Stultitia Delenda Est

What is it about Finns and goth-y music, eh? This music video is all kinds of awesome and demonstrates once again that when it comes to gorgeously dark music, the Nordic peoples are the world’s reigning champions.

(H/T to my friend Ann for linking me to the video.)

In this excellent TED talk, Peter Diamandis, Founder of the X-Prize Foundation and Co-Founder of Singularity University talks about the coming era of abundance.

I was particularly interested in his comments on the fact that anything that becomes an Information Technology also becomes an exponentially growing technology. This is not itself a novel idea, but it is relatively new. Moore’s Law is just over 50 years old. Ray Kurzweil and others began generalizing it just a couple decades ago. What isn’t widely understood, however, is that Moore’s Law-like effects are not limited to computation and that the roster of “Information Technologies” is broad and growing.

Take, for instance, the fact that the cost of sequencing a genome (integral in several of the trends and technologies Diamandis mentions in his talk), is collapsing at an exponential rate. Expressed as cost per megabase or cost per genome, the cost is, in fact, dropping much faster than the .5 / 18-month period specified by the original Moore’s Law:

Cost per Genome, from genome.gov. Click for full size.

Genetics and Genomics mean that medicine is becoming an information technology. 3D printing means that manufacturing is an information technology. Nanoscale manufacturing means that material science is becoming an information technology.

And the single biggest driver of both the growth of and the real world impacts of information technology is the Internet.

After all, the Internet is the world’s first and only globally-spanning, format-agnostic data network.¹ Which means, per Diamandis’ talk, that in the next two decades the population of people participating in this set of super-exponentially growing information technologies will more than double.

The super-exponential growth of these technologies, plus the exponential growth of the population of Internet users, plus the radically combinatorial growth of collaboration in the global consciousness caused by networking effects² means that unfathomable levels of abundance and prosperity are just around the corner.

This, of course, doesn’t stop the doomsayers from plying their ancient and despicable trade. Bad news and scare tactics appeal to the lizard brain, and so as long as human beings manage to see existential threats in even the slightest bit of bad news, we’ll still be in the strange position of heading into an ever brighter future, while cynically raving that it’s the end of days.

¹ – That the Internet is format-agnostic is extremely important, because it means that any digital artifact of information technology can, in principle, be transmitted to anywhere in the globe. That artifact might be a picture of a cat, it might be schematics for a 3D printed statue of a cat, or it might be the complete genome of a particular cat. Whatever kind of information it is, the Internet will transmit it. Believe it or not, it doesn’t even have to be cat-related.

² – To see why this is such an important part of the growth equation, it’s important to understand that the complexity of the network (as expressed in terms of two-way links in that network) grows exponentially with the number of nodes. So for any network of size N, there are N(N-1)/2 possible connections. But the Internet allows for collaboration among huge numbers of people, so the networking effects are not limited to edges, but to subsets of the nodes in the network. This means that the growth of collaboration is potentially much higher than the exponential rate suggested by the growth of the possible edges. I’m personally tempted to say that the growth of such collaboration is approximately factorial, but I don’t know if I have strong evidence to defend that assertion.

In a stroke of brilliance, the ACLU has submitted FOIA requests for some of the diplomatic memos released by Wiki leaks. Some of these memos were delivered heavily redacted, others were withheld in their entirety. This gives us an interesting view into exactly what information the government doesn’t want us to have and just what data they think should remain classified. Interesting stuff.

Link.

Once every four years, we programmers celebrate an obscure but important day of awareness and solemn reflection. And by that I mean we eagerly cruise the web looking for other programmers’ Date/Time fuckups whilst hoping that we haven’t committed any of our own in the four years. Here’s a couple good examples, courtesy of the always excellent Daily WTF.

Black Francis: criminally underrated or just extremely underrated?

Then there is ‘class’ science, or the ‘class approach’ to science–the tragic and grotesque inheritance of Lenin. There is no doubt that Lenin was a genius of political organization, of subversion, of manipulation. But perhaps the essential part of his bequest–unwitting, maybe–is the unacknowledged(at times–at other times fully acknowledged) Führerprinzip that permeates the entire structure of the Party and eventually of society. Power in such a structure emanates from the führer, the leader, el lider, duce, chairman, whatever his title may be. It willy-nilly begets lesser führers, not only in the political sphere but in all branches and walks of life. Participating in the power from above, most of them succumb to the illusion that the source of power is also the source of infallible wisdom–scientifically infallible wisdom–and that they participate in this wisdom as well. And so it happens that the führer likes a charlatan dabbler in genetics who dislikes the founder of genetics, ergo the founder could not have been a scientist, ergo the science based on his theories is a nonscience: a bourgeois science. Or the führer is not fond of syncopation, ergo the only good jazz is one without syncopes.

In essence, this is a vulgarized form of the scholastic method of referring to the auctoritates. In the Middle Ages it produced such curious situations as the mandatory belief in the horses’ heart being in its right side, contrary to the evidence of the battlefield, because Aristotle taught so. Its Soviet form, as Starr notes, leads often to devising elaborate arguments intended to prove that the führer’s dislike of an instrument’s timbre is a scientific assessment of that timbre’s decadent nature directly attributable to the disintegration of the outdated bourgeois Weltanschauung. The history of Soviet jazz is, therefore, also the story of incredible, of absurd meanderings of the ideologue’s ‘scientific’ false consciousness.

Josef Škvorecký, “Talkin’ Moscow Blues”, as reprinted in the collection of the same name.

Proof that such “science” occurs, indeed could only occur, in benighted Soviet Republics et al. is left as an exercise to the reader.

Patrick Hayes, writing for Spiked Online, brings to my attention the fact that last month marked the first time when more than half the Chinese population lived in cities. An analogous milestone was reached a few years ago for the global population, so it’s gratifying to see that China isn’t too far behind the curve. This especially incredible to see, since as late as 1980, less than 20% of China’s people lived in cities. As is almost always the case with urbanization, this trend has been paired with the usual increases in longevity, prosperity, and security.

What’s not as often recognized is that such incredible urbanization is most likely to be better not only for the people who participate in it, but the environment as well. In an interview with The European, economist Edward Glaeser reiterates many of the benefits of cities, including their positive environmental impacts. In short, city dwellers use less energy and produce less pollution than do rural folks. They also tend to use land and other resources more efficiently.

But what I really like about Glaeser’s interview, and what I wish he’d spent more time on, are the less tangible human benefits to urbanization. He has a great line that cities are making us “more human”, a sentiment with which I whole-heartedly agree, and helping us foster greater creativity, closer relationships, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world.

So welcome, China, to the majority-urban world. Now let’s see about getting the other 50% to join us.