date:20130321

From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by
Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup
of acronyms and buzz words.

Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?

https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597


This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all reasonably
clear. Maybe.

   -- Owen

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Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Sorry for the double post, but I thought a bit more info from below the
fold of essay would help:

For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of
technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people
can use them without even knowing that they exist at all. snip

That is also why it's so hard for technologists and non-technologists to
communicate together: technologists know too much about too many layers and
non-technologists know too little about too few layers to be able to
establish effective direct communication. snip

That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so
much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis
Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see,
while Dennis' was much deeper. snip

Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken:
technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the
people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of
the complexity of what they're regulating and running. snip



On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:

 From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by
 Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup
 of acronyms and buzz words.

 Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?

 https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597


 This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all
 reasonably clear. Maybe.

-- Owen


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

This is also why, when I talked with Sen Udall's staff about SOPA, they had a 
hard time understanding my input.  They (and presumably all the staff of folks 
who introduced the bill) had no idea that there is almost no such thing as a 
web-page anymore.  For Nick, et al, what you see when you see a web-page is 
a composite built up from content served by many web-servers, most of which 
aren't even related to the site to which you navigated to see the web-page.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Mar 21, 2013, at 11:08 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

 Sorry for the double post, but I thought a bit more info from below the fold 
 of essay would help:
 
 For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of 
 technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can 
 use them without even knowing that they exist at all. snip
 
 That is also why it's so hard for technologists and non-technologists to 
 communicate together: technologists know too much about too many layers and 
 non-technologists know too little about too few layers to be able to 
 establish effective direct communication. snip
 
 That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so 
 much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis 
 Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see, while 
 Dennis' was much deeper. snip
 
 Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: 
 technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the 
 people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the 
 complexity of what they're regulating and running. snip
 
 
 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:
 From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by Nick 
 and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup of acronyms 
 and buzz words.
 
 Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?
 https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597
 
 This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all reasonably 
 clear. Maybe.
 
-- Owen
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com



smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

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Re: [FRIAM] Twitches

I'll see your King's Men and raise you aStone Junction
http://books.google.com/books/about/Stone_Junction.html?id=woneSCNLbrYC by
Jim Dodge

It is a novel I think Glen might have liked to have lived in (I know I
do), Rich may *be* living in, Doug might wish he had written, and all
the lab rats here (folks working for, with or formerly so, the DOE
Complex... self included) will cringe at. Tory if she is listening might
likely wish both to live in it and have written it... She may have been
living next door to Jim Dodge in Berkeley *while* he was writing it, and
Frank may have had occasion to throw him out of the UCB Library along
with Paul Erdos and Phillip K. Dick at closing time. And Stephen
Guerin? I think he might *be* Jim Dodge!

While it is an outlaw epic of the magnitude of Abbey's Monkey Wrench
Gang, it verges on alchemical conceits roughly crossing Carlos Castenada
with the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

As an aside, I was shocked to notice deeper in the Google Books
information, a set of passages matched to other books? Google is now
indexing phrases in literature? Who knew? Creepy but cool? Cool but
Creepy?

e.g.
Page 130
http://books.google.com/books?id=woneSCNLbrYCpg=PA130vq=%22The+whole+of+art+is+one+long+roll+of+revelation.%27+And+it+is+revealed+only+to+those+whose+minds+are%22source=gbs_quotes_rcad=5
- The whole of art is one long roll of revelation.' And it is revealed
only to those whose minds are?
Appears in 7 books from 1947-2003
http://books.google.com/books?id=woneSCNLbrYCqtid=9e7e7810source=gbs_quotes_rcad=5

When Glen writes his great american novel (surely to be also an
alchemical potboiler, a digital noir happening, an outlaw epic?) all his
(published on paper or internet, indexed by Google) forgotten influences
and sources will be exposed. His Twitch will be a folding of the origami
paper, or perhaps a pull of the taffy.

Which tangents me (me, tangenting?) to Jiddu Krishnamurti's line
paraphrased roughly as: your existence is like a piece of paper, every
experience you have is a fold, and your soul is the sum of all the
creases left. At the time, I was feeling a bit like a crumpled ball of
paper, but the metaphor still held all too well.

- Steve

glen wrote at 03/21/2013 06:36 AM:

I forget when I read it, though. I still have my copy
somewhere; perhaps there are notes or something that will remind me when
I read it first. Thanks.

Yep. Sure enough I have page 314 starred:

We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try
for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in
California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom
under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing.
Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred
to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if
the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all?
Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was
all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face
know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how
did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I
decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is
what you have to go to Calfirnia to have a mystic vision to find out.
That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found
that uot, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one
with the Great Twitch.

My copy seems to have been printed in 1982. And I don't think I started
writing in the margins of books until my senior year in high school
(1985). So, this would definitely be one of the, if not the, earliest
influences for my awareness of the twitch ontology.

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Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion

2013-03-21 Thread Robert J. Cordingley


CSS is an extension of HTML and is confined to HTML element attributes.
JSON is a generic data interchange format (DIF)
LESS and SASS are preprocessors that programmatically generate 'static' 
CSS but PHP, etc. can do that too if you care to write it.


Perhaps to answer your question they were all developed by different 
inhabitants of the Tower but you knew that.


It seems to me that a) extra layers or preprocessors just make 
development and debugging harder and b) JSON is a rebellion against XML 
as a DIF.


BTW why are all serious coding languages and tools written in English?  
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages.


Robert C

On 3/20/13 9:24 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

Why is CSS an entirely different syntax than JSON or even HTML?



