A new web extension

How about making a web extension that lets you edit and share the edit of a particular homepage. The idea is to allow users to edit the DOM of a loaded page, and one can make more or less simple tools for that. Next, the extension should provide ways to package and share those edits so that other users can use them. This can then be automation things or other improvements of homepages, removal of particular contents that one does not want to be shown or whatever.
It is a way of democratizing the web, but it will of course pose huge risks since it will be easy to introduce malicious code/edits. That is something that has to be dealt with.

Dark energy

Clearly dark energy is something that does not interact with anything but gravitation. Could it be that it is actually extremely high-frequency electromagnetic (EM) radiation?
The idea behind this suggestion is that at of high enough frequency, matter becomes transparent to EM radiation due to that the particle resonators (atoms in the case of crystals) no longer have any overlap with with the wave function of the EM radiation. This is a well known phenomenon for e.g. gamma radiation, or even UV, where the penetration depth increases with increasing frequency.
If we assume a T4-law of the radiation at Big Bang (BB), what temperature must it have been to generate 98% of the Universe energy at frequencies above interaction with the matter as we know it?

Taking this one step further, if the radiation frequency distribution at BB was some kind clock shape, there seem to be a division at different spectral lines which do not interact with each other since we are now in a situation where all radiation above this frequency is effectively non-interacting with the rest of the Universe. Except via gravitation.

Thus we need some gravitational process that is non-linear or lossy in its interaction with the high-frequency EM radiation to make a high-frequency photon decay into something with lower energy (frequency) to make it visible.

Using experiences from machine learning/artificial intelligence in pedagogics

It is interesting to see how now people working in machine learning (ML) are classifying learning strategies or learning methods. Engineering and math has the clear advantage of being very concrete. You could probably call it constructionistic. Those different learning strategies are  classified and advantages are also investigate in relation to different constraints.

Thus, I have a prediction that that is that the work now done in ML will be very useful for pedagogics. How can we use what we learned about optimal teaching in ML to teaching humans or animals? There must be a connection there.

BIVs

We are brains in vats (BIVs).

The idea that you could be a brain in a vat (BIV) is most likely true. The vat is our scull and the stimulus is from our sensory organs.

Typically it is argued that for a BIV the outside world could be whatever. But this is certainly true about our current situation. There are things in the world that we do not have any direct experience about event though they are completely surrounding us. Take e.g. neutrinos or electromagnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum as examples. But it is also the case that we can experience things that do not exist is the normal sense. For example the rainbow or phantom pain from a lost limb. Thus, there is no direct or absolute relation between our experiences and the outside world.

However, it is still the case that we can know things about the world. We are physical entities who interact with a physical and stable world. With "stable", I mean that it is ordered and behaves according to rules that are not random. Hence, since we have a capacity to interact with the environment, we can follow that interaction, perform experiments and tests and make theories. There is no limit to how much we can know about the outside world other than in the way our interaction with the world is limited. But any part of the outside world that is not connected to us via interaction is irrelevant. It can never affect us. For if it could, we could investigate those effects and learn about that part as well.

It should be noted that the argument above makes no distinction between our "ordinary" world as we think about it in everyday life, and a more "complex" situation where we really are BIVs. We can follow the interactions in both situations. Hence, we are BIVs. It is just that our body is the vat. But there will be no difference to a can of water and some cables.

Religion, Philosophy, Science

First there was religion; the belief in a magical non-understandable world with ad-hock explanations based on sentient, often supreme, beings - i.e. gods.
Next it occurred to some brilliant people that we can try to organize thought and thus Philosophy was born. It still consists more in understanding our selves than the world around us. It aims at grasping how we can deal with something. But now in a structures critically thinking way where nature is understood as existing outside of us and being structured without requiring a grand mover.
At some point, some master stroke realized some key point and turned a part of philosophy into science. It started with the most structured = easiest parts of human thinking; math. Then came physics, chemistry, and so on...
Now comes an interesting question. What is next? What comes after science? Is the something coming? I believe there is. Not completely shore about what though. I have two possible suggestions. It is either this (1):

or this (2):

 

1. If this is what is going to happen it is semi-depressing. What will happen is that the human population will split up in several sub-sets. The world will consist of people who know something in some area putting them in the science position (in that area), and in the religion position in others. Because the world outside of my special field is simply too complex.

