Warp Watch - Our Watch

Human ingenuity at work

2007-06-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

How to create a waterway on a completely different level.

12 truths from IRC chat rooms

2007-05-30T05:48:00.000-07:00

Let's face the obvious: yesterday we were nerds, today we're the cognitive elite. Let's conquer. These past few weeks were interesting, so much so that in my free time I read the entire bash.org library of chatting highlights.
Most are rubbish, some are funny but few are truly full with meaning. Here is my selection from many thousands of quotes, there are many more that are hilarious but this selection represents ones that I found interestingly true :

#12
<SenioR> whahahah fravec! I fucked your mother!!
<@Fravec> Dad, buzz off, I'm talking to friends here...
Comment: never teach your dad how to use IRC

#11
SilverD: hmm, how can you tell if you're running a 32 bit or a 64 bit OS?
Reilithion: Is your computer all new, fancy, and shiny?
SilverD: no
Reilithion: You're running 32 bit.

#10
<Albides> I was insane before I used the internet... I was confused after I used it. Then horrified as I found out about things like dolphin sex and furries.

#09
<DannyB> some girl on the street asked if i was saved yet
<DannyB> i told her i saved at the checkpoint a couple minutes back
<DannyB> and can reload from there if i die
<DannyB> she was confused

#08
<SaintAlvus> I wrote a book on an object that lets you accelerate the passage of time.
<Bean> What was it called?
<SaintAlvus> Bong Mechanics

#07
<muse06> you ever think god gets stoned?
<humphrey> have you ever seen a platypus?

#06
<xterm> The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

#05
<Beeth> Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
<honx> well, you can stil get one from a strange country :-P

#04
<Nomenumbra> 1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 0 bottles of beer on the wall.
<Nomenumbra> 0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall.

#03
<mayb> procrastination is like masturbation
<mayb> it's fun until you realize you just fucked yourself

#02
<Bus> y = ¦x¦
<JaxomZero> thats thinking positive

#01
<kidd79> do u know what i'd like they add to Google.Earth?
<Don_Vito> ..3D graphics?
<Don_Vito> animated water, trees and stuuf??
<kidd79> orbital ion cannon

2007-05-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

The entire Internet is buzzing with sounds of swords and shield bashing into one another over the topic of religion and god. Is is quite amazing that people in this day and age still believe in imaginary friends in face of overwhelming science. Science, especially Darwin's theory has been called religion but there is one big difference; if its proven to be false, its gone. We don't know everything and most probably never will know everything as individuals but to say that because we currently cant explain something it must have been created by an all powerful being should be enough to institutionalize a person.

I have nothing against religion, people have the right to believe what ever they want, no mater how absurd it is. But to say that one religion is better than the other is the ultimate Hypocrisy.

People that claim to speak to god are the worst, psychiatric clinics are full of people that hear voices, only difference is that these got away.

There are many posts dealing with absurdities of religious people from dinosaurs and humans lived together to the Earth is 10,000 years old.

It also looks like that the more developed the society in respects to scientific education and the level of prosperity, the higher rate of agnosticism.

While reading Proofs of the Existence of a God it came to me that there was no real list of absurdities that one can ask a Christian to point it out to them just how absurd this debate is.

Q 9. Can you tell me what are the 10 commandments?

Only 40% of Americans can recite more than 4 commandments while 90% of them have said in recent poll that they believe in God. Now that's that I call absurd. If you identify your self as something and are passionate about it at least you should know the basis of your religion.

If you don't know them a list of 10 commandments can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

other sources:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-03-07-teaching-religion-cover_N.htm http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695

Q 8. Who killed more people God or Satan in the Bible?

God killed more than 2,270,365 people while Satan is accredited for only 10 killings in the Bible. And I always taught that Bible was meant to punish such deeds.

other sources:
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/who-has-killed-more-satan-or-god.html

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/hprajani/phun/god-v-satan.png

Q 7. Is Bible the word of God? A: Yes!
Q: Then how come he cant make up his mind?A: What do you mean?
Q: Choose any from the following : http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html#good_to_alland have fun.

Q 6. What were Jesus' last words?

This was taken from the last archive. Found this one interesting as it concurs the favorite part of every Christian and that is the crucifixion. Most people are sure that they know what were the Jesus' last words.

Well it depends from whose perspective you look.

