Skilluminati Research

Posted Jul 06, 2007

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as 'inverse geometry', which he explained as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions."

During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of "overground tunnels" carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so "saturated" into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as "infestation", seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of "walking through walls" involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare -- a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international "shadow world" of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of elite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural "shadow world" is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.

full article: The Art of War

EDITORIAL: Like we keep on saying at Skilluminati Research, the next generation of warfare is utterly open-source and decentralized. There is no shortage of "revolutionaries" out there, but if you actually want to make a difference -- pay attention.

Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

Posted Jul 06, 2007

When George Dyson took a tour of Google's headquarters, he wrote an article for Edge that had a line which raised a few eyebrows:

The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

A lot of tech news sources jumped on this story, but when pressed for comment, Google executives didn't really address the question:

"Every engineer is able to take 20 percent of their time to work on non-core projects. Google News came out of that. We want to hire the best people and for them to work on the projects that they need to but we also want them to innovate. Most teams contain from three to five engineers. At our company if you have 20 people working on something then the project is not working," said Levick.

Google has given some insights into its AI work in the past. Speaking in 2003, Google Senior Research Scientist Mehran Sahami explained that Google News was using AI techniques to handle information.

"AI applications are using the infrastructure to get people useful information in interesting ways," said Sahami, according to reports. "There is no human intervention. Google News is an example of where AI is making a huge difference. It's used several million times a day," he added.

Sahami also reportedly hinted at AI-based research in progress at Google that has yet to be deployed, such as voice-driven search and query results clustering to help users navigate. "We want to combine information retrieval, large systems, and AI to work together towards the next generation of search engines," he said.

More from Dyson's article:

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."
If anyone has further information:

UPDATE: further info from a news source I will never credit, cuz fuck 'em:

Responding to a direct question from Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, Google's Levick did not outright deny that Google was developing AI technology. Instead he postulated that the Google employee's comments were probably referring to the idea of "intelligent networks" of information rather than artificial intelligence.

However Levick did admit that Google's founders believe that current search technology is still in its infancy and the future would look very different. "Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] would say that search is nothing like it could be right now," he said.

When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google's core philosophy of "Don't be evil" guides all its actions.

Filed in: Future Tech

Posted Jul 06, 2007

...why is New Zealand reniassance man Chris King so unknown? We don't know, but he's probably got a detailed answer that makes perfect sense.

Chris King is a singular mind --- he's interested in the mechanics of absolutely everything. Every process in every system, at every level of scale. And he's found some truly remarkable patterns out there. His papers are dense and fast-paced. (Personally, when I read my first Chris King article, it took me about three months to get enough background knowledge to understand it.) This is not meant to be some quick brain food, but rather a permanent tribute to what we consider an important mind.

For the more educated reader, you can dive right into his latest magnum opus statement: Cosmic Symmetry-Breaking, Bifurcation, Fractality and Biogenesis, which is a guided tour of the entire Universe and assumes working background knowledge in nearly every scientific discipline. There is also a full-color, expanded edition available here.
One primary reason that Chris King is fairly obscure: there is no easy way into his work.

There is no popular summary in existence at this point. His papers are always complex, but if you're going to start anywhere, start with Quantum Mechanics, Chaos and the Conscious Brain. For a printable and compulsively readable version of the same theories, check out Fractal Neurodynamics and Quantum Chaos. (I still carry a copy of that essay in my laptop case.)

For a specific look at his work on neurology, and the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", we recommend Fractal and Chaotic Dynamics in Nervous Systems Chris King is also (quite sensibly) very concerned about the future of life on this planet --- especially the future of human life. He has created a sprawling encyclopedia of Earth Life, which he calls The Genesis of Eden. We especially recommend the sections on Sociobiology, Biocosmology, Evolution, and a summary of the current biocrisis that all of Earth is facing. (We're gonna go out on a limb here: mass extinctions might be a Very Bad Thing.)

Still Confused?

Here at Skilluminati Research, we don't assume everyone reads as much as we do. (In fact, we're grateful for your sloth, since that's precisely what makes you so easy to control.) Here's a list of key concepts, all linked to good introductions to that specific topic.

Hard Problem of Consciousness: How does the brain generate consciousness? This also leads to several other, equally important questions: Is consciousness a phenomenon limited to the brain? Is all matter conscious? What role does consciousness play in the growth of the Universe? ....that sorta thing.

Fractality: Self-similarity. There are few more visually beautiful introductions to fractals than Miqel Dot Com's math images gallery: start here.

Isomorphism: Similar patterns and forms at different levels of scale. For instance, electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom bear a striking resemblance to planets orbiting a sun.

In China, this has been studied for thousands of years and is known as Li: Patterns in Nature. <---the previous link is to order the book from Amazon. We recently had this book "borrowed" from the library before we could scan it to a .pdf. When it is returned, we'll post it here. In the meantime, this book and all others in the Series, especially Harmonograph and The Little Book of Coincidence, get the highest possible reccomendation from the BIPT.

Symmetry breaking: modeling the growth of life --- the emergence of something new --- mathematically. This principle applies on the cosmic level --- as weak and strong nuclear forces separated in the early Universe --- and it applies on the genetic level, where cells grow into humans.

