Consider Bookhling

In answer to a question posed by an interviewer at the end of a comic “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”

TW: 

Yeah, and all the other diseases-like malaria, which kills one person every second-that our pharma companies can’t even be bothered with because boner-pills are so much more profitable. 
We grant global monopolies to these companies over the reproduction of chemical compounds. They argue that they need these patents because otherwise, no one would do the core research they do and we’d all be dead of disease without them.
But what do they spend their regulatory windfall on? Figuring out how to reformulate heartburn pills that are going public domain so that they can be re-patented, cheating the system and the world out of twenty more years of low-cost access to their magic potions; marketing budgets that beggar the imagination; lobbyists arguing for stricter rules. 
Meanwhile, people are actually dying, in great numbers, of diseases treatable by drugs that Roche and Pfizer and the rest of the dope-mafia won’t sell them at an accessible price, and won’t let them make themselves.

This reminds me, there were quite a number of people representing pharmaceutical interests at the Hong Kong Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference… The possibility of building or reconfiguring microbial organisms to produce noble chemicals is certainly an attractive prospect, and is fast becoming an industrially viable production method of rare chemicals. A case in point, recent iGEM 2008 competition’s winning entry was asynthetically designed vaccine against Halicobacter pylori which causes gastritis, built using immunobricks biological components designed in-house by undergraduates (albeit with support of graduate level faculty and facilities). The BioBricks foundation (upon which most of the synthetic biology practices today are based upon) runs on the principles of opensource like many of the server side technologies and programming languages in use today, and the possible social and economic ramifications of the growing field of synthetic biology is promising even at this early stage of development.

Are we seeing the beginning of the end for the workings of current generation pharmaceutical industry? Vaccinations and pills developed by relatively small scale biotech developers, perhaps even run by some of the poorer nations to counter against indigenous diseases? Perhaps in such a  universe, intellectual property rights can truly be something that protects the interests of the public instead of being a noose around their neck. 

I’ve been going through a number of Cory Doctorow’s works lately (thank goodness for DRM free ebook reader). He released a lot of his works under CC license to be available freely on the net, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Visit his blog for a list.

First, take a look at this. Bunch of ‘monsters‘ written in the processing language. This little language from MIT is even more versatile than I first thought. I’m thinking of writing a small visualization bot of sorts later on, which might take some time since my primary medium of choice Mathematica just got bumped upto version 7. I’m harassing the school depot so I can get the latest copy without having to pay the ridiculous price tag that comes with this (albeit vital) program environment. 

These days I find myself using three web browsers at once, four if I include a little text-only script stuff (much like modified emacs) that I use exclusively to communicate with my school computer (which does all the heavy lifting these days). 

I use IE for all those pesky Korean/Japanese community sites that requires all those active x for full functionality (yes folks. For all the glitter the Asia is a backward place when it comes to CC licences and GNU philosophy) so I can keep in touch with people there. I’m currently in process of bugging them to ditch the crappy web services and migrate to twitter/tumblr/swurl/friendfeed. For some reason there’s already a sizable Japanese community on the twitter I think. Though most of them just ends up making a post or two and revert back to their original active x crap services (because all their other friends are still on the other service. Ugh).

I use firefox for all the research stuff. I have noscript which block out practically every single content on the website except for pure text unless I manually configure the site to show its content, which is a lifesaver when I have fifty tabs open and some website decides to pull in ‘bling is the thing’ flash content on my laptop. The ADP is just as essential. I usually spend most of my time in firefox without encountering a single ad, so less distraction, and less processing power/RAM wasted for something I’m not going to buy anyway. The zotero and ’science toolbar’ courtesy of the thriving firefox plugin/extensions community makes making notes and bibliographies a sinch. I can practically fly through dozens of archives and scientific data depots on the web in course of minutes using my fully customized setup.

And then there’s the google chrome. The chrome is still in the beta stage (like most other google services really), and lacks some significant functionality like ADP and zotero integration, but I still come back to the browser time and time again. There’s something innately elegant about the basic design and layout of the chrome browser that make it a joy to use it to surf the web. And the speed isn’t half bad either (I guess all that webkit engine hypes have a good reason). I like how the bookmark bar appears and disappears at the touch of a shortcut, and I like how I can browse the web without using the mouse.  I love the maximum amount of screen estate allotted to the content of the website itself instead of browser interface, a big faux pas firefox 3.0 made with its big shiny buttons. I love how i don’t have to lose entire sessions of tabs when a single tab fails to respond. I can just shift-esc, pull up the in-browser taskmanager, and cancel or troubleshoot the problem tab. I love how the ctrl-f brings up the search bar at the top of the browser window instead of the bottom, and I like how it doesn’t take an entire line of my screen estate. it’s ergonomically sound, and just plain makes sense.

Google chrome is the browser I use when I ‘just want to go to Disney Land’, so to speak. And since the chrome is open source I can live with my conscience, unlike with IE (though I wouldn’t use it if it was open source). Google chrome is the web browser firefox 3 should have been. And things can only get better as the time goes, with the obvious amount of effort google is pouring into the chrome browser.

I’m taking a bit of a break today, which leaves me some time to indulge in all sorts of creative yet ultimately possibly meaningless ventures, like mathematica visualization, the processing language study, and scrounging for interesting bits on the net.

