I stopped at the Met a few days ago, admiring the Renaissance bronzes and the interiors of the workshops of the era they reassembled within the galleries.
Along with my professed love of the libraries both real and imagined that borders on the mystical, I also hold a softspot for Renaissance era workshops somewhere in my heart. There's something mystifying about those spaces that places them on the same level of the library of the universe penned by the eponymous Louis Jorges. Something that just boggles my imagination when I think about them. The master's workshop of the era were not simple art studios. They handled everything from metallurgy and architecture to alchemy and mathematics, and the polymath of Leonardo Da Vinci's style was a common sight during those times, though interests did not necessarily translate into true calibre. Basically they were the science laboratories of the time before science was born, akin to a magician's library in many ways.
Just think about it. The blue gleam of twilight flows through the closed windowsill. Bits of orange light from the furnace of molten bronze laid on top of the thick wooden worktables. And you can catch glimpses of sketchs of real and geometric experiments buried somewhere among illegible scrawls of mathematical formulae. The maestro work with his tools pouring molten metal into a crack on the wax shape that will soon turn into a statuette of life like quality. We are witnessing transformation of a chunk of rock into a life like shape that still retains all the emotions and memories of the artist's intent.
To me those workshops are the places where sciences and arts intermingled with each other under the will of the human creator to form wonderful things, crafted from a lifetime of pursuit and mastery. And that is why I stubbornly refuse to compare those workshops to most modern artists' galleries and workspaces. I may be a bit one sided on this issue but many of the products of modern art makes me question the degree of mastery and understanding the artist has on his or her chosen medium. Do they pay attention to their colors? The surface tension of the pigments? The light and surfaces at an interplay of the quantum nature? The construction and porosity of their wood? The thermodynamic characteristics of their molten metals? People who lived centuries ago paid attention to those things so why can't the modern men/women do it? It feels as if vast majority of the artists out there pay attention to the fad and fashion of the times instead of true perfection of their arts.
Of course, I am not an artist, and most of the knowledge and impression I have on arts are superficial at best. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that what I just put to words above is more relevent to the art scene then I would like.
I love those old workshops, but most of all I love what those workshops represent. Ceaseless pursuit of perfection not limited by superficial boundaries of genre and scene. Modern forms that most closely resembles the workshops of old are probably science laboratories and hackerspaces (not art galleries, I'm sorry to say). There is something incredibly satisfying about being able to pursue something to a degree of perfection, spending sleepless nights and skipping meals left and right. It's intellectually stimulating and it makes me feel alive, something I can't quite say with most of the lifestyles out there.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Monday, March 16, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Night comes
The night is here. I'm strangely exhausted today, strange because I didn't get any real work done. I took it easy and even played a game for an hour or so, the most I've used in such trivial pursuits for a long time... A few months I think.
Maybe it's the relaxation. Maybe I needed something like that, apart from the pursuit of arts and sciences I usually try to devote my life to (at the risk of sounding pretentious). For some reason I feel very rested and relaxed right now, in both body and mind. It feels as if little pieces of myself that's been torn away to little pieces are slowly finding their way back to me, making me whole again.
For some reason I am reminded of the long road trip I took back when I was little, in California. Everything was quiet and there wasn't any obstruction to any direction. It was a largest empty field I've ever seen, the thin strip of highway coming from one horizon going off into another. The land was arid, but it wasn't hot. It was quite cold actually, as if I was high in the sky among the atmosphere. There was unmistakable scent of green in the air, like spring wind. The world was enveloped in the dark blue hues of the sky with a thin streak of red light just emerging from the violet horizon... The world felt impossibly pure, and in the middle I felt as if the sky was falling into my heart.
I don't know how I would be able to describe what I am feeling right now, so I listed down bunch of stuff from the time in my life I felt something similar. It would be simple to define the whole exxperience as something like 'relaxed catharsis' or something such, but would it have been enough to portray my impression in full? Shouldn't I write down the very form of the world that gave birth to my impression of the world to ensure maximum fidelity with the reader? With myself? How would I be able to explain such feeling of calm revelation intermingled with such intense sensation of nostalgia?
I'm tapping this away as I lay in my bed, waiting for the sleep to overtake me. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I might even be able to dream of the memory I just described above.
Such amazing feeling of calmness and wonder. It would have been sad to live a life without such an experience, something so pure that my meager linguistics just can't seem to be able to describe it.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Maybe it's the relaxation. Maybe I needed something like that, apart from the pursuit of arts and sciences I usually try to devote my life to (at the risk of sounding pretentious). For some reason I feel very rested and relaxed right now, in both body and mind. It feels as if little pieces of myself that's been torn away to little pieces are slowly finding their way back to me, making me whole again.
