Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Esther Dyson, chair of EDVentures, talks about her decision to publish her personal genome information, as well as the role of the Personal Health Record. I interviewed her at the Markle Foundation Connecting for Health Conference at Torrey Pines, San Diego, Ca. December 3, 2007. I talked about some of these topics in a paper Inverted Perspectives, Triggering Change I coauthored with Dr. Rob Kolodner in Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople

I was fortunate to attend the wedding of Jim and Amanda Hoffmeister in San Francisco. Here is my interpretation of the event. With thanks to Robert Hotz for help with the editing.

This represents my most polished film making effort to date, trying to distill 6 hrs of video down into the essence of a wedding. I first got interested in film making in April, 2006, when I was in a bistro in Paris, listening to a fascinating conversation between Thomas Dichter and Marcia Odell about development issues in the third world. (I was holding a workshop the next day entitled, “How can 6 billion people help each other help themselves?) I put my digital camera on a wine bottle, and put it in movie record mode. When I got back to my hotel to edit the movie, I realized that I could completely shift the meaning of the conversation just by moving the edit cut point a few seconds each way. I decided I’d rather be the editor, rather than just the viewer. Here was my original movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB6RkNVuhCE

This is a portion of the discussion at the 2008 Good Ancestors Principle workshop in Encinitas, Ca. Feb 19, 2008. It includes discussions by David Elleman, Dorion Sagan, Valdis Krebs, Frank Mosca, Frederick Turner, and Tom Munnecke, discussing some of the concepts behind resiliency in systems, including the work of Buzz Hollings.

A group of astronomers has proposed a SETI search strategy:

Richard Conn Henry, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ Zanvyl Krieger
School of Arts and Sciences, is joining forces with Seth Shostak of
the SETI Institute and Steven Kilston of the Henry Foundation Inc., a
Silver Spring, Md., think tank, to search a swath of the sky known as
the ecliptic plane. They propose to use new Allen Telescope Array,
operated as a partnership between the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
Calif., and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of
California, Berkeley.

This is an idea that I have been batting around for some time I posted a quick note on the idea in 2004, at and talked to some folks at the Hat Creek about that time when my wife and I were driving by and just stopped in as tourists.

I called the idea a “Paired Transit Protocol” - because the timing of the transits between the pairs of planets would establish a communications clock for synchronous communications (akin to computers using synchronous rather than asynchronous communications protocols. Synchronous computer communications are more efficient because they share a common clock that obviates the need for “start” and “stop” bits in the protocol.). Because each star/planet system can see the other’s transit, it creates a “leading edge” and “trailing edge” timing signal that precisely links to each other. One system transmitting an anomalous signal precisely when its planet enters or leaves the shadow of its star as cast on the other planet would confirm that that planet had seen the transit of the other planet.

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Thanks to a tip from Charles Smith a while back, I’ve discovered the Gigapan.org site, that helps folks post very large scale mosaics. It’s a fascinating process, and opens up a whole new way of doing photography. It also seems to be contagious. Three friends have seen my panos and have now begun their own exploration.

Above is a mosaic I took of the Copper Canyon in Northern Mexico last month. I shot 21 handheld individual photos, then stitched them together with Photoshop CS3. (using the Photomerge feature with both auto align and autoblend options turned on.)

I then saved the image as a TIFF, and uploaded it to Gigapan. Gigapan allows users to pan and zoom through the image, as well as take “snapshots” of the larger image.

This can take up a tremendous amount of compute time and memory. A 1 gb image can chew up 10gb of disk space while Photoshop is doing its magic.

Here are all of my panoramas

I’ve been casting about for ways of reframing our language relating to the health care system, and come up with “Disease Industrial Complex.” If we look at things from this perspective, the DIC is a very efficient process, efficiently absorbing an ever increasing percentage of our gross national product. This industry has little to do with health - its all about disease, how to categorize it, and how to sell things to fix it.

this is a test
For those who found the iPhone debut an amazing excursion to the twilight zone of hype over substance, there is an alternative brewing on the horizon, called OpenMoko.

OpenMoko is an Open Source project to create the world’s first free mobile phone operating system.

The OpenMoko project is a community that anyone can join, to help design their ideal phone.

The long term goal is that phone software won’t be tied to a phone. You can install any OpenMoko software over the whole range of phones, and if you upgrade your phone, you don’t lose the software. Bugs fixed on one phone are fixed on all.

With OpenMoko, you won’t be locked into a mobile phone vendor that spends a good portion of its technology trying to bill you outrageous amounts for trivial information. Don’t like your mobile phone service? use a local wi-fi. Want to travel to another network? Buy a local SIM card. Want to download some innovative GPS/video/mapping application? go for it.

Maybe a little competition will improve the quality of our service for all.

Just in case folks are bored with the issues of globalization, civilization faces another, longer term issue, call it galactization. We’ve had SETI, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence looking for signals from outer space, for some time. No luck yet, but maybe they are so smart that they don’t want us to know about them. As my neighbor David Brin points out, if you were wandering around a dark jungle at night, it probably isn’t a good idea to shine a bright light on yourself and shout, “Anybody out there?” See his essay, SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS: …Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory.

Now, there is a new issue civilization faces: METI: Messaging to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. This might seem a little advanced to some, for example, the iPhone doesn’t support it. The issue revolves around whether we should be actively sending messages to possible extra terrestrial intelligences. Should we broadcast our presence out into space, hoping to attract the attention of other civilizations? What are the pros and cons of this?

This is definitely a “long fuse, big bang” type of problem. Even if the Other gets the message in say 20 years, then the earliest we would get a reply would be 40 years… unless they’ve figured out some physics we don’t quite know yet.

Leaving the improbability issues aside, though, this still brings up an issue: just who decides whether to have a coming out party for Earthlings? Is this a UN issue? Do astronomers decide this? If New Age enthusiasts want to broadcast a message from a pyramid, do we let them speak for everyone on earth? Do we create a METI Institute?

See Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea? in the June 25, 2007 issue of the Independent:

Many scientists, frightened by the danger that might lurk out there, have argued against our actively seeking contact with extraterrestrials. Jared Diamond, professor of evolutionary biology and Pulitzer Prize winner, says: ” Those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are naive, even dangerous

I have been lurking on some of the mailing lists talking about this issue, and that even on a fairly closed list, the conversation broke down amidst typical mailing list dynamics. Its kind of ironic that a homogeneous group with a common language, culture, environment, and biology are having trouble talking about the possibility of communication with others wildly different.