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Peter wasn’t the most eclectic person, especially when the subject was musical styles. So it was a surprise for him when the alien that had landed in his livingroom (over all other places on Earth) started telling him that they were going to erase from the minds of all people, any memory of the best songs of every band that has performed on Earth.

This was an odd domination plan, to be honest, it looked more like some intergalactic prank, but hey, they’re aliens, right? You can never predict what aliens will do to your planet until they finally arrive and do, well, whatever they do when they arrive on new planets. And this was no exception.

According to the little alien, that was the first time that anyone from his species had landed on Earth and it was his duty to initiate Earthlings into the galactic customs. Peter tried to argue that Earth was on this very galaxy and that is not part of our customs, but the little alien did not reconsider. After all, it’s not like Earth is a central planet or anything.

The more Peter tried to argue, the more he was convinced that the alien was not fooling around. He was actually quite serious, stating that this is the norm for the initiation of any planet into the galactic fellowship, something that all other planets had done, too. There was no escape. The little guy got into his spaceship (or whatever that was, it didn’t look like it could fly in space but Peter was no rocket scientist), and disappear in mid-air, just as quickly and mysteriously as he had shown up.

There was one last thought that Peter should consider until the next morning (GMT), and it was that a single human could stop the initiation ceremony by killing himself. It was like an escape clause in the galactic contract. Either one being sacrifices himself (not killed by others) in the name of the fellowship, or all humans would have the best songs of all bands erased from memory. Forever.

Peter put the kettle on and sat on the dirty sofa of his small London flat. Was that a dream? Nope, he was well awaken, as proved by watching Rupert Murdoch on the telly. He was not drunk or intoxicated, so that shouldn’t be it, either. The kettle popped. He got up to get the tea bag and saw a business card laying on the kitchen sink, written: “You have until midnight of today, Peter. To kill yourself in the name of the Fellowship, tear this card in half.” Ok, now that was the confirmation he was waiting for. It was definitely not a dream.

But what is the problem with it? They’re not erasing all songs, just a few. The best ones, yes, but according to which criteria? For him, Bohemian Rhapsody, Lazy and War Pigs were the greatest songs ever, but there were people that liked Abba, and Beatles and, even those that did like Queen, could prefer Under Pressure instead. How is that even possible to choose? Peter put the tea bag in the cup and poured water in it. The vapour lifted the bitter smell of green tea, that would have to brew for a few more minutes until perfect.

Ok, so they can get the average of all favourite songs, or maybe a top500 list and remove duplicate songs per band. But that still doesn’t have all songs of all bands. They must have a way to traverse all songs in history, including those that were never recorded by humans. But how can they judge quality on them if no one knows they exist? So, they must have a different way to measure quality, an algorithm to judge by rhythm and choice of instruments and scales. Something that can be applied to virtually any audio signal to analyse the quality to a given set of standards, human standards. They must also understand perfectly the auditory system in humans, and human emotions, to know precisely what is good and what is just ok.

In that case, it doesn’t matter what he did like, but it was songs that were practically and theoretically good, no, the best! Wow, that changed things to a whole new level. All the songs he liked were just a handful, but all good songs, ever? That’s a different story. Erasing all good songs is much worse than erasing a single band from history, now matter how good this band is. It’s erasing everything that is good, and keeping a mediocre culture, it’s reducing the cultural richness of humanity to what shows on television or youtube. It’s making a sad world even sadder!

That is something he could not allow to happen! In his own mind, he was now beginning to believe of himself the same he though about the greatest band in the world. It’s better to lose the best band, than the best song of all bands, and him, well, it was better to lose him, even for himself, than to plunger humanity to even lower standards than today!

Peter looked at the tea cup, it was ready. The last green tea he’d ever have. He threw the bag in the sink and gave it a good sip. Burnt his tongue a bit, but no worries, that tongue wouldn’t care in a few minutes anyway. Got the card, and sat at the sofa, with the tea cup in one hand and the card in another. One more sip. This one was perfect, no burning. He put the cup away, held the card with his two hands and started ripping it apart, very slowly. Hearing the sound if it was making his hart stop, or at least beat slower. Much slower.

When suddenly it hit him. No, not death, Lady Gaga.

With the quality TV is these days, Murdoch and Lady Gaga is pretty much all you see without cable, and she was in all her glory (or whatever that is) on the screen. Peter had a revelation. Since the only way to precisely define what is good music is through a set of experiments outside the human mind, based on auditory and emotional systems, as well as the components that music is built from, it was, therefore, impossible to find a good song from Lady Gaga. QED.

Not just Lady Gada, mind you, a lot of what has been produced lately, pushed by the media companies including television. There was so much rubbish in the arts that it’d be impossible to find good music in more than half of what was produced in the last 3 decades! And, to not ignore alternative science, if they consider opinions, there would be a lot of songs that people wouldn’t even know exist.

The card was half-ripped, his tea was still warm. He put the card back where he got it from, sat on the sofa and finished his tea with the knowledge that, whatever that was, dream or bad trip, it was over. When he finished his tea it was Paris Hilton on the telly, doing something stupid, as usual. Peter felt somehow good watching that, knowing that those girls have saved humanity’s art history!

