This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

Google Launches gMail

Google has announced the beta of their new search-based free hosted e-mail service, called gmail. They will provide 1 gigabyte of free storage to every user, with built-in indexing and search. Wow.

Is Turbo10 Better than Google?

According to The Register, Turbo10 is better than Google. Decide for yourself here. They search the "deep web" by going directly into 1000's of databases, rather than just scraping Web pages.

Latest Stats on the Blogosphere...

Dave reports that Technorati broke the "2 million weblogs tracked milestone" today. He states that there are about 12,000 new weblogs created per day now, and about 150,000 weblog updates per day and growing.

Owners Resemble their Pets

It turns out that pets really do resemble their owners, but in fact it's the other way around! A recent study found that dog-owners choose pets that resemble themselves, rather than owners and their dogs growing to resemble one another over time.

Brilliant New Electric Motor Invented in Japan

An inventor in Japan has designed a new motor that uses cleverly positioned permanent magnets to consume significantly less power than it should, and even to output more power than is put in! But before you dismiss it -- read this detailed investigative article. This could be a very important innovation.

Spatial and Audio Visualizations of Prime Number Distributions

I have been thinking a lot recently about the distribution of prime numbers -- in particular, I've been trying to figure out if there is a way to predict the sequence of gap sizes between primes. But anyway, in the course of that investigation I came across a really cool site about number spirals in which the author develops a set of formulas and insights from them based on a particular way of aligning numbers in spirals. It's a very interesting, visual, site that anyone who knows basic algebra can understand. I wonder if some of the properties of these spirals relate to physics -- particularly the orbits of planets or the positions of particles?

I also found this site which has several illustrations on it of various spatial visualizations of primes -- the one I found most interesting is the "Golbach Folding at Multiples of 30," a way to make the primes line up (with one minor catch!).

This is another interesting site that provides music generated by prime number sequences that sounds suspiciously like free-jazz.

As long as we're on the subject -- I just found this obscure research paper that shows the prime numbers at work in nature -- they find that predator-prey interactions obey patterns that tend to favor prime numbers. Interesting. This adds to my hunch that the primes play an important role in nature -- and that they may be fundamental to understanding the patterns at work in chaotic dynamical systems.

Finding Primes Using Cellular Automata

It just occurred to me that distribution of primes looks VERY much like the output of a cellular automaton rule. This makes me wonder whether it might be possible to use a cellular automaton to generate prime numbers. If we can find the rule that generates the prime numbers, perhaps this rule has other important properties. Just a hunch. In any event, it would help to explain the distribution of primes. Below I discuss some approaches to doing exhaustive searches for CA rules that generate the primes.

Ads Moving to Weblogs... Ad Space on My Site for Sale

Advertising moves to Weblogs. It had to happen eventually. Now that we're on the subject, let me know if you want to advertise on this site.

First Ever Hurricane in South Atlantic - Global Warming?

For the first time in recorded history a hurricane has formed in the south Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil. Is this a precursor of coming climate changes?

Methane on Mars -- Possible Sign of Life

Methane has been detected on Mars, which may indicate the presence of bacteria.

Yellowstone About to Go Boom?

Of course I've been tracking this one for nearly a year already, but now that mainstream press is discussing this I guess it's ok to post it here without you all thinking I'm a wacko. The fact is that there are serious rumblings and changes taking place at Yellowstone and nobody knows what could happen -- but there is at least the theoretical potential for a truly massive hydrothermal explosion -- big enough to have national or even global consequences. In the dark labyrinths of the Web that I read every day there are raging debates about this subject. Anyway, if you're planning to go to Yellowstone in the near future, do us all a favor and walk very very softly!

A New Way to Find Patterns in Distributions of Numbers

This evening I had an interesting idea for a new way to look for patterns in the distribution of numbers such as the prime numbers and the digits of Pi. In a nutshell I propose that there may be patterns in these number sequences that might not be evident to a computer but could be evident to the human eye and human intelligence, which among other things is tuned to find order in chaos, even when that order is "fuzzy." In this article I propose a new class of rules that are similar in some respects to cellular automata, for generating visualizations of the distribution of numbers, and for leveraging distributed human intelligence to evalute those visualizations for meaningful patterns.

