I have finally put up some notes, about what I have been thinking about for a very long time, concerning Information Theory and Evolution.

Specifically:

How systems self-emerge and self-configure for information exchange from 0 to 1 to n bits.

How these systems necessarily culminate in the complexity and diversity of living things as a result of rules governing information theory, where natural selection is a specific case of the laws governing noisy information exchange between finite sized systems.

If anyone else is interested in this topic or has any questions, the notes are here, and I’d be happy to hear from you.

Georgia state: 8,560,310 in 2002.
Georgia the country: 4,646,003 in 2007.

“Russian excess is feeding discontent among poorer people. Pierrette, a housekeeper for one Russian, said: ‘I attended a party where the guests had fun throwing burning €500 notes into the air while everyone split their sides laughing. The domestic staff were later told to collect the ashes. It was sickening.’”
Link

China is a long way from anywhere in the US, and even San Francisco, with its Chinese immigrant history and psychological proximity, is nearly 1000 miles farther from Beijing than London is (London - Beijing: 5060 miles, SF - Beijing 5900 miles).

This counterintuitive fact is a result of just how vast the Pacific is and it means that following the games live will be difficult due to the time zone difference. As a result, here in the US, to keep up with the games, the internet will play a bigger factor than ever before. The Official Google Blog has a first stab at a roundup of places to go.

Meanwhile, on Smashing Telly, we have a video clip history of previous Olympic opening ceremonies.

The Register points to a Gartner report that suggest that the iPhone may not be an enterprise device because of poor battery life, among other things.

We do not need the Gartner report to nitpick about details, to know that the iPhone is not an enterprise product.

The iPhone is a wonderful, groundbreaking, beautifully designed product, just like the first Macintosh was.

Businesses do not buy groundbreaking, beautifully designed products that give the impression they might be spending too much money, just like they didn’t buy the Macintosh. They will buy a good enough, slightly crappy phone that has a keyboard - the Blackberry.

Seemingly Steward Brand has uploaded all 7 episodes of the BBC version of How Building Learn.
(Interesting and ballsy from a copyright standpoint since Brand is the author and decided to put it up, but its a BBC production).
See it on Smashing Telly.

By quite a long margin: 25% more, in fact (Salesforce.com market cap: $7.5B, GM, just under $6B).

Other unlikely companies that are now worth more than GM: Ryan Air; Pitney Bowes; J C Penney; Autodesk; Bed Bath and Beyond. Even tech. train wreck, Sun Microsystems is worth 25% more. And in a case of a piece being worth more than the whole, automobile parts distributor, Genuine Parts Company, and dashboard GPS maker, Garmin, are each worth $500 million more than GM.

Use Google Finance to screen for companies worth more than GM.

People talk about ‘carrying’ the name forward, when there is a single male in the family to preserve the pedigree of a family name. This is largely bogus, because the name line is merely one strand in the exponentially increasing number of routes that extend backwards as a family tree fans out, and it has ever diluted bearing on genetic ancestry.

Partly because of male pedigree beliefs and the one child per family rule, millions of Chinese girls are suspiciously missing. 119 baby boys are born for every 100 girls, something that doesn’t happen naturally or can yet be produced scientifically, at conception. Some girls were abandoned, some aborted and presumably some murdered.

There now aren’t enough prospective brides to go round. There are predicted to be 30 million unmarried young men in China by 2020 and these people are referred to as bare branches. Bare branches, because their genes will never be passed on.

By wanting to preserve the family name, the chances of your genetic lineage dying out increases, if everyone else behaves the same way.

Ironically, to have preserved your lineage in China, the best strategy would have been to have had a girl.

Culture, like religion, is something that people respect, irrationally, and because of this, the Selfish Meme (Family Lineage) has outwitted the Selfish Gene (Genetic Lineage). This is empirical proof, in some small part, that the effects of ideas, memes, can indeed behave like viruses and be damaging to our (genetic) survival.

People have a tendency, possibly through cultural respect, to look for examples of why religion may be a beneficial development for individuals (that reduces stress and makes us live longer, for example). But here we have a very simple concrete example of a cultural idea that is clearly not beneficial to the propagation of the individual’s DNA, being akin to a mind virus.

Since the distinction between culture and religion is not mutually exclusive, we have the possibility that religion too could be an idea that is damaging to an individual’s survival. Perhaps resistance to this notion is itself due to a cultural virus.

I read two things: The Economist and Bikesnobnyc. Everything else, I just look at the pictures. I was pleased, to find an audio interview with the snob - who isn’t.

Cuil, yet another search engine, launched this morning - and then sank this afternoon.

Normally it is disingenuous to criticize people who suffer because of their success (i.e. servers going down from launch overload), but only when they innovate. Innovation means you have created something new, rather than copying, and that there will be unpredictable things that can only be fixed through trial and error.

Because Cuil is an attempt to build a better copy of a search engine, it should be judged on how well it does that, not on the novelty of the idea. People liked Google because it was fast, accurate and reliable, not because they had never seen a search engine.

Cuil is down, meaning that at this moment it is infinitely slow, unreliable and inaccurate. It has been backed with $33 million by people who have put greed before imagination, thinking that a Google beater = dollars, that a Google beater is a search engine and that people who have worked for Google are automatically better. This is the mentality that would back an MBA middle-management type over a visionary entrepreneur, a John Sculley over a Steve Jobs.

Google is threatening Microsoft’s access to dollars, not with desktop apps. or a desktop OS, but by owning an innovative product that became the desktop of the web - search. To get some of Google’s dollars requires developing something new and different that becomes the starting point for people on the web, Facebook is possibly something like that, Cuil is not.

Cuil say that they are pronounced cool. If you have to tell people you are, you’re probably not.

Om has the skinny.