Uncompatible Systems

Nicholas Carr asks if “Google is making us stupid“. Interesting read, though he looses it here when he tries to make a judgment of how the brain works

[the google founders] easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Mr. Carr clearly doesn’t understand that this mysterious “contemplation” he speaks of is also composed of “a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized”. Each individual has their own sequence of steps that will come together as a pattern. Artificial Intelligence systems will be no different. Each one will be unique.

UPDATE. New York Times has an article about linear reading and intelligence.

There is a wealth of resources available now through Amazon Web Services. One of which is the EC2 compute cloud. But EC2 is really just a bunch of virtual machines with finite resources. To enable these to act as a render farm, performing asyncronous jobs, there needs to be some kind of management front end. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Scalr has nice process documents, a screencast and come flow charts. Main problem is it’s written in object oriented PHP. Suprisingly, this decision didn’t influence the developers enough to use some kind of ORM, and I’m seeing SQL in functions as high level as RunInstance. I’m going to write off Scalr for now. I wish them the best.

On the level of further abstraction, Morph is a company who’s attempting to completely abstract Ruby on Rails and offer a set of management interfaces for a complete production deployment scenario. Unfortunately this makes details like dependency management and base OS choice impossible, as well as making version conflict resolution complicated within a community (Ruby on Rails) that is currently not well coordinated, to put it nicely.

So…survey says…NOTHING. I’m off to generate some Rails scaffolding. Of course it will be open source. I’m actually sort of excited.

For the record, it is possible to use a 32 hole hub laced to a 36 hole rim. It is by no means recommended, though it will be a wheel and it will roll. The secret lies in skipping 1 hole for every 8 on the trailing spokes and lining up the leading spokes normally, so they are one hole away from the trailing on the same side of the flange. I followed this pattern and was still able to use Sheldon Brown’s wheel building page as an accurate reference, despite the mismatch.