Link Found Between Fructose Sweeteners and US Obesity

One of the most widely used sweetening products, "high-fructose corn sweeteners," may be the cause of the dramatic rise in US obesity levels since the late 1970's. Fructose is metabolized differently than other sweeteners -- it does not trigger hormonal responses that regulate energy use and appetite in the same way as other sweeteners and is more likely to be turned into fat.

Common Bacteria Linked to Alzheimer's Disease

In another recent discovery, researchers found that a common bacteria was associated with higher rates of Alzheimer's disease, opening the way for Alzheimer's to be prevented or cured (if caught early) with antibiotics.

New Research Claims at Least Some Cancers Caused by Bacteria

New research claims that at least some common types of cancer may be caused by toxins released by bacteria. This opens the way for cancers to be prevented or cured using antibiotics.

NASA Prepares to Test "Hyper-X" - Plane to Fly 7 Times Speed of Sound

NASA prepares to test its Hyper-X jet -- a plane that can fly up to 7 times the speed of sound. Future passenger jets based on the technology could go from New York to London in less than 2 hours.

We've Already Sent Life to Mars, It Turns Out...

It turns out that we've already sent life to Mars, and it may be still living there, according to a researcher who has studied the decontamination methods used by NASA. Only our early Viking landers were fully heat sterilized. Subsequent missions have most likely been contaminated with bacteria from Earth. This, in my opinion, is a very good thing. In fact I would advocate raising some private money now to deliberately send pods of Earth life to Mars as soon as possible -- bacteria, spores, seeds, and perhaps other lifeforms that can survive on Mars. Humanity could easily wipe ourselves out, as well as the rest of our planetary ecosystem -- this would at least help to increase the chances that Earth life would live on somewhere else. Perhaps after billions of years, we could even re-evolve on Mars from the bacteria we send up. Of course we could speed things up a lot by sending up higher lifeforms, like lizards etc. -- but we would also need to send something for them to eat. I have in the past proposed sending up little "ecopods" -- ecosystems in a pod -- that are designed to fall to the surface of Mars and seed ecosystems -- they are self-contained ecosystems that can survive on Mars, and also have opening so that things from inside them can go in and out at will. Ideally these pods would be designed to replicate themselves -- perhaps by spreading seeds and bacteria around themselves, or by containing things like ant colonies that have a way of spreading. It's an interesting design challenge to try to figure out what would be the optimal (lightest weight, most durable) "ecopod" technology that could spread life on Mars.

Brainwave Helmet Controls Video Game

Wow. This is a very cool new project -- controlling video games with a braincap.

Erik T. Ray -- A Genius You Should Know About

Erik T. Ray is a creative genius, in the classical sense of the word. I first heard about him when I was studying CS at Oberlin College. Many of my classmates were obsessed with something called The Lambda Expressway -- an amazing and bizarre serial novel in the tradition of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and The Phantom Tollbooth. But it wasn't until I heard Erik's musical version that I became hooked -- trust me, you should click on this link to hear some of that work for yourself (note: the site is a bit slow to download from, but it's worth the wait). I've always thought that Lamda Expressway should be serialized on NPR -- it's that good -- people should know about it.

What's amazing about Erik is that he has invented not only a world, but a range of technologies, and even it's architecture, some of which he is now proposing to build and live in as a solution for the housing problem. He is also a little insane -- for example, his proposal to lick the world is funny and interesting. Basically, he tastes tourist attractions and other things, and keeps a log of his impressions of them. He's got a number of other proposals you might want to check out. He also has a very retro all-ASCII blog in which among other topics he discusses his recent projects on archimedean chair
construction. You will find many other fascinating and totally original curiosities, toys, devices, artworks and ruminations on his Site. He's also the only person I know who lists his height on his bio in astronomical units (his bio, like everything else he makes, is full of hilarious and ingenous quirks).

Erik T. Ray is someone who really should be widely known, read, and enjoyed -- but he's not particularly interested in self-promotion. So it's up to those of us in his unofficial fan-club to get the word out. If you find his stuff interesting, pass it on.

Nanoshocks Heal Cancer

An interesting article in Nature discusses the healing power of nanshocks -- brief bolts of electricity -- on healing. They seem to cause cancer cells to commit suicide and healthy cells to get energized. Tesla was right. Again.

No More Comments Until Comment Spam Ends

I've finally given in to the comment-spammers. I've had to turn off comments on this weblog until Six Apart, the company that hosts this Weblog, does something to prevent un-authenticated commenters, or to enable me to moderate comments before they appear. And it turns out they are working on just that. So hopefully soon there will be a solution. In the meantime, if you want to comment, please send me an email and I'll post it to the site.

