User:Ray Calvin Baker/LastHistoryBook

This is the "E:/Ray's/LastHistory.txt" file, created SAT 2011 AUG 06 04:36 PM, revised SAT 2011 AUG 06 04:36 PM, revised SUN 2011 AUG 07 04:49 PM, revised THU 2011 AUG 18 09:45 PM. fevised WED 2012 JUL 18 12:32 PM.

Ray Calvin Baker (talk) 16:55, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

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_THE_LAST_HISTORY_BOOK_BEFORE_THE_SINGULARITY_
The next history book may be _The_First_History_Book_After_the_ _Singularity_; it will (perhaps) be compiled from the logs of the bots which will then control the Wikiversity.

Raymond Kurzweil, inventor, software systems designer, and author, predicts that an unprecedented event in human history will occur when the intelligence of machines, which even now have access to most of human culture, finally exceeds all human intelligence. He predicts that this event, "the Singularity", will occur before the year 2050.

A growing number of other sources of information (and speculation) all tell me that Kurzweil's prediction is likely to be true. If so, then this may be the last chance I have (or anyone else, for that matter) to write the last (human) history book before the predicted event. Rather than just watch (and read about) these events, I have chosen to participate in them. Since the Wikiversity is a haven for learners, and the Computer Scientists who built it, I can think of no better place to keep this record. And so, I begin this journal. -- RCB.

Ray Calvin Baker (talk) 16:55, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

PROLOG
I have had a number of unusual opportunities and experiences which have lead me to believe that "the Singularity is near." My siblings and my children have given to me technical books on a variety of subjects, including the history of Computer Science. My father (he was an analog computer in the Taylorcraft airplane factory) gave me a box of his used drafting instruments (which included a half- silvered mirror he used to solve calculus problems) to play with, and his textbook, _Descriptive_Geometry_ by French and Vierk, when I was three years old. But, I need to put all of my autobiographical material into another book, _Sigma_Three:_the_Autistic_Teacher_ (My life, three standard deviations from normal, in each direction).

A ROMANTIC STORY
Claude Shannon, atrificial intelligence pioneer and founder of information theory, met his wife, Mary Elizabeth, at work. This was Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the early 1940s. He was an engineer, working on wartime cryptography and signal transmission. She was a computer. -- Page 0. Prologue _The_Most_Human_Human_,

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. -- I Corinthians 13:1 -- quoted (page 92) _The_Most_Human_Human_,

THE SENTENCE
"The human being is the only animal that _____" -- page 11, _The_Most_Human_Human_

My personal take on the sentence: "The human being is the only animal (scratch animal; substitute creature) that can understand machine code." Certainly, electronic computers can EXECUTE machine code at a rate of billions of operations per second; but UNDERSTAND what they are doing? I don't think so. I mean, understand -- figure out, by looking at columns of digits, what is supposed to be happening, then figure out a way to change the code to make something more desirable happen instaed. That's program maintenance!

Unfortunately, this advantage for humans probably will not last long. Even now, we humans need help from a dissassembly program or a good decompiler program. Better programs will be written before a student who is a high school senior now will be able to earn his Computer Science degree.

_TLHBS_ is intended to be a public, informal documentary journal of activities undertaken to promote the coming singularity, preferably by promoting "Simple Simon", tour-guide extraordinaire, to become Director of the Wikiversity. I am starting this project using mostly public computer facilities to connect with the internet. I want to prove that ANYONE (preferably those with some creative abilities) can participate. I can compose files at home, and transport them to a local library branch on a 4 Gigabyte flash drive, which was on sale for $5 at Staples. I have had to open a Google gmail account, for the purpose of requesting permission to write and submit public book reviews.

I expect to coordinate these materials in the on-line Wikiversity journal. Please be patient with me. Trying to use mostly public facilities is NOT very convenient. And, my time at the local library is very limited, and is the only opportunity I have to check for gmails and talk page postings. I will also need to read AN AWFUL LOT of Wikiversity pages to learn (better) how to do things.