For some reason I am reminded of the long road trip I took back when I was little, in California. Everything was quiet and there wasn't any obstruction to any direction. It was a largest empty field I've ever seen, the thin strip of highway coming from one horizon going off into another. The land was arid, but it wasn't hot. It was quite cold actually, as if I was high in the sky among the atmosphere. There was unmistakable scent of green in the air, like spring wind. The world was enveloped in the dark blue hues of the sky with a thin streak of red light just emerging from the violet horizon... The world felt impossibly pure, and in the middle I felt as if the sky was falling into my heart.
I don't know how I would be able to describe what I am feeling right now, so I listed down bunch of stuff from the time in my life I felt something similar. It would be simple to define the whole exxperience as something like 'relaxed catharsis' or something such, but would it have been enough to portray my impression in full? Shouldn't I write down the very form of the world that gave birth to my impression of the world to ensure maximum fidelity with the reader? With myself? How would I be able to explain such feeling of calm revelation intermingled with such intense sensation of nostalgia?
I'm tapping this away as I lay in my bed, waiting for the sleep to overtake me. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I might even be able to dream of the memory I just described above.
Such amazing feeling of calmness and wonder. It would have been sad to live a life without such an experience, something so pure that my meager linguistics just can't seem to be able to describe it.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Blackberry so far
Okay, so I've been testing out (read:playing with) the new blackberry I picked up this morning. This is a cheap-o blackberry model that comes with full keyboard, GPS, and 2mp camera with video recording capability but no wifi. And it's on the lacking side when it comes to the number of bands it can transmit in, though the comm options are still much better than most mid range cellphones out there.
All in all, it's pretty good for something I picked up on a whim until I can get my hands on a decent android based phone. I was somewhat surprised to find video recording capability and LED flash on the phone though. It's not the kind of feature that's available on machines of similar class. For example, iPhone has neither.
I love the keyboard on this thing. It's much better than tapping messages on the standard T9 keypad, and surprisingly enough I get quite an impressive wpm on this device... It's no where near what I can do with a full sized keyboard of course, but still impressive considering that it's only been a few hours since I got my hands on the blackberry. No one will be writing a novel on this thing but it's still plenty enough for an occasional blog post (like what I'm doing right now).
The GPS is something of a disappointment though. It's nice to have the functionality on a mere 50 dollar device but the accuracy and lock on time leaves something to be desired. It almost makes me think that the chip may be running some sort of triangulation scheme instead of a full GPS module. I need to mention that I've only used the GPS inside the building with google maps application I downloaded off the cellular web though. Considering how carrier-locked devices are I may get a better performance with the bundled At&t navigator application. I do remember that the blackjack II smartphone from At&t had its GPS locked in so that it wouldn't even turn on if you didn't use the paid app supplied by the phone company (there are ways to get around it of course).
The photo quality is good enough. It's no where near the quality of the nokia N series phones I had a brief fling with but it will still serve its purpose in a tight spot. The picture quality is still better than what you would get with an iPhone under similar light condition, if only marginally. I will take a few pictures and post it up on the flickr when opportunity arises.
I am delighted to see video capture capability on this phone. For some reason a lot of carriers and device manufacturers leave video capability out of otherwise fine smartphones (like iPhone and the G1), so I wasn't sure if there would be video capability on this device. You won't be filming any hollywood movies with this, but it still does its job well enough.
How many words did I write so far? It's been about five minutes since I started writing on this phone. Marvelous.
The bundled web browser is nice enough. You can watch youtube videos on it, and the video loads swimmingly despite this device only being capable of data transfer over the infamous EDGE network (more on that later). Other pages load nicely as well, and the browser supports javascript and full CSS rendering (so far). I have a secondary opera mini browser loaded on the device though (among other myriad of applications).
Careful calibration of the web browser turns this device from a messaging centric smartphone into a fully featured synthetic biology reference, among other things. I have numerous web-widgets that links directly to the PLoS journal, openwetware web services, the GenBank database with full DNA table search capability and etc. Combined with the ability to view flash videos off the web, the innovative will be able to find a lot of crazy uses for this device.
The main reason people get their hands on blackberry is so they can maintain ubiquitous email presence. I have four email accounts registered to this device for work/school/mailing list/personal, with full filters. The email experience on this device is definitely solid. People say that blackberry is the best system on the market for messaging and emails, and I must say that I am inclined to agree. Other smartphones doesn't even come close to this, and this isn't even the best blackberry device (I'd say the place is reserved for the blackberry bold model, something that costs four times as much as this device even with 2 year service agreement). Now only if I could get rid of that annoying 'sent via blackberry from at&t' marking at the end of all my emails...
