had a wonderful day yesterday; New York's answer to the county fair... big
city people instead went to the JAVA expo at Jacob Javits center. In true
keep-the-rubes-at-bay form, it was supposed to cost 50 dollars to get in,
but it was underattended, and they would let you in for free if you said
you heard about it on the radio. One gets so used to NYC surrealism that
without a second thought, you play along. I was there for another event,
the ISC security conference, featuring video cameras the size of coins that
saw in infrared, bulletproof clothes, subliminal programmers to make the
muzak also keep you from shoplifting, and my absolute favorite, a fog
machine that would instantly fill the room with a glycol based smoke so
dense you really couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It was
ART... George Lucas' white room out of THX 1138 on command... it won't hurt
you, but you are completely disoriented. The thing is triggered by a motion
detector, and within seconds a spewing plume of whipped cream dense fog
comes whistling out of a small hole in the wall... next you know, you are
LOST, right there in the middle of everything... I couldn't help but think,
does the media do this from time to time ?
After I had enough of surveillance and neural nets that read
fingerprints I moseyed on over to the Sun Microsystems JAVA line. The
previously mentioned guard says to me "say that you heard it on the radio".
I say back "I heard it on the radio"... "O.K. you can go in".... so I
signed in on one of about 50 laptops which fed into a central server, and a
flirtatious Puerto Rican young woman called out my name and handed me my
badge... into the JAVA room!
First off, the people that work the security industry look good, like
they make a ton of money, eat right, get 8 hours of sleep, bathe regularly,
and work out... this was the healthiest looking crew of middle aged hombres
I've seen in dis place for a looong time... aha! of course, they're not
from here, no self respecting noo yawkah would sport erect posture like
that.... lesson #1 of the day... high tech security is one of the hot
businesses, and they've got this stuff so covert and data compressed you
will have no idea you are walking in a secure area...
They don't even take your name if you want more information on a product,
they just scan your badge with a handheld unit... this made for interesting
conversations... very little small talk... guys would walk over to you and
say, "would you like more information"; should you nod yes, instead of a
sales rap, the code grabber would hold his device up, aim it at you, and
wash your badge in a low intensity laser scan, smile, and send you on your
way....
Meanwhile back at JAVA... ah, geeks! Worse posture, noticable body odor,
defitine lack of sexual charisma... to many hours in dim rooms struggling
with programming languages eating pizza... and no snappy code grabbers...
you did get a nice, backstage pass-like badgeholder to wear around your
neck with a macho SUN logo on it... buuuut... hundreds of machines crammed
together like a processing crazed sweatshop... in the hot'n'heavy center of
the action you really couldn't move, you had to squeeeeeze between people.
In the middle of this I came upon a Mr. Henry See of Merzcom, who makes
the MerzScope visual web mapper....we talked for a minute and I averred
that wouldn't it be nice if some JAVA swifties could take the kind of
symbol manipulation process artists do inside their heads and transfer it
to other types of thinking and problem solving. We stopped short of the
mysterious Baysian Inference issue, but BINGO! he said, that's exactly what
his company was trying to do. The program was beautiful to watch in action,
as you could zoom in and out of idea webs that established hubs and
linkages between subjects and concepts. Still a teensy bit simplistic...
but definitely headed in the right direction... I can't wait until we start
seeing forums and discussion groups visualized along these lines. We
ideated whether the next step might be a three dimensional "idea space",
somewhat like a crystal that could be rotated to display different peoples'
perspectives on the relationships between "whatevers"... so if you and I
were getting down on a topic, we might construct a three dimensional idea
space which indicates your beliefs about the ideas and the relationships
that exist between them as well as mine... then we could color code them as
t "ideas in agreement", "ideas in exploration", "ideas in disagreement",
put on our VR helmets, and go to work in collective mental space....
Meanwhile, back at the security conference, I got into a conversation
with Mike Kless of Neurodynamics, that makes the neural net pattern
recognition systems... smart guy, smart company... we could actually have
an intelligent conversation... we started discussing something that the
company does not presently do, but from the gleam in his eye... well, ya
nevah know... I mentioned to him that some mathemeticians had discovered
that that numbers in the accounting for large companies have a basically
random nature, but where there's financial fraud involved, i.e. endofraud,
perpetrated from within the company, maybe even exofraud, fraud perpetrated
onto the company from outside, the numbers begin to show subtle deviations
away from randomness... as if there are subtle non-randomicities in our
brains, and if someone tinkers with those numbers enough, that person's
"nonrandomness signature" strart to walk like a ghost through the
accounting... danged fascinating; Mike was cool, acted like it didn't mean
nothin'; these multi-order mind reads get so wonderously subtle,; does he
know that I know he knows that I KNOW that he knows ? Possibilities ? We
leave behind us textual and numeric fingerprints on every datum we touch,
and a deep enough machine will be able to "intuit" your identity... the
future is so alert, man!
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