Another OS stories, synbio woes, and economy sucks.

Another OS stories, synbio woes, and economy sucks.

I've been rewatching a bit of serial experiment lain lately. How did I manage to do that with my recent schedule? Thank god for ipods. I had the DVDs converted to a raw file and then imported them into my 80GB ipod classic. As I have written somewhere before on some blog on the net, ipod is the modern vellum. It's like carrying a book around, except that there a lot more data to be stored in smaller packaging. I have quite a few MIT/UC Berkeley lectures on it as well, not to mention some of the more incredible (they are all incredible) TED talks that's available straight from the iTunes program. Not to sing praises of the Apple corporation or anything, but they really did get a lot of things right, the kind of things most large computer/electronics corporations just don't seem to be able to handle very aptly (probably because people who never programmed on computers run many of those corporations). If only they weren't being such dicks about it in their marketing campaigns and target population.... The fact of being able to have an external hard drive interfaced to a sound-out and a screen feels in many ways like holding a book for me, except that the format of the information and the amount of content is different. It's probably one of the reasons why I'm not all too find of the ipod touch. Too many functionalities, while useful and cool, is really a distraction I think (although the recent release of the Papers application for iPhone/touch is making me have second thoughts. That program is really a must have for any academic researcher). The app store concept integrated into the iPhone/touch was a stroke of genius as well. It's like software depository you can normally see on linux, just available ubiquitously, and each of the applications being self-contained without needing third party libraries and dependencies like it is normally the case with most linux distributions. Some people argue about the usefulness of the app store citing examples like 'pull my finger' or some other dumb derivative taking the top place among the most downloaded apps, but that's not the point, is it? Most bestsellers in books are pure crap. I don't mean to insult the authors but seriously, if you ever stopped and read through the Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet series you'll never be able to read any more fiction. It's amazing how there is both purity and filth in this world, manifesting in a single form of media. Likewise despite the flood of rather disgusting applications, app store provides a lot of gems like the aforementioned papers application that might as well change how scholars do research.

The facets of computerized culture is really apparent in the serial experiment lain. It can't be helped. the whole series revolve around computerization and its impact on the culture, and the anime was designed from the ground up with the accompanying PSX game in mind, where the player explorers the world of lain through a faux web browser that relays fragmented bits of information for the player to dissect. I've always found it interesting how Apple received such a prominent coverage through references in the lain anime. Most if not all the computers in the lain world (called navi, itself another Apple term derived from 'knowledge navigator.' it was basically a prototypical model for today's mobile computer/smartphones, where one would be able to connect to ubiquitous information and utilize various forms of media for literally navigating through knowledge contained in the web. Might not sound like much now, but we must realize that this idea came out while people still had to order floppy disc drives onto their computer) are some form of Apple computer in its previous or experimental derivation. The anime itself was largely done on Apple computers, using techniques that seem usual to us now but novel for the time it was made in. But if it were only superficial references I wouldn't be interested to actually write about it.

I'm interested because of so many of the software references present in lain. The copland OS in the lain world, which is the prevalent majority OS of the lain world like it is with the windows platform in ours, is actually a code name for experimental Apple OS that eventually culminated in the current iteration of OS X. You can also see a lot of references to other alternative operating systems like the BeOS and NeXT STEP. I don't know about copland (to be frank, Apple OS prior to OS X weren't all that great. There wasn't much you could do with those, made windows 95/98 look customizable), but BeOS and NeXt were both operating systems far ahead of its time. I'm not using this term lightly. They were both so far ahead of its time that many modern operating systems are still playing catch-up with some of their features (I'm looking at you, Vista). They were merely pushed out of the spotlight because of the incompatibility with the deluge of windows only application that also nearly did in the Apple corporation. Spec-wise, they were the operating systems of the future, capable of interfacing with, and running in mind boggling array of machines and peripherals with minimal modification. NeXT system was the first operating system in the world to feature the world's first web browser. That's right. WWW as we know it didn't really exist until NeXT came along with their crazy graphical applications and network capability. The first Doom was coded in NeXT machines. NeXT machines formed the backbone of the early CERN system and many other major labs around the world, and the coup-de-grace of all mathematical simulation/research applications, the Mathematica, was born on the NeXT system as well. Conventional Apple OSes and windows just couldn't handle the development and maintenance of such high caliber applications. Not that it was impossible, just that it would have required heroic feat of software engineering due to inherent faults and limitations of the operating systems themselves, which would have cost astronomical amount of money, and crazy amount of time, only to end up with buggy application capable of running only in highest of high-end systems (sounds familiar? Most modern games are programmed 'on' windows. Maybe that's why we have such crazy spec-eating buggy applications on the market today), something that was just not acceptable in mission critical applications used in laboratories and research centers around the world.

