This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

Humor: How to Spam Me More Effectively

Dear Spammers, If you want to send me spam and have me actually look at it, please try to keep the following helpful hints in mind:

- Never send me a message with a blank subject line or only "Re:" or "(no subject)," "hi there" or "Free" + [anything] in the subject line. I don't open them.

- Especially don't send me messages entitled "Thanks for last night..." -- I might think they are legitimate messages.

- If you are a relative of a deposed African dictator seeking help in transferring your hidden bank accounts to the West, please understand that while I would like to help you, I already gave all my money to your sister.

- If I don't know you -- please put something that is truly relevant to my interests, or someone or something we have in common, in the subject line, so that I can easily tell it's not spam when I go through my spam filter's Suspect Messages folder. Helpful hint: "Paris Hilton" is no longer relevant to my interests since she released that video of us without asking me first.

- Do not put the name of one of my companies + [register your site]. The fact that you and all your friends keep sending me messages like this proves my site is not so hard to find -- so why exactly do I need to register it with your directory?

- No more stuff about pictures of sex acts, "banned cd's," dating services, network marketing schemes, domain name renewals, or joining new social networking services. -- I am not a pervert! Although...now that I think of it, I am kind of curious about social networks. And well...ok, I guess if you have any really good pictures you can still send those too.

- If you're going to send me spam, please make it interesting so that at least I learn something or get something of value when reading it -- For example, how about including your valid passwords and credit card numbers for starters? I would really enjoy reading those.

- If I haven't responded to your spam after you send it to me a few times, how about not resending the same spam 100 more times? -- Strange as it may seem to you, I am actually LESS likely to respond the more times you send me the same thing. What are you, stupid or something?

- If you don't put a From-Address on your spam, I can tell you are hiding something. At least make up a From-Address. But don't set your From to my email address -- because that's me and I can tell I didn't send that message to myself!

- Also no more messages of the form, [herbal, generic, cheap] + "Viagra" -- I don't use Viagra. My brain synthesizes it naturally. And by the way Viagra is patented and there is no generic or herbal version. Besides, ever since I tried your product last week, I haven't been able to put on my damn pants.

- Please don't send me messages asking me for my passwords and credit card numbers anymore -- or at least tell me what I get if I give them to you; What's in it for me, cracka?

- If you insist on sending me file attachments, you might not want to name them "death.exe" or "sobig" or "worm.zip" -- it's a dead giveway. Besides, I never open viruses from people I don't know.

- If you really really reaaaally want to annoy me, you could post comment spam in my Weblog. That would really piss me off a lot, ensuring that I would be in a buying mood when I look at whatever product or service you are trying to market at me.

- No more messages of the form, [anything] + "penis" + [anything]. I'm secure about mine, and I'm not interested in yours, and besides I only want what I don't already have.

- If you send me anything about "Interest rates" or "home loans" please note: My interest rate in what you are sending me is -200%, which is a lot lower than whatever interest rate you are offering. But if you can meet or beat my interest rate, let me know and I'll be happy to borrow from you.

- If you would like to learn how to spam me more effectively, you can sign up for my "How to Spam Nova Successfully" course, available as an e-book. Now it's ABSOLUTELY FREE for a limited time! All you have to pay is $19.99, plus a small monthly fee. Some restrictions apply. Please use Paypal to send me your payment. Maybe I'll send you my book. Maybe I won't.

- But first, in order for me to process your order, your ISP and credit card companies asked me to get your login info, passwords, credit card numbers and PINs so I can make sure you are who you say you are. Please email them to me, with the title "Get Stuff Free, Now!" in your message.

Social Networks, Physics, Civilizations -- Do they All Obey the Same Underlying Rules?

I am having an interesting conversation with Howard Bloom, author, memeticist, historian, scientist, and social theorist. We have been discussing network models of the universe and the underlying "metapatterns" that seem to unfold at every level of scale. Below is my reply to his recent note, followed by his note which is extremely well written and interesting...

------------
From: Nova Spivack
To: Howard Bloom
Subject: Re: Graph Automata -- Is the Universe Similar to a Social Network?

Howard, what a great reply!

Indeed the metapattern you point out seems to happen at all levels of scale. I am looking for the underlying Rule that generates this on abstract graphs -- networks of nodes and arcs.

In thinking about this further, I think we live in a "Social Universe." What binds the universe together, and causes all structure and dynamics at every level of scale, is communication along relationships. Communication takes place via relationships. And relationships in turn develop based on the communication that takes place across them.

Relationships and communications take place between locations in the manifold of spacetime, as well as between fundamental particles, cells, people, ideas, network devices, belief systems, organizations, economies, civilizations, ecosystems, heavenly bodies, galaxies, superclusters, or entire universes. Whether you call it "gravitation" and "repulsion" and other forces are really just emergent properties of the dynamics of relationships and communications. It's really all very self-similar.

