"So it goes."

Quotes by recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

"The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still, I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art."

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her."

"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."

"So it goes."

The singularity is coming!

Those that read my Skype-tag sometimes ask me what a singularity is.

I usually answer them with the description given by I. J. Good in 1965:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

The other meaning is the one often used by astronomers, describing the state at the beginning or end of the universe (usually called "big bang" or "big crunch"), in which things such as "space" and "time" are meaningless.

I recently read "programming the universe" by Seth LLoyd, which describes the process of the universe expanding since the big-bang as a calculation-process. As more and more matter is converted into energy, the calculation of the universe nears the "end-singularity".

This is not new, and many sci-fi writers relate this to the human development, drawing parallels between this expansion of information and that of the human race. I read the Isaac Asimov Story "The last Question" when I was a child, and remember what an impact it made on me as a plausible future for mankind.

We can safely say that if we're lucky, our ultimate destiny as humans and that of the universe are linked. And this is if we're VERY lucky. Because once the first singularity is achieved, nothing can stop hyper-intelligent machines from considering their makers (us) as retarded, superfluous, or a simple "waste of good mass". In the best-case scenario, our creations will take care of us like we take care of our pets, or somehow assimilate us into their beings (as a kind of pet-programs).

Whichever singularity comes first, one will get us in the end.

But the real interesting question is: has this not already happened?

Statistics - Yawn!

Is yawning contagious? From my experiences I would have to say "yes", but this is "anecdotal" (maybe it is just me?). So a more scientific examination is required. Luckily this question was put to the test on Mythbusters, a TV-show that tries to debunk (or prove) popular myths with scientific experimentation. They had done an experiment, which had "proven" that yawning was contagious, because there was a clear difference in % of people who yawned after they were "yawned at"; 29% yawned vs. 25% who were not yawned at.

To my surprise, Mythbusters were wrong: A clever nerd calculated the correlation of the data, (if the difference is significant or just chance), and showed it to be chance (or more scientifically put: the correlation coefficient was smaller than 0.1). This was surprising to me, because I believed that the 29-vs-25% was proof for my experiences. When I read an article in a dutch newspaper about yawning, (sent by my father who miraculously knew what I had been reading about online), I felt a strong urge to yawn...

A few days later, I read about something called Benford's law.
It says that numbers in everyday life seem to follow a surprising "law of digits". As a result, many things around us tend to be numbered much more often with "1" (33%) than with any other number. For example, house-numbers are most likely to start with a "1", but also stock-quotes, the size of files on computers, number of headlines etc. I had never heard of this law. Even stronger: I had never had the experience of noticing that numbers occur irregularly.

Science (or more specific math) is often used to quantify our suspicions (or Benford's suspicions in the second case). As with the "the show with 3 doors" problem, the results sometimes seem counter-intuitive. For me this shows that on many occasions, our mental abilities cannot grasp certain facts of life just from observation.
We can only grasp them by applying a method (math) to them, after which they are shown to be "true". We then choose to accept these things as "the truth", and become foolish to believe otherwise.

In the first case, I had observed that yawning makes me want to yawn, and I correlated it. That this is wrong, I still find hard to believe (which makes me, in effect, more "foolish"). In the second case, I had never correlated the frequency of occurrence of the number one to an uneven distribution of numbers, but I have no problem believing this.

And how about you, did you yawn reading this?

How my PS3 helps to cure Cancer, Alzheimer, ALS and Parkinsons...

Bear with me:

If you suffer one of the diseases mentioned in the title, you have a good chance it was caused by what are called "badly folded proteins". An error in the formation-process of proteins result in "bad" proteins, which lead to a chain-reaction that cause the disease. If scientists can find out how the folding goes wrong, they might find a way to detect or reverse these "bad" proteins, and thereby stop the disease.

Scientists have modeled this folding process to be simulated on computers. But because proteins are very large (complex) molecules, this folding process takes very long (years and years) to simulate, even on the fastest computer.

