The Bewilderness

The connecting of things is a forthcoming matter

Wi-fi was not taken up universally due to conflicts over standards. This impeded the gradual adoption of the technology. Such a history has provided strong incentives for the industry to agree universal standards to enhance its adoption. New speeds of 1gps and 7gps hold the promise of video streaming and direct communication between all enabled devices.

It is a stepping stone on the way to augmented reality and the 'net of things. Becoming more visible from next year.

Quote of the day

Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.

A comment on our politics....

World of sensors

What will RFID mean? Is it a wave of machine to machine communication, though this is discounted as too expensive, especially in the short-term. The alternative is machine to object communication, according to Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal: 

The costs associated with requiring machine devices to actively transmit data about their status back to another machine (power, broadcast, etc.) will likely limit the deployment of that type of communication to contexts where fluctuations in data are extremely valuable in-and-of themselves. Using low-cost transponders to passively monitor changes in the status of objects will become far more common and important, Roberti argues.

This is all part of the internet of things, though on this plan, we will live in a world of sensors.

Even dinosaurs need second brains...

The US Defence Department, looking at the world around itself, has joined the dance of numerical iteration (in computer parlance: the upgrade) and is looking towards more open architectures so that it is not beholden to particular providers, like Lockheed. Nothing like good old-fashioned competition to reduce expenditure, and upgrade platforms.

In 2008, then-Pentagon acquisition chief John Young put the total cost of developing and installing Increment 3.1 and what became 3.2A and 3.2B at around $8 billion. The figure has likely gone up because the Air Force now plans to upgrade more F-22s.

Once the new architecture is installed, "if we want a new capability on the airplane, we can go out to industry with an RfI [request for information] and say, 'You all got good ideas; can you make it work with this architecture?'" Weber said.

The ultimate goal is to allow systems such as new radars to be "plug-and-play," as a printer might be to a desktop computer, he said.

How can they turn 'plug and play' into a dance of billions? Unbelievable. Baby boomers! Your vanished entitlements have funded empire (and what resources did you get out of Afghanistan for that investment?)

Europe squanders its breathing space

The transfer union is off the table; Eurobonds will not be tolerated; it is doubtful that the EFSF can be enlarged.

What remains? A disorderly rout once the ECB's firepowers is exhausted. Or a European coup d'etat overturning parliamentary sovereignty and constitutions: political will overriding legal niceties designed to protect democracy. 

Soon, the EU periphery may face costly chaos or a bureaucratic technocracy with a representative figleaf.

Innovate to cure

An article, interviewing the IEEE emerging technology committee chair: Professor Atam Dhawan at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dhawan highlights five categories: IT software, optical imaging technologies, bioelectronics, regenerative medicine and medical robotics. The overlap between the categories is quite clear; their effect, if state systems and debt dysfunction do not kill off all innovation, will prove revolutionary. 

We no longer appear on the map

How long does it take to construct a three dimensional map of the known universe, out to 320 million lightyears? About ten years on our current technology. The all-important third dimension depended upon the ability to map redshifts amongst all of the imaged galaxies, relating them to each other as well as to earth.

One of the first comments on the article asks where is the "You are here" arrow. Within the immensity of the map, earth and indeed, the Milky Way are lost. Just as Moore's law is an exponential trajectory inwards, one can map humanity's sense of significance against the scale of the universe. As the universe inflated to cosmic, our centrality in nature plummeted to irrelevance, indifference and insignificance.

Obviously not enough social workers or diversity officers

For years, they turned a blind eye to the development of gang mentalities in London. Ineffectual efforts to ameliorate gang difficulties were undermined by a criminal justice system that released criminals and penalised victims. No doubt any of the looters picked up will bleat their 'rights'. Armed with a redistributionist concept of retail, most will live off some form of state benefit or illicit activity.

A softly-softly approach was adopted yesterday, trading public safety for some insane theory that this would blow itself out. A complete and unmitigated disaster. When others saw that such actions were treated with impunity, it was a wildfire incentive. Now riots are leaping across the capital.

These riots are the outcome of a progressive consensus: a state that has inverted the value of work and fetishized consumption at the expense of others. These looters are the effect of a welfare state: exercising entitlements by breaking windows and seizing goods. Grab the playstation for deferred gratification and burn the shop to the ground, with no regard for life or limb, even their own.

You put riots down, like savage dogs. You take out the ringleaders. You ensure zero tolerance for all involved. Time to bring out the water cannon and the plastic bullets. Make sure short-term pain is high and long-term gain is non-existent. And how will our 'vote blue/red/yellow, get shit' politicians respond? Hand-wringing, check. Ample rhetoric of concern and cut holidays short, check. Increase number of social workers: coming down the line.

Thunderflops are go

What do we pay them for? The Met police proved to be thunderflops yesterday when their motto, "Stand By for Inaction" was met in full. The Met has stated that it was focused on the violent disorder (somehow converted from a peaceful protest) and looting (a violent act!) was dismissed as without concern. All because, yet again, we have an unexplained murder, perhaps understood, but perhaps not.

The focus of the looting was at Wood Green about two miles away to the east. Eyewitnesses there around midnight said they saw no police presence, and a passer-by filmed leisurely looting still taking place at about 5.30am – more than nine hours after the original trouble.

Now that the gangs have seen they can get away with this once due to the magnificent inertia of the Met (whose leaders have already resigned for taking tabloids rather than fighting crime), they will riot again. If our bleating pols wish to render this riot unacceptable, find the criminals and get them to the time, properly.

Did the Met preserve public safety? I think not!

Latest data transmission is 26 terabytes per second, the equivalent of 700 DVDs. Not all the time in the world would be sufficient to watch that many. For the engineers, such sppeds are now possible, and the breakdown starts at the receiving end:

As no electronic processing methods are available for a data rate of 26 terabits per second, the team uses purely optical calculation in order to break down the high data rate to smaller bit rates that can then be processed electrically.