It's a small (very small) world

Nanotechnology is developing at a pace that makes many sci-fi scenarios outdated almost daily. This time, I'd like to report about tools and light.

Carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong. They can resist to pressures as high as 40 gigapascals (ca. a tenth of the one at the center of the Earth). They have now been used to create metalworking tools (nanoscale jigs or extruders, see picture on the right). This could become an alternative way to manipulatating structures at the nanoscale. You could build them as you build a table. (Science, "Carbon Nanotubes as High-Pressure Cylinders and Nanoextruders" Vol. 312, No. 5777, pages 1199 - 1202).

So, fancy building a nanoship in a nanobottle?

Well, if your objection to the exercise is that it is too dark down there for anyone to appreciate your work of art, it's time to cheer up. It is now possible to grow glowing nanowires to light up the nanoworld. Nanowires made of semiconductor materials can now be used to build prototype lasers and light-emitting diodes with emission apertures roughly 100 nm in diameter. The wires are generally between 30 and 500 nanometers (nm) in diameter and up to 12 micrometers long (see picture on the right). When excited with a laser or electric current, the wires emit an intense glow in the ultraviolet or visible parts of the spectrum, depending on the alloy composition. (J.B. Schlager, N.A. Sanford, K.A. Bertness, J.M. Barker, A. Roshko and P.T. Blanchard. 2006. Polarization-resolved photoluminescence study of individual GaN nanowires grown by catalyst-free MBE. Applied Physics Letters. May 22. K.A. Bertness, N.A. Sanford, J.M. Barker, J.B. Schlager, A. Roshko, A.V. Davydov and I. Levin. 2006. Catalyst-Free Growth of GaN Nanowires. Journal of Electronic Materials 35, 576. April).

Seeing viruses

25 years ago, the first case of AIDS was diagnosed. Now, groundbreaking research (just published in the online edition of Nature, click on the title) by scientists at Florida State University has produced remarkable three-dimensional images of the virus and the protein spikes on its surface that allow it to bind and fuse with human immune cells.

Courtesy of the usual, pervasive and omnipresent digital technology, the picture you see here is not a drawing but the first, detailed, macroscopic image of the virus and its viral spikes.

The images were produced using cryoelectron microscopy tomography. This generates three-dimensional images similar to those from a CAT scan, but at the level of viruses and molecules rather than tissues and organs.

Seeing the structure of the virus, even if through our digital lenses, will give us a much clearer idea of the pathogen's complex molecular surface architecture that facilitates the infection process. It's like shooting at a target in full light.

As Professor Kenneth Roux (principal investigator of the FSU team) said: "Until now, despite intensive study by many laboratories, the design details of the spikes and their distribution pattern on the surface of the virus membrane have been poorly understood, which has limited our understanding of how the virus infection actually occurs and frustrated efforts to create vaccines"

You may listen to a Nature podcast featuring Prof. Roux

Informational Faithfulness and Loyalty

First piece of news.
A survey by Nielsen NetRatings for The Independent on Sunday indicates that Britain is the fastest growing market for the Internet adult pornography business:

• more than nine million men (almost 40% of Britain's male population) used pornographic websites in 2005 compared with an estimated two million in 2000
• one in four adults, including 1.6 million women, download porn images each month
• one in four men aged 25 to 49 (2.5 million) have visited an adult website in the last month (April) alone
• some 1.5 million women used Internet pornography in the last 12 months, up from one million in the previous year.
• men and women spent an average 40 minutes each month looking at pornographic websites while half of all couples watched pornography on the Internet together.
• more than half of all children (60% or seven million) have come across pornography on the Internet while looking for something else.
  
• the British porn industry is now estimated to be worth about one billion pounds (1.45 billion euros, 1.85 billion dollars).
  
• British web users look up the word "porn" more than any other on search engines.
  

Is one unfaithful to one's partner or spouse if one downloads XXX information and, the reasonable assumption is, has standalone sex? I grew up as a catholic. So I was taught that one could sin "in pensieri, parole, opere e omissioni", in thoughts, words, deeds and omissions. My catholic years are over, but I still have those quick-and-clean guidelines in mind. So, apparently, have other people, as it were. How would you react if you discovered that your sweetheart spent a substantial amount of time watching XXX? According to the survey, many women react in exactly the same way as if they had discovered their partner were having an affair. It seems reasonable, to be honest. One is supposed not to betray one's partner, not even with oneself or one's fantasies. It seems that faithfulness is not just a matter of physical intercourse.

