Reason for computers

 

 

The reason Alan Kay got into the computers in the first place. It's not about hardware, software, or even user interface. It's about augmenting human intellect.

I still agree with Alan Kay on most of the things he said. Computer revolution never happened. We still have absolutely no idea what computers are capable of. And we're still nowhere near the kind of world originally imagined by pioneers of computers where a high school kid with no significant social or economic advantage would be able to gain intimate understanding of the system of the world in terms of sciences and history through the tools of computerization.

I'm beginning to think that the real computer revolution might not have much to do with computers at all. Maybe it about laying out systems of ideas first. Systems of ideas for interaction between certain devices and a human being. Systems of ideas for interfacing a human being with existing knowledge base. Why can't object oriented programming framework be applied to formation of educational curriculum? Why do we still consider object oriented programming, something that was formed and finalized during the days of hulking mainframes as cutting edge programming technique, in that it finally addresses one significant facet about the act of programming, and thus computing; programming is not about feeding linear list of instructions to a computer, it's an act of reorganizing ideas into most efficient form of instruction.

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Untitled

Playpower: An introduction from Playpower Foundation on Vimeo.

 

According to the founder of Playpower.org, more people in India have TVs at home than tap water. And there are $12 computers everywhere that uses the TVs as monitors, like so many of the personal computers of old. 

Now consider that these hardwares based off older 8bit chip designs and the softwares that run on them are more or less in public domain. We are looking at a significant portion of the entire human population just poised on the verge to hackerdom. It's not just typing education and language training. We could build entirely new framework for education in 3rd world urban area using existing tools of education and science. Imagine being able to design an 8bit program for those machines (some of them can actually do internet) that pulls data from research institutions of all kinds (BLAST, Wolfram Alpha, and etc etc) and scale it down to a form those machines and people using those machines can understand. We already have beta versions of synthetic biology CAD program that undergraduates regularly use for their school assignments and private projects, so it's not that far away in the future. 

Will a child capable of programming computers and pull data on SNP variations to do his/her own genotyping using soon-to-be widely available opensource PCR machines still languish in poverty and despair? I don't know. I'd sure like to find out though. 

 

 

 

 

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Moving about

It's really difficult to concentrate on writing something these days (as I've been saying for the last year). Maybe it's because of my hasty decision to move to a blogger from previous livejournal account?

Right now I maintain about four main web presence. Twitter gets used most often, followed by tumblr, blogspot, and lastly wordpress. Twitter is really what I'd call an idea stream. I use it as a combination of microblog, mobile scratchpad and IM of sorts, and it's been pretty great at all of those things so far... Even at its current clumsy state it's a pretty good learning and research tool for a student like me (where else can you find a propulsion specialist at 3 am and ask random questions to him/her?). Tumblr is a web scrapbook. I just pour in most of the links, pictures, and videos I find interesting into it, though most of the time content on tumblr tend to be from other tumblr blogs... So while it's more colorful than a traditional blog or microblog, it doesn't hold nearly as much original content... I'm not sure why, but there's something about tumblr that stops me from uploading text heavy original content onto their services (or maybe it's just because I'm already using a number of different web services already). The blogspot one I use for relatively larger written pieces, though I never think about quality of the stuff I write there. It's meant to be a free form journal where I talk about anything from latest political scandal to promising developments in sciences and favorite books. And then the wordpress blog is the one that's supposed to be the face of my web presence... It's the kind of place where I watch my language when I write.

Well the arrangement isn't working so well now that I can hardly find the time to sit in front of a computer and do private stuff. These days, if I'm sitting in front of a computer I'm working on something, sometimes for money. It's difficult to come up with my usual text blog posts that range anywhere between 1000 to 5000 words. 

When I can write presonal stuff is when I'm walking or riding around the city to get to someplace else. While the MTA keeps deplorable timetable it gives me ample time to go through my books and write stuff down. The problem is it's difficult if not impossible to open up a laptop in a crowded F line train during the rush hour. The best I can manage is a handset, and regular blogs without straightforward mobile uploading scheme (that encompasses all froms of media, text, audio, video and etc) doesn't quite work as well as I'd like.

So, I'm reaching out to another web service again, to use posterous for all my 'flights of fancy' type posts on the run. Maybe I can do something new with this service and modern smartphones, like working on real videos that demonstrate interesting ideas rather than just simply writing about it. I always seek out professors and grad students for advice on the work I'm doing or just to talk science. Maybe I can upload some of the talks onto the web. I don't know. I think there's a lot of interesting possibility (most of which will be made unrealistic by AT&T's rather pathetic dataplan pricing scheme in which they eliminate the unlimited data and replace it with something that can't handle sending high quality videos on air).

Let's see where this idea of cloud scrapbook can take me for now. (oh, and I should look for some way to backup my posterous posts offline)

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Update

Summer's here again, and it's harder than ever to write a decent post while sitting in front of a computer. It's ironic that I'm beginning to use pen and paper far more than laptops and smart phones to do my leisure writing. Lot of things on my mind lately, like whether all this science stuff I'm trying my hand at will eventually work out somehow. With the basic issues like being able to find and hold down a job (I don't really want) so that I can pay my way through school and all that weighing down on my mind all the time, being able to pursue science as a vocation feels like a pipe dream all too often. Yeah, sure. Everyone works, more or less. And a lot of them actually work to pay their own rent, tuition and buy their own food like I'm doing right now (oh right, I'm talking about undergrads). All too often it's really a problem of future, and repercussions of mistakes I might make. Neal Stephenson wrote something about that in one of his books... Some kids go to jail for 10 years for striking up a joint, and some other kids get to protest in front of the city hall after making it to college. Some people just live in a very fault-intolerant world. That's about where I am. Not quite as bad as some kids I teach, but still enough to worry about becoming homeless after some idiot run me over with a car. And after you're homeless... Well it'll be a whole lot harder to beg professors to let me into a lab without being treated like some junkie or a maniac.

