This is Dyson at his best -- a silver star, at the very least. I can't believe no one told me about this article before now. If you're not a subscriber, check it out on your local newsstand today.

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever, argues physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson.

Will the domestication of technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers, GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe the answer is yes.

When you were a kid, maybe you had a chemistry lab. Maybe you thought it was cool. Perhaps you also had a family pet -- a cat, maybe, or a dog. Possibly a bird, fish, or hamster.

For tomorrow's kids, the family pet and the chemistry set are become one. This is the new convergence.

And here you thought growing up with cell phones and YouTube was interesting.

Make me a hipporoo, by Freeman Dyson | New Scientist

Alcatel of France and Lucent Technologies said today that they had reached agreement on a $13.4 billion merger that would create a French-American maker of telecommunications equipment with revenue of $25 billion, 88,000 employees and phone company customers across the world.

Well, at least the downward spiral for these executives includes a few years in the city of lights, even if:

It is stultifying and dull and leads to a nation that dresses less like Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour" and more like timid, provincial town hall employees.

Have you seen the film? In "The Great Movies", Ebert writes:

The most famous single scene--one those who have seen it refer to again and again--involves something we do not see and do not even understand. A client has a small lacquered box. He opens it and shows its contents to one of the other girls, and then to Severine. We never learn what is in the box. A soft buzzing noise comes from it. The first girl refuses to do whatever the client has in mind. So does Severine, but the movie cuts in an enigmatic way, and a later scene leaves the possibility that something happened.

What's in the box? The literal truth doesn't matter. The symbolic truth, which is all Bunuel cares about, is that it contains something of great importance to the client.

Remember the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?

Read the full text of Ebert's review.

Getting back to the deal, I imagine a significant fraction of the job losses will be on the American side. Lucent's executives may want to refer to Four Ways to Fire a Frenchman. And watch out for the protestors.

This I didn't know:

The French love three-letter abbreviations.

You'll have to click through for the explanation.

Alcatel and Lucent Agree to Merge in $13.4 Billion Deal

Check out this recent Friedman piece:

The more I travel, the more I find that the most heated debates in many countries are around education. Here's what's really funny -- every country thinks it's behind.

"We have a creative problem in this country [India]."

"We must allow our students to ask why, not just keep on telling them how."

It's interesting that Tom Friedman is syndicated in Venezuela.

Today's NYT has an article about Wu Man, a Chinese musician, in which she confirms Friedman's reporting:

"She's a 21st-century musician, meaning she knows something deeply, and not only playing the instrument. She can work with anybody in a short time. She can figure out what somebody knows, what they don't know. People say she's put the pipa on the contemporary page."

This after wondering whether she would be able to keep up her career in the United States. "I had initially been prepared to give up music," Ms. Wu said. "I thought I was going to end up studying computers like my friends."

For a sample of America's strategy in education, read Technically Foolish:

This proposal is drawing national attention as visionary, though it is more remarkable for the manner in which it neatly illustrates the problems with how we think about technology and schooling.

Absent in Michigan, and often elsewhere, is serious thought about how technology might help cut costs or modernize educational delivery.

There is no reputable analysis suggesting that the billions invested in technology have enhanced the productivity or performance of America's schools.

Everyone can use another degree, right?

"People think I'm crazy when they hear I'm getting my second master's degree at 27," says Krumm. "But I felt the degree was necessary to switch the direction of my life."

And now for something completely different:

Georgia is about to become the first state to approve the use of the Bible as a textbook in public schools.

But if you thought America was in bad shape, check out France:

The point of the new labor law is to encourage businesses to hire young people without worrying they'll be stuck with them forever. Youth unemployment has been one of France's biggest problems for 30 years. A quarter of those under 25 are jobless; that figure surpasses 40 percent in the troubled suburbs. It's an enormous failure: young people have never been better prepared or educated than today, yet France offers them hardly any future apart from temporary jobs and unpaid internships.

No one in France wants to be "flexible"; stable jobs are the best paid and the most prestigious. It's telling that the students at the elite grandes écoles have been slow in joining the protests: promised a better future than the graduates of the less illustrious universities, they figure that flexibility doesn't concern them.

