Blog 2006
2006 December 31
This week I read a big book on twentieth century history:
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Harvard professor, Oxford
don, and media star Niall Ferguson.
My review of the book
Watch his
UCTV interview with Harry Kreisler:
Conversations with History: Money and
Power (#8635, 56 minutes, 2004-06-14)
A topical thought for the day: a
Daily Telegraph piece he wrote about a year ago:
The Origins of the Great War
of 2007
2006
December 24
Read an excellent book on cosmology:
Many Worlds in One: The
Search for Other Universes by Alex Vilenkin, who is a leading inflationary
cosmologist at Tufts University. The book is short, lively and clear, with a
nice balance of personal anecdotes, basic explanation and wild ideas. I'd say it
was a better text mashup than Stephen Hawking's brief history of time, though
admittedly no less baffling for the clueless.
War Nerd Gary Becher has
finally lost it (if he hadn't already lost it long ago). His latest blog is a
tissue of crudely formulated and simplistic half-truths that add up to no case
at all for his main claim that World War 2 is "way overrated".
Excerpts with
my comments
2006 December 14
After 15 years finally liberated my article

The Globall Hyperatlas: A Development Proposal
The Visual Computer 8, 1-7
(1991)
A future hardware system designed to support an interactive
geographic database is outlined. The basic system is intended for domestic and
educational use and extensions of the system are foreseen as serving a wide
variety of professional users. The main physical and functional parameters of
the system are presented. Possible problems are indicated and development goals
are suggested. The aim of the paper is to initiate a detailed and informed
discussion about how such a system may be developed.
PDF: 7 pages, 705 KB
2006 December 10
Read JCS 13(12) containing my article Will Robots See Humans as Dinosaurs?

2006 December 9
Read some of the eXile blogs of War Nerd Gary
Brecher, apparently a loathsome fat slob from Fresno. I found myself both
horrified at his primitivism and delighted at his knowledge of war and his
insights into aggression.
2006 November 28
Read interesting article in
The New York Times:
The Power of Persistence by SAP Americas CEO Bill
McDermott and (for me) a much more interesting review
Strung Out
by
quantum theorist David Lindley of the books by Lee Smolin and Peter Woit on
string theory in the Autumn 2006 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. The review ends:
"As for string theory, it’s likely to unravel only when its practitioners begin
to get bored with their lack of progress. Like the old Soviet Union, it will
have to collapse from within. The publication of these two books is a hopeful
sign that theoretical physics may have entered its Gorbachev era."
2006
November 27
Visited IBM Frankfurt to lecture on SAP NetWeaver BI
Accelerator
Back home, read good article in The New Atlantis:
The Paradox of Military Technology by Max Boot
2006 November 26
Greatly enjoyed New Scientist 50th anniversary issue with articles on the big
questions: Roger Penrose on reality, Pat Churchland on free will, Michio Kaku on
a theory of everything, ...
2006 November 25
The Adventures of Doris Lessing
John Leonard
"It is as if some gauze or screen has been dissolved away from
life, that was dulling it, and like Miranda you want to say, What a brave new
world! You don't remember feeling like this, because, younger, habit or the
press of necessity prevented. You are taken, shaken, by moments when the
improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is
remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy
of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of.
You have been given new eyes." Doris Lessing
The World
According to Carter
Alan Dershowitz
Jimmy Carter's ahistorical,
one-sided, and simplistic brief against Israel forever disqualifies him from
playing any positive role in fairly resolving the conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians. That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has
done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy
Carter were as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the
Palestinians. AR Carter has fallen into the moral trap that claims
many devout Christians. He has let his tolerance of human weakness degrade
his ability to tell right from wrong. The struggle between Israel and the
Palestinians is not an example of the strong oppressing the weak, as if that
were the salient fact of the matter, and it would not be well solved by a
Solomonic splitting of the difference. The deeper truth is that Israel is
right and the Palestinians are wrong. If leaders in the Middle East could
rally enough vision, they would see that welcoming a flourishing Israel in
their midst and resettling Palestinians elsewhere with oil revenues instead
of buying weapons was the royal road to peace and progress in the region.
Arabs can profit from a Jewish presence. All they have to do first is turn
away from the anachronistic monstrosity they cultivate as Islamic militancy.
Carter should have had the sense to see this.
2006 November 21
My edition of an interview from The Observer with Robert Pirsig, author of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
2006 November 12
Gödel and Einstein Paul Yourgrau
AR Most of the story was familiar to me but I was gripped by the
tale of the ongoing neglect of Gödel's philosophical gloss on his discovery of a
solution of Einstein's cosmological equations that corresponds to a rotating
universe including time loops. Naturally, I am not surprised, given the
professional arrogance of philosophers, but I am happy to find that Gödel's
conclusion tends to support my own ideas about time. It
confirms the view that the dimensionalization
of time in general relativity does not do justice to the experience of an
ever-changing present moment moving from past to future. That experience is not
an "illusion" but it may reasonably seem secondary to a
cosmologist for whom psychology is of no great interest.
