Here are the "slides" for Vernor Vinge's talk at Seminars about Long-Term Thinking, 15 February 2007.

There's some cool stuff in this seminar series.

What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen

"Dark," cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not "dark" as in distant or invisible. This is "dark" as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as "the ultimate Copernican revolution": not only are we not at the center of anything; we're not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. We're just a bit of pollution, Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. "If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant."

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper "simpler" understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It's a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we'll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they're right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we're seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

Out There

If you go to YouTube and do a search for MemeStreams, you'll come up empty (at the moment, anyway).

But that's perhaps misleading, because there are references on the site.

This link will show you which YouTube pages are referencing MemeStreams. Here's a summary at the moment:

Jay Beale vs Dan Kaminsky - The Movie

1 clicks from

http://www.memestreams.net/search/?search=jay+beale

1 clicks from Jay Beale vs Dan Kaminsky

http://www.memestreams.net/users/abaddon/blogid9772273/

The Terrorism Index: Are We Winning?

(No "links" references; linkage is in Google's hypertext index)

Originally linked from Center for American Progress | The Terrorism Index

Ganja Kru - Super Sharp Shooter (1995)

12 clicks from MemeStreams | Information Warfare for The People!

http://www.memestreams.net/topics/

American soldier crying for their life in America war irak

3 clicks from YouTube - American soldier crying for their life in America war irak

http://www.memestreams.net/users/pnw/blogid321035/

Homeland Marketing Fiasco

1 clicks from RE: cbs4boston.com - Hoax Devices Creating Gridlock In Boston

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid28571/blogid302460

Autechre 'Gantz Graf'

5 clicks from MemeStreams | Information Warfare for The People!

http://www.memestreams.net/topics/

Four Months of News Good Evenings in 47 Seconds

1 clicks from

http://www.memestreams.net/memebox?mode=showmeme&oid=422632

Conceivably these referring URLs could contain 'private' information. At the moment, they include URLs things like this:

http://www.memestreams.net/memebox?mode=showmeme&oid=422632

That isn't really a secret, but it's not a URL you'd serve up to just anybody. (The message doesn't display if it's not yours.)

People should be aware that their web browser may publicize their MemeStreams search queries via the "referer" [sic] header, which may then be posted publicly by YouTube for others to see.

Search queries are frequently exposed via referral URLs, but it is perhaps less common to see them posted publicly like this.

MemeStreams click-throughs appearing on YouTube

This book came out late last year.

A wild, funny tale. Crazy mathematicians compete for the love of two women across space, time and logic.

Berkeley grad students Bela Kis and Paul Bridge have discovered the mathematical underpinnings of ultimate reality. But then they begin fighting over the beguiling video-blogger, Alma Ziff.

First Bela gets Alma’s interest by starting the wildest rock band ever. But then Paul undertakes the ultimate computer hack: altering reality to make Alma his. The change brings more than he bargained for: Alma is swept away into a higher world of mathematician cockroaches and cone shells bent upon using our world as an experimental set-up for deciding an arcane point of metamathematics.

It’s up to Bela to bring Alma back, repair reality, stop the aliens, and, most important of all, discover the true meaning of love.

RU Sirius recently interviewed Rucker; transcripts and audio are available.

Amazon has reviews.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rucker cleverly pulls off a romantic comedy about mathematicians in love. Following 2004's Frek and the Elixir, this even zanier excursion into alternative versions of Berkeley, Calif., is set in university towns called Humelocke and Klownetown, full of quirky, charming life-forms human and otherwise and ruled by a god who's the female jellyfish-creator of Earth. All this seethes around Bela Kis; Bela's roommate, Paul Bridge; and Bela's girlfriend, Alma Ziff, who ping-pongs between them in a sometimes acute, sometimes obtuse love triangle. Bela and Paul struggle for their Ph.D.s under mad math genius Roland Haut by inventing a paracomputer "Gobubble" that predicts future events. While most of the mathematical flights may stun hapless mathophobes, Rucker's wild characters, off-the-wall situations and wicked political riffs prove that writing SF spoofs, like Bela's rock music avocation, "beats the hell out of publishing a math paper."

From Booklist:

Rucker draws on his academic mathematics background for a mind-bending tale about the hazards of reshaping reality to suit one's own ends. Set in an alternate-universe Berkeley, California, dubbed Humelocke, the story revolves around a bizarre romantic triangle involving cerebral math majors Bela and Paul and their seesawing love interest, Alma. With the dubious patronage of their mentally unbalanced advisor, Professor Roland, Paul and Bela develop a proof for a radical new theorem that may facilitate prediction of future events with astounding accuracy. The roadblock to capitalizing on their discovery lies in creating a "paracomputer" to spit out usable data. When the cockroach monsters Professor Roland claims to have seen begin appearing in Bela's mirror with a written solution, reality begins to take a decidedly surrealistic turn. In a riotously twisting plot, complete with hypertunnels, alien shellfish from a parallel universe, and an improbable resolution to the threesome's romantic dilemma, Rucker pulls out all the stops for one of his most entertaining yarns to date.

