“Dean Hickerson’s orig­i­nal block-​​deleting 2c/​3 ter­mi­na­tion almost cer­tainly wasn’t designed with this in mind, but it hap­pens to absorb a double-​​length sig­nal in exactly the same way as a stan­dard sig­nal — the final sta­ble state is the same in either case. This means that com­mu­ni­ca­tion speeds approach­ing 2c/​3 can be imple­mented over long dis­tances in any direc­tion, not just diagonally.

In the accom­pa­ny­ing dia­gram, the input Her­schel sig­nal is cir­cled in red. The out­put sig­nal can be any of a num­ber of optional glider out­puts in the Her­schel cir­cuit at the bottom.

Two elbows in a row will not work (there’s no known way to turn a double-​​length 2c/​3 sig­nal). But in the absence of lay­out con­straints, a sin­gle elbow is suf­fi­cient to send a 2c/​3 sig­nal any­where in the universe.”

“In our opin­ion, Valdes nails it on the head. Twit­ter has raised tens of mil­lions of dol­lars that allows them to focus on build­ing the prod­uct. They do not need to rush into a busi­ness model, espe­cially with their eye-​​popping growth. Pre­ma­turely imple­ment­ing a busi­ness model could upset mil­lions of users and put a halt to Twitter’s suc­cess quickly.”

“While demur­rage is a nat­ural fea­ture of pri­vate com­mod­ity money it has at var­i­ous times been delib­er­ately incor­po­rated into cur­rency sys­tems as a dis­in­cen­tive against hoard­ing of money, as well as to achieve other per­ceived ben­e­fits. In par­tic­u­lar, with regards to long term invest­ment financ­ing it has the effect of chang­ing the dynam­ics of net present value (NPV) cal­cu­la­tions. All else being equal, a cur­rency sys­tem with demur­rage places an increased empha­sis on the value of long term returns on an invest­ment. As such it may cre­ate an incen­tive to invest in ini­tia­tives which offer more in the way of longer-​​term returns.”

“Here’s how it works: I’m going to donate a bunch of money, but I want ran­dom peo­ple on the Inter­net to decide where it goes.”

“But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of con­trol don’t work.
The old cat­e­gories don’t work.
The old ways of think­ing won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fun­da­men­tally, the old media won’t con­trol news dis­sem­i­na­tion in the future. And organ­i­sa­tions can’t con­trol access using old forms of accred­i­ta­tion any more.”

“You may hope that this bone-​​headed deci­sion will push mil­lions of peo­ple into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Fire­fox, but it prob­a­bly won’t. Most peo­ple, espe­cially most work­ing peo­ple, don’t have a choice about their oper­at­ing sys­tem or browser. Ditto their cor­po­rate email platform.”

“This piece nicely argues that it’s not the loss in income that mat­ters to most Amer­i­cans (we can adjust) but the loss of cer­tainty. We can always belt-​​tighten and money only makes you so happy (no rise in hap­pi­ness above $20k per capita per year–the world over), but this sense that we don’t know what’s com­ing next in the econ­omy is truly paralyzing.”

“The State, South Carolina’s dom­i­nant news­pa­per, had a col­lec­tion of (barely print­able) emails between San­ford and his honey six months ago, and didn’t pub­lish. Remind me again why we need news­pa­pers? Oh, yeah, I remem­ber: to pro­tect us from stuff we don’t really need to know.”

“We need more than the pas­sive ideal of easy access to pub­lished knowl­edge; we need the active ideal of improved method­olo­gies for advanc­ing knowl­edge. In the Enlight­en­ment Fran­cis Bacon had the bold­ness to call for a Novum Organum, a “new instru­ment” of knowl­edge (in con­trast to Aristotle’s old Organum); sim­i­larly, we must devise new instru­ments of knowl­edge to match our cyber envi­ron­ment. Ours is a knowl­edge rev­o­lu­tion on par with the intro­duc­tion of empir­i­cal research itself or even the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of the sci­en­tific method. But are we con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing and estab­lish­ing the new method­olo­gies to the same degree that we are fight­ing for the free cir­cu­la­tion of tra­di­tional mate­ri­als? We are not. That’s why we need Schol­arly Inquiry Optimization.”