Something like that probably won't happen, but I can't help but feel that chill in the back of my neck time to time. And about the only thing that makes all the fears and uncertainties worth it... Well I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to call it. Most people seem to call the practice of it science. It's some kind of pursuit toward something. And it makes life worth it.

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Wikileaks video

 

Just a quick post before I run off to work (it's so hard to find time to blog properly these days, maybe I should try one of those audioblog autodictation addon...)

Found out about this while I was browsing through the tweetstream

It's a video on a site called 'wikileaks' that specialize in sensitive information and documents. It's been around for a while but this must be its biggest case yet (or second biggest if we count the case of a certain pharmaceutical firm in Switzerland).

I don't think release of this video will really change anything. I just hope this can be a wake-up call to a lot of people out there believing in nonsense like 'clean war' but even that's doubtful.  

Before I go, here's something for the death of journalism. I don't think it's the internet.

 

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First DIYBio rant of the year

I can’t believe I’m uploading the first post of the year in March. Still, better late than never to show people that I’m still alive and kicking. While I haven’t been able to think about personal writing due to deluge of job and school related stuff I’ll try to keep things more organized in the coming months. If half of what I hope comes true this coming year will be the most awesome so far, for myself and for other activities and organizations I believe in.

This post is, like it says in the title, a rant post of what DIYBio ought to be and how I plan to do my part this year. It’s also written on my blackberry which I later copy-pasted into the wordpress… I just hope half a year of writing boring technical stuff didn’t burn out creative writing part of my brain. I’ll be using it a lot from now on.

Year 2009 was series of exciting experiences, with ISFF, DIYBio and iGEM jamboree. I’m trying to pan it out into this year without losing momentum, through activities like synthetic biology crash course for beginners, various internships and private research projects. Hopefully I’ll have more time to write about them in the coming months.

I’ve been thinking a lot on diybio, about what it’s supposed to be & what it needs, and I think I’ve arrived at some sort of conclusion.

DIYBio must inevitably find the way to bridge the gap between the enthusiastic members of the public and tools and devices that makes synthetic biology feasible. While there are many members out there who seem to work toward specific gadgets and other physical tools of biological experiment, I think we still need something more.

DIY or not, biology is a science. If we want to bring hard science to the public with aid of ever cheapening yet sophisticated lab equipments we need to look beyond the hardware.

I’ve written quite a few times about Alan Kay (on this blog and elsewhere), the pioneer of modern computer programming/interface paradigm and his relationship with synthetic biology… There are mountains of information on him and his works that are relevant to the discussion of models in biology and how they might be used to organize information, with emphasis on education as a sort of interface between data and human mind… All of which are beyond the scope of this particular post.

The important point is this. I believe true potential for diybio is to bridge the gap between the complexity of bleeding edge science with the innate human ability to learn and tinker. And the main tool in making it happen is idea, not low cost lab tools (the costs of the lab tools are coming down anyway. Why DIY every single appliance when you can buy a used one that works just as good, oftentimes even better?). While low cost lab implementations are important, the true future lies with the ability to abstract and package/rebuild complexity into something much more manageable.

Some people seem to have difficulty understanding what I’m trying to say from the few times I’ve tried to talk about… I’m talking about reviving and revising the notion of knowledge engineering, something that was supposed to be the corner stone of true computer revolution that never really took off (google and wikipedia are some remnants of the original idea).

Synthetic biology is a good example of what knowledge engineering coupled with physical science might be able to achieve. None of the specific pieces forming what we perceive as synthetic biology are new. They’ve been around for quite a while in one form or another following course of gradual improvement rather than truly new scientific advance.
Synthetic biology at heart is about how dedicated professionals can organize scattered pieces of knowledge into something that can potentially allow ambitious undergraduate students to undertake projects that would have been beyond their ability a decade ago. Never mind the actual success rate of their projects for now. They very fact that those students are able to plan for the future with much broader sphere of possibility is significant enough.
And why stop with undergraduates? Wouldn’t it be possible to have motivated high school students design something that at least works on paper? Wouldn’t it be possible to build a conceptual framework so that those kids can at least discuss possibilities of future projects on back of a napkin without resorting to sci fi?

If diybio is to do what it originally set out to do, we need to look beyond gadgets and tools. We need to think about ideas and how they come together… We need to make biology easier, not just cheaper. This is the mantra that will drive my DIYBio related activities this year.

At the Met

It's been a long time since I've walked through these halls. I'm only now realizing just how many memories I've left here, as I pick up all the little pieces and gaze through them. And I am a little happy about the little nagging question at the back of my head that just won't go away. Just what cnfiguration of molecules in this universe gave birth to these shapes and colors we call art? What is the equation that leads from the Big Bang to the Bernini, linking the two together into a greater, coherent whole?

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