Second piece of news.
The International Press Institute (IPI) is holding its 2006 World Congress in Edinburgh these days. The topic: long-term challenges and opportunities brought about by the new media age, the rise of the Internet, the technological changes in the press business, and the bloggization of information. An example many of us in the UK witnessed: pictures of the London bombing came from passengers' mobiles, not from professional reporters.
Pointlessly and boringly, some people warn that the web is going to reshape their industry. Thank you very much. It is far more interesting to ask who will edit and aggregate the news (who is the editor of the TV news one is watching? Why that particular syntax? It makes a big difference to talk about x and then y, instead of y and then x; etc.) and who will investigate the story. Mary may take a picture and John may recount his experience, but it is up to the journalist to gather the information, check its reliability and uncover the unsaid or the hidden. It's a tough job, it requires outstanding skills, and it involves long times. Readers may no longer be loyal to their daily Tabloids. It's about time. I'm always amazed by the Gargantuan capacity, of a vast chunk of the population, to swallow so much pointless rubbish. But they could become faithful to reporters who do their job well. In the process, weekly and monthly may become informationally priceless for their added analyses. For anything else there is Web News.

Human machines

This is a brilliant advertising by the German company Jobsintown, a job finder website.

These creative posters should be placed in any university cafeteria.

The message? Let machines deal with things and money. Humans are the only semantic engines we know of in the whole universe.

We are far more suited for jobs that require intelligence, understanding, insights, inspirations.

Technology should be liberating. A way to gain time to think.

After all, if we do not practice this rare art, who will?

Brain Machine Interalliance

TOKYO, Japan, May 24, 2006 "Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International ("ATR") and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. ("HRI") have collaboratively developed a new "Brain Machine Interface" ("BMI") for manipulating robots using brain activity signals. This new BMI technology has enabled the decoding of natural brain activity and the use of the extracted data for the near real-time operation of a robot without an invasive incision of the head and brain. This breakthrough facilitates greater possibilities for new types of interface between machines and the human brain.

An interface is as much a threshold between two realities as a channel of communication. If we had an interface with hell (any hell, Dachau would do, no need to think of the Sistine Chapel) we would behave very differently. It is because we have interfaces with computers that we behave accordingly. Two years ago, I was using a very unstable OS (how did you guess it was Windows?). I was forced to save regularly the files I was working on for fear of loosing them. So I developed an irreflective "CTRL+S" habit. One day, I was, very unusually, writing a letter with pen and paper. Irrespectively, I caught myself going "CTRL+S" on the keyboard next to my left hand, after the usual lapse of a few minutes. I was trying to save my ink on paper.
Had I been using some fancy version of the already available BMI by Honda (click on the title) I would not have noticed the absurdity of the operation. My mental state "save what you've written now" would have made the technology (the computer, the pen, the you-name-it) follow suit. After all, it would be easy to replace "paper" "rock" "scissors" with "write" "paste" and "cut".
There is something puzzling and conceptually unsettling (I did not write upsetting on purpose) in the new bio-mechanical alliance brought about by BMI. It makes telekynesis look boldy visionary rather than downright nutty. It opens a bypass between ourselves, our minds, intentions or volitions, and the world that, oddly enough, we can affect without using our external body. BMI externalises our internal efforts to capture something, move an object, change a channel, browse a page. I may be embedded in an environment without (having the overwhelming impression of) being embodied. It is because we live in a Newtonian/Euclidean environment that we need and have developed the body we have. But if the world were fully reactive to our commands, we could dispose of this shell, and the disembodied ghost in it would be sufficient. So one suggestion, which might be nutty rather than bold is: should we not emigrate one day to a world in which the body does not count and meet there all our friends whose bodies do not work as well they should out here? BMI is used to make someone interact IRL (in real life), as they say, but maybe we should use it to disembody ourselves and redefine both "real" and "life".

Manchenwiler Workshop on Information Theories

On the 17th and the 18th of May I had the great pleasure to participate to the international workshop organised by Giovanni Sommaruga & Jarg Kohlas of the Theoretical Computer Science Research Group of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. It was what a "meeting of true minds" should be: interesting, stimulating, informative, challenging, well-organised, friendly and culturally attractive. The place choosen was the beautiful Schloss Manchenwiler.

