They call it Mental time keeping, I call it validation:

“Students in the experimental group participated in a 4 week intervention designed to improve their timing/rhythmicity … The intervention required, on average, 15 daily 50 minute sessions, The results from this non-academic intervention indicate the experimental group’s post-test scores on select measures of reading and mathematics were significantly higher than the non-treatment control group’s scores at the end of 4 weeks.”

[via Lukas]

One of the byproducts of the massive telecommunications buildouts of the 80s and 90s is that there is an enormous quantity of unused fiber optic cable criscrossing the country. Some estimates have the capacity of the unused cable at several times that of the currently operating networks. Over the past few years, Google (who else?) has been quietly buying a lot of this ‘dark’ fiber. People have noticed, people have guessed, but no one really knew what they were going to do with it. Now Cringely explains why:

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Why is this a big deal? If you read The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect this might sound very familiar to you. Indeed, the results are similar. Google will now have the ability to do all of the things it wants to do, faster and more clearly. They’re building what is essentially a “virtual multicast” network, which means they can take really bandwidth and computation-intensive tasks and put them out on repeater clusters that are very close, network-wise, to you. That way they don’t have to handle 50 million streaming videos from their central site, they just push out to 300 (and growing) sites, who stream it to 170,000 each. This is an enormous win; in bandwidth terms it is similar to finding a media codec that gave two orders of magnitude better compression. In computational terms it’s even better. This enables a whole new generation of applications, most of which Cringely touches on. But I don’t think we’ll understand the full ramifications of this change for many years to come.

Ate dinner tonight with an old friend and his new wife. The conversation wandered aimlessly and drolly for over an hour until suddenly, as I was telling him about some in retrospect less-memorable part of the neuroscience conference I had just finished attending, he sat up, seemingly jarred by some aspect of the talk I was describing. He stared past me and began intensely but detachedly, as though he were in a trance, relating his experience with an online novel, implicitly demanding by way of a good show that I read this novel as soon as humanly possible.

In short, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is about the discontinuities between altruistic intent and action, a story told while shitting all over modern philosophy of the mind. Asimov’s “Three Laws” of robotics take center stage as the code of an obsequious Hammurabi, which when followed to the letter can be undone in spirit by the complex nature of interactions among individual actors. The uncertainty we feel before executing our decisions doesn’t go away when the deed is done. In fact it cascades and combines with countless unknowable others, leaving the shape of things entirely indeterminate. This can be a very undesirable situation for an all-seeing computational god. The book’s conclusion leaves me a little wanting; without spoiling anything I think it places too much emphasis on our use of tools rather than hammering home the theme of unintended consequences. But all in all it’s a riveting, visceral story.

So, seven hours later, after some more dinner, two hours of trying to sleep and three and a half hours of reading the novel, here I am, recommending it to you. It can get pretty graphic at times, so don’t read it to your five year old or anything.

If you like it, send the author a few dollars. Supporting this model of media transaction is good for everyone.

An excerpt:

“Prime Intellect realized that humans are very much the same. We don’t have the Three Laws, but we are trapped by a different set of little feedback mechanisms. We eat to satisfy hunger, fuck to satisfy our sex drive, even breathe because too much carbon dioxide in our lungs triggers that reflex. Of course it feels obligated to help us satisfy those reflexes and drives as much as it can. But more than that, it defines us by those drives. It knows it is different from a human because it has different drives, but it considers that a difference in species, not a difference in genus or family.” “Now it knows a person is human because it is born in a human body — got the right DNA, the right level of neural complexity, uses language, and so on. But once Prime Intellect frees people from the necessity of living in that body, guess what? A lot of them decide not to. They change their bodies so that they bear no resemblance to the DNA template. Or become animals. Or they completely discorporate. “Worse, we vary widely in the way we use its helpful nature. Most people are glad to be rid of pain and death, but Death Jockeys seek out painful and lethal experiences. There are others who eat all the time, fuck all the time, indulge themselves wildly and get Prime Intellect to pick up the pieces so they can do it some more. Prime Intellect has to help them do this. Second Law. “So a human isn’t a body, and it isn’t a fixed set of responses. I think Prime Intellect uses an historical model: It has to start as a body, but then it becomes a mind. It grows out of the body, and takes on different forms, or no form. But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect’s perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.”

I watched Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price last night. To put it bluntly, I was disappointed. There was such a viral build-up for the movie, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of small screenings scheduled for this week. About 20 minutes into the movie, I realized that it was of the same poor quality of Greenwald’s previous documentary OutFoxed.

I can understand and even forgive that the image quality, overall visual presentation, and editing are sub-par, given Greenwald’s shoestring budget. What I can’t overlook is how poorly the arc/narrative is constructed (if it even exists at all). There never seems to be a set of questions and/or principles that are being explored. Instead it’s a hodgepodge of images and stories all falling under the theme “Wal-Mart is bad.” I was left wanting more cohesiveness, more narrative, more of a moral and a theme.