Mathematicians in Love, a Novel by Rudy Rucker

.

"A nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is interposed a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torment of civil life."

-- Emile Durkheim

.

"The art of association then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

.

"Modernity in its essence means an enormous change in the human condition, from fate to choice."

-- Peter Berger

.

Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical.

Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has.

Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.

-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey

.

"I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written."

-- Louis Kahn, What Will Be Has Always Been

CNET covers the start of TED.

It's not a circus. It was just the opening two-hour session of TED, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference held here Wednesday at the Monterey Convention Center.

More: TED prize coverage in NYT.

In search of scientific inspiration at TED

Thanks to the Internet, there is unprecedented access to sociological data. And thanks to computers, sociologists are better able to sift through that data, find trends, and test models.

At Microsoft, Smith uses public Internet data to look at the social phenomenon of online communities, and he tries to make them better for people and better for business. He recently gave a presentation regarding his work at Microsoft's TechFest in Redmond, WA, an annual event at which Microsoft researchers from around the world share their latest work. Technology Review caught up with Smith to ask him about the field of cybersociology.

Sociology at Microsoft

COMSTAT comes to Baghdad.

General Pace said that “early data points” showed that sectarian attacks were slightly down since the Baghdad operation began. But he said that the increase in car bombs suggested that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was trying to incite further hostilities with this method.

Here's how COMSTAT was portrayed in the third season of The Wire:

At Comstat, Rawls and Burrell go on the warpath, ripping their commanders for their inability to stem the rising tide of crime. Rawls orders that felony cases must drop by 5 percent for the year, and murders must be kept under 275. "Here's a fun fact," Rawls tells his commanders. "If Baltimore had New York's population, we'd be clocking four thousand murders a year at this rate. So there is no excuse I want to hear. I don't care how you do it, just fucking do it." Major Bunny Colvin, 30 years on the force and six months from retirement, questions the wisdom of the new mandate: "You can reclassify an agg assault and you can unfound a robbery. But how do you make a body disappear?" Rawls and Burrell are infuriated, and Burrell warns Colvin: "Anyone who can't bring the numbers we need will be replaced by someone who can."

They need to set up a little Hamsterdam in Baghdad where the hard cases can kill each other in peace:

Bubbles tips off Greggs that Marlo and Barksdale are involved in a war, but Greggs, under orders to stop pursuing Barksdale, is uninterested. At least until she learns that Marlo's gang has just killed two Barksdale players. In the war that is sure to follow, Bubbles says, "Westside gonna be all Baghdad an' shit."

Buildup in Iraq Needed Into ’08, U.S. General Says

Abstract:

Current US counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy has relied heavily on the use of force against Islamist insurgents — a tactic that has increased their ranks. What is needed instead are stronger cognitive capabilities that will enable more effective COIN against an elusive, decentralized, and highly motivated insurgency — capabilities that will enable the United States to “fight smarter.” Cognitive COIN goes beyond information technology and encompasses comprehension, reasoning, and decisionmaking, the components that are most effective against an enemy that is quick to adapt, transform, and regenerate. Countering the challenges of a global insurgency demands the ability to understand it, shape popular attitudes about it, and act directly against it. The four cognitive abilities that are most important to COIN operations are anticipation, opportunism, decision speed, and learning in action, applied through rapid-adaptive decisionmaking. In 21st-century COIN, tight control and bureaucracy must yield to the power of networked intelligence, with each operative authorized to act, react, and adapt. With these notions as a backdrop, this paper offers concrete ideas for gaining the cognitive advantage in anticipating and countering the new global insurgency.

Excerpt from the Summary:

The US response to this pattern of insurgency has stressed (1) new bureaucratic layers, e.g., the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that seem to have improved neither analysis nor decisionmaking; (2) increased investment in military platforms, which are of marginal utility against a diffuse and elusive insurgency; and (3) the use of force, which may validate the jihadist argument, producing more jihadis and inspiring new martyrs. What has been missing is a systematic attempt to identify and meet critical analytical, planning, and operational decisionmaking needs for global COIN, exploiting revolutionary progress in information networking. Consequently, US COIN has been as clumsy as the new insurgency has been cunning. Among other benefits, more attention to cognition would improve the cost-effectiveness of US structures, forces, and operations.

That's a pretty harsh [but true] indictment, no?

Heads We Win — The Cognitive Side of COIN

HIV/AIDS in South Africa: the virus now infects 5.5m people, affects many millions more and kills close to 1,000 people every day.

The long journey of a young democracy