the internet is fantastic. you can explore an effectively infinite space while eating pringles. some rooms of the giant jungle gym have leaves, some have ferns, and some have animated gifs of baby jesus. you never know precisely what you’ll find, and there’s enough that the joy of discovery rarely fades… but you can still have at least some say in where the results go, leaving you feeling comfortably in control.

the jungle gym that is the web is N-dimensional… well, more like a giant network of boxes you could climb around and explore. many sites – this one included – link to more than 6 sites, giving them more than six degrees of freedom. this means the space must have more than three dimensions. this has a ceiling of infinite links to infinite sites, but that’s kind of hard to do in practice. so, i’m just calling it N-dimensional due to the presumption that a given site will be somewhere between some and maNy.

pages are chained together, little pageclaves in the giant jungle gym. most pageclaves have a purpose: sell books, confuse the book-buying consumer, blogging about either of the aforementioned book-related topics. you name it, there’s likely between one and many pageclaves covering it… but there would, likely be fewer pages about blogging about blogging about any of the aforementioned three book-related topics… this is interesting, my brain is translating that referential recursion of probability as a chain of decaying slopes. i’ll have to look into this avenue of research more… later.

anyways, many web pages today are dynamicly generated. the server gets this post from a database, gets the template from the drive, and mashes the two together according to some computer programs written in PHP. if you think about this, you realize that rather than designing a single web page, the programmer is specifying an entire SET of web pages. this page, for example, is the set of every possible blog post as rendered by the template we are using: an infinite number of pages. if you expand our definition to include the programmatic features, such as switching templates, the set size would become an even larger infinity (lol mathematics).

the great-grandaddy set, of course, is the set of every page ever possible. it’s theoreticly possible to code up something that has the potential to specify this set using some bastardization of turing machines and perl, but most programmers settle for something a little less painful to define: a smaller infinity of web pages, or even a finite set.

here are some DYNAMIC web pages:

http://www.qtard.com/
http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx
http://www.superbad.com/
http://randomwebsite.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/headerimg/
http://www.perl.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://wizardishungry.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/wtf/
http://www.chinscratcher.com/
http://www.actsofkindness.org/
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
http://www.fxbox.110mb.com/

remember: when in doubt,  use F5.

Elite shivering joysticks, magnetic levitation devices, techno-basin shaped interfaces, complex algorithms, remote controlled machines and reflexive mechanical force feedback controllers are just the beginning of what comes as a result of the development of Haptic apparatuses. Haptics, the science and technology of tactile sensations is explored in this article by Daniel H. Wilson at Popular Mechanics.

Editor and writer Jonah Lehrer, recently posted an interesting article in Seed Magazine titled “Out of the Blue, Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?” In the article there is much talk of: patch clamp technique, eavesdropping on neurological interactions, neuroscience looking to physics, mind modeling, and dizzying sums of data. Blue Brain, a concentration of 8,000 IBM microchips programmed to replicate real neurons and cellular activity inside the brain, was designed and constructed from the bottom up by neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. I especially dug the probable outcome of the Blue Brain project mentioned early in the article:

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project—”the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. “The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

Interesting is Markram’s implication of machine self-consciousness and its apparent feasibility so soon. Granted a number of important considerations like scaling issues, the epistemological dead end argument, transforming or transcending turning cells into experience, and simulated brain experience will likely provide ample obstacles, it’s exciting to consider the realization of machine intelligence, or at least a comprehensive neural model so nearly at hand. It is certain Markram is epic when one hears remarks such as:

There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes, consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.

If you dig Jonahs article, peep his book Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Certainly worth a couple times going over if interested in neuroscience or luminaries such as Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, or Walt Whitman.

Images courtesy of BBP/EPFL