Shaun was yet another physicist, working for yet another western country on yet another doomsday machine. Even that being far from the last world war, governments still had excuses to spend exorbitant amounts of money on secret projects that would never be used, just for the sake of the argument. It never matters what you do in war, but what’s the size of your gun, compared to the rest, and in that, his country was second to none. Not that anybody cared any more, or that anybody knew of that, since his country has never gone into a proper war in its history, but well, with these things, you can never be to sure, can you.

But I digress, Shaun, yes, the physicist. He had been working on his own project for nearly a decade now and had re-used the old pieces of the LHC in a much more miniaturized version, of course, but in essence, it was capable of creating elementary particles and at the same time entangle them. After the initial explosion, instead of losing the created particles into oblivion (what would be the point in entangling them in the first place, uh?), he actually converged the entangled particles back into atomic form. The idea was to create a clone army, or sub-atomic bombs, or whatever could be done to put fear in other countries. You know how scientists are attached to science-fiction, and Shaun was no exception.

In the beginning he wasn’t very successful, and it took him nearly 5 years to produce a pair of atoms with their quarks and gluons entangled on the other side. While you could easily make atoms entangle in normal lab conditions using lasers, at the moment you turned your machines off, they would go back into their natural state. But in this case, the effects were much more lasting. In recent years, he managed to create whole molecules that were virtually the same, stable for months, even years. Copy cats.

But what he didn’t expect (who would) was that his experiments were also touching the adjacent m-branes of parallel universes. It was hypothesised in the past that some forces could leak to adjacent universes, like gravity, and though that wasn’t widely accepted, it was very hard to prove it wrong. The problem is, until today, nobody had reached energy densities so intense as to actually make a remarkable effect on the parallel universes. Shaun did.

If the parallel universe was, like ours, sparsely populated, with a only handful of pseudo-sapient species, he’d probably have hit empty space. But the universe he found was nothing ordinary. In fact, Shaun’s own experiments for years had created a special condition, in which the aforementioned universe became aware of our own. I explain. His experiments, the entanglement of particles not always worked, as I said earlier, and the less they worked (ie. less matter on this universe), the more they leaked into the adjacent universe.

A door to your own room

In a lovely evening of spring, such as today, with daffodils and tulips blossoming, and the warm spells finally arriving, Shaun would normally be working. 30 storeys below ground. He would see none of that, or care for that matter. His new molecules (DNAs this time) were working at an alarming rate. He managed to duplicate an entire gene last week, and his team was now running loads of tests on the results. It required a lot of energy to create molecules enough to run all tests, but his lab had unlimited supply of everything.

With all his team elsewhere, Shaun was busy trying to expand his technique to achieve the whole sequence of a virus. That made the machine run at wild energy levels (quite a few Pev), and the whole thing destabilized for a moment, and stopped. Fearing he made the surrounding city go dark, he checked all energy inputs, and they were all fine. Trying to measure a few currents here and there, Shaun looked for his multimeter and, oddly, it was on the workbench, not where he’d left. Not surprised, somebody must have used it and not stored properly, it happens. With his multimeter in hand, he started checking all currents and they all look fine, apart from the 17th onwards, that the polarity was reversed.

That was odd. Seriously odd. As if his machine was actually providing energy back to the power plant, only that it was impossible (it was no fusion chamber!). Without a clue, Shaun went back to his desk, left the multimeter by the lamp and reclined his chair, looking in the infinite. The infinite, in this case, was his shelf rack. Everything was blurred, but a remarkably familiar yellow blur caught his attention, and his eyes focused for a moment, and clear as day (though it was never day in his lab), that was his multimeter. Exactly where he’d left, with the dangling red wire over the black one.

He looked back at the table, and sure enough, his multimeter was there, too. Obviously, that one was someone’s else, but just to be sure, he got his own, and started comparing them, finding the same imperfections, the same burnt mark, the same cuts. His head was not working any more, he went back where he found the other multimeter and started looking around, looking for clues. It could very easily be a prank, but his head was not thinking. It was in discovery mode.

Obsessive as he was, he started noticing differences to that part of the room, compared to what it usually was. Almost like the room was displaced in time, with that part a few hours, maybe days, back. And he started putting things in their own place, tidying up as a mechanical task to help him think. When he was satisfied with the place, he turned around and jumped so high backwards that he hit his head on a red pipe that was hanging from the ceiling. It was Shaun, looking back at himself, smiling.

“Hello”, said the other Shaun. “…”. “Yes, I see, you’re in a bit of a shock. That’s understandable, I um, let me help you with the concept.” Shaun said nothing.

“See, you are a very interesting specimen. We’ve been monitoring your experiment ever since we detected the leakage from your universe to ours. Generally, we wouldn’t ourselves believe in multiple universes, but as things were clearly leaking from your universe, we had no other alternative.” Shaun was still speechless. “As you probably have guessed by now, this part of the room is in our universe. Actually, the working part of your experiment has been inside our universe for quite some time. More specifically, ever since it started working…”.

“Hey!” Shaun opened his mouth for the first time. “You can’t possibly say that you guys did all the work!” – without even knowing who were they, but that was too big an insult to let that one pass. “Oh, no, you got me wrong, Shaun. No, you’re absolutely right, you did everything. We just provided our universe to you.”. Shaun was speechless again.

