Re: How Big is the Internet, Exactly?

Cuil:

1.  The tabs at the top are a clear, almost wondrous improvement.  Type in the “LSE” and it will put up tabs for “London School of Economics”, “London Stock Exchange” and “Luxembourg Stock Exchange”, allowing the searcher to easily filter out conflated search results.  Impressive.

2.  The colour scheme.  Because who hasn’t gotten bored of Google’s plain white, after a decade now?  But poq suspects black and blue will get old fast.

3.  Really?  It has more pages than Google?

Not Cuil:

1.  It doesn’t store personal information, so it doesn’t know what people are looking for, and so it doesn’t produce good results.  No PageRank, no love.

2.  It doesn’t seem to have the same incestuous relationship with Wikipedia.  Almost nothing brings up Wikipedia, which is almost always what actually answers the question.

3.  The pictures take ages to load, and aren’t necessarily at all helpful.

Which is the fairest engine of them all?

More important, Google responded with this claim:  the Web is even bigger than poq said it was before when poq said it was even bigger than you thought it was.  Yes, at this point it is official:

“for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page.”

The Web is infinite.  And because information is contained on every web page, even ones which are essentially a random pile of crap, that means that WE HAVE CREATED INFINITE INFORMATION, which poq believes is an impressive, almost alchemical achievement for mankind, and we deserve a pat on the back.

The Post-Everything World

poq writes to you with post-postal technology;  no longer the stamp, envelope and pen, but by some technomancy too complex to comprehend.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke

We are post-magic.

We are post-post-modern:  incredulity towards the metanarrative has become incredulity towards incredulity, and there is nothing left save inanity.

We are post-American – and we have long been post-European; now we are post-Western.   We are post-boom times; we are post-cheap food, and post-cheap oil.

We are post-Harry Potter, post-Spice Girls, post-Facebook, maybe even post-Oprah.

We are in the post-everything world, because our we cannot sit still anymore, and we cannot pay attention for more than 24 hours at a time.  We are not post-Pixar yet, but we will be next week.  We are post-ideology, and post-Chinommunism; we are post-everything but the Cloud.

Are we post-Hillary too?

May it long sustain us.

McCain Song

Suicide saigon, saigon,

hey saigon; saigon, long gone,

“we’re leaving”, he said, saigon so long.

Hypoqrisy

Ever since old Joe McCarthy cast his dark shadow over American politics, it has been a favourite game in American politics to single out one’s enemies as unpatriotic.   Attacking an opponent’s patriotism was a signature tactic for Karl Rove, for example, who drove the country to war in 2002 under the shroud of the flag; the Stars and the Stripes were used to silence critics in the House and Senate, and American politics was the worse for it.  The ploy was used again to smear John Kerry, in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008.

In politics, nothing ever changes.  Michelle Obama has faced an array of recent attacks along these lines, most famously with her quote in Febuary 2008:  “for the first time in my life,” she said, “I am proud of my country.”  Those who wear their country on their sleeve immediately unleashed the attack-dogs and began burrowing in.

Now a new firestorm is brewing over John McCain’s words:  “I never really loved America until I was deprived of her”, and his opponents are preparing to dance the same old weary waltz.

poq does not doubt that these attacks have revealed a hypoqrisy; that much was obvious. But what the critics may have missed in all the mud-slinging is that both John McCain and Michelle Obama are right.  Loyalty to a country cannot come from birth or blood alone:  it must be earned.  America must with each new generation prove again by deeds the values it holds, and it must give all its citizens a stake in its prosperity.  For the black woman educated at Harvard, but marginalized by the colour of her skin, or the soldier abandoned and tortured in a place he never should have been sent to, patriotism is by no means a no-brainer.

Blood was spilled over ‘the land of our fathers’, but no lines on a map deserve unquestioning loyalty.  If our public figures are less American, less patriotic than we wish, well, it only demonstrates all the more the need for change.

Only HillBillaries Are Left Behind

“Wells, he’s a-gettin’ past us.”

“Why, I heard he don’t see the rain no more, he’s his very own limozeen now.  He’s all up with the big folks these days.”

“Gotta give it to him, but he don’t forget where he come from.”

“Sure, Mah, but he done and forgot us.  Forgot his promises and all.”

“He’ll come back, boy.  You’ll wait and see.  Ain’t no man of his sort can win it without us.  He’ll come back with a beggin’ bowl.”

“You better hope, Mah.  Elsewise, when he wins…who knows what he do?  If he don’t need us, who knows what he do?”

- A conversation overheard upon a front porch in Weston, West Virginia, June 2008

From Where, Mind? Part Deux

Charles Babbage was the first one to see that a stream of consciousness could be produced by a confluence of weights and wheels, gears, pulleys and punch-cards.  Joining together mind and matter, he envisaged a Difference Engine powered by (what else?) fore-sight and steam.

Alas, it was the dream of a man too early born.  A century later, and the great revolution of science has made more of what the mind-machine needs:  electricity to feed the pulses of its thought, silicon to carry its weight, and knowledge – we understand deeper now what thought is.  Thought is not mere mathematical calculations of brute logic:  it is fuzzy and unclear, and it travels not by straight lines, but through neural-networks, synapses made into vast and obscure links.

We have not yet made Babbage’s dream a reality, but it is ever coming closer.  An artificial intelligence cannot be far off, and sometimes seems already to have arrived.  Turing showed us how to recognize when we have made it – it is when something has become indistinguishable from ourselves.

Meet A.L.I.C.E.  Surely we cannot be far now.

poq is spin

poq is symmetry

(courtesy of the NYT)

poq is spin

‘Cause you lived your life, like a candle in the wind