Age of Singularity, Convergence and Moore's Law

Humans first began making tools out of stone. After we began mining native copper and tin, we smelted them together to create the first tools and weapons made of bronze. Our knowledge of metallurgy grew, as a result we could smelt more advanced materials, so in some parts of the word before others - we forged tools made of iron. It wasn't until the mid-19th century when the industrial revolution started in one corner of the world.

Right now, we exist in the age of information. The idea of convergence: data throughput, access to the internet, computational speed, and memory storage is advancing exponentially. We are achieving milestones in artificial intelligence and robotics. According to Moore's Law, processing power and transistors per square inch will double every two years. This will happen with the slow integration of technology in our environment, bodies, and brains.

A Visit from Erik Hanberg

Erik Hanberg spoke at our class last week mainly about publishing and his experiences with the publishing boom.

Hanberg was an author, his wife designed the cover of his first several books and he seeked third party agencies to publish his books. As a result, he saved quite a bit of money on publishing, and made decent profit from selling his books. Hanberg began selling, initially, his mystery novels on the onset of the publishing boom. On his timeline, I could recall that he churned out novels almost yearly. This to me is fascinating, writing and keeping track of the progress of his books and visualizing the work being done on a step-graph was also quite neat. He was able to think of entire story lines in months, not to mention the needless research that may have been required his later novels particularly in the sci-fi realm.

Overall, his talk was very interesting, Erik is a bright guy. I had never had known how authors did work during the cusp of online publishing, and his analogies on the gold mines of California really gave perspective on the timing of these booms and how certain people, if lucky, can truly capitalize on the opportunity.

What You Should Never Buy Online

1. Sloths

Nine times out of ten it was just painted raccoons. 

2. Virtual Memory

Because sites like www.downloadmoreram.com exist - Yes, you should never buy it because you can always download it for free!

3. Anthrax

I'm never buying this again. It never delivered plus I got interviewed by the FBI, would not recommend. 

A Trial by Search Engines

In the span of an hour, groups had to complete a virtual scavenger hunt using search engines to find very specific websites and locations and later prove them with a screenshot or URL address. With clues so niche and detailed, within minutes our group was already struggling with some of the tasks.

We decided to split the hunt, each of us taking a few questions at a time and sending those answers to the designated recorder. Let us begin by going through some of the bizarre tasks I was assigned to scour the web for:

1. Twitterfall on global warming.

I was not familiar with Twitterfall. Neither was the rest of my group - and when asked if any of them have twitter accounts, all of them said no. Thankfully, I had a twitter account that I don't even use (I only signed up to retweet tweets for a chance to win a beta key) so I ended up using that to finish this task.

2. Comment on a message board, bonus points if you get someone to reply to your comment.

What better place to try this than on Reddit? I logged in, sorted by 'rising' (this means Reddit sorts through posts that are 'rising' in popularity) in hopes to get a quick reply. I saw a post about a user who did very interesting makeup for a Halloween costume. I chose this post for a couple reasons: The original poster is showing off his/her work to thousands of people, this makes it more likely for him/her to respond if you have any questions about his/her said work. It also implies the original poster did the makeup him/herself, and that this wasn't a repost from last year's Halloween. This way, I can ensure a reply. I entered the thread, and posted:

 "Spooky. How long did this take you?" 

All my predictions were correct, and within minutes she replies, "Thank you! It took close to an hour because I had to start over a few times, finding the right placement for the eye and nose was really tricky and having her real eye staring at me while I was doing it didn't help!"

3. What is the name of [Andrew Fry's] married sister?

We weren't sure if we got this one right. This question alone contributes to the idea of the vast power in today's search engines. How a user can do background checks on certain individuals, gather related information about family and/or locations live, and narrowing it down further by age and surnames is truly eerie.