Find one – that’s right, just one – video game that is not about learning. -- Keith Devlin, profkeithdevlin blog, January 29, 2012

The internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. -- Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Feb 17, 2012

The easiest way to become irrelevant is to stop. -- George Clooney, The Australian, Standing on the side of history, February 20, 2012

Whenever I tackled the impossible or the miraculous, I remembered the magician Rene Lavand, who had only one arm. Poet and extraordinary card manipulator, he baffled fellow illusionists by concluding his brilliant demonstrations with, "What I just showed you can also be done with two hands!" -- Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, 2002, p. 236.

Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. -- Paul Graham, What Happens at Y Combinator, February 2012.

If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. — Shawn Achor, The happy secrete to better work, TEDXBloomington, May 2011

We don’t really live in a country. We live on the Internet. -- Mr. Ljung, Betabeat, February 28, 2012.

Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. -- Keith Sawyer, via Jonah Lehrer, Groupthink, The New Yorker, January 30, 2012

The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and the "culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos. -- David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, 2000 p. 11

The best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers. -- Felix Salmon, Why Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't listen to management gurus, Reuters, February 10, 2012

Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots. -- Cole Stryker, The New York Times, February 27, 2012.

There are only two types of companies, those that have been hacked and those that will be. -- Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, in the New York Times, March 5, 2012.

A genius is the one most like himself. -- Thelonius Monk, Monk's Advice, 1960, Lists of Note.

It's become accepted among some academics that movies and even long TV series are the high art of this era -- the literature of our time. Video games are still considered low art, not quite the great masterpieces of our times. But I believe the best of them will be seen as masterpieces with a decade. This long and rough essay argues that the epic role playing action game Mass Effects (1,2, and 3) is one such cultural masterpiece.

What I found interesting is not its claim that ME is the greatest of all sci-fi stories, but its claim (which I agree with) that embedded in its vast sprawling creation, are some key post-modern ideas. In other words centuries from now, academics will go back to Mass Effects and "read" it, not by what it says, but by what it assumes. This essay tries to unravel some of the assumptions in the huge alternative universe of Mass Effects. The author claims its key assumption is "Cosmicism." He says:

"Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It’s far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence."

He says, "Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity." In the game Sovereign (a god-like eternal entity) declares: "Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal. We are the pinnacle of evolution and existence."

Warning, there is dense insider-jargon that is both off-putting, near non-sensical, but also attractive for its deep revelation of concerns, such as the following paragraph:

Further, the fear associated with biological destiny translates to transcending the biological in both body and mind. Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune’s planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence. The quarian war with the geth is not merely the victory of the cylons but also an allusion to the Bulterian Jihad. As a result even the friendly EDI, who never actually does anything to indicate she is a hyper-rational decision machine (i.e. HAL 9000), is viscerally feared by the Illusive Man, Joker, and Shepard herself. Legion’s playful mocking of biological limitations contains implications of organic obsolescence.

There's a lot going on. I don't think this essay is the last word on any of it, but in it I got a glimpse of a nascent cultural barometer.

I did a long interview with George Dyson in the current Wired. We discuss the origins of software, and how a small band of geniuses 60 years ago made the system we are still using today. The two most powerful technologies of the 20th century—the nuclear bomb and the computer—were invented at the same time and by the same group of young people. But while the history of the Manhattan Project has been well told, the origin of the computer is relatively unknown. Excerpts:

Me: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?

George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.

...

Me: How did the MANIAC project get started?

Dyson: The von Neumann project was funded to do H-bomb calculations. It was a deal with the devil: If they designed this ultimate weapon, they could have this fantastic machine.

Me: So the creation of digital life was rooted in death?

Dyson: In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life. These were young kids who had just come through World War II, who could repair the electronics on airplanes and get them flying the same day, and von Neumann put them together with mathematical logicians who could imagine a universe created entirely out of 0s and 1s.

…

Me: What were these guys like?

Dyson: They were hackers. They were young men and women, mostly in their twenties. The ones in their thirties were considered old. They did all the things hackers do: working all night, living for their code, arguing over whether a problem was due to software or hardware. They kept logbooks where they left notes telling the next shift what they had done, and they filled them with dark nerd humor, the same sort of sarcastic jokes you find on email and comment threads today. Von Neumann was warned by the director that his “computer people” were consuming too much sugar—when sugar was still rationed. And they were fast. They completed the entire project in less time than it took me to write about it!

...

Me: Other than bombs, what did they use the MANIAC for?

Dyson: They were gung ho on numerical weather prediction, and they made amazingly good progress in the first few years. Remember, all they had was 5 kilobytes of memory, running at a speed of 8 kilocycles. Yet by 1954 they were predicting weather for the northern hemisphere.

When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk. -- Philipe Petit (who tightroped between the Twin Towers), Man on Wire, 2002, p. 213

Slowly slowly, form follows funding. -- Clay Shirky, Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users, January 4, 2012.

