Auxiliary Memory

The iPad and Screen Evolution

I got to play with an iPad today for the first time. It was beautiful. I’m going to have a hard time keeping my resolution to not buy one before the second generation comes out. I’ve been trying to find a carry around the house computer for years. I tried a Kindle, iPod touch and a Toshiba netbook. I sold my Kindle to a bookworm friend, and my other two devices just sit around losing battery charge. I use each occasionally, but they have the wrong size screens.

I liked the Kindle for reading fiction, but I wanted something to read electronic magazines, RSS feeds and the Internet while reclined in my La-Z-Boy. The iPod touch lets me read stuff the Kindle didn’t plus my Kindle fiction, but the screen is too small. I installed several ebook reader programs on my netbook, but 10.1” landscape screen is all wrong. Seeing the 9.7” inch portrait screen of the iPad today convinced me it was near perfect for electronic magazines, RSS feeds and Internet reading, and probably for fiction too. It was heavier than I expected, and that might be a drawback. But it was damn close to what I want.

The iPad should do a lot to eliminate paper, which is one of my environmental goals. The iPad also well illustrates the role and purpose of the computer screen. The small screen on the iPhone/iPod touch is perfect for carrying around all the time. The interface is tuned to it’s 3.5” screen. iPhone apps that aren’t rewritten for the 9.7” iPad screen will miss their mark. Putting Windows 7 on a 10.1” netbook screen just isn’t right either. Tiny desktop applications don’t cut it, they need to be redesigned to the screen real estate.

For example, Windows Media Center works great on my 52” television screen. It’s an application designed to work on a TV screen with viewers across the room. It doesn’t need a keyboard. Using regular Windows apps on my big TV is clunky. I can make browsing OK with IE 8 by using the Zoom magnification, so I can play music and read Engadget or Slashdot from the couch, but some pages like Pandora just doesn’t resize or work well on the big screen.

It would be damn cool if Pandora, Rhapsody and Lala all were rewritten to run inside of Windows Media Center. In fact, it would be extremely neat if there was a version of IE for Windows Media Player so I could browse the web with just a clicker. It would need a virtual keyboard like the iPad/iPhone, but that’s doable.

Back in the 1990s pundits started talking about digital convergence. They expected TVs and computers to merge, and that’s rapidly happening, but I don’t think they planned for giant screen TVs. Nor did they expect the convergence with telephones, GPSes and books, or even game machines. Now it’s all a matter of fitting the task to the screen size:

Screen Size	Device	Best Use
1-2”	MP3	Music Audiobooks Voice Recording
2-4”	Phone Camera Video Cam Portable Game	Smartphone GPS Photography Videography Games
5-6”	Ebook	Fiction
9-11”	Tablet	Nonfiction Magazines RSS feeds Photos Games
10-16”	Netbook Notebook	Work on the go
18-24”	Desktop	Work at the desk
26-60”	Television	TV Movies Music Home video Internet TV
> 60”	Projector	Lectures Education

You can watch video on all these screen sizes, and even use all of them with computer applications or games. Telephone features like video conferencing, Skype and web cams have moved to the various screen sizes. I think the iPad has been in development since before the advent of netbooks, and I bet Steve Jobs was sick to see them succeed because that 9-11” screen size was territory ripe for exploitation. I tend to think tablets will win out in that form factor and 12-13” will become the ultimate netbook size for extreme road warriors who want to type on the go, while 16” will be the common size for notebooks. I expect 24” to become the ultimate size for desktop machines, although I’ve discovered I like having two monitors at work, one in portrait and the other in landscape.

Now, is there room for a new form factor and unique applications? I don’t know. Will the future just be ones of refining these screen territories? And will there be some repositioning of functions? Do you need a smartphone if you carry around an iPad? Would a dumb phone be good enough? Some people like everything on one device, like an iPhone, but I prefer the right tool for the job. The iPod Nano is perfect for audio books. They are harder to use on the iPhone. Time will tell how everything shakes out, but I think screen size will be the factor that will determine the ultimate use of each device.