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Re: [FRIAM] Twitches

2013-03-21 Thread glen

Steve Smith wrote at 03/21/2013 10:24 AM:
 I'll see your King's Men and raise you aStone Junction
 http://books.google.com/books/about/Stone_Junction.html?id=woneSCNLbrYC by
 Jim Dodge

Ordered!

 When Glen writes his great american novel (surely to be also an
 alchemical potboiler, a digital noir happening, an outlaw epic?) all his
 (published on paper or internet, indexed by Google) forgotten influences
 and sources will be exposed.   His Twitch will be a folding of the
 origami paper, or perhaps a pull of the taffy.

Unfortunately, I think the novel is dead as a format for story telling.
 It may return if peak oil or a zombie apocalypse obtains.  But overall,
I think it's efficacy is dwindling rapidly.  I still like them because
that's the way I was trained.  But I find them increasingly difficult to
read ... the surrounding people, devices, and non-fiction books with
good indices draw my attention away from novels.  I'll play a video game
for 6 hours.  But I won't read a novel for 6 hours.  Even when I do
manage to read for a long time, it sparks ideas that I have to write
down or pause to look something up in another book.  I am no longer
linear ... or even first order continuous.

-- 
== glen e. p. ropella
The dog is dead and the sacrifice is done



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Re: [FRIAM] less

2013-03-21 Thread Joshua Thorp

What I have seen of less has been all good.  Having variables and functions 
alone make css a lot more fun.  Mixins are great with all the clean up they can 
bring by abstracting things that in reality have to be dealt with in series of 
one offs for different browsers.  

It requires a compiler.  You run a watcher that automatically updates every 
time you save the file.  These things can be misconfigured or stop working,  
which is a bother, but same as any other automatic build process.

I have been on projects using Compass http://compass-style.org/ lately.  Adding 
ruby in the mix can make for some interesting scripts when you need to compile 
css for different situations (like having your static content on a CDN with a 
different URL while your dev compile is served on the app nodes itself).

--joshua

On Mar 20, 2013, at 9:56 PM, Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com wrote:

 Less used to be more, but now its something more and something less.  
 
 Mixins, hmmm, is somebody trying to bring back flavors?   In lisp land 
 they were great until they weren't, it was like buttons and threads.  
 Suddenly, a mess.
 
 
 On 3/20/13 9:25 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
 Anyone?  How about one of the other CSS tools?  Or even HTML/CSS combining 
 stunts.
 
 On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Robert J. Cordingley 
 rob...@cirrillian.com wrote:
 Does anyone have any decent experiences with Less they can share?
 Robert C
 
 
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Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you
have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process
itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics
to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no
one understands anything.

Even if it's true that no one understands anything, it's not
a particularly useful way to approach things.

It astonishes me that we as (mainly) software people who glory in
abstractions even consider this insightful.


*-- Russ Abbott*
*_*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach
*_*


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote:

  Jean-Baptiste Quéru's (accurate and complete to my study) description of
 the details (down to the physical layer) of what happens when you go to
 Google's homepage reminds me of how, roughly 22 years ago, at LANL:

 long-winded technical anecdote

 We wrote a simple PERL script to act as a daemon (a program running all
 the time, listening on a logical port (conventionally 80) on the network)
 to field this new thing called the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.  It would
 then parse the request (e.g. HTTP GET SomeGoodStuff), whereupon the
 daemon did a directory search of the Gopher directory structure for a
 directory (or file) at the root named SomeGoodStuff... assuming it was a
 *directory* rather than a *file* it then returned the directory listing
 enclosed in a UL tag and each directory or file name enclosed in
 LISubdirectoryOrFileName/LI tag, sending that back over the network to
 whomever so requested it.  If it were a *file*, it would return the
 contents of the file.   I think this was before MIME types, so the
 requesting client was left to decide what to do with the contents based on
 some assumptions about the file extension (.txt, .html, .jpg, etc.) and/or
 the Magic 
 Numberhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29#Magic_numbers_in_files
 (a simple signature in the first several bytes of the file).

 When we redirected the Directory Name Services (DNS) server for
 www.lanl.gov and put it up for public access, we alerted Tim Berner's Lee
 at CERN and we became the 50th listing on his 
 homepagehttp://info.cern.ch/of other World Wide Web servers.  It wasn't 
 long after that that the Web
 exploded, growing (geometrically?) to rapidly to follow, both in number and
 complexity of servers and in content type.

  Our own Chad Kieffer here on this list, entered the picture as a freshly
 minted Graphic Designer interning at LANL.  I helped to teach him to hand
 cut HTML along with  a half-dozen other designers there, and within a year,
 they outstripped my knowledge of all things Web, along with hundreds of
 individuals around LANL learning/creating on their own.   When we retired
 that PERL Script in favor of an early Apache (a Patchy) server with
 dedicated (including the Gopher branch) content, I was already losing track
 of the details that Queru (this has to be a taken name or a psuedonymn
 doesn't it?) outlines here, and I was right smack in the center of that
 vortex.  As I remember it, Chad took lead on handling the LANL Science
 Museum's presence and half a dozen others took on equally important
 branches in our growing bush of nonsense.

  In parallel, Alan 
 Ginsparghttp://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/%7Eginsparg/blurb/pg14Oct94.htmlwas 
 building
 xxx.lanl.gov which was NOT a pornography web server, though LANL and DOE
 administrators were *sure* it either *was* or would be mistaken *for*
 such.  It was an archive for scientific papers which would eventually
 become what everyone today knows and loves as ARXIV.orghttp://archive.org.
   Alan's xxx.lanl.gov may have been up fielding requests before
 www.lanl.gov even, it was hard to reconstruct the history later down the
 line.   Those of us who saw the barest hint of the future knew Alan was on
 to something and that LANL bureaucrats would do all they could to FF it
 up.  Several of us went to bat with the administrators to keep them off
 Paul's back, but he didn't need any help or protection, he was a force of
 nature.

