Apple's new Data Center

Being an avid reader of Apple related news, I’m just fascinated by the function of the newly built back-up center in North Carolina. Yes, most of the articles in the net are usually covering predictions of iPad3 or iPhone5, their features, release dates, etc. However, I would say that the data center, though it is less sexy than the shinny polished gadgets that we can get our hands on, it is much more interesting and would have far reaching consequence to the Apple ecosystem than most consumers would think.

Before Apple made iPhone, people had predicted that Apple would make a phone. Before, iPad was release, people already know Apple was making a tablet. This time, when Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are drumming for the possibility of Cloud Computing, you think Apple will sit around and do nothing? Certainly not, I think the data center would the key for it.

Apple’s strategy (non-financial wise) is to provide the best consumer experience in using personal technology to interact with information and consume entertainment. Desktops, laptops, phone, tablet, etc take care the physical part, the OS, itunes, app stores, etc are the software part. Apple still has to work on negotiation with content providers to get their contents on Apple’s platform to be delivered to consumers. Cables will be gone, wireless is the future, that’s where the cloud computing come into place. I’m no expert on this subject, but I read the article this morning and just love the analysis of what Apple’s data center would do. Just wanna share with you all:

What No One has Dared Think About Apple’s Data Center
Columns and Opinions by Adam Christianson and John Martellaro 2:29 PM, Apr. 20th, 2011
“When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster.” — Aza Raskin

There is a classic puzzle about a fellow in a rowboat who is rowing down a river and drops his hat overboard. The puzzle involves calculating how long it takes him to turn around and row back to the hat floating in the water. The problem is a lot easier to solve if one changes reference frame and works from the guy in the boat instead of from the shoreline view. It’s an example of how a change of reference frame is often useful for solving a problem. Another example comes from physics. Some problems in electromagnetism are a lot easier to solve in spherical coordinates. In other words, recasting the problem to make it easier to solve is a helpful technique. The quote above for this article extends that idea to not only re-framing, but also doing it in such a way that we learn faster.

It’s that recasting that I want to talk about with respect to Apple’s data centers.
A lot has been written about Apple’s new data center in North Carolina, but no one has been able to put together a coherent picture of what it all means. Most articles wax into lofty notions of a massive data center to deliver a better MobileMe experience, untethered iPads synced to the cloud instead of a PC — or a massive movie databank. And leave it at that.

Apple’s North Carolina Data Center
The problem arises when we start to formulate an idea about just exactly how the data center (and possibly more like the NC center worldwide) would be utilized. For example, if one takes all the assumptions about Apple’s DNA, it’s easier to re-frame the question about what Apple trying to achieve.

Let’s start with some easy analysis about Apple’s competition, Netflix. If Apple intends to out-Netflix the Netflix Corp., then how will Apple convince Hollywood executives to give them rights to a massive movie archive as Netflix CEO Red Hastings has done? (We know that Hollywood executives are alarmed at the prospect of Apple obtaining control over movies in the way Apple seized control of music.) We also know that Hollywood and the networks don’t want to upset the apple cart with the lucrative deals they have with cable and satellite carriers.

We suspect that buying Netflix, with its huge inventory of plastic discs and likely exclusive contracts with Hollywood, isn’t Apple’s style. (That is, Netflix’s contracts might not be inheritable if the company is bought.)

In fact, everywhere we turn, it seems like the problem is insurmountable and in desperate need of reformulation. The whole scenario suggests that we’re asking the wrong questions, making the wrong assumptions, and, worse, not analyzing the problem that Apple faces and imagining a next generation solution.

Seeking an Analogy
A good analogy comes from looking at the music industry and the development of the Apple iPod. The music industry in the 1990s was going strong and was all too happy to sell complete albums on a plastic CD. And we know how much they charged for that piece of plastic which forces us to buy all the songs in the album. It also forced customers into ridiculous collections, bookcases, boomboxes, and awkward CD players. Apple came along with a 140 gram iPod that could hold 1,000 songs and that changed the game completely. The labels’ obsession with money and the status quo blinded them to the next technological step, which was user choice, playlists, and massive storage in your pocket.

