Archives of ctltheory for Jun8-98

Archives of ctltheory for Jun8-98
Mon, 8 Jun 1998	Vol. 1.2

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The anti Cynical Science site

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CTLTHY: Cris Swart's ASS

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Date: 8 Jun 1998 12:40:21 -0400
From: tim@bruckner.stoch.uni-linz.ac.at (Tim Boykett)
Subject: The anti Cynical Science site

Hello CTLers,

I'd like to share something with you all, and I've
CCed the site owner because he might like what we
have here.
The site is below:

http://www.eskimo.com/~billb

and is run by a fellow who seems to have an intrinsic
hatred of institutionalised science. There's some
little bit on the site where he attempts to answer
the question "how did you get like this?" by saying
that "Reading is subversive, reading makes you wierd."
Or this might have been in relation to his philosophy
of web design: no frames, few pictures, blindness-
and low-bandwidth friendly. Kids who aren't scared
off by the lack of MTV-level graphics, who bother
reading this stuff, he wants to help them be wierd.

I followed the link to this site via some work he has
done on "Handmade Holograms", my goodness gracious me
this looks wonderful! Check it out.

Another great titbit were his collected quotes. Some
of my favourites were:

"There is no better soporific and sedative than
skepticism" - Nietzsche

"I love fools' experiments, and am always making
them" - Darwin

"There most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one
that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but
'That's funny...'" - Asimov

This was a nice site to find, balancing those sites
that exist by the dozen that get stuck into the
dangerous and stupid ends of pseudoscience, the
creationists and faith healers. Although I can side
with the skeptics, Bill Beaty's site about too
much scepticism was great.

Enuff 4 now..

tim

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\ / TIMEĢS UP
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\/ A-4020 Linz Tim Boykett
/\ ph:+43/732-787804 tim@bruckner.stoch.uni-linz.ac.at
/xx\ fax: +43/732-795742 --------------------------------------------
/xxxx\ http://www.timesup.org
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Date: 8 Jun 1998 20:51:22 -0400
From: tim@bruckner.stoch.uni-linz.ac.at (Tim Boykett)
Subject: list

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Date: 8 Jun 1998 21:55:09 -0400
From: tim@bruckner.stoch.uni-linz.ac.at (Tim Boykett)
Subject: CTLTHY: Cris Swart's ASS

My Fungible ASS

The ASS, the Absolutely simplified system of Cris Swart (indexed at:
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive-1996/0341.html, note that the
thing.des.nl URL is dead, and the last part of the article seems to be
missing) is something that grabs the imagination. Mine at least. It does
two things. The bit of me that went to uni and still does, the bit that
puts things in boxes, even if it has to spend time making those boxes and
defining the edges and bottom and top and how to get inside those boxes,
well, that bit of my brain says, "cute, cellular automata." Then it stops
talking, because it has a compartment labelled ASS and it's inside a
slightly larger compartment called CA, and in that compartment there are
many other things which fall under the title and are much more
"scientific."

But that's not what this text is about. Maybe for people who have never
played around with Conway's "Game of Life," this text might lead them off
there, and that would not be a bad thing. But if that's all it was, then
no. There are many people the world over who talk about CA type of ideas,
who chat about biological metaphors for computation, evolving strategies
for cooporation or tax avoidance or share-market winnings or something
else. No, Cris' text does something else.

Wondering about the whys and wherefores of computer hardware, somehow he
ends up at the CA model of computation. Not like tech-heads or physics
graduates, the arrival at CA follows a natural course towards minimalism.
Maybe I'm overly sympathetic because I've been dealing with hardware
installations and compatibilities recently.

So for me the issue that is hit upon here is this whole appropriate tech
thing. Geo here is working on biological computer stuff, the expression
"micro-hertz" gets bandied about. I'm not sure if it is the right speed for
any particular processing job to get done, but it might well be. But
there's this idea that certain forms of technology are simply inappropriate
for the job at hand. Hammer as a fly swat. Moreover, the organisation of
usage of those tools can be overwhelming in terms of the content that they
carry implicitly. It is no coincidence that clockwork models of
conciousness raged through the renaissance only to be replaced with
computational metaphors once the computer became our main intellectual
partner.

Perhaps the nicest aspect of the ASS proposal is the idea that
computational power is evenly spread through the computer. There is no part
that is the CPU, another part that is the memory. The name CPU, "Central
Processing Unit" captures all the control-freak centralised power that any
X-ocrat could want. There is a concept introduced by Tom Toffoli of
computation equivalence between various computational substrates. The idea
is that you should be able to obtain computational power in units that are
equally powerful. That computation is, to use a strange term, "fungible"
(see http://pm.bu.edu/tt/publ/fung.ps). That is, units of computation are
completely exchangable and summable. For a small job you need just a little
computation, for larger jobs you go out and borrow or rent a box-full, to
render and animation you need to borrow a truck to transport the stuff.
This model, abstract as it might be, appeals to me due to its locality and
friendliness. I can imagine popping next door to borrow a cup of sugar and
a kilo of computer.

If computational power were really perfectly fungible, then the process of
group computation becomes something else. A large group of people coming
together has computational power that no single person is likely to be able
to afford. Computers stop being these things that drag our eyes into this
private space, where try as they might, only the pair of eyes attached to
the hand on the mouse are really interested in what's going on (the hassle
of surfing over someone else's shoulder is too much). We start having
computation that is fungible, like a meal that is good in bits, some
noodles, perhaps a salad, becoming a delicious buffet when combined with
the dinners of friends for a large shared meal.

Somehow the title of the text from Cris, "nettime: our own computer
hardware" captures it.Something like this could be "our" computer hardware,
it has all the right buttons. Just one question, how do I get Eudora
running on it?

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