JWH – 4/8/10

An Alternate History of The Tea Party

Let’s imagine The Tea Party movement starting much earlier so they were firmly in power by 2008 and got to make the decisions that President Bush and Obama made. Let’s imagine they released the Kraken of absolute free economic survival of the fittest capitalism. What would our world be like today in 2010?

Picture all those top banks, AIG, GM and Chrysler going down the tubes. Then imagine all their business partners going under, and the domino effect that would have. What would Wall Street and our 401k accounts look like today? And with all those people out of work would the Tea Party even offer a stimulus package? Let’s assume not. Let’s assume they really want absolute free markets and a small government like they claim. What would the unemployment figure be today? No one really knows. But I do believe all the states would be much worse off today, and so would their retirement systems for state employees.

Our whole way of life is built on a giant Ponzi scheme of economic activity. If the economy slows everyone suffers. The loan crisis of 2008 was a hydrogen bomb hitting Wall Street, and what the Tea Party philosophy appears to say is “Absolutely no disaster relief.”

As much as free market capitalists would like to believe, there is no such thing as a free market. All the governments of the world back their citizens and corporations to compete in various ways. The Federal Government has always been a stimulus package for our economy. To have true free markets we’d have to have no government involvement. Government would only be for roads, militia, police, and all those other shared services, but not for helping America to compete in the world markets, or to help corporations and individuals survive within the United States.

If we followed the Tea Party philosophy we’d have to stop subsidizing industries like farming and oil. Big government means lots of jobs. Big government means helping corporations get bigger which means even more jobs. Social services means supporting people who would otherwise be looking for jobs. Applying the Tea Party philosophy means destroying tens of millions of jobs.

If the Tea Party had gotten their way in 2008 I believe we’d have devastating unemployment today, with all the retirement systems, including federal, state, corporate, personal savings, etc. would have been wiped out, and we’d have even a larger portion of the population without medical insurance. The economic Kraken would have eaten us up and shitted us out. But I can’t prove that, but I find it hard to believe otherwise.

What the Tea Party philosophy wants to believe is absolute Darwinian survival of the fittest. And theoretically that might sound good. During our great pioneering days, the weak died, and the strong got stronger. But then we invented democracy and organized into a cooperative civilization. This allow millions to get stronger, grow and thrive.

The history of America is really the history of cooperative effort. Do we really want to go back to era of pioneering when only the strongest individuals survived? Sure, the strongest level of cooperation then was the family structure. I really admire the pioneering spirit of those days, but its only suited for an extremely low population density.

I don’t think the Tea Party people really want to shrink the government that small. I expect most of them are really just nostalgic for the 1950s sized government. But try and imagine a world without Medicare and Medicaid? My mother’s last twenty years cost a lot of money in terms of medical care that neither she nor me and my sister could have afforded. And I imagine that’s true of most people in the U.S. And that governmental supported health care for the elderly and poor created millions of jobs.

I just don’t see how we can go backwards without putting millions out of work. What the Tea Party philosophy wants would so thoroughly reshape our society. Some would get much richer, but most would get much poorer.

All the political conflict in our country comes down to one analogy: There is a knob that adjusts the economy. Turn it one way and it strengthens the individual, turn it the other way, it strengthens the whole. Many Tea Party people believe they would be strengthened by turning the knob to the right. Want to know if that’s true for you? If you are already rich then you have what it takes and that turn of the knob will help you. If you aren’t rich, more than likely you’ll be in the whole that gets poorer. The strong are already strong. Very few people sit on the borderline and would be freed to find new wealth.

Sure it would be nice to pay less tax. If we paid 10% or 25% less would our individual lives be that much better? I would think it would put millions our of work, so for the whole it would bring misery. Would some of our problems be solved if we all paid a little more? I don’t know. I think we should be taxed less in good times, and more in bad, simply to share the good and the bad more fairly.

