Josh Dilworth

This is the clearest and best-written intro article on math, computability and big numbers I have read, period (and it’s from 1999, by the way).

More importantly, once the author (Scott Aaronson, a prof at MIT/CSAIL, and someone, hehe, semi-famously at odds with my client Stephen Wolfram) makes his way through the Ackerman sequence, Turing machines and Busy Beavers, he makes several very worthwhile arguments about our cultural understanding of big numbers. This is a topic that I’m keenly interested in, as I’m in the business, ultimately, of bringing advanced, and often algorithmically and computationally significant, technologies to market.

Specifically:

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

Definitely required reading, and thanks to @mrflip for pointing me to this piece.

Siri will give the first public demo of its virtual personal assistant tomorrow (Thursday) at the WSJ’s D conference.

In addition to the TechCrunch post, Elise Ackerman also wrote up an excellent piece for the Merc. And for even more info, video, and a mockup of a conversation with Siri, check out the MIT Tech Review’s profile from back in February.

I’ve been excited about Siri for a long while now, and it’s gratifying to open up and start showing the world what the team has built.

The vision is that everyone will have an assistant, a virtual agent that transacts on your behalf. Siri is focusing at first on “out and about” use cases, though they’ll certainly expand to other domains over time. Their app will enter private beta this Summer.

This isn’t HAL 9000 in the making, to be clear — Siri is all about tasks, tasks that we humans are not neccessarily particularly well-suited for in the higher-level cognitive sense — like making restaurant reservations, buying movie tickets, checking flight times, and guaging the weather, etc. Especially on mobile devices, the assistant metaphor makes a ton of sense.

I’ve been thinking a lot, though, about the bigger-pictrue ramifications of technologies like Siri. When everyone does indeed have an assistant, what industries will be entirely disrupted? How will the ecosystemm of API’s and services evolve? How will trust and ethics come into play?

Disclosure: Siri is a client.

A hearty congrats to Nova, Candice and the whole Twine team. This article in TechCrunch today is a great send-off for the long weekend.

Their meteoric rise has been well-documented along the way, and there are even better things to come with Twine 2.0 i.e T2.

It’s worth noting that Twine has a very strong and active core of maven-like read/write users, alongside a much larger number of people who use the site as a resource to discover and track information around their interests. The engagement for each group looks quite different. But these behaviors are symbiotic and in tandem are fueling the cited growth. In this sense, the model is a lot more like Wikipedia than Friendfeed in terms of how content is created and consumed. In fact, Twine and Friendfeed see each other as complimentary, not competitive.

One aspect of Twine’s success that doesn’t often get mentioned is community management. Twine’s users are passionate and vocal and more importantly, they’re very interested and interesting people.

Just check out the comments here and here for proof. The team has done an excellent job shepherding what has become an incredibly vibrant community. And accordingly, the Twine community itself deserves credit more than anyone.

Disclosure: Twine is a client.

To quote SEO jedi Eric Ward:

“A shout out to BuzzStream. Any of you link builders who haven’t already checked out BuzzStream should head over and have a look. I’ve been impressed enough to become an advisor to them. It’s in beta and already made my jaw drop. For years in my head I have envisioned the perfect link building management app, and in BuzzStream’s first feature set I see evidence it can be exactly what I’ve imagined. Sign up fast, because I have a feeling the demand might be about to get crazy.”

‘Nuff said. Buzzstream rocks.

I hereby pronouce April 28th to be International Search Innovation Day.

To top it all off, Andy Hickl has posted some very stealthy Swingly screenshots. It is going to be one heck of a summer, people.

Wolfram Alpha. Siri. MSFT/Kumo. Swingly. Watson. And much more…

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb wrote up a very nice piece on Swingly here.

Today’s preview at Harvard’s Berkman Center and the simultaneous webcast represents the first (public) unveiling of the technology, with launch only weeks away.

Congrats to the team for all of the hard work that it has taken to get to this point. Stay tuned to the blog for more information and context on what Wolfram|Alpha is and isn’t, as well as what can be expected from the company as a steward of knowledge.

Disclosure: Wolfram|Alpha is a client.

P.S. Check our IBM’s Watson project, and Google’s public data project, both of which were announced today. This is going to get interesting, folks.

I am adamantly of the mind that well-behaved PR people are more Kaiser Sauze than attention whore (and poof! He’s gone…)

Some kind words that were said about me and others at the link above, and I am very grateful. But I am still keen on getting feedback on the following thesis, which I proposed in the comments.

Is the problem that some of the people best suited for PR (and marketing generally) do not typically self-select for PR (and marketing generally)?

I look at myself and Louis as examples — we are nerds who somehow fooled people into letting us do marketing;)

I keep a Google doc that is what I call “the Bo Jackson list” – i.e. people who can play football AND baseball. And when we hire new people, we’re not looking to the typical crop of candidates for new talent.

Agree/disagree?

Update: to be clear, if you DID self-select for marketing, I am not saying that I think you are not right for the job, or that I don’t want to hire you or work with you! What I’m curious about is whether, as an industry, we can do a better job of purposely introducing a diversity of skill sets and perspectives (and accordingly, whether some of PR’s ills can be attributed to, broadly taken, groupthink).