Some smart people at Stanford University have developed a way to pick apart the complex folding-process, and to distribute the simulation over many machines. This is called "distributed computing". So instead of one machine that takes years and years, thousands of machines now only take months to accomplish the same task. A research team contributes a "folding" problem (usually some enzyme identified with a cryptic name) which is then distributed over many computers that participate in what is called the "folding @ home" network.

With the latest update of the PS3's software (1.60), a new program was added that takes part in this folding@home project. There are a few very cool things about letting you PS3 join this project:

1. When not playing games, your PS3 is used for a good cause. You feel you're donating something to science, without actually paying more than your electricity bill
   
2. The enzyme which is being simulated is shown in animated 3D. The program also shows who else in the world is using folding@home. Seeing all the dots light up on the black earth gives you a feeling you are part of something big. This even translated to my wife who said "wow" (always the ultimate approval of something-nerdy-but-cool).
3. The ranking of the PS3 in the folding@home project is now 3x higher than that of all PC's combined. It will be very likely that folding@home's PS3's will become "the worlds fastest computer".
   

Sony is often depicted as "evil" because of the restrictions they put on using their machine (makes sense because they're also a media company who have to protect their investments).
But adding the folding@home to the PS3 is surely a "good" thing. How cool would it be if one day the PS3 will be known as "the machine that cured cancer"?

Fingers (and enzymes) crossed.

By the way: Sony's latest update also solved the PAL playback (it can play my entire DVD collection now) . One more points for my PS3!

Risks, Fear and Bruce Schneier

I am not a person who easily subscribes to mailing lists or newsletters. I feel that just revisiting sites I like every now and then is more than enough to stay on top of things.

However, I do make an exception for Bruce Schneier. This man has such terrific insights into the world we live in, and presents our follies regarding security and risks so nicely (integrated into the latest news every month), that I read his newsletter religiously.

Americans seem obsessed with foiling plots a la "24", and I recommend you read his "Movie-plot contest", where readers are invited to send in their most exotic (fictional) terrorist attacks.
It is classic, hilarious, and illustrates beautifully that protecting against them makes no sense (or in Bruce Schneier's words "is a bad trade off").

In his latest newsletter, he has printed a draft of his latest essay "The Psychology of Security", an essay that describes why our fears often are so irrational, and not well-prepared for our modern world:

"[He] relates an incident when he and his wife lived in an apartment and a large window blew in during a storm. He was standing right beside it at the time and heard the whistling of the wind just before the window blew. He was lucky -- a foot to the side and he would have been dead -- but the sound has never left him:

But ever since that June storm, a new fear has entered the
mix for me: the sound of wind whistling through a window. I
know now that our window blew in because it had been
installed improperly.... I am entirely convinced that the
window we have now is installed correctly, and I trust our
superintendent when he says that it is designed to withstand
hurricane-force winds. In the five years since that June, we
have weathered dozens of storms that produced gusts
comparable to the one that blew it in, and the window has
performed flawlessly.

I know all these facts -- and yet when the wind kicks up, and
I hear that whistling sound, I can feel my adrenaline levels
rise.... Part of my brain -- the part that feels most _me_-
like, the part that has opinions about the world and decides
how to act on those opinions in a rational way -- knows that
the windows are safe.... But another part of my brain wants
to barricade myself in the bathroom all over again.[7]

There's a good reason evolution has wired our brains this way. If you're a higher-order primate living in the jungle and you're attacked by a lion, it makes sense that you develop a lifelong fear of lions, or at least fear lions more than another animal you haven't personally been attacked by. From a risk/reward perspective, it's a good trade-off for the brain to make, and -- if you think about it -- it's really no different than your body developing antibodies against, say, chicken pox based on a single exposure. In both cases, your body is saying: "This happened once, and therefore it's likely to happen again. And when it does, I'll be ready." In a world where the threats are limited -- where there are only a few diseases and predators that happen to affect the small patch of earth occupied by your particular tribe -- it works.

Unfortunately, the brain's fear system doesn't scale the same way the body's immune system does. While the body can develop antibodies for hundreds of diseases, and those antibodies can float around in the bloodstream waiting for a second attack by the same disease, it's harder for the brain to deal with a multitude of lifelong fears."

