August 24, 2004 - Macaroni Grill
Agenda
- The Da Vinci Code
- More on Cory Doctorow
- They know where you are
- Wanna Travel Through Time?
- Twilight Zone
The Da Vinci Code
George is reading The Da Vinci Code, the new runaway best-seller by Dan Brown. He says its a real page turner! George noted that the concept of "Phi", the golden ratio (approximately 1.61803398874989), appeared prominently in this book which is filled with symbols and hidden meanings. According to The Golden Number website, Johannes Kepler referred to Phi as one of the "two great treasures of geometry" (the other is the Phythagorean Theorem).
What? There's an entire website dedicated to Phi? It turns out that this number is VERY interesting. George and actually talked about it during our 2nd documented lunch on September 6th, 2001. This number pops up everywhere in mathematics and the natural world. It can be found in triangles, pentagons, concentric circles, pyramids, and pantagrams. In nature, it appears nearly everywhere you look. For example, the ratio of the entire length of your arm compared to the length measured from your elbow to your finger tips: Phi. The radii of the segments of a nautilus shell? Yep, they differ by a ratio of Phi.Here's another amazing tidbit I found at the Golden Number website:
The Fibonacci series, discovered by Leonardo Fibonacci, has an interesting relationship to Phi. The Fibonacci series begins with zero and one, and then each subsequent number in the series is the sum of the previous two:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... The ratio of any Fibonacci number to the number before it approximates Phi, and as you move toward greater Fibonacci numbers, this approximation becomes more and more exact. For example, 5 divided by 3 is 1.666..., which is close to Phi, and 34/21 is equal to 1.619 (much closer to Phi).
I tried measuring my own arm (with Teri's help) to see how it would come out. From the shoulder to fingertip, my arm measures 85 centimeters. From the elbow to fingertip, 51 centimeters. Hey! 85/51 reduces down to 8/5! That's a pair of consecutive Fibonacci numbers... and the ratio is 1.6666... not bad.
Cory Doctorow
Ok, so now I've read two of Cory's novels. And yes, he's only written two. So what do I think? Well, I liked Eastern Standard Tribe much better than Down and Out. I liked the main character better, the story was more interesting, and I always like Doctorow's writing style. He provides only what is necessary-- no more.
As an example, I will provide one chapter in its entirety from the book. This chapter follows a big fight between Art and Linda (his girlfriend) at Art's office, but they've just made up.
Chapter 15:Vigorous sex ensued.
Yep, that's it. No more is needed, really! I'm reading this story for the plot and the interesting ideas, not for a graphic sex scene.
Doctorow introduces some of his ideas about the future. He envisions communities forming on the internet, communities which might have a lot of common interests, but not all of the people are necessarily from the same time zone. This causes problems for those in a different time zone-- they want to sleep when their friends are sleeping, be online when their friends are online, but that may be at odds with the local sun cycle! The point here is that if "your people" are basically aligned with a different time zone, you'll adjust your hours to match theirs. You loyalty to your zone tribe will be greater than the loyalty you feel for your physical neighbors, so you end up being an agent behind enemy lines, so to speak.
My biggest complaint about EST is that it fails to deliver on a promise I thought it made in the first chapter. Art says:
| Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?" |
Philosophically, I find this to be an interesting question, one that I have asked myself. It does seem that the more you know about the world and the smarter you are, the more depressing the world and existence itself seems to be.
Doctorow completely disappoints me on this issue! The story ends, and I'm not sure if Art chose "happy", or "smart", or both. The book ended in kind of a "Happily Ever After" way, which I suppose is consistent with Cory's fascination obsession with Disney and the Magic Kingdom. So basically, he gets me all excited about this fundamental question, but there's no pay off.
Still, I would recommend this book for the following reasons: It's an interesting story, it creates a very believable (and recognizable) future, and it's pretty short! you could finish it in a day. Here's a perfectly legal copy you can download and read, if you don't yet want to buy it:
Eastern Standard Tribe (txt)
Other writings from Cory
Cory gave an interesting talk on E-books at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference entitled E-Books: Neither E, nor Books.