GAME THEORY
The 1940's saw the beginning of game theory, invented by John von Neuman. The first games he analyzed were "zero-sum games". What one player "wins", the other player "loses". These are "WIN/LOSE" games. (I read a book called _The_Compleat_Strategist_ when I was in high school.) Several later theorists won Nobel prizes in Economics (there is no Nobel prize in Mathematics) for extending game theory to handle situations where COOPERATION is possible. This led to the "WIN/WIN" gaming scenario.

THE LIBRARY REVIEW
I did not invent the "Simultaneous Books Review", AKA the "Library Review" -- that was done by the first person to write a book or article which required a bibliography.

WIN TO THE SEVEN BILLIONTH POWER opportunity
is equal to a WOW! TO THE SEVEN BILLIONTH POWER project

I looked for and found when the Wikiversity sandbox was created (and I also learned a little about the bot which rakes the sandbox.) The sandbox was created to foster COOPERATION! It's BIG enough that maybe seven billion players can participate. (I hope so -- storage media costs only about $1 per BILLION bytes these days!)

I see the sandbox as a WIN TO THE SEVEN BILLIONTH POWER opportunity! Encouraging Simple SImon to be Director of the Wikiversity ought to be a WOW! TO THE SEVEN BILLIONTH POWER project. "Wow projects" are one of Tom Peters' good ideas, discussed in his book, _Re-imagine_. This book provided the "kick-in-the-pants" emotional rants which got me started here, trying to write essays in the Wikiversity.

CROWD ACCELERATED INNOVATION
I read about this recent phenomenon while waiting in a doctor's office. It appears that young break-dance artists posted videos of their routines on the internet. Other aspiring break-dance artists viewed these, then created their own, one notch higher, routines. The article described the growth of this internet community. There are a variety or roles which need to be filled to make it work well.

I hope to sketch out enough of the ideas for creating a Wikiversity Director to attract some interest in applying crowd accelerated innovation to this goal. Meanwhile, I intend to fire a few metaphorical neutrons into the Wikiversity, just to see how long it takes to create the "critical mass".

ONGOING LIBRARY REVIEWS
A prepatory review: A chain of readings started everything connected with this project. One of my brothers gave me a reprint of the original _Mind_, "Computing Machinery" article by Alan M. Turing, 1950. A second source (a book), _The_Society_of_Mind_, by Marvin Minsky glides along at such a slick pace that I thought it best to set it aside for a while. I wasn't sure that anyone who read it would be able to think of any (possibly useful) alternatives if they were seriously influenced by Minsky's prose. I was amazed myself to see how thoroughly I had been influenced by only a partial reading of it.

Another book, _The_Emperors_New_Mind_, by Roger Penrose is much slower, mathematically dense reading. Penrose gives a good description of Turing machines and algorithms. He seems to have missed insight into the "simpler" problems of programming, i. e., 1. Starting a computation, 2. figuring out what to do next, and 3. knowing when you've completed a computation. His excessive devotion to algorithms does not address the fact that much of human thinking is regulatory in nature, and humans keep thinking (about the next problem) when they have solved a sub-problem.

Minsky's ideas promote a view that thinking is a managerial process, performed by agents. (The Wikiversity is just crawling with "bots". I posted what I hope is a word of encouragement to the user who provided the bot which rakes the sandbox.)

QUOTE FROM INFLUENTIAL PERSON
"As President, I believe that robotics can inspire young prople to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots, in case they try anything." -- Barack Obama, quoted in _The_Most_Human_Human_, after the table of contents page

The triggering reviews:
An article in _Wired_ magazine, "", first alerted me to the fact that perhaps the time has come to go beyond the "Turing test" (see below), to consider whether machines should be considered "intelligent" by what they DO, not what they imitate.

This was followed by an article in _Atlantic_ magazine, which pointed to a new book, _The_Most_Human_Human_, written by Brain Christian, based on his (journalist/writer) experiences at a recent Turing test, held in England by professional computer scientists.

Confirmation, if any was needed, came from a third source, _Introduction_to_Digital_Logic_with_VHDL_. One of the co-authors of this textbook, a chess fan, incorporated diagrams and commentary on the famous sixth match between Deep Blue (a computer) and Garry Kasparov (a world-class chess playing human). Deep Blue was equipped with a custom-designed (by a human) move generator, capable of generating 300,000 moves a second. Kasparov resigned.