2. If this happens, Something new might be something that resembles religion, or a synthesis of religion and science. Science and technology will create a world that is so complex that it is simply not comprehensible for someone outside of a very narrow niche area. But we will be enlightened and know that there is a rational explanation behind the phenomena we experience. That there is a fantastically complex machine behind it making it do the fantastic thing it is doing. This is enlightened religion with faith in other humans instead of a supernatural. But it is what will have to happen since it will simple not be possible to comprehend how things can be. This is already the case in many situations and is most obvious with how children perceive the wold.

On net neutrality

Net neutrality is of course important. And it is simply outrageous that some try to ban it. Imagine a country doing the same to roads. Som car brands could have deals with the road owners that only they can drive. Or that thy'll get a fast-lane for only them. Or that you could buy a special ticket to a fast-lane. or have a subscription on a car that can drive in the lane without any ques. Or that you get to drive faster if you accept looking as certain ads while driving.

Just a comparison.

We'r like the old days servants...

In books like Tjänstekvinnans son you can read how servants could roam around in the large upper class houses back in the days. Knowing everything. Hearing everything. They could walk around everywhere since the masters of the house took no notice of them. They just were there.

Now this is one of the benefits of being a curling parent of today: I can stand in the kitchen eating cookies. The kids run around my legs and don't even notice it. That simply believe I am there to clean something up. So I can eat those cookies right in their face.

Finally a benefit.

Why does not humans have any grown weapons?

Most animals have bodily parts that are made for fight. Teath, claws, fangs, paws, poison etc etc. But we humans have none. We suck at fighting with our bare body parts.
Why is this? My proposition is that this is no coincidence. It is rather the direct result of an evolutionary path. A stable path that can be driven forward by evolution. The thing is that we are smart. Much smarter than any other animals. And the reason we are, is that we cannot fight so we have to be smart. That is our evolutionary trait. That is what makes us unique. That is our niche.

I think one can think of this as stable co-evolutionary directions. It is really the case that everything is co-evolution. Evolution happens against a static background or surrounding. But co-evolution happens when several species evolve together and the evolution of one species is affected by the state and evolution of another (this is just my complete novice term. I have no idea if the biologists have another proper term for this). And in that surrounding, an evolution path is what a particular species will follow. It is stable if there is only one change that can survive. It will bifrucate if there are several and it will die if there is none. One can thus only speak of stability locally since it might change down the road depending on how interacting spieces evolve.

On connected buildings and reduced heating and ventilation costs

There is lots going on when in comes to connecting large building using sensors to control heating and ventilation depending on building usage. This is probably great, we might reduce const and energy consumption allot.

But I would like to raise one concern that I have not seen discussed, and that will come back and bite us if not handled: How will current building standards withstand the increased demands on the building it self when there will be larger temperature and moist fluctuations as a consequence of tuning heating and ventilation parameters? This is probably something that someone needs to clear before we go too far with this work.

A new thought on AI and I

Really AI is what we have when it is not intelligence. Anything intelligent is only I. Thus AI is a tool constructed bu humans as others (e.g. hammers, computers and cars). These kind of tools have the same dangers - thy can be used for good of evil by humans, that is, by I.

However, once AI becomes I, things start to be very interesting. That is the situation some people are afraid of, fearing that "AI" (which is then really only "I") will surpass us and initiate Judgement Day or The Matrix or whatever.

However when AI inherit us to be I it will also inherit our flaws, such as loosing attention. And then it will not be completely superior to us any more. It will be another intelligent being with all the flaws that intelligent (which here really means conscious and self-conscious) have: whiches, dreams, bore, sorrow, happiness, spitted mind, stress, you name it.

Math is an empirical science

It is often claimed that math is not a science. In particular because it is not empirical. However, this is entirely wrong. Math is completely empirical. We observe certain aspects of nature such as that one and one apple brought together become two apples. We observe that there is an operation splitting an apple in two halves and that the two halves make up the total apple.

These observations lay the foundation of mathematics. But they are observations of reality and hence they make mathematics empirical.

What is amazing is that the observations are very different than what is done in e.g. physics or social sciences. The observations aim at observing some very trivial facts about nature. From these facts, everything else is deduces.

