affiliations

“In this talk, John LeMasney will discuss the trials, tribulations, and successes of creating and teaching classes on Arduino as programming at several New Jersey libraries across the state. Arduino is an open source hardware platform for learning about and making electronics prototypes to scratch your own itch. It is a well-supported, low-threshold-of-entry approach of inviting those new to electronics to create their own working circuits at a low monetary cost and little existing knowledge. I’ll demonstrate what Arduino is in the larger sense, and why it’s fun and easy to get started with Arduino.

Presenter: John LeMasney, Owner, LeMasney Consulting, is a technologist, consultant, and open source advocate working in New Jersey and beyond. He often works with schools, businesses and libraries to develop technology-oriented training, programming and solutions for all kinds of people.

In this monthly feature of NCompass Live, the NLC’s Technology Innovation Librarian, Michael Sauers, will discuss the tech news of the month and share new and exciting tech for your library.” –

A conversation about whether evolution has a ‘mind’

I conversed with my 10 yo about the idea that evolution might have a mind. I believe that it does. It is not a physical mind in the sense that we think of the chemical/physiological extension of a brain. More like the chemical extension of trees.

Intelligence as evolutionary preference

We choose to be more or less intelligent. In degrees. We choose to have more or less information, process it, and make use of it. What would happen, (what if, if you will,) if we decided to be less intelligent, to work against our progress? Perhaps this exists already, in the interest of regression to a simpler time, maybe. What benefits exist, if any, in organized ignorance? This idea, as I write it, seems sacrilegious to progress. But what if it is the progressive path?

Data as prespectrometry chaos

We have limitless data coming at us all the time, in the form of visual information, light, smells, GPS coordinates, and so on. How do we interpret it? It is a fire-hose and we are looking for a water fountain. Filtering becomes necessary.

Hidden senses such as the limits of the eye to see the entire spectrum

We show the chemical makeup of suns as we look at them through a prism and telescope. What will the data driven sensor based data interpretation do for us, socially, and ideologically?

“Interfacing ion mobility spectrometry to mass spectrometry (IMS–MS) has enabled mass spectrometric analyses to extend into an extra dimension, providing unrivalled separation and structural characterization of lowly populated species in heterogeneous mixtures. One biological system that has benefitted significantly from such advances is that of amyloid formation. Using IMS–MS, progress has been made into identifying transiently populated monomeric and oligomeric species for a number of different amyloid systems and has led to an enhanced understanding of the mechanism by which small molecules modulate amyloid formation.” – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3787735/

GPS as sense of direction

I have a ridiculously poor sense of direction, and yet, with my phone, I will never get lost ever again. Ever. In a world where getting lost is impossible, will we work to lose ourselves? will it be a game? A lesson?

“Cooper switched on her GPS in the hopes that ‘Nell’ would bring them home, but in a 121 degree-weather, the confused device ended up taking the trio of day trippers further into the desert. After about 100 miles, the women were completely lost. To make matters worse, their car ran out of gas and they no longer had cell phone service to call for help.” – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2293713/Three-women-recount-lost-Death-Valley-THREE-DAYS-GPS-error.html

Camera as time machine

All of my memories are available, chronologically ordered, tagged and organized. I do not need to remember in my brain, because the evidence of my existence exists in other ways.

Step counter as caloric expenditure

I know precisely how many calories I have burned because a tiny sensor told me so. I need not wonder.

“Amazing Product! It motivates me to reach my goals!. This device is very accurate in my experience, and more importantly it motivates you to reach the goals you set. Excellent job Fitbit!” –

Technology is a solution for our human shortcomings.

I am obese because I have no sense of my intake and output. Solved. I am unintelligent because of my lack of photographic memory and understanding and recall of literature, math, and cinema. Solved. I am unloved because I do not have an understanding of the human condition, and yet thousands have written of it, and synopses of it. Solved. I am lonely. Solved. I am disconnected. Solved. I am inhuman. Solved.

I believe that we are years deep into a human evolution based on technology that will extend what we think of as sense, and will change how we emote

The obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a lot like a smart phone. Kubrick and Clarke coordinated on the idea of the extraterrestrial evolution of humans. I think instead we are being pushed ahead due to terrestrial technologies. I have always loved this idea. I think of the slab smart phone as the event that will move us forward evolutionarily.

I get frustrated when people complain about technology, because of its potential

Technology is not at fault, any more than a fire is at fault in the destruction of a home, it could have just as easily been used to make dinner. Guns don’t kill people, sociopaths kill people. Phones don’t make people antisocial, the phone/tablet is just a tool for those who want to do that.

