On the movements of society

I just finished off a good two hours of sorting and pruning my way through my subscribed feeds.

Though I get the same satisfaction with this that someone with more botanic tastes might find in tending to a bonsai tree, it strikes me how small my ability to absorb and process information is when compared to the enormity of the blogosphere. Most of the opinions and writings available online are like my blog; a few (if any) regular readers, with the general focus being either something personal, or something that already happened somewhere else in the blogosphere.

Personal inadequacy and fury at the inane-echo-chamber effect aside, every time I sit down in front of a keyboard I'm humbled at the sheer diversity of material just a short, magical hand-gesture out of sight. Since the internet went mainstream (1995 or so), it's gone from being something of a gimmick to an indispensable part of modern life.

That's only 13 years. 13 years took us from having to go to the local library to access a tiny fraction of the world's information, to having nearly all of it accessible just about anywhere within a few thousand miles of the entire planet almost all the time.

This is a big change for us as a species. This is bigger than Television, Telephone, or Telegram. It's more game-changing than Aeroplane, Automobile, or Locomotive. This is a change to society at least as volatile as the Printing Press, as innovative as Written Language, and getting right up there with Fire and Speech to compete for most important invention ever.

And it's only been around for 13 years. A system that's been running for 13 years without a single minute of global downtime. Kevin Kelly wasn't kidding when he said that it was the single most reliable machine humans have ever built.


People like to talk about revolutions. There was the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution; and they like to say that we're living in another one, the Information Revolution. I like to tell those people that they haven't seen anything yet. In these previous revolutions, it took generations for both people and society to adapt to the new structure of life. People today who have never seen the world without the web are still in middle school.

These are the kids that will truly start exploring the possibilities in an interconnected civilisation.

It's been too long, again.

Almost three months since my last post. You might have just been thinking I'd dropped off the map if you haven't been following any of my other feeds. (Which is unlikely, as the homepage of this blog has a window of shared items from my reading.)

A little update on my status for those who only have contact with me via this blog. Yeah, that's all of Zero people out there, but this is for the sake of continuity and my own sick amusement.

In the last three months: I've received the best grade I've gotten at the end of a semester since they started dividing my school years into semesters, had an eye exam (first one since 2005 I think) and subsequently started wearing contacts (pictures will go up on my Picasa as I get them), searched for, found, and quit a job, spent a month slacking off and trying to minimize my financial output, finally saw the Avatar finale, grown ever more obsessed with RSS in all it's succulent goodness, found not one but three writers to obsess over, got my finger jabbed and a magnet installed (My first functional body mod, good stuff. I'll write more about it later), re-read Transmetropolitan twice and become the fan of no less than three separate mad scientists. More on those after some more background.

At the moment, I'm sitting in a rather comfortable, if frustratingly non-massaging, recliner at my Mom's house. My Mother, as well as all the other family members that inhabit/regularly visit the 80 acre midland Texas compound that is the Cox family land, is off on vacation in California. As happened last year, I have been tasked with house-sitting, plant-watering, and dog-taking-care-of. This is all well and good, except for a few limitations that the property has. One; it's about as far as you can go from civilization without leaving the continental USA. Two; the nearest city, Buffalo, is roughly equidistant from both Dallas and Houston. Meaning I am quite litterally in the middle of nowhere. Three; The internet connection here is a marvel of the modern age. Satellite internet. I have no open incoming ports, a bandwidth that fluctuates between a quarter of a DSL link and a 4400 baud modem, and annoyingly frequent service outages due to passing clouds. And Four; I have five animals and about two solid acres of plants to tend to.

So internet video is mostly out, torrents don't run at all unless I shut down my IM client to free up a few decabits of bandwidth, and most of my time is spent making sure nothing around me dies. Needless to say, I've had a lot of time to think and a poor internet connection keeping me from keeping up with my feeds. Instead, I've wandered through some old backlogs, some low-bandwidth browsing of websites and forums, and I've started to make some connections re: mad scientists.

They're back in vogue, for some reason. Ever since these three doctors made their way into my awareness, my perception of things has taken a half-twist, looping back around on itself like some auto-cannibalistic möbius strip.

I discovered Doctor Horrible and his Sing-Along blog via my feeds a few weeks ago; the latest brainchild of scifi film master, Joss Whedon. Starring Niel Patrick Harris, this low-budget online-only musical superhero comedy was found to be a quite amusing, if traditional, boy-meets-girl story. Unfortunately, due to the poor internet connection here, I was not able to see the third section before it vanished into torrentable memory (I'll go back and see it when I get home). I've also recently discovered Twitscoop, a tag cloud automatically generated from the latest twitter posts. While following the cloud erupting from Dr. Horrible's premier, I noticed another doctor.

Dr. Steel, by contrast, is a doctor on a mission. No three-episode internet miniseries here, this doctor is an insane post-steampunk musician bent on ruling the world with an army of toy soldiers. When I saw what he intends to do with the world once he rules it, I immediately enlisted in his army and torrented his discography to start absorbing his message. A track on his 2002 album, People of Earth, caught my eye. "The Singularity". My favorite subject. I started digging around through his forums, chatting with other toy soldiers for a while, and discovered yet a third doctor.

Doktor Sleepless, it turns out, was created by "Transmetropolitan" writer Warren Ellis. It took a full day, but I managed to torrent a few issues of the comic to absorb them. Warren's writing has only improved since that other comic I'm familiar with, the storyline is both ongoing and excellent, leading me to wonder if the local comic book shop has some sort of subscription service I can use to reserve subsequent issues.