Matt.27:46,50: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" that is to say, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" ...Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost."
Luke23:46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, "Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit:" and having said thus, he gave up the ghost."
John19:30: "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished:" and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."

Q 5. Does God love You? A: Yes !

Q: No, he regrets ever creating you!A: Fuck off

Q: Look in ...

Genessis 6:7; "And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them."

Q 4. What is hotter, The Heaven or The Hell?

Actually by reading the Bible it seems that Heaven is hotter then Hell.

Data for the temperature of Heaven can be found in Isaiah 30:26; "Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days."

And for the temperature of Hell in Revelations 21:8; "But the fearful and unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone."

We have then, temperature of heaven, 525°C (977°F). Temperature of hell, less than 445°C. Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.

More information along with calculations and a rebuttal of the proof on http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm

Q 3. Is your god omnipotent (all-powerful)?

“Can God create a rock that he can’t lift?” If God can’t do this, then he isn’t omnipotent, and if he can, then he still isn’t omnipotent, because then there is something, that he can’t do – i.e. lift the rock.

This means that omnipotence is a logical impossibility, and therefore omnipotent gods are also logically impossible.

Q 2. Is your god omniscient (all-knowing)?

But how can humans have a free will, if a god in advance knows what is going to happen? There can be no choice in any meaningful sense of the word, if there is only one possible outcome to each and every situation (that is the outcome that the god has foreseen). This leads us to conclude that free will combined with omniscience is impossible, and if we want to keep omniscience and thereby have to kill off free will, what does that do to the concept of sin?

Q 1. If a creator created the universe, what created the creator?"

The only way out is to declare that the creator was not created and just "is" (or "was").

From here we might as well ask what is wrong with saying that the universe just "is" without introducing a creator? Indeed Stephen Hawking, in his book "A Brief History of Time", explains his theory that the universe is closed and finite in extent, with no beginning or end.

more information: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/arguments.html#lll

eBook will Succed

2007-04-28T02:54:00.000-07:00

While reading a recent post by Mike Elgan I felt a strong sense that he was wrong. Ever since I first heard of eInk I fantasized about having one book that would stand on my bookshelf and it would contain all the books that I have read and will read in my lifetime. It is understandable that such device will not show up anytime soon but I also know that I will own one. Currently they are thin plastic case with one "page", slow refresh rates, mostly in black and white and not long battery life for a "book". The most advanced eInk device by my account is Iliad iRex.

It sports a WiFi, 256 Mb of internal memory, USB, MMC and CF expansion slots, 400 MHz XScale Processor and a touch sensitive eInk screen. Just by writing this make my mouth water. Of course all of this takes toll on the battery but even then it can operate for 21h on one charge. This operation time is optimistic and in reality is less than that. Developers, please fix this, eBook should not be limited by such inconvinience. Implement alternative sources of power like solar, motion or even temperature difference sources of powering the little gadget.

Mike Elgan in his article argues that people buy books because they like the feel and touch of paper. They collect books, love to turn the pages and i general are book worms. I must admit, I also enjoy a good book and like the personal touch each and every book brings with it but to say that people like reading long texts or books off a glowing computer screens is nonsense, let alone reading such texts from mobile phones or PDAs. As for sunlight readability, try reading from your notebook on the beach, eInk has no problem with sun and at most we can say that the sun is its allay.

eBooks are in their infancy and it may look like they are not superior to traditional books but this way of thinking is wrong. Large adoption of eBooks is still a few years away but it is coming and with it a shift in paradigm.

And Yes, we love books but it is time for them to enter the 21st century.

reddit Wallpaper

2007-03-07T02:13:00.000-08:00

Similar to digg situation with wallpapers, another popular social news site does not have a proper wallpaper.

So here is a reddit wallpaper.

More to come.

digg Wallpapers

2007-03-01T00:51:00.000-08:00

It is supprising that there are no good digg wallpapers online.
So, I made some.

Ubuntu - not a threat to Windows

2007-02-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

I'm sad to say, but Ubuntu is not a threat to Windows Vista., not even close

I got so worked up about Ubuntu. Everywhere you go there is a mention of Ubunt and Beryl, how amazing it is, how stable, and all other whatnots. I intentionally did not use and help as it should be a strait forward process more or less found with windows and OS X.