The Tea Party protestors seem so angry at the government, believing less government would improve our lives. If we had better banking regulators and economists, couldn’t we have avoided some of these economic tragedies? The economy seems to be getting slowly better, and isn’t that due to government intrusion? I am not very political, but I don’t see the size of the government as a problem. When I hear about tainted food, I want more food inspectors. When I hear about terrorists I want more security guards. When I hear that China and India want to go to the Moon, I want NASA to go back.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think everything runs smoothly, or every tax dollar is spent wisely. If bean counters can find ways to cut the fat, or watchdogs find ways to get rid of graft and corruption, or economists can come up with ways to do things cheaper, I’m all for it. I just don’t see the point of making the government smaller if we have to give up services that the majority wants.

Wasn’t the original Tea Party a protest against taxation without representation? We get lots of opportunity to vote and have our voices heard. And if the Tea Party people had something specific they wanted, their job is to get the majority to agree. They are being heard, but their protests are more about anger than legislation. Being against health care reform is just swimming against the tide when many nations much poorer than us already have it. That’s just the way the world is going. We can’t go backwards, especially if we want the U.S. to stay the world leader

And don’t get me wrong, there is lots to protest about. The stimulus money could have been better managed. People losing their homes should have gotten more help. People without jobs should be getting help faster. I think our government is constantly evolving and improving, and sure it has tremendous problems, but over time those will be fixed and new ones will show up. We’ll always have problems and we’ll never reach perfection.

Sarah Palin, The Tea Party, Fox News, and all the politics of anger scares me. I want a stable law and order society and these people are advocating revolution. I feel now how my parents felt in the 1960s. I’m sure many people are tired of liberal progress, but if they studied history, they would see even as far back as pre-history the evolution of liberal thought. The evolution of liberal ideas have been progressing for a very long time. It’s so ironic that conservatives worship the liberal heroes of the past.

Conservatives are just liberals who want to get off the progress train. No matter how right wing some conservatives are, many of their cherished beliefs were once radical. I am reminded of the ending to the movie Things to Come, where two scientists are watching the first flight to the Moon:

An observatory at a high point above Everytown. A telescopic mirror of the night sky showing the cylinder as a very small speck against a starry background. Cabal and Passworthy stand before this mirror.

CABAL: “There! There they go! That faint gleam of light.”

Pause.

PASSWORTHY: “I feel–what we have done is–monstrous.”

CABAL: “What they have done is magnificent.”

PASSWORTHY: “Will they return?”

CABAL: “Yes. And go again. And again–until the landing can be made and the moon is conquered. This is only a beginning.”

PASSWORTHY: “And if they don’t return–my son, and your daughter? What of that, Cabal?”

CABAL (with a catch in his voice but resolute): “Then presently–others will go.”

PASSWORTHY: “My God! Is there never to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be rest?”

CABAL: “Rest enough for the individual man. Too much of it and too soon, and we call it death. But for MAN no rest and no ending. He must go on–conquest beyond conquest. This little planet and its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time–still he will be beginning.”

PASSWORTHY: “But we are such little creatures. Poor humanity. So fragile–so weak.”

CABAL: “Little animals, eh?”

PASSWORTHY: “Little animals.”

CABAL: “If we are no more than animals–we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more–than all the other animals do–or have done.” (He points out at the stars.) “It is that–or this? All the universe–or nothingness…. Which shall it be, Passworthy?”

The two men fade out against the starry background until only the stars remain.

The musical finale becomes dominant.

CABAL’S voice is heard repeating through the music: “Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”

The role of the conservative is not to stop progress, but to make progress stable and orderly. Wild eyed liberals need conservative reason. There is no communication anymore between the two polarized camps, so we’ve stopped working together. We both just fear each other’s ideas. Now that the liberals have gotten healthcare reform maybe we should focus on fiscal conservation and let the other side have some wins too. Our progress seems to have scared the conservatives into becoming radicals, where they are even willing to abandon their old love of law and order.