Asking a New Set of Questions
Let’s ask some new questions and see where it goes.

1. What if Apple’s analysis of the TV industry has led to the same kind of ground breaking, imaginative solution?
2. What temptations could Steve Jobs lay before Hollywood and the networks that would allow them to maintain the kind of control they want yet lure them into experimenting with Apple at a higher level?
3. How could a massive data center become, essentially, the next (super) iPod?
4. Apple recently made headlines by purchasing 12 petabytes of storage. One of our readers calculated that 12 petabytes would take up about 180 sq ft of floor space. Apple’s data center has more than 500,000 sq ft. We’re talking exabytes of possible expansion. More as storage continues to use less space over the lifetime of the data center. What service could use that kind of storage?

Some Assumptions
Let’s summarize our reasonable assumptions about Apple’s situation.
1. Apple doesn’t want to buy Netflix because it doesn’t want to inherit a mail order business of plastic discs. It may not be able to inherit the movie rights.
2. Apple doesn’t want to buy an ISP like Time Warner or Comcast and inherit the lousy politics, bureaucracy and customer service reputation of these companies.
3. Apple can’t reasonably replace the broadband infrastructure currently in place by telcos and cable companies. Apple would have to spends hundreds of billions, as AT&T has, to build a new, national wireless network. That’s not a good use of Apple’s money.
4. The Apple TV has taught Apple a lot about the home TV industry. It remained a hobby because Apple hadn’t solved the basic problem at hand.
5. Apple doesn’t want to own the newspaper, magazine, book, music and movie industry. Instead, they want a 30 percent cut, a piece of the action, on the delivery of all that content.
6. By the end of 2011, Apple will have 50 million TV sets, called iPads, in customer homes.
Some Guesses

The questions above are a completely different set of questions than we’ve have seen asked, and while we don’t have all the answers, we’ll try to make some educated guesses based on the questions and the assumptions.

First, we note that here are too many fragmented delivery mechanisms owned by different players and which use different technical delivery mechanisms. And each has its own unique library and UI for delivering content. Recall how, in the early 1990s, many of us had cassete players, CD players and VCRs. Now, we have DVDs/Blu-ray, Internet (Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, Boxee, Google) and cable/satellite. Vested interests lure us into buying physical media that’s constantly being made obsolete. Vested interests are keeping the industry from thinking about how to deliver all this content is a new, more convenient and coherent way.

Our chief complaint is that American households are constantly changing between these delivery mechanisms to get a better price for bundled Internet service plus content as they also wrestle with new hardware and pray for better customer service. It would be better to take content out of the equation and reduce the carriers to fast pipes by offering customers a superior content purchase and management experience.

In other words, the problem is not the content. Many movies and TV shows are terrific — once they get delivered. The problem is all the fuss we have to go through to get that content delivered (and stored, and backed up). What we need is a better channel. (For example, who uses Epix? Who has even heard of it?) What Apple could be building is the channel everyone wants to be on.

So, like the iPod, it seems that the key to all this is a simple, easy to use, dependable, customer friendly channel that delivers the content that Hollywood wants to deliver. To do that, Apple needs a modern, capable data center.

For example, here’s how content delivery happens for many people now:
[Comcast (etc), DIRECTV (etc)] -> DVR -> HDTV

Here’s how Apple is slowly introducing an evolutionary new channel. Each step is part of Apple’s plan, but it’s been one step at a time.
Mac (iTunes) -> Apple TV 1G -> HDTV
Apple Cloud -> Apple TV 2G -> HDTV
Apple Cloud -> iOS device (AirPlay) -> Apple TV 2G -> HDTV
Apple Cloud -> iOS device (AirPlay) -> (optionally) HDTV

The last step suggests the elimination of the Apple TV, and that’s why we’ve been hearing about Apple making AirPlay available to the TV makers. (Even so, Apple can keep selling the Apple TV 2G as part of a stopgap household solution.) This evolution could also explain why we’ve heard rumors about Apple making its own TV: to seed customers with an AirPlay capable TV to trigger interest in the technology, not to globally compete with, say, Panasonic and Sony.