All papers (you can read the presentations by clicking on the title of this blog) were of high quality and most interesting if, sometime, a bit difficult. Personally, the talks on information algebras would already have been worth the trip, and there was all the rest in the menu! It was great. I recommend at least a brief look at the work done on the topic by Kohlas' research group to anyone interested in information theory and in the philosophy of information. And I look forward to a philosopher-friendly version of it that they said they are working on. Until then, you may click here for a nice presentation.

Sometime it makes a lot of sense to travel and talk to each others.

Who needs a $100 laptop?

Click on the picture. See the boy on the right, smiling, the one with all his teeth? He looks so Brazilian.

I go to Brazil almost every year, sometime twice. My wife, a neuroscientist in Oxford, is from Rio (yes, sometime even Hollywood gets it right: there is a gorgeous Brazilian top-scientist in Oxford). We have been involved with kids from orphanages. It is not fun. The kids in the street live on nothing. They collect cans, plastic bottles, tourists' wallets, coconuts, your towel if you are swimming. Most of them cannot read or write. They are smart, in the usual street (sorry, it's Rio) beach way. They can trick anyone, they fight, they know and often handle guns, they survive, they are loyal to the group. Jorge Amado's Captains of the Sand (1988) is still a reliable picture of their lives, hopes and fears. You only need to add more violence, drugs (especially cheap ones, like glue) and weapons of all sorts. We are talking about kids between five and fifteeen.

When you are there, say in Copacabana, you do not give them money, because you do not know what it will be used for, or by whom. But you can buy them food. One day, I ordered a hotdog for one of them. He was hungry in a way I don't think I've ever experienced. It's hunger that not only lacks food, but that fears there might never be food. He waited for the other friends. And when the hotdog was ready, he had it cut into three pieces. It took a second to disappear, while they were running away, noisy and cheerful, under the sun and the blue sky.

Here in Oxford, under gray and rainy clouds, I wonder: do they need a laptop? What Rio would look like, with thousands of cheap computers given away with public money to kids who haven't even got shoes on?

If you think I'm being pointlessly pathetic, there are two alternatives. You may fly to Rio. Or perhaps you may read what the Copenhagen Consensus has to say about spending public money effectively. Free cheap laptops are not in the list.

PS
In the FAQ one can read that "The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most [sic] everything except store huge amounts of data."
Most everything. I guess "almost" was the intended word, but that most everything is what promoted this blog. Most. Not all. Not almost. Not quite. Not at all.

The Last Stand of an Utopian View: Net Neutrality

"[IN the US] Both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation are expected to review Net neutrality-related bills later this week."

In many countries (the UK is an exception) museums are not free: people pay to enjoy their culture. In many countries (the UK, again, is largely an exception), drivers pay tolls to use motorways. Sometime they can choose longer and slower but free routes instead, sometime they just have no alternative. In every country, people pay different rates for different postal services and for different flight routes. So why the Internet, whether you compare it to a motorway, to a museum, to ordinary mail or to aerial transports, should not be subject to the same usage-related rule? Users (read: companies) should be able to choose among ordinary (slower) and premium (faster) delivery services. What's wrong with this? Well, several things.

Many of the social and economic counter-arguments are rather well summarized in this article from the usual wikipedia, so I won't dwell on them here. Let me add just some further considerations.

First of all, it is not clear at all that the other services mentioned above are fairly priced. Does it really make sense to charge people for the usage of museums? If not, the same holds true for the net.
Second, the strength of some arguments may depend on which analogy one uses. People do not have access to faster or slower conversation over the telephone, for example. And they usually don't have to pay to access public libraries. Why should the net be any different?
Third, when one pays a toll on the motorway, whether the journey is speedy and comfortable is up to the driver and its vehicle, not the amount of money paid to enter the road. Likewise, how fast you download a file from the web or send an email may depend only on your IT, including the network you're using, not on a special fee you may be paying to buy a place in a fast-lane. Bandwidth and other technological limits are not in question, in "net neutrality" the central issue is the degree of latency controlled by a fee.
Finally, latency is a "bug" not a "feature" of the net, so any legislation that invites its economic exploitation runs the risks of tempting people to increase it rather than fighting. Consider the simple equation: more latency = more demand for faster services. Is it reasonable to expect that those in charge of the net will make much effort to improve it when the can profit from its slowness?