So, this is a day I will remember my long forgotten days with my trusty Linux box from some 10 years ago. For such experiment a new hard drive was needed, so I went out and got a new 160 gb HDD. Booted the computer one last time to Windows XP to burn the Ubuntu 6.10 to DVD and then I closed windows one last time. Or so I thought.
Now came the installation. I connected all the wires to the brand new HDD bought specially for the new OS, and proceeded booting of my soon to be new Ubuntu box.

The last time I was installing Linux it was RedHat distribution but cant remember the version. Its installation was in terminal mode with allot of Q&A, strange numeration of hard drives and/or devices. It was a completely different universe with its own distinct rules.
Here Ubuntu plesently surprised me, its installation has graphic installation interface. Even better, it was a live disk so actually I could try it out before I choose to install it. Of course, I did no such thing and proceeded with the installation. Ok, basic information, choose drive named something or other which on Windows would represent C:\ drive, press next and load tetris to wait the installation through.

Five minutes into the installation, ups, you did not select or made a swap partition. Damed, I know that, I remember that Linux uses swap partitions, hmm.. how do I add them? Well I guess it will lead me through it. Ok, click go back to the partition dialog, but it crashes. Lets start again, ok, basic information, select partition, ups almost missed the creation of swap partition, but no help prom Ubuntu. Actually I shouldn't even have to know what a swap file is let alone search through dialog boxes to find something that resembles the something or other a error dialog box stated I should do to correct it.

Ok, installation continues, and as it is live DVD I can try out some applications. I settled with a game of Tetris.

Excellent, my Ubuntu installation is ready. First boot up, excellent, no more terminal window, straight to xWindows and gnome. Resolution is low but that was expected as new drivers are needed. Ok, need to connect to the internet go get new drivers. Hm... how to do that, system, networking, that should be it. Ok, No, maybe the next networking, No, administration tools, No. This is getting ridiculous.

About 30 min later I'm still trying to find how to connect to the internet over ADSL. It should be strait forward process. Ok, I'm stuck, clicked on first help icon I found but it required Internet. Digging around for another five minutes and finally I found something that resembles a help file. Typed in ADSL and got the procedure in terminal. WHAT? I STILL NEED TO ENTER COMMANDS, THERE IS NO USER INTERFACE. Ok, easy, we setup it once and thats it. I follow the procedure and type commands in command prompt, which once again I should not know what it is but.... And it worked, I opened Firefox and the Internet just seamed to jump, it was so responsive I got goosebumps, downloads of drivers went over declared speed for my ADSL, and I have never seen such speeds in Windows. That was the first impression.

Next chapter, the installation of ATI video drivers. What on Earth do people using Linux smoke as I want some. The procedure for installing video drivers borders with science fiction, take a look here. Ok, driver installation completed. Now, I have dual display setup, if you would like to see how this goes, check here.

Ok, now I had newest graphic drivers, dual display that worked and all I needed was that eye-candy called beryl. I installed it and for all my trouble I got just errors.

Up to now the installation of Ubuntu took 3h of my life I want back.

Ok, I can live without the eye candy but I need my files from windows partition. Gewiz, Ubuntu has no NTFS support. I need to install that too. Went to the wiki about it and with BIG RED letters there is a warning, and with small plain letters bellow it says, don’t worry about it. What !?

At this point I gave up.

Ubuntu still needs allot of user interaction to make it usable, allot of advanced user interaction. It is a big step forward for linux but nothing dramatically changes. It is still the most stable OS but also the most un-user friendly.

I was hopping that Ubuntu could replace Vista as I have no desire to pay for it but it seams it is inevitable.

I expected a smooth and polished OS but actually found it light years behind in usability to Windows.

Two of the worlds most Exclusive club

2007-01-13T03:43:00.000-08:00

The two most exclusive societies or clubs are not based on influence of money. There is no way to buy or bully your way in. To enter you have to be smarter than 99.999999th percentile of World population. Just to illustrate this point, only six people on the world have such high IQ, almost 1 person per billion. Thats what I call exclusive club.

The most exclusive is Giga society, not by power or wealth but by having the only six people in the world whose IQ is at or above 196. This eliminates 99.9999999th percentile of world population. Note that there is one additional 9 than in prior mention of the percentile. What I found interesting is that 4 members are from Europe and 2 are from USA. 4:2 for Europe.