This device is all about communication and it shows. There's a program called blackberry communicator on the device that acts as an instant messaging protocol for any and all blackberry devices without any extra charge. I can see how corporates and research groups can go nuts for such a feature set.
The first third party application I installed on this phone is the twitterberry. As some of you might know already I'm something of a twitter junkie. I know that there are a lot of useless noise on that thing ('what I ate for lunch today' and etc) but once you can get through that part and link up withb worthwhile people the whole thing becomes indispensable. Not to mention that it acts as a field report on my day to day thoughts. The second application would be a full suite of google mobile apps including Gmail client, google maps, and rss reader among other things. I also got mobireader for blackberry, turning this device into a semi-decent ebook reader.
Not all is well in the blackberry land however. There is one glaring and quite frankly insane omission from the standard application set that comes preinstalled on the device. This particular model of blackberry does not come with any kind of instant messaging program. There are a few for most of the major protocols like ICQ and Gtalk available on the net. Many of them programmed by the device manufacturer (RIM) themselves so that they sit flush with the operating system, but users of this type of message centric device should not have to jump through hoops like that in the first place. Also, all of those free applications are single protocol only. Having multiple instant messaging programs open on your desktop was ridiculous five years ago and it is ridiculous now. Maybe the time I spent with nokia's symbian operating system spoiled me, but I can't believe the lack of free multiprotocol instant messenger clients on the blackberry os. There are a few programs available but they are all commercial apps you have to pay for. It's crazy I tell you.
I added 1 gigabyte memory card to this phone, and it didn't have any trouble recognizing it. I'll be needing it for the crazy number of photos I'll be taking with this phone.
Hardware-wise I have no complaints. This phone is surprisingly small now that I have it in my hands, it's almost a miracle that I can type away with my fingers like this. The size is more or less a fine balance between mobility and usability. The construction feels very solid and hardy without being heavy, and I would definitely refer to the overall feeling as being classy without being boring. For a smartphone with a full keyboard I found this phone to be surprisingly pocketable, but then I have skinny legs so your mileage may vary on that. At least this phone is significantly smaller than the G1. This phone is also slightly smaller than the Samsung blackjack II(an interesting bit of trivia, the blackjack II is the smartphone of choice for the female lead of the scifi tv show Fringe), something I couldn't really notice until I got the two devices side by side (thanks Ann!). The trackball interface needed some getting used to, but it worked out nicely in the end. I don't particularly see the advantage of trackball over other navigation methods though. Maybe it's the aesthetics?
The biggest gripe I have with this device is of course that it doesn't run android os. An ideal handset at for me would be blackberry hardware with Asian band compatibility, better camera, running the android os. Well, one can dream on, right?
Well that about wraps it up for preliminary review of the device. I'll write some real world usage impressions later on...
I'm beginning to notice some pattern to my gadget purchasing habit. I settled for thinkpad T400 for my laptop and now a blackberry? Both are criticized for rather conservative design yet praised for superior build quality. I wonder whether this is a good thing or not... Hmm.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
All in all, it's pretty good for something I picked up on a whim until I can get my hands on a decent android based phone. I was somewhat surprised to find video recording capability and LED flash on the phone though. It's not the kind of feature that's available on machines of similar class. For example, iPhone has neither.
I love the keyboard on this thing. It's much better than tapping messages on the standard T9 keypad, and surprisingly enough I get quite an impressive wpm on this device... It's no where near what I can do with a full sized keyboard of course, but still impressive considering that it's only been a few hours since I got my hands on the blackberry. No one will be writing a novel on this thing but it's still plenty enough for an occasional blog post (like what I'm doing right now).
The GPS is something of a disappointment though. It's nice to have the functionality on a mere 50 dollar device but the accuracy and lock on time leaves something to be desired. It almost makes me think that the chip may be running some sort of triangulation scheme instead of a full GPS module. I need to mention that I've only used the GPS inside the building with google maps application I downloaded off the cellular web though. Considering how carrier-locked devices are I may get a better performance with the bundled At&t navigator application. I do remember that the blackjack II smartphone from At&t had its GPS locked in so that it wouldn't even turn on if you didn't use the paid app supplied by the phone company (there are ways to get around it of course).
The photo quality is good enough. It's no where near the quality of the nokia N series phones I had a brief fling with but it will still serve its purpose in a tight spot. The picture quality is still better than what you would get with an iPhone under similar light condition, if only marginally. I will take a few pictures and post it up on the flickr when opportunity arises.
I am delighted to see video capture capability on this phone. For some reason a lot of carriers and device manufacturers leave video capability out of otherwise fine smartphones (like iPhone and the G1), so I wasn't sure if there would be video capability on this device. You won't be filming any hollywood movies with this, but it still does its job well enough.