The global empire

"Though tourists know Xian for its army of terracotta warriors, the capital of Shaanxi province is quietly becoming one of China's most modern cities. Xian is the birthplace of the nation's space programme, its aircraft-construction hub and home to one of China's biggest technology parks—a 35-square-kilometre Chinese Silicon Valley housing 7,500 companies and supported by more than 100 universities that churn out 120,000 graduates a year, half in computer sciences alone. And that is just the start. The Xian High-Tech Industries Development Zone will eventually span 90 square kilometres at a cost of 100 billion yuan ($12 billion), says Jing Junhai, its director. " (The Economist, Special report - Outsourcing to China, Watch out, India May 4th 2006)

3006, which empire is dominating? What language are we speaking? And which currency are we using? Smart money is on China, but not on Chinese, nor on yuans. In 3006, globalization has created the first empire that does not own the language and the currency that make the world tick. Of course, in 3006, we have re-interpreted human history as a long development from the old Chinese empire to the new one. In between, Rome, London and Washington are seen as empire-bridges. Bruxelles never made it to the top list and has long been forgotten. The Middle-East is not a problem, because under its sand there is now only more sand. In the global empire, educated people are all bilingual, but, for the first time in history, this is an "eccentric" bilingualism. There are those who speak their vernacular dialects (say French) and an international version of English (call it Inghlish); and there are others who can speak Inglish and some version of Chinese (call it Mindarin). But Mindarin is not, contrary to Latin and English, the language used to rule, although it is the rulers' language. In 3006, you don't have to speak Mindarin to belong to the elite. You may still be part of the ruling class or of the intelligentsia by speaking Inglish. And you don't pay in any country's currency, but in deys (dollar-euro-yuans). Deys are controlled by the World Bank. Most of the added value in the world is generated by people living in a country which does not control the world's currency. The real empire, in 3006, is not China, but a horizontal class that speaks Inglish, pays with credit cards in deys, has no real location but occupies key places. Are we there yet?

Jane Austen and Alexandre Dumas as philosophers of information?

If you have watched The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), directed by Kevin Reynolds, and the more recent Pride and Prejudice (2005), directed by Joe Wright, you may have noticed that both revisit a classic in terms that are essentially informational.
Communication and the managements of information is what drives the plot, and what determines feelings and passions, actions and interactions.

Start with Dumas. Reynolds directs a film in which the whole plot is geared around the exchange of misinformation (Edmond Dantes [a sailor who then becomes the Count of Monte Cristo] is falsely accused of treason by his best friend Fernand through a letter), the acquisition of information by Dantes (not only cultural but also financial, through a "privileged" access to an excellent source, the Abbe' Faria) and Dantes' merciless use of his newly-acquired information to take revenge.
This exchange is the key to the film: "[Abbe' Faria] In return for your help, I offer you something priceless. [Edmond] My freedom? [Abbe' Faria] No, freedom can be taken away, as you well know. I offer you my knowledge."
If you compare this film to previous versions you will notice that drama, passions, intrigue, actions and adventures are all more prominent there than information, which plays a key role in Reynolds' reading of this classic. The part on the manipulation of information about the stock exchange, for example, betrays a post information-turn mind.

Watch now Austen's masterpiece. Of the recent films based on her novels (Emma, Sense and Sensibility) this is probably the least lightly-touched. There is a serious attempt at grasping some timeless human traits and the always-hard business of human relations. The entertaining, eye-pleasing, heart-warming aspects are not central. But in order to make the film "thick", Wright seems to be inclined to transform it into a sort of Gricean experiment, showing what happens when the exchange of information is hindered by wrong evaluations, lies, retinence, broken channels of communication, and misunderstandings. This is Jane Austen, so in the end all Gricean parameters are restored, but one can easily imagine how things might become tragic at every turn of the story.

Classics are open texts. They allow for a boundless number of interesting interpretations and have the unique, indexical capacity of being ethernally contemporary. So it's normal, to be expected and indeed intriguing to see Austen and Dumas nowadays read in terms of communication and information. The key seems to be the level of awarenesss that we may be able to exercise towards our roles as information agents when we start reading anything in terms of information. Of this, there seems to be a one-dimensional lack. It is the inevitable destiny of anyone who lives the Zeitgeist unreflectively.

Should Blu-ray Disc be called Red-ray instead?

