Hiss and Deceased Notice!

 Seen  this morning in Memex 1.1

Interwebby Thing

My Dear Sir,
I am instructed by my client, Messers Buddhist Pizza Enterprises, to require you to cease and desist from the use of the phrase “Interwebby Thing”. This phrase is reserved by patents common, copyleft, and trademarxs in the territory of New Hiberia, associated islands and semi-detached bothies, for exclusive use by my client in the Buddhist Pizza Blog. I note with some regret your use of the phrase in a recent substandard, so-called, newsletter which I believe is scattered thither and yon like snuff at a wake.
(That’s telling him. I bet he is shivering in his boots, it's badly edited too … Ed) 

With temperature in the 40’s in most of continental europe I doubt it.
(Could there be any spondulics in this? Could we not, perchance, touch him up for a few bob, and call it quits? Otherwise, we could suggest he might get a visit from the lads in the GRU and he should watch the tea if he is ever eating out...Ed?)

I believe the DMP and associated prosecuting authorities might regard that as a touch criminal. 

(Pass me the dark glasses and me bicycle and I’ll be off...Ed!)
Eegit!

Despite the rant above, I have been a reader of Memex 1.1 for many years and would suggest you do the same or sign up to the newsletter if that is your thing. (If you know what is good for you...Ed!)

Go Go Dancing

So that's it then we can all hang up our gobans and take to the bottle! (The machines have won. We're doomt, I telt thee, doomt. Are Go Bans like Ray Bans... Ed?)

No! See attached photo, ejit.

For those of you who are interested, there is a brief analysis of Lee Sedol's first game with Alpha Go and a nifty animated pictorial representation at the Go Game Guru site. Other sites are available and you may want to rummage in secondhand bookshops for a copy of the Master of Go.

 Mind how you go!

Good to get that off your chess.

Here's what  Garry Kasparov had to say about in a review of Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by  Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky in the New York Review of Books in 2010. The insight given into what it is like to be tanked intellectually by a machine is still worth it alone but there are some thoughtful observations about AI and the human mind and the way in which they can work together. I found it interesting that IBM seems to have closed down Deep Blue once the machine beast had bested the man. 'I'm going to take my marbles and go home'. Now where have I heard that before? Maybe Deep Mind has a greater life expectancy!

And six years before the broo ha ha over the computerisation of Go...

With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

Well maybe not all our best minds. (Nice to get a bit of recognition now and then...Ed!)

Present company excepted. 

Dimpened

Go, a game I used to play, is under attack from DeepMind's project AlphaGo. Google's official blog on this is given here and  other reports are out there. However, John Naughton has a perceptive piece in Th'Observer.  Different take on the "OMG the robots are taking over we're dooomtd I telt thee, dooomtd" that usually comes with these tales. Fits in nicely with the wrecking ball image of this piece.

(Oh I see what you did there, DeepMind - dimpened, and here I am wearing my fingers to the bone trying to find the blessed word in the collections of Mr Collins and Mr Chambers... Ed )

I had often wondered why you had fingers of remarkably similar length, still you do have the opposable digits in the right place.

Postliterature

Interesting piece from Oor Pauli on Scribid.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/250612659/Wtf-is-Eleni-Haifa

Particularly like the heading

If you give Frodo Baggins a cellphone The Lord of the Rings becomes a considerably shorter book. 

Perhaps that should be Post Literature - Animal Farm anyone?

I'll just be off to my book group then!

Greetings

Remember?
In cyberspace only the algorithms can hear you scream.

Thanks to all those that have given us such a laugh this year!
B O'B, KJ-U, Mr Murphy and the wasted eggs, Mr E M and his penchant for bacon butties.
Mr G O. Go Gideon for screwing the, the economy, mainly.....

Christmas Caption Competition

I stumbled on this post in Memex 1.1. If my eyes and the camera do not deceive me, and they often do, they show our own royal Big Ears and his goodladywifethesecond having a sort of royal chortle!

The challenge for this year is to provide a caption suitable to the gravity and solemnity of the occasion.

Please do not lower the tone of this blog by inserting words such as t*dger, jo*nson, will*e or even coc* and think you will get away with it. Our eagle eyed, ever vigilant, editor will be on your case like a rat up a drainpipe. I said our eagle... (I heard you the first time for god's sake. I was up half the night with the bairns...Ed)

Would that be the single malt, 32 year old Bairns by the way? (They have grown  in the last few years I have to admit. Now do you think we could discuss, quietly over a cup of tea, a small cost of living increase in my remuneration.. Ed? As Jimmy Cameron once remarked the cost of living has increased to the equivalent of  £45 a bottle!)

The best, and printable caption will appear in this blog in  the new year.

He said, fearlessly, steadfastly, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the estab (... Jaysus I'm off to my bed before this gets any worse and the big boys come and kick the door in ...Ed)

Do blogs have doors? Possibly they have back doors!