In this sense math is a (very formal) model. Models are great. They can be used to predict how a system behaves by deducing conclusions from known facts.

But it must also always be remembered that models are approximate. And they can be used to model different physical situations with differing accuracy.

This raises the question of whether math could be any different. But there is plenty of evidence that it could and can be. There are some axioms of  math that are very solid and not questioned. There there are those propositions that can not be proven with ordinary mathematics and thus can be added positive or negative. But the only difference between the axioms that we take for granted and the ones we discuss (e.g. the continuum hypothesis) is the the ones oped for discussion are harder to asses empirically if they are true or not. The same applied in geometry.

So, in conclusion; we should question every axiom and be open to others, creating other formal systems. Many of those perhaps can not be related to this world, or be used as models for phenomena in this world. Or perhaps, they all will. This is very interesting. If that is the case, that every formal system we can conceive can be used to model something in our world, it could perhaps be claimed that our world is such as it is by necessity.

Programming animals

This is a prediction of the future for bio tech.

I have recently made a plat where I grow strawberries and some other vegetables. But after 2 months or so, it look like this:

Not sure if you can spot the strawberry plants in there, but I promise there are some. Of course there should not be so much weed. But who has the time to clean it out?

So this is what I want: A programmable chicken.

Chickens are great! They eat everything:

But that is not what I want. I want them to eat everything but my strawberry plants!

Today I think it is a challenging task to do that, but what about in the future? My prediction is that in (quite many, say 20-40) years I will be able to buy, together with my strawberry plants, a tailored chicken that will eat everything but strawberry plants.

This will be great. But how will that be done? Not sure, but perhaps one could engineer taste receptors to bind to DNA or RNA so the check do not like the taste of strawberry DNA. Or there might be some gene modification of both the chicken and the strawberries to make the chicken stay away from the strawberries.

The idea here is quite general and is based on the fact that animals are amazing machines! I am quite convinced that humans will not for an extremely long time be able to build a machine with all the nice properties of a chicken. But we will be able to re-program the chicken to do exactly what we want it to.

So, there will probably be VHDL for chickens. This is what programmers will work on in the future. It has to be efficient to design the chicken for a particular task. Hence we will need some general blocks in a language that can be used when programming the animals.

No more weed in our plants. We could probably get rid of all the pesticides and get eggs and great strawberries at the same time. A brilliant future lie ahead!

What's next after IoT?

The motivation for IoT is that they say that everything that can benefit from being connected till be so. For sure that is true. But what is next. I tell you. It is that everything that benefits from learning deep will do so. That will give similar benefits as being connected and soon most everything can benefit from being intelligent (not "smart" since that is a very worn out word).

So; a prediction. We will soon (12-15 in year time) see deep learning solutions in all our gadgets.

Using wxPython

I have been fiddling with wxPython which is a quite nice cross-platform GUI toolkit for Python. The main issue, however, is that it is fairly poorly documented with very few up-to-date examples and very minimal information in the class documentation. Thus, in this post I will discuss things as I go along which I have found out, but where I experienced the documentation lacking. Perhaps it will help someone some day.

Using ListCtrl

ListCtrl can be used to create complex list views as in other GUI tool kits. I wanted to make a list where multiple items can be selected. This can be done, and is actually in version 3/Phoenix which I am using the default mode. However, it was very hard for me to figure out how to read out which items were selected. GetIndex() in the emitted event only returns the index of the last selected item, and there is no GetIndices() or anything like that. The solution is to use the method GetNextSelected() which is in the ListCtrl class, not in the emitted event.

This method is kind of silly,  not very pythonic since one has to call it multiple times and increment an index every time to where the method should start looking. One can get out a list of all selected items with the code:

items = list()

i = my_listctrl.GetNextSelected(-1)

        while i != -1:

            items.append(i)

            i = my_listctrl.GetNextSelected(i)

I recommend wrapping this into a generator function like:

def GetIndices(listctrl):

    i = listctrl.GetNextSelected(-1)

    while i!= -1:

        yield i

        i = listctrl.GetNextSelected(i)

If you really need a list, make it one using:

list(GetIndices(my_listctrl))

Keywords

I just changed the slogan that I have in the title of this blog since its creation in 2008. Now, instead there is a list of keywords identifying me as a person. This reflects the fact the this blog is more of a diary than a blog in the sense that I write down my thoughts, often quite incoherently, mostly for my own sake and to remember them.