2006
November 6
Finally posting here an SDN blog I posted on SDN a few weeks ago.
There it drew no reactions, I think because it was far too chatty for the
propeller-heads who usually post on SDN. Maybe more people will appreciate it
here.
2006 November 1
Reading the proof of my next JCS article:
Will
Robots See Humans as Dinosaurs? A reply to Claude Pasquini (blog June 23-26)
Also read first novel by Petra Theunissen:
Alien Genes 1: Daughter of
Atuk (Whiskey Creek Press 2006) Classic story, charming fantasy engagingly
realized, and very readable too
2006 October 29
Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?
Journal of
Consciousness Studies 13(10-11)
AR Galen
Strawson starts with a target article "Realistic Monism" and ends with a reply
to critics including a wonderful metaphysical thesis (the last of 36 such
theses) called Equal-Status Fundamental-Duality (ESFD) monism: Reality is
substantially single. All reality is experiential and all reality is
non-experiential. Experiential and non-experiential being exist in such a way
that neither can be said to be based in or realized by or in any way
asymmetrically dependent on the other (etc.). The metaphysical-epistemological
framework culminates in five variants of a Revelation thesis asserting that "I
am acquainted with the essential nature of" various kinds of experience. All
this is offered both as a contribution to science ("physics is psychics" and
real physicalism must embrace at least micropsychism) and to modern philosophy
(as a version of what Chalmers calls "Type-F monism") as well as a gloss on some
central views of Descartes and Spinoza. Bravissimo!
2006 October 22
Among the Dead Cities
A.C. Grayling
AR Graying questions the morality of the Allied bombing of German and
J apanese cities in World War 2. Of course it is easy to moralize from an
armchair decades later, but the issues are troubling.
2006 October 21
The God Delusion Richard Dawkins
"Imagine someone holding forth on biology
whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a
rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a
professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the
least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe
there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
understanding."
Terry
Eagleton
2006 October 16
Why do some of my colleagues at work
insist on finding the prospect of driving a Hummer to work each day exciting? If
they want to intimidate other road users, why don't they forget about
soft-skinned vehicles like Humvees and go for a Cougar (as the U.S. army calls
them; the British army calls them Mastiffs), even if they do weigh 12 tons and
have diesel motors?
2006 October 10
Read interesting article by Robert D. Kaplan:
When North Korea Falls
2006 October 8
The End of Faith
Sam
Harris
AR Good brisk argument, overstated, mixed tone and topics
2006 October 3
Baur au
Lac Club, Zurich, Switzerland Dinner with old boys from Exeter College Oxford
and College Rector Frances Cairncross
2006 September 24
After the Neocons Kenneth
Anderson
Review of America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama
AR Fukuyama's internationalism may not be as
ineffectual as Anderson makes it seem. The global order imposed by liberal
democracies has as much to do with economic clout as political ideals. The
globalization of business and the resulting tight integration of supply chains
and consumption models demands an international political order. The windfall
oil revenues that support the resurgence of Islamism are a potential choke point
where we can apply pressure to return to the agenda of ending history. We need a
"BP" energy policy.
2006 September 21
Group photo with (most of) the TREX
team
 Not
an official logo: I invented it!
2006 September 17-20
Read new book
The Trouble with Physics by
Lee Smolin Smolin says what needs saying and offers a wealth of ideas and
opinions: string theorists should reflect on his argument
2006 August 26
Granted blogging rights in
SAP Developer Network
2006 August 19-23
Enjoyed pleasant days with Lynn, visiting from California
2006 August 14
Inspired by New Scientist cover story: "Out of the Void" by Davide
Castelvecchi Topic: loop quantum gravity
2006 August 7
SAP Labs Palo
Alto SVP for research Ike Nassi explains in Computerworld that integration of
the real world and the IT world will accelerate
2006 August 3
PTG Summer Summit,
Holiday Park, Hassloch A large
number of SAP employees met there with their families. I enjoyed a multisecond
free fall from the Free Fall Tower
2006 August 1
British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered what was billed as a major foreign
policy speech on the Middle East to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council
2006 July 8
Royal Naval Air Station, Yeovilton, UK
International Air Day
2006 June 23-26
ASSC 10
St Annes College, Oxford,
UK From the subsequent conference report:
An Opening Reception Amidst
Dinosaurs "Just like these guys" — Andrew Ross pointed to the giant skeletons
of the dinosaurs — "are now the remnants of our distant past, we humans will be
the remnants of the distant past of robots which will replace us humans. From
the point of view of those future machines the world as we know it will be their
primeval soup and humans will have been some biological dirt one could dispense
with." Was it a sacrilege to talk like that in the University Natural History
Museum ...? Claude Pasquini, A (Mostly) Sunny and Sober Anniversary, JCS
13(6), 79-100 (2006)
This is a not an exact quotation of my words,
though I admit the general sense is accurate. I am preparing a more
extended and systematic defense of my position.