Compromise

“Understand, we’re in a somewhat different level of technology than you. In some cases, much more advanced, in others, much less.”, the other Shaun continued after a pause, probing for any offence that he could have made. “In practical matters, we’re much more advanced. Our universe has been extremely kind to us. We have a very dense population throughout our known universe, it’s actually hard to get to know all the cultures yourself, we just don’t live long enough. The fact that your universe has been leaking energy has boosted our physics so much, that we managed to halve the energy consumption of all our technology and at the same time, more than double our energy production levels!”, Shaun would not let that one pass… “Lucky you, we have nothing of that…”

“I know! Very well indeed! And it’s in that respect that you guys are so much more advanced than us. Your theoretical physics is so advanced, your mathematics so robust, that make our feeble attempts in model our universe a pre-school matter.” – “Ha!” said Shaun, “our mathematics is broken, Goedel has proven it and Turing re-proved. Our theoretical physics is still fighting over string theory and the alternative and we’re getting nowhere fast!”.

“On the contrary, Shaun. Your universe is limited, so your mathematics can only reach thus far. Your theoretical physics is considering things that we never imagined possible. Our universe is lame next to yours, the challenges that you face are the most delicious delicatessen for our theoretical physicists. There is an entire community, the fastest growing of all times, just to consume the material you guys generated three centuries (of your time) ago!”

The other Shaun was breathless, smiling from ear to ear with a face like a dog waiting for you to throw the stick. There was a deep silence for a few moments. Shaun was afraid that someone would enter through the door and he would have to explain everything, and he was not sure he could, actually. He was still holding the last tool he was going to put somewhere safe. He looked at it and considered that that tool was not actually in his own universe, but somewhere else. Yet, it was there, on the same room.

“So,” – a pause – “how come you are… me?”, “Well, I’m not you, obviously, I’m just represented as you in this piece of our universe. I wouldn’t fit this room otherwise.”, “Oh, I get it.” lied Shaun. The other Shaun continued “You see, your studies has allowed us to extrapolate you idea and re-create your own universe inside our own. This room is just the connection point, if you go through that door” – and pointed to an old door that lead to the emergency exit – “you will continue inside our version of your universe.”, “Wait a minute, how much of our world have you replicated?”, “World, no, not just Earth, everything.” – a long pause, with wide open eyes. After a blink: “you mean, galaxies?”, “Yes, yes, all of them. Your universe is quite compact for all it has to offer, and we were firstly intrigued by that, but then we understood that it was necessary to have the constraints you have, and well, an important feature to generate such high quality theoretical physics.” “And we decided to lend an unused part of our universe so you could not only teach us by broadcasting your knowledge, but also running tests on our own universe.” “Most of your experiments are now part of our day-to-day life, from vehicles to communication devices to life-saving machines.” “You, Shaun, has made our lives so much better, that it was the least we could do.”

Anthropocentric

“Is there anyone living in this version of our universe? I mean, human … hum … clones?”, “No, no. We thought that would be improper. We do try to live in it, just for the curiosity, actually. There are some holiday packs to travel the wonderful places your universe has to offer. It’s nothing we don’t see in our own, but you know, travel agencies will always find an excuse to take your money, right?” and finished that sentence with a grin and almost a wink. His human traces were very good, almost as if he was observing for far too long, making Shaun to feel a little bit uneasy…

“Actually…” – the other Shaun continued – “maybe you could help us fixing a few things on this side of the universe. Make things a bit more suited to the people from our side, what do you think?”. With the rest of the team deep in tests, it’d be weeks before they would even consider going back to the main lab, and nobody else would dare to enter there, after the several claims (in the private circle that knew him) that his lab would produce a black-hole that would consume Earth and everything else.

Shaun decided to go in, at least to explore the very convincing copy of his own world. Going up the emergency exit, he found the lift all the way to the top, as expected. Outside, as expected, the early rays of the spring sun casting long shadows on the trees and buildings. The nearby cattle farm was empty, though. When the other Shaun noticed Shaun’s curiosity, he added, “Ah, yes, you see, we decided not to include mammals, as they could eventually evolve into sapient beings and we’d be altering the history of our own universe. We didn’t want to do that!”. Shaun thought it was sensible.

For several days, Shaun has listened to all complaints about his own universe and how would that fit into their own physiology. Animals were turned green to photosynthesise, trees would reproduce by multiple ways at the same time, genetic combination of more than a pair of chromosomes were allowed, as was normal in this new universe, and many of the landscapes were altered to fit the gigantic stature of most of its inhabitants. Some parts were left untouched, or the travel agencies would lose a huge market, and some were shortened and simplified, for the less elaborate, but still pseudo-sentient species.

Shaun was feeling very well, like a demi-god, changing landscapes and evolution at his own wishes, much like Slartibartfast. How fortunate was him, the only human – correction – the only being in his universe (as far as he knew) to play with a toy universe himself.

Inevitable causality

After meeting with leaders of the populations of the alter-universe, receiving gifts and commendations (and a few kisses from the lasses), it was time to return to his own universe. Shaun felt a bit tired, but after drinking a bit of their energetic beverage, he blasted back to alter-Earth in his new hyper-vehicle, to his own alter-lab. In there, only alter-Shaun was there to say goodbye. A handshake and a wink was enough to mean “I’ll be back, and thanks for all the fish”, which Shaun has taken as a warm gift, rather than a creepy resemblance.