Nova

LOAF Filtering of Email Via Social Networks

LOAF, A new decentralized approach to filtering email by sharing addressbook information with your friends (without giving away your addressbooks) may be the solution we've all been looking for to the growing problem of spam.

Subvocalization Becomes a Reality

Cool. This is an idea I came up with several years ago; looks like it's actually possible. The idea is to detect a person's "whispers" as a way to enable private speech input. It's called subvocalization. NASA has figured out how to do it.

Earth on Verge of Sixth Mass Extinction

Scientists are charting an alarming trend in the rate of species exctinction that mirrors previous mass extinction patterns, such as the decline of the dinosaurs. Data indicates that we may be on the leading edge of the "Sixth Mass Extinction" -- this time it is caused not by a meteor impact, but by humans.

USA Online Population Tops 200 Million

Three quarters of the USA population older than two years old is online according to a new study.

New Security Threat from P2P Bot Networks -- "Phatbot"

Security agencies are monitoring the emergence of a new type of Trojan Horse that uses peer-to-peer networks of bots to mount denial of service attacks on targeted sites. Dubbed Phatbot, one such Trojan is spreading widely across the Net and is especially difficult to disable due to the peer-to-peer nature of the attack. This type of technology is something that I predicted would emerge several years ago when I was thinking about cyberwarfare. If enough PC's had such bots installed, they could literally take a government offline by focusing their combined outputs on a set of key nodes around the network. Similarly these networks could be used by protestors, or by terrorists, to bring business and communications to a halt. The problem is, the centralized architectures of our current networks are simply impossible to defend from distributed threats. We need to start developing truly decentralized server architectures that cannot be targeted and taken offline by attacks on any one location.

Critical Comparison of Existing Social Network Sites

This is a very well thought-out critical review of the pros and cons of various social networking sites. Full of insights for those of us in the biz.

Nice Illustration of How News Travels Across the Metaweb

This is a really good article with a cool illustration of how news moves across the Metaweb. Definitely take a look at it.

As I predicted .. Lifelogs are coming...

I call it a Lifelog -- Nokia calls it a "Lifeblog" (my terminology is better) -- but it's the same idea -- a log of all the stuff you experience -- your whole life, blogged and online. OK but the key is to make sure I can keep my lifeblog private -- or at least parts of it private! I would like my camera phone to take a photo every minute and add it to my Lifelog automatically. Then I can speed through it flip-book-animation style to get to a section I am interested in. Next would be to add a digital streaming voice recorder to my phone and record whatever is being said on every phone call, and even when I am not on a call at 1 minute intervals. Using voiceprints and speech-to-text we can then index who was speaking and what was said as a way to search and navigate the Lifelog -- for example, this would make it possible to find all photos that correspond to times when Sue was speaking about "Internet." With a little more work we could link this to additional semantics and make it really searchable.

The Actual Situation in Madrid: Unsanitized News

Here is an article that accurately depicts the carnage in Madrid. In the USA we only get highly sanitized news and war coverage is usually very minimal -- but this article tells it like it really is. Perhaps if the public was shown what was war was really like there would be less of it?

Drinking Coffee Prevents Diabetes

One more reason to drink coffee -- a major study found that those who drank the most coffee had the lowest chance of getting diabetes.

Taming RSS

Tristan posted a nice article about better ways to manage RSS today (reproduced here with his exact wording, typos and all, since my policy is not to edit other people's words)...

2004 is obviously the year of RSS, with article popping up left and right in mainstream publications. However, RSS can also be a source of much stress, if you subscribe to too much.

A few weeks ago, my list of subscribed feeds went over 300. That was the beginning of a sobbering experiment. While it is technically possible to follow 300 siets via RSS, it's not for the faint-hearted. I've since been prunning the list a little as it became more and more time consuming to go through all the entries. While I felt like I must be failing somehow, Sebastien Paquet pointed out that the median number of subscriptions people have is under 100.

I suspect this is where the power laws actually become useful. Because some blogs are disproportionally read, they can be seen as flag-bearers in the blogosphere. Because they are so powerful, they can easily shape opinions in the blog world. And because they do so, one can limit the number of blogs they read in order to get an idea as to consensus among blogsters. This is great in that those powerful bloggers become editors of sorts.