OLYMPIQ Society just slightly less exclusive society with minimum IQ required for entrance of 180. Currently number of people with such high IQ is 12 with 1800 potential members.

Group cohesion and needed chaotic influences during group interaction.

2007-01-02T12:43:00.001-08:00

This topic has far reaching consequences on the make up of the teams. During the selection process it is often regarded that the best makeup is to put together people that have worked together before and/or have compatible personalities. This is not the case in nature.
If we compare natural system to human made systems that are in use today, nature have several advantages. They are not rigid systems and have embedded chaotic regimes that are used to push the system to evolve beyond the starting parameters. This chaotic element in human made systems for analysis (Teams) can be viewed as a Specific Performance Challenge. But in my opinion it is not enough.
To fulfill the requirements needed individuals in the group have to evolve their skill of acquire new ones. Sense of pride and accomplishment will bring exhilaration to the individual. Sir John Eccles said it best when he summed up the “free will”. Everybody assumes they have it and that they can control their actions, “The controversially of consciousness and free-will in science stems from their supposed inconsistency with causal scientific description”.
Every stable closed system will develop its own chaotic regime which can not be predicted and can have far greater consequences on the whole that popularly believed, a.k.a. the “butterfly effect”. By making a team of people that have predictable personalities it is impossible to predict the outcome. Ben Goertzel views the brain as "high dimensional dynamics with underlying low-dimensional chaos. There is, admittedly, some evidence for this view: mood cycles, nostril cycles and EEG patterns demonstrate low dimensional chaotic attractors”
My opinion is that by introducing an unstable element in the team, the emergence of chaos can be observed and controlled indirectly with primus at a given time in the team. Unstable element in a team has been avoided in the practice of team creation but it is my opinion that it has been neglected. Such element could give the team the edge it needs in accomplishing the goal faster and quicker if controlled correctly.
This could best be controlled in larger groups. Smaller groups are not as much under the influence of chaotic regimes as larger because of the level of interaction between the members of a group which is far higher that that of a large group. This enables small groups to smooth out any discrepancy by mere communication.
For such a control to be implemented group or a team should have a leader at any given time, preferably a primus as he is selected from the group and is trusted by the group. It would however not be applicable to extremely large groups or crowds.
This is a very wide topic and this is why a professional counselor should be hired for the duration of team creation.

References:
Mind and Brain, Chaos and Quantum Mechanics
The crowd, A study of the popular mind, By Gustave le bon {b. May 7, 1841--d. Dec 13, 1931}
Chaotic Logic: Language, Mind and Reality from the Perspective of Complex Systems Science, by Ben Goertzel

The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men

2007-01-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday nigh I watched a Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Dictator, filmed in 1940. I was surprised how brutaly true it is. At the end of the movie Chaplin gives a speech to a large assembly of soldiers which made a grate impression on me:

“I am sorry; I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; yew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other happiness not by each others misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there’s room for everyone and good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned man souls. Has barricaded the world with hate, has goose stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and fell too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More then cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life would be violent, and all would be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men. Cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. Millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men thither, and imprison innocent people. To those that can hear me I say; do not despair; the misery that is upon us is just the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. So long as men die, liberty will never perish … You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are MEN. You have the love of humanity in your harts. You don’t hate, only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural … in the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written; the kingdom of God is within men, not one man nor a group of men but in all men. You, you the people have the power. The power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure … Let us use that power, let us all unite, let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give a men chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By promise of these thing brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill that promise, they never will. Dictators free them self, but they enslave the people, now let us fight to fulfill that promise; let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress would lead to all men happiness … Let us all unite.

… Look up Hanna, the clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking trough. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindly world, where men would rise above their hate, their greed and brutality. Look up, the soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly, he is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us.”

Charlie Chaplin would be disappointed if he know that people today have unimaginable power at their disposal but choose not to use it. In fact they fear it and present it as something that can't be understood. By not choosing to exercise the power that was given to the world it allowed individuals to control world’s future.

Consumer society is a direct result of capitalism and mankind’s inability to grasp the implications of technology. I am a big fan of technology, and I consider it as driving force behind progress, but technology has been mismanaged. It was used to wage wars, commit genocide; to install fear, and was made into a new kind of logical religion.

