HE more we move forward, the more we stay the same and sometimes step back. The Internet was created to facilitate the use of one’s space and one’s own material, but in this age of mashups and ‘free’ hosting by so many companies, a lot of people simply subscribe to be a guest at someone else’s platform, thus conceding of the main features of the World Wide Web.

It is saddening to see the number of people who willingly (or due to peer pressure) choose to upload ‘public’ photos that will only be visible to those who give away their personal details to creepy Mark Zuckerberg. It is scary to see how many people still manage their E-mail (professional and personal) on servers in other countries — servers that can be snooped without even informing those affected. Those two problems are not the same, but they illustrate how much different today’s Web is. Once we go there, there’s no going back.

This whole thing boils down to a culture of renting. People purchase machines that are only rented in the sense that they are not general-purpose machines; they are controlled and thus owned by just one company. People also subscribe to other sites where they rent space and sometimes a mail box. People rent a ticket to some database which determines who their “friends” are. When life is “rented” from big corporations rather than bought to be owned, self-determination is assured a destruction. The whole “cloud” media hype makes this worse.

UR current mechanism for measuring time is a combination of Babylonian and other cycling conventions, making up one of the most messed up timing systems to ever be conceived, with months of nearly arbitrary length (and unknown astronomical meaning) and a base unit ranging from 12 to 60. If our distance and weighting standards were the same, even the imperial system would be an improvement over them. The beautiful thing about decimal systems with base 10 is that once we choose some immutable base unit like the Earth’s diameter we can expand in a way which is easily divisible and makes physics a lot simpler. Currently, in the science of physics, it is common to just measure everything in seconds and then subdivide those by shifting decimal points (millisecond for example). What happened to macro seconds and giga seconds? They do not seem to exist because for large time units we have a sordid mess that extends to our mind (perceptual gap).

Will there ever be a reconstruction of the timing system? It would be nice, but there would be a highly complicated transition phase consisting re-education of the already-adult and thus unwilling-to-relearning, not just revision of many programs and systems. Better to make time more science-compatible than adhere to an arcane system for several generations to come. Complications of the mathematics of time impede progress.

One day in the future civilisation will abandon this current pile of garbage and look back in a way we can’t grasp now how silly an analogue wrist watch looks (especially for the twenty-first century).

CIENTISTS are trained to honestly report on findings. Lawyers, on the other hand, are trained to defend a side — any side for that matter — regardless of what’s just and what’s unjust. They are paid to have subjective arguments.

Political moves are hinged not on facts but on influence, and studies that are used to support actions are typically funded by those with influence. It’s all stacked. Politicians are selected based on their obedience to influence; it’s a complex selection process where candidates who do not surrender to influence simply cannot get funded.

This problem is inherent in the UK, not just the US. Spend some time checking the professional background of politicians, who were not really elected but rather installed for people to approve at the ballots.

Some people choose to ignore politics, knowing very well that it’s all corrupt. Others, however, choose to participate not as voters but as critics and reformists. There is a lot that can be done to bring real “Change”, just not enough people eager to make it happen. These people are not lazy. In their defence, they are kept ignorant by the media and kept busy at work all day. They have not the time to digest information and take necessary action. The system has them tamed and closed to ideas that contradict media consensus.

Image by David Shankbone

HE corporate media has trained people — very effectively in fact — to worship money. The admiration of wealth can be achieved through subtle insinuations that those who have more money are therefore smarter (false causality argument) and that a man or woman who surrounds him/herself with a lot of belongings is most certainly always happier. The reality is a lot more complex and can probably be realised quickly by speaking frankly to those whom the media glamourises. Famously, it was reported that Charlie Chaplin spoke to Einstein about fame and said that it was all worthless, or at least something along those lines. So why is it that there are still so many people out there who envy and glamourise socipaths like Steve Jobs?

Jobs is given as just one example among many — and one that recently died. People close to Jobs attest to the Jobs experience, people some of whom end up clarifying amid his death that he was rude. In his younger days, long before he was a billionaire, this man lied to the court under oath in order to disown his daughter, so we cannot quite defend this man’s character by saying that he lost his way after he met “success” (as in money).