I believe that we can make an abstract model of this -- just a graph comprised of nodes connected by arcs -- where the nodes (and possibly the arcs too) have states, and information may travel across them. Then, at each moment in time, we may apply simple local rules to modify the states of nodes and arcs in this network based on their previous states and the states of their neighbors.

A Plant that Detects Landmines

Danish researchers have developed a plant changes color when its roots come in contact with explosives. They are proposing that this plant could be used to detect buried landmines. Of course that would require that this plant was growing pretty much everywhere in certain regions that are rife with landmines. Not very practical. But interesting.

Semantic Social Networks

Josh Kirschenbaum has some interesting ideas about a different way to constructing a social network.

Instead of a LinkedIn (or any other system) style of listing everyone I know, and everyone who knows who I know- it shows a list of other nodes that I am strongly connected to. This strength is based on the quality and quantity of "connection" to that node. The node could be another person, or it could be a website/weblog/asset. This way, my "network" is a constantly evolving dynamic representation of my digital presence. Now if you expand this out- my "network" can determine other "likely" nodes to connect to based on how well connected THOSE nodes are connected to nodes I am connected to.

Click here to read more.

Girl With X-Ray Eyes

I have come across several references to Natasha in the last week. It seems to be a well-documented case of extra-sensory medical perception. This type of perception is not at all uncommon among Tibetan lamas and Chinese Taoists that I have studied with, and I have heard from friends who are close to Native American and African healers, of people with similar abilities. There is also a well-known teenager named Adam who gained some notoriety with similar abilities -- although he is able to do it remotely. I wonder how this is possible?

USPTO Grants California Lawyer Patent to Entire WWW Naming Scheme

Do you know about United States Patent No. 6,671,714? You should. The patent, recently granted to one Frank Weyer of Beverly Hills, California, grants the patent holder full rights to:A method for assigning URL's and e-mail addresses to members of a group comprising the steps of: assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"; and assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "[email protected];"

Sound familiar? Well, it should, because the patent describes what is essentially one of the most basic, most crucial underlying structures of the World Wide Web, namely the domain naming system.

Click here to read the rest of the article...

Rename Orkut to Kaput?

So now that Orkut has been summarily shut down after only a brief period online, perhaps it would be better to rename it "Kaput"???

Graph Automata -- What Can Social Networks Teach us About Underlying Physical Laws?

Hello all, I have been thinking about the general problems of social networks on the Internet. It occurs to me that these issues are closely related to digital physics. For more on digital physics see the work of Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Norman Margolus, Tomasso Toffoli, and other pioneers of the field of cellular automata.

In the past I have worked informally on cellular automata at MIT in the lab of Fredkin, Margolus and Toffoli -- and in particular that led me to get interested in what could be called "graph automata" -- rules that operate on arbitrary graphs in a manner that is similar to the way that cellular automata operate on cells in rigidly defined neighborhood topologies. The general concept is that the structure of a graph can be optimized for various parameters in a bottom-up, iterative, emergent fashion by running local rules at each node based on the neighborhood structure around each node (taking into account the number of arcs around each node, the directionality of arcs if any, and the states of nodes if any). There is a general class of rules that we could call "graph automata" that are quite interesting to study because in many ways they are better metaphors for physics than simple CA's, in my opinion.

In any case, that's not the point of this note. Instead, I would like to propose that one way to discover the "general laws" of digital physics might be to study social networks. Social networks are an interesting "macro-level" phenomenon that could be considered to be useful analogs for discovering the general properties of physical information networks. They are comprised of nodes connected by arcs in which information flows. We could view all physical systems through this lens and perhaps learn quite a bit from this approach.

Optimization of Social Network Architectures Using Tiling Rules

Here's an interesting follow-up thought on my suggestion of some Hypothetical Laws of Social Networks.

What if in fact there is an entirely new way to design social networks, based on the mathematics of tilings? A tiling is a method of filling a space with geometric shapes. For example, you can tile a space with squares, hexagons, quasicrystals, spheres, etc. -- depending on the dimensions and topology of the space.

More on Auto-Caching of URL's on Weblogs: Need for a New Service and API

I blogged about this earlier, but here are some new thoughts about how it should work.

I would like my Weblog provider to auto-cache every URL I link to from my blog. When I put a URL into the content of a posting, my Weblog engine should strip it out and replace it with an intermediary URL. The intermediary URL should go to a page that provides the actual URL that I put in my content, as well as another URL that links to a cached copy of the content that I linked to originally.

