long ago. Yeah sure, the world's slowly getting better. It's all there when you take some time off and run the real numbers. It's getting a little bit better as time goes on, and things are definitely changing like some slow-moving river. But this isn't the future we were promised so long ago.
We have engines of information running in every household and many people's cellphones right now. What is an 'engine of information?' It refers to all sorts of machinery that can be used to create and process information content. Not just client-side consumption device where the user folks money over to come company to get little pieces of pixels or whatever, but real engines of information that's capable of creating as well as consuming. It's like this is the Victorian Era, and everyone had steam engine built into everything they can think of. Yet still nada. Nothing. Zip. The world's rolling at the same pace as before and most people still think in the same narrow minded little niches of their own. What's going on here? Never had such a huge number of 'engines' beyond the expansion of the humanity in history been available to so many people at once. And that's not all. Truly ubiquitous computing made available by advances in information technology is almost here, and it is very likely that it will soon spread to the poorer parts of the world in similar fashion as is with the large cities of the G8 nations.
But yet again, no change. No dice. Again, what's happening here, and what's wrong with this picture? Why aren't we changing the world using computers at vastly accelerated rate like how we changed the world with rapid industrialization? That's right. Even compared to the industrialization of the old times with its relatively limited availability and utility of the steam engines we are falling behind on the pace of the change of the world. No matter what angle you take there is something wrong in our world. Something isn't quite working right.
So I began to think during the hacker movie screening and by the time the movie finished I was faced with one possible answer to the question of how we'll change the world using engines of information. How to take back the future from spambots, 'social media gurus', and unlimited porn.
The answer is science. The only way to utilize the engines of information to change the world in its tangible form is science. We need to find a way to bring sciences to the masses. We need to make them do it, participate in it, and maybe even learn it, as outlandish as the notion might sound to some people out there. We need to remodel the whole thing from the ground-up, change what people automatically think of when they hear the term science. And tools. We need the tools for the engine of information. We need some software based tools so that people can do science everywhere there is a computer, and do it better everywhere there is a computer and an internet connection. And we need to make it so that all of those applications/services can run on a netbook spec'd computer. That's right. Unless you're doing serious 3D modeling or serious number-crunching you should be able to do scientific stuff on a netbook. Operating systems and applications that need 2GB of ram to display a cool visual effect of scrolling text based documents are the blight of the world. One day we will look back at those practices and gasp in horror at how far they held the world back from the future.
As for actual scientific applications, that's where I have problems. I know there are already a plethora of services and applications out there catering to openness and science integrated with the web. Openwetware and other www.openwetware.org/Notebook/BioBrick_Studio.html">synthetic biology associated computer applications and services come to mind. Synthetic biology is a discipline fundamentally tied to usage of computer, accessibility to outside repositories and communities, and large amateur community for beta testing their biological programming languages, so it makes sense that it's one of the foremost fields of sciences that are open to the public and offers number of very compelling design packages for working with real biological systems. But we can do more. We can set up international computing support for amateur rocketry and satellite management, using low-cost platforms like the CubeSat. I saw a launching of a private rocket into the Earth's orbit through a webcam embedded into the rocket itself. I actually saw the space from the point of view of the rocket sitting in my bedroom with my laptop as it left the coils of the Earth and floated into the space with its payload. And this is nothing new. All of this is perfectly trivial, and is of such technical ease that it can be done by a private company instead of national governments. And all the peripheral management for such operations can be done on a netbook given sufficient degree of software engineering feat. There are other scientific applications that I can rattle on and on without pause.... So why isn't this happening? Why aren't we doing this? Why are we forcing people to live in an imaginary jail cell where the next big thing consists of scantily clad men/women showing off their multi-million dollar homes with no aesthetic value or ingenuity whatsoever? Am I the only one who thinks the outlook of the world increasingly resembles some massive crime against humanity? It's a crime to lock up a child in a basement and force him/her to watch crap on T.V., but when we do that to all of humanity suddenly it's A-OK?
We have possibilities and opportunities just lying around for the next ambitious hacker-otaku to come along. But they will simply remain as possibilities unless people get to work with it. We need softwares and people who write softwares. We need academics willing to delve into the mysterious labyrinths of the sciences and regurgitate in user-friendly format for the masses to consume, with enough nutrient in it that interested people can actually do something with it.
This should be a wake-up call to the tinkerers and hackers everywhere. Stop fighting over which programming language is better than what. Stop trying to break into facebook accounts of whoever the snotty-nosed brat is. Get off your fat sarcastic asses and smell the coffee.
Get to work.
Change the world.
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