“See, this is the prob­lem with Amazon’s Kindle—even they can’t tell their cus­tomers exactly how the DRM works. They blame the pub­lish­ers, but we’re not sure that pub­lish­ers have ever been given ade­quate infor­ma­tion either. (We know the press hasn’t.) From what we under­stand, pub­lish­ers are con­trac­tu­ally for­bid­den to share any infor­ma­tion about their licens­ing agree­ments with Ama­zon, which cre­ates a con­ve­nient way for Ama­zon to redi­rect all inquiries into a black hole of “it’s the publisher’s fault.””

“Wel­come to Al Zimmermann’s Pro­gram­ming Con­tests. You’ve entered an arena where demented com­puter pro­gram­mers com­pete for glory and for some cool prizes.

I run one or two con­tests per year. Each con­test asks that you come up with your best solu­tions to a set of related com­pu­ta­tion­ally inten­sive prob­lems. Although I speak of “pro­gram­ming con­tests”, tech­ni­cally you don’t need to write a com­puter pro­gram to enter. You can enter whether you use a com­puter, man­ual cal­cu­la­tions, or tea leaves to solve the prob­lems. You send me solu­tions, not programs.”

Def­i­nitely some tar­gets for genetic programming

“I write for free because there seems to me to be no mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship between whether a pub­li­ca­tion pays me and whether it’s worth­while for me to write for them. I’ve been skill­fully edited and I’ve been allowed to bab­ble on painfully unchecked by pay­ing and non-​​paying pub­li­ca­tions alike. I’ve gar­nered indi­rect mate­r­ial ben­e­fit from pay­ing and non-​​paying pub­li­ca­tions alike. I’m not sug­gest­ing that any­one fol­low my exam­ple or posit­ing that I know what The Future of Jour­nal­ism entails, but I do know, bar­ring cat­a­stro­phe, what my par­tic­u­lar future is: I am going to keep get­ting paid to write when I can and writ­ing for free when I can’t. If/​when this sit­u­a­tion becomes unten­able for me as a way of actu­ally mak­ing my liv­ing, I’ll start mak­ing more of my money with my non-​​writing endeav­ors. Peo­ple have been doing exactly that, and writ­ing sad essays about the injus­tice of hav­ing to do exactly that, for much longer than the Inter­net has been around.”

Graph #2 is par­tic­u­larly interesting

Would like to train the squares to self-​​assemble to do the cov­er­ing “them­selves”, while min­i­miz­ing the num­ber needed.

“This page con­tains a col­lec­tion of small com­puter pro­grams which imple­ment one-​​player puz­zle games. All of them run natively on Unix (GTK), on Win­dows, and on Mac OS X; they can also be played on the web, as Java applets.

I wrote this col­lec­tion because I thought there should be more small desk­top toys avail­able: lit­tle games you can pop up in a win­dow and play for two or three min­utes while you take a break from what­ever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn’t avail­able the next time I was sit­ting at a Win­dows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that every­thing in my per­sonal puz­zle col­lec­tion will hap­pily run on both those plat­forms and more. When I find (or per­haps invent) fur­ther puz­zle games that I like, they’ll be added to this col­lec­tion and will imme­di­ately be avail­able on both platforms.”

“This series of games has a con­sis­tent size and for­mat, and any four will fit neatly into The Games Col­lec­tion Stand (Pin’s part num­ber 02705).”

“An impor­tant addi­tion to the grow­ing inter­na­tional dia­logue about the com­mons can be found in the new anthol­ogy, Genes, Bytes and Emis­sions: To Whom Does the World Belong? (dis­cussed in this pre­vi­ous blog post). Recently released in Ger­man, the essays in this book are now avail­able online in English.