The cache-link could point to Google's cached version, or better yet to a local cached hosted by my Weblog provider (Google does not guarantee that cached copies will always be available, whereas my Weblog provider could make that guarantee; furthermore Google may not even have a cached copy of the item I link to, whereas my local Weblog provider could make that cached copy at the time I post the article).

This would ensure that all content that I refer to in my Weblog will always be available, even if the original source is taken offline. I think this is essential -- without it someday a significant portion of the links in my weblog may be broken due to content going offline or moving, which would render much of my Weblog content obsolete.

There are some copyright issues to consider perhaps -- but I am not sure they are obstacles. After all HTML does provide a way to designate that a page should not be cached, and Google is caching a lot of pages without any legal challenges. Another approach to this would be to use the Internet Archive as a cache -- at least they are non-profit, thus perhaps the legal issue of hosting cached copies of sites may be easier to resolve: they do it already.

Perhaps my friend Brewster and his pals at the Internet Archive should create an API that bloggers can use for this purpose. When the API is pinged with a URL, the archive makes a cache of that URL and returns a new permalink to that cached copy. Blog engines can use this API to submit URLs and get cache-URLs in return, which can then be inserted into blog postings automatically for the posters. This would be a great use of the Archive and would help bloggers immensely.

A Very Smart Parrot

Here is a fascinating article about a parrot with a 950 word vocabulary, a sense of humor, and telepathy!

Yamaha's Amazing New Singing Voice Synth

Yamaha has released a new synthesizer that sings. And it sings really really well. You have to hear it to believe it! This is going to revolutionize the music biz.

Note about Comments on this Blog

Until Typepad figures out a way to effectively block out comment spam I am stripping out HTML from comments on this Weblog. So if you want to put links in your comments, please include links as text not HREF's for now, so that they don't get stripped out. Thanks.

The Big Secret? Is it all About Helium-3?

An article claims that Bush's Moon initiative may be motivated by the lunar presence of Helium-3, a better source of fuel for nuclear reactors that just happens to be abundant on the Moon but virtually absent on Earth. The article proposes that whomever has space supremacy controls the near-earth Helium-3 supply and therefore has future energy supremacy as we move towards increasing reliance on nuclear power. Helium-3 could also be used to make weapons perhaps. Could this be what it's all about? There aren't a lot of other benefits for going to the Moon -- other than perhaps using it as a launchpad for future missions to Mars.

Some Hypothetical "Laws of Social Networks"

In this article I discuss some insights about optimization of social networks. Basically I suggest that "trust is not preserved" along relationship paths of more than 3 hops. In other words, social networks should never forward messages beyond 3 hops. Doing so makes the communication of that message effectively arbitrary, adding noise to the system and degrading utility for users.

A New Solution to Spam: "The Internet Member's License"

I keep hearing about various half-baked proposals for solving spam, so I couldn't help but add my own half-baked proposal into the mix. Actually my proposal may be more than half-baked -- It might be the solution we've all been waiting for. I call it the "Internet Member's License" (IML -- pronounced "I-mail").

Basically what I am proposing is an Internet-equivalent of a driver's license -- only it works very differently. Unlike a driver's licnese the Internet Member's License is not about granting permission to use the Net -- you don't need to have one in order to get online or surf etc. -- instead, its purpose is to simply encode the holder's "identity and reputation" in a standardized manner that enables others to test and screen messages and content you create.

I'm on WIRED News today... Article about my use of RipDigital

Check out this new article that WIRED News just published about my use of RipDigital to digitize my music collection.

Neural Net that Invents Things

The Creativity Machine is a special application of neural networks based on the deliberate introduction of mathematical noise into the network. By adding noise after the network has been trained, the system is able to wander around slightly less rigidly, leading it to "free associate" and even to "dream" and "hallucinate." Stephen Thaler came up with this idea after becoming curious about what happens when the human brain dies. He began experimenting with deliberately killing his neural nets by randomly degrading the weights connecting the artificial neurons in the system to simulate cell death. He found that as they "died" the network generated memories, then fragmentary memories, and finally new conceptions made from the shards of memories. This led him to realize that he could stimulate artificial creativity in his neural nets by adding noise to the weights and then seeing what the system dreamed. In the past I spoke with him about this technology; now it looks like things are finally moving forward with it. Stephen is definitely a visionary.

The Emerging Problem of "Social Overload"

Thanks to the recent mushrooming of social networking systems, I am starting to experience a new problem that I call "social overload." Now that I am connected to the world via LinkedIn, Ryze, Plaxo, Orkut, and Typepad, as well 6 different IM systems, and several email accounts, I am finding that an increasing amount of my time is spent on "relationship maintenance" tasks like approving or declining relationship and referral requests.

The fact that I am experiencing social overload is ironic because the intent of many of these systems is actually to increase the efficiency of my relationships, thereby improving my productivity. However I find that exactly the reverse is what is taking place in practice.