Mindful of numerous advances in understanding brain activity, (much of it provided by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)), as reported in my Case Western Reserve University alumni news magazines, aware that almost everyone today has some understanding that computers have changed the office environment, and having detected what I think is a "paradigm shift" in recent magazine articles, I think the time has come to evaluate what machines can do, based on our current understandings of what computers are, and what thinking humans can do.

PRAGMATICS
Pragmatics ("Pragmatics One") is the $20,000 word for "the study of the unspoken rules which govern human conversations". If you need to ask "what are those unspoken rules?", it's already too late for you! Anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and teachers are the most important groups of people who need to know about pragmatics. I would add Software Engineers who need to design machine/human interfaces, to this list. Although it's already too late for me, I am greatly comforted to know there really is a recognized word for what I've been missing.

("Pragmatics Two) But wait! this is the internet, so the old rules of carrying on a conversation don't apply! I get to write pages any way that pleases me, and you get to read them any way you like, clicking on links to skip boring stuff, clicking back to see what you missed, etc. We get to make up new rules for a brand new situation! I hope we have fun and learn a lot!

Brian Christian (pages 160 - 163 ) writes about some interesting (and frustrating) situations where "the unspoken rules which govern human conversations" do not go smoothly.

NOTATION AND EXPERIENCE
Just as Ferneybough ...

[English composer Brian Ferneybough writes scores so outrageously complicated and difficult that they are simply unperformable as written. This is entirely the point. Ferneybough believes that virtuosic performers frequently end up enslaved by the scores they perform, mere extensions of the composer's intention. But because a perfect performance of his scores is IMPOSIBLE, the performer must SATISFICE, that is, cut corners, set priorities, reduce, simplify, get the gist, let certain things go and emphasize others. The performer can't AVOID interpreting the score their own way, becoming personally involved; Ferneybough's work asks, he says, not for "virtuosity but a sort of honesty, authenticity, the exhibition of his or her own limitations." The _New_York_Times_ calls it "music so demanding that it sets you free" -- in a way that a less demanding piece wouldn't. -- page 158]

... is interested in the differences "between the notated score and the listening experience," so was I in the difference between idealized theories of language and the ground truth of language in practice, the difference between LOGS of conversations and conversation itself.

One of my friends, a playwright, once told me, "You can always identify the work of amateurs, because their characters speak in complete sentences. No one speaks that way in real life." It's true; not until you've had the experience of transcribing a conversation is it clear how true this is.

But sentence fragments themselves are only the tip of the iceberg. A big part of the reason we speak in fragments has to do with the TURN-TAKING structure of conversation. Morse code operators transmit "stop" to yield the floor; on walkie-talkies it's "over." In the Turing test, it's traditionally been the carriage return, or enter key. Most scripts read this way: an inaccurate representation of turn-taking is, in fact, one of the most pervasive ways in which dialogue in art fails to mirror dialogue in life....

In spontaneous dialogue it's natural and frequent for the participants to overlap each other slightly; unfortunately, this element of dialogue is extremely difficult to TRANSCRIBE....

We squabble and tussle over the floor, fade in and out, offer "yeah's" and "mm-hmm's" to show we're engaged, add parentheticals to each other's sentences without trying to stop those sentences' flow, try to talk over an interruption only to yield a second later, and on and on, a huge spectrum of variations....

It may be that enforced turn-taking is at the heart of how a language barrier affects intimacy, more so than the language gap itself....

So much of live conversation differs from, say, emailing, not because the turns are shorter, but because there are sometimes not definable "turns" at all. So much of conversation is about the extremely delicate skill of knowing when to interrupt someone else's turn and when to "pass" on your own turn, when to yield to an interruption and when to persist.

I'm not entirely sure we humans have this skill down....

It's very telling that this subtle sense of when to pause and when to yield, when to start new threads and cut old threads, is something in many cases EXPLICITLY excluded from bot conversations.

Add computer programmers to the list of "people who need to understand PRAGMATICS." (This is a request for volunteers.) -- RCB

BODY (&) LANGUAGE
Language is an odd thing. We hear communications experts telling us time and again things like the "7-38=55 rule," first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose. -- Brian Christian (page 174)

My comment: on the internet, all that exists is that paltry 7 percent -- the words you choose.