The overall idea here is to make the user experience with its family of iOS devices so superior that customers will naturally want to opt for the Apple channel rather than the old, obsolete technologies the cable companies have been delivering.The overall idea here is to make the user experience with its family of iOS devices so superior that customers will naturally want to opt for the Apple channel rather than the old, obsolete technologies the cable companies have been delivering. After all, these companies have been modestly successful delivering bandwidth, but have been terrible at delivering mobile technology devices with modern UIs. With hundreds of millions of iOS devices in consumer hands in the near future, customers will naturally opt for these devices rather than the sorry, disjointed services, UI and equipment the cable companies have been able to muster.

Apple hopes the content delivery services of the bandwidth suppliers will dry up and blow away thanks to customer demand for Apple iOS devices and technologies. At the very least, Apple will surge to the top when it comes to customer choice for delivery, making it very difficult for Hollywood and the studios to avoid doing a staggeringly large business with Apple.

The associated step is to point out to Hollywood and the studios that links to this content are everywhere. Every movie, every song, every book has a URL. The embedding of those URLs is everywhere in the web. Apple has 200 million customers with credit cards on file who are always just two clicks away from buying content from their iPhones and iPads, etc. That’s the leverage Steve Jobs will have, along with the insame popularity of the iPad, to lure content developers onto the Apple channel.

Apple will have bypassed the content from the cable companies without building its own network. And Apple gets 30 percent of all the action.
________________________________________
John Martellaro is a senior scientist and author. A former U.S. Air Force officer, he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple Computer. During his five years at Apple, he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager for science and technology, Federal Account Executive, and High Performance Computing Manager. His interests include alpine skiing, SciFi, astronomy, and Perl. John lives in Denver, Colorado.
You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