More Info on Orkut

My friend Richard Soderberg has contacted me to provide more information about what Orkut actually is and who is behind it. According to Richard...

Orkut is the first name of a programmer at Google. Orkut, as part of the standard employee contract, must dedicate 20% of his at-work time to personal projects. Three days ago, he put one of his personal projects, Orkut, up on the web. It is affiliated with Google because he's an employee of Google.

(..snip..)

Now, I can't say whether Google secretly pressured Orkut into doing this, but as I understand it, Orkut developed this tool of his own accord. That said, I can see millions of wonderful integrations between it and Google, and one specific integration that no one has yet thought of.

If this were a stealth venture, then why would Google be linked from the front page? Why would the site not be protected with a simple, plaintext password to even allow logging in?

- R.

Note however that this article seems to suggest that Orkut is more affiliated with Google, and perhaps more tactical to their evolving portal strategy, than Google is saying, but who knows? Time will tell.

Thoughts on Orkut -- Google's New Service

OK, thanks to my friend Clay who is chief techie for Dean, I got into Orkut today -- Google's new stealth social networking service designed to kill Friendster, Linked In and Ryze. It appears to be a clone -- pretty much what one would expect from a state-of-the-art social networking site. There are hooks in there for connecting to Google's upcoming e-mail service, and it looks like they are also planning to get into classifieds eventually. Why the name Orkut? It is clear that Google has its eye on the portal space. Bad move for Google in my opinion, but I guess they have to do this now that Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb which indexes more of the Web than Google in fact. I don't think Google knows how to run a content or community based service -- this is not their core competency -- and I worry that if they extend into these areas they may risk diluting their brand and confusing their message. This will be an interesting case study to watch as it plays out. By the way let me know if you want to be invited to my Orkut network to try it out. Just email me with the subject line "Orkut" to nova AT radarnetworks DOT com.

Josh Gave Me a New Banner, Thanks Man!

Josh Kirschenbaum made me a really great new banner for my blog today. Thanks Josh!!! Really cool!

Article on Cognitive Overload

Here is an interesting article on "Cognitive Overload" for those interesting in a more scholarly analysis of the subject. Nice work!

10 Reasons Why RSS Isn't Ready for Primetime...

Here's an interesting thread on some shortcomings of RSS that's making it's way around the Metaweb at the moment. I would add a number of other weaknesses of RSS -- chief among them is that RSS lacks formal semantics and is mainly suitable for describing very simple unstructured data such as Weblog postings.

New Service Uses Your Social Network to Filter Search Results

A new service called Eurekster uses your social network to refine your search results on third-party search engines. The concept is that your interests should be similar to the interests of those in your social network, therefore based on what others in your network search for and like, your own searches can be tuned for your likely interests. Interesting idea.

Google Launches Social Networking Site

Google has quietly launched a social networking site called Orkut. Currently it appears to be semi-stealth. Here is a detailed article about what is known about it so far. Looks like Google really did want Friendster.

Autocaching: A New Blogging Feature I Would Like to Have...

I post articles about things all over the Net. But many of those pages that I link to probably won't be there in 5 or 10 years so the links will be dead. I would like my Weblog provider to automatically cache a copy of any page I link to, and provide the cached copy if the original page is moved or taken offline.

Comment Spam -- A Case Study and a Proposed Deeper Solution that Google Should Provide

I have a friend who is a poet, mother and journalist in Norway. Her name is Aina Gerner-Mathisen. She recently emailed me trying to figure out who was posting in her name on various sites. I looked into it and discovered that she is a victim of comment-spam identity-theft. Comment-spam is a new type of spam that is spreading across weblogs. It is one of the problems that we will see in the emerging Metaweb -- and it comes about because there is still no standard, widely used authentication protocol on the Internet. No responsible content provider should allow non-authenticated postings on their pages.

Comment-spam is a new type of spam that is spreading across weblogs. It is one of the problems that we will see in the emerging Metaweb -- and it comes about because there is still no standard, widely used authentication protocol on the Internet. No responsible content provider should allow non-authenticated postings on their pages.

Click here to view this case in Google's search results. Almost every one of the results of this search is a fake posting generated in Aina's name. Open some of them and notice the auto-generated quote. Then click on her name and see where it goes. Yikes! It is quite extensive and all seems to have happened recently -- possibly via a bot. This seems to be a new use of comment-spam -- hijacking someone's actual identity in order to use it to post spam ads.

Aina Gerner-Mathisen Temporary Home Page

This article is actually a Web page that I have created to help my good friend Aina Gerner-Mathisen dig out from a major identity-theft problem she recently experienced. It seems that some evil comment-spammer has posted spam comments onto a number of weblogs in her name. Now these comments appear higher in Google search results than legitimate pages about/by Aina.