Anyways, at the end of each Doktor Sleepless comic there's a bit of text from the author. Warren's been busy lately, it seems. There's a wiki for the comic, a webcomic he's writing for and it's associated forum, and so on. But something caught my eye. The body mod community in the Doktor Sleepless universe, "Grinders", are represented in the fictional blogosphere by a groupblog at grinding.be... but grinding.be also exists in the real world as a groupblog for transhumanist subjects. I've been following this blog for months... Weird how I'm just now discovering it's origins.

And even weirder, it seems Warren has somehow woven his way closer to me. While writing a weekly column for SuicideGirls, Warren worked alongside and mentioned Zoetica Ebb; who's blog I follow and is also a contributing writer to Coilhouse, an art blog I also follow. Also, that webcomic he writes for, FreakAngels, is also another one I follow...

It's strange how people gravitate towards those of like mind, even without noticing it.

Weighing in on Anonymous

Having just watched this video on Youtube,



I feel its about time for me to throw in my $.02 on Anonymous.

I've spent a good many years on Ebaums, hanging out in the online community that would eventually mutate into an activist collective. I'm what Anonymous would call an "Oldfag", someone who was around early enough to remember when Anonymous' websites were full of hatred, racism, bizzare pornography, and disturbing images of gore. I consider my time in that realm to have been a coming-of-age of sorts, it was the sort of community that seperated the men from the boys (with weak stomachs).

But what has happened in the last two or three years to turn this wretched hive of scum and villany into a burgeoning sociopolitical movement? Right-wing talking heads would probably call it "The Pussification of the Internet" if they saw it the way I do. Allow me to explain.

Human nature is one of those things that's hard to code for. When Anonymous first started self-organizing on Ebaumsworld, early members bickered over 'The Rules of the Internets". First and Foremost among these are two rules adapted from Fight Club.

1. Do not talk about *****.
2. Do Not talk about *****.

The way the oldfags intended was for Anonymous to remain small, spreading like like a conspiracy theory to anyone curious enough to track down the source of our memes.

But that's not how people work. Anonymous spread by word of mouth, despite rules 1.&2.

The word spread and , like a hipster with a record deal, Anonymous sold out as soon as it got popular. The original Internet Hate Machine has been co-opted by reality-friendly interests. Namefags (people who are not Anonymous) like Wise Beard Man grabbed the reins of the collective consciousness and pulled, and Anonymous was weak enough to be turned.

The greatest strength that the oldfags wrote into the Anonymous charter turned out to be their greatest flaw. By virtue of anonymnity, anyone can be Anonymous; and thus, anyone can change what it means to be Anonymous.

The Anonymous of today is not the Anonymous I remember. The Anonymous I remember was cruel and heartless. The Anonymous I remember had no concept of mercy, pity, or restraint.

The new Anonymous is different. They're making the world a better place.

Earth is lucky.

Updates go here

I promise I'm not dead or anything. The semester is building towards it's inevitable conclusion; meaning I'm swamped with tests to take and papers to write.

I really shouldn't be taking this blog too seriously. According to Adsense, I've received a grand total of 250 impressions and 0 clicks since I put ads on my site. That pegs my site's worth about $.03. I don't get enough page views to really consider making this blog a for-profit venture, and I've got no idea how to drive more traffic my way. I'm not likely to show up on any popular searches and there are officially two people linking to me.

To quote a friend of mine on a forum somewhere, NetworkedBacteria exists, despite the glaring futility.

Space, politics, computers... all that sort of stuff.

Here we go, another post in not too many days. I'll use up to my backlogged news eventually.

The DailyTech blog reports that IBM has developed a new vertical stacking method for computer chips. Most modern integrated circuits are all sketched onto a single plane, but by expanding upwards, they allow much more processing power to be contained in less real estate. The downside being that there is less surface area to dissapate heat, requiring more complex cooling systems.

Physorg.com is running an article about the development of a new telescope. This telescope is similar to the very large array in Arizona, with the notable exception that it is an optical-, rather than a radio-telescope. This first generation tech will only have a few telescopes small working in concert, but they will have an effective aperture of dozens of meters. One can easily imagine blanketing the sky with a large array of these sometime in the future, making a telescope the size of a planet.

Also out in space, Wired reports on a Pentagon imagining of orbit-based solar farms beaming power down to the planet. Unfortunately, economics will most likely prevent it from occurring without a breakthrough in solar panel efficiency or great reduction in shipping costs to space. Fortunately, developments are working along both those lines, see the previous post or google for space elevators.

Slashdot reports that the NSA and the leaders of our executive branch are working on expanding the already broad power granted to them. Now, I'm totally not opposed to letting the president tap phones at will and do whatever he likes as long as we are granted the same power. If the NSA wants to listen in on me, let us listen in on them. It's a balance of power between the three branches of government (which is being demolished) and the state and people tha has maintained our nation for so long. Times change and the balance will shift but we have to push back so that no one leg of our five-legged table grows too long and flips us on our metaphorical backs.

An Iraqi veteran is one of 25 or so trying out a new prosthetic leg designed for above the knee amputees. The new limb acts more like a natural limb than those previous by sensing the environment and preforming the actions of calf muscles. It's being called the first bionic prosthetic for it's efficiency in acting like a regular limb, and personally, the guy looks awesome wearing it. Check out the pic through the link.

And our last article for the night, also from physorg.com, describes a new online census showing more female Americans are online than male. It's not stunning news, what with myspace, flickr, and other social and life-sharing sites popping up, it stands to reason that more persons less interested in viral video would come onboard. I guess the old meme about there being no girls on the interwebs has finally had it's coffin nailed shut.