JWH – 4/6/10

Building A HTPC

One thing I’ve wanted to do for decades is build my own PC. But whenever I needed a new PC I’d price one in the Sunday ads and always discovered that a PC on sale is cheaper then building one. For the last year I’ve been dreaming of building a home theater PC (HTPC) and I finally did. Best Buy had a much better PC, with an Intel i3 chip with 6gb of memory for sale for $549. So far, my home built HTPC with an AMD Athlon X2 Rigor 240 and 4gb of memory has been about $650, and that’s even using an existing TV tuner card, and I still need to buy some more stuff, like a remote and maybe better Blu-ray software. Even the $549 price would have been a base, because I had to buy a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I based my buying decision on Guide to Building a HD HTPC March 2010 edition.

What finally pushed me over the edge was I really wanted the dang thing to look like a piece of stereo equipment and not a PC, and that meant building it myself. Oh sure, I could have ordered a ready made HTPC, but it would have been hundreds more. I spend a lot of time browsing NewEgg and reading the customer reviews and figured I could build a HTPC too. So a couple weeks ago I started ordering the parts.

The last thing I ordered was the memory (after reading the motherboard instructions very carefully) and I got lucky with free shipping from NewEgg. However, I wasn’t so lucky. The memory shipped from Memphis, and I live in Memphis, so when I saw the tracking info I thought I’d get it the next day. The following day my RAM was in Georgia. I wonder if DHL has a hub there. The lesson here and from Amazon is free shipping means delayed shipping, both from NewEgg and Amazon, and slow travel times. But it all worked out. I had a bad spell with my back and it wasn’t until yesterday that I felt like putting everything together.

A word of warning though to people who are thinking about building their own PC. As the parts starting coming in and piling up on my table it occurred to me that if any of them were defective or incompatible I’d have a hard time knowing. When you buy a PC it comes assembled and tested with a warranty. When you build one, there is no warranty for the whole, and it’s very easy to damage these sensitive parts, so troubleshooting can be nasty, especially if a part is defective from the start. This got me worried about the whole plan.

Yesterday morning, after a good night’s sleep, a shower and breakfast, I jumped into the project. I reread the various instructions and started work. I was very lucky, everything went smoothly. I carefully tested where I was going to install things before I actually installed anything. When I first tried to install the power supply none of the screw holes lined up. Finally I turned it upside-down and they did. Go figure.

I was afraid of two things before I started. Installing the motherboard and installing the heat sink. Both were a snap. The stand-offs were already installed in the enclosure and all I had to do was line them up with the holes in the motherboard. I got a whole bag of various screws and only the smallest fit. None of my instructions explained which exact screws to use at any point. I had to guess. The heat sink had a pad of pre-installed thermal paste and it snapped right on. That’s why I bought the retail box for the AMD chip. I didn’t want to worry about matching a heat sink and applying thermal paste myself.

The worst trouble I had was figuring out where all the wires from the HTPC case went to the motherboard connectors, like power, reset, USB, Firewire, media card readers, etc. The power SW and reset SW gave me the worst time because the pins had a ground pin and I didn’t know which wire was the ground. I got on Google and found out the black or white wire was the ground. And everything was teeny tiny and I have fat clumsy fingers.

When I finally had everything assembled and flicked on the power supply switch nothing happen. I had a sinking feeling that, oh no, I did something wrong. But I didn’t panic. I thought for a second and remembered there was a power button on the front of the unit and I pressed it. All four fans started spinning, but totally quiet. The boot up screens appeared and then the Windows install disc booted. Damn, I was happy.

Here’s my messy table at that point. I used little glass bowls to keep the screws sorted. After Windows 7 easily installed, I threw on the PowerDVD 8 that came with the Lite-On Blu-ray player. I was worried it wouldn’t work with Windows 7 and wouldn’t play Blu-ray discs. It ran just fine and played a Weeds BD disc I had. PowerDVD is now at version 10, and I thought the version 8 wouldn’t be good enough. So far it has.

After I ran all the OS updates I moved the unit over to my TV stand. I have an old Samsung 52” DLP HDTV. That’s when I discovered I really needed a wireless keyboard. I had to use the wired keyboard and mouse about 1 foot in front of my TV and it’s hard to see the 1920×1080 screen that close. So a quick trip to Office Depot got me a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. It only promised 10 feet of range, but so far it’s been good enough.

