| kranenbu on Mon, 7 Oct 2002 17:57:55 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> on natures |
On natures Gerry Patrick Hemming, who signs Semper Fi / De Oppresso Liber, has some good news. Genuine SEALS, LRRPS, Rangers, SOG "have established websites where citizens might inquire as to the veracity of the "war stories" told in the bars and bistros in the 'Hoods. And apparently, the SEAL vets have great connections and can check out a "braggart" within 20 minutes while you are on line or on the telephone!!" The Seals have friends with connections to decide between data/not data, we ordinary folk have to make do with programs who produce patterns, well hopefully: "We're trying to find patterns, to see that one set of conditions tends to result in something else. We don't know why, and we don't need to, because the answer is in the data." This a programmer talking, a programmer and a sailor: Katori is writing a program that crunches the measurements and creates a "wind profile number an implied wind," a wind an implied boat can sail on, as sailing, so long an intuitive art, has become a contest of technology: "Sensors and strain gauges are tracking 200 different parameters every second and sending the information across Craig McCraws OneWorld's LAN to its chase boats and offices. Then the info gets dumped into a Microsoft SQL database, where it's sifted to pinpoint the effects of sail and hardware experiments. Unraveling all the input is, in the words of OneWorld engineer Richard Karn, "nearly impossible." And that's not all: every day for the past two years, five OneWorld weather boats have headed out into the Gulf to harvest data." What is the greatest liability on board of such a boat? Human capacity for interpretation, deciding between data/not data while sailing a ship. Indeed, the biggest point of failure in today's defense systems is the human being, "human capabilities are fair game for augmentation", says researcher Joseph Bielitzki of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office,"and sleep- and the consequences of a lack of it constitute an obvious starting point for this work". One of the methods include even prompting the brain to produce additional connections between brain cells, according to Bielizki. In On Dreams, Aristotle draws the conclusion that the dream is a sort of presentation, and, more particularly, one which occurs in sleep: "The dream proper is a presentation based on the movement of sense impressions, when such presentation occurs during sleep, taking sleep in the strict sense of the term." This is the realm where you can dream that you stepped into a bullet when it was only a beam. And you wake and thought you stepped into a beam, but, well, it is a bullet. It is the most promising audio advance in years, and it's coming this fall, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, writes: Hypersonic speakers. The key is frequency: "The ultrasonic speakers create sound at more than 20,000 cycles per second, a rate high enough to keep in a focused beam and beyond the range of human hearing. As the waves disperse, properties of the air cause them to break into three additional frequencies, one of which you can hear. This sonic frequency gets trapped within the other three, so it stays within the ultrasonic cone to create directional audio." Step into the beam, you step into a bullet. Step into a bullet, you step into an equasion. Researchers at MIT Media Lab's Center for Bits and Atoms have used a physical object instead of a mathematical function to generate cryptographic keys: "The team created tokens containing hundreds of glass beads, each a few hundred micrometres in diameter, set in a block of epoxy one centimetre square and 2.5 mm thick. These are 'read' by shining a laser beam of a particular wavelength through the token. The beam generates a speckle interference pattern, which is projected onto a two-dimensional grid and then converted into a key 2400 bits long. Changing the position of one of the randomly set beads even by less than a micrometre, changes about half the bits in the key." (New Scientist, Sept 21, 2002) Step into anything, you step into everything: In 'Smart' Silicon Dust Could Help Screen for Chemical Weapons Sarah Graham reports the development of dust-size silicon particles that could be used to detect chemical and biological agents from a distance using a laser light source: "The idea is that you can have something that's as small as a piece of dust with some intelligence built into it so that it could be inconspicuously stuck to paint on a wall or to the side of a truck or dispersed into a cloud of gas to detect toxic chemicals or biological materials," co-author Michael J. Sailor explains. So far, the researchers have succeeded in identifying chemicals from nearly 20 meters away. Their goal, Sailor says, is to increase that distance to at least one kilometre." What is the greatest liability in such environments? Human capacity for interpretation, deciding between data/not data while simply walking about: An apprentice story. "With the flick of the wrong switch, an unsupervised power-plant apprentice melted down a half-million-dollar transformer, blacking out the city for 40 minutes. Apparently, Coady [the apprentice] failed to follow procedures. Two circuit