Small. Strange. Written by Jesse LaRue.
As a legacy-design this recurrent laryngeal nerve was a control wire for the gills of ancient fish. In mammalian species, this nerve has stretched to strange proportions.
(p.s. Forewarning, there’s a lot of guts in this video, as it’s a dissection of a giraffe, but it’s totally worth watching if you’re interested in this sort of thing.)
Any of my friends will tell you, I’m a dork for birds. In particular, it’s the working model of air-viscosity that birds seem to have which intrigues me. Is it instinctual, coming form their genetics? Or is it a function of living their lives in the air, that each bird learns about wind and motion independently of it’s parents?
As is typically the case, I suspect it’s some mixture of the two. Which is rather fascinating, as well.And this leads to some interesting considerations for the future.
First, as we decode the genome of our bird-friends, the genetic information describing their world model will become apparent. With that information (and the requisite leaps and bounds necessary to understand that information) humans should be able to develop some interesting software to facilitate robotic flight. Perhaps ‘robotic’ flight isn’t the way to consider it, but instead some sort of bird-cyborg airplane.
Second, and this is my favorite part, it seems reasonable to suspect that bird brains are well suited to understanding their own flight-physics. Some birds migrate, other birds hunt, or scour the earth for their food, but all birds have to get enough fuel to stay aloft. Certain species move so quickly through the air that they generate 10 G forces during turns. Others are known for flying literally thousands of miles. What is it about the bird brains (and of course the physiology) that allows these feats of endurance?
It seems to me that when we are able to successfully replicate the growth of bird brains in software, and to virtualize environments for those simulated brains to fly around in, that it will be a few short steps to robotic-cyborg-airplanes that deliver our goods and find our missing children. Ah, the future, how do I love thee.
Until then, I’ll have to settle for video cameras strapped to the backs of birds of prey. My favorite part starts at 1:54… enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-_RHRAzUHM
An investor said some things that I disagree with, then commented on an article about his statement. I saw that he responded, and thought it might be a prime opportunity to spout off.
It’s not a zero sum game, don’t pretend like you’re something bigger than you are… you’re status and position of authority comes from earning-power, not genius.
I saw this an article at Venture Beat and was terrifically bothered by the title: Investor Dave McClure: ‘Open is for losers’)
The article title refers to his response to a comment from Dick Costello (aka: twitter ceo), roughly reiterated as: “does openness in tech make sense?”
After reading the article, stewing, and discussing with a friend, I noticed that McClure had left some comments in the discussion thread. Seeing that there wasn’t much response to his comment, I thought I might be able to make a connection to an opinion/decision maker… and hopefully make an impact.
Here’s my response copied from the link above, thought you guys might appreciate. Also, I’d be interested to know what people think of my position… does it hold water? am I missing something? am I on the right track? Or am I just a troll?
Response follows:
IMHO, cost is “borne by the climber alone” specifically because of the persistent closed-tech meme perpetuated by those in positions of authority. Rather, it is the open nature of information that makes progress possible in the first place. Closed information is treated as ‘property’ in a way that minimizes the value of ingenuity. Imagine, for instance, that we awarded a patent the process of tying shoelaces, or wiping with toilet paper, or wearing hats, or agriculture, or brick making. Would that make sense? Not at all, instead we allow anybody to learn to tie their shoes so they can walk to work without their shoes falling off. Sure, we do, and must, charge for the service of shoelace manufacture and delivery, but we don’t prevent new companies from making stronger/lighter/skinnier/fatter shoelaces, improving on the original idea of a shoelace.
Consider the case of written language as an open technology: I’ve been told that slave owners actively prevented slaves from learning to read and write. This was done as a means of maintaining control of their ‘property’. By maintaining ceaseless, often brutal, control of that property, slave owners were able to amass great wealth and privilege without lifting a finger to plant, tend, harvest, or deliver products to market… all they had to do was show up and put their face on the label. And of course, they had to perform horrible feats of what I would describe as meme-maintenance to maintain control and dominance of their property (e.g. 3/5ths type policies, lynching, institutional indoctrination, civil war, etc…).
Suppose Americans were forced to pay for the privilege to read & write in our native tongue, would there be more or fewer ‘winners’? I’d argue fewer. Case in point, let’s search for examples of human achievement and general wellness in places that don’t provide institutions of free, minimal education. Instead of being a resource-sink, language training (an open technology) seems to breed more, and more complex, technologies. Open technology, in this case, is a beautiful, self-perpetuating sky-hook.