 It has been a very short but very long 22 years!  I could dig up a
 screenshot of one of our early pages (even find a few of them on Brewster
 Kahle's Wayback Machine, but they are quite ugly/clunky and I would just
 embarass myself).  If you do go to the Wayback 
 Machinehttp://archive.org/web/web.php,
 you will note that LANL was being crawled a LOT during the 2005-2006 tenure
 of Retired Admiral Dr. Peter G. Nanos when Doug was using his Pester Power

Re: [FRIAM] Twitches


Glen -

Unfortunately I fear you are correct.  *I* have probably *written* at 
least one Novel's worth (a Michener or King's worth?) right here on the 
FRIAM list, yet you don't see me buckling down to publish my own next to 
Doug's.   And in fact, I think Doug will acknowledge that even *he* 
wouldn't (couldn't) write his novel today... it was enough focus just to 
dig it out, re-asciify it, reformat it, edit, dust, clean, etc. enough 
to publish as an e-book on Amazon.  Patricia  (and other published 
fiction authors here???) might have another perspective of course!


I don't play video games for 6 hour stints, even though I came of age 
along with Pong, then Asteroids, Pac Man, Battlezone, and Missile 
Command.  I do occasionally fall into a hole dug by Tetris on my iPhone, 
however.


But I *rarely* read a novel anymore.   I was, as you were, was trained 
on such... but the last  22 years (if you read my last post) have slowly 
eroded that.  22 years ago I had a TV connected to a VCR in a cabinet 
with doors, and I might have indulged in a movie once every week or 
two... maybe two during a weekend.  I rarely even turned the tube on, 
and then only to maybe catch a local weather forecast.


*Even* I didn't have a *laptop* until about 1998 and while I spent at 
least half my time at work in front of a computer, I spent almost no 
time at home on a computer and the other half of my work time 
arm-wrestling (other) idiots in meetings or crawling around fishing 
cables under raised floors or dropped ceilings.  Today I spend (to this 
list's chagrin) 4-16 hours a day (350/365 days) in front of this (or one 
or another) damned machine either reading/writing e-mail, surfing the 
web (for very important stuff), writing proposals, writing code, 
(occasionally) writing invoices, building 3d models for proposals or for 
specifying physical parts of systems, or streaming a movie or ...


I'm lucky to pull my face out 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3j9jpBez8g(2:14) of this machine for 
any significant amount of time, it is only because I maintain something 
of a homesteader's lifestyle that requires me to chop wood, carry 
water, repair a dumptruck/tractor/trailer  haul my own trash away, 
etc.   I still spend *several* hours a week arm wrestling (other) idiots 
in meetings but half of them are on Skype!


Someone needs to design a haptic-interface (and mediation protocols?) 
for a USB attached device to facilitate arm wresting over the wire 
proper?  Rob Shaw's (also on this list?) brother (Chris) was involved in 
a startup 15 years ago (Haptek?) that was designing pneumatic haptic 
suits for martial arts games, unfortunately it didn't make it to the 
market.  They got distracted with People Putty http://www.haptek.com/ 
(and more)...


I *am* working with the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) to try 
to help them develop/teach *immersive* storytelling in their Digital 
Dome http://www.myiaiaonline.com/digitaldome/ but I fear, even with 
full 360 surround environments and full motion tracking, storytelling is 
losing something, unless it can somehow transcend and come full circle.  
For those lucky enough to experience Robert Mirabal's live performance 
(Po'Pay Speaks http://indianpueblo.org/mirabal/), you might know that 
there is always hope for such!


We (most of us) are of a generation that preceded all this, I can only 
imagine what it has been like for the current generation of children who 
were born *after* Al Gore invented the Internet and the rest of us 
invented the rest of it. I only see MiniVans and SUVs on the highway 
with 2.6 (or is it 1.8) kids in the back seat with 2 video screens (one 
on the back of each parent's seat/headrest with either a movie or maybe 
a video game (or web browser) running.  I have quoted Jerry Mander with 
Shoot your Television.  Obviously that was not enough, my computer 
snuck in and filled it's niche to bursting!


Off to a face-to-face meeting that will actually require walking around 
outside waving our arms (Hi Jane) !


I've gotta stop this Twitch!
- Steve



Steve Smith wrote at 03/21/2013 10:24 AM:

I'll see your King's Men and raise you aStone Junction
http://books.google.com/books/about/Stone_Junction.html?id=woneSCNLbrYC by
Jim Dodge

Ordered!


When Glen writes his great american novel (surely to be also an
alchemical potboiler, a digital noir happening, an outlaw epic?) all his
(published on paper or internet, indexed by Google) forgotten influences
and sources will be exposed.   His Twitch will be a folding of the
origami paper, or perhaps a pull of the taffy.

