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Sunday 16 November 2008

Print all the Money

10 Trillion is such an inconcievable sum that we seem to have lost touch with reality.
M3, M4 etc. We are pumping out money, making money with money. We have lots of money but what is any of it worth?
At least the paper it is printed on I suppose?

So if we wanted to print all the money, how much would it cost?
Even if it was just a penny a note, for 1000€ bills, it would still cost 100 Million.
Silly enough?

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Friday 10 October 2008

Is it a bird?

The World Bank and IMF are jumping in like the Justice League!

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Wednesday 8 October 2008

Apple TV

Apple TV
I have a feeling that we are about to see a real apple TV. Forget the current set-top box Idea, that was just a way to thrash out the bugs. Think iMac for the living room. The point here is that all people can buy TVs, people over 50 (yea this is condescending) don't understand computers or consoles, there is a fear of the unknown that makes them hostile to these new fangled gadgets. But eveybody understands a TV. Perhaps 50% of this group will never use iTunes to download a movie but every one that does is a formely unreachable customer. Just a thought.

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Friday 3 October 2008

Out of Eden

The friendliness function of an AI that is spawned from a technological singularity could be to provide human like consciousnesses with a happy simple life, no disease or suffering, plentiful food, small communities, family close by - basicly what we evolved for.

But the fitness function says we mustn't be slaves, so the AI needs to give us free will. But this is a tricky one because if we start down the technology path again from our Stone Age nirvana we WILL eventually create another singularity.

If the AI is around and can guide us during the gestation of the new singularity then this 2nd order singularity cannot be guaranteed to emerge within the confines of the original fitness function. Therefore the original fitness function dictates that at the point where the human agents decide to develop technology more advanced than say stones, the singularity AI must self destruct - deleting all traces that it ever existed. This last task might for example require a full rewrite of the genomes of all animals - to remove traces of tinkering.
The AI must slowly recede into the background to make sure it's sudden disappearance does not leave us unable to cope. It might even leave a few books around as a sort of guide with a few simple commandments to help the humans of to a good start.

Which technology would set the AI off into programmed self destruction mode? Probably banging stones or throwing sticks would be OK, but perhaps dissatisfied with small bitter fruit, Man ignored the warnings and went too far with the forbidden technologies of grafting and breeding. Finally tasting big juicy apples?

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Saturday 20 September 2008

WriteRoom: Landscape at last!!

Landscape at last!! A landscape text editor for the iPhone. Writeroom, my favorite editor for just 'writing stuff' for the Mac, is now available for the iPhone.
No Spell Check, or Copy and Paste, but this is version 1, I am sure these 'minor omissions' will be fixed in a future version.
App Store

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Friday 5 September 2008

Mad Dogs and Terrorists Go Out in the Midday Sun


Gait detection from shadows.

Big brother can sentence you to death in absentia then blast you to goo from orbit, but how will they find you? (See previous post)

Up till now you could leave the mobile phone at home, stay away from the internet, and wear a baseball cap.
Mornings and evenings will be the most dangerous, so watch out for strange men limping around on cloudy days or in the midday equatorial sun.

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Thursday 14 August 2008

From Big Brother to Divine Strike

Laser Sci-Fi Heaven - Major Government Oppression?
Burning somebody to a crisp from a Hercules 50km away - Or how about quietly, gently, boiling somebody's brain from orbit?

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Friday 27 June 2008

Conciousness

We have lots of miscellaneous items in our minds: streams of sensory input, memories, hypothesese. We can be concious of any combination of these while ignoring others. How about a distributed search, where the search algorithm is embedded in a dynamic propagating pattern, like an entity in Conway's Life? The search replicates, bouncing around the brain. When it finds a local pattern that matches its criteria, it stimulates this region to fire at a frequency unique to this current search pattern.
Conciousness integrates all the elements synced to the same frequency. An integration mechanism was described by Terrence J. Sejnowski at a talk I attended in Zurich, the gist is described here and in detail in the article "Selective attention through phase relationship of excitatory and inhibitory input synchrony in a model cortical neuron".


The authors of this article go further, saying that not only are we concious of trains of thought when enough patterns fall into sync, but that we can only be concious at all if we have the capacity for enough patterns fall into sync.

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Wednesday 25 June 2008

Strange Loop Google app.

Use google sets, Google image search, Google text to speech? Google translate etc. with an HTM hierarchy built as a google app. This would be the conciousness module, the seed for the singularity. Therefore all blog entries, emails, web pages etc, are elements in the subconscious of the embryonic Escaton.

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Tuesday 22 April 2008

Replace CNN/Fox News tickers with relevant user generated content.