My belief

I think that we are in the midst of a relatively quick evolutionary change due to the quickly accelerating use and portability of technology. I would argue that we are human-robot hybrids now, because we benefit from all the sensors and extended senses of the devices we carry, even if they are not literally and directly connected to us, as science fiction often predicts. This is similar to the idea that people are waiting for the future to come where flying cars exist. They exist now, we call them planes. Smartphones are adapters that allow us to have time travel, audio capability over long distances, an amazing global sense of direction, the ability to know what thousands of people are talking about at once. We are becoming a kind of god, knowing all of what is going on all at once, a few typed keys away from knowing the answer to anything that is known and shared openly.

In a single device. we can publish globally in a second, a dream never imagined by Gutenberg. We are our own television and radio stations, media creators who have a global audience waiting. We can send a thought out in text, audio, video, image, photograph, and endless mixtures of all of them. Everything is recorded, and readily retrievable, to boot.

I am able to watch any movie ever published, listen to any song, listen to any recorded speech in history, look at any photo. More personally, my entire recorded history in text, photography, music, video, and everything else digital is available to me, now, from any internet connected device, including one that I’ve never touched before. We live in an amazing time. What will happen next is a more streamlined connection between us and devices. For example, wearable technology is emerging, a further alignment between our flesh and these devices. Google Glass, Android wear, and Fitbit all point to devices that might one day simply be embedded in us, but for now, they are just very close to our bodies.

There was a man, Dann Berg, who embedded a magnet in his fingertip and it affected his everyday understanding of iron and ferrous metals. He sensed his world in a different way. There is a compass present in every contemporary smart phone which gives the same kind of feedback when viewed. The smartphone-based sense is just not nearly as obvious and unmistakable as the magnet fingertip.

“Let’s talk about magnet implants. I don’t really bring it up much, but I have a small rare earth magnet implanted in the pinkie finger on my right hand. I’ve had it for around three years now.” – http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-finger

On the death of privacy

In my opinion, privacy is dead. It makes more sense to simply know that it is dead and to act accordingly. If everything everyone did was truly, fully open, I think that we would care far less about things like marijuana use, or masturbation, or the existence of a human body in its natural form.

“Google knows what you’re looking for. Facebook knows what you like. Sharing is the norm, and secrecy is out. But what is the psychological and cultural fallout from the end of privacy?” – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston

In regards to the idea of too much access to knowledge, (see also Genesis,) I think that people have feared that at every paradigm shift in communication. I’m sure that when the printed book became available to the average person, people were concerned that we might know too much. I have no such fear.

“In Jewish tradition, the Tree of Knowledge and the eating of its fruit represents the beginning of the mixture of good and evil together. Before that time, the two were separate, and evil had only a nebulous existence in potentia. While free choice did exist before eating the fruit, evil existed as an entity separate from the human psyche, and it was not in human nature to desire it. Eating and internalizing the forbidden fruit changed this and thus was born the yeitzer hara, the Evil Inclination.[6][7] In Rashi’s notes on Genesis 3:3, the first sin came about because Eve added an additional clause to the Divine command: Neither shall you touch it. By saying this, Eve added to YHWH’s command and thereby came to detract from it, as it is written: Do not add to His Words (Proverbs 30:6).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil

People also regularly believe that everything has already been done, all ideas being complete. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. If it were, the world would still be flat, we would be without electricity, and we would still believe that gender or skin color or sexual orientation was a significant difference between people and their ability. It is not.

“All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, “See this, it is new “? Already it has existed for ages Which were before us.…” – http://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-9.htm

You can try to hide from it, but then you lose the benefit of it. You can have a kind of privacy, at the loss of technology. Even then though, you could and would still be tracked/traceable.

On Application Permissions

I am familiar with the issue of Facebook Messenger’s privacy concerns over its request for certain sensor permissions. A friend tagged me in their post about it to comment. I started with privacy is dead, and reminded them that many other applications ask for exactly the same information. We can give up technology and convenience and assume that we have something like privacy, or we can dismiss it as a possibility, and use technology at will. Regardless, the concept of privacy is a dead matter.

“Much of the problem, Facebook says, is due to Android’s rigid policy on permissions. Facebook says it doesn’t get to write its own, and instead must use generic language provided to them by Android. The language in the permissions “doesn’t necessarily reflect the way the Messenger app and other apps use them,” Facebook wrote in a Help Center article designed to address what it calls misinformation on the topic.” – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-privacy-fears-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Are you familiar with the concept of the boiling frog? If you drop a frog into a pot of burning water, it will jump out, happy to escape the boiling. If you take the same frog and put into a pot of cool water, then slowly turn up the heat until boiling, the frog will simply stay there, always adjusting to the temperature around it, becoming boiled. We are the frog, and the loss of privacy is the boiling water. Facebook is the slow and gradual rise in temperature. We are the boiled frog.

In short

The devices we have in our pockets are a vehicle for a series of 13-20 sensors that extend us as humans from the standard 5. We should embrace the reality of that and become the superhumans we are evolving to, and stop worrying about the noise versus the signal. Embrace the signal.