My recent thoughts on Politics, Economy, and Global Conspiracy

I’ve not blogged for a while due to the hectic pace of my personal life recently. On top of that, my thoughts have not been very organized lately. Just too many things fleshing around me that I kinda lost focus on some concrete topics that I really wanna blog about, it is somewhat like ‘jogging’ in department store. i.e. you see a lot of things, but nothing hold you attention long enough to tell people afterwards what you saw. You know what I mean? Well, fortunately, I feel a bit better today and am also able to squeeze few minutes to blog. Hopefully, this blog is not too confusing as I do have few items that I wanna blog about. The more I read news, the more I’m frustrated with the local political scene which is such a mess. Government officials are so incompetent; the opposition parties only make sound bites without providing any concrete alternative policies or suggestions to counter the half-baked policies from the government. Given the deformed political structure without real functioning democracy and empowered mass, the current regime is just waiting to pass its patron to the next who has yet to be ‘chosen’. Being a member of a relatively highly civilized population, I think that we deserve better. However, we are just too occupied with filling our bowls that we are still kinda passive in fighting for our deserved rights. I don’t think we are truly powerless; as our current relatively inaction state may not last long. Agreed with most social critics have said recently, the pressure is certainly building in the society rapidly. The young, the poor and the middle class will not be willingly kowtowed to the riches and powerful for long. If they don’t wake up and do the right thing soon, they will sure regret….. Internationally, the Jasmine revolution in Middle East is contagious, particularly the current situation in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Ivory Coast. How the West react to those uprisings differently just can’t hide the hypocrisy. Fighting for freedom and democracy are just hollow mottos that can’t fool any independent minds. I just think the nation that really holds the ‘key’ of peace is Israel. Cuz, its relationship with Palestine and Iran pretty much dictate the atmosphere in the region. Inflation is hitting home, I can tell from the growing grocery bill week by week. Things are just getting expensive. Bonus is not enough to cover tax, salary raise is a joke. Regarding the FX situation of USD, RMB, AUD, JPY, etc., what we earn and what currency we pay for goods are not in our favor. I’m ok financially for the time being, but I’m a pessimist in terms of our financial future. So, I’m really conscious about my spending. The financial picture of my household is still ok, but things could change easy down the road. Being a parent is expensive these days. That’s why I’m never a fan of luxury items and clearly know the difference between ‘needs’ and ‘desires’. As a result, looking at my current family situation, I’ve forfeited my desire of getting an ‘iPad2’ and perhaps an ‘iPhone5’ as well till next year for upgrade. The macroeconomic environment is not encouraging. Just look at the prices of oil, gold, foods, and all sorts of commodities, they are surging. The QE by the Fed floods the world with paper money that worth less and less….. I’ve long been interested in alternative, non-mainstream stuff. Reading articles and books of paranormal activities like ESP, ghost, UFO, aliens, etc have long been my favor pastime. However, what I’ve been reading recently are on ‘conspiracies’ like the Freemason stuff. Though there are reported that Freemason is related to the Pentagon which is alleged to work with aliens on secret bases and technology, etc. For me, I wouldn’t say I would completely discount the alien stuff from the whole picture. But, for the rest of stuff about conspiracies, the more I read, the more I found that the conspiracies can link up and explain ‘dots’ which are things that are happening and may happen in coming future. Those things are actually part of a complex matrix that cover political, economical, technological, social, and health aspect of our world that do affect us on personal basis. Yes, I can neither prove the conspiracies, nor make any meaningful change for some of those that may potential hit home for being a tiny powerless individual myself. However, just knowing something does give me a bit of comfort. It may sound silly to some people that if you gonna die, what makes a difference if you know the cause or not. Yes, that’s true from a point of view, but, as I said that I like alternative stuff that I don’t think along with the mass. I enjoy knowing something, i.e. to have a set of coherent belief/theory to explain how/why certain things happen, much more than being ignorant and then perish in veil. For the mentioned matrix above, I think the so-called conspiracies that I read so far did help me to link up the following ‘dots’: SARS, Swine Flu, Genetic-alternated foods, Monsanto, World Population control, IMF, World Bank, Center for Foreign Relations, U.S. Presidents, Iran, Stuxnet, CIA, War on Terror, 9/11, oil shortage, global warming, Hurricane Katrina, Drug Cartels, Rothschild, Freemasons, illuminati, Zionism, the Pope, Media, Chinese Economy, WW3, EVP, U.S. National Debts, QE, New World Order, Federal Reserve, Wall Street, etc. I’m not gonna elaborate the connections of those dots, they can be found in internet easily. Let’s be honest, I’m truly fascinated by the materials that I read recently. Nonetheless, as I said, I don’t think I can do much in spite of ‘knowing’ how things are connected and what ‘may’ happen in near future. What I will do is simply living the way I can and to be what I should be: to protect/support my family and to be a constructive member of the society. I’m not sure if what I’ve just blogged too confusing or not. Well, that may simply reflect part of what have been on my mind recently.

I need a break

I’ve been very tired in these 2 days. I didn’t know why at first. Is it because I didn’t sleep enough? Or too busy at work? Yesterday was Thursday, but I felt like it was Friday. So, you can imagine how I feel today. I think I'm tired is a result of combo of factors.