Of the three oldest professions practiced since we moved from the sunny top of a tree to the darkness of a cave, two have always had a fundamental impact on the development of IT.

No, not philosophy. Unfortunately, thinkers tend to be rather luddistic, for reasons that go back to a disgraceful divorce between Sophia and Techne. I'm talking about prostitutes and generals.
We all know about Turing's job and ARPANET. These are clear, if sheer-lucky, proofs that not all money spent by the army is entirely wasted and harmful. Generals have pushed the development of IT at the rate of billions of dollars of investment.
We sometime forget, however, that the pornography industry, which generates an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide, is a major drive in the choice of standards. The Internet started as a defence system, had an infancy as a scientific tool, but it also developed as a means of mass masturbation. It happen already with the development of printed illustrations and then photography, cinema, television. Later, we know that the P industry determined the battle between the VHS vs. Beta standards. By opting for the VHS standard, it contributed to the defeat of the Beta one (according to many, technically a better standard). Unsurprisingly, still the P industry is probably going to determine the winner between Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD.
Sony, with its PlayStation 3 (PS3) box, due out in November, supports Blue-ray. PS3 will soon be everywhere, thus guaranteeing a foot in the living room. So the P industry is joining Sony, and it will probably tilt the balance. Next time you play with a PS3, you may pause a moment to think what the P stands for.

Skype me up Scotty

According to Skype, there are 100 million registered users, with another 200,000 signing up every day. Very likely, you are among them.
Version 2.5, (beta) just recently released (Windows-only; users of Skype's Mac and Linux clients will have to wait) is more than a mere upgrade. I cut and paste:
"Easier international dialing to landlines and cell phones (you tell Skype what country you're calling, rather than having to remember country codes).
Easier payment (from within the software) for Skype's various fee-based services.
Sharing of contact groups (sounds handy for coworkers, friends, or family who have mutual contacts).
The ability to send SMS messages from within Skype.
Support for viewing and calling Outlook contacts within Skype."
The conceptual question, however, is another: why Ebay ever decided to buy Skype? Valuable investment only? Or is there a more interesting strategy/vision behind? Ebay deals with things, though only as a service that puts offers and demands in touch. Skype deals with words, whether written or spoken. If words could dominate over things (see ABRACADABRA in the previous post) then it would make sense to try to get hold of Skype as a privileged entry into a market of potential buyers and sellers. Did Ebay had in mind this priority of semantics over physics? Hard to know, but one thing is clear: it will be very interesting to see how the marriage develops.

What makes a country better than another for your life?

We know that ranking countries on the basis of the information provided by their GNP is not satisfactory. There are so many other measures of well-being and quality of life. But what we are often offered as alternatives are only partly satisfactory as well, for they seem to be based on people's self-assessment of how happy and satisfied they are with their lives and conditions at that moment in that place. This may mirror cultural attitudes as well as real levels of well-being or, more often a bias in the choice of the "right" sort of population being modeled. So I'd like to propose an alternative test. People should be asked the following question: with the exclusion of your own country, rank countries of preference (here one provides the list) according to where you would like to live if you were (choose your ordering):

- a child from a very poor background
- a very poor adult
- an adult without health insurance
- a completely uneducated adult
- a member of a different community
- a lay adult (not religious at all: agnostic, atheist, indifferent)
- a drug addicted
- a woman
- a homosexual
- a vegetarian/vegan
- a animal rights supporter
- a prostitute
- someone affected with AIDS
- someone affected by a chronic disease
- homeless
- a pacifist
- old and in need of constant care but without a family
- convicted (whether justly or unjustly) for murder
- convicted (whether justly or unjustly) of terrorist acts
- a prisoner
- a handicapped
- someone mentally ill
- a scientist
- a philosopher

My bet? People would like to live somewhere in the EU.

If you see it and manipulate it then you really understand it

Visual thinking has been around since the Greeks' passion for eidos (idea). But of course computers have transformed it into an art, whose dynamic simulations and graphic representations of concepts and abstract entities is orders of magnitude more effective and impressive than anything done in the past. This website, for example, offers some remarkable pictures that visualise prime numbers and their beautiful patterns.

If you find the topic interesting, then I may recommend Modelling Reality - How Computers Mirror Life. It is a very well-written, interesting and accessible text on how computers have transformed our way of dealing with the world of information, including cellular automata, Shannon's measure of information, deterministic chaos, fractals, game theory, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and of course Turing machines. It comes with a CD full of applications that actually allow you to experiment and see the processes and theories discussed.

