Dreamtrove's strange sideways world by dreamtrove

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Dreamtrove's strange sideways world

POSTED BY: DREAMTROVE
UPDATED: Friday, December 30, 2011 16:54
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Thursday, December 29, 2011 4:13 PM

You know how something obvious that everyone already knows can be a revelation? I had this thought, which came after some studying.

First, I was googling and browsing Wikipedia on TGF beta and its relationship to SMAD2, which if you're familiar with it is an enzyme whose name literally means [Sma] Mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 2. Anyway, it's a wander through a faerieland where complication is magic and the data known and unknown is infinite and the conclusions at least unfathomable.

By chance, an hour later I was having a very similar walk through on a topic I know well: Programming. When programming in a new environment (android in this case) you find yourself having to relearn a lot of stuff you already know really well. Anyway, I found it just as fantastic and complex, and resigned myself to returning to my book with an animal on the cover, in this case the Owl on O'Reilly's "Learning Android."

Then it occurred to me, slowly, that the reason I was doing this is that someone had taken that knowledge and distilled it down into a book, and why couldn't someone do that with the macromolecular relationships in oncogene expression?

Well, that in itself wasn't very much of a revelation, but it lead to one, which was started thusly: How did the data on the web get into the state that it's in?

Lack of proper limiting factor.

For the first time, information had a limitless amount of space to expand into, and expand it has. More than that, I think it has expanded according to a complex but predictable formula, based on the number of people involved, communications and available sources and depositories. IOW, without the binding limitation of the physical text, not only can we learn everything, we can say everything, an endless number of times, and take an endless number of pages to say it. And the amount of space we take is defined by a data progression never before uncovered because until very recently that number was controlled by a limiting factor.

This retroactively explains the value of ancient wisdom. It was not that the ancients knew more, they likely knew less, but they had less space in which to say it. Their problem of limited space was confounded by their lack of automated reproduction techniques, so a volume had to be penned not just for each text but for each copy of each text.

Ergo, we have a wonderful tool of infinite information in the web, but it is only half of the tool we need. We also need the information distilling function, which has to match the equation of information expansion before the information we seek expands away from us faster than we can read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_against_decapentaplegic_homolog_2

Consider that wikipedia already compresses the data, removing verbose text and redunancies, and this is the end result, or rather, the better part of a million pages just like it.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 4:33 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

"Lack of proper limiting factor."

Hello,

This is the problem with modern programming, in my opinion. Possibly this will be solved by mobile computing devices, but more likely the mobile devices will become powerful enough to stop being good limiters.

When I was a child, programmers had to figure out a way to compress their program onto a floppy disk. They wrote efficiently. Now, programs are overly large, cumbersome beasts that are only useful because we have machines that store limitless information and process blazingly fast.

I would love to see what a 1980 era programmer thinks of 2011 era software and operating systems. They'd probably be aghast.

I think a good project would be for Windows to stop releasing new Operating systems. Rather, they should take their current in-development operating system and figure out how to get it to 90% of its current size without dropping any functionality. Then every year they should see if they can do it again. Then, when they've squeezed all of the resource requirements of the thing as far as they can, THEN they should release it.

But they won't. There's no incentive to make things more efficient when computers keep getting better and better. Each year the goal is to do slightly more stuff with vastly more resources than ever before in the history of computing.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 5:49 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Hah.

Take that concept, spin it 180 degrees, ponder it a while, and then run like a bastard with it.

I'll have more to say later when I've mulled it over a bit, but I think you're going completely in the wrong direction with it - cause often times the extranous info and flavor text carries a far deeper meaning on a HUMAN level that too many seem to have forgotten.

I posit to you a quote from the intro of Stephen King (yes, I KNOW, the veritable poster boy for trim-down editing..) in his uncut, expanded edition of The Stand - which I own, of course.

Quote:
I don't know what you think, but for me, that version's a loser. The story is there, but it's not elegant. It's like a Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain't, you know, boss.

All communication by humans, *IS* human - you take that away, you lose something...

Something I feel is very, very important.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 6:55 PM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Modern technology has allowed there to be a lot of information available to anyone at any time with just a click. The problem is that there is no check on that information. Anyone can put stuff out there that's correct, incorrect, un-proven, or just flat made up, and there's no validation except for the individual reader's critical thinking. It's really easy to find someone who will 'authoritatively' confirm whichever belief you have.