• Am I too busy at works? Well, I had busy days, but not to a point of exhaustion.
• Am I sick or something? I don't think so. I think I've not worked out for a long time, that doesn't help.
• Anything to do with my diet? well, actually I eat quite well recently, just too full sometimes. But, it is fine overall.
• Have I got enough sleep? Well, that is a bit lacking, maybe I listen to podcast a bit too much, cuz I've been trying to catch up with some programs, just wanna clean up the backlog. However, coffee helps and I did do some catch up in bed to make up my needs.
• Am I too stressful over things? Well, yes, to some extents, considering the recent and upcoming change on the home front. However, I think that's still manageable.
• Am I bored? Hmm..... certainly not as vivid as many others. I've responsibilities to fulfill. I've jobs to do. Most things take time. I need to keep harmony at home. That takes effort. So, with the limited spare personal time that I have. My PC and iPhone entertain me. Is that enough? No, but I somehow just get use to it. Not trying to complain. Perhaps time is really the issue, that's why I decide to put off my desire of getting an iPad2 and get iPad3 next year instead. iPad3 will certainly better than iPad2, if I don't have time to enough iPad2, why I just wait till I may have more time next year to get a gadget that refresh every year.

Come to think of it....I suddenly realize a forgotten fact that I've not have a vacation for at least a year if not longer. I start my current job last May and it's been 10 months now. I can't recall when did I have vacation in my previous job. That means I've been working for months and months without a break to refresh myself, to rejuvenate, to recharge, to chill or whatever you call that. Maybe that's why...........

However, based on my current situation on home and work fronts, I don't think I will take time off till June. So, there's 2-3 more months to go!! Oh Shxx! I need a break!....................

NBA 2011 predictions

I'm quite tired lately, both on the works and family sides. However, that hasn't stopped me from reading news, particularly my favorite topics...

NBA regular season is getting close. Based on my gut feeling, I would make following bold predictions, let's see if I'm right or wrong in few months.

Eastern Conference:
Celtics will beat Heat in 6 games
Bulls will beat Magic in 6 games
Celtics will beat Bulls in 7 games to go to the Final.

Western Conference:
Lakers will beat Mavericks in 5 games
Spurs will beat Thunder in 6 games
Spurs will beat Lakers in 7 games to go to the Final.

Final:
Celtics will beat Spurs in 6 games -> 1825!

Fukushima 50

A team of workers said they would give their lives to save Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant from disaster. I definitely think that they are truly heroes. For god sake, they may die sooner than they suppose to be due to the potentially fatal levels of radiation that they are voluntarily exposing themselves to. They will be regarded as martyrs for sure.

They said that they are not afraid to die. It is easy to say, but really doing it is another thing. The 180 technicians have been nicknamed The Fukushima Fifty because they rotate shifts at the plant in teams of 50 in a desperate bid to cool overheating reactors.

They are the bravest of the brave and have put themselves before their country. And Tokyo radiology professor Keiichi Nakagawa said: “This is like suicide fighters in a war.” But, I disagree with that. Yes, they are Japanese, but they are not Kamikaze. Those fighter pilots crashed their planes to U.S. battleships in WWII gave their lives to a wrong cause. Though that was probably not what they believed then, they died for their country on the wrong path. However, Fukushima 50 are doing for the well-beings of not just their fellow citizens, but for the rest of us as well. Whether they succeed or not, we owe them to some extents for sure, and they absolutely deserve salute from the world.

Reportedly, many bone marrow centers all over the First world are ready to help these folks. However, their fates in terms of medical reality are doomed. Hopefully, the medical world would be able to level their pain and their government would take care of their love ones, so they will rest in peace and received the highest honor and respect that they deserve.

Japan Earthquake + Tsunami

I wanna blog about this topic for few days, just too many family errands to run putting me off from blogging till today. March 11, 2011 is recorded in world history as an important date given the earthquake of 8.9 magnitude scale took place in North-Eastern part of Japan and the tsunami as a result. Thanks for the advance in technology, we could all witness the horrific power of nature with our eyes. The images are just devastating and the damages are still unfolding.

