From Ye Olde Blogge Sunday, January 18, 2004

Memory Lark

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Leave The Car At Home Day

... which was today, has come and gone. I noticed only marginally less traffic than normal (if at all) and decided that someone needs a reality check. The idea is to promote health by asking people to walk. It wasn't pre-promoted all that well, first I heard about it was on the radio in the car on the way to work...
And it's definitely ditzy and impractical...

Example: I live 12km as the crow flies, or 15km by road, from where I work. Yeah sure I'll leave the car at home, start out for work at 2AM and get home by 9PM... I'm sure everyone else in Perth would also do this, yeah sure...

I've also tried using what laughably passes for "public transport" in this fair city. The bus route must be 16km at the very least with all the zigging and zagging to cover as much territory per route, and they stop about seven times as often as I do when driving to work. It takes me 15 minutes on a good day, 25 on a really bad, slow traffic day. I tried the bus the other day. 35 minutes later I arrived at the busport, waited another 10 minutes for a connecting bus, then another almost 10 minutes to get from there to my workplace. And that was the fastest route...

Train? Don't make me laugh. My nearest train station is 12 minutes away by car, then takes 20 minutes to get to the city, then I have another two or three kilomtere hike (depending on which station I stop at) to walk to work. Connecting buses? Oh yes, walk 5 minutes to the stop, wait 10 for a bus, then sit in it 5 - 10 minutes while it meanders all over the place and finally deposits me about 2/3 of the way towards work, leaving me almost a kilometre to walk anyway. Or get on one of the "CAT" intracity buses, then it goes the LONG way round its route and finally drops me about 200 metres from work. But takes 15 minutes to get there...

And our government wonders why we stick so doggedly to cars.

Oh - and using eco-friendly transport? I can't cycle - emphysema tends to do that to you - and I've looked at electric and hybrid vehicles. Who can afford them? Hell I am one of those people who buy a $2000 old smokey banger because I can't afford to hock my life for a new emission-controlled vehicle, give me a break okay? So until there are incentives to lose the smokers and go with the sparkies, I would very much like to drive a new Prius or some such greener vehicle but can't. I'd love to get on a bus or better yet a train every morning and go to work in a reasonable amount of time, but it's not possible yet.

Ask yourself why nothing gets done about this. "Hmm" says the government, "we could spend a few billion on better transport and providing incentives to make, import, and buy green vehicles - but the disasters that are happening now won't come home to roost for another 10 years. And not doing this now makes our figures look better..."

I REALLY don't want to be alive when those chickens come home to roost...

Something I really like?

http://atanks.sourceforge.net/

Something I really like is the old classic Scorched Earth, but for years, PCs had become too fast for the old unclocked DOS battler, and I'd given it away as a bad joke. (They recently released a version of Scorch that didn't need one to run SloMo but I can't find the URL.) So when I saw Atomic Tanks I just had to download it. Verdict? Cool!

e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet

http : // e3 . com . au /
e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet are a wireless freenet in Perth, Western Australia. I plan to provide some linkage to this network, by way of letting them piggyback on my wireless link to work. Always assuming the wifi to work becomes a reality. Man it's difficult to get spare time to do stuff!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Technology's Pace Is Racing

Not technology's pulse - technology's pace. It proceeds, as it's sometimes said, "most apace." I don't think there's a BPM that'll measure the kind of heartrate tech's exhibiting now... 

And I know - I sound like an old guy yelling at - whatever. But bear with me. I've seen people on Youtube feeling frustrated because things they'd spent a few days recording editing and publishing a video about, had progressed so much that by the time the video went up it was already out of date. 

"Oh ha ha!" I thought. "That's a bit rich, Youtuber. How can you say something like that?"

But they were right. Reviewers would get a 3D printer to review, spend several weeks putting it through its paces, produce a thoughtful review and put it up on Youtube - and the company had updated software version and fixed two hardware issues by that time.

More recently I saw an explainer-type channel presenter complain that what they'd posted about AI yesterday was already superseded by today's new AI app online. "M'kay boomer" the youtubers said ... 