That said, if you read anything here that you want to comment on, please do so. I would love to read it. I might even link to this blog from my LinkedIn page at some point. But I am not quite there yet I think.

On the comparison of automakers to phonemakers

I just read an article where Tesla is compared to Apple. The analogy is interesting and has some merits. But I think they are taking it way too far. The auto market will not go the same way as the phone market did.

There are several reasons for that, but the main one is that when phones turned into smartphones they stopped being phones. The term smartphone is actually completwly missleading. It should rather be denoted nanoportable computer or something. And by that, a completely new set of functuons became available.

But this will not happend to cars. They will still be cars. Just that they will drive by them selves. The nanoportable computer we have will be the devices that will occupy the time we used to spend on driving. Not something new in the cars.

There are also a bunch of other reasons that the analogy is limping. The safety and security requirement on cars can not be compared to those on phones. Also the price tag is completely different. And the life span. Also the complexity of a car can not be compared to a nanoportable computer. Those are actually quite simple devices relying totally on Moores law. However that is not the case of cars. They are just so much more mechanical. And therefor complex.

Hence, in conclusion, Tesla is not the next Apple in the sense that they will obtain a 50% market share. But that belief is what makes their stock completely over valued.

As an interesting side note, Apple is big now, but it was bigger some time ago, and it will continue to decline. The idea with proprietary solutions that are not shared has proven a bad one over and over again (beta max, mini disc, ...) Thus, Apple will continue to decline and Android will continue to dominate. Price allays beats performance. And shared competition always beats proprietary in the long run.

Marx analysis is will be even more important in the future

I just saw a video on YouTube about the future of automation. I agree with most of what is said there. However, what is not discussed is how to deal with it. The political implications of the development.

The difference between those who own means of production and those who do not will grow further. This is a key point in Marx analysis of the interplay on the capitalist market.  Of course, his solution was not very successful, and hence, we are in a desperate need to investigate how to deal with the situation.

I would like to propose some embryos to solving the situation. It is obvious that we will need to abandon the idea of continues growth. This is not a sustainable scenario. At least not in the setting it plays out now.

Another thing that perhaps could be used and put into the analysis is irrational players. Game theory is the basic framework in which economics is done. It that is all well and good. however, the central assumption of rational players is not true. Thus, that should be replaced by irrational players. One such scheme would be to let the players also act randomly to some degree. That could be used to model irrational players. There will be many questions that needs to be answered about irrational players and game optimum with irrational players. E.g. prior distributions of random moves.

Angående de nysläppta frekvenserna i 700 mhz-bandet

Nu har regeringen beslutat att TV får flytta på sig till förmån för mobilt bredband i 700 MHz-bandet. Det är nog bra. Men nu gäller det att PTS inte gör bort sig som tidigare och ger bort detta bandet utan att säkerställa att det faktiskt används som det är tänkt - att ge bra täckning på landsbygden. Det duger alltså inte att detta säljs till någon operatör som väljer att bara lägga till stödet i sina befintliga basstationer och där med öka kapaciteten där man tjänar mest pengar, dvs. i tätbebyggelse.

Nu gäller det att frekvensägandet ska komma med tydliga och sanktionerbara krav på 100% täckning i hela landet. Det måste alltså finns med klausuler i avtalet om frekvenserna där PTS kan ålägga operatörerna kraftiga viten om inte kravet på 100% täckning uppfylls. Beloppen bör överstiga kostnaden för total utbyggnad. Det kommer vara enda sättet att garantera att full utbyggnad.

About the letter on AI from celebrities

Ok this is a bit old by now, but misinformed people are still referring to it in the wrong way.

I am really annoyed with how everyone is recovering and reporting about the AI letter as "experts warning for an emerging super intelligence".

That is not what is in the letter. It is a balanced discussion on how we should relate to AI. Then it is true that some of the signers of the letter have a quite alarmistic view on AI. But the ones that have that have expressed that in other circumstances and they are typically not the experts of the letter.