But as soon as Shaun stepped up into his own universe, he noticed some things were out of place. After being in an alter-universe for so long, it was only natural to misplace normal concepts, but some things were not normal at all, like a 10 meter high corridor leading from his side of the room. Normally, It’d be no more than 2 meters and there was a very good reason for that: humans are not that tall!

He ran through it to find a huge door to a huge lift. In the lift were a few people still discussing what had happened. “It was definitely not that big! We must have shrunk!” said one, “No, that’s not possible, that’s Hollywoodian at best!” said the sceptic. Shaun took the lift up to the ground level, and ran to the farm nearby, fearing the worst.

And the worst happened. The cows were green, and the houses huge. Being a bad theoretical physicist himself, and not being able to count on the alter-physicists for theoretical matters, Shaun hasn’t taken into account that his machine was a duplication machine, of entangled particles. That means, for the lay to understand, that whatever happens to one, invariably happens to the other, no matter in what part of the universe, or in this case, in the multi-verse, they are.

That, thought Shaun, would take a bit more than a few days to fix… but he know how, and he was looking forward to fix it himself!

It’s funny to see how people judge events to be unnatural without any basis, or even defining the word natural. In its most basic meaning, natural is something that happens in nature, excluding any man-made achievements. For some reason, we like to think of ourselves as living outside nature, which beats me. We also have the super-natural, which are the things we can’t explain.

For us humans, being outside of nature, has a strong powerful feeling of superiority. We learnt to protect ourselves from the rain, and with time, we managed to protect ourselves from tsunamis. This feeling of loosing battles but winning the war has powerful consequences on the mind of men. This superiority, though, is a fake feeling of safety, since nature (aka. non-humans) always play neutral, and humans always play harsh. If nature had feelings (Gaia and other non-sense), we’d be doomed.

That puts us in three categories, according to a human eye: what’s below us (nature), us, and what above us (our myths and technologically advanced aliens). This relation is far from correct, but that doesn’t stop us seeing the universe with these eyes, and most importantly, basing our beliefs on it. Most original religions put nature on top of men, like Norse, Greek, Roman and indigenous mythology. But, in the eyes of science and technology (even well before Christ) that has changed, substantially.

Single-God based religions put men on top of nature. That thought would be impossible to conceive for pre-historic cultures, but with the advent of technology, humans started feeling superior, super-natural. But there were still things they couldn’t explain, so instead of removing religion altogether, they just removed themselves from nature. That common sense is what made religions evolve from the native form to the super-human form, where God made men, and only men, on its own image. The most obvious form for God to take, then, was the human form.

Modern Times

With time, men learnt the power of its own creation. Religion was used to destroy entire civilizations, many times over. More recently, however, with the greater separation between state and religion, it became unfashionable to blame horrendous crimes on religion alone, so the role of religion changed from the main cause, to a role model. If you can’t tell God made you kill that entire village, you can say that God teaches us that what they do is wrong, so wrong, that they deserve to die. Problem solved.

But more importantly, and with the advance of atheism (reaching up to 10% of the population, according to New Scientist), especially in key positions of the world (rule-makers, money-makers), religion had to change its form and take a whole new meaning to people. I’m an atheist, I can’t say I’d do anything for God, but I can say I’d save a child from starvation. So, religion or not, people are still willing to go to extreme lengths to do something right. All you need to do is to define what’s right and wrong, no matter what religion (if any) you follow.

It’s fun to blame wars on religion, but that’s not the point. Never was. Einstein worked on nuclear physics in the US knowing the government would use that to make atomic bombs, and he still did it. Would it be worse doing it for the Germans? Maybe. Ultimately, our behaviour, with or without religion, has to do with what we evolved to do: fight. And fighting is not about striking first, but calculating the risks.

There is a theory, which I like very much, is that this transition in religion happened for socio-political reasons. Not just control over people, but advice and care that wouldn’t otherwise reach remote places. Like the bans on pork meat for the Jews, during times were it was generally unsafe to eat it anyway (still is). Or tales about how people in a immoral city burned to death. I try very hard to teach my son about moral issues, but nothing is as powerful as “burned to death”. I end up doing some extrapolations, nothing of that sort, but I see the power in it, and for that, it served its purpose very well.

As modernised as religions got during the last centuries, most of them still have things of the past that they can’t loose, no matter how weird it sounds. Catholics sill trying to convince people against contraception, Jews still having to eat food blessed by a rabbi, Muslims still having to wear burqa and stone their women, and so on. Different people will read this and laugh at different parts, but each one accepts their own prejudices as if it was the obvious truth.

When I was a boy I got beaten by my friends (yes, friends) because I said I didn’t believe in God. I must have said something like “for me, Jesus is just like any other guy.”, for three or four friends, of different Christian factions, to beat me up and sent me home bleeding. Normally, the universal bullying is to say “your mother is like…”, but if any of them had said: “your mother is like any other gal”, I would have said, “yeah, ok, your point is?”. But in this case, it hit a deeper and irrational feeling in all of them, at the same time. It was as fast as instinct.

Homosexuality

Most religion will say out loud that homosexuality is down right wrong. Simple as that. What they won’t do is to explain why. Unlike most other fears and prejudices, I cannot fathom where on Earth did they get that from.