The web is evolving from a place to find things, into a place to do things. — Reid Smith, Knowledge Technologies Conference, 2001

[In the publishing business] the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. -- Dave Winer, Scripting News, December 29,2011.

The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask. -- Max Tegmark, Our Universe Grew Like a Baby, Edge, January 16, 2012

The biggest surprise for any new president is the strain placed upon the “decision-making muscle,” since the choices that come upon him every day are precisely those the rest of the government has not been able to resolve. -- James Fallow, Obama Explained, The Atlantic, March 2012.

I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters. — Neal Stephenson, Getting Big Things Done, Solve For X, February 2, 2012

I prefer pirates to SOPA. I would rather lose a piece of my profits than lose access to others' thoughts. -- Greg Stolze, Google+ January 18, 2012

If you struggle financially, upgrade your social skills. Money flows through people. -- Steve Pavlina, Google+, January 16, 2012

Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals of the valuable historical and State papers deposited in our public offices … let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time but by such a multiplication of copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident. -- Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson to Ebenezer Hazard, Philadelphia, February 18, 1791. In Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America

[Tim Berners-Lee] told me about his proposed system called the ‘World Wide Web.’ And I thought, well, that’s got a pretentious name. — Ian Ritchie, TEDGobal Talk, July 2011

Classic internet cartoon from xkcd.

Who are all these people in my circles?

To my astonishment over 560,000 people have put me in their Google+ circles. That is over half a million strangers who want to hear what I say on Google+. That crowd is far greater than the number of people subscribing to Wired magazine during the years I was editing it.

Where did these half million people come from? And who are they? Because they are starting to post a lot of spam in the comments. You the reader don't see much of this spam because Google does a fantastic job of suppressing it so it's invisible to readers. But as host I see the hidden spam grayed out so that I have the opportunity to undo it in case an entry is legit, but that has happened only once so far. All the other times Google has expertly and accurately removed spam before it displays.

Still, there is enough comment spam that it got me to wonder: how many of my circlers are spammers?

With the help of my research assistant Camille Cloutier, we randomly sampled my great circle to see who was there. I'll tell you our conclusion and then how we got there.

Conclusion: Most of the half million people following me on Google+ are ciphers. They have signed up, but have not made a single public post, or posted their own image or a profile, or made a comment. They aren't home. The only place you'll see people are in the same small set of 100 "recommended" people they follow, of which I am one.

That is why I have half a million followers. Not because I have half a million fans, but because I am on a default list to fill an otherwise empty street when folks sign up.

Camille paged through a subset of 5,000 of my circlers, and then took 5% of that 1% to inspect closely. So I can't say this very small sample has any statical significance, but it may serve as a hint. (If you want to inspect the Google spreadsheet with the minute breakdown of what we found it's here.

This chart plots the number (out of the sample) of my "followers" vs the number of others who have added them to their circles.

This graph plots the number of followers with how many they are following. Most of the ones they are following are recommended "celebs".

What we found was that only 30% of Google+ers made any public activity. And 6% were outright spammers. So the good news is that spamming occurs at a low percentage (and as I said, Google does a marvelous job filtering it out), but the bad news is that most of Google+'s inhabitants are ciphers. Not there. Ghosts. 36% had not even filled out a profile. Now, it is possible these ciphers are busy posting stuff privately on each other's streams, but that is not the impression I get looking at their profile.

It is important to note that this great vacuum may be present solely because my followers are so artificially inflated by the recommendation machinery. I suspect that most normal Google+ accounts not on a recommendation list will have a more organic spread of followers, with many fewer ciphers.

This same cipher effect has been noted on Twitter, which also provided newbies with a recommendation list of folks to follow. And their circles also were inflated with ciphers and bots. Two journalists at Popular Mechanics magazine hand checked 1,000 of their Twitter followers. Here is one of their breakdown:

Real people: 24.6 %

Legitimate companies or organizations: 14 %

Fake or spam: 48.6 %

Unclear: 12.8 %

So more than half of their Twitter followers are ciphers.

This has been verified by PeakAnalytics, which observes that the more followers you have the higher percentage will be ciphers. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claims to have 1.3 million followers. But last August a group at Indiana University did an analysis of some of the 2012 Presidential candidates and found that 76% of Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter accounts lacked a profile biography. That doesn't prove they are all fake, or bots, but it does say they are ciphers.

Chart from Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.

Google, the big data wizard, knows in great detail who is who on Google+. They can tell from activity, links, associations, or lack thereof, who is real or not. Ciphers are a benign problem, unlike spammers. Many of the ciphers are real people, who are inactive now, but might be later. Their inactivity is not hurting anyone. But businesses believing they are there may experience failures.

The main lesson of the Social Ciphers is to beware of large numbers in social media. The larger the number, the more fluffy it is. Real or not, these folks are just not there.