[ExI] the next 20, was: RE: hand foot counterpart?

spike spike66 at att.net
Sun Feb 7 19:05:52 UTC 2016


On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] hand foot counterpart?

On 6 February 2016 at 17:18, spike wrote:
>>... I can’t think of a way to ask my search engine this question, so I 
> will Exi-Google my generally hip ExI friends please:  {etc}
...
>...You can't say 'functionally equivalent' as the functions are very different.
See:<http://www.theodora.com/anatomy/comparison_of_the_bones_of_the_hand_and_foot.html>
BillK

_______________________________________________

Cool thanks to Rafal, BillK and others.

Here's why I asked and how it relates to the next 20 IQ points.

Back in my misspent childhood, I lived within walking distance of the public library, and ooooh what a high that was, surfing the shelves, all this stuff people have figured out or seen, wrote books about it, and to my astonishment, here it all was, on the shelf, FREEEEEEEE free free, for anyone to take down, read it all up, like an information pacman, long before the actual pacman was invented.  Any yahoo could just go wobba wobba wobba down the shelf, read up all the books like gobbling energy dots, and you came out of there feeling like some kind of super-thing, ready to chase away the ghosts of ignorance, and it was all FREEEEE free free, a sole exception to the universal rule you get what you pay for.  This cost nothing, which was good because I owned no money then.  Inside that library, I could find out anything known to humanity, oh what a high.  It was like 20 free IQ points.

Years went by, misspent childhood progressed to misspent youth (much of which was also in the good old public library) to misspent young adulthood (still in the library, love that place, still do, paper books and all.)  

Suddenly, everything changed.  Most of us here (who are old enough to remember how it was before) know what it was like when competent search engines came along.  I am one who knows the exact day, 14 April 1994, because I wrote about it in my personal log at length.  The minute I saw a search engine, I realized the world had changed.  Mine certainly had.  I could now surf the library at home.  Better than that: this world-library internet was bigger than my local library, and had word-search capability.  It was another high: it was like being handed a surprise gift, unwrap, find that it is 20 more IQ points!  Cooool!  And ooooh how I loved that gift.  And still do.  You can go find out anything!  Oh for the information pacman, the hopelessly addicted data junkie, that was a high from which I still haven't sobered and don't want to.  I want to stay on that info-trip as long as I have at least two synapses still synapping at each other.

I am starting to get a sketchy vision of the next 20 IQ points, and these will be cherished ones indeed.

In the old days, we had 20 free IQ points, but only when we had time to go over to the library.  But I am not always able to go there.  After 19 April 1994, I had 20 more points, and these were easier to access, for all I had to do was be in front of my computer.  But I am not always in front of my computer.  With OK Google, we start to see how we can get 20 mote IQ points everywhere always.

Consider what we were talking about here in the mid to late 1990s: wearable computers.  Some of the ExI folks hung out there and some of the discussion spilled over.  We visions of a CRT and keyboards with shoulder harnesses to carry it (that was the joke (we already knew back then that I/O was the big showstopper (even before anyone had heard of LANs and broadband and so forth, we envisioned it.)))

All that stuff we talked about 20 yrs ago in the wearable computer group we have now.  All of it came to pass, in a way better than we envisioned: we have computers powerful enough to do internet which can (and is) carried in our pockets, we have the internet growing beyond our expectations (for we were afraid it would be only computer geek stuff and porn, which was a good portion of the internet in those days (all that bandwidth, tragically wasted on material having nothing to do with nekkidness, oy vey.)))  We have the voice recognition, which is surprisingly competent.  We have all that glorious knowledge transmitted by RF signals to our portable pocket computers!  We can even talk to each other and see other on them, just as the hipsters told us we would be able to do.

OK then, Gregory Stock's Metaman vision has come, and even he, the visionary of interconnectedness written in 1993 was insufficiently optimistic.

We have everything we need now to get the next 20, which focuses on the I/O bottleneck we have known about for some time.  It must have something to do with image recognition, which takes me all the way back to the original question: that hand/foot homologous structures question.  If I am out and see something interesting, I want to show that to my computer and ask it what I am seeing, even if it needs to be explained to some extent.

One of my son's friend's father has something going on with his arms.  If you and I stand and hook our thumbs on our belt, we see our elbows are bent at about a right angle.  This man's arms are proportioned such that his elbows are almost straight when he does that.  If he wants to fish something out of his pocket he must bend his trunk toward that side.  The homologous structures in his legs, paralogs (thanks Rafal!) are proportioned nominally.  His hands are approximately nominal I think, perhaps stubby, hard to tell.  When I saw that, I wanted to know right then, what that is called, what causes it, is it genetic, all the usual stuff an info-pacman wants to know for no reason but curiosity, but wants to know right there, right then, not when I get home, not when I can go to the library, now.  I am hungry for info NOW while I can gather more observations, right freaking forthwith now.  I am not impatient or anything, just inquisitive.

A lot of what I want is nature stuff.  If I am out for a walk and see a bug, I want hold my phone camera near it, have it do an image recognition, tell me interesting stuff about that particular bug.  That in itself would be such a breakthrough for those of us interested in buggery, but more than just that, way more.  

My phone knows where I am always.  I want it to tell me when I am near or upon interesting landmarks, historical stuff.  Here I am right near some of the oldest remaining landmarks in the Silicon revolution, and I went right past them for years before I even knew their significance.  I have driven right past the first lab set up by the "Traitorous Eight" original Fairchild guys who left Shockley, and never even noticed.  It is right down the street and a left turn from where Shockley's lab was torn down recently.  I want to know that kinda stuff.  No particular reason, might not even cover my head and worship prostrate before it.  Well, OK I might do that.  But either way, I want to know about oddball medical conditions when I encounter them, I want to know details of urban wildlife and entomology when I see it, I want to know when I am treading upon hallowed ground so I may remove my damn shoes and speak in low reverent tones as even I, unworthy to be called an emerging hipster, plead for techno-mercy and offer humble adoration before the cherished and sacred cradle of modern technology, the origin of everything I hold so dear.

Oh this will be so cool.  In some important ways, this will be the next 20 IQ points, and they will glorious ones.  We will love those, all of them.

spike










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