Anyway. They're right. I've recently written and scheduled a post, added to it twice before the publication date, and then right after it was published, had to schedule another post with even more new stuff relating to the original post. The post was about EV charging stations, and I mentioned the rapid pace that battery technology was taking from chemistry to chemistry to construction to manufacturing and two posts later I'll have to start another one and start with this new technology (which incidentally isn't the latest battery news any more either . . . )

This is the state of everything at the moment. Ray Kurzweil famously suggested The Singularity and many people wondered if Moore's Law would keep being more or less true, and I've been working on the basis that if you replace "the number of transistors per chips" in Moore's Law with "the amount of computing power per dollar of cost" then it still holds true. And The Singularity holds sort of true because the last decade in particular has seen prosthetics and "biohacks" start on a geometric rise to that point. 

This is one of my favourite banner images I ever made.

Fifteen years ago I read about someone building themselves a home-brewed prosthetic hand, now you can download the model files to print your own, build your own controller, and set it up. Or you can buy them ready-made customised to your needs. There were the parents that built portable filters so that their children didn't need to have dialysis as often, insulin pumps are now mainstream and the age of cyberpunk biohackers is here if you search for devices like implantable NFC chips to hold your bank card's functionality or open your doors or start your car or even just store some information for emergency services in case of accidents.

Two or three other companies are competing with NeuraLink and I've actually posted about Augments and neural nets and stuff, mostly though as fiction stories, but it's been a thing I've thought about for 20+ years so I'm sure hundreds of other people will have thought about the exact same things - and for all I know there are biotech and nanotech companies pursuing that very research right now. (I've found that I'm almost never the first to arrive at what I thought at the time was a unique and revolutionary idea, and literally hundreds of others were also thinking they had the same unique and revolutionary idea... And sometimes, I'd see the idea become a commercial reality as someone got more research and development done than I did. Because I never really went past the "Oh wow! A unique and revolutionary idea!" stage.)

No, there's no ulterior motive to this post

I'm just blown away by how fast things move. "Oh!" I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be great if we could put a direct connection into our nervous system?" and then a decade later "No Elon - not like that . . . Sheesh . . ." I mean, I'm still waiting for some nanotech company to develop the Nano-Augment products I predicted in my blog post sixteen years ago. (Yes, there is an ulterior motive - sixteen years ago. Me.)

What are they?

I thought to myself that we can't really expect to connect a person to the Internet via hard hardware (like panels of fine pointy metallic bits) attached to a small patch of brain for a very small number of inputs/outputs. There're a number of reasons I think that it'll never work, despite NeuraLink's little successes. And Elon you can try and change my mind but in this case you're just not enough of a visionary, sorry. 

My basic premises for rejecting hard implants are that A) it'll damage the brain tissue it's implanted in, for sure. Take a hard tumble and the contacts'll drag and destroy a few cells.
B) Even though the currents may be in the range of picoamps, that will still cause electrolysis effects over time.
C) Materials themselves won't be up to the flexing required. Yes we have bendable screens now but how many have been tested to last 30 - 90 years of constant use? Hmmm. 
D) Resolution: a thousand points of contact of which only between 100 and 400 could end up being unuseable only gives a small number of bits that can input/output commands. 

So what's the solution?

Well - nanotechnology. And BIG thinking. And a lot more time. You see, nanotechnology can be rigid machines, or it could be liquids and suspended molecules . . .  

And - a LOT of experimentation and trials before ever making the first treatment. 

The basic idea is that we can make nanomaterials that can have pretty specific properties right now. What we need is to get good enough to give them extremely specific properties. They have to be made to adhere to particular types of human tissue, and then join together along it to form a conductive circuit. 

So you make a mixture of these nanomachines and introduce them into a person, they form along all manner of nerve cells, in effect creating a parallel to the nervous system and connected to it. you now have "wiring" in the body that runs at a far faster speed than nerve cells, and which it's okay to connect to. And you have - in effect - the entire nervous system in analog that can be used for - whatever you want. 

There are downsides to this. I thought this through at the time. If you have a second nervous system in your body that runs at around ten times faster than your original nerves, you'll suffer from a terrible "double vision" effect where the signals arrive, and then arrive again a second later. Unless it's possible to train oneself to ignore one set of signals, it would be nauseating and disorienting. But I assumed it wouldn't be insurmountable.