How many words did I write so far? It's been about five minutes since I started writing on this phone. Marvelous.
The bundled web browser is nice enough. You can watch youtube videos on it, and the video loads swimmingly despite this device only being capable of data transfer over the infamous EDGE network (more on that later). Other pages load nicely as well, and the browser supports javascript and full CSS rendering (so far). I have a secondary opera mini browser loaded on the device though (among other myriad of applications).
Careful calibration of the web browser turns this device from a messaging centric smartphone into a fully featured synthetic biology reference, among other things. I have numerous web-widgets that links directly to the PLoS journal, openwetware web services, the GenBank database with full DNA table search capability and etc. Combined with the ability to view flash videos off the web, the innovative will be able to find a lot of crazy uses for this device.
The main reason people get their hands on blackberry is so they can maintain ubiquitous email presence. I have four email accounts registered to this device for work/school/mailing list/personal, with full filters. The email experience on this device is definitely solid. People say that blackberry is the best system on the market for messaging and emails, and I must say that I am inclined to agree. Other smartphones doesn't even come close to this, and this isn't even the best blackberry device (I'd say the place is reserved for the blackberry bold model, something that costs four times as much as this device even with 2 year service agreement). Now only if I could get rid of that annoying 'sent via blackberry from at&t' marking at the end of all my emails...
This device is all about communication and it shows. There's a program called blackberry communicator on the device that acts as an instant messaging protocol for any and all blackberry devices without any extra charge. I can see how corporates and research groups can go nuts for such a feature set.
The first third party application I installed on this phone is the twitterberry. As some of you might know already I'm something of a twitter junkie. I know that there are a lot of useless noise on that thing ('what I ate for lunch today' and etc) but once you can get through that part and link up withb worthwhile people the whole thing becomes indispensable. Not to mention that it acts as a field report on my day to day thoughts. The second application would be a full suite of google mobile apps including Gmail client, google maps, and rss reader among other things. I also got mobireader for blackberry, turning this device into a semi-decent ebook reader.
Not all is well in the blackberry land however. There is one glaring and quite frankly insane omission from the standard application set that comes preinstalled on the device. This particular model of blackberry does not come with any kind of instant messaging program. There are a few for most of the major protocols like ICQ and Gtalk available on the net. Many of them programmed by the device manufacturer (RIM) themselves so that they sit flush with the operating system, but users of this type of message centric device should not have to jump through hoops like that in the first place. Also, all of those free applications are single protocol only. Having multiple instant messaging programs open on your desktop was ridiculous five years ago and it is ridiculous now. Maybe the time I spent with nokia's symbian operating system spoiled me, but I can't believe the lack of free multiprotocol instant messenger clients on the blackberry os. There are a few programs available but they are all commercial apps you have to pay for. It's crazy I tell you.
I added 1 gigabyte memory card to this phone, and it didn't have any trouble recognizing it. I'll be needing it for the crazy number of photos I'll be taking with this phone.
Hardware-wise I have no complaints. This phone is surprisingly small now that I have it in my hands, it's almost a miracle that I can type away with my fingers like this. The size is more or less a fine balance between mobility and usability. The construction feels very solid and hardy without being heavy, and I would definitely refer to the overall feeling as being classy without being boring. For a smartphone with a full keyboard I found this phone to be surprisingly pocketable, but then I have skinny legs so your mileage may vary on that. At least this phone is significantly smaller than the G1. This phone is also slightly smaller than the Samsung blackjack II(an interesting bit of trivia, the blackjack II is the smartphone of choice for the female lead of the scifi tv show Fringe), something I couldn't really notice until I got the two devices side by side (thanks Ann!). The trackball interface needed some getting used to, but it worked out nicely in the end. I don't particularly see the advantage of trackball over other navigation methods though. Maybe it's the aesthetics?
The biggest gripe I have with this device is of course that it doesn't run android os. An ideal handset at for me would be blackberry hardware with Asian band compatibility, better camera, running the android os. Well, one can dream on, right?
Well that about wraps it up for preliminary review of the device. I'll write some real world usage impressions later on...
I'm beginning to notice some pattern to my gadget purchasing habit. I settled for thinkpad T400 for my laptop and now a blackberry? Both are criticized for rather conservative design yet praised for superior build quality. I wonder whether this is a good thing or not... Hmm.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
frustration
I just wrote a two thousand-ish word post on the livejournal website only to have my browser revert back to a previous page because for some combination of keys I pressed. The whole day's post down the drain just like that. Apparently the 'restore from saved draft' option doesn't work properly on the opera browser. I don't fee like writing something I've written all over again, so I guess I'll have to write a brand new post.
Just in case you were interested, the post was about how amazon was selling the android G1 for fifty something dollars, which is a ridiculously cheap price for a fully featured smartphone. If you're in the market you probably should get it.
