A couple must-see YouTube vids.
First, a trailer for an upcoming movie about a very special date: 5-25-77
if you’re not geek enough to get it, it’s the day that Star Wars premiered. Looks awesome.
And for a few laughs, here’s a fantastic compilation of some of the worst movie scenes ever. I think I’ve seen every one of them, and I’m not sure how I should feel about that…
I’ve always been proud of my linguistic abilities, but there are a couple here that I’m completely clueless about. How’d you do?
According to the folks at Houghton Mifflin, every high school grad should be familiar with the words in the list below. I’m not surprised that I was unfamiliar with the word abstemious given its meaning, and moiety is now part of my vocabulary.
If you’re a Simpsons fan, the word chicanery should be familiar to you (”Oh, Mr. Homer…What has reduced you to such cheap chicanery?”). If you remember your Phil Hartman-era SNL, you might recall his use of the word jejune (”Compulsion” by Calvin Kleen). Monty Python fans will have run into a form of expurgate (the bookstore skit), lugubrious appears in both Lou Reed lyrics (The Original Wrapper) and an old Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and I recall the word sanguine being used in an 80’s-era X-Men comic.
I posted a link to an incredible video of someone playing the original nintendo Super Mario Brothers on some insane advanced level that I didn’t even know existed. What really makes the vid worth watching is the commentary though… absolutely hilarious! I’ve since found out that it’s not the player on the voice over, just a guy that found the original video online and decided to have a little fun with it. Still dang funny.
Anyway, the only annoying part of the video is the fact that the level never gets finished! I was dying to find out how the heck someone could wrap that thing. Thankfully, someone has. It’s a “tool-assisted” speed run, which means he used various hacks and/or cheats to get it done, but hey, I’m just glad to see that little flag fall.
Cory Doctorow: 
Last year, I spoke at a Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Summit at Stanford, a day-long event about the future of technology and the possibility of a coming Singularity. There were some killer speakers (including my hero Douglas R “Godel, Escher, Bach” Hofstadter).
The technological Singularity — what Ken Macleod called “The Rapture of the Nerds” — is the moment at which it is possible to make a computer that is as smart as a human, and then smarter. The idea is that we will irrevocably change as a species at that moment.
The Singularity Institute has put up full videos and audio from the Summit now — there’s some great stuff here. Link (Thanks, Tyler!)
Cory Doctorow: Would you like to be the exclusive owner of a number, with the right to sue other people for knowing your number or telling other people what it is? Now you can.
Last week, the AACS consortium made history by issuing legal threats against the 1.8 million web-pages (and counting) that mentioned its secret code for preventing HD-DVD discs from being copied.
In effect, AACS-LA (the AACS Licensing Authority) claimed that it owned a randomly chosen 128-bit number, and that anyone who possessed or transmitted that number was breaking the law. Moreover, it claimed to own millions more random numbers — claimed that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises telling people how to break anti-copying software, gave it exclusive dominion over its many keys.
Why should the AACS get all the fun? Princeton prof Ed Felten has come up with a great way of giving out legally protected 128-bit numbers to anyone who wants them. If he gives out 2^128 of these, then all 128-bit numbers will be owned and no one will ever be able to use a 128-bit key without breaking the law. Good times.
Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.The haiku is copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten:
We own integers,
Says AACS LA.
You can own one too.
My number is AF BC 9C 5D DA 6B 7A A8 7C 33 A1 2B E7 D3 EA 11. You aren’t allowed to know this number. I also reloaded the page and generated a few more numbers. I’m not telling you what they are, but I’ll be setting up a Google alert for them and if I catch you using them, I’m gonna take your house away. Link
See also:
AACS vows to fight people who publish the key
AACS DRM body censors Cory’s class blog
Digg users revolt over AACS key
Secret AACS numbers, the photoshopped edition
Side effect of AACS turmoil: MSM turns on Web 2.0? UPDATED
Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken – processing keys extracted
EFF explains the law on AACS keys
More AACS spoofs: WOW protest, and PSA vid: Think Before You Post
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray cracker muslix64 interviewed
Web-page aggregates links to “forbidden numbers” used to break HD-DVD
Update: Bo sez, “I figured I might need a 128-bit number someday and was afraid that mean-spirited jerks like Cory would take them all and threaten to sue me if I used one. So I decided that I’d grab my own before they were all gone. I figured other people might be in a situation like me, so I decided to publish my number as a line of text and offer it to the world with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. So even if all the other numbers are gone, anyone wants to use “C6 8C 14 E1 9F 29 2A 6B 9E 6C C7 38 D2 80 9E 27″ to encrypt something is welcome to do so. Just be sure you give me credit! (That means you, too, AACS-LA! Don’t get any funny ideas!)”
I wanted to post a link to this article anyway, because it’s really freakin’ cool on a brainiac level way above mine, but this is also a convenient test of Google Reader’s new Email function. Could end up saving me from those massive Link Dump posts of hand-coded links that sit in my bookmarks folder for weeks…
Anyway, if this works, enjoy the article:
Various futurist thinkers, and even a few unusually insightful journalists have pointed out that the next generation of threats to humanity are self-replicating technologies.
It’s really too bad that self-replicating technologies are so dangerous, because such technologies would also be most useful for completely realigning the material structure of the world with our collective will.
Self-replication is something that life figured out a long time ago. The DNA in every cell of your body has a replication lineage that can be traced, in an unbroken line, all the way back to the first self-replicating piece of genetic material ever. Every branch on the Tree of Life is a descendant of the first self-replicating organic being.
