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Showing posts from 2014

The unshareable lightness of seeing

The naturally ignored moment of a photo opp as you witness that perfect twilight moon with your loved ones, friends, family, or tribe. The forgotten opportunity of the social share - the innocent laughter of your children deeply engrossed  in the art of unscripted moment-making. The perfect smile of that happy parent,  as she REMs through her dreams reliving her favorite times of life spent with her child. The bright lit face  shining through the dim lights - as you thank them heartily  for their gracious service of food and shelter - helping the rest of the world  live their holiday. And a million more moments - of travels with others whose paths  we could never guess or anticipate, but are there to intersect with yours. Neither shared nor share-able in any medium other than a mirror-neuronal reflection with a snapshot stored in future nostalgia. -- Filled with sharper smells,  softer sounds, brighter lights and broader smile

A Packet Switched Society

A Packet Switched Society The world of human social interactions evolved as a small network of circuit switched conversations and interactions. Happening in real-time and space, together, within sense-shot, it has built the modern edifices - those we now take so much for granted: institutions, technologies and frameworks for society. This movement in evolutionary space, distinguished us from most other creatures, Now almost a platform, plus or minus a few black swan events that could flatten it all Into the beginning of the next random walk down life-space and gene-pools, in an eyeblink of geological time. The tools of this revolution, our senses, were perfect to build the societies of yesterday - Where circuits of conversations led to breathtaking jumps in the evolutionary space of tools, ideas, conversations and social change.  In those times, we had very few channels, mostly single channel face-to-face, building out extensive new creatio

The impossible choices

Life is filled with choice, moment to moment. We are therefore led to believe that every choice is free to be made. Some choices are bounded by time - if you don't make that Black Friday choice, your deal is gone. Some choices are bound by space - you have to live here, or there. But some choices are impossible to make after a particular amount of time has gone by. These choices aren't the normal everyday ones. These are hard ones. What to do after losing a loved one, what to do when you lose everything, or what to do when you've reached the place of your dreams as a child. The problem with these kind of choices is that you are almost always too late to the game if you are thinking about it after the fact. Even rarer are those choices, not about space or time, but about the mind. If you are at a fork in one of these choice-roads, the curious thing is this: if you are looking at yourself AT the fork, you're too late - either choice leads you to get neither! You

The unstable equilibrium of staying true

Unquenchable in our heart: is the wish: To lead a good life; something purposeful, meaningful, one that is worth our self-worth. Unconditionally aver the wise: "The path of truth is best! difficult though this road, well heeled sure it is, just follow us." Fortunate are we, that their wisdom shines on us, to enliven and educate - "peer behind the veil, dethrone every shallow recipe of success; perceive the field of discourse, practice harmlessness, conform to higher norms, make it Safe for others, be courteous to everylife!" Inside this meta-recipe, is hidden the path to heaven; but it is also found by living out-there. And it is your very Self that uncovers it. As we gaze to these horizons from the expansive valley of our desires, to verify that we see the truth, from the intersections of our forefathers' ways - How sweet to stop after seeing, and flip the channel back to "ah, now back to real-life"! The tempor

Securing yourself online - a beginning (101)

Online presence is very different from physical life. Our intuitions aren't good at all, when it comes to protecting ourselves. No amount of clever habits will be enough. Having said that, I hope that a small effort by each of us can help our network be more secure, gradually. Here is a simplistic view of how you get hit by vulnerabilities and infections in the digital universe: WARNING: "Diffuse, hand waving kind of math" alert! Yes, I'm working on a virtual Ph.D :) your possibility of getting hit =    SUM over all i ( virility_of_attack * rate of spread * impact-level * network-size * habit_probability * hours spent online) where,   i is in the set of all vulnerabilities and attack vectors.   habit_probability = f(browsers, machines, apps, shop, online_vendor_site)   network = {home | work | public_wifi | private_net | mesh_net } You will be under constant attack. No question. Your basic actionable item is to minimize your attack surface. 