Many thanks to JN for a bit of light  and some fun in a dark world this year!

Snaps

Mr Getty, who has a lot of snaps (35 million at the last count), has organised his holiday photos so that it is possible for us folk to use some of them in a non commercial way. Check it out here.

Not everyone would be pleased though I guess. Those on the beach with the big cameras and the donkeys to support; well you can imagine. Still there is no standing in the way of progress as your man said to the head scribe at the monastery in Gutenberg. 

Thanks to the old British Broadcasting Corporation for the story. I know I put the reference to it in my pocket somewhere. If you don't want to wait while I find it you could always use the Hypi thingy at the  story.

Lost for words

Cory Doctorow, who knows a thing or two, points out the fact that it is not possible to own some digital material!
You can of course sell what you like as long as the great washed and unwashed desire to buy it. In order to avoid any doubt I am, of course, only referring to that which the law and m'learned friends would approve of. (Thank god for that. We don't want the peelers round stomping their big boots on the antimacassars and the like looking for contraband and the stuff you should have turned over to the Receiver of Wreck years ago... Ed)

In an article in the Grauniad he points out that it is not possible to buy a digital copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED). This raises a number of interesting questions.  I was struck again by the fact that the interweb has changed forever things we have taken for granted as being part of the fabric of society - You sell... I buy - and changed them in ways we do not recognise or see where they will leave us.

But the point is that we have sleepwalked into a new way of accessing some very ancient tools. Commercial decisions married to the lawyerly norm of asking for the world, the moon, and your first-born in rental agreements have birthed a new, non-negotiable relationship between people who live and die by words and the lexicographers whose work serves them. A university whose name is synonymous with the perpetual archiving of books is now telling scholars that their crucial references can never be their property, and that their ongoing use of those works is subject to continuous monitoring and indefinite retention.

I particularly like the idea of a lien on your first-born.

Have a gander at it and of course remember Aaron Swartz.

(Glad to see you back. Have a good break? Weather fine? Relatives and young thriving? Get much reading done?
Now about the price of coal and the vital editorial work I do for this enterprize - any chance of a sub...Ed)

Guilt and the Interweb!

Just because it is amazing it does not mean it will not be abused.

I do call her Scary Mary and live in fear, in Cambridge, of her pursuing me through the streets on her bicycle with trademark red coat. That is only because I will have done something wrong and she will instantly know it!

Upgrade Now!

Buddhist Pizza Software is pleased to announce an upgrade to its acclaimed Tanka Town operating system. The fix new release (TT 17.75) will be known as Snowyleopardz and will offer truly amazing functionality, an unbelievable range of built in applications, and mouthwateringly good code design nestling behind the usual propitiatory firewalls.

Best of all it's going to squeeze gazillions more in juice outa you lemonheads who don't know sh*t from Shinola.

Can someone do a final edit on this before it goes out to the  creative fruitcakes?

A Little Perspective

To paraphrase Peter Cook -
Twitter has done so much to prevent the massacre of civilians in Syria!

eBooks Naa!

See, they'll never catch on. I mean who wants to sit in front of  a screen and look at this kind of thing.

The Waste Land; you said it. Who is that broad? She looks pretty wasted to me, ha ha!

Periodic table:-
Its not a table, and where do I put my coffee, period?

Code this, code that, is this guy some kind a communist?

Book Data

Sunday afternoons in January when the garden can look after itself and you don't have a dog to take for a walk you are looking for an intellectual challenge. You can always plot the fall of capitalism or chart the rise of peace and justice.

Click on the graphs and all will be revealed!

Nice little gizmo from Google Books - The Ngram Viewer

Thanks to:-
Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science. Published Online Ahead of Print: 12/16/2010.

Dead Trees and Electrons

Books again and a confession.
I've read The Inky Fool with enjoyment for some time. I  heard The Etymologicon, read well by Hugh Dennis, as Aunty's Book of the Week before Xmas. I thought it would be a good thing to have to distract me from the horrors of the new year.  I decided to purchase it from Mr Amazon for the free Kindle software on my magi-phone. In mitigation, I was very busy, mainly hiding to avoid the Xmas spirit, and people, and presents and ... 
I thought it would be very discrete, very cheap and almost educational.
The transaction from clicking my clicker to the book appearing on my magi-phone was over in the twinkling of an electron. I was terrified, suffering sever palpitations I had to sit down. I called for tea! Soon I was able to revive myself with a cup of the finest fair trade char and marvel at  the book there on my magi-phone.
Interesting to learn that the sellers of the dead tree variety can't get enough of them. There would seem to be no shortage of electrons, yet.

Whoa!