While on my usual sojourn throughout the infosphere this morning, I found an interesting passage written on subject of education by someone I assume to be the Bruce Sterling (here’s the original website I found this in). This passage was intended as a response to a question asking him what he would do as a ‘head honcho’ of the Ministry of Education asked earlier in the said webpage. A little too close to the truth for comfort I think. And people actually wonder why the public education systems all over the world is hitting the rock bottom.

If I were head honcho of the Ministry of Education,
my job would not be to make schools work as learning
environments.  Basically, my job would be to make
school-age children walk in straight lines and
salute the flag as I freed up the productive
capacity of their parents.

If schools were learning environments, all the smart
kids would clear out in half an hour.  Then they'd
go home and demand attention from Mom and Dad.
That just can't be allowed.

Normally I don’t make more than one post on my blog, but this is way too cool to pass up for next week.

A friend of mine sent me an interesting link to a video on Vimeo, titled Music Is Math (so true).

As the author/programmer/artist said on the Vimeo page, this is a visualization of music created through a programming language called processing. I like it. While some would argue that this is more of a glorified music visualizer frequently seen built into most popular music players available for download on the web today, simple visualization is not the only thing the processing language is capable of. Take a look at this.

Apparently, the creator of this particular piece used the processing language in such a way that it analyzes the graphic file of iris to create music from it’s sequence. Visualization and auralization at heart is a translation of one type of information into another. Is it possible that as the digital media advances we would find some universal pattern or principle behind different aesthetic systems, to define the intangible spirit of beauty beyond individual manifestations in front of our senses? A little too platonic, but a good food for thought nonetheless.

I haven’t looked much into the processing language yet, but I definitely plan to do so some time in the near future. Just think of the possibilities. The computer can be turned into an instrument that can recognize and play the universe around it, or vice versa, map the universe compressed into a piece of music.

How about a perpetually observant telescope translating the chart of the stars into music? Perhaps even a motorized automaton with similar function? It wouldn’t even have to be playing music. Perhaps it can have multitude of functionality built into it. Perhaps it can be designed to seek out certain vision of the world, to find a vision of the universe it ‘likes’ through physical travel. It would be an automaton designed to seek out beauty.

Maybe in the future, the automaton would even begin making a thing of beauty by its own motorized hands.

Part of being an adult is pulling an all-nighter, and then getting paid for it. You see, kids pull all-nighters all the time on ridiculously stringent schedule, but they (usually) don’t get paid. Ah the sweet innocence of the lost days.

I just took a relaxing stretch in the living room, with all the lights off and only the monitor of my trusty laptop blinking at intermittent intervals in the study while crunching numbers with the Mathematica and running some minimal cellular automata written in python.

Of course, I had the obligatory glass of alcohol in my hand. A cheap, mild merlot. What is a night without a decent drink?

As I lay myself on the sofa in the dark, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, with remarkable haste I should add, since I’ve been staring at a full-brightness LED screen for past five hours straight.

For a moment I thought I was standing on the edge of a skyscraper in Tokyo. A trick of the tired vision.
You see, my living room, for all its tidy appearance (I like to keep things organized), is filled and stacked to the brims with electronic gadgets ranging from draft-N wireless router to media center laptop I have cabled to external HD and a HDTV. I didn’t notice it before with the light on, but the whole room is apparently dotted with constantly blinking LED diodes embedded into the electronics.

Distantly blinking lights of green, red, orange and blue, all around the dark rectangular and squarish masses.

It seems that I’ve been unwittingly creating a skyline within my own living room.

P.S. I found another web-augmentation to play around with. The good thing about this particular service? I don’t have to do anything to it. I’m just syndicating all the existing input-services to a central location, so that bits and pieces of myself can permeate the web further. Have you ever searched for Bookhling on the Google?

http://bookhling.swurl.com/

I’ve had a chance to encounter a service on the web called ‘tumblr.’ So far I like it.

Tumblr is a service that’s somewhere in between the constant microbursts of the twitter and full-scale blogging of the wordpress. Only more modern, not in sense of any aesthetic faux pas, but in sense of integration with the user, like being able to post animation/picture directly from one’s cell phone, rssing different services on the web and etc… More media centric friendfeed would also be a reasonably accurate description of the Tumblr service.

While I am somewhat tired of such deluge of ‘web 2.0′ applications that are practically everywhere these days, I do feel that the whole experience is a positive one. Some people might argue that broadcasting one’s own thoughts and lives are somehow ‘arrogant’ or something such because no one would care about their lives in the first place anyway… Well people who argue that point must not have many friends.

Seriously though, I do not see services like twitter and Tumblr as a channel to reach out to people. Rather, such web applications are augmentations of modern human mind, something physical technology is hard pressed to catch up to. Augmentations of memories and visions one would encounter in the daily life, recording bit and pieces of ‘experiences’ that are separate from carefully mediated thoughts that permeate the decent portion of the web these days…

A rough continuum created to fill the vacuum left by the lack of physical technology of memories and experiences.

And when you tinker around with one of those services, you are tinkering with an augmentation service for your mind itself, albeit in crudely executed form that requires multiple intermediaries.

It is interesting how then the user’s lives get increasingly intermingled with the web, as the experience of the living stands next to the fantastic shapes and movements scrounged from the remotest corners of the infosphere.