Farlops Industries

This was a news item I missed when I was at the Robotics/AI conference a week or so ago but, IBM has built AI programs that are apparently better than humans at commodities trading.

One could make the argument that, as financial expert systems and computer models of the economy improve, and there are strong incentives in business to fund this sort of research, we will give over more and more control of our economy to software. Ever since Crash of 1987, stock trading programs used by big brokerages have been written to shutdown if they spot negative feedback loops that might trigger a stock market crash. Who knows where this is all headed?

Charles Mann, who wrote The Heavenly Jukebox, wrote another thoughtful article on Internet regulation. I only take issue with his assertion that hardware affords better protection against illegal copying than software. For example, if print media, music, movies and so on are dispersed through the Internet only to specialized hardware (Music players, e-books, etc.) and not computers, he claims that this will be harder for people to hack. But what if someone writes code so that computers can emulate these devices (including MAC addresses, ID numbers blown into silicon and the like) so as to fool the servers dispersing the content? The only way to prevent that from happening is to prevent the content from being dispersed on the Internet at all. Still, his Techreview piece raises some good counterexamples to techno-libertarian dogma.

Another neat article I came across in the last few days was a New York Times article about tantalum mining in Africa. In addition to the difficulty in recycling computer components, this is another counterexample to the assertion that the consumer electronics industry has less environmental impact than other industries.

Today many sites are running stories on the twentieth birthday of the IBM PC. Rather than rehash a story that has been rehashed a million times ever since Microsoft broke with IBM on OS/2, this site will remind folks that a few months back FORTRAN celebrated a reunion of sorts. As the Mac first appeared on the market, as Microsoft began to mushroom on the bizarre idea of selling operating systems as products, and as the IBM clones reduced computer hardware to a commodity, I was studying FORTRAN in university. So in my mind its all vaguely related.

Around the same time I found the FORTRAN piece, I found:

• A story about a tropical fungus that eats the aluminum right out of compact disks.
• And I found stories related to mechanical nanocomputers and electronic nanocomputers.

President Shrub decided to take the easy way out by compromising on stem cell research today. Not surprisingly this news drove down biotech stocks and for the past few months some researchers have left the US for the UK where the regulations are more lax.

The promised benefits of stem cell research are becoming plain daily and, to me, there is a simple way to bypass all the controversy: just figure out a way to revert adult stem cells to their fetal state. Once this is done, there’ll be no need to harvest fetal tissue and the abortion debate can boil along on it’s own.

In other, vaguely related, medical research, scientists are beginning to understand how to control phagocytes to attack cancers and prevent degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.