It’s not like it doesn’t happen on nature, plenty of animals have homosexual relationships. Some of them even change sex during their lifetime to re-balance the population. But if a human being do it, it’s unnatural.

It’s not like it never happened in human history. Old civilizations are full of homosexuality, soldiers being encouraged to love each other so they could perform better in battle in Roman and Greek times, and since then there is a rich history of same-sex relationships throughout European history that would make anyone blush.

It’s not like it’s going to change the world or anything. Men and women still have sex, and well, we’ve passed the 7bi people mark years ago! If anything, we should encourage homosexuality, as birth control, much more effective than abstinence.

There isn’t any context that I can think of where it would be unnatural. Both in the sense of not happening in nature, or not happening to humanity. Where does it come from? Can anyone explain to me, even with religious arguments (other than God doesn’t like it)? I truly need to know this one.

New taboos

But it’s not all about loosing old stupid taboos, it’s also about creating new ones. Today it seems natural to not enslave the population of a village, or to allow women to vote. It’s also impossible to think about paedophilia without turning your stomach inside out. But that was not always like this. Greek society was perfect because there was a huge number of slaves outside of society to keep it going. Women were rarely allowed to rule or even express their opinions, and as to child-adult relationship, well, it depends on what you consider to be a child. If 14 years old is a child for you, well, they got married (with full status) much earlier than that not too long ago.

Even more recent, it seems that the world is changing a lot on labour laws, making it very hard for companies to sack incompetent employees, or to refuse a job applicant with fear to be discriminating a growing list of minorities. It seems that the majority of people belong to at least one minority group. For instance, I changed countries, moved to England, and here I’m a foreigner. We’re far from minority, especially in England, but people still take great care when talking around me not to offend me.

That would never have happened during Roman times. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? Well, not here. In England, you’re allowed to ride motorcycles without a helmet if you’re using a turban for religious purposes. In Scotland, the police apologised for taking a picture of a dog puppy on top of a police hat (cute picture, actually) to promote their new phone number because that offended a few Muslims.

Paedophilia is another interesting topic, and one that shows that taboos can grow to unimaginable power in just a few years. It is possible today to be arrested on your 18th birthday because your girlfriend is 17. Not that it happens often, but if her father is a radical, and where he lives is radical (say, Texas), then, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen.

I wonder if we should add these taboos to the bible and the quran. That would make it easier to force the whole world to follow these simple, but important moral guidelines, even when some countries’ legislations say otherwise. It’s also easier to write a story to illustrate, and later extrapolate from it, than come up with a set of definite rules about something. For instance, if you have two stories: one that tells the tale of John, who was crucified for having intercourse with a 14 y.o. girl, and another of a young brave men that was absolved for having a 17 years old girlfriend, but just because he was 18. Each religion will extrapolate slightly different, but all of them will punish paedophiles and none of them will be allowed to punish the 18 y.o. boy. Simple, efficient.

Unnatural

It may be cynic, but in my concept, everything is natural. There are good things, and bad things (depending on your point of view), but bad things are also natural. There’s nothing more natural than death. Even Wikipedia seems to be at a lost on defining unnatural.

As Arthur C. Clarke put so eloquently: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“. Magic, super-natural and deities are all different views of what’s too complicated for our pitiful minds, but still nonetheless, natural.

The act of defining what is natural is an act of prejudice. Is to separate what I like from what I don’t. What’s like me from what’s not. Is life what breathes? Or what photosynthesise? Or what reproduces? Or what is capable of intelligence? It might be just as well something so radically different to what I’m used to that I can’t even comprehend, much less name it.

What we call Nature is, actually, just a very tiny subset of the Universe, which, according to the most recent theories in cosmology, it just a tiny subset of whatever’s beyond it. Nature is a very anthropocentric concept, one that we grab so strongly, and restrict it to our needs so irrationally, that it becomes meaningless.

Unfortunately, that behaviour is absolutely natural. If we weren’t selfish, fighters and a bit stupid, we wouldn’t have survived. That’s nature at its most basic form. And the fun part is that we’re not destroying Nature, or our planet. We’re destroying ourselves (and a few other life forms as a side-effect). Nature, or the Universe, or the Multiverse, will linger.

My conclusion is simple: stop using the word natural, or moral, or good. Use “I agree“, or “I like“. It’s much more sensate, correct and a lot less likely to create prejudice.

Despise all the controversy, Google started his new Privacy Policy last Thursday and whether you like it or not, you are being watched.

Being realistic, this is not far from what they were already doing: Google already tracked your searches, what you are watching on Youtube or your emails.

But before March, 1^st, Google Plus, Youtube, Gmail and almost 60 Google products, were in different databases. With this change, Google guys are giving themselves the right to put all those products in just one big place, put one and one and one together to build a better and more complete online behaviour of YOU. And use it to chase YOU with their ads.

And you can’t opt out. If you want to use any Google product you are under their privacy policy.

It should be nonsense for me to tell you to stop using Google products. Almost everything you do in the internet today, from searches and emails, to finding a street and comparing products’ prices, is somehow through a Google product or related to it.

But you can at least reduce the amount of information that Google will be able to collect from you.

