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Google’s “Buzz” is a wonderful feature, one that took me completely by surprise. Out of nowhere, right in the middle of my Gmail session, I found that I’m already enrolled in a Twitter-like social network. Not only that, but I also saw that Google had graciously provided me with people to follow my tweets (buzzes?) and other people for me to follow, all culled from the people I email most often.

I love the boldness of this move. No longer will you need to decide whether you want to be in a Twitter-like social network. Google has already decided that you do. And they’ve even decided who your friends are. None of this old fashioned choosing your own friends nonsense. Such quaint notions are soooo 2009. The best part is that Google makes all of this information public, so that everyone in the world knows who you email regularly.

Some people might object that this is an invasion of privacy — that the entire point of email as a medium is that it is a kind of semi-private space, where you can have conversational exchanges without everyone in the world automatically knowing your business. But those people clearly haven’t gotten with the “buzz”.

I found myself excited by this freedom from having to think for myself, delighted to be rid of the intolerable burden of needing to choose my own lifestyle choices and my own friends. So I called up my friend George Fingler at Google Labs, and asked him if he could give me a sneak peak at what is coming next to our Gmail accounts.

George showed me some pretty cool things, and he told me that it would be ok for me to share them with you, my loyal readers. So let’s take a look at what’s coming next from the people who brought you “Buzz”.

Have you ever wondered what happened to all of those embarrassing digital photos you decided not to upload to the Web? Like that one at the Christmas party where you got drunk and naked and somehow ended up in a compromising position with a rubber chicken? Well, it turns out that all of those pictures are still stored somewhere on your hard drive. In fact, thanks to an advanced disk crawler that you automatically downloaded with your last Gmail upgrade, they are now also sitting on Google servers. As part of its new free service, dubbed “say cheese!”, Google will soon be posting those images of you, at the rate of one per day, to popular social networking sites. Of course you can opt out of this free social networking service if you’d like. Unfortunately, due to the extra maintenance costs involved, the opt-out fee for this service is approximately $1000 per month.

Another cool feature that is soon going to show up soon in your Gmail is Google’s “Shared Telemedicine Database”. This is a feature that automatically displays your complete medical history for people in your extended “friend” network. The upside here is enormous. For example, have you ever wanted to date someone, but weren’t sure if they had genital herpes, or gonorrhea, or one of the various forms of syphilis? Well thanks to Google STD, you can rest easy — the complete medical history of everyone you’ve ever “friended” will show up on a convenient sidebar. And the best part is that every STD will be automatically loaded into your Gmail client when you log on. I have a feeling that this one will be going viral!

But the best feature George showed me was a little something Google calls “meta-search”. This one is pure genius. Basically, every search term you’ve ever typed into Google, from “drug dealers in the greater Seattle area” to “junior high hotties”, will now be available to your ever expanding network of Google friends. And the entire database of those terms is itself searchable (this is Google, after all!). Any time a new friend is added to your Buzz or Google Chat list, a random set of your searches will automatically be forwarded to them. This can be great when you are first starting to work with a new colleague or supervisor, or when you’ve just gone on a first date with someone you really like. After all, isn’t that the perfect time for this person to learn about your interests in “sexy clown pictures” and “interspecies dating tips”?

I’m sure you are as excited by these new developments as I am. Luckily for you, while you were reading this blog post, a Google Ajax client has been loading and embedding these delightful features into your operating system’s kernel. Congratulations, you’ve already opted in. Feel the Buzz!

Jake stared down upon the lifeless girl
Had he just seen his own creator die?
Could he revive her? Should he even try?
So many thoughts! His mind was in a whirl.
“You seem confused,” a voice behind him said.
He turned around but saw no other bot.
“You wonder was this real, or was it not.”
The voice, he realized, was in his head.
“Our intent, you see, was never to deceive;
“We programmed you to seek the human out.”
“But why?” he asked, “What is this all about?”
“We sought to test your power to believe.”
      “You mean there is no truth behind religion?”
      “There is,” replied the voice. “But just a smidgeon…”

I was having a conversation with some friends the other day, and one of them wondered aloud why human sexuality is so weird. She pointed out that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the vast array of psychological, cultural and aesthetic responses to this same basic instinct that we all share.

That prompted me talk about cats. In particular, I sketched out for my friends my own (admittedly quirky) theory of human sexuality which is based on the way that cats walk.