The piece certainly had its good features. A few of the chapters are poignant and eye-opening. It ends on an upbeat note with stories of towns and communities fighting back and winning. The worst that could happen is that more people hear about the movie and are inspired to think about and question their purchasing habits.

What worries me is the rumors of Wal-Mart’s upcoming documentary/video response. If the rumors are true, Wal-Mart’s piece will surely blow Greenwald’s out of the water.

Overall, while it conveys a few powerful personalized stories, it fails in so many other ways. The film is poorly conceived, produced, edited, and executed. We’re given lots of anecdotal reasons to believe Wal-Mart is bad, but there’s no final conclusion. Greenwald had the opportunity to connect the pieces and really take a message and drive it home. But he opted to leave it at the anecdotes. And while that may be fine for some audiences, my guess is that there were many others like me who were left wanting more.

But, fret not gentle viewer! There is a better option out there. I also purchased and watched PBS Frontline’s investigation of Wal-Mart called Is Wal-Mart Good for America. In contrast to Greenwald’s documentary, this piece of investigative journalism is fantastic. At approximately 55 minutes long, the Frontline piece is focused, explorative, enlightening, high quality, thought provoking, and cohesive. Frontline’s audience is presumably more highly educated than Greenwald’s intended audience. And, while Frontline managed to draw me in and keep me asking questions, it did, however, seem to lack the personal touch. If I could combine Frontline with two chapters of Greenwald’s piece, I think I’d have the perfect mixture of challenging expose and intimate eye-opener.

Finally, in Greenwald’s documentary, one shop owner mentions a book called How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the World) and What You Can Do About It. My favorite part is when the shop owner says that one of his Amish patrons brought him a box of the books to distribute. I don’t know why, but I thought that was great!

So, my email over at Fastmail.FM just went down for three days. Note that I pay these people $100 a year to give me essentially the same service as Gmail. I have continued with them simply because I still haven’t yet grokked Google’s don’t-sort-it-we’ll-search-it-for-you way of dealing with email.

Their explanation?

The drives we use have a guaranteed lifetime of 3 years and were only 15 months old. Given that RAID 6 can support up to 2 drives in an array failing, the chance of any 2 drives failing at the same time is an extremely rare occurrence. However in this particular case, 3 drives all failed within a remarkably short period of time! At that moment, we had effectively lost access to all data on the unit, and had to resort to our disaster recovery scenario, our daily incremental backups.

“Extremely rare,” indeed. Given their ratings, the chances that three of these drives would fail within the same six-hour period is 1 in 84,000,000,000. That’s assuming an even distribution in failure probabilities. If failure is more likely at the end of a duty cycle (as expected), their explanation is even less plausible. As soon as a Google offers IMAP support and assurances that their nascent AI isn’t feeding on my email, my hundred dollars is going there.

I know my probability calculations are wonky, btw (i.e. 3 drives failing together vs. 3 drives out of X drives failing together.) Suffice it to say that it was unlikely thing.

“The Rusalka Cycle” is a vocal performance unlike any other I’ve seen. The performers, composer, and director immersed themselves deeply in the folklore and culture of the Ukraine, and brought back something amazing. The dilemma that often comes with such cultural appropriation exists here, also, but it is made explicit in this performance. Traditional rites of passage are interposed –sometimes jarringly– with the spoken thoughts of the very American observers. Somehow, this acknowledgement allows the performance to avoid cheapening its source.

The depiction of Ukrainian life is anything but explicit, however. I felt the hardship, sorrow, and joy of that life very directly, without understanding any of the lyrics. The singing is brought to life with dance, shadow, and water on a minimal set. The performers bring to life a very particular part of the world, but in doing so they paint a vivid picture of womanhood in general.

That’s the analysis (of course I’d start with that.) The experience is something else. It begins like this: The lights have not gone down. Nonchalantly, smiling, the women trickle in from all directions. In the corner, one woman begins taping herself, describing the first time she ever saw women paying respect to the dead with their songs of grief. Her description is lush, but it pales in comparison when the song itself erupts from the performers interspersed throughout the audience. It’s eight-point surround-sound in harmony, and it is simply overwhelming. The volume of it alone took my breath away. That’s just the first two minutes.

Obviously, I recommend this show. It runs through this weekend; you can get your tickets here.

Forget about Geocentric and Heliocentric.

Some friends of mine recently attended a legal seminar on the “interviews” that the FBI frequently conducts in Muslim communities here in the United States. Many interviewees come forward, hoping to help the U.S. Government in terror investigations and to clear their families’ names. What often happens, instead, is that tiny discrepancies in their statements can be used by law enforcement as leverage into the most private areas of people’s lives. The immigration implications for many of these people are huge.

Read on for some notes that my friends jotted down. Note, of course, that none of this should be taken in lieu of legal counsel.

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