Then there's a second issue. You might sense a mosquito landing on your arm in a tenth of the time that it took you before the Augmentation, but you still couldn't get your muscles to react fast enough. THAT would drive you crazy, maybe. Maybe crazy enough to have a similar treatment done to increase your muscle speed. 

Now when you sense that mozzie, you send the swat signal, your new muscles power on and - 

break the bones of the arm you're swatting with. Followed by the mosquito, and the bones of your other arm that it was sitting on. 

*sigh*

You need some titanium reinforcement for your bones, too. 

And before you worry about how much weight you'll gain with all that nanotech inside you - it's nano. You have ten times more bacterial cells in your gut than there are somatic (body) cells in your body, yet they weigh only about a kilo. Any nanotechnology is similarly going to consist of numerous molecules but weigh only a kilo or two. 

Okay okay - I took a bit of artistic license.

The thing is - I'm expecting to read about it anytime now. THAT'S how fast I think technology is going.

It's a system that would allow a person to send every aspect of a learned behaviour (aka an 'engram') to an AI to teach it a particular task. Imagine someone who's been a truck driver most of their life, providing their experience to an AI. And also a rally driver. And so forth. Eventually you have an AI that can be trusted to drive you everywhere. And because the Augment is in all your nervous system, the driverless car AI will even be able to have "gut feelings" about traffic situations and act on them...

One downside of course is that you could be infected with a digital virus. In that 16 year old blog post I actually thought about that too. I'm just going to re-state that. Sixteen years ago I'd already thought of a way to make a superhman, and a way to defeat them. I'm not - I'm nowhere near being - the sharpest tool in the biotech / cyborg / cybernetic shed, but I could imagine this back then. I had (and still have) no laboratory for any such ventures, no formal education, and no money to do any research like that.

Imagine what a bunch of smarter people with a decent set of laboratories and funding could do . . .

I would sooo like to be able to get my posts seen farther and wider. And I'd so like to chat. There's a link in then graphic above that you can use to chat with me. (There are also links to donate and subscribe t the once-a-week newsletter . . .)

Please share this article if you liked it.

From Ye Olde Blogge October 31, 2003

Memory Lane Friday, October 31, 2003

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Contemporary history through... - searches for drugs

Mesothelioma - Viagra - Phentermine - Zocor - Bontril - Prozac - -Tenuate - Zyban - Didrex - Meridia - Lipitor. As of this writing, these are the most popular terms searched on drugs.com, a site that mainly seems to shill for secondrate drug companies and cut-rate cure-alls... It reveals an interesting anthropological find and a not altogether unsuspected snapshot of people now - i.e. people are stupid. Mesothelioma is a disease of the lungs caused usually by inhalation of crocidolite (blue asbestos fibres) in a certain range of lengths. It isn't a drug at all.

The interesting fact here is that if mesothelioma manages to beat viagra as a search term, then there must be a lot of people with asbestosis out there... How did this happen? Dust from old asbestos fencing? Asbestos house cladding? Pipe lagging? Or car brake shoes?

Then we have the inevitable small-dick-syndrome people, and then the obese and the cholesterol-obsessed, the stressed, smokers wanting to get off, and more fat people whose inner thin person is screaming to get out.

If for any reason, this fact survives s few centuries and is finally dug up by an anthropologist / historian, what sort of a world will they imagine we lived in?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Two Poems, circa 1970-80ish:

Here's a thing. I was searching for another topic in my old blog posts and found what I'll repost here.

I was going through older posts, and found two poems, I thought at the time I'd written them in the mid-1980s but I recall writing Smokey's Lament just after my gap years which would make that one written in the late 1970s. And Sing A Song Of Chaos was written within a year. 

I was backtracking to see how far back I could verify my TEdALOG Lite / TEdALOG Lite II blog series. I found a text dump of a blog that I'd written on my PC (in HTML, no less, and using Notepad) and uploaded with some software that arranged and linked it and then wrote the whole shebang to a website of your choice, and thus includes the earliest blog post I still have records of. 

