White is segregated because it is pure.
How do you know it's pure?
Because any impurity stains a white sheet.
Black is collective.
And by Black, I mean all colors
that aren't white. Black is the color
of all colors.
Impurities don't taint Black.
In a world of Black and White,
White will cease to exist.
It will be absorbed in the collective.
Racism is the last rearguard
of segregation.
White fears it
because they fear the collective.
They should just relax.
What they think is purity is merely an accident of ancient inbreeding
amongst a desperate people
in cold climes.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Information Theory
How much information is contained in a book?
Seems like a simple question. A computer scientist might count the number of bits describing the words in the book. Okay, that's one measure, but if you just laid all those binary digits out in a line, would it mean anything to anyone? What if you fed them into a computer? Do the words mean anything, carry any information at all, if there is no human at the other end to interpret them.
What is a unit of information? Is it a bit? That's just a number. It is just a symbol.
No... information is the thought. Information does not exist outside the human sphere, so there is no such thing as information without the human at the other end to interpret the symbols representing information. This is where Artificial Intelligence runs up against a wall. Feed all the symbols you want into a computer, you still need a human brain in there somewhere to translate those symbols into information.
So what is it about the mind that enables us to translate symbols into information? What is information?
Information is an analog pattern. The world makes an imprint on the brain. Somehow, as information is fed into the brain, it resonates with the imprints and changes those imprints in indelible ways. Constantly. The only way to become smart, to have know more, is to experience it.
And if you want to create a brain that contains intrinsic information, you have to somehow create a system that allows the world to make an imprint and constantly refreshes that imprint by comparing new information to old imprints to modify or reinforce.
Seems like a simple question. A computer scientist might count the number of bits describing the words in the book. Okay, that's one measure, but if you just laid all those binary digits out in a line, would it mean anything to anyone? What if you fed them into a computer? Do the words mean anything, carry any information at all, if there is no human at the other end to interpret them.
What is a unit of information? Is it a bit? That's just a number. It is just a symbol.
No... information is the thought. Information does not exist outside the human sphere, so there is no such thing as information without the human at the other end to interpret the symbols representing information. This is where Artificial Intelligence runs up against a wall. Feed all the symbols you want into a computer, you still need a human brain in there somewhere to translate those symbols into information.
So what is it about the mind that enables us to translate symbols into information? What is information?
Information is an analog pattern. The world makes an imprint on the brain. Somehow, as information is fed into the brain, it resonates with the imprints and changes those imprints in indelible ways. Constantly. The only way to become smart, to have know more, is to experience it.
And if you want to create a brain that contains intrinsic information, you have to somehow create a system that allows the world to make an imprint and constantly refreshes that imprint by comparing new information to old imprints to modify or reinforce.
Digital/Analog
By now, the iPad has landed, and with it, a potential revolution, or at least a big step in evolution between the battle between analog information vs. digital.
What do I mean by this? Analog information is information residing on paper. To be stored in ink and read by eyes. Digital information is information stored in binary, read only by software and displayed on a screen.
Analog information is permanent. Once it is stored on paper, it is in existence until the paper is destroyed. Digital is impermanent. It is stored on an impermanent medium that is easily written and rewritten, and it's only "written" as long as there is a reader to decode the binary.
Because digital information is encoded and decoded by software and because it is stored in impermanent medium, it is difficult to "own" this information. A paper book, you can own. You buy it, you sit it on your shelf and it never moves. Digital information, by contrast, is easy to copy and easy to lock up for the same reasons. It is easy to copy because what you are copying are simply representations of two characters. Analog is harder to copy because you must copy a physical set of symbols.
The consequence of this is analog information is bought and sold, whereas digital information is only rented. To own digital information, it must be copied repeatedly; maintained and updated as the storage mediums and interpreting software changes. And whereas you can charge a rent on information, by encrypting the information and making the encoding software proprietary, you cannot charge for ownership of the information. Once you allow the digital information to be owned by someone other than yourself, it is owned by anyone who wants it.
