I just finished watching the first three seasons of the 4400. It is yet another cheesy, low-budget sci-fi TV series. Or is it?

The premise is interesting. A scientific breakthrough has been made: we are now able to improve substantially human beings at the genetic level. Not all human beings are helped similarly by this technology however. A genetic divide is created. This quickly leads to an us against them mentality. A catastrophe occurs.

At this point, the writers took a shortcut and decided that human beings from the future would modify people in the past to avoid the problem. By carefully choosing who gets genetically improved, they hope that the catastrophe can be averted. The problem with time travel is that it becomes a deus ex machina. Some writers are better at handling time travel than others. Mostly, what writers do is put obstacles in front of the heroes so that changing the past to solve present-day problem is very difficult. To achieve this, the writers of the 4400 imagined that another group of human beings from the future are trying to make sure that the catastrophe still happens. It is vague and sometimes unconvincing.

I think that the idea of a genetic divide is very interesting. It is a metaphor for the fast-paced technological changes happening right now. Some are surfing the changes, but the vast majority is left reacting to the changes. The people who are making the changes happening have to fight the establishment. How do we reach a balance so that a catastrophe does not occur?

Moreover, I believe we are already able to induce significant changes in our bodies. The most obvious superpowers I can see are males with giant genitals and females with very large breasts. Hardly the first superpowers I would have thought about as a kid, but they would appear extraordinary to people a century or two ago. I do not think people will learn telekinesis, but some of us may become immune to cancer. We may not learn to read minds, but some of us may be able to control our hormones better. Body-modification technology is not dividing us yet, but it may happen in the near future. What if I am able to embed Wikipedia in my head? What if there is a whole class of people with Wikipedia embedded in their head? Would not these people form a separate class? If you do not like Wikipedia, just think about having an artificial photographic memory?

The technological singularity is often thought to occur when we can construct machines smarter than man. I believe that making some human being artificially super-intelligent could also cause the same effect — and some would argue that these are equivalent technologically.

I learned that the show was cancelled. I will still order season 4 as soon as it becomes available.

In my previous blog post, I defined research as the need to do great things. What I had in mind was quite broad, ranging from someone who does research to build a prettier garden, to the writer who does research for his next book, and including the artist who tries to come up with a new painting. I defined research as a need, and not an action. That is because research is a state. More precisely, it cannot be defined as a set of actions one willfully takes.

What is your greatest frustration about your work? What is your greatest victory? If they have to do with recognition, you are a marketing drone and not a bona fide researcher. Do no worry, there are many like you.

The title of this post is my best attempt at explaining what research is. And I do not mean just academic research.

Michael says that everything should be code. If you accept the strong Church-Turing thesis and believe in the principles of digital physics, that the universe is indistinguishable from a computer simulation, then everything is already code.

But Michael means that representing everything as code should make collaboration easier. I argue that pseudocode is better. Do you really want to be reading and writing Java all day long? Because Java is the lingua franca. There is no question that you can express everything in Java, Java being Turing complete, but socially, pseudocode seems far more acceptable. For one thing, pseudocode is perennial.

David Brin also convinced me that natural languages have evolved the way they have, with their quirks and ambiguities, because this provides us with the necessary flexibility to be creative. Try being creative with Java. Bad idea.

Update: Peter Boothe points us to Marvin Minsky’s essay written in 1967, Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas.

Blogging is dangerous for non-tenured faculty: Blogging will not get you tenure. Neither will giving talks worldwide. Tenure is usually granted because you were able to hold a decent research program, and you showed respect for the students. However, if blogging prevents you from getting tenure, something is very wrong with your blogging or your school. I have heard stories of famous bloggers who did not get tenure. But I have not been convinced that they were denied tenure because of their blogging. For my tenure case, blogging was a one-liner in my activity report. I doubt my colleagues paid any attention to it. Certainly, none of them had read my blog. But even if they had read my blog, I doubt if they would have found it very surprising. My blogging activities just reflect who I am.

Serious researchers have no time for blogging: Indeed, there is always another paper to write and more time to spend at the library, isn’t there? Let me quote Downes on this: If you are spending time in meetings, spending time traveling or commuting to work, spending time reading books and magazines, spending time telephoning people (or worse, on hold, or playing phone tag) then you are wasting time that you could be spending connecting to people online.

Blogging distracts you away from the research: bloggers do not tend to write about their latest research results. We tend to write about ideas that will not make it into our research papers. Is it a distraction? It might be, but does blogging cause you to lose focus in your research? I doubt it. If your research is out-of-focus and going nowhere, blogging may not help you, but you should not blame blogging either. However, your blog will help you write and communicate better. While a blog will not directly promote your research, the increased visibility it generates cannot hurt you.

Disclaimer: I do not claim that maintaining a blog helps your academic career.

Source: David Crotty and Stephen Downes

Update: David Eppstein points out that if you get comments telling you that you are coming across in an unflattering light, it might be worthwhile paying attention to them.

Some time ago, I asked whether optical disks were obsolete. The best way to ship 50 GB of data might still be to ship a Blu-ray disk by mail. However, Apple is now the first music retailer in the USA.

ISO just approved the Office Open XML format. In case you do not know, it is a controversial decision.

I have a unique perspective on the issue because I used to be a member of a Canadian ISO committee. I resigned out of disgust. I am a bit suprised people still take ISO seriously. Here is my experience with them:

• Most of ISO specifications are deeply flawed and have never, nor will they ever be, implemented. (Show me an ISO-compliant SQL database.) There are a few reasons why that is. 1) Checking the sanity of 50 500-page technical documents is hard. Much harder than you might expect. 2) There is no requirement to implement these specifications before they become a standard.
• ISO specifications are not public. You must pay to read them. Where does the money go? I fear to know the answer. This makes it hard for volunteers to help organize the information.
• ISO offers no support to committee members. The documents are not hyperlinked and organized, except by random volunteers who tend to come and go. What you get are very large dumps of PDF documents with names like 74438432-4343-JZ-423 (I kid you not!), with many references to other documents you do not know how to find quickly.

There are sane standard bodies like IETF. The work they do is very valuable. ISO, on the other hand, is a body you should avoid.