Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

You know, a lot of people criticized Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for being somewhat naively optimistic and glib, but I tell you, the most compelling part of that book is the graph he does of computing power per unit cost (adjusted for inflation) that shows that Moore's Law has held ever since the days of Babbage. This of course is different from the original formulation which was about transistors per unit area or something like that and is therefore inapplicable to Babbage or to the distant future.

It makes sense that technological advance would be exponential. You're using technology to build more technology. Evolution also seems to have that exponentialish shape, though it's hard to quantify something like that. 3 billion years to develop multi-cellular organisms, but 3 million years to develop consciousness?

Writing in 1999, he also says that "deflation was a concern of economists in the early 00 years" and that most conflicts are between nations and small bands of terrorists.

The book is really uncanny in that way.

Melissa

A nice post.
Thanks.

My Personal Experience of the Vietnam War

I am a US Merchant Marine Vietnam veteran and a Vietnam era US Navy veteran. I was never a hero but I knew plenty. this is my little story:

I’ll never forget September 1964. The long voyage from Bombay and through the straits of Malacca was marked by my poignant view of Singapore as we sailed by. Much to my regret it had been scratched from our itinerary at the last minute but that didn’t keep us from sailing close enough to get a view of that great Asian city. Then, on a steamy hot day, the Clipper wended its way up the Saigon River towards the capital city of Saigon. My watch partner Manny, my buddy Willie and I were leaning on the railing enjoying the breeze in our faces and admiring the translucent green “lawns” that bound the river on both sides. “Oyez, Manolito, what’s with all those lawns around here?” I asked curiously. “Estupido! – Them are rice paddies.” he answered as he and Willie laughed knowingly at me, the no-commonsense college-kid.

I will forever be grateful for the experience of working with those street-smart unlicensed seamen as one of them. In those days, the globally-wise working guys on US flag ships were mainly white-trash, Hispanic and or black. Even though they continually made fun of me, I made great friends among them and admired their manly competence and unpretentious bravery.

My buddies at MIT and I all thought we were so much smarter than everyone else, and that that was very important and that obviously entitled us highly evolved cognoscenti to rule over the great unwashed masses. Perhaps that explains why, today, I am so unimpressed by the over-educated social theorists who feel so compelled to control our lives so that they fit their ivory tower theories.

I was recently reading about a Harvard professor’s research in to why so many highly intelligent people are hopelessly unable to effectively navigate everyday life. It seems that...

http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/my_personal_exp.html

Stop blogwhoring, Spidle. It makes you look even more of a tool.

This off-topic for the specific post, but I am hoping that someone tech-savvy can answer this question. The postings from this site appear with the proper formatting when I view them using IE, but on Firefox 0.9.2 (the latest), the lines don't wrap. Is this a problem with the particular script that Dr Long uses, or a problem with Firefox? Any idea how I may be able to use Firefox to make the pages show up properly?

piraisoli:

i think that the long url in the post entitled "ow. Our Next President After Our Next President. Sign Me Up" is causing the problem. the solution to formatting problems caused by excessively long links is to use tinyurl.com.

OK so one question left, where are we going to find a terabyte of porn to fill it?

Computer generated porn - M-F, F-M, M-M, F-F, MM-F, M-FF, .... Many combinations, and that's not even counting the Santorum Set (man on dog, man on box turtle).

The problem now isn't storage capacity. It's storage accessibility. And that means a few things need to be tackled.

1. Searchability (Apple's Spotlight, Microsoft's WinFS? Applications for text/document filing?)
2. Exploiting redundancy for performance and data robustness (i.e. RAID)
3. Doing backup properly on the consumer level (the dawn of the router/fileserver?)

We're still at the point where it's quicker to retrieve a document from the web via Google than from a hard drive. Why the heck should that be?

This is a no-brainer. The Moore's Law formula has applied to hard drive capacity just as surely as it's applied to CPU power and RAM prices. We now have $120 250 GB drives. In three years we can expect $120 terabyte drives. The searchability issue is becoming impornat, sure, but terabyte drives aren't driving it. You don't fill a terabyte drive with hundreds of thousands of plain email messages or even digital photos or MP3s. You fill it with video, in chunks that take up between 300 MB and 2 gigs per hour depending on the quality. As disk space doubles, the number of content files someone has doesn't double. The files are getting bigger.

It's sort of like howin 1981 downloading a game demo took 40 minutes on a 300 baud modem. In 1984 the game demos were bigger and took 40 minutes to download on a 1200 baud modem. By the mid 1990s and 56K modems, the game demos were another 10 times bigger and took... 40 minutes to download.

If you just dump your DVDs straight to hard disks in order to make a home video jukebox, as some people are now doing, today's 250GB drives only hold 50 or so movies. Many PCs above the budget category are now shipping with RAID-friendly disk controllers. Some gamers and hobbyists already have RAID arrays at home. We'll probably see it become a mainstream option soon enough, first on "media center" PCs.

The bigger problem is backup. In order to do backups, tape and optical media just aren't big or fast enough. What we might see in a couple of years instead of terabyte PCs are half-terabyte PCs that come with a pluggable second half-terabyte disk module for storing a backup.

Tape and optical media are big and fast enough to back up terrabyte sized data stores. After all, this is what major corporations do today. What they aren't, is inexpensive enough. A terabyte of tape storage costs over $400 today, takes 8 pieces of media, and requires a $8,000 silo to drive it. A terabyte of disk storage, on the other hand, costs $480 today, and is four devices, and can be driven by a $80 RAID card.

MAID (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks) is the next big thing in data backup for corporations. Right now, it's hindered by lack of backup software capable of taking advantage of MAID, but the same software that could back up to MAID could back up to ordinary hard drives. The neat thing is that with the proper software, you can create a time trail and restore a file as of a particular point in time (like, 2 minutes before you accidentally deleted it? Or 2 minutes before your idiot brother opened the file, put a bunch of crapola in it, and saved the corrupted file to disk?!).