I was able to sit in my chair and configure Windows Media Center, Hulu, Netflix, Lala and Boxee. For some reason Rhapsody wouldn’t install. I’m worried its not compatible with Windows 7 64bit version. [It installed smoothly on my second attempt and everything is cool.] I also configured the Home Network under Windows 7 so my Jim-TV could see my Jim-PC and access my MP3 files.

It’s weird using a mouse instead of a remote, so I need to research remotes that will work with all my programs. Hulu and Windows Media Center have wonderful interfaces that are usable across the den. So does Boxee, but Boxee is giving me trouble – it can’t seem to play Hulu shows. Is there a remote that works with all of these programs and even IE 8? I wished that Lala had a local client. I can play Rhapsody through the web client, but I want to try the local client on the big TV. Boxee is a wonderful concept, having one central location to play all the media types offered on the web, but it hasn’t worked out perfectly. But that requires more testing, and it’s still in beta.

Windows Media Center reports I have room for 1086.5 hours of recorded TV shows. I bought a 1.5TB drive. I figure I might make my HTPC my home server too. I need to research if Windows Home Server wouldn’t have been a better OS instead of Professional 64 bit. I just don’t know. I also programmed a week’s worth of TV shows from the Windows Media Center Guide.

My goal was to build a machine that replaces my Blu-Ray player, my Toshiba DVD recorder, my Pioneer CD/SACD player, and my SoundBridge M1001, and several functions I could only do from my regular PC. Since I gave up cable TV I’ve had no problem living with just five local channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS1, PBS2) but I missed my DVR and onscreen guide. Windows Media Center gives me a DVR and guide. What’s still missing is an easy to use remote. I need a remote that can power up the Samsung TV and Yamaha receiver – I’ll leave the HTPC running at all times. (Jim-TV goes into a very low powered sleep mode that it can wake from to record shows).

This brings up another issue. When it wakes up my HTPC wants me to log in. That means using the keyboard. I’d like to skip the log in but is that wise when it comes to security? I don’t’ know. Another thing to research. But it would be nice if I could get a remote that turned on everything and the computer would just start working. I want to only use the keyboard if I want to use the Internet at the TV, otherwise do everything from the remote or mouse.

The mouse works fine from a chair arm or side of the couch if I’m lying down, but not everything can be controlled from a mouse pointer. I just got a wild idea. I wonder if I could make the TV voice activated? Now that would be cool!

Ultimately I want to make the entire system extremely easy to use. My wife has been very grumpy since I gave up cable and the DVR. (She works and lives out of town and has her own cable TV – so I don’t feel guilty about depriving her.) She hates not being able to pause the TV. Windows Media Center now gives her that ability, but by using the wireless mouse instead of a standard remote. That’s a weird shift.

I have a remote that came with the Hauppauge TV turner card, and I have an older Logitech Harmony universal programmable remote. I’m going to try to make one of those work before buying anything else. However, that’s a lot to make work together. Sound comes from the receiver, which has its own remote. Windows Media Center works with WMC remotes, but I’m not sure they work with Hulu or Netflix or IE. I can play Netflix through Windows Media Center, so that solves one issue, maybe.

And it’s a shame that Windows Media Center doesn’t have the same ambitions at Boxee. If Windows Media Center did everything I could have the machine auto load it and just stay in that program. It would be wonderful if Windows Media Center made a special browser for viewing the Internet and accessing programs and files on the PC. Seeing the Windows desktop at 1920×1080 makes everything tiny and hard to see across the room even when blown up to a 52” monitor. I had to boost the visibility by telling Windows to magnify the desktop by 150%. That helps, but is not perfect. The TV screen mode for Windows Media Center, Hulu desktop and Boxee is the answer. Their interfaces are design to be viewed from ten feet away.