2006 June 19
University
of Trier, Germany Presented invited guest lecture to Diploma students in
department of business informatics: SAP NetWeaver and the Business
Intelligence Accelerator
2006 June 14
Data Mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator Thomas Legler
(TU Dresden), Wolfgang Lehner (TU Dresden), Andrew Ross (SAP Walldorf)
Proceedings of the 32nd VLDB Conference, Seoul, Korea, 2006
VLDB 2006
Abstract. The new SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
accelerator is an engine that supports online analytical processing. It
performs aggregation in memory and in query runtime over large volumes of
structured data. This paper first briefly describes the accelerator and its
main architectural features, and cites test results that indicate its power.
Then it describes in detail how the accelerator may be used for data mining.
The accelerator can perform data mining in the same large repositories of
data and using the same compact index structures that it uses for analytical
processing. A first such implementation of data mining is described and the
results of a performance evaluation are presented. Association rule mining
in a distributed architecture was implemented with a variant of the BUC
iceberg cubing algorithm. Test results suggest that useful online mining
should be possible with wait times of less than 60 seconds on business data
that has not been preprocessed.
PDF: 10 pages, 543 KB
2006 June 5
Omniscience
Life, the Universe, and Everything
PDF: 24 slides, 171 KB
Omniscience is the science of everything. Starting from logic, the scope of
omniscience extends to embrace life and the universe. But the aim is not to
reach a final formula, in the style of theoretical physics, that one could
print on a teeshirt. For omniscience that aim is clearly utopian, or rather
trivial. As Douglas Adams said in his hitch-hiker's guide, the answer is 42.
Now what exactly was the question again? One formulation is due to William
Arntz et al., and goes approximately like this:
What the Bleep do we know!?
2006 May 28
Reading Breaking the Spell by
Daniel C. Dennett Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit
2006 May 23
A leading
global company, Switzerland Lecture on SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator (based on
TREX)
2006 May 18
Received my copy of Journal of Consciousness
Studies 13(4) containing on pages 6-38 a symposium on what consciousness means
based on an article by Christian de Quincey, Professor of Philosophy and
Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University, followed by responses,
including mine
2006 April 28
SAP team TREX colleagues Gerhard Hill and
Thomas Peh and I are preparing an academic article on the use of virtual pairs
for outer join resolution, which was recently the topic of a patent application
from our team. It is now my task to set the raw draft in LaTeX and to polish the
language and presentation for submission to a journal.
2006 April 24
An SAP
team TREX colleague and I recently submitted a
U.S. patent application. It discloses a method for implementing fast access to
business objects in the SAP Enterprise Services Architecture as well as fast
update of the data used for the objects. The method is based on multi-join
indexes and extended join indexes, and is several times faster than previous
approaches.
2006 April 3-8
Sad but true: did not attend
Tucson VII -
Toward a Science of Consciousness 2006 Center for Consciousness Studies,
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

2006 March 18-19
Enjoyed mystic epiphany with DVD and book:
What the Bleep do we know!? (William Arntz et al. 2005)

This is the
glorious collapse of my ten-year quest to relate quantum theory and
consciousness. Numerous people whose books I'd read were in the movie confirming
my boldest ideas. All that remains for me now is to work out the details and
tell the world. That may take a while ...
2006 March 11-12
Schönes
Buch gelesen:
Skurrile Quantenwelt Autorin: Silvia Arroyo Camejo
(Springer 2006) Wahrlich ein Paradebeispiel, wie man mit subtilem und
teilweise paradoxem Stoff unterhaltsam und doch rigoros umgehen kann.
2006 February 21-22
Lectured on the SAP NetWeaver BI accelerator at IBM
SAP University 2006 EMEA Palatin Congress Center, Wiesloch, Germany
2006
January 29
The Moral High Ground
A secular
answer to fundamentalism
We humans are not as separate from each other as
we may like to think. Each of us is not only an individual and a member of
various groups but also part of a natural order that locks all life on Earth
into one ecosystem. Our striving for separate goals is bound by our need to
fit smoothly into the natural world.br> Nowadays the natural world
includes the fruits of technology. A world cluttered with machines and
cities does not need to be worse than one filled with trees and animals, but
we do need to plan it carefully. Managed incompetently, it can turn sour and
push its human parasites to extinction. Part of the planning we need is a
policy toward ourselves.
