some high order bits from the morning

danny hillis of applied minds demoed some of their mindblowing work, much of it in robotics and hardware, but really in every conceivable technological field.

imagine a plasma screen tv oriented like the surface of a table, with a touch sensitive surface that you could use to manipulate a global map interface. zoom from earth to high resolution images of actual buildings, swipe various layers of GIS information across the map. he showed a video of this demo given to an esri conference of geographers, which he said brought some of them to tears—then he showed us the next version with a “programmable surface”, which deformed to the surface chacteristics and elevations of the map.

super great talk about von neumann, by george dyson, brother of esther dyson and son of freeman dyson. grew up in at princeton’s institude for advanced study in the shadows of einstein, godel, turing, and john von neumann–the man credited with inventing the modern computer architecture.

dyson got access to several boxes of archives from the ias with details of their original computer development activities, which he had annotated and assembled into a very engaging, entertaining presentation about some of the history of our collective hacker culture.

lunch

vigorous discussion with patrick on microsoft, mozilla, open source, web standards, economics, etc. over a juicy pub burger.

talks from the afternoon

• folks from the eff on endangered gadgets
• annalee newitz how sex laws encourage innovation
• bbc radio using sms for song requests
• sam ruby on just use http
• werner vogels – amazon.com: e-commerce at an interplanetary scale