That Vague Face of the Little Bird

Since invented, I think only a few people have some ideas what Twitter is. It didn't even have a business model until recently (though the same goes to Facebook, even Google). I surely doubt that there was any vision that it is to be the most poweful global conversation engine of the 21century. Co-founder Williams hinted during his TED talk that he and the other founders were just thinking along the line of 'wouldn’t be interesting if there's an online application with which people can say what's on their minds in an instant.' Much of what has been happening next with Twitter were as surprising to them as they were to any tech foretune teller, or maybe even any of us.

It's amazing how invention seldom work the way the inventors intended. Once society has their hands on them, they figure out ways to make them work in their directions. Some of the time they even work way better (I suspect that by 'some' I mean 'most of the time' but as usual I have no data to back me up).

Back when Yahoo! was the king of the net (a day in internet years) it flooded me with new stuff, but they are stuff they steered me to know. When Google took the throne, I suddenly realized that I was just being handed the freedom that we netizens rightfully own all along (I mean, the page was just a logo and a search box). That was the year that my browsing frenzy truly began (that and the fact that I began to have enough money to pay for my own internet connection). Like a ferocious cancer, the number of information I accessed was on crazy high-speed growth.

The crazy thing about that --that is, for me-- is that Twitter actually managed to top that. With Twitter, you sign up, you follow people --those of your peers, those whom you share similar interests, and here comes the good part, those who know better than you do, and those who inspire you. After that, cyber magic happens.

With Google, the one thing that stands between you and the knowledge 'for you' is the right keyword. If you're keyword blind, all you the data you get are just garnish at best. Suddenly with Twitter, that blindness is globally medicated. All you need is those people to connect to. It even doesn't matter whether you know if the the people you know know what you don't know (ah crap, my line). You just follow some people, and you get what THEY google, too. It's like your very own outsourced team working for you. For free. And you can do the same for them, too. How you collaborate with them is a wide-open possibility.

On my Twitter days so far, I get to find out who inspire my idols. I get to know that Bill Gates is admiring Khan Academy founder Salman Khan. I get to read the same economic essays my favorite comedians read. I witnessed some great scientific minds get creamed by novice science soldiers (great overlooked debates of all time, in my opinion). I get to see how evidently the number one of anything is number one only by social perception, not by facts. Yes, I get to see significant political changes from the point of view of the very people who bring the strong words on to the streets, too (as opposed to major news media narratives). That exec from Google who had something to do with recent Egypt revolution is amazing.

The likes of these you can see literally every day. These are available because people you know search for things you probably won't, and TWEET them (maybe not for you, but you get them anyway). I think that is the clue to the true face of Twitter.

Those chains of rants and cheap wisdoms that busied our timelines are merely the surface, cosmetic even. Still, they don't have to be a bad thing. Maybe we'll learn as we go (besides, they may be well be a post for another day). Maybe these misthoughts are the building blocks of the eventual better lessons we will learn and earn. I have no freaking clue what will happen next with people. Will we still be on Twitter when we're better people? Or will we mirgrate to some Twitter killer? Or will we even be better people with whatever app at hands? You have to agree that is exciting (No, you don't have to).
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Not These Ones

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My sister told me that my dad is now a proud owner of a Twitter account. She hadn't told the username, so I googled "anwar yusuf on twitter." I found these. I don't think neither is my dad.

Small Attention

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Early morning there was a sad news in the family. On the taxi ride to meet my family, a 'good-morning-drive-safely' from a toll-booth officer on duty eased up my worried mind, to my surprise.

Thank you.
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Confusing Option

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Kultwit is a confusing option. If there's that much to tweet, why not blog them?
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In Awe

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I'm in awe of the mechanism of intelligence.
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What To Learn About Singularity

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Excerpt from TIME February 21, 2009
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
Original article is here.


Sin.gu.lar.i.ty
n: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.


(At age 17, Kurzweil appeared on 1965 TV Show I've Got A Secret, showcasing a computer that composes music --his own invention)

(on artificial intelligence)
"... Kurzweil would spent much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence."

"...We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brains by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity --never say hes not conservative-- at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of the same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today."



Ray Kurzweil Explains the Coming Singularity (from YouTube channel BigThink)


(on life extension)
".. After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension, biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable. Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarians ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.

For example, it's well-known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular noncancerous cells with telomerase? In November, the researchers at Harvard medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a goup of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger.

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."
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What To Learn From Child's Brain

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"In investigating the child's brain, we are going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human; and in the process we may be able to help keep our minds open to learning for our entire lives." (at 9:52 of 13:28)

Patricia Kuhl at TEDxRainer
Seattle, Washington,October 2010

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