Hacking the Good days…

I always thought that chimps are beautiful animals, especially the silver black ones, until I came across Howard Bloom’s article from Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace on ‘Who’s smarter: chimps, baboons, or bacteria? The power of Group IQ.’ [thanks Lok for bringing over the stone-heavy book all the way!!]

The article is fascinating not just because of the chimps, but also Bloom’s argument on why Group IQ matters – defines by how well animals adapt, solve practical problems and hence their chances of survival. I’ll get back to the chimps in a minute, but let’s start with Bloom’s mesmerising argument – bacteria is definitely his favourite among the three. Imagine billions of years ago when ‘each asteroid that thwomped it, the earth woggled like a pudding. [p.255]‘ Bacteria re-engineered itself to ingest granite, and that’s pretty impressive. Always groups as trillion, and functions in as trillion, bacteria adapts by being truly the first parallel distributed processing system even before human came around.

With this, think of computing system invented by us, human, homo sapien – we have only learnt to harness the power of parallel distributed processing in computing in the last couple of decades, and in collaboration through the internet in very recent time (e.g. Wikipedia, Project Glutenberg, FLOSS etc). It’s ironic that we seem to be inventing something new but we are yet actually only starting to mirror the law of nature in its most fundamental way?

Going back to the chimps – Bloom points out another key point – he thinks baboons are second to bacteria to have higher group IQ than chimps despite their smaller brains. Can you guess why?

Baboons functions as groups in hundreds where chimps only functions in dozens. Hence once a rare-breed baboon who has a hacker-mentality (i.e. non-conforming, curious, wanders and constantly seeking new ways to do thing), survival hacks efficiently spread to hundreds of baboons. This comes rare in Chimps. So when human (aren’t we evil?) replace the forest with dumps, baboons adapted to good finds in dumps, where as chimps did not.

Now ready for the sad part? When baboons split in opposing groups, they might hurt one another but they don’t wipe one another out. But when chimps split into groups – they kill all the males of the opposing gropus, and only leave the ‘most delicious and fertile’ female. In human terms, the pursue of systemic genocide.

And guess what (you probably know already) – chimps and human share ~99% of gene. Perhaps size doesn’t really matter, does it?

Sometimes updates like this make me suspect that if it’s me being dumb, or new solutions have become too convoluted.  Older versions of Wordpress by default have a simple menu option of ‘blogrolls’ where you show off your links, and the changes are reflected one you hit the ’save’ button. Very simple and slick.

But since version 2.5, ‘Widgets’ are introduced, and the original ‘blogroll’ menu button is gone. In general I like the new admin interface, but it is almost a nightmare to find out where to change/update, or hide/show your blogrolls. Given my frustration I decided to share the new changes.

The main difference is, updated blogrolls in 2.6 has become a two-steps, separate process.

1. Go to ‘Manage’ -> ‘Links’:

Make sure you click on the number on the right hand side instead of the word ‘Blogroll’ itself, since it will take you to changing your definition of ‘Blogroll’ (such as renaming, adding description) instead of the links themself.  Update your blogroll links from there, you can also rename ‘blogroll’ to anything and define different catagories here.

2. Then navigate to ‘Design’ -> ‘Widget’

Make sure ‘Links’ is one widget that you have enabled, and ‘Save Changes’.  This step is to ensure your sidebar shows ‘links’ (aka ‘blogrolls’).  Yes, confusing, I know…

Ta! Can’t believe it took me 45 minutes to figure this out, but a general search shows that quite a lot of people share the same frustration.  I still love you though, Wordpress.

Was given an UNIX enlightenment years ago by my Wikipedia mentor fuzheado, but if you don’t use it you loose it.  What’s so nice about working in a geeky environment is to be surrounded by tons of web experts.. and boy, finally executed proper command today and uploaded a file via sftp :)

Okay, the point is, do encourage women in UNIX:

special notes to 3.14; 3.19 and 3.25.

/wink

So why UNIX (exerpt, the future of innovation)?

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the future will bring. O’Reilly suggested that really you just need to look around and ask the right people. He quoted William Gibson, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” So how do you figure out what’s coming? O’Reilly related the story of a toy company looking for beta testers. They would go ask kids “who’s the coolest kid you know?” They would then follow the trail until a kid answered, “I am.” O’Reilly sees his core business as serving the alpha geeks, the inventors of the future. He tries to spot and follow interesting thinkers and the people they think are doing interesting things.

O’Reilly looked at the various stages of technology evolution. The first stage is the hackers. A hacker is someone who pushes the envelope. When the tool they’re using on a computer doesn’t do what they want, they figure out a way to do it anyway. The second stage is the entrepreneurs. These people make things easier for ordinary users. Mac OS X has many cool tricks available from the Terminal, but they don’t exist for ordinary users until there’s a GUI front end that’s easy to use.

The third stage, according to O’Reilly, is the scary one. This is the stage where dominant players integrate the technology into a platform and either raise barriers to entry or build a healthy ecosystem. This can be stifling in the Windows space. Microsoft figured out that if you offer a platform and make things easy for people then you’ve got control. Unfortunately, O’Reilly cautioned, if you take too much control you dry up innovation. O’Reilly said that his mom told him that Bill Gates sounds like someone who’d come over for dinner and say, “I’ll take all the mashed potatoes.” When the dominant players take over a technology, the hackers and the entrepreneurs are no longer interested so they go on to look for other opportunities.

A simpler version of this is the story of the boiling frog – we jump out of hot water because we know it’s going to burn us, but we die from gradually heating water because it gets all too cozy.  Before we learn how to drive, we should learn how to cycle.  Before you start getting too used to client-based programmes, we take a glimpse on how things are being made.  It still surprises me how easy it is to make perfectly steamed seabass, and how restaurants charge an exorbitant price.  Anyway.  I digress.  As usual.  But you get the point.  :)

Also inspired recently by Jonathan Zittrain’s ‘the future of the internet and how to stop it’ – see the ‘dumb-down’ version of his interview by Colbert here (it’s rather funny ;D):

A good friend of mine sent me a link to MJ’s Photo essay on Phone Sex Operators, and asked for my thought on this. At first I thought it was a prank – as the thumbnails of the photos seemed to be a bit revealing, especially when he posted that on my facebook, where I still have not yet set out proper privacy levels (say my boss is on my facebook, duh!).

To my surprise, I was moved. This is good journalism – a subtle lens for us to see things in different light while maintaining neutral point of view. More importantly, you feel like you grow up slightly before and after reading the essay.

For the aesthetics of these amazing photos, and for taking a step back and see the world from someone else points of view, I recommend you to check out the photo essay, too. Oh, and by all means let me know what you think. I’ll end this post by my favourite quote,

I try to heal the wounds that our closed-minded society inflicts.
It may sound weird, but it’s true.

We as people should learn to talk and listen to our neighbors and share our inner light.

I wish the world was run by phone sex operators.