“[M]ost of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?”
— Mark Zuckerberg, in Jose Antonio Vargas’s profile for the New Yorker.
Echoes of Vannevar Bush’s Memex.
geek
The Turing Test
Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, which sets forth the Turing Test, is often cited, but perhaps not as often read. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth your time. Much of the AI debate of the last 60 years are mere glosses on the ideas set forth in this paper.
The Links Inside Our Minds
The memex has been making me think.
Google’s PageRank is based on the notion that links between documents convey information about authority, importance, and meaning, even when the target document doesn’t explicitly contain the terms being searched for.
But the most important links in the world are not HREFs put between documents by writers, but by readers. They are links made in the mind.
Quoting Vannevar Bush again:
The human mind … operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
During a single day, we make hundreds of such connections in our minds as we read: books, web pages, emails, magazines. An article in the New Yorker makes me think about a Ted Chiang story. A web page on the history of Roman coinage makes me think about the complexities of “obverse” vs. “converse” in logic and rhetoric, discussed in a post on a blawg. A newspaper article on the history of qipao makes me think about a novel set in Hong Kong in the 1940s. I’d think that the vast majority of links between all kinds of content (text, images, video, sound) are like these, made by readers, not hyperlinks.
These connections are not preserved in any permanent form, and most of them would be forgotten quickly afterwards. But they are the stuff creativity is made of. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way of capturing them, such that we can sift through them later, connect other snippets to them, add to the trail of associations that blaze like lightning over the vast dark plains of our daily existence. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Google, instead of searching merely through links some writer explicitly coded onto a web page, could make use of these links made by the associative mind of the reader as well? When I search for “conversely” or “coins,” it would bring up that blawg post and the page on Roman coins and all the other things I’ve connected to them. Maybe it’s something like a universal tagging scheme, but reader-centric.
Seems like Google ought to look into this.
WordPress Child Themes and remove_theme_support
One of the interesting new features in WP 3.0 is child themes. This is a way to customize a given — “parent” — theme without copying or directly modifying the original theme files. This way, when the original theme is updated, you can update its files without losing your customizations.
[Read more…] about WordPress Child Themes and remove_theme_support
Transactions of the American Institute of Homeopathy, 1881
This is what I’m reading, as research for a story.
Reading the ePUB version on the iPad is quite pleasant, though I wish it were possible to download the file on the iPad and open it in iBooks. Right now, you have to go through your computer and iTunes.
BlackBerrys
From CNN:
It’s the smartphone everyone owns — and no one seems to like.
Barely three years ago, people were in love with the BlackBerry. What a business.