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Betrayal by Biden on climate
This COP28 leadership is not surprising, after Kerry at COP27 was pro fossil fuel in the US position. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/cop28-john-kerry-backs-uae-appointment-oil-chief
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Jeff Beck
When I grow up I want to play my Strat like Jeff Beck… I suspect there’s no hope of that, but I’m very glad he inspired me since I was a teenager, and sad at his passing.
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Awesome insights into flaws in quantum conventional wisdom
Carver Mead is very slowly building up his reputation debunking conventional physics wisdom taught today. This discussion he does on YouTube about Mead’s Collective Electrodynamics and John Cramer’s Transactional Quantum Theory is great. I have to say this though, the mainstream Theoretical Physicists continue to object to both Mead and Kramer’s view of quantum electrodynamics,…
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Peer Review is moribund
Put peer review out of its misery, ASAP Dave Taht shared this great piece with me. The Rise and Fall of Peer Review. It needs to be shared widely. 50 years after my bachelor’s degree now, I’ve looked at peer review from all sides, and I completely agree. There’s no fix. I publish (make public)…
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Fediverse
I’m joining the Fediverse. At first, via my main public site. The name here is @dpreed@deepplum.com and it is a WordPress site using ActivityPub plugin.
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SBF and the EA/Longtermist “Moral Reasoning”
MSM picking up on lunatic idea that one can extrapolate the future of moral choices by simple reductive reasoning without context, then justify any decision one takes based on that “logic”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-crypto/ This is like Mein Kampf’s careful logical justification, based on a reductive theory of history, or Lenin’s “What Must Be Done?” careful logic.…
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Ending WP and FB monopolies
As I wonder what can be done about the messes we humans keep suffering rather than fixing them, occasionally I have an idea that others don’t seem to have thought about. Here’s one. Centralization of power grows as unequal power structures are accepted and tolerated. Though we use “monopoly” to describe them, monopoly presumes that…
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Posting again?
It’s been a long while since I’ve posted new content. Frankly, I find myself focusing on “conversations” in Facebook and email, though both of those are poor substitutes for thinking and writing about complex ideas. So I’m back to posting here to see if this medium can remain alive. I may put pointers on FB…
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Greta Thunberg’s Climate Emergency Challenge
For the past few months I’ve been struggling to sort out why very little has been being done to address the biggest issue that faces humanity today. That is, the Climate Emergency. I’ve been digging more deeply into the scientific understandings we have gained, and into the range of solutions being proposed, and into the…
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GoGo does not need to run “Man in the Middle Attacks” on YouTube
Ars Technica mentioned in a post that GoGo, the primary “airplane Internet Access provider” is breaking HTTPS security with a fake certificate in order to prevent access to YouTube over HTTPS when using GoGo to access the Internet. Many are already pointing out that this damages all of Internet security by playing on a known…
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Does the Internet need “governance”?
It’s remarkable to me that there are now two powerful agencies fighting to “govern” the Internet – the ITU and the FCC. On any given day, it’s hard to tell whether they are on the same side or different sides. The ITU process apparently began in earnest with the World Summit for the Information Society…
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The (word) Internet is dead. Long live Fiber!
To me, this NYT article suggests that Susan Crawford “doesn’t get it” about the Internet, in a an amazingly extreme way (an “epic fail”). She focuses on a specific hardware technology (fiber), when in fact the whole point of the Internet was to focus on interoperability among ALL transport technologies and all end-to-end communications. She…
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What The Internet Is, and Should Continue To Be
Occasionally, people ask my perspective on the Internet, since I often object to confusing it with things like the telephone or Cable TV. Recently I composed a response that captures my perspective, as one of the participants in its genesis, and as an advocate for sustaining its fundamental initial design principles. I hope these words…
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Regarding OAM based multiplexing of radio and light
Bob Frankston suggested I post some of my recent remarks and references to Orbital Angular Momentum and its potential value in increasing the capacity of “spectrum” (the word I think misleads everyone, but that’s a subject I’ve talked about a lot). So I did put up a brief page here, with some references also. I…
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What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!
What do we teach when we teach science in school? And really, why do we teach science that way? I’ve personally never been quite sure whether I’m more of a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. The public lumps these all together for some reason, perhaps because they all appear to deal with concepts that are expressed…
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A response to Barbara van Schewick: code needs (only a little) help from the law
Barbara van Schewick posted a really thoughtful analysis about how about application-specific vs. application-agnostic discrimination directly affects innovation, and looks at an actual example of a Silicon Valley startup. I think her points are right on, and I strongly support the rationale for resisting “application-specific” discrimination. In fact, Barbara’s point is the key to the…
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Broadband vs. Open Internet, Open Internet scores a point
FCC Chair Genachowski released a statement today to announce that he will put forward a proposal to his fellow commissioners “Preserving a Free and Open Internet”, and it has already been reported on the NYTimes online. It is possible to read Genachowski’s statement very, very carefully, and see a distinction between Internet and Broadband that…
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A statement from various advocates for an Open Internet – why I signed on
Today a relatively large and diverse group of advocates for the Open Internet filed a statement with the FCC under their notice of proposed rulemaking entitled Further Inquiry into Two Under-developed Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding. Here’s why I signed on early to support this statement, and why I hope you will support it,…
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Lost posts, alas
Due to a complex double failure, old posts were lost about 9 months ago, and while I’ve reconstructed a couple from network caches, I’ve given up on efforts to reconstruct old blog entries from remnants. However, I will be posting new material, largely focused on ideas I’m exploring outside of “work” (I’m now at SAP),…
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What matters is not who
One of my grad students (whom I won’t embarrass here) just introduced me to a new UROP student as a fount of Internet know-how by saying that I “invented UDP”. This just seemed odd to me. Perhaps because our culture is so oddly focused on “who” and ignoring the more important “what”. People Magazine is…