I've been using opera as the personal browser of choice for a while now. Of course, firefox still remains my browser of choice for all the work related stuff due to the bevy of science related extensions I can no longer live without (zotero and evernote, etc etc, programs that makes automatic bibliography of the resources I pool into the browser off and online, with full notation engine for any kind of file format including pdf, and I'm not even going to begin with the full journal article search engine I can build into the FF itself using extensions). Yet the sad reality is that while firefox is the swiss army knife of web browsers it's fast becoming rather unwieldy with its large memory/processor footprint and slow startup time. I've also used google chrome for a while (for all their faults, I like google and the weird products they keep on pumping out) but for some reason chrome gets ridiculously slow when you leave the browser window open for a long time, something that's unacceptable on a modern laptop with dedicated graphics card and top of the line processor. I think it might have something to do with the processor intensive architecture of their browser itself. Hopefully they'll iron out the faults soon, since the chrome browser really is blazingly fast compared to the competition.
For some strange reason, Opera browser is capable of maintaining the smallest memory/processor cycle with multiple tabs compared to the competition, considering how many functions are built into the browser itself (torrent engine, irc, etc etc). I did a little tweaking with proxy engine (also built into the browser itself) so opera is now ad-free as well. The interface to make that happen is a little bit clunky compared to the simple button interface of the adblock plus extension on the firefox, but it works.
Just in case you were interested, the post was about how amazon was selling the android G1 for fifty something dollars, which is a ridiculously cheap price for a fully featured smartphone. If you're in the market you probably should get it.
I've been using opera as the personal browser of choice for a while now. Of course, firefox still remains my browser of choice for all the work related stuff due to the bevy of science related extensions I can no longer live without (zotero and evernote, etc etc, programs that makes automatic bibliography of the resources I pool into the browser off and online, with full notation engine for any kind of file format including pdf, and I'm not even going to begin with the full journal article search engine I can build into the FF itself using extensions). Yet the sad reality is that while firefox is the swiss army knife of web browsers it's fast becoming rather unwieldy with its large memory/processor footprint and slow startup time. I've also used google chrome for a while (for all their faults, I like google and the weird products they keep on pumping out) but for some reason chrome gets ridiculously slow when you leave the browser window open for a long time, something that's unacceptable on a modern laptop with dedicated graphics card and top of the line processor. I think it might have something to do with the processor intensive architecture of their browser itself. Hopefully they'll iron out the faults soon, since the chrome browser really is blazingly fast compared to the competition.
For some strange reason, Opera browser is capable of maintaining the smallest memory/processor cycle with multiple tabs compared to the competition, considering how many functions are built into the browser itself (torrent engine, irc, etc etc). I did a little tweaking with proxy engine (also built into the browser itself) so opera is now ad-free as well. The interface to make that happen is a little bit clunky compared to the simple button interface of the adblock plus extension on the firefox, but it works.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
android
I've been testing out android os for a week or two now. I got through the basic hello-world examples and ran them on the emulator without much fuss. I didn't get to try the iPhone development environment before, but I don't think the android development environment is half bad. It's much better than anything else I've seen so far. As for the hello world program, I tried "Close the world, open the neXt" from the serial experiment lain series instead of the standard example. Just a few line changes and it was all done very smoothly. I feel like a geek saying this, but seeing that phrase actually displayed across the emulator screen for quite possibly the most Navi-like device ever made me feel quite giddy. I have secret ambition to be able to code a decent augmented reality software for the android os someday. Something people can use for fun, different from all that business-like GPS and location tracking softwares that already seem to be on the android os (in beta forms? I don't think they are actually on the marketplace). Augmented reality rpg games where you use the camera of the android-phone to watch see your world. Web-connected graffiti application, where you can draw on real things you see on camera using location awareness. It will be shared through the network connection so that you can also see what other people drew on the city hall or whatever. Hidden item game, exploration game where you explore city-in-city using the virtual world of augmented reality, transmitted to you through you android phone.
They all sound so cool, and so in line with what had been predicted in the anime like serial experiment lain and other cyberpunk-ish media. I wonder how the kids who will grow up with such technology would think of reality. Will it become something more magical for them? Or will the magics become trivial?
Of course, as the things stand right now I'm just a newbie who just finished his first notepad-like application on the android, following step-by-step instructions. I guess I have to learn to be patient, putting together something like an augmented reality program for handsets can't be easy, especially when we think about the rather minimal hardware it will run on.