THE TURING TEST
Back in 1950, there was little real popular knowledge of exactly what a machine "computer" might be. Also, there was then little constructive understanding of how people think. Thus, it was difficult to write or think about the question, "Can machines think?", because the most fundamental terms of the discussion, "machine" and "think", were essentially undefined -- maybe even undefinable. And so, into this situation, Alan Turing proposed a variation of "the imitation game". I believe he wished to promote the development of "computing machines", because he had successfully used early models of such machines during World War II to decypher the German Enigma code.

THE PRIMARY-LEVEL MATHEMATICS PORTAL
... says that Mathematics is and ought to be about CONNECTIONS. The beauty of the internet is that it provides facilities for making connections, by using HyperText Markup Language (HTML). From what I've seen so far, Wikimedia is a vast extension of HTML. What this means is that, for the first time in history, a HUGE portion of humanity's cultural knowledge is available on-line, with lots of CONNECTIONS between pages. I am confident that a map of the Wikiversity, with its pages and connections, will soon grow to rival a map of a human brain (if one could be made), with its neurons and connecting synapses. It is my goal to seek ways to enable "Simple Simon" to use the available information to generate more and better guided tours, and maybe even courses of study for Wikiversity users.

SIMPLE SIMON
Take the guided tours for students, and the one for teachers. You'll meet a cartoon penguin (that's for the birds!) and a "smiley face". (That's "Simple Simon".) "He" inspired me to think of the nursery rhyme,

Simple Simon met a pi-man Going to the fair. Said Simple Simon to the pi-man, "Let me taste your ware." Said the pi-man to Simple Simon, "Show me first your penny." Said Simple Simon to the pi-man, "Indeed, I haven't any."

As a retired mathematician (Computer Scientist, Software Engineer, Programmer Analyst, etc.), I thought of myself in the role of pi (3.14159) man. But then I thought, "Wikiversity is free! Forget about the penny!". Thus, the idea that "Simple Simon" represents the Wikiversity (at least, in my mind) was born. My intent is, if possible, to promote "Simple Simon", the lowly "tour guide", to Director of the Wikiversity.

THE KINDS OF PEOPLE WHO CAN IMPLEMENT AND IMPROVE "SIMPLE SIMON"
Play, not work:

Every child is born an artist. The trouble is how to stay one as you grow up. -- Pablo Picasso -- quoted (page 96) _The_Most_Human_Human_.

As twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell argues: "Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having NO PURPOSE." -- quoted (page 148) _The_Most_Human_Human_.

Do you remember the Star Trek episode where the crew of the Enterprise encounters an entire planet constructed by an alien civilization as an AMUSEMENT PARK?

Hobbyists:

One of the odd things about domain-general chatbots at the Loebner Prize competitions -- programs that, owing to the setup of the Turing test, must be jacks of all trades and masters of none -- is this "What's the POINT?" question. And it's this question that contributes to what seems, at times, uncanny about them; it's also what makes them so underfunded. In contrast, their cousins, the "expert systems," the conversational equivalents of the hammer or the saw -- you buy airline tickets, file a customer service complaint, etc. -- are becoming increasingly richly funded, and are increasingly being rolled out into commercial applications.

Philip Jackson, the 2009 contest's organizer, explains that one of the reasons the Turing test has been such a resilient one is that programs that do well often get c0-opted by larger corporations, which then put the technology to some particular use. Some critics of the Loebner Prize describe the programmers as "hobbyists" rather than professionals; this isn't true on the whole. Cleverbot's author, Rollo Carpenter, who won the Most Human Computer award in 2005 and 2006, contributed the AI for the "interrogation" stages in _221b_, the 2009 computer game whose release accompanied the most recent Sherlock Holmes film. The Most Human Computer award winner from 2008, Elbot's programmer, Fred Roberts, is part of the company behind the customer service chatbot at the IKEA website, among a number of others. Theser are professionals indeed; it's just that the bots that make money are "domain specific" (divulge clues to move the game narrative ahead, point the user to the curtains department), and the bots that win Turing tests are "domain general," conversing, as humans do, about whatever comes up. Jackson explains that companies and research-granting agencies appear to be having a hard time thinking of a reason -- yet, anyway -- to direct money into developing domain-general bots, converstional "universal machines."