Unfortunately, I think the novel is dead as a format for story telling.
  It may return if peak oil or a zombie apocalypse obtains.  But overall,
I think it's efficacy is dwindling rapidly.  I still like them because
that's the way I was trained.  But I find them increasingly difficult to
read ... the surrounding people, devices, and non-fiction books with
good indices draw my attention

Re: [FRIAM] Twitches


Pamela -
I'm going to assume the Patricia Steve mentions is me. Ten published 
books. Four of them novels. You write because you must. I feel blessed 
to be able to do what I love to do.
Absolutely... my apologies... I should have turned my brain over at 
least one more time on that one.  I *feared* was misnaming you!  I did a 
scan of my e-mail contacts and of course found no Patricia McCorduck 
and should have trusted my instincts.  And of course, just as we are 
many of us too flitter-brained to read more than a few words at a time, 
some of us are also unable/unwilling to focus properly on what we write 
(thus some portion of the *wrong* connected to the *lofty* and *long*).  
Thanks for speaking up...


I understand that Writers Write and I am thankful for that.  In Glen's 
vernacular, that (Writing) would be your Twitch I suppose? What I'm 
mostly addressing is that even those of us who have been the most avid 
readers of such writing in the past have undermined ourselves with a new 
texture of stimuli that feeds (some of) the same needs.   I fear, 
however, that it is the white-sugar/white-flour/grain-alcohol of the 
intellect and emotion... and it does not serve us.
Like most authors, I'm always saddened to hear that literature doesn't 
speak any more to a certain group of people, but that's the way it 
is. I could argue that the numbers it ever spoke to were always small, 
so what's new. But my missionary work is past, so no arguments from me.
I am not arguing that the work embodied in good 
writing/literature/novels is not worthy, but sadly that many of us are 
allowing our palates to go to pot, as it were.   We are reading 
headlines, bumper stickers and tweets where we perhaps once read 
paragraphs.  We are reading summaries and abstracts where we once read 
short stories and articles.  We are reading Cliff's notes, the abridged 
version or watching the movie where we once read the novel.   I am far 
from reveling in this collapse of attention span from the epic tales ( I 
recently toiled through the Illiad, but alas by listening on audio) to 
the soundbite, the catchy phrase, the tweet!  But it seems widespread.


I hope that this in fact, as i mentioned last posting, can come full 
circle and the storytellers don't all get buried or brushed aside in 
favor of the twitch emoters (again to adopt/adapt something of Glen's 
terms) or the tweeterers or the YouTube creators.


I occasionally (surprise) get the response from folks TLDR, an acronym 
for Too Long, Didn't Read and while I know it is a highly 
motivated response (for I am lengthy and perhaps tedious and pedantic to 
some), I believe that some of this is in the eye of the beholder.  TLDR 
(as an acronym) can be a self-admission to having given up one's ability 
to attend to more than a phrase or a sentence or two before rotoring on 
to the next thing?


Please *do* continue to write, and maybe even a few of us will shake off 
our twitching stupor, find our fingerprint-smeared and dusty readers and 
read your work, cover to cover.


- Steve


Pamela



On Mar 21, 2013, at 2:58 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com 
mailto:sasm...@swcp.com wrote:



Glen -

Unfortunately I fear you are correct.  *I* have probably *written* at 
least one Novel's worth (a Michener or King's worth?) right here on 
the FRIAM list, yet you don't see me buckling down to publish my own 
next to Doug's.   And in fact, I think Doug will acknowledge that 
even *he* wouldn't (couldn't) write his novel today... it was enough 
focus just to dig it out, re-asciify it, reformat it, edit, dust, 
clean, etc. enough to publish as an e-book on Amazon. Patricia  (and 
other published fiction authors here???) might have another 
perspective of course!


I don't play video games for 6 hour stints, even though I came of age 
along with Pong, then Asteroids, Pac Man, Battlezone, and Missile 
Command.  I do occasionally fall into a hole dug by Tetris on my 
iPhone, however.


But I *rarely* read a novel anymore.   I was, as you were, was 
trained on such... but the last  22 years (if you read my last post) 
have slowly eroded that. 22 years ago I had a TV connected to a VCR 
in a cabinet with doors, and I might have indulged in a movie once 
every week or two... maybe two during a weekend.  I rarely even 
turned the tube on, and then only to maybe catch a local weather 
forecast.


*Even* I didn't have a *laptop* until about 1998 and while I spent at 
least half my time at work in front of a computer, I spent almost no 
time at home on a computer and the other half of my work time 
arm-wrestling (other) idiots in meetings or crawling around fishing 
cables under raised floors or dropped ceilings.  Today I spend (to 
this list's chagrin) 4-16 hours a day (350/365 days) in front of this 
(or one or another) damned machine either reading/writing e-mail, 
surfing the web (for very important stuff), writing proposals, 
writing code, (occasionally) writing invoices, building 3d models

Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:

 I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you
 have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process
 itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics
 to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no
 one understands anything. snip


Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble.

I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web
page, and shows the dirty little secret.

I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might
prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology.

Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats
and protocols.  And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does
not happen without the standard formats and protocols.

I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks.  Can you do
it?  Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong.  But most folks
understand contracts, and that leads into protocols  formats.

I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy.  Registrars, Name
Servers, TLD hierarchy.  His questions kept leading deeper into details,
and made it all impossible.  My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up
in tears.

   -- Owen

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread Robert J. Cordingley

At the risk of hijacking the thread... I liked the comment on the 
ycombinator:


   PeterisP

   There exists a viewpoint that in case of a cataclysm (which would
   involve man-made objects disappearing*) we would never, ever
   progress past 18th century tech again.
   The argument is that getting from animal-powered devices to
   solar/nuclear/whatever powered devices while at the same time
   switching from 90%-agricultural workforce to anything more
   progressive can happen only if there is a cheap source of energy
   available - and we already have mined and spent all of easily
   available fossil fuels.
   Even if all kinds of fancy devices are available and constructed by
   rich enthusiasts, the lack of cheap steam power ensures lack of
   cheap steel/etc, and all the technologies don't get the mass
   adoption required for their improvements, there are almost no
   advantages for industrialization, so the world gets stuck in
   feudal-agriculture systems as the local optimum.

which suggests the Knowledge Ark 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_ark would be largely a waste of 
time.