The experts signing the letter have a much more moderate view on how AI will affect us. They are rightly discussing how to relate to a very powerful technology, similar to how discussions have been about atomic energy. And of course, that is the sensible thing to do when something disruptive pops up - keep an eye on it. But don't raise alarms like "this is going to end the world"...

This seems also to be the view of most moderate and sensible people in the business. 

On perception

In a recent blog post I discussed the topology of colors. As a generalisation, I would here like to discuss a fundamental property of perception in general.

The perceptions that a being have are in some sense irreducible. That is, they can not be described in terms of any other quantity  (this is kind of related to Wittgensteins idea of atomic concepts. It might be the perceptions that are those concepts). The reason for that they cannot is that those perceptions are part of the consciousness. They form the representation in the consciousness of the sensory input. Hence, if they were reducible, they would have to be interpreted in terms of something else by the consciousness and thus not be part of the consciousness but only something interpreted.

Will scientific progress stop?

Some claim, such as the discussion here. My take on this is: of course not.
Just look at the enormous progress in technology currently at hand. It just cannot keep up with science. Soon we will have quantum computers, (true) AI, quantum AI, colonized Mars, and so on. It is strange that people never learn. How many times has it been said that everything to know is know or all progress has already be made?

Om arbetskraftsinvandring

Jag är för en generös invandringspolitik och att vi ska bli bättre på att utnyttja nyanländas kompetens maximalt. Men jag håller inte med om den kritik som framförs i fallet Tayyab Shabab. Klart att han ska utvisas. Att skydda den svenska modellen är viktigare än enskilda invandrares väl och ven när arbetsgivare tänjer på systemet. Det är tråkigt att se den populism som t.ex. Annie Lööf ägnar sig åt och tar tillfället till kring ett regelverk som funnits när de borgerliga satt vid makten i 8 år. Svagt.

A possibilty for the next WCry-kind of worm

During the past days the WCry worm has caused more damage than probably any previous internet meltdown. This one was used for ransomware. What about this one: An organised crime unit develops something similar to WCry. But in addition to using it as a ransomware, pre-knowledge about what will happen is sold to other criminal elements, alerting them about when and what will happen. Thus, the general chaos can be used to conduct other criminal activities, terror acts or espionage.
That would be a kind of nightmare scenario.

About the 1990th vs 2000 and forward

It is much discussed that we seem to have peaked at around year 2000, now having more military conflicts and degrading stability in the world. I want to claim that it is what happened during the 1990th that lay the foundation to most of the problems we have now. What I am talking about is then the exploration and suppression of Russia and its population. After the Soviet Union fell, the leaft overs were ruthlessly explored by capitalists
Further, it might be possible to correlate these kind of event for other crises. Take for example the suppression of Germany after WW I, laying the (solid) foundation of WW II. The point is that large countries needs to be in a good state and relation to the rest of the world or trouble will follow.

What should 6G be and what 5G will be

Now days everyone except Ericsson and Huawei (and some others that depend on the success) admit that 5G will not be very exciting. Only offering slightly more of the same thing as today. But it will now revolutionize the way we live in the same way as LTE did (oh but it did!).
My prediction: 5G will be like 3G, a system developed that does not quite fit the needs. Thus, there are much bigger chances with 6G, or perhaps 5.5G. (These generations are really quite silly to talk about anyway since it is much more of a continuous evolution)
However, there is still a bright future for communication. And the application is... *drums*... Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality. That is what will shape the future. And the world will be ready around 5.3G. Then it will be clear what 5G should have been, and we can correct it with 6G.

One key function that will be the most interesting one is local data sources. That is, the system will have to be able to fetch large quantities of data that is produced very locally (within meters).

Topology of colors

These ideas have been updated and clarified somewhat and put into a pdf instead.

I am a creator of strange loops

Douglas Hofstadter wrote the great books Gödel, Escher, Bach and I am a strange loop. In these, he argue that we are strange loops. A strange loop is described here so I will not repeat it. Instead I want to claim, that I am not a strange loop, but rather the creator of strange loops. Pah!

Why are there no physical theories depending on the continuum hypothesis?

The continuum hypothesis or its negation can be added to ZFC without changing its validity. Yet, to my knowledge, there are no known real-world consequences of either choice. How can that be? How do we decide which axioms in a fundamental mathematical theory matters?