To be fair, I love the concept that life is equal, but in fact, it isn’t in the world that we are living in. Looking back to other natural disasters, when I read news about earthquake hit Turkey or Iran with death toll in tens of thousand just few years back. In spite of images from TV, the impact to us was not that great. Coz, those places in rubbles were not too much different from before the earthquake hit. It is not true for sure, but the television image wasn’t helping much. Even for the big one that hit Sichuan few years back, kept aside the ethic feelings towards the victims, the damage of collapse building left us feeling sad, but anger was resulted upon reading the news that some teachers would escape while leaving behind the kids in classrooms, and the substandard building standards that kill so many innocents while the government buildings still stood with minimal damage. The South Asia tsunami that kills 200,000+ was also horrific. However, the television image was mainly focusing on beach resorts and islands. The visual impact was more a matter of aftermath and we could more or less rely on victims’ recount and imagine why horrible it was.

This time is different. First of all, it happens to a first world country with advance technology. The visual images are available almost real time with minimal delay. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube just made all the difference. Secondly, the scale is greater. Earthquake is huge in historic measure, and the power of tsunami….man….just make us speechless. When we see the black wave swam with cars, trucks, boats, ships and hit houses, highways, trains, and airport! The debris put things in scale, cuz we know how big those items and they just look so small from the sky. That made the damage of tsunami that much grand and terrible. In addition, the image of burning power plants, the spread of fire to engulf towns near by, swept by the burning debris, and the worst case scenario about the destruction of nuclear plants. God, that has made the whole saga much more devastating unprecedented.

Natural disasters happen everyday. The major reason that they got reported is when human beings are involved. Either they are perished or they survive in spite of odds. Survival stories are still emerging, I’m sure that will shed tears and joy. That was normal. What make this Japan disaster special are that there are so many different aspects that would not just affect Japanese but people all over the world for years to come.

On the economic side, besides the short term shocks to the stock market, what costs that would affect the economy rebuild? Would that drive commodity and raw material demands? How would insurance companies be affected? On social front, would they try to rebuild those towns? If so, how so? On the technology side? Would Japanese invent some fancy but ultra-efficient clean up machineries? How would the nuclear power meltdown affect the health, the economy rebuild, Japanese’s foods export, and future energy development? Also, would Naoto Kan be able to surge in its premiership as other world leaders in face of crisis? Also, how other countries learn from these disasters? Tons of studies can be done in those areas and more just come to think of it.

The most remarkable thing so far in this disaster is not new to me. I’m talking about Japanese people’s civility and graceful behavior. I knew that from the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Tens of thousands people died, but Japanese were so calm in such environment that put most people of other first world countries to shame. Unlike Japanese, other countries would deploy their natural guards to patrol the streets after this kind of disasters. The goal is to maintain order and safety of survivors as well as for those incoming rescue teams. Not in Japan, they are not needed. Rather than looting and fighting for supplies, Japanese help out their fellow men and women. Businesses and even gangsters would help the victims voluntarily, and people would naturally lie up for supplies. Nobody complains nothing! That happened in Kobe and now as well. Such wonderful civic behavior has been successfully implanted in the Japanese DNA. Such remarkable exhibition dwarfs people of most first world countries don’t need to even mention those arrogant and idiotic neighbors.

May the victims rest in peace, strength to the survivors and God blesses these wonderful people. I wish the nuclear radiation issue would be swept away without any long term harm. I’m confident that the Japanese people would rise again as before and congratulation again for being the Jewel of human for the rest of the world to learn and worship, in spite of such horrific happenings to their country.

English Internet is still superior

Being a bilingual person who love spending time on the net, I think I would stand by my believe that sites with content in English are generally superior than those in Chinese. This is purely a subjective opinion without any scientific or systematic proof behind it. Nevertheless, my view is a result of years of observation and visits to sites in both English and Chinese worlds. Here are some of my views that contribution to my overall opinion on this topic.

I spent about 60% of my times in English sites, while the rest in both Traditional Chinese and Simplify Chinese sites.

Most of the sites that I visit frequently are blogs, search sites, web portals, forums, news sites, sites of specific topics, e.g. movies, web videos.

In spite of the huge population of Chinese netizens, reportedly with a current population of 450M, the development of internet is still largely driven by the West.

