Aldoblog

A friend sent me the following screen capture from Google News:

I take this as another sign that the first true machine intelligence will emerge in the Googleplex.

Back in November 2005, Robert X. Cringely wrote about something he alternatively called the Google Cube and the Google Box. Bob’s description of the Box’s capabilities and Google’s plans for it were rather grandiose, but buried at the end of the column was something I thought was a solid business idea:

A couple of days ago I saw an eloquent “4,000 word” essay (4 photos) about the impact of clear cutting, written with the new Google Maps feature, showing satellite photos of the map area, allowing you to zoom in and out using the same controls as the street map version.

Seems Google wants to expand the universe of Gmail users. If you want an invite, I have 50.

Through the grace of a friend of a friend, I am now a Gmail user. I am only posting that so I can also rant on the so-called “privacy issues” that people have raised regarding Gmail, especially the moronic state senator Liz Figueroa, who this past week introduced legislation to ban Gmail.

I’ve written before about the interesting things that are taking place on the internet today. Two articles over the last two weeks made me think that the links that are spontaneously happening between the many active websites (mostly blogs) are similar to the formation of “neuronal paths.” We are building a giant, global brain.

The DHI I spent the last few days working on was moving the data for this weblog from my desktop Mac to the main server. I was able to move the data easily enough, but when I tried to actually connect to the new server, I was getting an error message that the connection was lost during the query. Searching Google for the error string usually leads quickly to a solution; it was a little trickier this time.