Aina is a leading journalist and writer in Norway. She is a good person. She doesn't deserve to be victimized like that and it pisses me off. Please join me in rescuing her identity from the comment spammers and returning it to her. She's worth it!

Until Aina gets a home page, this article's permalink (below), will serve as her "legitimate URL" on the Net. Please link from your blogs and sites to the URL of this blog posting to help me rescue Aina. By doing this you will help me to increase her Google standing for this page versus the nasty comment-spams which currently are obscuring her good reputation. Please note that you should link to the permalink for this page (below), or the URL for this article if you are viewing it via a newsreader -- not to the home page for my weblog (because it will help Aina most efficiently if we all link to the page about her).

When Aina gives me some URLs about her and perhaps starts a homepage or blog, I will put that information here as a way to redirect traffic to her legitimate addresses.

(Also, in case there is any doubt as to why I am doing this, yes Aina is a 100% real person -- this is not a ploy on my part to get better Google ratings -- my Google rank is good enough already. You can verify that she is real if you care to -- she and I both attended Oberlin College. Her byline also appears on several published press releases for European PR companies. Her poetry is published too.)

Study Shows Brain Solves Problems While Sleeping

And interesting study shows that people are shown a difficult math problem are 3 times more likely to figure out a hidden rule that solvesit after 8 hours of sleep. The brain seems to work in the background to solve problems. Actually, there are many examples of how the brain solves problems during sleep -- for example, dream-discovery is how the chemical structure of benzene was discovered. There are many other examples of this. I have experienced very detailed "working sessions" during my dreams in which I develop comprehensive designs and breakthrough new approaches to problems I work on during the day. I know a lot of other creative people who have similar experiences. Perhaps this could be a new way to solve problems: focus on them intently before going to sleep and perhaps that primes the brain to do background processing on the problem during REM sleep. This is testable. For example, provide a test subject with several problems to solve. Then randomly choose one to focus on as they go to sleep and later test to see if the chosen problem is more likely to be solved correctly, or is solved faster, than the other problems that were not targeted prior to sleep.

Is Blogging just for Geeks?

I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let's face it, we are all a bunch of geeks. The question is, will blogging ever go "mainstream"? Will consumers want to post their thoughts and ideas on the Web for all to see, or is blogging really just for exhibitionists, intellectual impressarios, and voyeurs? Are Weblogs the "new homepages" or are they just a fad for the technorati? Does anyone have compelling stats for blogging being something that mainstream consumers will want to embrace?

And Now... The Award for Stupidest Cell Phone Technology, Ever!!!!!!!!!

A Japanese telecom has introduced a cell-phone that does bone-conduction to transmit audio through your skull. You are supposed to hold it up to your head so you can hear the phone vibrating through the bones of your skull. Gee, just what I always wanted! One catch though -- they say it works best if you "plug both ears" while you use it. So how are you supposed to hold it to your head and plug both ears at the same time? Maybe if you use the thing enough you grow a third arm? Of course there's another wonderful feature of this phone -- the act of putting it against your skull also angles the antenna right into your brain. Hmm. Nice! And then there's the issue of being able to listen to bone-conducted audio, but not speak -- so the damn thing is only good for voicemail review. Excuse me but why is this any better than an earphone? Isn't an earphone a little less obtrusive than walking around with your cell phone stuck to your forehead??? Maybe we need a special new World Court for prosecuting bad industrial designers?

How to Make the iPod Better

Well I finally made the leap and got a 40 Gb iPod recently. Thanks to RipDigital the process of digitizing my nearly 1000 CDs took only 1 day and I got it all back on a nice new 250 Gb Maxtor external drive (as well as a stack of DVDs containing a backup of all the new MP3s). After a few days of hacking around I got everything working and all my music organized, categorized into playlists and synched with my iPod. I also downloaded a useful little utility that I found on iPod Lounge that enables me to load all my Palm Desktop contacts onto my iPod addressbook too. The iPod is a fantastic innovation that is very well designed. After only a short time using I know I can't live without it, and I can't imagine how I surivived for the last year without one. Not only that but iTunes and the Apple Music Store are totally addictive. I've already spent quite a bundle on music there. But although the iPod is great, I do have a wishlist of features that I would like to see in a future version of the device and the software. I will list some of my suggestions for improving the iPod here. I will update it from time to time. Feel free to add comments with your own feature suggestions to this posting. Maybe Apple will notice it someday and use some of these ideas.

Proposal for One-Way Trip to Mars

Paul Davies has put forth an interesting proposal for a one-way trip to Mar as the most cost-effective way to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. It's a smart and novel idea.

Wow.. The Payphone Project...