The reason we are urged to admire rich sociopaths is testament to the fact that the biggest media is owned by the biggest corporations and the PR industry has become so vast that those with money get more access to our minds.

Remember to appreciate people for the small things they do in their everyday life and not based on newspaper headlines that often just serve a publicity purpose for affluent people. If only more people had harnessed the skill of being sceptical of the mainstream press…

EGACY of one’s life may typically matter to a person when death is near. That’s partly because last/recent memories persist better than old ones. Legacy is also what remains in visibility after a person departs from this world, having first emerged in it through conception. But legacy need not be associated with depressing things such as being deceased. Legacy throughout one’s life can be seen as the work that’s left to have impact when one moves from one area to another, from one field of work to another.

In older terms, publications and books were seen as a form of legacy. In a digital world the importance of these becomes more questionable and long-term persistence almost dubious. Work that is done in the disciplines of science and technology may matter a lot at the time of publication/invention, but only years later that work becomes uninteresting due to irrelevance. There are of course exceptions such as key, landmark papers (Charles Darwin’s for example) and immortal series such as Cosmos, but the vast body of work will only have its 15 minutes or fame — if any — and thereafter be shelved.

Activism is different in the sense that it has broader impact due to scale of reach (like target audience). Those who fought SOPA, for example, achieved a great deal and did this not for profit but for ideology.

In my younger days as a researcher I strived to publish papers and had my name put on half a dozen of them around 2005 when I was completing practical work on my Ph.D. In early 2006 I stopped submitting papers and also ceased to attend conferences. These had low impact compared to my sites, their target audience was small (mostly departments in the same field as mine), and the sense of accomplishment was not high. It was then that I turned to activism and spent the majority of my day dedicating energy/effort to good causes, even if it comes at the expense of a paying job. There have been no regrets, except perhaps regrets that I had not started doing this sooner.

The life of an activist is a lot richer than the life of a compulsive businessman. Richness cannot be properly measured in terms of monetary currency and some people are so poor that all they have is a high bank balance. Over the long run, history teaches, activists have a memorable legacy; the latter have not.

OPA is a culmination of years of corruption orchestrated by the copyright cartel. The victim is the public, whose elected officials became more concerned about campaign funding from Hollywood than about justice.

Copyright as we know it is outdated. Copyright in general is not a bad idea, but its implementation is incompatible with today’s world (SOPA tries to ‘fix’ it in the opposite direction). If Hollywood feels so entitled that is it eager to break the law, corrupt politicians and attack the public, then perhaps the best action we can take is avoid Hollywood’s work and seek alternatives (of which there are plenty, just not in the mainstream).

SOPA may have been defeated (for now) but the conspirators behind it were not punished and in fact they behave as though they are the victim in all this. This is some really sick soap opera.

GMDS for surface pairs comparison

S natural succession to the previous experiments, I compromise speed and increase the number of points in GMDS from 10 to 50, hoping to see performance improved noticeably. So far, based on results that are coming out, no classification mistakes are being made, but more pairs need to be tested overnight before meaningful conclusions can be drawn.

As expected, increasing the number of points in GMDS helped improve performance, at the expense of speed of course.

They will now be increased even further to see how good an improvement can be made.

I have begun running GMDS-based recognition experiments with 300 points rather than the originally/already-tested 50. So far, based on 18 pairs, the classification is perfect (albeit the process is slow). It will be interesting to see how long it runs before the first error occurs. There was a talk back in December about a new server potentially arriving, with a lot more x86 cores in it.

Following the first mistake of the classifier, the ROC curve looks like this.

The next step doubles the density of the triangulation to see how major an improvement in performance it can entail (we never tried as many as 8,000+ vertices in such experiments).

With ~8,050 vertices the results are a bit baffling. Both computational servers got rebooted midway (memory upgrade), so there is not much data — to say the least — to base these results on.

By summing up all the GMDS stress (multiple iterations) we get iffy results.

By taking the optimal fit (over all iterations) we get something better.

In summary, despite the small size of the sample, it does seem to suggest that using a triangulation too dense leads to poor results or does not lead to optimal performance. I’ll explore other route towards improvement; adding density just slows things down considerably.