While the software side of the android os development continues to wow me (it's really a first real software development environment for me), the advance on the hardware side had been disappointing so far. As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, I'm in the market for a new smartphone (eversince my N85 died on me and I got that refund) and I was dearly hoping that it would be an android phone. So far the only android phone on the market is G1, and it lacks some features I deem critical on a handset. Like the ability to capture video. I still can't believe they decided to leave that function out. It's too nonsensical to the extent that I am beginning to believe the whole 'Apple pressuring Google/HTC to cripple the G1 hardware' story that's be making the rounds on the net lately. The G1 itself isn't such a terrible phone. I would say that it's rather average. Being average wouldn't be so bad if it didn't cost US$399 unlocked (I'm talking about the developer's version. There seem to be other ways of getting somewhat cheaper G1s though).
I would wait for a new android phone to come up on the horizon, but so far the only model that's been sighted is a touch-screen only model. Seriously, what are they thinking? I've used Samsung Blackjack II and had a brief fling with a Blackberry. And the general usability level of input system on handsets goes like this.
1)Keyboard (like on Blackberries)
2)T9 input system (the predictive input system for regular phones)
3)Touchscreen keyboard (like the one on the iPhone)
People can rave about touchscreens all they want. The fact of life is that in terms of pure input, nothing really beats a real keyboard system embedded into the handset (at the moment) and touchscreen remains an interesting novelty interface. I'm not saying they are unusable or anything. Far from it. I'm just stating how they perform compared to the competition. So I'm in a dilemma here. Do I wait for a keyboard android phone that may or may not happen? Should I just grab the new touchscreen android phone when it comes out? Or should I just grab a decent handset of non-android variety to tide me over until the ideal android phone comes along (how long that will take, I have no idea)? I'm leaning toward the third option, with the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia E71 prices that keeps on dropping.
However, if I were to go for the third option it would still mean that I have to choose between locked-in but roaming capable BlackBerry Bold or E71 that's unlocked yet lacks the kind of international roaming frequency I need (the 2100 UMTS etc for Korea/Japan). The price difference between them is about 50~100 dollars, and then there's the matter of software library. I know I can download whole map database into E71 and use it as a GPS even when offline, but I'm not so sure about BB.
And when I consider the whole pricing issues of the phones and how long I would actually use them, and compare it to my study of the android platform, something just tells me to make the jump to the new touchscreen android phone and get used to it...
They all sound so cool, and so in line with what had been predicted in the anime like serial experiment lain and other cyberpunk-ish media. I wonder how the kids who will grow up with such technology would think of reality. Will it become something more magical for them? Or will the magics become trivial?
Of course, as the things stand right now I'm just a newbie who just finished his first notepad-like application on the android, following step-by-step instructions. I guess I have to learn to be patient, putting together something like an augmented reality program for handsets can't be easy, especially when we think about the rather minimal hardware it will run on.
While the software side of the android os development continues to wow me (it's really a first real software development environment for me), the advance on the hardware side had been disappointing so far. As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, I'm in the market for a new smartphone (eversince my N85 died on me and I got that refund) and I was dearly hoping that it would be an android phone. So far the only android phone on the market is G1, and it lacks some features I deem critical on a handset. Like the ability to capture video. I still can't believe they decided to leave that function out. It's too nonsensical to the extent that I am beginning to believe the whole 'Apple pressuring Google/HTC to cripple the G1 hardware' story that's be making the rounds on the net lately. The G1 itself isn't such a terrible phone. I would say that it's rather average. Being average wouldn't be so bad if it didn't cost US$399 unlocked (I'm talking about the developer's version. There seem to be other ways of getting somewhat cheaper G1s though).
I would wait for a new android phone to come up on the horizon, but so far the only model that's been sighted is a touch-screen only model. Seriously, what are they thinking? I've used Samsung Blackjack II and had a brief fling with a Blackberry. And the general usability level of input system on handsets goes like this.
1)Keyboard (like on Blackberries)
2)T9 input system (the predictive input system for regular phones)
3)Touchscreen keyboard (like the one on the iPhone)
People can rave about touchscreens all they want. The fact of life is that in terms of pure input, nothing really beats a real keyboard system embedded into the handset (at the moment) and touchscreen remains an interesting novelty interface. I'm not saying they are unusable or anything. Far from it. I'm just stating how they perform compared to the competition. So I'm in a dilemma here. Do I wait for a keyboard android phone that may or may not happen? Should I just grab the new touchscreen android phone when it comes out? Or should I just grab a decent handset of non-android variety to tide me over until the ideal android phone comes along (how long that will take, I have no idea)? I'm leaning toward the third option, with the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia E71 prices that keeps on dropping.
However, if I were to go for the third option it would still mean that I have to choose between locked-in but roaming capable BlackBerry Bold or E71 that's unlocked yet lacks the kind of international roaming frequency I need (the 2100 UMTS etc for Korea/Japan). The price difference between them is about 50~100 dollars, and then there's the matter of software library. I know I can download whole map database into E71 and use it as a GPS even when offline, but I'm not so sure about BB.
