Morning Thoughts.

Actually Morning == No Thoughts. I woke up after a good sleep, to find my eyes stuck together with sleep gunge. Having spent an hour reading LJ, I am ready to make my day's predictions:

1) I will drink more coffee
2) A tall dark breakfast is in my immediate future.
3) Cats have fur.

Well whaddaya expect? Its 8:00 in the morning!

Birthingdays

Just wanted to say a big
Happy Birthday
to _sps_

Why we need better Computer Security.

A recent study has shown that 80% of computer users have spyware currently installed and running on their systems, and 20% have an active virus on their systems. Most of the folks with the spyware or virii were unaware of them, or unable to get rid of them. Now, as a seasoned software proffessional, my instinct is to put the blame where it belongs: on the software industry in general, and Microsoft in particular.

The average user should no more be required to understand the inner workings of the internet in order to be safe than the average car driver needs to know about the carnot cycle in order to safely get to the store. Microsoft has no incentive to fix its horrible security problems, because the average user is unaware when their security has been breached, and so security is not a major selling point for software.

Since Microsoft won't fix the problem, another solution is needed. Linix is a solution of sorts, but not the ultimate one. Linux still has consumer usability problems and while it is vastly superior to Windows in that it actually has a security model, it is woefully out of date, especially considering the sorts of tasks that the internet requires of it.

What is needed is a fully distributed operating system and language for internet operation with a security model designed from day one to deal with questions of resource quotas, authentication, authorization, capability assignment, cryptological identiites, and so on. We already know that any successful system for performing internet transactions will need to be good enough to do banking, voting, signing contracts or the discusion of politically hot topics in a safe manner, and so the needs of these operations have to be addressed in the initial design, not hastily bolted-on later.

Thus we come once again to the reason that _sps_ and I want to scrap the current internet and replace it with something that actually works.

Synchronicity Bites!

Moments ago I went to scratch my eyelid, just as my computer decided to issue a cork-popping-out-of-a-bottle noise. I momentarily thought I must have ripped my eyeball out...

Eeeep!

Woman's Ovary transplanted into her arm.

Yep. The title pretty much says it all. A full explanation of why this was done can be found here.

Collaborative Semantic Analysis.

I just had a random thought that I figured I should write down before I forget it. When _sps_ was here on Saturday, I mentioned to him a paper I had seen on the difficulty of storing and retrieving scientific papers that are relevant to a field of research. It has gotten so bad in the field of mathematics that it is now often easier to spend a year re-solving a tricky mathematical problem than it is to find an existing paper with the solution. There is a (woefully underfunded) institute that tries to produce a controlled-vocabulary description of the semantic elements in new papers, and record them. They keep falling further and further behind.

Anyway, _sps_ had some not-unreasonable ideas on how to encode useful indexes of these math papers so that relevant materials could be searched for. The big question is: how do you do the semantic analysis? For something like Math, you need a human, and one that understands the math as well. Plus, it would help if they just happened to know of all of the other bits of math that the paper overlapped, even if they are in other fields and use different nomenclature.

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be possible (I'm not sure how) to design a mathematics-paper search-engine and browser which had the express purpose of eliciting from a mathematician information about the nature of the paper being studied, and how closely its contents matched that mathematicians current work. This would be done, not by asking questions, but by allowing the mathematician to categorize his searches by project, and to pay attention to how long he spent studying various sections of the paper. As well, if we provided various renaming and renomenclaturing systems, we might get further information by observing the transformations that were performed on the paper.

In the end, I would hope the gathered data from a large number of mathematicians could be used to build a fuzzy index of any given paper, and to let us build a map of which things seemed to be close to each other in a semantic space.  I don't know, ultimately, how well such a system would work, but I think it would be worth giving it a try.

Gobsmacked, I am.

So, it appears that someone is performing experiments to determine the taxonomical status of God.  So far he's figured out that God doesn't belong to any of the three standard domains (Archaea, Bacteria and Eucarya) so he's added one called Divinea into which he's put all of the Hindu and Pagan gods as well as Divineus deus, the Christian god. The big question in this persons mind, is whether Divinea are more closely related to Eucarya, or to Bacteria. The theory is that since Man is in Eucarya, the whole 'in Gods image' thing might mean those two groups are closest. But, if its all just done by evolution, then maybe the Dinvinea are most closely related to the earliest life, the Bacteria...

Now, since he doesn't have any members of Divinea to experiment on, he's been breeding cyanobacteria (Bacteria) and fruit flies (Eucarya) and seeing which are most easily mutated into more god-like specimens...

Ooog. My brain is dripping out my ears.