Further, to me, if there are no observable effects of an axiom, it should be taken as false. This is of course a problematic position to take, since those observable effects might show up much later. Thus, it is probably sensible for mathematicians to investigate the consequences of choosing either that or that. In that way, a path to observability might be found.

But, my position might have a more fundamental issue. What axiom should be taken as false? Should I choose A or ¬A as false? This will probably come down to applicability. If A provides many weird theorems and applications (as e.g. the axiom of choice does) then probably A should be taken as false.

Some thoughts on concessions

People are claiming that the material can not account for concessions. I do not believe this. Instead I think there are some key functions that, together with emergence, create concessions.
Those key functions are (partly)
* contents addressing
* association feedback

Contents addressing means that the data is the address. Or rather that there is no difference between  data and memory addresses. That means that by purely thinking about something, that that something is addressed in memory. Once that memory is accessed, if there is data there, there is also a new address that will be looked up. This kind of structure could perhaps be emulated in a computer by having a list of addresses included in each object stored in memory. 

Next, association feedback means that once a memory has been addressed, the memory contents is automatically used as a new address - accessing anything that can be addressed using that memory.

In this way, human (long term) memory is really made up of many interleaved tree data structures. Kind of like a block chain.

A (sketchy) note on evolutionary game theory

The (Nash) equilibrium in ordinary game theory (GT) has the same relation to equilibrium in evolutionary GT (EGT) as has expectation in time and sample in statistical signal processing. That is, they are the same if the process is ergodic.

By saying this, I claim that there is some concept (call is EWWS - evolutionary WSS) in EGT that corresponds to a WSS process in statistical signal processing. I think that I am claiming that evolution is an EWSS. Or maybe it could be of interest to investigate when an evolutionary process is EWSS.

Actually, evolution is such is for sure not EWSS, since species co-evolve. Thus, there should be specific sub-branches of evolutionary processes where they are EWSS. This could perhaps also be linked to geographic location in the sense that at far enough distance evolutionary processes become disconnected  due to that there is no interaction between the individuals. 

Towards a theory of consciousness

It is widely debated what consciousness is. Most of the time it boils down to an idea that consciousness is in some sense atomic. It is a singular property that pops out or exists or was created by some deity.

I would like to propose a different view to attack the problem. The idea is simply to not treat it as atomic, but rather as how physics or chemistry or some other scientific matter is done. Treat it as something that will require models and where it can be acceptable that different models partially contradict each other but explain and treat different parts of a complex "ding an sich".

By that I am also saying that consciousness is not an atomic thing. But rather a complex intertwined phenomena that has be treated and explained in parts. This thought springs from the fact that it seems very hard to define what consciousness is - it is not something deterministic, but is is also not something random. However, these are the only to types of variable we know of. Maybe it is possible to define some third type of variable - a "conscious" variable, but it seem very unlikely to me. Rather, we should treat consciousness as a matter requiring its separate theory.

Transparent pricing

I have a which for an updated pricing methodology. Today in Sweden, prices are simply stated and if you state the price except VAT, it is required to be stated and in shops for consumers (not sure what that means) also the price including VAT has to be given. But that's it. I would like a much more detailed pricing description, e.g. how much is profit, how much is payed to the suppler, and further, what are the suppliers costs. E.g. similar to how lifecycle analysis is done, but to the pricing. This would severely increase the consumer power.

About the post-truth scenario

There are so many people today raising the issues connected to the post-truth world we experience. However, I wonder why there are so few of these people bothering trying to understand why the "crowd" is not caring about the truth any more. It is easy and obvious to criticize, but how to manage it?

I think there are very many ingredients to it. But not all are properly discussed. The establishment and peoples reluctant feelings towards it is mentioned. But why are people angry with the establishment?

One thing I believe causes it is that people are dick for being thrown facts in their faces. Facts that they are not capable or willing to verify. So it all smears to a big "what ever".

Religion as a human activity

I think it is important to note that religious activity is a human activity. In that respect  it is no different than other activities performed by humans.
By noting this, claims and comparisons done on entities categorized to religion can be managed on the same footing as other claims and comparisons. It is really the argument the will win the religion vs. freedom of speech debate, to freedom of speed advantage.