This site collects phone numbers from payphones around the world, so you can lookup any payphone anywhere and call it -- for example, to practice a foreign language or just to have random conversations with bewildered strangers. Some people have too much free time!

Entire Apartment Encased in Tin-Foil: New Year's Prank of Extreme Proportions

I just came across a wild story about a recent New Year's prank in which a group of guys used tin-foil to completely cover every object in their victim's apartment -- right down to the individual CD's in his music collection, individual coins in his spare change, etc. See this page for pictures of what they did and an interview with the nutcases who perpetrated this trick. Funny and insane.

Belgian Rabbit Poachers "Bond Car" Gadgets

It turns out the Cold War never ended -- it just switched from humans vs. humans to humans vs. rabbits. And the frontlines of this new Great Game are in Belgium, where police just captured the latest in secret weaponry on the side of the humans: A new Rabbit Poaching Spy Car that could have been designed by Q himself. It's so loaded with gadgets even James Bond would be jealous -- things like spring-loaded boxes to release caltrops to pop tires of pursuing vechicles, a set of bicycles on the back that can be ejected onto the road behind if being pursued, lead shielded license plates, bullet proof panels, etc. Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!

Now You Can Program Your Dreams...

The company in Japan that brought us the "BowLingual" dog-bark translator has now announced their new Dream Workshop device. They claim you can use it to program your dreams at night while you sleep. People who've tried it say it sometimes works. Only one minor problem... the dreams don't always go as planned...

New Images from Surface of VENUS!

I just read an interesting article about new images from the surface of Venus ... yes, Venus, not Mars! The Soviets sent a number of probes to Venus, several of which actually managed to land on the surface and send back photos. Recently Don Mitchell (who has perhaps one of the coolest homepages ever -- try it you'll see what I mean) digitally reprocessed the raw images from the old Soviet missions to produce amazingly high quality images of the surface of Venus, Pretty cool stuff.

Warning Over Possible Link Between Cosmetics, Deodorants and Breast Cancer

A study found that many tumors contain traces of chemicals that are commonly found in women's cosmetics and deodorants. The question is now whether or not there is a causal linkage here or whether these chemicals are found in healthy tissue as well.

Scientists Discuss How to Save Earth

A group of climatologists met recently in England to discuss how to save the Earth from global warming. Rather than actually doing something to stop the emission of greenhouse gasses -- they proposed a giant space shield and a bunch of other insane ideas.

Some New Progress on the Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript, which resides at Yale, is a famous historical coded text that remains uncracked even by our best crypto technologies. The text is written in a bizarre language and illustrated with all sorts of unsual images. Some theorists think it was created by Leonardo Da Vinci, others say it was Roger Bacon. Some have suggested it contains alchemical secrets. Others thing it is from an other planet. Nobody knows what it is really. Now recent experiments have yielded at least some insight into a potential explanation for the text's inner structure.

Bush's Mars Initiative

I admit it. I'm a total sucker for things like this. If the Bush Administration commits to sending a manned mission to Mars, or even just putting a permanent base on the Moon, it would definitely be a point in their favor in my mind. I really think space exploration is one of the most important things the human race can do. If they are willing to go out on a limb and fund this it would be something I would support. Of course there are big problems on Earth that could also use the money that would otherwise go towards Mars development, but I think in the long-term -- if we take a 1000 year view of things -- spending money on colonizing Mars has greater potential benefit for greater numbers of people in the future than almost anything we can do on Earth -- as long as we don't destroy our species before we manage to colonize Mars. Spreading to another world dramatically increases the odds that humanity will survive in the universe. Staying only on Earth is far too risky in the long-term. Therefore, spending money on Mars is a long-term investment in the future evolution of humanity, and other lifeforms from Earth -- by getting them off of this one ecological niche that is our planet. Furthermore it could have profound economic benefits -- the fact is, Earth is getting pretty saturated. The world economy is powered by growth -- and colonizing New Worlds is certainly one way to open up new economic vistas. After all, America was once a "New World" too.

Using Nanoparticles to Augment Human Brains...?

CNN posted an article today about the potential risk of nanotechnology on the human brain. Basically some research shows that nano-scale particles such as industrial waste, or even components of nanotechnologies, can migrate through the human circulatory system and eventually lodge in the brain. This could cause harmful effects. But on the other hand, maybe this "bug" is actually a "feature!"

The fact that this is possible could be used to introduce nanoscale computational devices into the human nervous system -- essentially splicing a distributed computer into a living human brain. Suppose the nanoparticles could establish an ad hoc local area network amongst themselves, and suppose they lodged throughout the human nervous system, attaching to neurons. Suddenly it might be possible to do real-time sensing -- and triggering -- of any neuron in the human body. And all of this could be monitored by an external computer system. This could enable amazing new biofeedback systems. But that's just the beginning -- because it might also enable people to "backup" their nervous systems -- including perhaps their memories and skills. It could also potentially enable software augmentation of human thinking as it happens -- an external computer network could interact with your own "internal network" and as you think or sense things, it could search the entire Net or an expert system, or the brains of other people in your network, and give you suggestions, knowledge, etc.