Make an overlay for a TV viewer (e.g. for mythTV) that overwrites the annoying ticker bar in CNN (etc.) with alternative content. e.g. fact checking from politifact.com or putting stories in perspective: "although flooding in this small US town is tragic, there are currently 3000 major floods on earth affecting 160M people" etc.

Stories rotate so frequently that a small group of people could create and schedule the content. The service could even sell google adwords in the ticker.

Update: voice analysis for spotting lies would fit nicely in here too.

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Tuesday 15 April 2008

Cute Mini Elephants

Body shape variation in dogs as a training set for Genotype / Phenotype transformation.

Sequence the genomes of all the true breeding varieties of dogs. The physical dimensions of the same set of dogs is also recorded. Now let some algorithm extract the correlations between shape and genome.

An ideal outcome will be an application where the input is an initial dog shape and associated genome and a desired dog shape. The output will be a new genome.

If these growth rules are conserved across species then the same application might be able to design a cute little short legged dog sized elephant.

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Tuesday 8 April 2008

Google Road Trip

EBay for transport.

- You plan a route on Google Maps and click the "Road Trip" button.
- You see a list of other people who are making the same journey, some have space in their car, and some want to join somebody who does.
- Companies can use the service to offer transport for defined journey legs, for a set price.

E.g. A taxi company can give a price from the city center to the airport; a flight charter company can give a price from Miami to Cuba; a guy who commutes every morning can sell seats in his car.


As the service matures more legs will be entered and eventually Google will be able to give you total journey prices comprising multi legs. Ebay style reputation feedback will keep folks reliable.

2011: I type London to Sydney in Google maps. The "Road Trip" options include:
- BA business class direct, 1000GBP.
- A 3 stop journey using Aeroflot and a buss leg between Ulan Bator and Yinchuan, 400GBP.
- An adventure by container ship to Cairo, passenger seat in a Rally car to Dubai, and a final leg on a jump seat in a FedEx plane, 200GBP


Update: this would fit well for a company offering something like this air-taxi idea.

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Friday 21 March 2008

Pick Up The Gun...




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Monday 10 March 2008

Media Upgrade Liscences

I own the Lord of the Rings DVDs, so what will I do when they are released in HD?

It's the same story for my Prodigy CDs and should be the same for my copy of Photoshop CS, all just data on disks. But unlike the record labels the software industry grew up with one click, one to many piracy and has a business model that reflects that. Back in the Golden Age of albums and films, a paradigm changing technology shift would arrive perhaps once in a record label exec's carrier. Now they arrive weekly. So instead of hitting the litigation panic button with each new technology why not adopt software's 'full version' / 'upgrade' model.
Let me buy a DVD, with a little gold leaved, hologramed liscence agreement in the case. I now own the rights to consume that media, where and when I want. Let me download it from bittorent, burn it to Blueray or copy it from a friends iPod. Then sell me the upgrade to HD, then 3D, subjective immersion or whatever comes next... Make it worth my while to buy rather than renting or stealing. People buy software so where is the difference?

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Friday 15 February 2008

Light Saber Wii

Game: VR overlay speks , Wii controller projecting a VR light saber.


When the blades pass through each other they loose power and the ability to cut for a while - maybe they recharge faster when moving fast, but only reactivate after a complete swing. They re-power with a throbbing buzz.
When an enemy is cut down, a VR body remains lying where ever the bits fell.
Then the defeated player becomes a force ghost until the next game. A score is displayed above the force ghost showing his wins and losses.

(What about in 25 years when we make real light sabers, will Lucas own the copyright the patent is based on?)

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Monday 11 February 2008

30,000 Millionaires

Could Alexander, Genghis or Julius have expected to sire 30,000 princes?

If today's richest billionaires decided to maximise their fecundity they could produce destabilising numbers of ultra fit offspring. Just offer couples of suitable fitness the chance to raise an additional child. 1Million as a sweetener for the parents, plus a 1Million trust fund for the child.

30,000 millionaire children! Elite colleges to educate (indoctrinate) them... A dynasty with some clout!

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Ultimatter

A micro black hole surrounded by a shell of structural diamond. Nano tubes and quantum dots providing 20th century internet levels of processing power to each molecule sized node.
Varying the radius of the structural node controls the separation of the black holes in the matrix. Charge swapped in and out of the singularity gives precise control over the binding strength of the nodes to each other. Configured for ultimate tensional strength, with event horizons separated by just a few atoms of carbon, it becomes the toughest material in the universe.

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Saturday 26 January 2008

spek

We are just a spek, on a spek, on a spek. But hey! Thats not that many speks!

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Cyberhavior