And if you share my fascination with computational modelling, then you cannot miss The Philosophical Computer. The book presents a series of exploratory essays on how computational modelling can help to tackle a variety of issues in philosophy and in philosophical logic, including self-reference, fuzzy logic, epistemic chaos, and cellular automata in game theory, dealing with generosity, possible causes and cures for discrimination, and the formal undecidability of patterns of social and biological interaction. The book comes with a CD containing and the source code of all major programs to facilitate further research.

Mastering nature's information: the blue rose

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of information:

a) information about reality, like a train timetable, or what you tell a friend regarding last night dinner party;
b) information for reality, like recipes and algorithms; and
c) information as reality, like the pattern of rings in the trunk of a tree, or one's fingerprints.
If you can access a key piece of information as reality which is also information for reality, like the DNA of an organism, then you can modify its outcome and, magically, modify that piece of reality. "Magically" because magic spells try to do exactly that: they use words (semantic information about reality) to change (hopefully but unsuccessfully) the corresponding piece of reality. ABRACADABRA, if it were code instead of gibberish, would work like GATTACA (meaning).

All this to explain that the truly (mind the faked, pale, or "coloured") blue rose by Florigene is part of the informational revolution. If you read some relevant articles (see below) you will see that the colour of the rose (read: information) has been made possible by the engineering (read: informational) manipulation of genetic features (read: information). Genetic engineering is becoming more and more a matter of code designing. The difference is only that the code is "alive".

"Australian and Japanese researchers have demonstrated the application of RNAi (gene silencing) technology for gene replacement in plants, developing the first blue rose in the world. Till date, breeders have attempted to make true blue roses over many years, but none have successfully bred roses with blue pigment."
"World's first blue rose developed", May 10, 2005, BioSpectrum

"Roses are blue - Scientists Genetically Engineer the Impossible" November 30, 2004, Trends in Japan

"Breeders have attempted to make true blue roses over many years, but none have successfully bred roses with blue pigment. In its first commercial application in plants, the CSIRO-developed RNAi technology was used to remove the gene encoding the enzyme dihydroflavonol reductase (DFR) in roses. A truly blue rose has been the Holy Grail of rose breeders since 1840, when the horticultural societies of Britain and Belgium offered a prize of 500,000 francs to the first person to produce a blue rose." Link

"A truly blue rose has been the Holy Grail of rose breeders since 1840, when the horticultural societies of Britain and Belgium offered a prize of 500,000 francs to the first person to produce a blue rose. Molecular geneticists with Florigene and Suntory achieved the prize that had long eluded conventional rose breeders by combining something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue." Biology News

From the Windmill to the Quantum Computer

Are we getting close to the first quantum computer (QC)? Maybe. The theory on paper is clear and rather straightfoward, but the technological implementations are fearsome. The following (between //) is a summary from a nice article just published in The Economist (4 May 2006):

//What distinguishes a QC from a classic (Newtonian) computer on you desk is the number of calculations it can do in parallel. Both QCs and NCs use binary arithmetic, but a NC employs bits which can be in only one state at at any given time. QCs, on the other hand, use qubits, which can be in more than one state simultaneously (superposition). So every time you add a qubit, the process scales geometrically. A QC with two qubits could run four calculations in parallel. A 1,000-qubit device could process more simultaneous calculations than there are particles in the observable universe. So far, only small-scale devices have been demonstrated, and many of these need to be kept in strictly defined conditions. One reason for this sensitivity is that qubits can maintain their quantum superposition only if they do not interact with other objects. And this is really hard to achive.//

The article continues illustrating four available alternatives, none of which is yet an obvious winner over the others. What I find intriguing is the fact that, sooner or later, we will be told that the mind is a QC. It happen with windmills (Leibniz) with the old PC (the Newtonian computer), with Neural Networks... surely QCs are fancy and high-tech enugh to be the next analogy in line. So, if you wish to anticipate history, try to think of an even more futuristic metaphor now, and you'll qualify as a visionary. What about the mind being a "society of QCs"?

Paradisiac information

When it comes to cataloguing paradises, there seems to be two main categories, the information-rich and the information-poor.