Essentially this could be a way to network humans to computers, the Internet, and then to other humans. This could enable future "group minds" and "collective intelligences" that we cannot even imagine yet. It could also enable humans to easily interact with virtual reality environments -- they could be overlaid onto their sensory experience to augment information (such as a visual scene being augmented with labels or diagrams etc.), or even to "switch channels" from this "reality" (which may also be virtual) that we experience to other synthetic realities that exist in our computer networks. It might even enable people to record their dreams, and/or enter the dreams of other people -- that would be the most advanced "virtual reality" possible.

Another interesting application of this technology might be to deliver neural drugs more effectively. It could also be used to facilitate interspecies communication -- for example imagine a system that could map between a human brain and a dolphin brain. You permeate both a human and dolphin's nervous systems with nanocomputing particles. First there is "learning phase" where an external system monitors them as they do things in order to learn how their brains work. Then it starts to learn how to map between them by observing how they interact with other organisms of their species and with their environments in order to figure out their language, communicat and memory representation schemes.

Once that is known it could directly map information between them, maybe even in real-time, enabling not only communication but even memory uploading and downloading. That would be cool -- imagine being able to do virtual telepresence into the nervous system of a dolphin as it swims around with its pod in the wild. You could "look through it's sense organs" as it swims around, and maybe even observe what it thinks and feels like -- sort a window into being someone else -- in this case someone who is of a different species. Among the many other applications of this technology of course there would be amazing potential in the arts, education, therapy, collaboration, entertainment, science, relationships, etc. and many other enjoyable diversions that people would probably figure out they could engage in once their nervous systems are networked.

Anyway the idea of permeating a human nervous system with networkable nanocomputers is definitely something to think about, or think twice about, as the case may be (pun intended!).

Bimodal Minds in the Prevailing Linear Monoculture

Another interesting article from my father, Mayer Spivack, about his theory that there are two main modes of human cognition. One is linear and the other is associative. Our culture calls the linear mode "intelligent" and the non-linear mode "dyslexic" or "disabled." But actually the non-linear mode is in fact another form of intelligence, with incredible utility and special adaptive benefits. Linear cognition is not inherently better -- in extremes it is actually disabling as well (for example savants, and some autistics for example). What is interesting is that nonlinear cognition -- what my father calls "syncretic thinking" is underutilized in our society. In fact, our entire educational process discourages it and penalizes it. But what if we actually recognized syncretic thinking as an important cognitive skill -- and actually trained children to develop and harness it just as we train them with linear thinking? We could produce a whole new generation of syncretically trained kids. They would be more creative, more intelligent, better at solving complex problems and managing complexity, and they would probably be more successful at whatever they end up doing. Why? Because they would be using all of their brain's potential, not just half of it!

Human brains and minds appear to be inherently capable of at least two quite different kinds of processes and reasoning, The first kind, the one we have come to regard as normal, is predominantly linear and logical. The second process is more non-linear. It is often labeled “sloppy,” disorganized, and is considered by many as slow to learn. In school it does appear to be inefficient when compared to the linear. It is called learning disabled, and specifically often diagnosed as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder.

You can read the rest at Arts and Minds

Check out RipDigital.com -- Cool New Service Converts Your Music

Hey everyone, my good friend, Richard Adams -- who used to work with me at EarthWeb -- has just launched his new venture RipDigital -- it's really useful, check it out.

They have put together a special robotic CD ripper system that can convert hundreds of CD's to ultra-high-quality MP3's at extremely high speed.

You just send them your regular music CD's in a special box they mail to you, and they automatically clean them and convert them all to optimal MP3s.

Then they ship back your original CD's and your new MP3 CDs.

And they are extremely fast -- you can even get everything back the next day or at least the same week!

Another thing that's cool -- the MP3's they make are better quality than the ones produced by most PC CD-rippers -- they use special software to automatically convert all your music to produce much higher quality MP3's than you can do on your own (unless you happen to have your own digital recording studio).

If you have several hundred CD's this can save you months of effort, and get you better quality conversion too. It makes it really fast and easy to get all your existing music onto your iPod or whatever MP3 player you use.

It also preserves your music collection (you may not know this but CD's decay over time and if you don't digitize all your music, eventually you're gonna lose it or have to buy the CD's again -- CD's oxidize so you eventually have to buy them again; a dirty little secret of the music biz!).

So I finally made the switch and sent RipDigital my entire collection (almost 1000 CD's), and they get it back to me within the week as MP3's, nicely organized on a set of high quality discs. Wow.