The book was edited by Silke Hel­frich and pub­lished by the Hein­rich Boell Foun­da­tion; Hel­frich is the for­mer direc­tor of the Foundation’s Mex­ico City office, which hosted a major con­fer­ence, Cit­i­zen­ship and Com­mons, in Decem­ber 2006. The col­lec­tion, whose title in Eng­lish is To Whom Does the World Belong? offers a thought­ful and provoca­tive array of view­points on the com­mons. (The links below con­nect to pdf files of the essays.)”

“A group of stu­dent entre­pre­neurs has opened a small-​​business incu­ba­tor in the base­ment of a down­town Ann Arbor build­ing. They’ll spend the sum­mer shar­ing space, equip­ment and ideas.

The incu­ba­tor, called the TechArb, hosts 30 stu­dents run­ning 10 dif­fer­ent start-​​ups. The space came together with the help of Ann Arbor ven­ture cap­i­tal firm RPM Ven­tures, the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan Col­lege of Engineering’s Cen­ter for Entre­pre­neur­ship, and a new student-​​run entre­pre­neur­ial orga­ni­za­tion on cam­pus, Maize Ventures.”

“Each of these exam­ples is based on a story I’ve heard of an inno­v­a­tive project that died not because it was a bad idea, but because of soci­etal iner­tia. Given how tough it is to start new projects (and find financ­ing and sup­port) under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, inno­va­tors fac­ing this kind of oppo­si­tion often end up con­tent­ing them­selves with incre­men­tal — some­times down­right mean­ing­less — gains.”

“Over­looked in tax strat­egy is the huge tax advan­tages own­ing and self-​​managing real estate. I pre­fer res­i­den­tial real estate. You have write-​​offs and phan­tom depre­ci­a­tion galore (which can be deferred until death via 1031 and sim­i­lar prop­erty exchange pro­grams, or sim­ple refinancing).”

“So, to sum up: Trans­form­ers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the great­est achieve­ments in the his­tory of cin­ema, if not the great­est. You could eas­ily argue that cin­ema, as an art­form, has all been lead­ing up to this. It will desta­bi­lize your lim­bic sys­tem, prob­a­bly for­ever, and make you doubt the solid­ity of your sur­round­ings. Gen­er­a­tions of auteurs have strug­gled, in vain, to cre­ate a cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence as over­whelm­ing, and as lib­er­at­ing, as ROTF.”

“China has ¹⁄₅ of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. If life were fair, it would have ¹⁄₅ of the world’s water. It doesn’t — China has just ¹⁄₁₄ of the world’s water sup­plies, and much of that is rank, dank, and pol­luted. You think oil is impor­tant? Try liv­ing with­out water. Or with water too pol­luted to drink. And prob­lems have wors­ened con­sid­er­ably in recent years as the pop­u­la­tion bur­geoned and fac­to­ries dumped toxic pol­lu­tants into rivers and lakes. A Chi­nese bureau­crat recently noted that 90 per­cent of China’s cities and 75 per­cent of its lakes suf­fer from some degree of water pol­lu­tion. They have water – they just can’t drink it.”

“In Copen­hagen this Decem­ber, the Indi­ans and the Chi­nese will be within their rights, and maybe even well-​​advised, to say “you spent the last eight years burn­ing as much oil and coal as you could, and deny­ing cli­mate change was a prob­lem. Now you enact leg­is­la­tion that forces use of corn ethanol that’s more global warm­ing inten­sive than gaso­line, muz­zles your sci­en­tists, and requires your reg­u­la­tory agen­cies to lie to the pub­lic about green­house gas releases, all to put money in the pocket of your farm­ers and reelect a few rural leg­is­la­tors. You’ve made sure no-​​one who uses elec­tric­ity from coal will have any rea­son to use any less of it. You expect us to do your cli­mate sta­bi­liza­tion for you, and even more to make up for the antics of these yokels, and to help you pre­tend you’re being green when you’re not? You trashed Kyoto and now you’re here to trash Copen­hagen: get a grip. We’re out of here.””