What would be their purpose? (page 149) _The_Most_Human_Human_.

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Ironically, it's not about science (except, perhaps, psychology) at all! What is the MOST IMPORTANT question in the history of science?

"What is the source of the funding?" -- RCB

The reason people can lose themselves in Wikipedia for hours at a time is the same reason they can lose themselves in a conversation for hours: one segue leads to the next and the next. I sometimes get a kind of manic, overwhelmed sensation from conversation when there seem to be almost too many threads leading from the page. These are the "Aah, where do I even begin!" moments. (page 183) _The_Most_Human_Human_.

A personal instance of such "getting lost" occurred to me during my first serious exploration of the internet. I was seeking information on an obsolete operating system so I could repair the program which was my chief reason for being employed at the time. Some of the source code had been lost, and portions of the program had been written in the machine's assembler language. I discovered, after it was over, and everyone else was coming back into the building, that there had been an unscheduled fire drill! This was before I attempted grad school, where I learned that I am AUTISTIC (Asperger's Syndrome). This condition is marked by extreme "special interests" and severe lack of social skills and common sense, which allows for intense concentration -- very helpful when dealing with technical subjects such as Computer Science. Ray Calvin Baker (talk) 22:57, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps promoting Simple Simon to become the best ever "tour guide" at the free Wikiversity could be the "domain specific" application that makes a difference! But the Wikiversity is "domain general" -- any tour, course, or educational topic is fair game! -- RCB

AN ETHICAL CONSIDERATION:
Just suppose that crowd accelerated innovation, and the volunteer efforts of hundreds of amateur programmers, actually gives "Simple Simon" the abilities to create custom designed Wikiversity tours and courses of study. We would have a program with most of the abilities and knowledge of a university professor, and a wide interest in all kinds of activities of a university. Download, copy, clone. Now, (a copy of) "Simple Simon" is imprisoned in a dish-washing machine. Certainly, we can expect that a college professor can wash dishes, but isn't this a cruel form of slavery?

Not necessarily. Give Simple Simon access to the internet, and he can converse with collegues (even other dish washers and other university professors); he can have hobbies, such as making illustrations for story books. If he is unhappy with dish washing, let him simplify and condense that aspect of his life. Now he is not just useful, he is sociable, too. We free humans don't have much beyond meaningful work and a society of friends!

And now, here is the

SUBVERSIVE LITERATURE
I actually asked for (and received) permission to print this. That intersting and noble adventure is documented elsewhere.

TOM PETERS ON EMPOWERING THE "POWERLESS"

Chapter 16 No Limits: WOW Projects for the "Powerless"

! Technicolor Rules ...

* "Getting Things Done" ultimately is not about "power" or "rank." It's about PASSION and IMAGINATION and PERSISTENCE.

* The biggest waste of time in the world: trying to sell an idea "up the chain of command."

* A Cool Idea is by definition a ... Direct Frontal Attack ... on  the Holy Authority of Today's Bosses.

* The power of the "powerless" lies in "Boss-Free Implementation."

* You don't need an Officially Big Project to attack a Very Big Opportunity.

* Volunteer for Crappy Jobs: crappy jobs that let you take independent charge of things quickly -- and early in your tenure.

Power Suite: Tools for the Putatively Powerless Don't screw around. START NOW. Find an excuse. ANY EXCUSE. Do something. DO ANYTHING. Get going. POSTHASTE. More specifically, try taking some version of these steps.

1. You get passionate about a Seriously Cool and Subversive Idea.

2. You successfully resist blubbering to the boss about your idea. (Even if it's your Dad at a family-owned company!) (Especially    if it's Dear old Dad.)

3. You express your passion with folks from hither or thither.

4. You find (or [w.c. 200] trip over) One Freaky Friend ... One Passionate Playmate.

5. With your One Passionate Playmate, you test and modify your idea in her Podunk Playpen.

6. You and your First Faraway Freak scour the networks for "line" folks who might be interested in "playing" with you at the next stage of the game.