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This is no joke!

4/1/2006 - RONI SIZE | MARKY | ARMANNI: Buzzlife presents April Fools Rinseout at the 930 CLUB

Roni Size, This Saturday at the 9:30 Club

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale.

Really?

Sites like MySpace and Facebook, and social-networking rivals such as the video-oriented YouTube are promising new channels for communication, entertainment, and marketing. Social-networking sites are a primary form of communication for millions of younger people in the U.S, and increasingly, around the world. It's not unusual for young people to spend an hour or more a day at such sites, posting photos, messages, and blog entries, and building up huge lists of online "friends."

I like how "friends" is in quotes.

That $2B figure has me feeling a little verklempt. Please, talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Discuss.

Facebook's on the Block

Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA, said that his company could supply private soldiers to any country. Blackwater has been marketing the concept of private armies for low-intensity conflicts.

"About a year ago, we realized we could do it."

He said the company was capable of providing a brigade-sized force on alert.

Can I place an order over the Web? Can I designate targets with a web-enabled camera phone?

Cofer Black offers 'private armies' for low-intensity conflicts

I wrote:

Each stream is a vector. To the extent two vectors are the same, they are one identity.

Rattle replied:

That's not useful. Online identity is useful, especially when attacking reputation to it.

I assume you meant "attaching." Regardless, that's not what's driving the front page. In fact, the current front page algorithm is explicitly NOT based on reputation.

You seem to have ignored my observation that the front page is presently frequently populated by items that only appear in one stream, and thus the issue is moot, since anyone can readily overtake the front page with only one account.

Are you trolling me?

Is it still a troll if you respond?

In an environment with a sizable user base and a steady flow of traffic, having two accounts would be scarcely more useful than just one account. You'd find that the entries dominating the front page were those that have been recommended a large number of times -- not twice instead of once. If it so happened that having two streams become common, then it would offer no relative advantage, and thus would not be much of an issue.

At this point, if one has the goal of getting a specific item on the home page, this is quite easily done, all by oneself, with only one account, during any "slow" period. Simply submit the URL to your stream multiple times, using slight variations of the URL that don't affect retrievability but which make each instance suitably distinct, as required by the stream. For example, submit URL_A. Then submit it as URL_A?foo. Then change "?foo" to "?bar". And so on, ad infinitum. Let's say you do this 100 times. Then, when the front page algorithm goes to select an entry from the set of entries whose thread-count is 1, your URL will be there 100 times. If there are only 10 other single-recommendation URLs at the moment, your URL stands a good chance of getting selected. To increase the probability of getting chosen, just increase the number of times you enter that URL on your stream.

Re: Reengineering MemeStreams for our posthuman future

Rattle wrote:

What guidelines and rules do you think should be applied to handling this situation?

Oh, that's an easy one, at least for the specific case you cited.

Each stream is a vector. You can compute the distance/difference between two vectors. To the extent two vectors are the same, they are one identity.

What makes a post "interesting" is when it lies at the intersection of many otherwise "different" vectors. These are the posts that belong on the front page.

If Tom and Jerry are twin brothers whose streams are always and forever identical, does it really matter if I treat them like a single "identity" in the context of MemeStreams?

Besides, the whole democracy/popularity angle is stale. Who needs it?

If you want to attract venture capital, you need to think posthuman. When the AIs on the Internet outnumber the humans, then what are you going to do?

Re: Reengineering MemeStreams for our posthuman future

Rattle wrote:

do me a favor.. Only recommend things with one account. If you start using both accounts to recommend things, it's going to be very hard to make a good argument why people not should do the same thing to game the front page.

One man, one vote!

You're contending that a stream is equivalent to an identity. That is an artificial constraint, and it is going to break down sooner or later.

The purpose of having two streams is to apply a filter; it goes with that definition that items will be multiply recommended.

As far as "gaming" the front page goes, it's hardly necessary to recommend things twice. Take a look at the front page any time in the last week, and you'll find at least half of the entries are from the pnw stream. Most of those are not recommended by anyone else. There have been many otherwise "slow" periods during which the entire front page is essentially a subset of the pnw stream.

Reengineering MemeStreams for our posthuman future