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Colour portal

Files related to my essay What Colour are your bits? and the ideas it raises. (13 May 2008)

Buried in bits

Almost ten years ago, I read a fascinating essay by George Gilder in Computer Underground Digest, reprinted from Forbes.  He predicted that in The Future, technologies like the erbium doped fiber amplifier would cause bandwidth to grow faster than CPU power, and that that would eventually have drastic effects on how we do computing and networking.  I'm not sure that prediction has really come true, but supposing it did, what would be the effect on the copyright wars? (16 January 2007)

Colour of bits rendered in orbit

Here's an interesting example of Colour:  it's an image "rendered in orbit" using POV-Ray.  POV-Ray is a free ray-tracing package, which generates pictures by simulating (a limited subset of) optics to compute what a given scene would look like.  They created a scene file and ran it through POV-Ray to generate the image; the gimmick is that the copy of POV-Ray they used was running a computer that happened to be in space.  It's pretty clear from the Web site that they're holding out this image as being in some way special because of having been rendered in space, but the question is, what's special about it?  The output image is a deterministic function of the input scene file.  So if I used a computer on the ground to render the same scene file, the output image would be bit for bit identical with the "rendered in space" version.  Would it really be the rendered in space version?  What's the difference between the two?  The difference is Colour. (22 June 2005)

Livejournal friends betray trust; film at 11

Some comments on the legality and morality of a public archive of private Livejournal postings. (6 March 2005)

Colour, social beings, and undecidability

Okay, it's been about two months since I posted my piece about colourful bits, and I really should have posted a follow-up before now, but better late than never.  First of all, here are ten other places that carried the story, in no particular order: (9 August 2004)

What Colour are your bits?

There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is set in an extremely repressive Utopian futuristic world run by The Computer, who is Your Friend.  Looking at a recent LawMeme posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the ideologies in these areas. (10 June 2004)