To coin a phrase!
Missed this one - Bitcoin

More here and before you get as excited as I did Charles Arthur has the wet-blanket handy.
Still, nice idea. Having just read DarkMarket by Misha Glenny it may be some time before Buddhist Pizza announces the adoption of Bitcoin as the official currency.
Not until the penny drops!

Raspberry Pi

I think it is in the interest of solidarity among interweb comestibles that I mention Raspberry Pi. If you would like to see what they are up to, the home page gives you an embedded video or link direct here. If you are more a wordy sort of soul then Uncle Wiki might do the trick.

For Sun readers who stumble across this page looking for thrills:- this is about putting a sort of computer and the links to other stuff and all manner of things on a stick, and plugging it into the telly; all for £20 and change. Of course you don't understand it or see why. Your kids will, so buy them one, each. It will keep them off the streets. And no there are no parts of the female anatomy on show in this blog. Thank you very much and good day. Get yourselves back to whatever the Dirty Digger is offering at the moment!

Many thanks to Mr N for the link, as always.

Remember the old interweb proverb:-

The technology that farinates together causes the dough to rise!

Hackem and Backem 2011.

The new tricks of the old dog

I have mentioned before the numbers of mobile phones in the world, allegedly.
I revisited the lost socks department of my brain after reading this article in Th'Observer.

The involvement of the Grameen Foundation seems very positive and the implications for development absolutely sock loosening. The system Grameen are building relies on community knowledge workers (CKW) who are paid. Hmm... Perhaps we should have few of those.

Interesting contrast then - The old dog and bone. For hacking or accelerated development to the point where we don't have to watch small children starving to death before our eyes.
You choose!

A force for good, or good business.

We may assume that the world is enhanced by the interweb, its works and pomps. Indeed, you would have to be a complete Luddite not to admit considerable benefit to Messers All and Sundry from the beast itself.

An article by Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble, in The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011 questions the universal benefits of the web.

In an extract from The Filter Bubble he writes

An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view.

A great danger to be aware of. The article argues further:-

In Bowling Alone, his book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam looked at the problem of the major decrease in "social capital" – the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favours, work together to solve common problems, and collaborate. Putnam identified two kinds of social capital: there's the in-group-oriented "bonding" capital created when you attend a meeting of your college alumni, and then there's "bridging" capital, which is created at an event like a town meeting when people from lots of different backgrounds come together to meet each other. Bridging capital is potent: build more of it, and you're more likely to be able to find that next job or an investor for your small business, because it allows you to tap into lots of different networks for help.

Everybody expected the internet to be a huge source of bridging capital. Writing at the height of the dotcom bubble, Tom Friedman declared that the internet would "make us all next-door neighbours". In fact, this idea was the core of his thesis in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "The internet is going to be like a huge vice that takes the globalisation system … and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day."

Friedman seemed to have in mind a kind of global village in which kids in Africa and executives in New York would build a community together. But that's not what's happening: our virtual neighbours look more and more like our real-world neighbours and our real-world neighbours look more and more like us. We're getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging. And this is important because it's bridging that creates our sense of the "public" – the space where we address the problems that transcend our narrow self-interests.

The Big Society is currently being wheeled out as a producer and reservoir of social capital. Of course, cynically, it is a method to avoid investing real capital and providing revenue to run necessary services. Many vital services cannot be provided efficiently or effectively by volunteerism alone. Believe me I'm a volunteer. However, the model being put forward by the government is almost exclusively "bonding" social capital. My group, society or coop does not include you for whatever reason and so you will only benefit if we let you. As Pariser notes, we need more "bridging" social capital, we need to build the public and the civic domains as well as tending our own, Big Society, cabbage patch.

Hey, be careful when you Google out there!

The time has come

The end of the year; no doubt we will be plagued by pundits, caused to fret by futurologists, and startled significantly by jobbing scriveners. Concerns will be raised about many things and I would, if given to betting, put 50p each way on the tired old nag being dragged to the starting line that the interweb is shortly to, if it has not done so already:-

• reduce our brains and those of our first-born to jelly,
• turn us into a nation of drooling addicts with personal hygiene problems, significant gambling debts and RSI in our wrists,
• suffer the horror at an ATM of finding that all our accounts have been emptied by arms dealing Albanians operating from a grass hut in Nigeria,
• force good, honest, hardworking monopolies to reconsider their modest surpluses,
• and in the last, mortal, words of Bluebottle that we have been deaded by an evil jazz playing conspiracy of grizzled old men called the Biderbeck Group.

(Ed. Ahem... could we move on a little?)

I made brief reference in a blog to some thoughts John Naughton had about the internet
in June of this year, and I would suggest you reread them.

They will act as an adumbrating antidote, a poultice for puffery, a balm for the bewildered....

(Ed. That's enough now. One more alliteration and I will turn the electrons off. Adumbrating antidote indeed!)