You can, for instance, delete your Google history going to https://www.google.com/history/ and clicking the button “Remove all Web History”

You can also configure your advertising settings here:  https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/

You can edit your settings or even opt out.

Another way to “confuse” Google is creating a different account for each Google service (if you can keep up with all usernames and passwords).

Or, when watching a video on Youtube or searching the Web, make sure you are not logged in to your Google account.

There is also the possibility to use browser plugins that work to protect your data, or even anonymous proxies.

But, the truth is, as soon as you type into your computer, click anything, visit at a page, talk through Skype, or even talk on a telephone, (mobile or fixed), those who want to, can spy on you.

At least now Google is coming clear and telling you that they are spying on you. It makes better sense to me than living in a fool’s paradise, where you still believe that you have control over your life.

Paralegal‘s Peter Kim sent me this nice info-graphic about a short history of the media industry in Hollywood, and I thought I would share with you.

I’m not a Lawyer, but his site seems to have some good bite-sized information about copyrights and other law terms that we should all know if we are to avoid The Big Brother in our society. Most of it obviously only apply to the US, but as we all know, US law has been extended to the world far too much. British hackers being extradited to US, European citizens getting harassed by US media companies and Asian companies being shut down by the mighty power of Hollywood.

There are other info-graphics on the site that are worth looking at. Thanks for the tip, Peter.

There is a lot of attention to emergent behaviour nowadays (ex. here, here, here and here), but it’s still on the outskirts of science and computing.

Science

For millennia, science has isolated each single behaviour of a system (or system of systems) to study it in detail, than join them together to grasp the bigger picture. The problem is that, this approximation can only be done with simple systems, such as the ones studied by Aristotle, Newton and Ampere. Every time scientists were approaching the edges of their theories (including those three), they just left as an exercise to the reader.

Newton has foreseen relativity and the possible lack of continuity in space and time, but he has done nothing to address that. Fair enough, his work was much more important to science than venturing throughout the unknowns of science, that would be almost mystical of him to try (although, he was an alchemist). But more and more, scientific progress seems to be blocked by chaos theory, where you either unwind the knots or go back to alchemy.

Chaos theory exists for more than a century, but it was only recently that it has been applied to anything outside differential equations. The hyper-sensibility of the initial conditions is clear on differential systems, but other systems have a less visible, but no less important, sensibility. We just don’t see it well enough, since most of the other systems are not as well formulated as differential equations (thanks to Newton and Leibniz).

Neurology and the quest for artificial intelligence has risen a strong interest in chaos theory and fractal systems. The development in neural networks has shown that groups and networks also have a fundamental chaotic nature, but more importantly, that it’s only though the chaotic nature of those systems that you can get a good amount of information from it. Quantum mechanics had the same evolution, with Heisenberg and Schroedinger kicking the ball first on the oddities of the universe and how important is the lack of knowledge of a system to be able to extract information from it (think of Schroedinger’s cat).

A network with direct and fixed thresholds doesn’t learn. Particles with known positions and velocities don’t compute. N-body systems with definite trajectories don’t exist.

The genetic code has some similarities to these models. Living beings have far more junk than genes in their chromosomes (reaching 98% of junk on human genome), but changes in the junk parts can often lead to invalid creatures. If junk within genes (introns) gets modified, the actual code (exons) could be split differently, leading to a completely new, dysfunctional, protein. Or, if you add start sequences (TATA-boxes) to non-coding region, some of them will be transcribed into whatever protein they could make, creating rubbish within cells, consuming resources or eventually killing the host.

But most of the non-coding DNA is also highly susceptible to changes, and that’s probably its most important function, adapted to the specific mutation rates of our planet and our defence mechanism against such mutations. For billions of years, the living beings on Earth have adapted that code. Each of us has a super-computer that can choose, by design, the best ratios for a giving scenario within a few generations, and create a whole new species or keep the current one adapted, depending on what’s more beneficial.

But not everyone is that patient…

Programming

Sadly, in my profession, chaos plays an important part, too.

As programs grow old, and programmers move on, a good part of the code becomes stale, creating dependencies that are hard to find, harder to fix. In that sense, programs are pretty much like the genetic code, the amount of junk increases over time, and that gives the program resistance against changes. The main problem with computing, that is not clear in genetics, is that the code that stays behind, is normally the code that no one wants to touch, thus, the ugliest and most problematic.

DNA transcriptors don’t care where the genes are, they find a start sequence and go on with their lives. Programmers, we believe, have free will and that gives them the right to choose where to apply a change. They can either work around the problem, making the code even uglier, or they can go on and try to fix the problem in the first place.

Non-programmers would quickly state that only lazy programmers would do the former, but more experienced ones will admit have done so on numerous occasions for different reasons. Good programmers would do that because fixing the real problem is so painful to so many other systems that it’s best to be left alone, and replace that part in the future (only they never will). Bad programmers are not just lazy, some of them really believe that’s the right thing to do (I met many like this), and that adds some more chaos into the game.

It’s not uncommon to try to fix a small problem, go more than half-way through and hit a small glitch on a separate system. A glitch that you quickly identify as being wrongly designed, so you, as any good programmer would do, re-design it and implement the new design, which is already much bigger than the fix itself. All tests pass, except the one, that shows you another glitch, raised by your different design. This can go on indefinitely.