The problem with this mode of organic self-replication we’re so familiar with is that it’s relatively restricted in what it can build. Water is essential in large quantities for all the processes of life so any terran biological life form must be made up of primarily H2O. This requirement strongly constrains all material properties, including freezing point, boiling point, tensile strength, density, toughness, and many others. The Tree of Life is located in a narrow chemical ghetto.
Humanity’s task is to reinvent the technology of self-replication that the first single-celled organisms stumbled upon billions of years ago, but this time, do it right. Expand the range of possible forms. Boost the throughput and decrease the minimum duration of each self-replication cycle. Combine the adaptive elegance of the biosphere with the superior absolute performance and chemical flexibility of the technosphere. The final outcome is something far greater than both: the means to turn the inorganic to the organic and vice versa at arbitrary rates and generate new forms of more diversity and ability than either sphere could generate alone.
The basic concept of a non-biological or super-biological self-replicator dates back to a posthumous work by math/comp-sci superhero John von Neumann. More recently, our friends Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle did a comprehensive review of everything known about kinematic (physical) self-replicators, including a 137-dimension classification system that subsumes all known and proposed self-replicating machine systems, and presents numerous plans for artificial self-replicators to be built in the near future. Most futurists and “technology experts” are cheerfully clueless about the coming revolution in artificial self-replicators, but not everyone. For example, Gregory Cochran, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah known for his work in adaptive optics and evolution of the Ashkenazim, recently came out with a “don’t you people see what’s coming?” statement on Edge.org:
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”it has always been that way.
Most men have been slaves of necessity, while the few who were not lived by exploiting others who were. Although mechanization has eased that burden in the advanced countries, it is still the case for the majority of the human race. Limited resources (mainly fossil fuels), as well as negative consequences of industrialization such as global warming, have made some people question whether American living standards can ever be extended to most of the human race. They’re pessimists, and they’re wrong.
Hardly anyone seems to realize it, but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. Within a generationsooner if we want it enoughwe will be able to make a self-replicating machine, first seriously suggested by John von Neumann.
Such a machine would absorb energy through solar cells, eat rock and use the energy and minerals to make copies of itself. Numbers would grow geometrically, and if we manage to design one with a reasonably short replication timesay six monthswe could have trillions working for humanity in another generation. You might compare this process to a single cell of blue-green algae, which replicates over the summer until it covers the entire pond. But unlike algae, a self-replicating machine would be programmed and controlled by us. If it could make it its own mechanical and electronic parts, it would also be able to make toasters, refrigerators, and Lamborghinis, as well as the electricity to power them. We could make the deserts bloom, put two cars in every pot, and end world poverty, while simultaneously fighting global warming. It’s closer than you think, since the key technologies are already being developed for use in rapid prototyping and desktop manufacturing. Aristotle thought that slavery would only end when looms weave by themselves: we’re almost there.
This is something that people should get with no problem. We’re on the edge of an era where we can make anything from raw materials for free, and quickly. This is so unlike anything humanity, or indeed life on Earth, has ever experienced, that it warrants sitting down for a couple hours every week and pondering in detail.
With self-replicating workers that get their energy from the Sun and their building material from the Earth’s crust, there is no limit to the scale of engineering projects. We’ll be able to dig holes of such depth and width that there will be a risk of the atmosphere being heated up by portions of exposed mantle. Pollution will be a thing of the past, as long as new self-replicators can recycle the raw material of old self-replicators into new forms, which seems chemically plausible.
Geoengineering – significantly reengineering the structure of the Earth as a whole, will become possible. Advanced technology, including displays, actuators, and devices for communication and computation will be available in unlimited quantities, as long as they require no rare elements. Our current knowledge tells us that such devices can be built using elements fairly common on the Earth, such as iron, carbon, silicon, etc. This will lead to products such as mile-wide displays and completely customized surroundings, similar to those in a virtual environment. Peeling matter from the planet in an onion-like fashion and arranging it in concentric shells, each illuminated by sunlight rerouted from the top level, could provide living space for trillions of human beings, expanding the Earth’s available surface area from 500 million km² to dozens or hundreds of billions of km². The huge quantities of iron available in the planet’s core could be used to create a framework of pillars and levels on which to layer the lighter elements. Layers could be made permeable by installing motion-sensing doors across large areas of their surfaces. Screens covering the bottom of each layer could provide the illusion for those living in the layer below of empty blue skies, complete with a day/night cycle and simulated weather. The layers could be covered in forests or grasslands, providing miles of open space for anyone who wants it.
Yes, the above is speculative, but entirely permitted by the laws of physics, and if the rearrangement of matter on this scale still sounds incredible to you, you need to learn to appreciate the great potential of artificial self-replication. The “Unfolded Earth” scenario I’ve described above may sound too fantastic for some, but it’s just a tiny sample of what will become possible when we unleash the power of self-replication and make it our own. Yes, there are numerous risks, but if we can handle them, the possible rewards go beyond our wildest dreams.
Numbers are fun.
Thanks for the tip Mr. Wheaton, I like these numbers too.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Ready… set… GOOGLE!
3.14
3/14
March 14.
Go eat some pie.
Nerd.
(PS – Here’s the Wikipedia entry, just so you know I’m not the only dork that thinks of this stuff!)
(PPS – Of course, just so you don’t think I’m a complete dork, today is also a very special day for men around the world. The male equivalent of Valentine’s Day: March 14th, Steak and BJ Day.)
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Downtown Tokyo
Remember when Abraham Lincoln died by being hit with a Care Bear Stare after colliding in the air with Jackie Chan while attempting to pole-vault onto Optimus Prime?
I was reminded today of one of the greatest geek songs ever written, “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny“.
Extremely catchy. I’ll have it in my head for the rest of the day for sure. But it’s worth it.
Don’t mess with Mr. Rogers.
~~~~~
Listening to… Work Blog