For English sites:
I found a greater variety of sites in English that cover wide range of unique topics, basically, nothing is off limit. What I find to be impressive is not just the depth of information of those topics, but the originality and design of those sites. I think that reflects the long history of individualism of the people and the freedom of information in West.

Many English sites have better or unique art design which matches the theme of those sites seamlessly. This observation does not just apply to those of large corporations, but to many sites of individuals as well.

As English is still the most ‘international’ language in the current world, many visitors of English sites are coming from places outside the English speaking countries. That can be reflected by the visitors’ comments and that give a more international community feel.

For Chinese sites:
I found Chinese sites design are generally subpar, if not terrible, comparing with those in English. First of all, many of the better ones are clearly ‘borrow’ from the English sites. E.g. Baidu vs Google in terms of simplicity. Many Chinese web portals are just clamed with ‘stuff’ all over the screens with annoying pop-up flesh ads. They are definitely not user-friendly in netvigation. It kinda remind me of comparing the store windows of Chinese department stores to the Western stores. You will see the store windows of the former are filled up with pottery, traveler bags, vases, blanket, toys, and everything as long as an inch of space looks to be available. In the contrary, the latter will only show a theme of simplistic artistic design with only few merchandizes. That analogy applies to the portal sites as well. I guess it is not about the language, but more about the culture and mentality of the people.

Also, the design and layout of major Chinese web portals/ sites of similar purposes are indistinguishable. You can’t tell which is which unless you look at the top left logo on the front page. Yes, that’s right, the logo is always at the top left of the screen. All topics are clammed on the same page, if there is not enough space to fit everything on one screen size, they still put everything there and may user to drag the page down, down and down till the bottom. All those sites just look the same. My impression is that the starter of the pack borrowed or came up with the first design, then other competitors just copy the shelf and populate with their own content. You can see examples of such in Sohu.com, Sina.com.cn, etc.

Of course there are better sites in the Chinese worlds, particularly those in traditional Chinese. I guess it is because of the level of information freedom in Taiwan and Hong Kong versus Mainland China. However, as the popular of the traditional Chinese world is much smaller than the simplified Chinese world, the relatively greater variety of topics in traditional Chinese sites do lack the ‘depth’ compared with those English counterparts. On top of that, many ‘experts’ or ‘specialists’ of specify topics are still mainly found in the English speaking world, thus the newest research results and information are still firstly reported in English sites. Those found in Chinese sites are still mostly second hand information as a result of translation. Bear in mind that many of the English information are written by the experts themselves. If the Chinese translation is done by the Chinese experts of the topics, the timing will still be late because they need to spend time on translation which is not their strength. If the translation is outsourced to translators, the turnaround may be quicker but the quality may not be the best due to special knowledge of the topic which is unfamiliar by most translators.

Of course, there is well-known paranoidic censorship in simplified Chinese world.

Therefore, in spite of the widely discussed money-making opportunities in the Chinese internet world due to the huge population of netizens there, I still see that as a much more separated world than the rest of English internet world which is more integrated. Yes, money can be made in the Chinese cyberspace, as I opine that many netizens that are living in that closely monitored internet do behave like schools of fish. In spite of the rising economic power of China, I think the baton of web development is still in the hand of the West, i.e. the English speaking community. The Chinese will continue to play the second fiddle for years to come.

On Steve Jobs, iOS, Nokia+MS, and Jasimine Revolution

I’ve just been too busy to blog lately. Today, I happen to be able to squeeze few minutes on blogging, so I just wanna comment on few topics all at once.