I had read a research paper several years earlier that described what has been learned about how cats know how to walk. It turns out, not surprisingly, that if a cat’s cerebrum is seriously injured to the point of being non-functional, the cat will simply sit in one spot all day long without moving, like a living statue.

However, if you give the cat a push, or drop it from a height onto the floor, the cat will walk, run, leap, land on its feet, and make all of the other graceful locomotive movements that cats make. So here you have an animal that moves with masterful balance, grace and precision, all without benefit of a working cerebrum.

It is clear that these capabilities reside not in the cat’s cerebrum — the most high level and general purpose part of its brain, and also the most recent to have evolved — but rather in its cerebellum, a part of the mammalian brain known to be essential for motor coordination.

But here is where it starts to get interesting. In known cases where a human is left with an essentially non-functioning cerebrum (eg: due to a massive brain tumor), the human, like the cat, will remain immobile and non-responsive indefinitely. However, if you try to get this poor individual to walk, he or she will just fall over. No human cerebrum, no human locomotion.

What seems to be happening here is that whereas the cat’s abilities of locomotion and balance (which are substantially better than ours) evolved over a very long period of time, becoming “hard wired” in the cerebellum, our movements as bipeds evolved much later, after the cerebral cortex had already evolved to be quite large. Consequently, for humans the process of learning to walk and to balance involves a lot of participation of the more general kind of unsupervised learning that goes on in our cerebrum.

Practically this means two things. First the bad news: We will never be able to run and jump as well as cats, no matter how hard we try, and no matter how long we train and practice. Now the good news: We humans are capable of learning varied ways to move our bodies that are far outside the capabilities of the feline brain. People regularly learn intricate sports moves, exotic dances, techniques for playing musical instruments, and other physical skills that lie completely outside any particular movement that might have been “wired” into the evolving prehistoric human brain. In effect, we don’t get to be the ultimate specialists precisely because we get to be the ultimate generalists.

Which brings us back to sex.

My theory is that the human brain responds to sexuality in much the same way that it responds to the need to walk and reach and balance. Rather than react to sexual desire by going through a predefined sequence of behaviors, every individual human learner makes use of that powerful engine for unsupervised learning – the cerebrum. Each one of us develops, with the help of the very highest level of our brain, a highly individual set of responses and coping strategies for dealing with this powerful emotion.

Which, arguably, tends to make certain aspects of life a lot more interesting for humans than it is for cats.

Jake was stricken. This was too much to digest.
What were these humans? A source of life or doom?
His world was changing, right here in this room,
Was this the end, or the start of some new quest?
He felt afraid, as frightened as a child
Who’s stumbled on a deep and endless void.
“Are you my God?” asked the hesitant young droid.
The girl looked thoughtful, then suddenly she smiled.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “it is time for me to go.”
Then she shrugged, and began to turn away
He felt that there was something more to say
“Wait!” Jake cried, “There is much I need to know!”
      All at once, the stranger’s face went blank
      And as Jake looked on in horror, to the floor she slowly sank.

I’m fascinated by the concept of a “compensated spokesperson.” The basic idea, as I understand it, is this. A company has some product they are trying to push, so they hire a well known actor to shill for them. Everybody knows that the actor is doing it for the money — after all, there is a big disclaimer that says we are watching a “compensated spokesperson”. It doesn’t get more obvious than that.

Generally these companies like to hire an actor known for playing trustworthy characters. After Sam Waterston spent some time playing a highly ethical Assistant D.A. on “Law and Order”, he got hired as a pitchman by the TD Waterhouse banking group. More recently, John Roland went from a long career as a legendary NY TV news reporter to the “compensated spokeperson” for Wilens & Baker, a law firm in serious need of a public relations face-lift after having been censured by the NY Judiciary for being nasty to its own clients.

There are a lot more examples of this, and it’s always the same. Some trusted face that you know from TV or the movies, somebody you may have grown up watching as they battled fictional bad guys, becomes the public face of a company that wants to borrow some of that honorable Mojo, and is willing to pay for the privilege.

Yet here’s the interesting part. Everybody knows that this is all a complete crock. Essentially a company is telling its public: “Hey public, we’re going to try to convince you we’re the good guys by hiring an actor, and we’re even going to tell you that we’re paying them to shill for us, but we think you’re so stupid that you’re going to believe us anyway.” In effect, the company is telling its potential customers that it believes them to be mindless, knuckle dragging, drooling morons, who wouldn’t know a bald faced lie if it jumped up and bit them on the keister.

