This little image is a closeup of the top of one of the
Arnold Tongues
(phase locked
regions occurring at frequencies that are
Farey numbers),
specifically, the one that appears on the
iterated circle map. There are many more pictures in my
Art Gallery.
Due to the fact that I have been receiving several hundred megabytes of spam a day (yes, that's right, tens of thousands of mail messages daily),
Sorry. If the message is important or urgent, and you feel compelled to use electronic communications, then you may post a brief message at my Wikipedia talk page. Otherwise, give me a call over the telephone. No sales calls or soliciting, please.
Currently, I am employed by Novamente, engaged in R&D work in natural language processing and artificial general intelligence. A smattering of related open-source agi work is listed here.
I've spent many years at IBM; most recently working on the Linux kernel for PowerPC-based mainframes. The Linux on the PowerPC wiki is a good place to find out more about IBM Linux mainframes and systems. I've been active in the Linux community; I was a founder of the Gnome Foundation; and was the lead developer for GnuCash for over 7 years. I've founded three dot-com startups, all of which failed to enrich me financially. I was a founding member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board; and spent 8 years learning about and designing 3D graphics hardware and software. I have a PhD in theoretical physics from SUNY at Stony Brook. Currently, I am utterly infatuated with mathematics, and have made large contributions to over 300 math articles in Wikipedia. BTW, y'all, global warming is for real. Do something about it.
I've always felt detached from the political scene. I just figured out why: politics is unreal, and politicians are from outer space.
Illegal AT&T Wiretapping Unlike most Americans, (yes, I'm American; I was born here in the USA) I grew up in a household that echoed with talk of the Soviet Union, of Soviet politics, of Siberian deportations, wiretaps, the KGB, identification cards and papers, and the routine surveillance of the general public in the name of "national security". These terms had a special meaning in my household; they were code-words; for each, there was a spine-chilling tale; for each, there was a relative or friend of the family, killed, imprisoned, or in hiding.
I knew I was in the Eastern European minority, but after the Cold War with the Soviet Union, after Ronald Reagan, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after Joe McCarthy and Joseph Stalin and J. Edgar Hoover, I thought that each and every American understood. Hell, we knew why we were fighting Hitler. Right? Didn't we?
Apparently not: A recent poll by USA Today indicates that two-thirds of Americans approve of the routine warrant-less government wiretapping of the telephones and Internet connections of every man, woman and child in the United States. Not criminals, but ordinary people: grocery store clerks, corporate executives, high-school kids. Two-thirds of Americans have no clue what happened in Wiemar Germany in the 1930's? Don't have a clue as to what the KGB was about? Two-thirds of Americans have forgotten, or never knew, who J. Edgar Hoover was, who Joe McCarthy was? This is a shameful time for America; a time when the country has fallen ill, and is loosing its way.
Anyway, here's the dirt, some sealed, confidential grand jury documents that were leaked to the press. Read this and weep for your children; they're the one who will suffer the brunt of it. And then get off your duff and impeach our highest ranking citizen traitor, the treasonous President George W. Bush. Its not too late. (Yet.)
News coverage: Wired - NSA Bill Performs a Patriot Act (Senate Judiciary Committee approves SB2453, authorizing warentless, unsupervised & indiscriminate wiretapping of all US citizens) - ABCNews - Does The Government Have Your Phone Records? - Washington Post-ABC News Poll - Poll: 51% oppose NSA database - Center for Constitutional Rights Complaint - Legal Claims in ACLU v. National Security Agency - Judge keeps papers sealed in AT&T spy suit - DOJ wants NSA wiretapping suits dismissed - NSA spying on phone records of innocent Americans is only surprising to the uninformed masses
Budget of the National Intelligence Program under Negroponte: 44 Billion Dollars. Lets figure that there are 100 million taxpaying households in the US. That means that $440 of your annual federal income taxes go towards spying. Got that? That's your tax dollars at work.
The Art Gallery has been running for fifteen or twenty years while being silent about the underlying math. I suppose its high time to make amends. The core idea of the dissertation is that the shapes of fractals are describable through Farey Fractions, which appear naturally through continued fractions, which have the symmetry of the Modular Group SL(2,Z), which is inter-twined with the Riemann Zeta and the structure of the set of rational numbers. Besides the four basic operations on the real numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), there is a fifth basic operation which is rarely taught in primary school and under-appreciated at higher levels, namely, "Farey Addition" or, expressed correctly, group multiplication in SL(2,Z). The modular group doesn't just lead to Pellian equations and algebraic numbers, it in fact intertwines all rational numbers (and their extensions to reals and p-adics) in crazy, fractal ways. This is why, for example, one sees Farey Fractions in the Mandelbrot Set. In number theory, the structure of the Modular Group provides a unifying theme for understanding the nature of factorization and primality. This is why, for example, power series and Dirichlet series (such as the Riemann Zeta) exhibit such crazy fractal Cantor-Set type patterns. Despite this connection being seen by Weierstrass as early as 1872, its more-or-less entirely ignored in standard textbooks on Analysis and Number Theory. The series of articles below tries to provide some of the underpinnings for the above breathless assertions.