These were posts from late 2003 to late 2006. Everything earlier (and done completely manually before 2003) was lost when the web provider I'd been using before 2003 went belly-up. That would have been from 1997 - 2003 and the blog was called TEdLIVISION!!! as a nod to my BBS I ran before that.

But it establishes TEdALOG as being at least 20 years old, with a name change to TEdALOG Lite II in January 2007. And if I ever find my earlier blog on the 

Anyway - here, with no apologies and no expectations - are some poems that had to be written by a guy in his mid-20s and the blog post he wrote with them in his 40s:

Poems Across The Decades.

As we were selling up and moving house, I went through many many boxes of my father's possessions, airing out a lot of it and seeing what's there. Two sheets of paper fell out of one book, written on my old dot matrix printer, and turned out to be copies of poems I'd written in the mid 80's. I think I have second sight...

SMOKEY'S LAMENT

Smokey the bear went out one day,
Found a six lane carriageway,
Saw the cars belch fumes and soot,
People competing to pollute!

Something welled in Smokey's eye,
A bitter tear, he wiped it dry . . .

How long can we do it, this rape of the soil,
This searching and striving for land to despoil?
How long can we pillage the trees of this land,
Before we fall victim to our own wanton hand?

Silting the rivers with algae and spill,
How long before we must swallow this pill?

Smokey the bear turned aside for the city,
Sad there was the Earth, and the more was his pity,
Covered in concrete, entombed in highrise,
Cloud of pollution was hiding the skies,

Coughing and stumbling and hiding his tears,
Smokey resolved not to come back for years.

Kill the damn bugs, for the ruin our hay!
Curse them with sprays for they get in our way!
Coursing their ways through the Earth's veins they ran,
Now in us all, every child, woman, man!
Salt in the tillage, a new man-disease,
We've forsaken the land and raped her of trees!

Smokey the bear turned his steps to the West,
To places which once were with native life blest,

Found only farms, all sterile and bare,
Rusting machines - man must once have been there.
Bowed now and weeping and heavy of heart,
To the wide oceans did Smokey make start.

Full of our excrement, turgid and green,
The results of the Exxon Valdeez were here seen,
(yes I added these verses when reprinting it for Dad, in 1990.)
And great were the fishes that died in the net,
And great were the whales (what was left of them yet)
Lifeless, the reefs and the corals as one,
Nature again has by man been undone.

Smokey the bear thought he knew of a place,
Safe, and so far from our human deathrace,

Made for the east, for the rainforests there,
(Arrived just as we laid the last acre bare)
Heavy of heart now and laden with doubt,
Smokey the bear booked a fare to the South . . .

"Here in Antarctica, surely," thought he,
"I will no more of this man-folly see?"

Alas - that which greeted him, ugly and dusty,
Was campsites abandoned, boats, reefed and rusty,
And with horror he noticed his blistering skin,-
No-one had told him the ozone was thin . . .

Smokey the bear asked the Lord for one boon,
And so, in a thrice, had set sail for the Moon,

But space debris Got in his way,
Up there, where Killer Sputniks prey,
And on the Moon too We'd left our traces,
Pitted robots andRocket cases . . .

And so on he continued, he's gone off to see,
If somewhere there might be a sane galaxy,
We're left here to face this our pell-mell race,
To make amends to our birthing-place.

Such a beautiful world that we treated unfair,-
And now without Smokey, what hope is there?

SING A SONG OF CHAOS

Sing a song of Chaos, Entropy reversed,
New and strange attractors,
In the mind are nursed.

Mindful of another verse, I can but watch and frown -
It looks just like "Atishoo!
We all fall down..."

Ere I wake this morning, Before I end my sleep,
I pray to have a gentle dream,
A treasure I can keep.

No more nuclear nightmare, Frightening to my rest,
Please not another forest raped,
With axe and chainsaw "blest!"

Want to dream of pastures green, Not razed by 2-4-T,
Please - show me a verdant place,
Where in dreams I can be.

Let me look on fish and whales, At play in waters blue,
Don't show me an albatross,
Dying in black goo!

Let me roam a mountain range, Not opencut collier's pit,
I want to swim on beaches clean,
Not have dodge through shit!

Oh Progress, you are wonderful, You fill me with such dread,
You've stuffed a lovely planet
Now you're starting on my head . . .