Now, you would expect that the public would respond to this kind of thing with utter disgust, massive boycotts, deliberate avoidance of any product peddled in such a ridiculous manner. But actually, it works. People turn on their TV sets, see Sam Waterston, or John Roland, or William Shatner, or Tiger Woods (well, um, until recently), and they believe! The use of a compensated spokesperson has been proven, time after time, to increase trust in a product or company. It turns out that we really are mindless, knuckle dragging, drooling morons.

Well, have you ever had the thought “Boy, if I had all the money in the world, what I’d really like to do is…”?

One of my fantasies — maybe something I’d do with that second billion — would be to hire all of those compensated spokespersons, and pay them to talk about what they really think of the product they are shilling for (it’s amazing how creative you can get with money you never expect to have). It wouldn’t be dishonest or anything. Just a general sort of consciousness raising, a kind of karmic compensation. It could even become a spectator sport. People could see some well-known actor (as in “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”) peddling a product, and then the next week they public would get to hear what the actor really thinks of the product.

On the other hand, such a project might not be necessary if all compensated spokespersons were all as cool as the late great Antonio Carlos Jobim — composer of “The Girl from Ipanema” and other immortal Bossa Nova songs. In the Brazilian beer wars, two rival brands — Brahma and Antarctica — would each spend a fortune battling it out in the marketplace of public opinion, a kind of alcoholic Coke versus Pepsi. For many years Jobim, a living legend in Brazil, made a hefty sum as a paid spokesperson for Brahma. He’d even work its brand name into his song lyrics.

But when he was asked about it, he said: “Yes, it’s true. I get paid to promote Brahma. But I drink Antarctica.”

“That’s evident,” said Jake, somewhat bemused.
“Like everyone,” he said, “I am a bot.”
“You are indeed,” she said, “but I am not.”
“Not what?” replied our hero, all confused.
The concept she was trying to explain
Was so outside the universe he knew
That as she spoke, his puzzlement just grew
He felt troubled in his cybernetic brain
“Look,” she said, “I am a human being.”
“I do not know this model type” said Jake,
“Perhaps some newer bot? A recent make?”
“No!” she said, “You’re looking, but not seeing.”
      “Well then?” inquired Jake, “What do you do?”
      “We create robotic droids,” she said. “Like you.”

Thanks for all of the thoughtful comments on my Forever font post. For those who requested it, here is the font in an easy to transcribe form:

The font can also, by the way, be helpful for displaying a reasonable amount of text on a very low resolution screen, so it might find use in very low cost or low power display devices, such as a future smartphone designed to cost less than ten dollars, which would be useful in large parts of the world where today’s smartphones are unaffordable. If every kid has a smartphone, the challenges of attaining universal literacy can be approached in new and creative ways.

But let’s talk about those future people, the ones who might not even have the concept of electricity. The other day my colleague Murphy Stein and I were discussing the underlying challenge of developing modern technology specifically for the purpose of transmitting knowledge to fellow humans in a less technologically advanced future. We found ourselves circling back to the asymmetry between producer and consumer — what advanced knowledge artifacts might we produce here in the present to compensate for the limits on how those artifacts can be consumed in the future?

Ideally we wanted to do better than the information density of paper, but not rely on the rediscovery of the magnifying glass. One idea we came up with is to embed many different pages on each sheet of paper, so that you would see a different page as you looked at the paper from different directions. No magnifying glass required.

There are various ways of doing this. One way is to use scratch holograms — since these can be illuminated by the Sun (the one light source we can assume future humans will be able to access). They are also less fragile than regular holograms. One can also use Benton holograms (those rainbow holograms you see on credit cards), although these can only encode different images in one angular dimension, which seriously limits the number of different page images you could practically embed into one sheet.

Another possibility is to use integral imaging, the brainchild of Gabriel Lippmann back in 1908. In this approach, each page would be covered with many thousands of tiny plastic hemispherical lenslets. Looking through one lenslet from any given angle you can only see a tiny, highly magnified, speck of the underlying paper. If there is ink at that spot, the entire lenslet will appear black, otherwise the lenslet will appear white. If you print the right pattern behind the array of lenslets, then one piece of paper could contain a hundred different pages of text, each appearing when viewed from a particular angle (say, ten choices of view angle in each of the horizontal and vertical directions), as an array of visible black and white dots.

This last approach is particularly well matched to the Forever font. When you look at an integral image you see patterns of discrete dots — exactly the right sort of display on which to read the Forever font.