breakers -- called the east and west buses -- must be flipped in a particular order to avoid damaging equipment: the west bus first, then the east bus. The procedure was written for an important reason -- because the west bus turns on the cooling system for the transformer. The switches are in separate rooms. Coady said he closed the east switch before Stephenson [the supervisor] closed the west one. They couldn't see each other when the [switches were closed and the] damage was done. The result was disastrous. "It was literally an explosion inside the transformer," Lake Worth Utilities Director Miller said. "The internal parts of the transformer reached such high temperatures that even the insulation inside the transformer was burned." Stephenson said Coady had no clue what had happened. "He was completely unaware," Stephenson wrote in a memo to Baker. "With his lack of knowledge of the plant electrical controls, it was not even possible to explain to him what he did. He would not have understood. His training did not include these advanced concepts." Comment from Scott Wlaschin: "Giant circuit breakers have to be flipped in a certain order blindly in different rooms? This was an accident waiting to happen. It is scary that systems like this can exist. Note that the poor trainee was blamed, of course, for not understanding the 'advanced concepts'." The biggest point of failure in today's information systems, is indeed the human being. Not because he or she is beyond understanding, but because we are lacking procedures of translation that will negociate between everyday notions of the world and highly advanced concepts that generate other worlds; where sound becomes physical, smell becomes visible, and the sea can be read indeed: "It's a statistical process," says Katori, the team's lead programmer, as we take the boats in tow and head back to shore at the end of the day. "You have to build a lot of very subjective data before it begins to mean anything, and that's especially true in light wind. But over time you do build real numbers." Over time you move from implied to real numbers. Real numbers to any apprentice. Flipping giant circuit breakers blindly in different rooms. At random. Thinking there are only two that matter. And have an order. A real one. "What allowed him to produce a series of scientific syntheses so far ahead of their time,and so at odds with the rest of his culture, that for almost a century the scientific community proved incapable of following the road map he left?" , a question about Charles Darwin goes. It may be that: "Although many Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction. For Marxists and capitalists, anarchists and imperialists, Christians and freethinkers alike, humans were to be the summit, the goal around which the world is organized and toward which life and history progress." We are witnessing our own irrelevance becoming more and more unquestionable, even to ourselves. We are moving into a world in which what surrounds us is behaving more and more like a director, less like the personage wed prefer to have it act out. It is time to centre the process of becoming itself as the default position. Even though "it is generally assumed that huge floods play a disproportionate role in modifying river courses and eroding bedrock", Hartshorn shows in a field study on the LiWu River in Taiwan, "that it is the everyday flows that are mainly responsible for deepening of the bedrock channel in this region of active mountain building. The huge floods act primarily to widen the channel and induce hillslope collapse." Always faithful everyday flows. Rob. Notes: Seals: (Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 09:01:01 EDT Re: [Spy News] FW: Veterans to Bush: Not In Our Name!) Katori: Carl Hoffman ([email protected]) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/sailing_pr.html Sleep at Darpa: To: [email protected] http://www.nando.net/healthscience/story/483980p-3865527c.html) Hypersonic sound: Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, Popular Science, Audios next big thing? Sep 20, 2002. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,351353,00.html Token at MIT New Scientist - September 21, 2002 http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992828 September 03, 2002, 'Smart' Silicon Dust Could Help Screen for Chemical Weapons, --Sarah Graham >From the RISK list: Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 19:21:31 0700 From: "Scott Wlaschin" [email protected] Subject: Rookie's mistake melted down $500,000 transformer *Palm Beach Post*, 23 Aug 2002 (via Romensko's Obscure Room) http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/epaper/editions/friday/news_d3568ba0e56222b00057.html Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 18:57:38 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [>Htech] 'Charles Darwin': The Scientist Was Celebrated, His Work Dismissed 'Charles Darwin': The Scientist Was Celebrated, His Work Dismissed New York Times Book Review, 2.10.6 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/books/review/06TOOBYT.html Everyday Wear and Tear: SCIENCE, Volume 297, Issue 5589. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol297/issue5589/twis.shtml # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]