Utopians have almost always seen technology as an instrument of giving people more time to concentrate on more important issues, like betterment of one self. Instead, a bell curve, a statistical expression of dominant population distribution seen everywhere in the nature presents it self in a new light.

Bell curve tells us that there is a small number at the beginning of the curve that make up of poor performers, fallowed by a large number of average performers, and at the end again small number of overachievers.

Let’s review what was given to the humanity in the last century in regards to technology. First and most important discovery was the alternating current (AC current). It allowed for electrical power to be transmitted over great distances, and today it powers the world. When radio appeared it was predicted that it will fail but even today we can’t imagine the world without radio waves. They travel though ether, filling our skies and our being. It is probably the only medium that was used and is used correctly. It has the ability to convey ideas without the need to fully involve the listener. Radio ushered a new era, the globalization era. Ideas and news from all over the globe could be transmitted, and shared. Not only ideas but it also entertained the listeners with music and talk shows.

Television is a fluke of human nature. It is so close to our trail of thoughts that it needs only 30 seconds to emerge us into its world. Beta-endorphin levels increase and bring the viewer in a state of trance where his logic is suppressed, and pleasure released. The television set in your living room and bedroom is doing a lot more than just entertaining you. (The battle for your mind, by Dick Sutphen) Television is the most mismanaged technology to date. It has a great potential as a learning tool but, is not primarily used as such.

The Airplane, now even space travel presented an unprecedented speed and mobility to the world but under capitalism only privileged and wealthy can afford such mobility. Democracy and law tells us that we are all equal but capitalism comes in as hypocritical brother in-low that creates casts according to wealth. The step in the right direction I see with the onset of Internet. In 1990, when Internet was in the beginning of its adolescence, as was I, the Internet held a promise of quasi space popularly called cyberspace free of regulations and control of any single nation present today on Earth. But it to be grasped by capitalism which developed it into a tool for massing unimaginable sums of wealth in extremely short time. The promise of freedom if not in the real world but in cyberspace was loosing its zeal. It looked like freedom was an idea that doesn’t exist except in the stories of the old. After the change of century and the fall of house of cards that made up the capitalistic Internet a new life was given to the Internet. Today, 16 years after the creation of World Wide Web the Internet has passed its teenage experimentation and can now start to contribute to the reshaping of the world. There are still issues to be addressed for it to assume this function.

Internet today is less capitalistic then in its beginning, but not yet free of its grasp. A large population of the world is still not introduced to the benefits of Internet, or is introduced but controlled as example of China shows us. There is also a large population of people that do not see Internet as something that can benefit them. Everything that is created by men is understandable to men. It only requires effort to understand it. It is much simpler to watch television and let it emerge one into it world of fiction then to understand world around oneself.

There are many ways this can be done, one can be chosen but not on expense of others as all of them are required to partially understand and better ourself. There is religion as most primal of all; religion has been with us in one form or another since the down of men. By saying religion I do not imply explicitly the study of Holy Scriptures but to the spiritual exploration of human existence. Philosophy is similar to religion in its way of trying to understanding the world and us. The science is yet another way of describing the world around us and us self. It represents methodical research that has to pass peer review, proven and checked numerous times to become acceptable. Science is one unlike religion, but has many fields that resemble different religions on earth, along with disagreements between them. It is a world of numbers and formulas that are not easy to understand and no one fully understands everything. The same is true about religion; we can try to try, success is not guaranteed and this could be the reason that people do not even try.

Democracy is a failure, maybe the biggest along side Communism. Both are ideas to be pursued but not yet. The world is not yet ready for them. What is troubling is that all of this is known but nothing is done by the people to change the situation that we found ourselves in, not to say that it was us the people that brought this upon our selves. We have all became “stress resistant”, we passed the psychological barrier that is designed to help us recognize when something is wrong. In other words we became insensitive to the world around us, we have all became individuals, another modern development. The purposes of such Ideas are diluted in the masses. Democracy has become a word just like any other. It no longer expresses an Idea or Ideal to fight for as no one really knows what democracy is. Solidarity is gone and hypocrisy is the main meal of the day.

What can be done today to set the world on the right track back from this path that is evidently taking us to doom? Much can be done but the problem is that people do not control the means by which they can take control. People of the world gave away that power to individuals, to the capitalist, to their elected officials, in promise of fare treatment and betterment of their lives. But they lied. Dictators are not gone from the face of Earth, they evolved.