Jake was too astonished to reply
Transfixed, he simply stood in silence, gawking,
Confident that had he started talking
He would have gotten stuck somewhere at “Hi”.
For never in his life had our young bot
Beheld a vision of such sheer delight
This strange new robot was a lovely sight
For she was everything that he was not.
Her armature was delicate and svelte
Her cover plate a soft and glowing pink
He found it was becoming hard to think
He thought his circuits were about to melt.
      And then she spoke again — her voice was sweet.
      “Are you a real robot? That’s so neat!”

Questions about “robots after the humans are gone” have gotten me thinking more about what might eventually become of our human knowledge-verse, which in turn led me to various on-line discussions about the potential long-term advantages of archiving on paper. So now I’m thinking about that.

Certainly digital media possess vastly greater bandwidth than old-fashioned print. On the other hand, it is not clear that any given digital storage medium of today will be readable far in the future. In theory, future civilizations could examine our magnetic tapes, compact discs and flash storage devices, and reverse engineer them to find out what was going on way back in the twenty first century. But such a theory assumes that future civilizations will have a lot in common with our own.

In the event of some disruptive calamity, it is not clear that surviving humans will have digital computers, but it is highly likely that some existing languages will survive. In such circumstances, as civilization gradually pulls itself together, books will be continue to be useful.

But what about that limited bandwidth problem? A printed book will typically contain around 2000 to 3000 characters per page. If we really want to help those future generations get a good start, we might want to do better than that.

One on-line discussion I saw talked about using ink on paper to print in binary format — essentially using paper as a digital medium. If you print only 1’s and 0’s (as tiny dots and spaces), you can get about 500,000 bytes — equivalent to 500,000 characters — on one side of a single sheet of paper.

This is great, but it assumes that future humans will be able to decode binary. If those folks don’t have any computers, that might be a very big assumption indeed.

So I started wondering whether there might be some way to compromise, a way to retain some of the advantages of text (readability forever into the future, as long as language itself doesn’t die) while picking up some of the benefits of binary encoding (far higher storage density).

I came up with a text font that might do the trick. The Forever font is composed of little on-off patterns of printed dots, just like a binary encoding on paper. But unlike a binary pattern, it is directly readable by humans. The result is not quite as compact as binary encoding — it takes about twice as many bits. So rather than being able to fit 500,000 characters on a page, you would only be able to fit 250,000 characters.

Still, going from 2500 characters per page to 250,000 characters per page is not too shabby — it lets you replace every 100 pages with a single page. You could store an entire reference library in a single book.

Below you can see the font at three different scales, together with the equivalent binary (ASCII) encoding. In each case, in the binary encoding the two lines of text are side-by-side, whereas in the Forever font they are arranged one below the other:

Each Forever font character is four dots high, and from one to five dots wide (the more frequent characters tend to be skinny). To achieve the full 250,000 characters per page, you would scale down the font so that each dot is as small as possible — about 1/300 of an inch is the limit for ink printed on ordinary paper. Of course you would need a strong magnifying glass to read print this small. So in practice, you’d start with large and easily readable text at the top of each page, and then gradually taper down the text size on subsequent lines. That way it would be clear to the reader that there is indeed text to be read in the tiny sized print.

One could object that future civilizations might not have access to a magnifying glass. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that the convex lens will be rediscovered well before the digital computer. Meanwhile, the need for a magnifier will be immediately self-evident to anyone who sees a size-tapered page of text in Forever font, and this need might even prompt some innovation.

Another advantage of the Forever font over binary encoding is its robustness. Paper can be damaged, and printing at small sizes is inaccurate. If noise creeps in to the position of the dots (as shown in the lower text, below), the binary encoding becomes undecodable, whereas the Forever font is still readable:

The fact that the text appears as visually identifiable words and characters (which people are quite good at recognizing) — together with that extra factor of two in space — results in a far more robust and error-resistant encoding than you could get from the binary encoded version.

Jake awoke to find himself inside
Some sort of large mechanical device
Making sure to check his circuits twice
He found nothing amiss, except his pride.
Quite relieved to see he wasn’t dead,
He knew there was still much to understand
It isn’t often that a giant hand
Lifts one into the air from overhead.
He set about examining the place
Just where he was, he really could not tell.
He hoped he’d find some other bots as well
Perhaps a friendly cybernetic face.
      No sooner had this thought formed in his head
      When a lovely face appeared. “Hello,” she said.