* refers to a preceding comment.

Robert C


On 3/21/13 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved 
by Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet 
soup of acronyms and buzz words.


Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?

https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597


This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all 
reasonably clear. Maybe.


   -- Owen



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread Gillian Densmore

where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms
metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to
minuses) :P

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote:

 I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that
 you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process
 itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics
 to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no
 one understands anything. snip


 Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble.

 I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web
 page, and shows the dirty little secret.

 I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you
 might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology.

 Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats
 and protocols.  And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does
 not happen without the standard formats and protocols.

 I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks.  Can you do
 it?  Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong.  But most folks
 understand contracts, and that leads into protocols  formats.

 I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy.  Registrars, Name
 Servers, TLD hierarchy.  His questions kept leading deeper into details,
 and made it all impossible.  My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up
 in tears.

-- Owen

 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

The standard example is that most people can drive a car even though they
don't understand how internal combustion engines work -- and they would
even if the car were powered by an electric motor. I have no problem with
putting that in terms of contracts: turn the steering wheel and the car
wheels turn. One doesn't have to know how power steering works.


*-- Russ Abbott*
*_*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach
*_*


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.comwrote:

 where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms
 metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to
 minuses) :P

 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.netwrote:

 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote:

 I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that
 you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process
 itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics
 to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no
 one understands anything. snip


 Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble.

 I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web
 page, and shows the dirty little secret.

 I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you
 might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology.

 Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats
 and protocols.  And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does
 not happen without the standard formats and protocols.

 I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks.  Can you do
 it?  Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong.  But most folks
 understand contracts, and that leads into protocols  formats.

 I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy.  Registrars, Name
 Servers, TLD hierarchy.  His questions kept leading deeper into details,
 and made it all impossible.  My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up
 in tears.

-- Owen

 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com




FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread Joshua Thorp

Probably the issue pops up when turning the wheel doesn't have the desired 
effect.  Without knowing more about how the car works all the user can say is 
it doesn't work,  and all the mechanic can say is bring it in.  

Having an idea of how things are supposed to work one or two levels down can be 
useful when dealing with them when they don't.  And knowing who to talk to, and 
what to say.  Sure you can drive without knowing about how internal combustion 
works,  but having an idea that gas is necessary component and when it isn't 
present the car won't go is also useful and could save you a headache down the 
road.

Seems to me the more interesting question is what level of detail should we 
understand something like a web page or a car.  We have a fairly worked out 
basic level of understanding needed for operating a vehicle, but even here that 
level of understanding is generally going down as we lock up more and more of 
the operational decisions in black boxes instead of requiring the human to 
attend to them.

So the question is where do we stop this trend of not knowing,  or do we just 
want to live in a point and click world where everything either works or no 
help but to go to the experts when it doesn't.

--joshua

On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:11 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:

 The standard example is that most people can drive a car even though they 
 don't understand how internal combustion engines work -- and they would even 
 if the car were powered by an electric motor. I have no problem with putting 
 that in terms of contracts: turn the steering wheel and the car wheels turn. 
 One doesn't have to know how power steering works.
 
 
  
 -- Russ Abbott
 _
   Professor, Computer Science
   California State University, Los Angeles
 
   My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688
   Google voice: 747-999-5105
   Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
   vita:  sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
   CS Wiki and the courses I teach
 _ 
 
 
 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms metrics 
 about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to minuses) :P
 
 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:
 On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:
 I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you 
 have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process 
 itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics 
 to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one 
 understands anything. snip
 
 Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble.
 
 I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web 
 page, and shows the dirty little secret.
 
 I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might 
 prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology.
 
 Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats and 
 protocols.  And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does not 
 happen without the standard formats and protocols.
 
 I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks.  Can you do it? 
  Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong.  But most folks understand 
 contracts, and that leads into protocols  formats.
 
 I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy.  Registrars, Name 
 Servers, TLD hierarchy.  His questions kept leading deeper into details, and 
 made it all impossible.  My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in 
 tears.
 
-- Owen
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Well, if the subject is computer security instead of web-pages then a point and 
drool, Idiocracy, world will keep me in employment.

On the other hand, point and drool policy makers tend to annoy me with their 
stupid policies.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:25 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote:

 Probably the issue pops up when turning the wheel doesn't have the desired 
 effect.  Without knowing more about how the car works all the user can say is 
 it doesn't work,  and all the mechanic can say is bring it in.  
 
 Having an idea of how things are supposed to work one or two levels down can 
 be useful when dealing with them when they don't.  And knowing who to talk 
 to, and what to say.  Sure you can drive without knowing about how internal 
 combustion works,  but having an idea that gas is necessary component and 
 when it isn't present the car won't go is also useful and could save you a 
 headache down the road.
 
 Seems to me the more interesting question is what level of detail should we 
 understand something like a web page or a car.  We have a fairly worked out 
 basic level of understanding needed for operating a vehicle, but even here 
 that level of understanding is generally going down as we lock up more and 
 more of the operational decisions in black boxes instead of requiring the 
 human to attend to them.
 
 So the question is where do we stop this trend of not knowing,  or do we just 
 want to live in a point and click world where everything either works or no 
 help but to go to the experts when it doesn't.
 