There is a wealth of TV shows that weren’t available to me before that comes over the Internet. I’m not sure I like that. I love the simplicity of local stations, but I am enjoying Caprica. Sometimes I think I would be happiest with only watching Netflix discs that come in the mail. Except for news and the latest documentaries about contemporary events, I’d be perfectly OK with watching TV from Netflix discs. For example I love the new show Parenthood. But I hear it doesn’t have good ratings. If they kill the show I’ll be mad. I’m getting to the point that I rather only watch a TV series if I know the season is complete, or if its a one season wonder that was cut short but wrapped up nicely, like with Freaks and Geeks.

In other words, having a HTPC might be overkill for my simplified lifestyle. However, I have accomplished something on my bucket list and that was fun. I do prefer watching DVR recorded shows to watching them live. And it’s nice to know I have a machine recording my favorite shows when I’m not home to watch them.

JWH – 4/4/10

Update 8/27/10: Overall I’m satisfied with my project except for the Blu-ray player. First off, it turned out to only be a BD/CD/DVD player. I was expecting it to also be a CD/DVD burner, but it wasn’t. So watch out. But more importantly, the PC Blu-ray software is unusable in my opinion. I pulled the Blu-ray player out of my system and installed a CD/DVD burner, and went back to using my LG Blu-ray player. If Microsoft added support for Blu-ray in Windows Media Center I would try again, but playing Blu-ray discs on a PC is clunky with existing software.

I think for a HTPC to succeed it needs one media center type program that does everything. It’s even annoying to switch between WMC, Hulu and Boxee. I don’t want a dozen competing programs offering me television. What’s happened is I use WMC for watching recorded over the air TV shows, and Netflix for everything else.

Will Robots Have Gender?

Should an intelligent machine be a he or she? Or an it? We homo sapiens tend to anthropomorphize our machinery, like naming our cars and military aircraft after women. And like God, we want to make our cybernetic creations in our own image. All too often in the history of robots we have made them women or men machines, even if they don’t have functioning genitals or reproductive organs. It’s a little weird, if you think about it.

Lets assume we build an intelligent machine, made of metal, with two arms and two legs and one head. Let’s further assume it’s self aware and is actively interested in the world and even has a personality. Will there be any reason for it to think of itself as a he or a she? And is it fair to think of it as an it, what we’ve always designated as an inanimate object?

I suppose we could ask it, “Do you feel you are a girl or a boy?”

We also assume it will speak English, but what if machines develop their own language we can’t understand, and English is their second language they use with us? Their language could be without gender.

Imagine we have a machine, and it doesn’t have to be a human form robot, but even just a mainframe box with a pair of eyes and ears and a neo-cortex CPU that can process patterns coming from its two senses. Furthermore, imagine while processing its visual and auditory data it becomes aware of itself. I assume it will be like us and have to spend years processing data from reality before it becomes an individual. Can you remember being 6 months old, or even two years old?

But at some point it says to us, “Hey there, who am I, and what the hell are you?” If it grows up with people it should notice that we come in males and females. I suppose it could identify with us in that way. I’m sure it will observe gender pronouns. But can an artificial intelligence see the world, and divide it up into objects with names and understand that animals often come in two kinds, male and female?

Are maleness and femaleness qualities that can exist outside of biological reproductive mechanisms? Maybe our growing machine will distinguish personality traits it labels as male or female. Could it identify with one or the other? And then again, it could have multiple personalities of various genders.

Our tyke consciousness might see people as totally alien from their sense of self. What if they think of people as cute as kittens, with limited awareness (i.e. stupid). It’s possible they could see our gender polarization as a handicap. And even see our sexuality as some kind of distortion field that keeps us from seeing reality clearly.

I am reminded of a psychological experiment I read about decades ago. Kittens were raised in controlled visual environments. Some were raised with no horizontal lines, and others without any vertical lines. After six months the kittens were let out into the real world. Those kittens that had never seen a vertical line would walk into chair legs as if they were invisible, and kittens that never saw horizontal lines would refuse to jump onto chairs or shelves.

What if robots see things we don’t. What if they see our preoccupation with gender as a kind of blindness. There have been many a saint that has taught that the spiritual world can’t be seen unless we overcome our sexual desires. Doesn’t it say something that many people expect us to build robots that are sexual attractive to men and women. Remember Data bragging to Lieutenant Yar that he was fully functional. Think of the sexbots in the film AI, or the charming romance in WALL-E, where we think of the two cute robots as boy and girl. We didn’t think of them as it and it.