Anway, I'm sending this review to you because you're a techie and/or friend -- I have no financial incentive if you choose to use it or not. I'm just trying to help Richard get the word out and help my friends who have big music collections at the same time.

So send this to your friends who have lots of CD's and want to go digital, even if you don't need it yourself.

And if you do choose use RipDigital -- tell them you are a "friend of Nova's" and they'll give you priority service and take good care of you.

Hope it's useful to you!

Part of the Lore...

I was goofing around in Google Groups today, looking up ancient conversations I had in USENET in the long gone days of the 1990's and I came across a quote of mine which is "I don't care how many levels of reality you posit, as soon as you posit even one, it's turtles all the way down!" from this hilarious old newsgroup alt.buddha.short.fat.guy which is one of the places where renegade freakazoid crazy-wisdom Buddhists used to hang out (and still do?). Anyway that led me to read their old FAQ -- which is one of the funnier things on the Net -- truly hilarious quotes from members of the group. But you probably won't get some of the jokes unless you have a lot of background in eastern philosophy and history. Anyway, if you happen to be a freak like me, you will probably now surf this link and actually read the FAQ and spend the next hour laughing.

Humans Should Intentionally Seed Life on Mars. Why We Must Start Now.

Here's a wildly unexpected proposal that just popped into my brain: Humanity should intentionally contaminate Mars with Earth lifeforms -- as soon as possible! The benefits vastly outweigh any concerns to the contrary. Indeed, it may be the smartest thing our species ever does.

The first obvious benefit is that it will get Earth life off of Earth, making it more likely that it will survive. Humans are wrecking Earth -- but even if we don't Nature may do it for us. All it would take is one big comet or meteor impact -- or a supervolcano or ice-age and much of the living systems and civilization we currently take for granted would vanish in the blink of an eye. Our only insurance is to have a "planetary backup" -- so why not use Mars? We back up our data -- why not our DNA -- why not also backup the amazing ecosystems and living organisms that have evolved so painstakingly over aeons on Earth? By moving at least some of them to Mars we can at least rest assured that no matter what happens on Earth, life in our solar system will continue in other places. But that's just the beginning.

Another benefit of seeding Earth life on Mars is that we can jumpstart evolution on Mars by several million (or billion) years by seeding it with life from Earth. And then we can study how it evolves and adapts. Remember, many organisms contain in their DNA bits and pieces of lots of previous generations and species -- and as they adapt on Mars they could even eventually re-evolve lifeforms we have (or had) on Earth. Perhaps life on Mars will revert to adaptations that existing on Earth when our climate was harsher. But over time that could slowly transform the Mars climate, enabling life to catch up again, and evolve to "higher" forms. Eventually that could even create and spread living systems and ecosystems that humans can live off of, or live within at least. Yes it could take a very long time to evolve higher lifeforms on Mars if we start by just sending microorganisms, insects, landcrabs, lizards, etc, but it could happen given that the selective pressures on Mars are similar to those on Earth. On the other hand, life could go in a completely unanticipated direction -- that would be interesting too!

It's actually a fascinating and important scientific question worthy of funding and long-term study: given the same precursor lifeforms and similar or identical conditions, will life evolve along the same evolutionary course as it has on Earth? Will Mars get dinosaurs eventually, or even primates? And what about flora and fauna? If the Bush Administration wanted to propose A Really Bold Initiative what could be better than seeding life on another planet?

Hey NASA, are you listening? -- this idea is worth $100 billion in funding. We could learn more from seeding life on Mars and studying it as it adapts, spreads and evolves for the next several thousand years than almost anything else we could do with the space program. It will help us learn about ourselves, the cosmos, and ultimately about how species move to new worlds. It will even lay the groundwork for humans to eventually colonize Mars by starting to build a food-chain and life support web there. And seeding life on Mars would have a greater long-term benefit on humanity, and the solar system, than just about any other space or Earth-sciences research program we could embark on.

You must see the full 8 meg color Mars image...

NASA wisely buried this amazing full hi-res version of their now-famous color Mars image on their site because they are getting too many downloads to handle the load. But here it is -- the full sized 8 megabyte color Mars image in all its glorious detail. It's absolutely incredible!!! Like being there. Totally mind blowing. You have to see it and just scroll around in it for a while... Wow.

Virtual Currency Exchange Between Gameworlds Goes Live

A new online exchange for trading virtual cash between different online virtual gaming worlds goes online. This is cool -- trading virtual currencies that have no meaning in the physical world but can buy things in virtual worlds. And of course, this is already convertible to cash because people resell virtual stuff for cash on eBay. Fascinating development. Is this a sign of economic changes to come. Is currency going virtual?