Some changes are better done in packs, all together, to make sure all designs are consistent and the program behaves as it should, not necessarily as the tests say it would. But that’s not only too big for one person at one time, it’s practically impossible when other people are changing the program under your feet, releasing customer versions and changing the design themselves. There is a point where a refactoring is not only hard, but also a bad design choice.

And that’s when code become introns, and are seldom removed.

Networks

The power of networks is rising, slower than expected, though. For decades, people know about synergy, chaos and emergent behaviour, but it was only recently, with the quality and amount of information on global social interaction, that those topics are rising again in the main picture.

Twitter, Facebook and the like have risen so many questions about human behaviour, and a lot of research has been done to address those questions and, to a certain extent, answer them. Psychologists and social scientists knew for centuries that social interaction is greater than the sum of all parts, but now we have the tools and the data to prove it once and for all.

Computing clusters have being applied to most of the hard scientific problems for half a century (weather prediction, earthquake simulation, exhaustion proofs in graph theory). They also took on a commercial side with MapReduce and similar mechanisms that have popularised the distributed architectures, but that’s only the beginning.

On distributed systems of today, emergent behaviour is treated as a bug, that has to be eradicated. In the exact science of computing, locks and updates have to occur in the precise order they were programmed to, to yield the exact result one is expecting. No more, no less.

But to keep our system out of emergent behaviours, we invariably introduce emergent behaviour in our code. Multiple checks on locks and variables, different design choices for different components that have to work together and the expectancy of precise results or nothing, makes the number of lines of code grow exponentially. And, since that has to run fast, even more lines and design choices are added to avoid one extra operation inside a very busy loop.

While all this is justifiable, it’s not sustainable. In the long run (think decades), the code will be replaced or the product will be discontinued, but there is a limit to which a program can receive additional lines without loosing some others. And the cost of refactoring increases with the lifetime of a product. This is why old products don’t get too many updates, not because they’re good enough already, but because it’s impossible to add new features without breaking a lot others.

Distant future

As much as I like emergent behaviour, I can’t begin to fathom how to harness that power. Stochastic computing is one way and has been done with certain level of success here and here, but it’s far from easy to create a general logic behind it.

Unlike Turing machines, emergent behaviour comes from multiple sources, dressed in multiple disguises and producing far too much variety in results that can be accounted in one theory. It’s similar to string theory, where there are several variations of it, but only one M theory, the one that joins them all together. The problem is, nobody knows how this M theory looks like. Well, they barely know how the different versions of string theory look like, anyway.

In that sense, emergent theory is even further than string theory to be understood in its entirety. But I strongly believe that this is one way out of the conundrum we live today, where adding more features makes harder to add more features (like mass on relativistic speeds).

With stochastic computing there is no need of locks, since all that matter is the probability of an outcome, and where precise values do not make sense. There is also no need for NxM combination of modules and special checks, since the power is not in the computation themselves, but in the meta-computation, done by the state of the network, rather than its specific components.

But that, I’m afraid, I won’t see in my lifetime.

In the future, people will be able to project three-dimensional films using holograms. These holograms could be placed among us, rather than at a stage, to give us a much better sense of reality and emotions than it is possible on a theatre or cinema.

When this technique gets common place, it’ll be possible to use it in the classroom. Actors would re-enact events in history, and children will be able to live the moment, rather than just listening to stories. The teachers, then, will have a much more fundamental role in teaching. They will comment on what’s happening, rather than merely serve as a narrator.

Holographic teaching has numerous advantages. Seeing the streets of London in 1666 on fire, running for your life is much more vivid than just chalk traces on a blackboard. Seeing Jews suffering on German camps, being a Jew on a German camp (minus the physical harm, of course), gives us a much better tool to avoid this in the future, and to do it to other people.

In the future, children will be able to live the credit crunch, the Syrian civil war, how the international community helped, and provoked, several conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. How people in the poorest parts of this world live without clean water or food, and how their parents die of unimaginable diseases and it falls on them the responsibility of raising a family, by the age of 4.

Children won’t be listeners, any more, they’ll live the moment, feel the pain, and learn that this is not acceptable, under any circumstances, for any living bean: Humans, animals, aliens.

However, you don’t have to wait for that glorious future to fix society. If things continue how they are, it is very likely that this future will never come to pass. If there is one constant in human history is the force of self-destruction. The more humans we have (we passed the 7bi barrier long ago), the stronger this force is.

There are several ways any of us can help save the world. The single most important you can do is to teach your children that ruthless selfish behaviour is not accepted, that the ends don’t justify the means, and that people deserve freedom to live and think for their own. Other things involve going to the most affected areas and work to revamp those cultures (not just bring food and water), help re-structure their governments (on their own terms) and work with your own government to stop invasive manoeuvres and third-party destructions for their own benefits.

A simple start is to help Avaaz. They do most of the bureaucracy, they go into the countries, they empower people, they turn rogue legislations around and, more importantly, they warn you before it’s too late.

Signing to their mailing list will give you a much better view of the world. You don’t have to donate money to help, just by signing the petitions, showing you care, is already a good start. The best part is that they will always ask you what’s the next step. How much effort they have to spend on this or that, and how much (and which) technology they have to develop to help their – our – cause.