Neurogenesis: The growth of the brain. There are of course many more terms to define, but we will leave you with one of the more amazing quotes to be found in King's written work:

"The raw numbers game of neurogenesis [growth of the brain from embryo to adult human] suggest attractor dynamics may form an essential bridge between central nervous system genotype and phenotype. The 5 x 10^4 genes governing central nervous system development, around 60% of human genes, cannot informationally specify the connections for 10^11 neurons and 10^15 synapses."

(In other words, the Human Genome Project's claims of "DNA determinism" ---- "everything is in the genes" ---- is radically wrong, not just "popular science" but flat-out dumb. Our genes are clearly working in concert with our environment at every single iteration of human development. Any arguments about "Nature vs. Nurture" might as well be about how many angels are in heaven, wether or not the Earth is flat, or the benefits of bloodletting.)

Filed in: Future Tech

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Any effective attack means the attacker must flow a burst of concentrated energy along a line directed at you. If the attack is a punch to the belly, the attacker's energy, embodied in his fist, moves along a line from his body to your belly. If it hits, you can be badly hurt. So you follow the first basic principle: you get off the line--you move or turn so that the energy of that punch does not connect with you.

The second principle is to blend or harmonize with the attack. You practice Ai. . . . To truly harmonize with the attack, you would not only get off the line, you also would not slow the punch down or oppose it in any way. In fact, you might put your hand on the punching arm and add energy to it in the direction it was already going. You have harmonized and blended with the energy of the attack. By projecting your energy in the same direction the attacker projects his, you see, as it were, your attacker's point of view. . . .

The third basic principle after you have gotten off the line and harmonized with your attacker's energy is to lead energy further than it originally intended to go, thus taking control of it. Then you can throw or otherwise control your attacker. The attacker thus provides most of the energy for handling his attack.

If you were a practitioner of Aikido, how would you react to a personal attack in this imperfect world? In an idealized scheme, we can distinguish three levels of self-defense.

At the highest level of Aikido skill, you would have developed a great sensitivity to subtle cues from others. Among other things, Aikido is a kind of mindfulness meditation (Buddhist vipassana) in action. Thus you would probably sense that the other person was getting upset and might get physically aggressive, so you would leave before the potential attacker's feelings reached an overt level! Not being there when someone gets angry is a marvelously effective kind of self-defense, and you certainly don't need to get angry or aggressive yourself in practicing this approach.

If you were not skilled enough to sense the imminance of the attack before your attacker felt angry, you would still be skilled enough to know how to stay centered and peaceful under the developing tension that precedes an attack. Remaining calm, present, and centered is an excellent form of self-defense. Note the importance of being present as well as calm and centered. You may be calm because you are so lost in your own fantasy world that you don't know what is happening around you, but that is quite different from being calm and present.

As I have discussed elsewhere . . ., there is a great deal of fear of psychic abilities in many people, sometimes conscious, often unconscious. One way this fear can manifest without the person having to realize he is afraid, is through hostility toward psychic and spiritual subjects. Since I frequently lecture on these topics, I sometimes become the target of this kind of anger.

I certainly don't like to be attacked for any reason, even if it's only verbal. I can become afraid, angry, self-righteous, and lose contact with reality as I get absorbed in this pattern. It's not only unpleasant, there is a further frustration: my goal was to communicate useful knowledge. I might seem to "win" an argument, but if I'm angry and self-righteous, I probably have not communicated effectively to my audience, and certainly not to my "opponent".

Before I had studied Aikido, my reaction to an attack in a lecture question was to counterattack. I would expose logical flaws in my attacker's thinking, and/or show he was ignorant of the facts, and/or shower him with high-status scientific facts to demonstrate to him the error of his ways. I would usually "win" the argument, for I was an expert in the subject matter compared to almost all questioners, and a skilled debater. This also made me popular with most of the audience, who were typically "believers" in psychic and spiritual matters, for I had won a victory over the kind of person who attacked them, too. I fought force with greater force.

In retrospect, I doubt that I actually communicated much of anything useful to my "opponent."

Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Have you ever sat down and computed how much money you spent a year on weed? We did that last year and it solved a lot of mysteries about our budget.

Of course, growing marijuana is "illegal", because marijuana, a plant which grows naturally on nearly every continent of our planet, is "against the law". Millions of dollars were actually spent on destroying wild marijuana plants for over 10 years.

As any wise monkey knows, though, in a dominator society there is only one real Law:

"Don't Get Caught"
So with that in mind, we present to you a small but potent library of resources for the self-realized marijuana user.

All of the following links are to .pdf downloads that we host. Information is free, or at least: it wants to be.

The Cannabis Grow Bible, 4th Edition Close to everything you'd need.

The Closet Cultivator A treatise on compact, undetectable indoor grow operations. Excellent reading.

The Big Book of Buds Sounds like the dumbest book on Earth, sure.....but as a guide to breeds of marijuana, you couldn't do much better than this.

Outdoor Marijuana Cultivation Those of you with more land might want to use this book instead.

If you'd like some serious data about marijuana, you are not alone. Since marijuana was rendered illegal, reputable and honest research has been hard to come by. Here at the BIPT, we have two dynamite resources for the curious primate:

Pharacology and Toxicology of Marijuana

And here's the very best of the bunch: an exhaustive and authoritative report that was given to Congress and promptly buried. Turns out marijuana has extensive medical use and is extremely safe!

Filed in: Future Tech