BeOS was later forgotten into oblivion. It had its share of devoted fans, and they still develop for the platform that's about to be reincarnated as the opensource Haiku OS (still in beta), but as the things stand it's a hobbyist platform at best. NeXT STep also has its share of devotees as well. They are developing a type of shell called GNUStep that's opensource and capable of running as a front-end for any operating system architecture, including linux, FreeBSD and windows. However, NeXT really didn't fall into oblivion like the BeOS did. Steve Jobs was the CEO and founder of the NeXT corporation, and he brought the whole thing to Apple when he became the CEO of the Apple corporation, which merged into some of the existing Apple architecture to form the backbone of what we know refer to as the OS X.

Apple has a bad reputation of being a computer company for fashion-conscious jerk wads with money to burn, and to some extent they really do deserve that reputation. You don't gain that kind of popularity without intentionally marketing your products toward them, and Apple certainly did target people who think computers are fashion accessories aiming for the lucrative high-end electronics market. Regardless, physicists and other scientists (especially the biologists of all kinds) love OS X. It has UNIX backbone so it integrates easily into any major research mainframes out there, most of them running some derivative of UNIX platform. It's popular enough to support most formats out there, like PDF, PPT and whatnot. It has bigger library of available softwares compared to linux, and it (was) a whole lot more stable compared to equivalent windows distributions while using less hardware resources to do more (modern versions of windows nearly caught up with OS X on the issue of stability though. OS X being inherently safer than windows isn't all that true in most cases). OS X has generous licensing terms, and you can reinstall you OS on your computer as many times as you want. If your windows crash on you and you need to reinstall it more than three times you need to call Microsoft and get permission to do things to your own computer. If you're using the arduino kit, OS X interfaces better than windows. If you're programming for the android OS, OS X connects better (though they are remedying that problem). Mathematica and other numerical simulation software is better integrated in OS X. OS X is capable of multiple processor array using multiple number of computers out-of-the-box. With windows? Well you can do it if you have money and time. And physicists/chemists/biologists usually want to do research, not spend grant money and weeks of time in configuring their computer system. It might have been fine to do that,maybe even cool when they were pimply faced teenagers, but when you have a paying job priorities change. People can argue about merit of different operating systems all they want. As the things stand at the moment, the only edge windows has over OS X is that it has bigger software library, and bigger software library is beginning to sound more and more like 'more games to buy and play with', which isn't something people with things to do keep in mind when buying their computers. If Microsoft thinks they can get away with having more games on their system as the leading reason to run windows, they need to wake up and smell the coffee. It's relatively trivial to port games. It's bloody difficult, if not impossible to port scientific applications, or anything else that you need to do your job. It's clear what people will choose when spending their 1k+ money on computers, and the gap will only deepen as the time goes on.

I don't like Apple. I don't like the Apple corporation. I think Microsoft spends more on their research projects and Microsoft does more for humanitarian projects compared to the Apple corporation. When I praise OS X, I'm praising BeOS and NeXT, not the Apple corporation. I'm not sure if I like Steve Jobs. From what I hear he's quite unpleasant to be around, and it's probably true. What really boils me when I think about OS X is the inevitable comparison between OS X and windows. At least linux is free. You don't complain when you get things for free, that's being distributed for more or less ideological reasons. Either you work with it or don't. But you need to pay for OS X and windows, and for operating system that costs money and that's bound in quite possibly draconian DRM windows usually doesn't feel like you're getting your money's worth. Mostly because it's really difficult to do actual work with windows based OSes, and mostly because windows OS doesn't have a shell.