There is, however, a problem with that. As recently reported in a Wired News story, the most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas. This means that the power laws succeed in a mainstreaming of ideas but fails in terms of coming up with new ones. This, unfortunately, means that there is a bit of a pack mentality among power bloggers which can only be counter-balanced by reading blogs that are not as popular.

But blogs represent only part of the RSS world. If one adds news sources from mainstream publications, one gets a fuller picture of a subject, mixing expert opinion (from the bloggers) which general overviews (from the media). From this mix, one can get a fuller picture. What we now need is a tool that would create something akin to a self-organizing system within the RSS world. Tools like Blogdex provide an idea as to what's popular right now; Tools like Feedster give search capabilities; and tools like Share your OPML provide data as to what people subscribe to.

The next step is finding a merger of those three categories, along with some better tracking mechanism as to what is actually read and what links are followed vs. what is subscribed to. If, based on the stuff I read (and not necessarily the stuff I subscribe to), I could get some changes in behavior in my aggregator (as in "the following articles in feeds you subscribe to are seen as important by other people who read similar stuff and are related to categories you are interested in"), I might be able to tame the flow of information I get. Think of it as the equivalent of the karma system on slashdot. This would give me an idea as to what is popular and of interest to me.

The next step would be to also provide a serendipity factor. Ideas that are out on their own should have their own basket. If a particular site is a good source of original content, then that source should move up in my personal ranking if I am subscribed to it.

Of course, the classification provided in RSS 2.0 and in OPML also needs to be considered as part of this. If there was a way to sort feeds by categories (and identify categories based on how people classified things in their OPML file), it would make things easier. For example, I classify some feeds in the Gear category but others might classify them in the Gadgets category. I should be able to then create an associate between those two words so that when I peruse someone's else feed, entries and blogs listed under Gadgets would pop up in my Gear section.

This seems like a lot to code but could truly give some semantic to the web. Already, the world wide web, as it was used pre-RSS is becoming an archival medium and RSS is becoming the updated world (as a side note, this is going to have a huge impact on web-side design and marketing as one has to rethink how to reach reader in a space where all entries look alike).

Read the original article here

An RSS Feed Tool I Would Like

It would be cool if there was a way to automatically make and serve an RSS feed from my daily IE history -- this feed would be a running stream of every URL I look at every day. It would be generated by a little floating utility on my desktop. The utility would allow me to turn URL streaming on and off -- so that if I don't want some URL to go into my feed I can stop that from happening. It might also enable me to add some commentary to each URL in the feed. You people out there in the Metaweb could then subscribe to my feed and see all the interesting stuff I looked at today. It would be even cooler if we all had something like this -- and each of us could view what any of us was viewing. And hey, while we're at it, why not have some compound feeds that are created by merging feeds from various people -- how about a feed that is the set of all URLs looked at today by all my closest friends -- where the rank of a URL in the feed is the number of times it was looked surfed to today by people in that group (i.e. the popularity of that URL). Cool huh?

A New Feature for Spamblockers that I Want

I am sitting here using my Earthlink Spamblocker feature -- which is a whitelist. I am manually adding in domains for companies that I will accept mail from. That is annoying. Why isn't there a way to instantly add in lists of companies and others that I want to whitelist? For example, I would like to be able to just whitelist "all venture capital firms" and "all members of W3C" etc... Why doesn't someone make a system for instantly whitelisting sets of domains and/or addresses for specific interests?

Blogging by the Numbers

Here are some good stats on the size of the blogosphere.

Patent Office Nullifies Eolas Plugin Patent!

Good news, and good riddance to Eolas. The USPTO has nullified the Eolas plugin patent. They have 60 days to appeal though. Hopefully they will give up or at least lose on appeal. This patent has created a world of problems for third-party software developers with plugins for IE -- and has given Microsoft extra firepower in blocking other technologies from their software.

From Application-Centric to Data-Centric Computing: The Metaweb

One of the big changes that will be enabled by the coming Metaweb is the shift from application-centric computing to data-centric computing. As the Metaweb evolves, information will be imbued with increasingly sophisticated metadata. HTML provides metadata about formatting and links. XML provides metadata about structure and behavior. RDF, RDFS and OWL provide metadata about relationships and meaning.

