jayokay.com - universal truths and uncommon sense

 From Times Online:

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Read the rest of the article here.

From Alternet:

Food Bills Getting You Down? Try Dumpster Diving

If you’re disgusted with our culture of waste, wasting resources, wasting money, then swallow your pride and start sifting through supermarket trash.

It’s dark outside, as it tends to be past midnight, and unseasonably warm but raining. Though it was my idea to be parked behind Trader Joe’s, scoping out the dumpster, I didn’t really want to come; I’m kind of lazy in general, and specifically nervous right now, and it’s so much easier to just make a list and go buy groceries in a sheltered, lighted shopping facility where you are guaranteed to both find what you want and avoid police harassment.

My nerdiness is showing: Before we get out of the car, I turn to my partner in crime and ask, “What’s the plan?”

Dan looks at me. I’ve heard about dumpster diving, and read about dumpster diving, but in conversations and articles that seemed to identify it as the pursuit of anarchists and gutter punks –nothing that served as a guide for upwardly mobile middle-class squares. A few weeks ago, though, some hippie Dan went to high school with mentioned she was going to Trader Joe’s to score for free the very same foodstuffs we paid good money for. It was just as good, just as edible and sanitarily packaged, and it didn’t cost $100 a week if it just came out of the trash, she said. We felt like suckers.

Complete article at Alternet.

There’s a lot of talk about boycotting the Olympics in Beijing this summer, and if this is news to you, just google “china tibet olympics”. Obviously I understand the calls for a boycott in principle, but in practice I think it would be a case of cutting off the head to spite the shoulders. By “the head” I mean the athletes. They work incredibly hard for this opportunity that comes once every four years, and it’s not exactly like they’re getting rich in the process.

Could a boycott actually stick it to China? Maybe a little. But it would have to be a major boycott led by the US, and the strain on China/US relations would certainly not be worth it. What about less powerful countries? I think this would just be screwing their athletes over with little effect on China. Everybody’s already pissed off about what’s going on in Tibet, but I don’t think bringing the Olympics into it is the thing to do. If the athletes want, they can boycott opening and closing ceremonies, and at the end they can walk out the door with their middle fingers in the air. Anna Battke, a German pole vaulter, is planning a protest despite the fact that political statements are prohibited at the games. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is 10 a special number? It’s everywhere, and I don’t think I have to justify the claim that 10 is a special number in our society. This is in no small part because it’s easy to work with. If you multiply a number by 10 you just add a ‘0′ on the end. This is because it’s the first two digit number.

Well why is it the first two digit number? Because we use 10 digits: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.

And why do we use 10 digits? Well, just look at your hands. We use 10 digits because we have 10 digits.

And that’s it. That’s why 10 is a special number to us. It’s natural to think that 10 is a special number in and of itself, or something that has some universal importance, but it really isn’t. It’s a product of our physiology. When we were writing in the dirt with sticks, developing our alphabet and our number system, we chose to write numbers in base 10. This is almost certainly because of the distinction between numbers that we can express with our hands and those that we can’t. Those that we can express with our hands are basic and those that we can’t are on another level of complexity. For a number higher than 10, think about how we can express it by flashing fingers a number of times. For example, 1864 can be expressed by flashing 1 finger, flashing 8 fingers, flashing 6 fingers, then flashing 4 fingers. That’s 4 flashes for a 4 digit number. We can use this system to express any k digit number with k flashes. (Note that for simplicity I’m glossing over some details here, like expressing boundary cases like 100 or 10000, and how to flash 0 fingers. The digit 0 has an illustrious history of its own which I will completely ignore here.)

Now, my aim is not to blather on about numeral systems. It’s simply to open a few eyes to the fact that, apart from its relationship with our hands, the number 10 isn’t all that special. When considered outside the context of human existence, 10 is just the product of two prime numbers, 2 and 5. And I know you looked at that sweet digit 5 and you like that one too, almost as much as you like the number 10. But apart from the fact that you have 5 digits per hand and, more importantly, you see 5 everywhere (probably on money and in prices more than anywhere else), the number 5 really isn’t anything special. Well, it’s more special than 7 I guess, but less special than 3.

The way we look at numbers is proprietary, not universal. If we encountered a race of intelligent extraterrestrials they would almost certainly not use a decimal (base 10) numeral system unless they, too, had 10 little appendages that they used for counting when they were developing their system. If they had 8 instead of 10, they would probably use an octal numeral system in which numbers are multiplied by 8, not 10, when you add a ‘0′ on the end.