SkyFi - informal SciFi

PR Newswire, 2022, Bay Area Cyberomics Korporation (BACK). BACK predicts that by 2022, the first  packet-switched  life form will evolve inside a US corporate network t ​ ​ o do truly useful work for employees who need to gain productivity.   This life form, called MC (“Me, Cyberome”) will digitally  persist * itself in the  dark-matter*  blocks of the  DSD*s  within all our NCDs.   There is no additional storage cost, as MC lives as  runtime/ephemeral copy * within various de-duped data pools inside DSD drives on corporate data storage farms. There is no additional compute cost, as MC attaches itself to every compute grid program that is launched/executed. It simply runs itself during the pipeline stalls that inevitably happen from human compiled code.   There is no additional cost of security, since the binary will be completely obfuscated using Amit's IOP*. It will use call-home protocols to determine when/where to run. No one except a corporation's dig

Net Neutral is more valuable than Gross Profit.

A silent change might carve out the majority of Internet usage (users) into digital have-nots. The issues are complex, and there is no easy way to weigh in on one side or the other of the "Net Neutrality" debate. But a simple argument may convince you more than elaborate pontifications. Here goes: Humanity is going to live in an increasingly software powered digital world. Net is the spinal cord for such a world. A spinal cord that is partial to a tall or rich man is not how human beings are built. Take heart from billions of years of evolution: neutral platform technologies become the engine of growth for next generation of technologies.  A network that is equally available to all is important for software powered humanity.  The "minimum wage" in a digitally connected world is "equal access". The "spinal cord" of the digital world has to remain "neutral". Act now:  https://act.demandprogress.org/sign/fcc_nn_

Ode to an anniversary

So, here is a thought about wedding anniversaries for your consideration... this was spurred on, as it only can, by a close group of friends:  "Why doesn't everyone write up something about their own anniversary (or better, why don't their spouse do it)"? Ode to an Anniversary Caught between the extremes - of  differential perception of  identical things and the timeless happiness of making life happen, together, Flitting between the unconditional hopes for their children and her necessary ascent to equality in all, skating on the thin ice  of being too much of a huntsman yet aiming to reach an equal share with her, in the  evolution of their of community and family, A serendipitous union of minds begins by a long  weathering of the razor sharp rivers  of experiences - colliding, cavorting, cajoling, testing, serene, flooding, silent, plodding. Until all that remains, are the smooth edges between the rivers of p

The right to equality 2.0

In a quite interesting and thoughtful commentary, Sam Altman talks about some results of technology induced inequality in wealth: http://blog.samaltman.com/ technology-and-wealth- inequality?curator=MediaREDEF This is not hard to prove mathematically, even. The machine-to-labor scaling ratio has been increasing year on year. At some point, the compounded difference becomes so large that any differential productivity gains from getting the work done by humans will completely disappear for most functions for which humanity was being trained for millenia. One of my friends pointed out a political view by Orwell , an equally interesting read.   If we think about life and evolution, it is obvious that the history of the world has been a series of gradual accretion of features, interspersed by large scale asymmetrical compounding of differences in a short period of time that results in explosion of living forms in waves. If we believe the current data, society is starting t

Celebrating 2014

Why celebrate a year that is just beginning? Because celebration should be the beginning, the start of our contribution to the world. The year is going to give us a lot - happiness, cheer, fun, health, opportunities,  dreams, satisfaction, closeness. But to a lot of us, that isn't going to be all. To those unfortunate, the disenfranchised, the ones who are served by those derelict in duty, the ones who are subject to the complexities of a system that has become too diffuse to hear their stories - life is a stream of hope alone. Their stream of experience doesn't compute. It is a stream of hope that the world will notice them, that they are welcomed into the next year, that they have a better shot at what they dream about. The truth: the entire edifice of progress, the upper echelons of human experience, is carried on their backs. It is only because they are bowing down to carry the load, that the world is looking up. Celebrate this year now - so you can make it better

2Give or !2Give a happy new year.

An excellent question gets asked at any alumni meeting , whenever the subject of "giving" comes up: "what is the problem@Univ-FOO that we are trying to solve". Many detailed questions are asked about whether money is well invested, of course necessary. Many observations are done about whether the current process is conducive to utilizing the funds effectively. Instead, one way to look at this for ANY educational institution is:  " We should stand head to head among the world's most innovating, business creating, value generating institutions of learning". Are we there yet? Will being in the top#100 world universities serve that goal? Are we generating far more value for the govt. investment on us, than any other equivalent average institution of learning? I strongly believe many alumni of every great institution do create asymmetrical value. They also create businesses. They also innovate. But is that all we can do? A lot of