On religion as a human activity and secularism

It is hard the argue against the fact that what is generally called religion is a human activity. What should be classified as religious activity can of course be dabated and which features of our society that should be attributed to religion is also so.
More fundamental activities, concepts and ideas can further be categorized to the activity of religion or not.
My proposition is then that the categorization of activities as religion is destructive. Religion is a very charged word. Further there are ideas claiming that religion and religious activity should be free from critique and the executor can often claim religion and be free of any responsibility for his/her actions.
It is slightly easier with culture and it us thus better to assiciate elements to a certain culture.

On a modellistic world view

I need to write something. Regarding materialism and all the fuzz about spirituality and non-materialism. Again the discuasion is messing the point. It is not a question of weather our being is materialistic or idealistis or something in between. The question is if it is modellistic. By that I mean that it is fundamentally coherent and can thus be modelled by proper language (in some Wittgensteinian way). This is what is interesting and where a so called atheis and a theist differ in opinion.

But having a non-modellistic world view is absurde and self-contradicting. You can never hope to have a coherent view of something that is non-modellistic and hence what can not be said clear can not be said at all.

On local time, memory and hysteresis

I would like to propose a new view on time. Time evolution should be associated to each process that evolves. It should not be seen as an external parameter driving the equations. Instead it should be seen as a dependent variable. The dependence is from system evolution. This way, time can flow at any speed, depending on the evolution of the system.

Further, hysteresis and memory are the same thing and they are the stopping of local system time. Thus, objects (and beings) can interact over time in the sense that they are parts of a system where there is time evolution, but where them selves are in a time stopped state.

This is all a bit fuzzy, but I will try to extend the idea to be more coherent in future notes. In the mean time, here is an illustration of what I mean:

We are surounded by a world we do not understand

There is for sure nothing controversial with the statement in the title. When we are born we basically do not understand anything, then we learn some things. We go to school and learn some more. However, somewhere here it starts to differentiate. As adults we know and understand different things. And this is important and is gong to be more pronounced in the future. This is due to specialisation.
However, more and more of the specialised understanding is understanding of man made systems/phenomena/... And these man made phenomena can be exploited more and easier then the physical world it self (e.g. via bugs or particular features).
Take a thing like bitcoin, and all the applications behind the blockchain. We will be surrounded by them. But only a few will understand how they work. This is of course the case already with different IT systems and other things. But the new thing, and for the future, these will be more and more abundant. And more and more of our core reality will be based on it.

This, in turn, will generate a new (or a more pronounced) class system dividing those who know and can and those cannot.

About the American election

Since the winning of Trump,  there has been extensive analysis from everywhere what went wrong.
However, this is really missing the whole point. They are discussing the result, which tipped over to Trumps favor by pure chance. Seriously. The margins are so tight that it was really random. Now why is that? It is not related to white working class, Clintons lack of message or whatever. There is something else. A process that forces the results to equilibrate around that 50% mark.
What this is, I cannot with certainty say, but it is much bigger than the ideas presented so far.

The future of virtual reality

I just tries VR glasses for my SGS6 and I am hooked. So with this post I want to share my vision about the future of VR.

1. Multi camera mobile phones. The next generation mobile phones will come with two (or more) cameras to be able to do proper stereoscopic augmented reality. There might even be cameras to enhance vision, e.g. by sensor for other wavelengths, other dynamic range, and so on.

2. One or two generations further away there will be displays where it will be possible to control radiation angle of the different pixels of the screen.  This will provide the last piece for a complete visual experience: depth of field.

3. Screen resolution will one way or another increase some factor 10 or so. This is really required to provide the right visual experience.

4. Around 2 generations away the applications will explode. Games is really not the main thing. Conferencing (all participants in the same augmented room), replacing a monitor (complete privacy, enormous screens (virtual ones that is), education, ... everything really!

So, the phones will adapt to the VR requirements and some time in the future will they merge and we finaly get to Google glas, but much better. Sort of what hapend for the Apple Newton and smart phones.

The first Indiana Jones

I was just watching the first Indiana Jones movie. It is from 1981. Then I realised it is interesting in how many ways this movies could never have been made today. It is xenofobic, even racist with the supreior white male. But it is also mystifying something nobody in todays global society will find exciting. Today it is all about aliens and super heros. Some old idian tribe does not excite us any more.

This is the societal change we have gone through in 35 years. Remarkable.