This is Your Brain on Drugs explores drug use in America today, and the political forces wrestling with this social problem.
Labour of Love - The Volunteer Economy Free-market economists, thinkers and pundits (correctly) champion the power of free markets to create a better world. Yet if one opens a history book, it is hard to find a historical figure that was motivated by greed. Both prominent and emerging social and economic institutions are marked by excellence due volunteer, freely donated efforts, rather than wealth accumulation. When will we recognize the economic benefits of channelling this powerful force with social, political and governmental norms?
Free Software ~ Free Trade? An examination of the powerful economic forces driving the acceptance of Free Software/Open Source in corporations and businesses. When we realize that Free software is not just a (political) philosophy, or a social or anthropological movement, but an economic force akin to the removal of trade barriers, we can finally understand why its adoption by corporations promises to be a sea-change in the way that software is used. Reviews a business case study of a very large, failed technology project. If you thought the Internet was big ... this is bigger.
DeCSS: Consumer Politics in the 21st Century A moral/sociological/legal diatribe about the immorality and evil ethics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the corporations that wish to squish human endevour in the name of the protection of intellectual property.
Open Source and Code Quality The relationship between the software worker and the software means of production leads to fundamentally new economic forces that will change the very nature of the software industry.
DeCSS: Consumer Politics in the 21st Century A moral/sociological/legal diatribe about the immorality and evil ethics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the corporations that wish to squish human endevour in the name of the protection of intellectual property.
DeCSS Miscellaneous legal documents, web-page mirrors and source code related to the DVD encryption and playback scandal. Seems to me that the movie industry is a confederacy of dunces, and is unwilling and unable to recognize the absurd situation it has placed itself in. But then, we are all mortal, and what would life be if not decorated by foolish exploits? Indeed, Hollywood should know ... this has all the markings of a made-for-TV movie. (See also: Eternity, a screed that ties together some of today's fore-runner technologies.)
cp4break Mirror of some contentious content relating to Internet censorship, copyrights, the GPL, and reverse engineering. Another hot political issue that ultimately bridges back to the issue of the freedom of expression, and the freedom to ignore the expressions of others.
linkparser> Atvažiavom į sodžių.
Found 1 linkage (1 had no P.P. violations)
Unique linkage, cost vector = (UNUSED=0 DIS=0 AND=0 LEN=1)
+----LI----+
| +-DG-+-Xp-+
| | | |
atvažiavom į sodžių .
A Better Way to do SETI makes the argument that if extra-terrestrials are trying to send us a radio message, then they will be using broadband spread-spectrum (pseudo-random noise) modulation techniques. Finding such a signal is much, much harder, but when found, it provides a much, much clearer communications channel than any other modulation technique. The ET's know this, and they know that we know this, and will thus use this technique preferentially. Essentially all of the current SETI searches, while being important so as to rule out other methods, are all really looking for the wrong thing.
Eternity Service is a commentary on the basic ideas behind Napster as viewed through the eyes of David Gelertner. David chooses not to dirty his prognostications with the names of present-day technologies. I do. They are E-Rights, distributed.net, and Eternity Service, all mashed into one.
Scalable Semi-Reliable Datagram Protocol Internet Radio broadcasts based on TCP/IP are not scalable. Broadcasts based on UDP are subject to dropouts. Here's how one can do better than either. Addresses multi-cast and congestion issues. (circa 1997, old, out of date).
HTML-CGI Templates Anyone who ever writes a CGI-BIN must struggle with this issue at some point or another. Circa 1995, very old. Very stale.
The good stuff is in the form of letters:
An Airline Flight Reservation System (Defunct) I founded Teleport Travel, and was bought out by Intransco, where I served as Chief Technology Officer. More work, for less money, at an Internet startup. Developed the prototype entirely by myself. Teleport Travel was the very first on the 'net (Spring/Summer 1995) with an actual functioning airline reservation system, never mind that it worked better, and had a nicer user interface than many/most travel res systems today. An unhappy experience in the end, as this was a dot-com that dot-bombed. I shoulda been a billionaire by now, but it turns out (duhh) that superior technology has no correlation to success. Its all about management, the CEO, in the end. Who sucked. Who had no moral problems grabbing my top-notch technology and squandering it. Which I tried, repeatedly, to tell "angel" investor Rear Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, but he seemed incapable of listening. Or hearing. Or something. If only ... sigh.
OpenGL and VRML. I worked at IBM as the OpenGL(tm) architect for many years, participating in a variety of technical and marketing activities surrounding the RS/6000 hardware, operating system software, and 3D graphics subsystem.
Besides creating the above web pages in a fit of marketing mania, I've written some technical articles:
Pioneer 10/11 Silver Anniversary Commemorative Site Dr. John Simpson hired me to work on Pioneer 10/11 Charged Particle Instrument data analysis programs for my first paying computer programming job, twenty years ago. These are now the farthest spacecraft from our solar system. Goodbye Pioneer 10/11!
Morgan Park Academy Class of `76.