I’m following Avaaz for a few years now, probably since its foundation, and I have to say that, not only they surpassed my expectations on what they could do with the world, but also on clarity, openness and use of technology and resources. They’re not a charity, they’re an activist group, and a very good one at that. If you were looking for something to support to help change the world, Avaaz is a great start.

After a good week battling against SOPA, it’s time to go back to real life, to battling our own close enemies.

As was reported over, and over, and over again (at least in this blog), Google is dragging itself towards a giant dominant player it’s becoming, much like Yahoo! and AOL in previous times.

Lifehacker has a very good post about the same subject (from where the title of this post was deliberately taken), around Google+ and the new Search+ (or whatever they’re calling that), and how the giant is loosing its steam and trying so solidify its market, where it’ll comfortably lay until the end of its days.

True, Google has a somewhat strong research department, and is working towards new TCP/IP standards, but much of it was done by Yahoo! in the past, towards FreeBSD, PHP and MySQL. Yahoo! actually hired top notch BSD kernel hackers (like Paul Saab), MySQL gurus (like Jimi Cole and Zawodny) and the PHP creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. And they put a lot back to the community. But none of that is true revolution, only short reforms to keep themselves in power for a bit longer.

The issue is simple, Google doesn’t need to innovate as much as they did in the past, as did Yahoo! and AOL. Even Microsoft and Apple need to innovate more than Google, because they have to sell things. Software, hardware and services, not only cost money, and time, but they age too rapidly and it’s not hard to throw loads of money at a project that is borne dead (like Vista). But Google get its money for free (so to speak), their users are not paying a penny for their services. How hard it is to compete with that model?

Like Google, Yahoo! had the same comfort in their days. They had more users than anyone else, and that was the same as money. They did get money from ads, like Google, only not as efficient. And that put them in a comfort zone that it’s hard not to get used to, which was their ultimate doom. This is why, after 25 and so years failing, Microsoft is still a strong player. This is why Apple, after being in the shadow for than 20 years, got to be the biggest Tech company in the world. The must innovate at every turn.

Yahoo! displaced AOL and bought pretty much everyone else because they’ve outsmarted the competition, by doing the same thing, but cheaper and easier. Google repeated the same stunt, on Yahoo! and is beginning to age. How long would that last? When the next big thing appears, making money even easier, Google will be a giant. An arrogant, slow and blind giant. And natural selection will take care of them as quick as it took of AOL and Yahoo!

So, the day has ended and we’ve seen many protests around the world. Did it help? Well, a bit, but don’t hold your breath right now.

European citizens are still being sued by the American government and being extradited to the US because their sites had links to copyrighted material. So, in a way, what SOPA and PIPA stands for is already reality, but it takes the US government a lot of effort and money to do so. With SOPA and PIPA, enyone in the world could end up in Guantanamo Bay, as easy as any American.

While I welcome the protest, and feel that Americans did a good job converting 30 more senators to their cause (it was 5, now it’s 35), it’s far from enough. I think people still haven’t realised that this is not an American issue. Just like American copyright laws have bankrupted creativity around the world (think Mickey Mouse effect) and the American patent system has destroyed technological advancement (patent trolls, et al), SOPA and PIPA will spread throughout the world and be the icing on their cake.

The people that are so desperate to preserve their profits by breaking the rest of the world are the people that already have more than anyone. Last year, Viacom’s CEO had a 50mi raise in his salary. Not a bonus, mind you, a raise. To protect those people’s profits, we’re letting them destroy the entire world, stop technological advancements (that don’t give profits to them) and kill all the artists in the process.

If you, like me, are outside of the US, please make sure your government stops short of bending to the US government, as they always do. Europe, and particularly UK and France, has been America’s puppet for far too long. The US is not the only country in the world, and nowadays, it’s not even the most important one. We need to change the world to multi-polar and promote countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India. Not that I like any of them, but we must not put all our coins into one crazy country, we need more crazy countries to re-balance the world.

Now, for some of the protests

Apart from the obvious Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, there were some others I’ve seen that are worth mentioning.

• FightForTheFuture had a very interesting video explaining the whole thing.
• Ars Technica published only SOPA/PIPA articles, and very good ones at that.
• Bruce Schneier, security legend, also joined the protests.
• Avaaz, always alert, started a petition and already got more than 1.5mi signatures.
• People that live on content (in theory, the ones affected by piracy) also had their say: XKCD, Abstruse Goose, Basic Instruction.
• Last, but not least, The Daily WTF has a very interesting piece about how bad it already is, and supporting PIPA so we can go back to the BBS era that was much more comfortable!

It was not just that, some people actually went on to the streets (NY and SF) and it seems most senators’ phones and websites went dead for the traffic. It’s working, but this is not the end, nor this is just about copyright. This is about freedom of thought, freedom to share, freedom to be a human being. Stopping SOPA/PIPA is just the first step, we need to undo most of what the media/war/oil/tobacco industry has done for the past 80 years, unless you like dictatorships, of course.

To protest against absurd piracy counter-measures in US, the Wikimedia foundation (and others) will be shutting down this Wednesday.

We’ll be supporting the act by shutting down our blog, too. Not that our blog makes any difference, it’s more for the protest than anything else.

UPDATE: More sites, including Google and WordPress, are joining the strike.

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