Category Archives: Lemonisms

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Richard Dawkins on the programming of humans …
Richard Dawkins is am amazing man, and the creator of the term “meme” in his book “The Selfish Gene”. In this article he discusses some perspectives about humans and the September 11th attack on the United States.

Although I disagree with his perspectives on “religion” as a whole, I do believe that there are a variety of ways that organizations create stories which assist in furthering their intentions. He does a great job of explaining a scenario in which the humans who committed the terrorist acts, and died in the process, might have been convinced to do this.

The area that I do disagree is the requirement of some “religous-like” practices which I believe were culturally evolved to provide forms of memetic maintenence. I think that there are numerous distinct aspects of a “religion” and that several of them might provide valuable contributions to an effective organization or society. It seems that every race and culture has developed some sort of “wise man”, “guru”, or “religion” of some kind … or the converse is that it seems that communities that do not have some sort of “religion” no longer seem to exist.

I plan on writing more on this subject in the future …

Richard Dawkins: “Testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.” [Scripting News]

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3d Semiconductors …
At several of the George Gilder Telecosm conferences that I have attended, there have been discussions about the evolution towards 3 dimensional semiconductors. It has been said that this will be a huge leap in semiconductor fabrication which will provide huge leaps in capabilities and power.

One of the most amazing presenters was Carver Mead (now at Foveon), who indicated that with no new knowledge or further advances in semiconductor science we can expect to see a 100,000 times increase in the compute capacity of our home computers … all in the next decade or so! All of this continues to feed the acceleration of technology and what we can create. This article is a great one that outlines the details of 3d Semiconductors, the history, the issues, and the solutions.

http://www.sciam.com/2002/0102issue/0102lee.html

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More Wearable Computer fashion … from e-Holster …
This is a cool site that is offering some new fashion for the fringe crowd that is into wearing their electronics. Of course in the coming years these guys are going to be bought, or put out of business, as the big fashion and clothing vendors jump in and begin to address the needs of the electronic consumer …

http://www.eholster.com

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Amazing vision! An Identity Management solution that is well thought out …
This is a very cool find … it appears that Mr. McCandless was working on the same ideas at the same time as our team at Novell! When we were working on digitalme we realized that identity was something that had to be collected in a “Personal Directory” (e.g. Novell’s Personal Directory – Leading Edge Downloads #138) to be an effective solution. Although Novell has not done anything with this since, we now have a new project that will demo in January. We will be releasing our “FreeID” agent as a tool for automating the collection, distribution, and coordination of identity information.

I’ll have to get in touch with Mr. McCandless to see what he thinks!

Private Personal Agents vs. Microsoft’s Passport [Slashdot]

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Nice Jabber IM Programmers Overview …
Jabber is a open source solution for Presence and Instant Messaging. I am still a big fan of Jabber … I believe that it is still looking for some big visibility, and I’m thinking that it will get this through a killer-app that will support Jabber. Here is a good start for developers to write support for Jabber into their code.

Jens Alfke: Jabber Client Developer’s Cheat Sheet. [Scripting News]

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More articles on the 802.11b “parasitic grid” conversation …
Althought many people (like the cell phone companies) don’t like the concept, and many people (like the creators/users) don’t like the name, the result will end up being the same. We are going to see the development of a global wireless solution created by the users … and our organization is working to contribute to this. 80211.net is one of our “fun” projects that is slowly making progress … 😉

O’Reilly Networks’s Rob Flickenger and Dave Sims discuss the parasitic grid: nice discussion between two clued-in folks.

[80211b News]

Users reject notion of parasitic grid: although InfoWorld didn’t publish any of the many letters I was cc’d on about a column that appared in its pages a few weeks ago about free wireless networks, it did run this odd article. (My take on the initial issue is here.)

[80211b News]

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Very cool declaration for Cyberspace …
I have to admit that I am a fan of John Perry Barlow after hearing him speak at conferences a couple of times. This is a very good beginning of a new declaration … describing new times.

We have all been living through a “survival of the fittest” community/government era, and the Internet now begins to transcend the physical limits of these battles. The the Internet creates a whole new substrate … a new medium … for societal and cultural development.

This is a very good beginning …

http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

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New antenna designs …
For wearable and mobile computing to take place, in my opinion, there will have to be some real transitions in how we think about wireless communciations. I do not believe that we will have one type of wireless, but several. So technologies which contribute to these architectures will continue to show up. Here is a company that is developing new antenna designs that allow a single antenna to be used for multiple wireless solutions at the same time. Cool stuff …

http://www.skycross.com/

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More on Ginger …
So this is a late post … and everyone has read or seen “Ginger” by now. Or most everyone. I wanted to post some links, and also make a few comments.

The most amazing thing about the Segway HT is that we are now seeing some of the potential that Ray Kurzweil alludes to. The Segway is an amazing device that can actually “balance” … and it can do so with a human rider! How can it do this? The same way that a human does! What we are seeing is when technology begins to reproduce or exceed the some of the same capabilities of a human being. The Segway HT is able to detect motion and “balance” (much like the inner ear), it is able to compute corrections (much like the brain and nervous system), and it is able to move itself (much like the muscles in our legs) to stay balanced.

I want one of these really bad … not only to experience, but to own one of the first pieces of a whole new realm of possibility!

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-8020427.html?tag=mn_hd

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/2001/segway/index.html