psyche

So, YouTube has made it to the Apple TV! I was just thinking that it might never happen. This may boost the Apple TV’s value in the eyes of a disapproving public.

Pax

Information and communication are the keys! Information handling is impressively developed, but communication techniques fall short: programming languages and markup formats like HTML are living (well…) proof of this, although more dynamic systems like XML are a step in the right direction. Imagine a web browser that isn’t simply an interpreter (something that shows you a picture of what the web developer had in mind) but is instead a sort of personalised display (not unlike an RSS aggregator) that could digest information and display it to your specifications. Perhaps legacy “art” browsers would remain, allowing the information to be presented as it is now. The “art” browsers would be to the new aggregators as ornately decorated manuscripts are to modern minimalist books in terms of appearance. Perhaps there would be a level of “digestion” that would be user-controlled (i.e. the user could move a slider to tell the browser how much it should re-sequence the data that are presented to it, changing it from its “intended” form to a more useful, categorised form. Maybe in time, “form” would be forgotten, no tags would be required and computers would read websites like we read books - understand them, not simply interpret them (like we would, say, read out a passage in another language which we vaguely know how to pronounce but not understand - I remember wasted days in my youth during which I would phonetically read out passages from the Qur’an to some old teacher, never knowing what I was actually saying).

Linguistic awareness of some kind is highly important. An AI doesn’t need to think very hard; it simply has to use basic algorithms to process data as its predecessors are no doubt doing as I type and furthermore use more complex algorithms to make its other algorithms more efficient, complex and useful. The data must be digested. We must teach the machine. The greatest processing power, in this era of pre-quantum computing, is us. We teach the web and it in turn teaches us. We tag, sort, prune, remove and add information. There are many people involved. A significant chunk of everyone is involved. Soon we will be replaced by programs (at least in terms of information sorting if not even adding) but until we are, we must endeavour to power this interesting sociological experiment that is, in my opinion, one of humankind’s greatest achievements (the other main one in my mind being the internet…).

I was previously asking myself whether I should pursue maths, physics or computer science but now I have a feeling it’ll be all three in copious amounts in the friendly package that is quantum computing.

I don’t know why I feel this compulsion to make computers think. It would be a magnificent system, a being created manually (so to speak) by a large group of other beings.

It would make my fucking day.

In chess, Elliot and I are making good progress with the middle- and endgame but our openings, although now familiar and underpinned by good intention, are still highly random and in need of consolidation. Over the summer I think my routine will comprise proper formal practice the following:

• Chess
• Fencing
• Maths
• Guitar
• Tetris
• Reading (mostly on informatics, quantum mechanics, electronics and programming)

This is a war!

Pax

Despite the blanket of GCSEs suffocating me (particularly English. I’m so confused. I’ve bluffed every previous English exam and never done badly - and each time I became more complacent. Now it’s the real thing and - what if I’m expected not to bluff it?! It’s too late. I was too slow!), I think I’m more happy. Which is bad. This is who I am, I think. I am an insecure and annoying, marginally successful boy with a fistful of busted 3A fuses and some gadgets in my pocket and a gallium arsenide-coated piece of silicon stuck on my trousers and a whole load of (mostly incorrect) stuff in my brain.

This is it.

Pax

Check this out: it’s pretty interesting. One of those Google guys is involved; this technology is pretty impressive. My dad is excited at the prospect of a business-oriented version. Aggregation of feelings - welcome to Web 2.0!

http://wefeelfine.org

I feel oxymoronic.

Pax

As the creation of this group hints at, the iPod/RAZR generation of form-over-function has infested Apple and is buying Apple computers for no reason other than their social meaning. This disgusts me. These people probably configure their systems so badly that any advantage that could be gained by use of Mac OS is lost and they might as well be running Windows!

If you’re an Apple noob, I suggest you subscribe to MacUser (I’m talking UK here, I don’t know about the US one), learn about UNIX, NeXT and Linux from Wikipedia and ditch the iPod in favour of something more great.

Pax

If western governments want to prove that the theory of anthropogenic global warming isn’t simply a pretext to sell more Toyota Prius hybrids or to stifle the industrialisation of LEDCs, maybe they should demonstrate this, perhaps by fixing some countries as opposed to draining out their resources and building military bases in them.

Pax

So, the obligatory post-25th post. I hesitate to call it Christmas, as that was dubious from the start, what with its fusion into Pagan festivals and all. Anyway, I came out relatively unscathed, with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, a 250GB HP external Hard Drive, a new Nokia 6131 and Command & Conquer: The First Decade - and yes, I preordered Tiberium Wars.

I updated Psyche - for the first time in a while - with some Tiberian Sun stuff and made some aesthetic changes to Science and some more significant (but still aesthetic) changes to About, so that’s all good. I’d like to pick up an Intel iMac and boot Vista in order to run Tiberium Wars, but I’ll see what rolls over at Macworld and check out Leopard before I finalise my choices. I need to get good at Yuri’s Revenge so I can challenge Elliot, damn it!

Anyway, you know the deal. Tiberian Sun is a beautiful game.

Logitech MX RevolutionFor the record, I’m on an old-ish 17″ PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.8. The installation was … well, non-existent - in a good way. I put the mouse into its power cradle and left it charging for a couple of hours after unpacking it. I downloaded the Logitech Control Center (there was no Mac software in the box) and wandered off somewhere… and then sauntered back and checked it out. I plugged the RF dongle into my USB port, slid the slider on the underside of the mouse to the “on” position, and voilà, the mouse was working! I hastened to System Preferences, wherein I increased the sensitivity, configured some options etc. although I might add that my global settings are almost the same as the default ones as they were well thought out. Basically, the mouse is perfect apart from the absence of a left-handed version, which means nothing to me but everything to, say, my brother and my dad. Anyway, the only oddity I encountered was in Jedi Academy (don’t laugh) when I found that switching weapons with the primary scroll wheel always caused me to suddenly look upward. So far I have no explanation - it’s probably something to do with the way I’ve configured the controls in JKA - but until I can eliminate this I’ll use the left/right tilt function of the wheel. Phew. Once you configure the speed you’d like the SmartShift wheel function (the scroll wheel basically goes into a frictionless spin when you spin it at a certain speed) it pretty much becomes a better and more convenient (and fun) version of page up/page down. The mouse is great - works well, was easy to set up, is easy to configure. Unfortunately there’s no left-handed version… hmm… that’s economics for you.
Nokia 6131
Once again, no Mac software or USB cable out of the box - shame on you, Nokia! However the phone is good. It’s not Series 60 and therefore all my crap from my old 6260 is, well, non-transferable. It also takes a microSD card (which I haven’t got yet) - and I thought miniSD cards (which the 6260 took) were small! The font for the clock thing on the outside is really bad. Anyway, this is progress towards a really good Nokia clamshell, but until then, looks like Motorola have that market under control. How’s that KRZR thing doing?

Pax