Information-poor paradises are based on as little interaction as possible, which usually means being present somewhere, mainly watching, at most listening. The closer one is to the source of light and sound the better. Dante has roughly this in mind when he describes his Paradise. It's the ultimate TV experience.

Information-rich paradises are made of more than light and sound. Touch, smell and taste are at least equally important, and interactions, often of a rather erotic nature, may be involved. The Garden of Eden must have had paradisiac smells, not just marvelous colours and shapes. And of course, in other paradises, dancing virgins, fresh water, tasty honey or ambrosia sound like a real bonus.

So one way of looking at the development of interfaces and virtual realities is in terms of how well they can pass the paradise test. So far, they can provide sights and sounds that are Turing-indistinghuishable from those available in information-poor paradises. Tastes and touches still escape our technology. But smells seem to be getting more and more "doable" and certainly identifiable.

If one day our technology will pass the information-rich paradise test, Nozick's tought experiment will become an empirical problem. That day, I bet humanity will plug in the experience machine for good, unless someone decides to spoilt the the fun.

Too much travelling...

Who is more representative these days, Socrates and Kant, who hardly ever left their Athens and Koeningsberg, or Wittgenstein, who seemed to be unable to live in the same place for too long? Cheap airlines, a more international community, a de-Europeization of philosophy... all factors that have made us academics with this strange job (philosophy) travel around too frequently, for too short times. Three days in Pescara (Italian Philosophical Association annual meeting), a weekend in Guarcino, three days in Salerno for two talks, then Bari for some further work, then Oxford, then Freiburg, then ALife in Bloomington, then ECAP in Norway, then Chicago, then...

Better learn to reflect while churning miles (a bit like having one's best thoughts while shaving) or start saying more nos than yes.

Firefox 1.5.0.3

Firefox 1.5.0.3 now available (click on the title above). If you are running Firefox 1.5 you should receive the upgrade automatically. If you are not running Firefox, my suggestion is to start as son as you can. The upgrade fixes an important security problem.

And for those web sites that (like MS own) can be surfed only by using IE, there is a nice, free Firefox extension that let's you work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer by embedding it in tabs of Firefox, so you do not need to open IE anymore. IE Tab for Firefox is the extension that helps you quit IE-ing, download it from here.

Escher's Worlds and Impossible Worlds

This reminds me of a current debate, which involves modal logic, semantics and ontology. Are there impossible worlds (BTW: no such entry in Wikipedia as of today)? Worlds in which, for example, you can prove that Goedel was wrong, that the Halting problem is solvable, that the circle can be squared, that unicorns have and do not have four legs in the same sense of the expression and at the same time. If the answer is yes, is there more than one impossible worlds? (Compare: empty sets are possible, but they actually "collapse" into only one, The empty set = {}).

My inclination is to suspect that the idea behind the possibility of impossible worlds (something you need for some other theoretical needs in semantics) is mistaken and if a theory needs them, this is a bad sign for the theory (if P implies Q and Q is false than P is false; a classic reductio). There are none, or it would make little sense to deny anything at all and the universe would be a very crowded place indeed.

Impossible worlds are possible, mistaken, informational states. "Possible" qualifies "state", "mistaken" qualifies "informational" i.e. the fact that the agent in question believes that there is a world in which 2 + 2 is both equal and not equal to 4. But mistaken information is not information, is misinformation (a false policeman is not a kind of policeman, is not a policeman at all). So impossible worlds are possible misinformed-states. You may think you see them, but they are really a trick. There is no Escher's Belvedere.

Your typo$ are worth money

Wat's wrong wit tis blog? Noting, you are still able to read it, despite the absence of "hs". But of course, if you wish to book a Hotel, you won't find it under "otel". Typos and misspellings. Nightmares for anyone who needs to use a written language that, to an Italian, just makes so little sense, when it comes to a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and signs. Italian is read as it is written, but in English you can never tell how the surname of anyone will appear on paper, or indeed how that name on paper may sound. So?

So, there is money in it, and quite a lot. Ever thought about all those mistyped or misspelled items on ebay that nobody buys and that you could get for a penny? Visit TypoTracker, it will help you to search for them and get a better bargain.

And what about misspelled/mistyped urls that lead nowhere? Google, as usual, is there already, placing advertisements that pop up when you look for things like www.compani.com instead of www.company.com. Not nice, is it? But not evil either. According to a recent article, the business is worth more than 1 million dollars. Yours typos and misspelled words are definitely not just your business.