 --joshua
 



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Every once in a while I hear about a survey where it is asked who you would
like to have with you in case of a major catastrophe.  Overwhelmingly the
answer is an engineer.  I wouldn't disagree.



*-- Russ Abbott*
*_*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach
*_*


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote:

 Well, if the subject is computer security instead of web-pages then a
 point and drool, Idiocracy, world will keep me in employment.

 On the other hand, point and drool policy makers tend to annoy me with
 their stupid policies.

  Ray Parks
 Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
 V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
 SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
 JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



 On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:25 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote:

 Probably the issue pops up when turning the wheel doesn't have the desired
 effect.  Without knowing more about how the car works all the user can say
 is it doesn't work,  and all the mechanic can say is bring it in.

 Having an idea of how things are supposed to work one or two levels down
 can be useful when dealing with them when they don't.  And knowing who to
 talk to, and what to say.  Sure you can drive without knowing about how
 internal combustion works,  but having an idea that gas is necessary
 component and when it isn't present the car won't go is also useful and
 could save you a headache down the road.

 Seems to me the more interesting question is what level of detail should
 we understand something like a web page or a car.  We have a fairly worked
 out basic level of understanding needed for operating a vehicle, but even
 here that level of understanding is generally going down as we lock up more
 and more of the operational decisions in black boxes instead of requiring
 the human to attend to them.

 So the question is where do we stop this trend of not knowing,  or do we
 just want to live in a point and click world where everything either works
 or no help but to go to the experts when it doesn't.

 --joshua



 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Fwd: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Steam engines work fine on wood - not as efficient but they worked with wood 
for years.  Hydro-power has worked even better since ancient times.

Charcoal comes from wood and can be made into coke.

All that aside, I don't understand the comment we already have mined and spent 
all of easily available fossil fuels.  That's stupid on several levels.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Mar 21, 2013, at 4:41 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

 At the risk of hijacking the thread... I liked the comment on the ycombinator:
 PeterisP
 
 There exists a viewpoint that in case of a cataclysm (which would involve 
 man-made objects disappearing*) we would never, ever progress past 18th 
 century tech again.
 The argument is that getting from animal-powered devices to 
 solar/nuclear/whatever powered devices while at the same time switching from 
 90%-agricultural workforce to anything more progressive can happen only if 
 there is a cheap source of energy available - and we already have mined and 
 spent all of easily available fossil fuels.
 Even if all kinds of fancy devices are available and constructed by rich 
 enthusiasts, the lack of cheap steam power ensures lack of cheap steel/etc, 
 and all the technologies don't get the mass adoption required for their 
 improvements, there are almost no advantages for industrialization, so the 
 world gets stuck in feudal-agriculture systems as the local optimum.
 
 which suggests the Knowledge Ark would be largely a waste of time.
 
 * refers to a preceding comment.
 
 Robert C
 
 
 On 3/21/13 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
 From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by 
 Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup of 
 acronyms and buzz words.
 
 Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?
 https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597
 
 This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all reasonably 
 clear. Maybe.
 
-- Owen
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread glen e. p. ropella

Russ Abbott wrote at 03/21/2013 04:45 PM:
 Every once in a while I hear about a survey where it is asked who you
 would like to have with you in case of a major catastrophe.
  Overwhelmingly the answer is an engineer.  I wouldn't disagree.

I've always preferred to answer that question with a craftsman or
artisan.  In principle, there shouldn't be much difference.  But in
practice, I find engineers talk and argue like lawyers whereas artisans
talk very little but produce quite a lot.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and
he will love you. -- Proverbs 9:8



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

How about a craftsman or artisan that understands the engineering principles of 
what they craft?  Too many craftsmen I've met don't know why they do things a 
certain way - that's just the way they were taught to do it.  I can think of 
two people I'd like to have with me in case of a major catastrophe - one is a 
rocket scientist who crafted a museum quality (as in museums have offered to 
buy it) astrolabe, sews costumes from eye (not patterns), and makes water 
balloon catapults.  The other is a carpenter and builder who restores old (as 
in 1000 year) buildings on the Isle of Jersey.  Oddly enough, both are members 
of the Society for Creative Anachronism - which might be another pre-req for 
surviving a major catastrophe.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:50 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

 Russ Abbott wrote at 03/21/2013 04:45 PM:
 Every once in a while I hear about a survey where it is asked who you
 would like to have with you in case of a major catastrophe.
 Overwhelmingly the answer is an engineer.  I wouldn't disagree.
 
 I've always preferred to answer that question with a craftsman or
 artisan.  In principle, there shouldn't be much difference.  But in
 practice, I find engineers talk and argue like lawyers whereas artisans
 talk very little but produce quite a lot.
 
 -- 
 glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
 Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and
 he will love you. -- Proverbs 9:8
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
 



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Either way, the point, of course, is that it's often vitally important to
understand how things work.


*-- Russ Abbott*
*_*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688*
*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach
*_*


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote:

 How about a craftsman or artisan that understands the engineering
 principles of what they craft?  Too many craftsmen I've met don't know why
 they do things a certain way - that's just the way they were taught to do
 it.  I can think of two people I'd like to have with me in case of a major
 catastrophe - one is a rocket scientist who crafted a museum quality (as in
 museums have offered to buy it) astrolabe, sews costumes from eye (not
 patterns), and makes water balloon catapults.  The other is a carpenter and
 builder who restores old (as in 1000 year) buildings on the Isle of Jersey.
  Oddly enough, both are members of the Society for Creative Anachronism -
 which might be another pre-req for surviving a major catastrophe.

