Omega Point

Just recently, I was lamenting the fact that there are likely orders of magnitude more people who understand the “turn it off and then on again” method of troubleshooting than the scientific method.

To back up my theory, this month’s Wired Magazine sees editor Chris Anderson confidently stroll into Crazyland with his essay The End of Theory, asserting that the age of the scientific method is over, replacing hypothesis and testing with statistical number-crunching of massive databases.

Needless to say, there exist a variety of reactions to this idea, most of which can be summarized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s critique of Anderson’s article was particularly effective, pointing out that recognition of correlation is not the goal of science; rather, it provides a starting point for science to begin from:

Noticing a correlation between factors is the START of science, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a scientist.  When you just record a million trials you’re an accountant.  When you say “It happens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answering a five-year-old’s fortieth question in a row, or uninterested, or possibly religious.

The “you are not qualified to make this assertion” style of criticism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems particularly accurate:

This combines with his second error: Belief that the Internet is the entire world.  This is an easy mistake for somebody like a Wired editor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shouting “LOLCAT” most people wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about.  This is important.  In fact, a species where everybody knows about LOLCATS is one whose viability needs severe re-evaluation.

And she updates her site all the time.

Seriously.

I’m sick. Sure, I’m getting over it now, but it’s been a couple of days. I’m not actually sure what I have, only that it sucks. So far, I’m pretending it wasn’t due to my walking to the pharmacy in the rain the day before I started seeing symptoms. No, that’s crazy talk.

Recently, it seems like everyone I know is either sick, or involved in some massive family/social life drama, or having stuff stolen. I lost one half of a pair of earrings, Eric lost his camera equipment and Rob from Social Signal had his MacBook stolen.

Rob, of course, had the courage to at least put on a brave entertaining face for the rest of us, but man… that had to hurt. After a quick “back up your data, seriously” conversation, I did just that. Badly. But I’m going to grab another drive this week, so… you know, please don’t steal it before then, guys.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about ways of LoJacking my MacBook Pro to produce some kind of entertaining photoblog of snapshots of whoever stole it, complete with a record of access points detected, cross-referenced to WiFiMug. (or better yet, some obsessive wardriver’s map!)

Experience tells me that stolen laptops are rarely recovered, and that photos of computer thieves are frequently faked. Still, it’s something I’m setting up just in case.

So I guess it’s probably about time I updated the look of this blog. It’s come to my attention that I may be the only published blogger not to have plugged their book on their site in every possible way. Maybe I should do something about that…

(more…)

This is fascinating. Matt Haughey writes about his thoughts on the disappearance of CNet editor James Kim and his family:

If each recording is say 30 minutes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 minutes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask viewers to leave comments pointing out when they see anything strange. The Kims were in a silver Saab wagon, so it’s probably something that can be seen from above. In total, there’d be 50 or 60 short clips and in a matter of hours you could have millions of people closely scan then and start pointing out the things worth looking into on the ground.

In his incredibly good (yet incomplete!) webcomic Spiders, Patrick Farley describes a world in which President Gore enacts a similar project in the aftermath of the 9/12 attacks on the World Trade Center and US Capitol Building. A million tiny robot spiders are deployed to Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In one chapter, an unseen figure describes how surely this is some sort of psy-ops gimmick; the Americans would need a million operators to monitor the video of every spider. A second figure agrees, and is suddenly revealed to be Osama bin Laden himself, as seen through the camera eye of a tiny robot.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away, a small girl is sitting at her computer. “Mommy? Daddy?” she says. “I think my spider just found that bad man.”

(Via kottke.org)

Hamlet needs to not talk to reporters about me while drunk. Seriously.

Update 16/09/06:
It seems some people have gotten the wrong idea here. Allow me to explain:

• Yes, I was homeless. However, what Hamlet is talking about in that video happened in February of 2003. In fact, his original story about it even notes that I hadn’t been homeless for some months as of its writing.
• I did not build a laptop; I had one with me. Hamlet is drunk and mixing up his words. Besides, have you ever looked inside a laptop? Not gonna happen.
• I did build much of the computer I actually used to connect to SL from parts I scrounged up, both before and after I became homeless.
• “Hacking” into wireless networks is more a matter of antenna strength than software. The software is a matter of point-and-click.
• Picking power supplies out of a dumpster is not a feat of unparalleled hacker skill.
• I have been living well out of slum conditions for over three years now.
• Had I been homeless for the past four years, there is almost no way I could have continued to enter Second Life during this time. Computers break. Computers are stolen. Computers are sold for crack.*
• I attended SL Views at Linden Lab earlier this year, without anyone suggesting I might be homeless.
• There are numerous photos of me circulating around the internet, with clean clothes and skin, my hair cut and styled, in an apartment I claim to be mine.
• Homeless people tend to be homeless for a reason. People homeless for more than a couple weeks tend to be homeless for a very good reason, that frequently precludes their ever escaping poverty. Society sucks.

* I am not on crack. I was not on crack. After four years on the streets? The odds are pretty good I would be.