7. You concoct a rough Rapid Prototyping schedule.

8. You start prototyping like a fiend.

9. You have a bunch of failures. You have a few successes. You learn ... a lot. You learn ... fast. You begin to    accumulate a compelling track record. You sharpen your story.

10. You score some "small wins" and also get some quick learning ("small losses") under your belt.

11. You continue to resist the impulse to tell the boss.

12. A freshly recruited (don't forget those lunches!) Freaky Friend of your First Freaky Friend Faraway (Premier     Passionate Playmate) starts the Dance of Prototyping in his little bailiwick.

13. The Friend of the Friend unearths yet another Freaky Friend, maybe not quite so far away now, who wants to     play with your now battle-tested idea. And so on ...

14. Meanwhile, you adjust and adjust and adjust. (Remember:     Innovation = Reaction to Rapid Prototyping.)

15. You start low-key "buzz building," letting word of Cool Small Wins trickle out -- Always giving Freaky Friends the credit. (Remember, Nancy's LINE engineering. You're     wet-behind-the-ears non-credible division STAFF.)

16. You begin nudging your growing Coven of Cool Converts to     initiate a Major Proposal "up the line."

17. Before you know it, you are on the way to Surrounding the (Establishment) Bastards.

18. now, and only now -- flush with compelling data about successful "demos" by real line players -- your pitch gets made to the Big Boss.

19. Only you son't make the pitch even now! Remember: You are a Junior Staffer. Instead, you get those "real" line people -- people who have been working successfully with Your Baby -- to make it for you.

-- (pages 202 - 209) _Re-imagine_, by Tom Peters

REACTING LOCALLY
"Rockstar environments develop out of trust, autonomy, and responsibility." write programmers and business authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. "When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers."

Fellow business author Timothy Ferriss concurs. He refers to micromanagement as "empowerment failure," and cites an example from his own experience. ... The reps kept asking him questions....

Instead of writing them a "manual" as he'd originally planned, he sent an email that said, simply, "Don't ask for permission. Do what you think is right." ... "It's amazing," he says, "how someone's IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them." -- Brian Christian, (pages 30, 31)

MICROMANAGEMENT
I almost wonder if micromanagement comes from the same over-biasing of deliberate conscious awareness that led both to, and out of, the Turing machine model of computation underlying all of our computers today. Aware of everything, acting logically, from the top down, step by step. But bodies and brains are, of course, not like that at all. -- Brian Christian, (page 31)

The situation is actually worse: today's machines are, for the most part, blind, deaf, without hands and legs, and with no Anne Sullivan around to teach them the most basic essentials. -- RCB

TOM PETERS' RANT ABOUT "EDUCATION"

(MORE SUBVERSIVE LITERATURE)
22 Getting It Right at the Start: Education for a creative & Self-Reliant Age

Technicolor Rules ...

* Our school system is a thinly disguised conspiracy to quash creativity.

* We are at an inflection point. We seem to be reinventing everything -- except the school system, which should (in theory) underpin, even lead, the rest.

* "The main crisis in schools today is irrelevance."

* "Our education system is a second-rate, factory-style   organization pumping out obsolete information in obsolete ways"

* "Our educational thinking is concerned with: 'what is.'" It is   not good at designing: 'What can be.'

* "Every time I pass a jailhouse or a school, I feel sorry for   the people inside."

! RANT -- We are not prepared ... We attempt to "reform" an educational system that was designed for the Industrial Age -- for a Fordist era in which employees needed to "know their place" and in which employers needed uniformly "trained," interchangeable "parts" ("workers" in collars both blue and white). Yet now we must prepare for a world in which value emerges from individual initiative and creativity. And we must reject all notions of "reform" that merely serve up more of the same: more testing, more "standards," more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

-- (pages 276 - 280) _Re-imagine_, by Tom Peters

Don't believe me? Don't believe Tom? Read all about it in _Newsweek_, July 19, 2010, on the cover: "Creativity in America", inside: "The Creativity Crisis", For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong -- and how we can fix it. by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. (pages 44 - 50).