Check out the full essay at http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0702a.html

Now if only every American would read his newsletter...

Mount your ipod on your PS3 using udev

To mount your iPod on your PS3 under Yellow Dog Linux, follow the below steps:

1. Create a new file /etc/udev/rules.d/11-ipod.rules and add:
## iPod
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="iPod*", NAME="ipod"
2. Create a link for the ipod to be mounted:
mkdir /media/ipod
3. Add the ipod-mount to your /etc/fstab:
/dev/ipod /media/ipod vfat users,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

Note: only works with windows-configured ipods.

CEO with a twist

After reading and hearing a lot of praise on Jack Welsh' management methods, this man has an interesting counter-opinion:

Change of any kind, of course, takes leadership, and in your book you take kind of a swipe at somebody whom many executives regard as the ultimate leadership icon: Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric. You characterize his policy of annually firing the bottom 10 percent of employees as "microterrorism."

Yeah. I'd say there are two sides to Jack Welch. Yes, he is a paradigm, and everyone looks up to him as being the most perfect example of an executive. He would never have been able to accomplish what he did if he were not a tremendous man, so that should not be under discussion here.

The model that Jack Welch presents, however, has problems, principally in its emphasis on charismatic leadership. This is true not only of Welch but also of Lou Gerstner, Michael Eisner, and Roy Vagelos of Merck. CEOs around the world are drawn like a magnet to the idea of having the influence that Welch had. But I don't think it's in the best interests of GE or any company to have a very strong charismatic figure, because the capacity to make succession happen is diminished. When succession time rolls around, the question is, Should the organization be attuned to the Neutron Jack way of doing things, or should it be attuned to what GE needs to be in the new world? That is the trouble with the Jack Welch paradigm.

My second objection has to do with a method of management that says, Here's what I need you to do, here's my vision-lock into it and you'll be all right. Work hard, deliver, and you'll survive, but if you don't play along, you're out of here. To my mind, that's a format of terror. By eliminating the bottom 10 percent every year, you're losing a tremendous investment, because these people could change places and be used in other ways. You're also sending the message up and down the line that your company is a military hierarchy. The Welch paradigm is, after all, a military paradigm; it is a Norman Schwarzkopf paradigm. What's the difference between them? None to speak of. Wouldn't Welch have been able to run the Gulf War? Perfectly. Would Schwarzkopf have been able to run GE? I'm sure he could have. There's something wrong with that; it shouldn't be that easy to make that interchange, because the creative business world needs a lot of components-ingenuity, free thinking, leaps of faith-that the military model doesn't value.

For the complete interview, see http://www.conference-board.org/articles/atb_article.cfm?id=255&pg=1

A very accurate observation from more than one hundred years ago:

"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.

These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.

History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity."

T.H. Huxley, 1892 - http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE5/ProCQ.html

The dark side of my PS3

After playing around with my PS3, I was impressed with its performance, the demos/games, , the Cross-media bar (XMB). It all looks stunning ( especially on my new 1080p screen). However, for a machine that has been delayed and delayed for various reasons, I expected a lot of effort must have gone in to make sure its functions would provide a superior user-experience. I was wrong. I would go so far as to say that if they would have let me test the thing for a week, I would have come up with quite a few crucial things ANY user would want to have fixed BEFORE the released the thing.

I have compiled a list of functions that have been bugging me, and I am sure they will bug you too:

1. No USB ports at the back
This one had me literally crying out loud.
Why do I have to have ugly wires sticking out from the front of my PS3, when they could be nicely hidden in the back? Why did sony decide to make a flip-cover for the memory-cards, but not for the USB-ports? Now my ipod, external harddisk etc. all have to connect through the front. Ugly, and even ONE a USB-port in the back would have set them back around one dollar. Why-o-why ruin the entire look of my "black beauty" to save one buck?