Nokia’s adoption of Window phone 7
It is a bad marriage. They found each other because they are the leftovers in the mobile marketplace. If I’m a stockholder of Nokia, I will sell it. Nokia should hop into Android’s camp and try to become the best Android phone maker. I don’t see helping MS to beat Apple and Google is any easier than beating HTC, Motorola and Samsung. Anyway, with their latest announcement of releasing the phone in coming October, I don’t care how good that phone will be, the timing is just off! By then, there will be advanced iPhone and Android 3.0+ phones swarm the market, which will just right about capitalized on the trend of smartphone adoption. October release of new Nokia Window Mobile phone is simply too late. I understand that it takes time, but timing is the most important factor in the smartphone market now. I predict that the Nokia-MS effort of making phone will go the way of MS’s own Zume. i.e. good product but bad timing. Coz, the ship has sailed.

Steve Job’s health
I can’t believe so many mainstream newspapers would even quote an article from ‘National Enquirer’ about Steve Job’s health, which said that he will have only 6 weeks to live. On the other hand, he has just gone dinner with Obama and other chief tech heads. 6 weeks? Let’s count from Feb 18 on. We will see just how low the standard of newspapers is running these days. BS belongs in forum or chat room, not A1 of newspapers.

Jasmine Revolutions in the Middle East
These are definitely historical events that will be covered in books in few years. The power of internet/social networking has been shown in the events. I don’t live and have never been in Tunisia, Egypt, and those countries. I would say that those people do what they believe are right for them out of years of frustration and desperation. I’m not sure if that’s the best way to get change. Coz, it is too early to tell. I think these kind of revolution will only succeed if the citizens are educated and there is well-established opposition party that can take charge shortly. Otherwise, besides chaos and destruction, replacement of old bad oranges with new bad oranges is highly probable. So, don’t get too excited too early. Just stay tune.

iPad2 and iPhone5 rumors
As an avid reader of rumor mill of iOS products, the rumors about iPad2 and iPhone5 are getting mess lately. Screen resolution and size are the main area of contradictions. I’m sure Apple has done prototypes of all sort and leaks are probably coming from there, at least partially. I would be quite disappointed if iPad2 has no retina display, but I would still get that once it is out. I read an article from CNET which analyzed what set Apple apart from its competitors. It is the iOS ecosystem. I largely agree with what it said for being a living organism of that ecosystem. Tech products’ battlefield this day is neither the software nor the hardware alone. It is BOTH which create a comprehensive user experience. If the critical mass of consumers are at least satisfying with their lives in that ecosystem. Though it is not irreplaceable, most of them would find it tedious or simply to lazy to switch. The challenge to Google, MS, and the rest is to create an ecosystem that have to be at least as good as iOS if not better, and to create an easier way for the iOS users to switch to if they are successfully allured away. This is just a monumental task to do that. Coz, most of Apple’s competitors just don’t own ALL the pieces of the ecosystem. Cooperation is a must, though there could be synergy, problems do exist when there are indeed selfish interest among companies respectively. So, I don’t care if HTC, Google, or whoever is gonna make better products (at least spec wise) than iPad2 or iPhone5. I think majority of iOS users, including me, will stick with Apple for at least next 1 or 2 generation of iOS products.

Singularity

I found this article in Time.com today and is fascinated by the content of it. I've have interest in the future development of humanity. This article is about the technological side of it. What the article depicts about our future is neither positive or negative. It just says that based on the momentum of technology development, we will reach the stage of this, this and that. However, given the evil side of humanity, I can't help but worry about what could happen in future. Anyway, just wanna share this with you all.

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
By Lev Grossman

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show , the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there's more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language.

The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion":

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence."

In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?

Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project," he says. "So it's like skeet shooting — you can't shoot at the target." He knew about Moore's law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It's a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.

As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore's. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900.

Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.

Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains."

Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.

Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology.

At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.

After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.

For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger.

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.

But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailing to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. "There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people," he says. "But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion."

Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.

Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude.

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error.

If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools."

Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.

Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth."

This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called the Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)

By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to really look."

In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species.

Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn't strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits.

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

Crazy weather is coming from...

Just came across this article this morning....upon finishing reading it...no wonder where the crazy weather hit the earth recently....that explains them all pretty much!