As higher levels of metadata are adopted and added to content, the content becomes "smarter" -- more information about how to display, use and interpret the content is added to the content itself. The key here is that this metadata is added in an application-independent manner. In other words, the "intelligence" for interpreting the data is moved out of applications and into the data itself. Thus we move from "smart applications, dumb data" to "smart applications, smart data."

A data-centric world will be very different from the application-centric world of today -- for one thing, application providers will lose much of their competitive advantages (from platform lock-in and closed formats) as data becomes increasingly portable across various tools. Another big change will be in how we think about content -- rather than content being thought of as static documents, every piece of content will be more like an object with its own unique identity and behaviors on the network.

Instead of moving data around we will access these semantic data objects using Web services protocols and interact with them from anywhere like mini-online services. To edit a document we might send commands to an object that represents the document on the network, rather than actually downloading and modifying a local file.

Ultimately this will bring about a shift from desktop computing to network computing -- software will truly become a service and the business model of software will shift to be more like online service business models -- based on subscriptions, a la carte pay-per-use features, and perhaps even advertising. Data objects will be accessible from everywhere and will be responsible for maintaining their own state, relationships and contents, as well as managing their own access, rights and usage policies. These are some of the changes that will come about as the Metaweb evolves.

Firestation Catches Fire...

A Florida fire station burst into flames while the firefighters were out..

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "fighting fire with fire" ...

Membership *Really* Has its Privelages...

Good news for American Express customers -- you can now use those extra points from your Membership Awards Program to fly to SPACE!!!!!. Full sub-orbital flight only costs a mere 20,000,000 points! That's NOTHING -- all you have to do is purchase a single skyscraper, or an F-18 fighter jet, or 2,000,000 movie tickets, and you've got yourself a ticket to space!

AOL Joins Social Networking Craze ... Using ICQ

AOL is entering the social networking fray by converting ICQ to a social networking tool. As I previously predicted social networking and IM are converging and this will give competitive advantages to companies with established IM user-bases. Here is the article.

Mystery Virus May Thwart HIV

Very interesting article about a strange new virus that seems to block HIV.

The Metaweb is Coming... See this Diagram...

This diagram (click to see larger version) illustrates why I believe technology evolution is moving towards what I call the Metaweb. The Metaweb is emerging from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web.

Desktop Personal Fusion

Evidence is mounting for the feasibility of desktop personal fusion. The technology is based on using ultrasound to generate and collapse explosive nanobubbles in a liquid, releasing light and heat. Temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reaches 10 million degrees.

One of World's Leading Insurers Warns of Global Warming Catastrophe

One of the World's leading insurers is warning that global warming is going to get dramatically worse and may result in economic losses equivalent to one World Trade Center disaster, annually. Read the article.

Calculating the ROI of K-Logs Versus Enterprise Portals

This is a fantastic article that calculates the ROI of "K-logs" -- Weblogs used for collaborative knowledge sharing in an enterprise -- versus traditional enterprise portals.

Neuromarketing and Memetic Attenuation

This article discusses new research in how the brain makes buying decisions and other choices -- what is now called "neuromarketing". Neuromarketing researchers seek to discover, and influence, the neurological forces at work inside the mind of potential customers. According to the article, most decisions are made subconsciously and are not necessarily rational at all - in fact they may be primarily governed by emotions and other more subtle cognitive factors such as identity and sense of self. For example, when studied under a functional MRI, the reward centers of brains of subjects who were given "The Pepsi Challenge" lit up when they tasted Pepsi, but Coke actually lit up the parts of the brain responsible for "sense of self" -- a much deeper response. In other words, the Coke brand is somehow connected to deeper neurological structures than Pepsi.

Neuromarketing is interesting -- it's actually something I've been thinking about on my own in an entirely different context. What I am interested in is the question of "What makes people decide that a given meme is 'hot'?" Each of us is immersed in a sea of memes -- we are literally bombarded with thousands or even millions of ideas, brands, products and other news every day -- But how do we decide which ones are "important," "cool," and "hot?" What causes the human brain to pick out certain of these memes at the expense of the others? In other words, how do we differentiate signal from noise, and how do we rank memetic signals in terms of their relative "importance?" Below I discuss some new ideas about how memes are perceived and ranked by the human brain.

Blogging Study Stats Released

The Internet and American Life Project found that between 2 and 7 percent of Americans have weblogs, and about 10 percent of them update their blogs regularly. 11 Percent of surfers reported visiting blogs. The study was a random telephone survey of 1,555 Internet users with a 3 percent margin of error.