2. Audio output HDMI OR optical , not both
For the love of god, even my 700 RMB (80 USD) DVD player can output its sound to both HDMI and optical. But if I want to switch audio from my stereo to my TV, I need to go into the XMB and choose Sound-settings, then choose which output I want, select which output-types to "Allow", and then confirm. All of this doesn't make any sense and is extremely annoying

3. No folder-structure accessible from the XMB
There is no way to easily combine videos and pictures in the same folder. For example, I would like to combine pictures and videos of my baby in a certain folder.

4. No network-streaming audio
Internet radio, with decent channel-selection, audio recording etc. are all supported in all media centers. Why not in the PS3?

5. No network downloads? Are you kidding me?
It's 2007. My console has two network cards, (one 54Mps Wifi, one 1 Gigabit ethernet). I still have to get my iPod and manually copy my files over to the PS3.

6. Re-inventing the wheel? Use Firefox already!
What's wrong with sticking with the world's best browser, when it can be integrated in the PS3 free of charge, and with almost zero development efforts? The PS3 browser is not bad, but with very limited Javascript and plugin-support, it's not even close to the stability and usability of Firefox. Missed opportunity by Sony for sure, but they seem to really like NOT sticking with any standard (minidisc/UMD/Memory-stick etc)

7. Dodgy registration-process? Save my data, dammit!
If your internet connection is not rock-stable, the registration process can make you want to chew your arms off. Over three times have I redone this song-and-dance, because halfway through the 10-step process, the moronic browser decided that the Sony server could not be reached, and it should abort the WHOLE PROCESS, discarding what I had typed in so far. Typing with the controller is frustrating, Re-typing the same stuff three times is excruciating. Why not save the data entered so far? What's the point of a hard-drive when you don't use it?

8. No quick-links in the XMD
Adding an option to set a menu-item as a "quick-link" could make the XMB much more user-friendly. Getting directly to my bookmarks and opening those would help. Directly selecting "Other OS" to boot would help too. Defining favorites for certain videos and and picture-folders would help. Time for an update of the XMB!

9. No PAL playback (if you're in Asia / America)
It's irritating not being able to play your DVD's. Come on, Sony, the CSS has been cracked. Live with it. Regio-free playback is a fact. Time to make money on your new (region-free) (online) games and other Blu-ray discs.

10. Sony store takes ages to load
It takes forever to load the store's homepage. And while it's loading, the system does not let you do anything. So if I already KNOW I want to go to the demos-section, the browser wont let me UNTIL I'VE DOWNLOADED EVERY SINGLE GRAPHIC of the opening page. How irritating is that? Very.

11. No RSS feeds
How dumb of Sony not to put some RSS feeds into the XMB screens. It would have made a great marketing-tool for them to show new content in their store etc.

Linux gripes
Apart from the obvious restrictions of the PS3's hypervisor (it restricts NVIDIA's acceleration, access to the PS3/XMB-partition etc.), there are a few gripes about Linux on the PS3:
- wireless not activated: why only activate the ethernet adaptor, and not wifi?
- no clear support for the bluetooth-controller
When connected by wire, it is activated as a USB-joystick, but not enabled on bluetooth.
- no sharing of the graphics-memory: the framebuffer of the PS3 only takes up about 18 MB of the graphics memory. If the remaining graphics-memory could be combined with the regular RAM, this would make it a comfortable 400+ MB instead of a crippling 256


Apart from issue 1 (USB ports), all of the above issues could possibly be solved with a software-update. Despite its shortcomings I love my PS3, but let's see how serious Sony is about improving their user-experience over the next few months. I hope the European release (March 23rd) will improve some of the quirks.

So far so good...

My wife's trip to Bali and the Chinese new year holidays gave me four days to fiddle with my new toys (a PS3 and a 47" LCD from LG). Being the nerd I am, I quickly decided to put Linux on there.

After connecting a keyboard and mouse and installing Yello Dog Linux 5.0 (20061208 release), it loaded up nicely.

Thanks to Google I got the 1080p display to work, and I have installed VLC and xmame. Both work great.

All I need now is a good media-center which I can control with the PS3 controller, and I'm set.