  Ray Parks
 Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
 V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
 SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
 JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



 On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:50 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

 Russ Abbott wrote at 03/21/2013 04:45 PM:

 Every once in a while I hear about a survey where it is asked who you

 would like to have with you in case of a major catastrophe.

 Overwhelmingly the answer is an engineer.  I wouldn't disagree.


 I've always preferred to answer that question with a craftsman or
 artisan.  In principle, there shouldn't be much difference.  But in
 practice, I find engineers talk and argue like lawyers whereas artisans
 talk very little but produce quite a lot.

 --
 glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
 Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and
 he will love you. -- Proverbs 9:8


 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com




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Re: [FRIAM] You just READ the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread Carl Tollander

You just READ the Google homepage.   What actually happened?   How do 
you digest your dinner?  The problem at hand is not a new one.


Couple years ago (2011), David Krakauer gave the Ulam lecture, which had 
some observations on outsourcing competencies.   I seem to recall he 
thought it was a good and necessary thing.


On 3/21/13 5:25 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote:
Probably the issue pops up when turning the wheel doesn't have the 
desired effect.  Without knowing more about how the car works all the 
user can say is it doesn't work,  and all the mechanic can say is 
bring it in.


Having an idea of how things are supposed to work one or two levels 
down can be useful when dealing with them when they don't.  And 
knowing who to talk to, and what to say.  Sure you can drive without 
knowing about how internal combustion works,  but having an idea that 
gas is necessary component and when it isn't present the car won't go 
is also useful and could save you a headache down the road.


Seems to me the more interesting question is what level of detail 
should we understand something like a web page or a car.  We have a 
fairly worked out basic level of understanding needed for operating a 
vehicle, but even here that level of understanding is generally going 
down as we lock up more and more of the operational decisions in black 
boxes instead of requiring the human to attend to them.


So the question is where do we stop this trend of not knowing,  or do 
we just want to live in a point and click world where everything 
either works or no help but to go to the experts when it doesn't.


--joshua

On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:11 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com 
mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:


The standard example is that most people can drive a car even though 
they don't understand how internal combustion engines work -- and 
they would even if the car were powered by an electric motor. I have 
no problem with putting that in terms of contracts: turn the steering 
wheel and the car wheels turn. One doesn't have to know how power 
steering works.


/-- Russ Abbott/
/_/
/  Professor, Computer Science/
/  California State University, Los Angeles/

/  My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: 
ssrn.com/abstract=1977688 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1977688/

/  Google voice: 747-/999-5105
  Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/ 
https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
/  vita: /sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ 
http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/

CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach
/_/


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Gillian Densmore 
gil.densm...@gmail.com mailto:gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote:


where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly
forms metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as
aposed to to minuses) :P

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore
o...@backspaces.net mailto:o...@backspaces.net wrote:

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott
russ.abb...@gmail.com mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:

I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which
implies that you have to understand all levels of any
process to understand the process itself. If that were
true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to
understand everything. But no one
understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands
anything. snip


Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of
babble.

I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea:
view a web page, and shows the dirty little secret.

I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I
think you might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction
to digitology.

Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in
standard formats and protocols.  And no, modularity .. tho
nice in program structure .. does not happen without the
standard formats and protocols.

I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks.
 Can you do it?  Most start with code, which as I say, is
wrong.  But most folks understand contracts, and that leads
into protocols  formats.

I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy.
 Registrars, Name Servers, TLD hierarchy.  His questions kept
leading deeper into details, and made it all impossible.  My
poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in tears.

   -- Owen


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Fwd: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

2013-03-21 Thread Roger Critchlow

Yeah, wood is great, except almost everywhere that depended on it ended up
with none within wood gathering radius.  The story is if you look at early
photos of Santa Fe, the hills seem strangely denuded compared to the
present.

-- rec --


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote:

 Steam engines work fine on wood - not as efficient but they worked with
 wood for years.  Hydro-power has worked even better since ancient times.

 Charcoal comes from wood and can be made into coke.

 All that aside, I don't understand the comment we already have mined and
 spent all of easily available fossil fuels.  That's stupid on several
 levels.

 Ray Parks
 Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
 V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
 SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
 JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



 On Mar 21, 2013, at 4:41 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

  At the risk of hijacking the thread... I liked the comment on the
 ycombinator:

 PeterisP

 There exists a viewpoint that in case of a cataclysm (which would involve
 man-made objects disappearing*) we would never, ever progress past 18th
 century tech again.
 The argument is that getting from animal-powered devices to
 solar/nuclear/whatever powered devices while at the same time switching
 from 90%-agricultural workforce to anything more progressive can happen
 only if there is a cheap source of energy available - and we already have
 mined and spent all of easily available fossil fuels.
 Even if all kinds of fancy devices are available and constructed by rich
 enthusiasts, the lack of cheap steam power ensures lack of cheap steel/etc,
 and all the technologies don't get the mass adoption required for their
 improvements, there are almost no advantages for industrialization, so the
 world gets stuck in feudal-agriculture systems as the local optimum.

  which suggests the Knowledge 
 Arkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_arkwould be largely a waste of 
 time.

 * refers to a preceding comment.

 Robert C


 On 3/21/13 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

 From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by
 Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup
 of acronyms and buzz words.

  Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?

 https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597


  This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all
 reasonably clear. Maybe.

 -- Owen


 
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 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[FRIAM] Apple Adds Two-Step Verification Security Option for Apple IDs

Apple joins Google for 2-factor authentication.

http://www.iclarified.com/28490/apple-adds-twostep-verification-security-option-for-apple-ids
It would be nice if we could agree on a single phone app for the pin, but
hey, that's the price of bleeding edge.