Alberta has oil! Hooray! Free money! But wait a sec, instead of tearing it out of the ground as fast as possible and writing (another) check for every Albertan, maybe we should think about this. Here are some reasons why Alberta should slow down. Obviously we should all stop consuming oil so companies can stop producing it and profiting from destructive practices, but this is a more pragmatic view.

1. Environmental Impact

The faster people try to take the oil out of the ground, the more of a mess they’ll make in the process and the faster they’ll make said mess.
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Do you know what the difference between atheism and agnosticism is? It’s pretty simple. Atheists say, “There is no god,” while agnostics say, “I don’t know it there’s a god.” A simple look at the etymology of the two words can help. Atheist is basically Greek for ‘having no god’. Agnostic is basically Greek for ‘having no knowledge’.

Atheism has become the default ‘religion’ for people who don’t believe in Jehovah, Vishnu, Allah, Waheguru, baby Jesus, Santa Claus, or Xenu, and I can definitely see where they’re coming from. It’s pretty easy to step a little too far and say, “These religions are preposterous fairy tales. Clearly they are all wrong and there is no god.” But remember, the opposite of something wrong is not always right.

I see atheism as something reactionary, whereas agnosticism is born out of true critical thought. Socrates once said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” This is the tenet upon which agnosticism is built. The fact is that our ignorance is a universe unto itself, and it takes a good deal of critical though to understand this.

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I hear a lot of people say that Wikipedia is a disreputable source of information because anyone can edit articles. Most of these people who distrust Wikipedia do so because an equally uninformed friend told them they should. Yes, vandalism on Wikipedia is a problem, but is not a major problem like some alarmists would have you believe.

The truth is that Wikipedia is a masterpiece of collaborative work and knowledge. Almost all articles are written by experts. It contains an incredible amount of information in an easily accessible and traversable format. It is free knowledge. It is a triumph of truth over profiteering and is a vanguard of positive change in the information revolution.

If 1% of Wikipedia contributors are vandals the other 99% are the good people who share knowledge and fix mistakes. Most contributors are just know-it-all nerds who want to share their knowledge with other people and make the world a better-informed place. I should know, I’m one of them. Mistakes and vandalism are fixed promptly as broken windows are in any decent area of town, because Wikipedia isn’t a slum — it’s a university.

In related news, the information revolution is underway. Videos about the evolving nature of information after the jump:

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I love avocados. I get them for about 75c each and they’re healthy and delicious. I use my unbelievably fast and simple avocado recipe when I want a rich and satisfying snack without harming my body and self-respect with potato chips or cookies.

All you need is an avocado, salt, and lime juice. Cut the avocado in half and remove the seed. See the little divot in each half where the seed was? Squirt some lime juice in there. Now add salt to taste and you’re ready to eat it right out of the skin with a spoon. You can help the lime juice mix with the avocado by making a criss-cross of cuts in the avocado flesh. A little flavor irrigation system.

I like to have a couple of avocados ripening in the fruit bowl. Then, when the time is right, I strike. All the savory satisfaction from saturated fats with none of the heart disease, pudgy belly, or self-loathing.

According to our primitive senses, we live in a 4-dimensional world. Three of these are spatial dimensions — if we look at a cardboard box, or a desk, or a fridge, we can see that it has height, depth, and width. The fourth dimension that we perceive is time, and it’s no small feat to truly get that time is a dimension just like height, depth, and width.

Now imagine somebody who just couldn’t comprehend that there are more than two dimensions (if it makes it more plausible, let’s say this person has no depth perception and cannot move their head in any way). They argue, “I can see left and right, that’s the first dimension, and I can see up and down, that’s the second dimension.” You try to explain the concept of depth, and they don’t understand. You try to explain the concept of time as a dimension, and they really don’t understand. Don’t even start about relativity theory because you don’t even understand that, so how on earth could they? They see life in this world like we see a photograph. Unchanging. Flat. An accurate but unliving, unenlightened representation.

But we’re not so enlightened ourselves, seeing the world in all its four-dimensional grandeur. Our prophets (physicists) have spoken with god (the universe) and apparently there are likely between 10 and 26 dimensions. Life as we know it is a flat representation of reality. A photograph. An unliving snapshot. We live in this universe and we cannot even begin to fathom the lush and vivid truth.

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