The policy must be based on a conception of
what we are and what humanity represents for life on Earth. Are we beings
who maximize our consumption of manufactured products in the process of
pleasing ourselves to death? Are we embodied souls whose highest goal is to
return at death to the realms of glory from which we emerged at birth?
Answers at this level carry ideological baggage that we need to check
carefully.
For a person in a stable community, such questions can
often be answered in humble terms. A person naturally strives to live a
decent and productive life that leaves the community better than he or she
found it, and to enjoy some happiness along the way. Practically speaking,
what precedes birth or follows death is only meaningful in terms of the life
of the community. And happiness is a by-product of a good life, not an end
in itself. A person who fulfils dreams and plans in a supportive community
achieves happiness and has no need of glorified visions of birth and death.
The human community as a whole can scale up an answer along these lines
to glimpse the role of humanity in the bigger story of life on Earth. If our
species sinks into extinction in a world that seems better than it was when
humans first appeared, the last humans may be able to die happy. If we can
realize our human projects effectively and without too much strife, we can
hope to achieve fulfilment as a species before our descendants in the great
flowering of life replace us.
So what is it that humanity as a
species will add to the universe? To answer that, we can look at what life
has achieved so far on Earth. It is hard not to be self-serving. Humans are
the latest and most efficient products of an evolutionary development toward
the increasingly organized exploitation of natural resources for
functionally defined goals. Previous species had limited horizons, but we
have broken through to global organization. Previous species were mostly
limited to genetic transmission of information between individuals, so they
adapted only slowly to changing circumstances. In our global civilization,
information flows and organization exceed all previous bounds by orders of
magnitude.
Our machine-based civilization is the primordial soup for
life-forms that have the potential to transcend us in the ways that matter
most. As people with dreams and plans, we work hard to do what we can. With
the help of machines, our ability to do so has leaped massively forward. Our
ancestors dreamed of conquering continents but we dream of reaching the
stars. More to the point, our ability to realize our new dreams is
unthinkable without increasingly sophisticated machines. Human outposts in
the solar system will be dwarfed in scale and practical importance by the
robot infrastructure we set up to sustain them.
Here on Earth, a
human life is a drop in an ocean of living and lived activity that is
transforming the surface of the planet in a process whose end we cannot
expect to understand. We need no more understand it than birds or fish
understand what humans are doing to the world. But it is organized human
activity that has started this process. By leveraging our best ideas we can
glimpse the long view.
Our most refined ideas come from science and
technology. Here we can see the fuller picture, not only the physical
universe and the biological world of genes and neurons but also the
infrastructure of cars and computers and businesses and burocracies that
shape modern life. Here we can see too the evidence of global warming and
resource exhaustion that constrain our future. Further, we can see analogies
and symmetries to inform our moral judgments, such as the equivalence of
different races and sexes or the similarities between species. We can even
judge the logical strengths and weakness of various traditional ideologies
that still hold many people in thrall.
The traditional ideologies
that loom largest in any 2006 plans for how to pursue life on Earth are the
Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All share a vision
of a transcendent reality that gives meaning and purpose to the human drama
between birth and death for all who have faith. Many believers conceive this
transcendent reality to be quite separate from the practical world of
everyday life, but this is a mistake. A reality can only be relevant to life
on Earth if its transcendence is a matter of perspective. We can see our
lives from a higher perspective without losing our roots in the here and
now. And here and now we have practical issues to address.
The
practical issues that should not be held hostage to Abrahamic ideologies
include questions of governance, administration and morals. For many of
them, good secular strategies have been developed that leverage science and
technology and fit harmoniously in a world of personal and political
freedom. To follow these strategies, we need to put religion in its proper
place. It is a plain fact that human beings are embodied as psychic agents
implemented in biological structures living in a physical world. Any real
meaning we can find in our lives is immanent in that fact. So militant
fundamentalism based on any Abrahamic foundation is a posture rooted in
obsolete philosophy. It has no rightful place in any worldview with healthy
roots in psychophysical reality.
2006 January 1
About Time
PDF: 16 pages,
175 KB
This essay is an exercise in
scientific metaphysics. Its aim is to sketch a unified account of time that both
works in modern physics and makes sense in psychology. The raw materials for the
sketch come from elementary logic and set theory. The experience of time flow is
seen as a direct manifestation of a fundamental physical process. The ontology
and epistemology of this experience can provide a foundation for psychology. If
the physical sciences in their present form depict “the view from nowhere” onto
reality, the new foundation can depict the view from anywhere.
|