Sometimes (or often, perhaps) on open input stuff like Wikepedia, you can find 'information' that you know has been edited by someone with an agenda, rather than trying to be objective.

The fun now is tryng to distill the nuggets of fact from all the B.S., and doing it without yielding to your own biases.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 7:51 PM

DREAMTROVE

Anthony,

Absolutely. Now Apply Frem's concept here to that, and you see the possibility for a more human computer.

Frem,

Partly, but there's also a chaotical pattern to it which, like a snowflake, is actually replicating the same thing a million times over, while fascinating in its construction, is an untold burden to the would-be reader.

Select to view spoiler:

Yeah, I know it's not a word, but I had to coin it here to have something to refer to the product of chaos theory style artifacts rather than the product of random chaos

Which, while I find it makes the whole text more fun to read that oncogenes have names like sonic the hedgehog and sleeping beauty, time if of the essence. I think that there's something of human nature that tells me that I wouldn't get through it without the human element, but that this can be distilled down while trimming the 100 million iterations across the datastream into something focused.

Strangely, I think that in this thread I might have just defined wisdom as the content of a collective human consciousness distilled down into the fewest possible words.

Geezer,

Sure, that is true, but the number of well intentioned people vastly outnumbers the ill-intentioned, especially on the chosen topic of cancer research. (at least at this technical a level) I think that overall, the massive input of everyone will come far closer to the truth than the controlled input governed by an elite few, in fact, by definition, I think it has to.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:01 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

Hello,

I think Twitter may be the promised land for you. Limited space by design, so each word must count.

Perhaps you can be the creator of Encyclaconica, the laconic web Encyclopedia where all entries are limited to 1 page in 12 point font.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:06 PM

DREAMTROVE

Twitter is part of the problem. That's not condensed wisdom, it's somebody's lunch.

You missed the part where I said the explosion of information was one half of the miracle required to create wisdom, the other half was the distilling. Ancient texts required many centuries for many nations to build. That's not an accident. The thoughts had to expand through that network, and then be transcribed.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:38 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"More than that, I think it has expanded according to a complex but predictable formula ..."

Similar to the human brain - when it malfunctions, it malfunctions in specific, repeatable ways.

"Now, programs are overly large, cumbersome beasts that are only useful because we have machines that store limitless information and process blazingly fast."

Well, if your program is really bad, the fact that there is lots of memory and speed won't rescue it. Going in an endless loop negates speed and space, as does leaving your processor in a undefined state. And having an OS that you just have to

every now and again.

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Friday, December 30, 2011 6:16 AM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

"Twitter is part of the problem. That's not condensed wisdom, it's somebody's lunch."

Hello,

You can hardly blame the format for the shortcomings of the writer. People can write voluminous nonsense as well.

However, if you want brevity, sharpness, and directness of language- a distilled wisdom- then you must force the writer to distill. Whether they distill tripe or treasure is up to them.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

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Friday, December 30, 2011 4:54 PM

DREAMTROVE

Anthony,

Perhaps I'm not explaining this very well. Allow me to try again.

Wisdom is a funnel. The Hoffer line is the end result, a pithy quote summing the scope of a much broader topic. We post many of them here all the time, ie "The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is that good men do nothing" as just an example.

But they carry meaning not because they are a tweet, but because they speak to so much we already hold. Yet they are wise because they do compress that concept down into a tweet, and thus make it easy for us to remind ourselves of key conceptual takes in simple prayers or meditations.

By contrast to a refining funnel of wisdom, Twitter is a fountain of nonsense. It starts with pithy tweets, and that is its referential base, not a vast sum of human understanding, but a few minutes of someone's day; and then it produces a billion more per day, so that any valuable wisdom, rather than being hones, is rapidly lost in almost infinite dilution.

So, yes, I think it is the process which determines the quality of the output, and not the talent of the author. I'm sure great wisdom goes into twitter somewhere, and it just does not come out on the other end.

If millions of words are condensed into hundred without losing meaning, the result is going to be very profound. If the reverse is done, the result will be inaccessible and meaningless.

Twitter is not useless of course, it makes a good news aggregator, and potentially an emergency distress system, and a possibly valuable tool of communication when aggregation is the desired effect. Stocktwits is a good example of how to use this effect. But, no, it's not a funnel of wisdom. And I think that is by design of process, not the talent of input.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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