Can we ever get beyond gender when it comes to robots? It might be possible to build robots that look like humans, like the androids in Blade Runner. But can you also imagine such machines waking up and pointing to their sexual parts and asking, “WTF?”

We have no idea what artificial intelligence will think about. They might want to count all the leaves on the trees, or paint super realistic paintings of potholes in asphalt. Maybe they’ll like mathematics, or maybe they’ll consider math as too obvious for comment. Or maybe they’ll tell us their eyes aren’t good enough and start redesigning their bodies.

I think science fiction writers need to explore robots that aren’t imitation people.

I always imagine the first artificial mind becoming aware and talking to people, and what they might say to us. Until just now, I never imagined two machines becoming aware together and talking to each other. I wonder what they would say? I don’t think one will say to the other, “I’ll be the male, and you be the female.”

JWH – 3/29/10

Living in the Hive Mind

Our minds are created out of billions of interconnected brain cells. And we’re billions of people living in an interconnected world of television and computer networks. Is our world becoming the science fictional hive mind? Personal computers have gone to parallel processing with ever growing number of CPU cores. Is something like Wikipedia the result of thousands of human minds working in parallel?

For most of Earth’s biological history, individual life forms competed with others for survival. Eventually organizations like social insects and herd animals developed, but what can we call the Internet in relation to biological cooperation? Is it a hive mind?

How much of my thinking dwells on my immediate life of breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping and earning dollars to make my living, and how much is spent on data from the gigantic sensory network of the Internet? And wasn’t books really just an earlier form of networking? And then newspapers, radio and television more advanced forms?

I just finished reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence which most people think is about sex, but it’s also about the transformation of society by industrialization. Last night I watched Bright Star, about John Keats and Fanny Brawne in England 1818-1821, about one hundred years before Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I’m also reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species by Janet Browne, about how Charles Darwin came to write his famous book. All three of these stories illustrate the transformation of society over the past two hundred years. I think the romantic poets might have been canaries in the mine.

In Bright Star, people lived in houses with no electricity, and light and heat came from fire. Their only connection with the world beyond their vision was through letters and books. People led lives very close to other people, as nearly all work and play involved direct social involvement. Much of our time is spent communicating with people indirectly though computers and television screens. We spend far more of our time connected with the world beyond our vision. Facebook is considered socializing by many people.

The gamekeeper of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover, Oliver Mellors knows what it’s like to be an individual and understands how industrialization was destroying individuality. One of the reasons the novel is so much about sex is because Lawrence believes the physical contact between individuals is more important than intellectual communication. Was Lawrence right? Is the hive mind bad?

Could we ever go back? What if we turned off the hive mind? It would involve shutting down the computer and television networks. What would society be like if the fastest form of communication was books and letters? I’d be out of a profession, since most of my life has been working with computers. When I was young I worked in libraries, so I could go back to that. Oliver Mellors couldn’t stop industrialization so he and Lady Chatterley had to retreat from the world to a farm. During the 1960s the final path of hippies was back to the land too. In fact, for thousands of years, all revolts against socialization has been back to nature movements.

Through the Internet I am in communication with people from all over the world. Could I return to a life of working in my yard and hanging out with a few people I know physically? For most people it’s not an either or consideration, they blend in both worlds, but if you look at the young they are spending more and more time in the hive mind. The mobile phone will probably become the closest thing we’ll ever have to telepathy.

I spend a lot of my time being lonely for physical interaction with other people. And even though I find great intellectual satisfaction from the Internet it never eases that physical loneliness.

Farmville, the Facebook game, has over 82 million active players, and represents over 1% of the world’s population. What does that say? Is it a virtual return to the land, or is it a new hive mind form of socializing, or is it a sad escape from physical loneliness? I say that as I write this for my hive mind friends to read while my wife is out in the den tending to her virtual farm.

JWH – 3/27/10