All of this is beginning to sound a lot like bunch of techno fetishism isn't it? It probably is. I think the creator of serial experiment lain also makes a point on that issue, in an interview I read somewhere. Despite the level of technology in our possession, they way we wield it is not a whole lot different from how shamans of ancient religions would have wielded their religious fetishes in order to inflict some intended change upon the world. Like the lain OS project, for example. It's an old, possibly dead project that planned to use GNUStep interface on top of FreeBSD to make a new OS that runs the same way as most of the conventional operating systems in the lain universe, with similar level of customizability and interfacing options that include full voice support and etc. (it's a really ambitious project that probably fell apart under its own weight). Maybe the originator of the idea to create the lain OS was trying to immanentize the eschaton in his own right. Bringing about a change in world through symbols and symbolized actions. A lot of software based ideologies are beginning to sound more and more like their hardware-based counterparts, like cutting out the heart of your enemy and eating it to gain strength, or burying some sort of devotional item under a building to protect it for posterity. Now I know some of you might be smirking with obvious sense of superiority over the rest of the populace at not being subject to such barbaric impulses, but that's exactly my point. I'm saying that such semi-religious impulses are innate part of how human beings operate and view the world around him/her, so if anyone's feeling 'superior' over any other it's bound to be some sort of (possibly xenophobic) illusion, like saying my stick is better than your stick. Even the root of transhumanism can be explained in such a manner when you think about it. Basically people are searching for immortality and omniscience. A completion of the self as a human being through changing the body, something that's in the same league as the African scarification and Scandinavian body tattoo. They thought those patterns and runes held power to change the self, so they sought to integrate them to themselves by carving those patterns onto their own bodies. People now think molecular and atomic patterns have power to change the self, through it the world, and through it the very course of future, so they are searching for the way to integrate them to the very core of being, becoming transhuman. We may be living in an age where becoming something more than human is being equated with carving patterns and tattoos onto our bodies, along with other fetishes god knows what, maybe even some sort of exoskeleton.

Despite the aversion of the normalcy against 'barbarism' or anything that remotely reminds them of the past, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that we need to keep an eye out for ourselves when charting out the course of change for our future, not to get caught up in individual fetish objects as the end-of-all solution to our problems. I want to be a mad scientist, someone who can inflict change on the world through the use of knowledge and technology. It's a self-fulfilling cycle, where change in the world begets more knowledge which in turn changes the world further. Maybe my fixation with computer OSes and other peripherals are because of my desire for knowledge. Maybe I've been unwittingly sacrificing to the gods of knowledge by devoting myself to one type of operating system or the other, or some web browser, programming language, whatever, hoping that fixation with such objects would grant me power to achieve my dreams. Perhaps the same can be applied to everyone else out there, to varying degrees of intensity. I've seen people who don't know squat about entry level calculus holding zealously to physics and chemistry text undoubtedly beyond their comprehension, as if uttering those arcane words and tracing those symbols would somehow grant deeper wisdom, and change the course of the world to their liking. Perhaps the same can be said of the fashions and other items for 'fitting in' at the society. Maybe it's not about fitting in at all, maybe it's about collective understanding of the world, each individual trying to find a way to fulfill their sense of self according to that shared depot of information, which inevitably results in similarity.


Okay, enough about the whole fulfillment of self, cults, religions, and softwares.

I was set to have a meeting next Monday at the AMNH for possible first diybio-nyc meeting, but it doesn't look like it's going to work out (why am I not surprised). The meeting is still set to go, but it won't be in the AMNH which is a big shame because it would have been epic to have the first diybio-nyc meeting in history of the world in the museum of natural history. Maybe I should still push for the meeting in the museum... Apparently the reason for sudden change of venue is due to the changed policy of the museum due to economic woes and shrinking budget. The trouble with lab funding and now this. I'm feeling the effects of economic woes all over the place, and I get a feeling that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
As for the quality of the diybio-nyc personnel, I might as well be the most junior one of the bunch in terms of actual biology experiences. Apparently some members were actually participating members of the iGEM competition and one of them actually works in a biotech company situated in nyc.