I contend that the difference between these two types of information is fundamental. Words and paper will never be replaced by bits and computers because you cannot maintain ownership of bits and you cannot store bits.
What do I mean by this? Analog information is information residing on paper. To be stored in ink and read by eyes. Digital information is information stored in binary, read only by software and displayed on a screen.
Analog information is permanent. Once it is stored on paper, it is in existence until the paper is destroyed. Digital is impermanent. It is stored on an impermanent medium that is easily written and rewritten, and it's only "written" as long as there is a reader to decode the binary.
Because digital information is encoded and decoded by software and because it is stored in impermanent medium, it is difficult to "own" this information. A paper book, you can own. You buy it, you sit it on your shelf and it never moves. Digital information, by contrast, is easy to copy and easy to lock up for the same reasons. It is easy to copy because what you are copying are simply representations of two characters. Analog is harder to copy because you must copy a physical set of symbols.
The consequence of this is analog information is bought and sold, whereas digital information is only rented. To own digital information, it must be copied repeatedly; maintained and updated as the storage mediums and interpreting software changes. And whereas you can charge a rent on information, by encrypting the information and making the encoding software proprietary, you cannot charge for ownership of the information. Once you allow the digital information to be owned by someone other than yourself, it is owned by anyone who wants it.
I contend that the difference between these two types of information is fundamental. Words and paper will never be replaced by bits and computers because you cannot maintain ownership of bits and you cannot store bits.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Uncertainty in Design
What they don't tell you in engineering school, as you are quietly studying how to do boxed problems with every even answer out of the back of the book, is that most problems are ill defined or not defined at all. Some problems that you think are insignificant are, in fact, big and drive the design, and others that you think are huge; not so much. And that's just in identifying the problem. That says nothing about defining it, and it says nothing again about actually going about solving it.
Mechanical systems, I think, are more prone to this than problems in other engineering fields. With electronics, the main design problem that is ill defined is the issue of "noise" or "EMI". These are generally dealt with by guess-and-check; make the design using the best "design practices" that you can come up with, and check to see if it works. It's an ill defined problem, but the problem is not a design feature. In other words, it does not drive the design so much as constrain it. The only design issue is to mitigate the problem; there is no optimization; the less of it the better.
Mechanical systems, and thermal systems in particular, have all this design uncertainty as a driving force in the design. It is an optimization problem. You cannot just make fans bigger and bigger and the enclosure bigger and bigger to make everything cooler. Even if you could specify huge fans, there remains the problem of getting the airflow to where you need it. it's just not that obvious.
So, how to deal with this engineering uncertainty? That's the 64 million dollar question they don't really teach you in school.
There is guess and check. Effective but expensive. There is software. There is back of the envelope correlations or sophisticated design tools.
Right now I am stuck on a design. I don't know if it will work worth beans. There are lots of components and lots of integration and it is all very confusing. At some point I will just have to make the jump. See if it works.
Mechanical systems, I think, are more prone to this than problems in other engineering fields. With electronics, the main design problem that is ill defined is the issue of "noise" or "EMI". These are generally dealt with by guess-and-check; make the design using the best "design practices" that you can come up with, and check to see if it works. It's an ill defined problem, but the problem is not a design feature. In other words, it does not drive the design so much as constrain it. The only design issue is to mitigate the problem; there is no optimization; the less of it the better.
Mechanical systems, and thermal systems in particular, have all this design uncertainty as a driving force in the design. It is an optimization problem. You cannot just make fans bigger and bigger and the enclosure bigger and bigger to make everything cooler. Even if you could specify huge fans, there remains the problem of getting the airflow to where you need it. it's just not that obvious.
So, how to deal with this engineering uncertainty? That's the 64 million dollar question they don't really teach you in school.
There is guess and check. Effective but expensive. There is software. There is back of the envelope correlations or sophisticated design tools.
Right now I am stuck on a design. I don't know if it will work worth beans. There are lots of components and lots of integration and it is all very confusing. At some point I will just have to make the jump. See if it works.
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