I've looked into banking 2-factor auth and it turns out there is a middle
man solution .. I forget who manages it .. but it can use a card or a phone
app.

So in 2-4 years it will be relatively standard.  Hope it works well enough.

   -- Owen

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Re: [FRIAM] Google Voice

It occurs to me that some of us may not have tried speed test.  I always
get a grin when I see it pissing all over our network!  Burning man?  Sure.
 Pissing man?  Hmm..

[image: Inline image 1]

   -- Owen

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:

 After the great tales of Doug and Android/Nexus, and seeing sigs w/ GV
 numbers .. I thought I'd ask for those of us (not me yet) who use GV could
 give us a glimpse into that future.

 Just as Doug has taken the phone to its logical conclusion: Its the
 internet stupid sort of thing .. maybe we all ought to think about GV and
 internet-only (data-only) services.

 In other words .. how close _are_ we to data-only services for phone, TV,
 etc?

 I finally switched from DSL to Cable, urged on by the idea of data-only
 TV, landline and so on (thanks Gil). Speed test (http://www.speedtest.net/)
 showed seriously shocking differences between DSD  Cable:
 *ping ms  down Mbps  up **Mbps*
 *DSL:  69  1.470.60*
 *Cable:43 35.325.73*

 So what _are_ our experiences with GV?  Can we cut that cord?

-- Owen


image.jpeg
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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

S.M Stirling (Santa Fe based, prolific Science Fiction author) addresses 
this to some extent in his series (first was /Dies the Fire/) set in a 
post apocalyptic world.


The Apocalypse was simply the supposition that the solar system moved 
(whatever this means physically is hard to figure but bear with him) 
into a region of the universe where the rules of physics changed just 
subtly enough to make all electronics and all high-energetic systems 
(internal combustion, dynamite, gunpowder, C4, etc) fail to work, 
throwing the world into an artifact and material rich, energy-poor 
world.  The next 3 or 4 novels explores, in fact, the 
fuedal-agricultural world (set primarily in the Pacific Northwest) that 
emerges in the wake of the Change.


The main antagonist relation was between those who chose to respond by 
trying to figure out how to create a sane and self-supporting culture on 
top of this plethora of artifacts but without any obvious source of 
concentrated energy beyond human and animal and those who chose to be 
parasitically violent, subjugating the former wherever they could.


Stirling is a gifted world-builder/storyteller and a great read if you 
happen to be into post-apocalyptic epics... He's also an interesting 
person in-person.


In this case, the lack of fossil fuels is their lack of efficacy, not 
their literal lack of availability (though the refineries would 
presumably fail quickly anyway).   There might have been mention that 
steam-power was still likely possible, but i can't remember.


A friend of mine happens to own what might be the oldest known steam 
automobile... it is a 189? Locomobile, the very one in fact used in the 
most recent making of HG Well's Time machine.  For what it is worth, he 
told me the story (as he was building steam to give me a ride) of how 
much new tech was required to make a steam auto possible.  A liquid-fuel 
burner had to be developed (including the system now used in coleman 
stoves) which is primed by pressurizing the tank, but then uses the 
heat of the flame to maintain the pressure.  The boiler was equally 
problematic as anyone working with steam knows, it is easy to 
over-pressure and cause a catastrophic explosion.  The solution used 
canon-building technology... a cored steel cylinder *wrapped* in piano 
wire to make it stronger.  Even this could be overpressured, so the 
*ends* were capped with steel plates drilled with a multitude of holes, 
copper tubing inserted through the holes (and the vessel) and *swaged* 
onto these ends.  The result was dozens of parallel tubes which the 
flame/exhaust could be routed through to transfer heat to the boiler 
water/steam but which if overpressured would gently pull the tubes out 
of their swaged holes and release the pressure fairly gently... 
something important since the boiler could not be removed from the 
driver and passenger far enough to be otherwise safe.   Also, I believe 
this might have been when the modern differential was developed.   The 
Locomobile still steered with a tiller but soon after, automobiles 
started sporting steering wheels.


An early motorist (or pilot) had to at least be their own mechanic if 
not practically a full-fledged engineer just to use and keep operating a 
simple automobile.   Getting from steam trains and traction engines to 
the automobile as a non-trivial step, complicating the matter you bring up.


As a (sad?) corrolary, it is possible that large scale urbanization and 
agriculture could never have emerged without an effective slave class.   
If we fell back into pre-agriculture and pre-urban circumstances, we 
might have to drop our current social mores to climb back up out of 
hunger-gatherer or herd-follower?
At the risk of hijacking the thread... I liked the comment on the 
ycombinator:


PeterisP

There exists a viewpoint that in case of a cataclysm (which would
involve man-made objects disappearing*) we would never, ever
progress past 18th century tech again.
The argument is that getting from animal-powered devices to
solar/nuclear/whatever powered devices while at the same time
switching from 90%-agricultural workforce to anything more
progressive can happen only if there is a cheap source of energy
available - and we already have mined and spent all of easily
available fossil fuels.
Even if all kinds of fancy devices are available and constructed
by rich enthusiasts, the lack of cheap steam power ensures lack of
cheap steel/etc, and all the technologies don't get the mass
adoption required for their improvements, there are almost no
advantages for industrialization, so the world gets stuck in
feudal-agriculture systems as the local optimum.

which suggests the Knowledge Ark 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_ark would be largely a waste 
of time.


* refers to a preceding comment.

Robert C


On 3/21/13 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
From HN, a pointer to a delightfully

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?