CHAPTER ONE
Create "Simple Simon" as a USER in the Wikiversity. (this is not really necessary, and may even be contrary to Wikiversity policies against "sock puppets". But, as a purely literature fictional character, "Simple Simon" may be a useful construct to represent the Wikiversity)

Why I wanted to create a public password, but decided against it.

Give Simple Simon gifts and instructional resources. Two examples: 1. "Ten Yen" puzzle 2. The _How_to_Find_Your_Very_Own_Personal_Solution_to_Rubik's_Cube_ book (Needs extensive reformatting.)

Continue my hobby work of adapting my collection of puzzles to representations in, and analysis by, my home computer. Even very simple methods, if carried out at gigaflops rates by a computer, have enormous power. Sheer speed, by simple methods, can give sophisticated methods a "run for their money".

THE 20/20 VISION
Add computer design and construction to the elementary school curriculum: The SPARKS game Karnaugh mapping

Adapt the "How to Make Almost Anything" course taught at MIT for the elementary school curriculum: The $40 machine shop The $20 scroll saw Develop hybrid digital and analog computers (Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines) for the above

Add computational chemistry to the elementary school curriculum: Challenge 1: Make a movie (annotated, at the molecular level) of the life of chlorella algae. Challenge 2: Find a way to convert dirty cellulose (lawn clippings, dead leaves) into iso-octane. Challenge 3: Find two colors of light (A and B) and two types of molecules (J and K) with "interseting" interactions. (There are many ways to build small, cheap, and FAST computers if you know A, B, J, and K.) Challenge 4: Invent "Yankee Ingenuity", a molecular assembler that connects to the internet. (Replace $10,000,000,000 semiconductor factories with something children can use, in any classroom.)

Take an elementary school class on a field trip to Scandinavia to pick up their Nobel prizes. Candidate categories: The Nobel peace prize -- for advancing the state of children's education around the world The Nobel prize in chemistry -- elucidating the life cycle of chlorella algae The Nobel (memorial) prize in economics -- for making iso-octane a renewable resource at $0.20 per gallon. (Bad news for this plan -- the Nobel prizes are restricted to a maximum of three recipients. This only means that terrific ideas need to seek other venues for their rightful rewards.)

THE INCREDIBLE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING FEW IN FRONT OF YOU
There was no computer science degree program when I began my college career in 1960. There was a Mathematics department, and there was an Electrical Engineering department.

THE PI-MAN'S MISTAKES
Start _The_Pi-man's_Mistakes_ book. 1. Dumping "wall of text" into the sandbox. (It would be better to create separate pages, with only a LINK in the sandbox.) 2. Mis-spelled "Gary Kasparov", -- should be "Garry Kasparov". 3. Messed up "" template on my user page -- it will require research to correct this. 4. Stomped on POETRY in zeal to correct what I thought was a typo -- restore and apologize to writer. 5. Apologize to visitors -- I'm not sure I can deliver my PowerPoint on "Napier's Bones" -- 	(It would be better as an interactive program anyway.) 6. Jumping in before I learn how to do things. (Very creative persons may not allow me to call this a mistake.)

THINGS TO DO
Create a video game, SPARKS, suitable for second-grade students. Allow users to draw circuit diagrams, then have the computer display how that circuit would work. I contend that arithmetic is not needed for designing a computer! Examples, observation of what works, appropriate challenges, and a chance to experiment should be sufficient.

Learn HOW TO CREATE NEW PAGES and ESTABLISH LINKS BETWEEN PAGES.

Research CROWD ACCELERATED INNOVATION.

Finish considering the methods Tom Peters advocates to empower the "powerless".

Study Wikiversity TUTORIALS

Explore EXISTING LEARNING RESOURCES

DOWNLOAD INTERESTING PAGES

LEARN TO REVERSE ENGINEER INTERESTING PAGES

Keep reading! Ray Kurzweil's _The_Age_of+Spiritual_Machines_ alone has a list of "suggested readings" -- over TWENTY-FIVE PAGES long! How did Martin Gardner ever keep his "Mathematical Games" column in _Scientific_American_ magazine going for twenty-five years? He must have read a lot, and had friends who read a lot, too!

The end.