Open doesn’t mean free of charge, it means freedom to examine, alter, improve and re-imagine. To fall back on my shoelace example, it would be outrageous to suggest that government policy should disallow the replication or redesign of shoelaces by all but the original inventor.
And to your ‘bombastic’ comment that “Open is for losers”… here’s my equally bombastic response:
Closed is for those who think they could make it in this world alone. Closed is for the pompous, the self-important, and the arrogant. Closed is for those unwilling to admit that they are no longer ‘working’, but are fundamentally dependent on those ‘losers’ at the bottom. Closed breeds slaves and worse, slave owners. From your bio (which I didn’t read until after I wrote all of this, lucky guess I suppose): “Many years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.”
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/about-dave-mcclure.html
With respect to your human dignity,
.me.
p.s. Dave, if you want to reach out I would love the opportunity to respectfully cuss & discuss. I’m certain you would offer interesting insights.
I’m a big fan of Google Wave, but I think it’s really hard to imagine using in conjunction with e-mail. But, the chatty, e-maily features that you see in your browser might not be the really important future of Wave. The UI is cool, don’t get me wrong, and it shows off how flexible the system is for message relay between any number of collaborators… but what intrigues me is the underlying server technology.
Beneath the UI, there is an open-source server technology that really makes me think about the future of the web. The web that’s steadily enveloping its users. The Wave Federation Protocol is built on XMPP and designed to integrate easily and securely with other Wave servers, allowing information in a Wave to be shared easily with those permitted access. Also, information changed in a wave is updated in nearly real-time (given a sufficiently fast server and connection).
Imagine a federated wave server running on hardware the size of your Apple Newton? And on your refrigerator. And in your car, washing machine, etc… Even your house itself. All these information aware devices in your home communicating with the actual house, and with each other, about: power consumption, maintenance needs, inventory (gas, cucumbers, toilet paper, water filters) and anything else that comes up. All shared with the dashboard app on your Newton to remind you that it might be a good idea to turn off the A/C while the rates are high. Or maybe writing a grocery list, knowing what’s in the refrigerator and whether the leftovers have gone bad and whether you’re likely to want that meal again in the next few weeks. All of these devices working in unison doesn’t necessarily need to be supported by Wave, but it seems like a set of problems likely to be solved by federated servers. And all of these devices getting smarter and easier and more reliable, making your information rich environment that much more effective and efficient… for better or worse.
This guy knows what I’m talking about:
“What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a dangerous word - avatar - in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant.” Eben Moglen - Freedom In the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing
It’s cool to watch as the net is changing the way we do everything. Whether I’m shopping for a car or a book, or just trying to keep myself entertained… the old paradigm of passive information consumption is being flipped in the direction of information pursuit.
Since we came up with the idea of using radio-frequency to transmit information, the primary method of doing so has been thru either traditional radio, or with televisions. How do you interact with your television or radio though??? Well, you don’t really - you just sit there and absorb whatever it is that you’re being told.
It’s kinda like going to church on Easter Sunday… you get dressed up, you get a message in a bottle, you drink, you leave. Maybe you talk to friends after the show but nobody’s in the business of making the message is interested in you what you’re interested in hearing. Unless you have a 2-way radio, no consideration can possibly be given to your mood or feeling at the time of delivery… you just get what you’re given.
The internet is doing something great to the culture of sales and (hopefully) for the world as a whole. Instead of advertising at you, businesses are trying to engage with you by generating content that you’re interested in. That’s not just the businesses that are trying to get you to buy a new car, but also those who are interested in getting you to improve your own knowledge. The whole idea is that we are no longer being broadcasted at, instead we’re being presented with a set of options that adjust to our preferences. We can go 24/7. We can go in our underwear, or nothing at all. We can now pursue an education, instead of being told a story:
Here’s a good one for starters - http://www.academicearth.org/
There’s about a million (not really that many, still plenty) cool looking videos here. They’re all from professor-types… and there’s a range of topics. I was particularly intrigued by the MIT Course Lectures!!! that’s right folks… you can go to school at MIT for free if you have a computer with web access.
…my next link - http://laptop.org/en/
The idea is this - by sending these ‘rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected’ laptop w/ educational software & content preinstalled, the One Laptop Per Child group is putting computers in schools for 6-12 year-olds. The kids get to take the laptop home, and the child can use all sorts of open-source (free) software with the laptop.
What’s gonna happen when these kids start entering the workforce where they grew up? They’re going to have access to the same learning materials that the best and brightest have had access to in the first world. Imagine a hundred million entrepreneurs solving problems in the poorest parts of the world. I expect great things. What about you?