I also ran across a reference to a short story Cory wrote (Salon published it) which is a sequel of sorts to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Truncat. It explores the ramifications of file-sharing someone else's consciousness (you may remember from our August 1st lunch that people in Down and Out can create complete backups of their brains in case they need to restore them after a fatal accident). If you are a Salon subscriber, or promise you will be, you can just download this PDF version (honor system!!).
Lastly, I want to remind you about the currency used in Down and Out: whuffies. Since resources are plentiful and no one ever dies, money is not really necessary. Instead, everyone has a personal rating based on the opinion others have about you. It's like a combination of Google Page Rank, and maybe Ebay feedback rating. The higher your whuffie number, the finer the food, clothes, accommodations, and other stuff you get to receive. It has been called a "reputation currency."
Well, this is a cool idea, and someone has even created a Whuffie Blog to discuss it, but it seems that mathematically, it is a system which is highly susceptible to perversion by those with ill intent. "If the right thing to do would seem suspicious, then reputation systems encourage you to do the wrong thing, to enhance your reputation." Here's the brief entry on Boing Boing which links to the painful math-based article, as well as a site for the math-challenged.
They know where you are
George referred me to an article by Brendan Koerner in an issue of Legal Affairs magazine. The article, Your Cell phone is a Homing Device, indicates that nearly every cellular phone manufactured since 2002 is "E911 capable", which means that police can use the GPS satellite system to locate your cell phone, ostensibly in the case of an emergency.The real problem here is it is not you who decides what constitutes a valid use of this feature! Another important point is that it is not the police who track your location continuously-- it is your cellular provider. IF your phone is properly equipped, they can know precisely where you are at any moment (as long as your phone is powered up), and can keep histories of your movements. Yes, if police know this information exists, they could subpoena your location records just as they might subpoena your call logs.
Perhaps even more unsettling than the government monitoring angle are the opportunities for Verizon or T-Mobile (or whomever) to exploit this new information. Imagine standing inside Tower Records and receiving a spam text message from Amazon saying "Come to Amazon.com! Lower prices than Tower every day."
There's a lot more to this topic. If you are concerned about your privacy, turn off your cell phone, and read the article.
Wanna travel through time?
Are you ready to not only travel to the future, but also to be rich when you get there? Well, that's what they're promising over at the Time Travel Fund. You just sign up now, making a small investment of $10. During the hundreds of years between now and when time travel technology is finally developed, your small investment will grow into a fortune! A small amount of your fortune will be used to pay for retrieving you from your current time context, placing you far into the future, as a billionaire.
So this company takes a cut of your ten dollars ($9, I think) to pay for the website, setup the trust accounts, pay any legal fees, line their pockets, etc. Your remaining dollar is invested on your behalf. Oh! You also get a dandy certificate, suitable for framing.
I don't know about you, but this looks like a great bargain. And it makes a terrific gift!
Twilight Zone
While reading Boing Boing, I stumbled upon something really special: Planet of the Apes re-imagined as a Twilight Zone episode. I never knew that Rod Serling was credited as a screenwriter of the original film, but that makes it a natural. And that surprise ending-- classic Twilight Zone material!
The driving force behind The Forbidden Zone (a Planet of the Apes site) created the remix. I don't know his name, and I cannot find it anywhere on the site! Anyway, he (she?) changed it to black-and-white, used opening and closing credits from original TZ episodes, and found quite appropriate narration from Serling! He even edited the entire movie into three 7-minute acts, just as though there would be commercial breaks. You can read the production notes to discover the details of how it was all accomplished. Naturally, all editing was performed on a Macintosh.
This is brilliantly done, and I really enjoyed it. You will, too! The Quicktime version is over 61 MB, so the Forbidden Zone is having some bandwidth exceedance problems... still, you can find links to mirrors here.