And when I consider the whole pricing issues of the phones and how long I would actually use them, and compare it to my study of the android platform, something just tells me to make the jump to the new touchscreen android phone and get used to it...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Internet consciousness
So here's an interesting short article on the possibility of internet gaining some type of consciousness due to its network based emergence-friendly structure. The author is the famous Ben Goertzel, one of the foremost minds of the futurist/AI school. If you've got time you should check out his blog for other articles as well. I've found a number of them to be quite compelling. I've always been interested in artificial intelligence, though my concentration is with artificial life. In time I've come to view the two as the same type of system manifesting in different mediums, and I've come to think that intelligence is a trait that naturally comes along with the collection of characteristic called life. Intelligence is life and life is intelligence. In that sense I consider even minuscule bacteria to be intelligent, though not in a way we usually think about intelligence. The very fact that certain collection of molecular machines can work in conjunction to behave in such a way that allows it to feed, evade harm and propagate, even in evolution-aided unconscious manner means that certain system should be considered intelligent. Of course, this is merely my personal view that is not backed by evidence based professional study. This is more of a personal impression with reasonable causes, something that's on it's way of becoming a hypothesis but not quite there yet as the things stand. Considering that I consider our current definition of intelligence to be lacking in many ways, I will be at ire of many neurobiologists should I exclaim such opinions carelessly. And for some reason there are a lot of neurobiologists around me so I try to keep my mouth shut most of the time regarding that issue.
Ben Goertzel's answer to whether the net can become an intelligent construct is somewhat vague, but then he probably can't help it himself. The question itself is a bit on the vague side when you think about it, including the whole uncertainty of the definition of intelligence that I just wrote about above. He briefly mentions the pervading ethos of the neurobiologists of the recent years, that many of them believe that intelligence/consciousness is a property that will inevitably emerge from any complex system that has the right sort of internal dynamics. I do definitely agree with him on that point, since when you think about it it's about the only scientifically feasible explanation of the emergence of intelligence/consciousness without attributing some specific part of the brain to the trait of intelligence (like how Rene Descartes attributed ganglia as the sit of the soul). I also suspect that life arises in a very similar manner, and whether that pattern of internal dynamics can be an abstraction that can be applied to different types of physical systems is a major part of my current research as a fledgling science student (the one that's helping paying my rent). Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something in my lifetime, since I view the possibility of such a universal theoretical platform to be a big game changer in the upcoming human century, something that might as well change the world we live in along with applications of nanotechnology and modular biology.
Will internet itself become intelligent at some point? I'm sure it will. Dr. Ben Goertzel points out that the internet is way too fragmented to display a coherent vision of an artificial intelligence and instead suggests that there might be a way to construct a sort of unifying backbone using the network infrastructure of the internet itself as a sort of raw data feed/complexity provider for that central structure. It makes sense, in a way that no one really thinks about it before someone else says it first. Most complex emergent systems, when laid out using some elements of graph theory (the graph theory, we are not talking about bar graphs and such nonsense here, for those who haven't been keeping tabs on mathematics) displays inexplicable tendency to form central clusters around certain limited number of nodes instead of distributing indefinitely. And the change usually isn't gradual or predictable. It happens rapidly under certain critical threshold as Stuart Kauffman put it very succinctly on his book "At home in the universe." Internet is very obviously following in that pattern. The last graphic map of the internet I've seen displayed certain number of nodes (websites/services) with overwhelming number of links with a lot of nodes with limited number of links. Similar pattern is also observed in the growth of neural pathways and formation of galactic clusters, and who knows what other phenomenon in this universe escaped our notice, considering that complexity science is still a new field. Now I don't have a very clear idea of what form that central structure would have to take to make the internet truly intelligent to observable degree... I assume it would be something on par with designing CNS for the distributed system that is the internet, possibly with a hint of recursive structure via Douglas Hofstadter, but this is all just some ideas bouncing around and I have no idea what physical/informational form such a construct would take. I'd assume it is something far past the simple matter of linking a lot of links within network nodes or providing raw processing power (that would be like saying any game of go can be won with large enough number of stones, which is just dumb. This isn't a chess, kiddo)... I should definitely give some more thought to this, the ideas on the nature of the 'central structure' might as well be the catalyst I've been looking for.
The problem that continues to bother me whenever I think of artificial intelligence is the vague definition of intelligence we seem to share. Just how can we tell what is intelligent or not? Most definition at the moment seem to be about figuring out how human-like other organisms/systems are without regards to the actual 'intelligence' of that organism/system. I may not be a professional but I smell a very homocentric perception whenever I read something that pertains to the nature of intelligence. If intelligence is about being able to communicate with other beings then antisocial foreigners are not intelligent. If intelligence is about being able to react to the environment so that you can find sources of food and multiply, then bacteria are intelligent. Maybe even viruses. Both of them do not have any sort of nervous system like we do with 'higher organisms' so it makes the problem of intelligence a bit more complex.
Internet may become intelligent someday. This is the year that the internet will have the equal or higher number of hyperlinks as there are synapses in our brains. The real question is, how will we be able to tell if it is intelligent? Are we looking for intelligent traits or are we looking for human traits? How would we be able to tell the difference when the time comes? Maybe the first machine intelligence that blossoms on the world wide web will be trampled on by us as a mere bug in the system. After all, we do it to each other all the time.
Ben Goertzel's answer to whether the net can become an intelligent construct is somewhat vague, but then he probably can't help it himself. The question itself is a bit on the vague side when you think about it, including the whole uncertainty of the definition of intelligence that I just wrote about above. He briefly mentions the pervading ethos of the neurobiologists of the recent years, that many of them believe that intelligence/consciousness is a property that will inevitably emerge from any complex system that has the right sort of internal dynamics. I do definitely agree with him on that point, since when you think about it it's about the only scientifically feasible explanation of the emergence of intelligence/consciousness without attributing some specific part of the brain to the trait of intelligence (like how Rene Descartes attributed ganglia as the sit of the soul). I also suspect that life arises in a very similar manner, and whether that pattern of internal dynamics can be an abstraction that can be applied to different types of physical systems is a major part of my current research as a fledgling science student (the one that's helping paying my rent). Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something in my lifetime, since I view the possibility of such a universal theoretical platform to be a big game changer in the upcoming human century, something that might as well change the world we live in along with applications of nanotechnology and modular biology.
Will internet itself become intelligent at some point? I'm sure it will. Dr. Ben Goertzel points out that the internet is way too fragmented to display a coherent vision of an artificial intelligence and instead suggests that there might be a way to construct a sort of unifying backbone using the network infrastructure of the internet itself as a sort of raw data feed/complexity provider for that central structure. It makes sense, in a way that no one really thinks about it before someone else says it first. Most complex emergent systems, when laid out using some elements of graph theory (the graph theory, we are not talking about bar graphs and such nonsense here, for those who haven't been keeping tabs on mathematics) displays inexplicable tendency to form central clusters around certain limited number of nodes instead of distributing indefinitely. And the change usually isn't gradual or predictable. It happens rapidly under certain critical threshold as Stuart Kauffman put it very succinctly on his book "At home in the universe." Internet is very obviously following in that pattern. The last graphic map of the internet I've seen displayed certain number of nodes (websites/services) with overwhelming number of links with a lot of nodes with limited number of links. Similar pattern is also observed in the growth of neural pathways and formation of galactic clusters, and who knows what other phenomenon in this universe escaped our notice, considering that complexity science is still a new field. Now I don't have a very clear idea of what form that central structure would have to take to make the internet truly intelligent to observable degree... I assume it would be something on par with designing CNS for the distributed system that is the internet, possibly with a hint of recursive structure via Douglas Hofstadter, but this is all just some ideas bouncing around and I have no idea what physical/informational form such a construct would take. I'd assume it is something far past the simple matter of linking a lot of links within network nodes or providing raw processing power (that would be like saying any game of go can be won with large enough number of stones, which is just dumb. This isn't a chess, kiddo)... I should definitely give some more thought to this, the ideas on the nature of the 'central structure' might as well be the catalyst I've been looking for.
The problem that continues to bother me whenever I think of artificial intelligence is the vague definition of intelligence we seem to share. Just how can we tell what is intelligent or not? Most definition at the moment seem to be about figuring out how human-like other organisms/systems are without regards to the actual 'intelligence' of that organism/system. I may not be a professional but I smell a very homocentric perception whenever I read something that pertains to the nature of intelligence. If intelligence is about being able to communicate with other beings then antisocial foreigners are not intelligent. If intelligence is about being able to react to the environment so that you can find sources of food and multiply, then bacteria are intelligent. Maybe even viruses. Both of them do not have any sort of nervous system like we do with 'higher organisms' so it makes the problem of intelligence a bit more complex.
Internet may become intelligent someday. This is the year that the internet will have the equal or higher number of hyperlinks as there are synapses in our brains. The real question is, how will we be able to tell if it is intelligent? Are we looking for intelligent traits or are we looking for human traits? How would we be able to tell the difference when the time comes? Maybe the first machine intelligence that blossoms on the world wide web will be trampled on by us as a mere bug in the system. After all, we do it to each other all the time.
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