fractalnavel

well, maybe not quite that ultimate.  that would be the implantable holographic blah blah blah thing.

no, i'm just looking for something with [google search] “phone pda gps wifi camera bluetooth satellite video broadband windows”.  that search gets over 100k hits.  basically i'm just hitting all the buzzword pages.  but, except for maybe the sat phone (voice & data) part, i'm pretty sure there are devices out there that fit the bill. 

as for form factor, there are good reasons for everything from phone size to palm / pda to tablet.  a pda seems a nice compromise, as long as various bluetooth peripherals are available.  i'm thinking personal-area-network here.  also, all the capabilities need to be built-in; i don't want to have to play mega-man or what-have you, swapping cards in and out to get what i want done, but not being able to do it all simultaneously.

and really nice would be a sports/recreation shock/water proof capability, with additional sensors for temp, pressure, depth?, etc.  ooh, now i am dreaming !

ok, what else am i missing in the feature wish list ?

anyway, what brought this on is my old phone's battery dying.  i stopped at a store yesterday, and a new battery is $50.  if you can find one; the phone's pretty old by such standards.  now, i could get a nice new phone for that amount - along with another two year commitment.  but to stay with my current carrier and kep my phone number, i can't take advantage of some of the rebates and service plan improvements - !  what a world.  so that means i need to consider other carriers as well, and i figured i may as well look in the wider mobile device market too.

so, any suggestions ?  there's a huge number of choices.  i thought that perhaps requiring all the bells & whistles would narrow it down, but the snr sucks.

this little gem popped up in my random links feed.  i last ran into it in 2001; now, some four years later, there's an additional couple dozen articles.

the idea is that each article is to be updated to keep up with state-of-knowledge in its topic, which is a great idea compared with the usual static content journals and books.  however, it appears updates have been few and far between.

still, it may be worth looking into these in more depth, since they are reviews of their respective topics, which tend to have much more context than your average original research article.

they provide email and rss as modes of keeping up, but as updates and new articles seem to occur approximately monthly rss is somewhat overkill (especially since the feed is all articles - “not clear on the concept” is my conclusion).

linked from that site at some point is a project with authoring tools whose intent is to expose semantic mathematical content to the web via mathml, etc.  so, i'm thinking, you know how textbooks have equation numbers that then get somewhat annoyingly referred to for the next n-hundred pages ?  well, what if there was only one instance of each equation on the web, referred to by anything else as needed - ?  and that's really what mathematics is. 

but how much semantic content can be contained in the set of all strings n symbols in length ?  taking n to be 1, which is the (irreducible?) set of symbols themselves, the answer is “all”. (irreducible? maybe not; one could consider the physiological perception/cognition of the symbols themselves as constructed by shape, etc.) 

“all”.  seems silly.  but consider higher n's.  what if n was book length ?  call it at n-symbol.  a library contains a tiny subset of n-symbol space.  the full (large but finite) space contains much of what appears to be nonsense (but is only awaiting context), and much of apparent redundancy.

yet even books have a limit as to what they (individually) contain, just as with 1-symbols, or the more manageable intermediate, say, 20-symbols.  n-symbols must be combined to gain further new information (or even to make sense of existing “information”).  here we have m*n-symbols (trivially, n-symbols are n*1-symbols, etc.).  now this combination process is not finite.  effectively, novel semantic content can be contained only in the entirety of ever larger books, made up of known sub-pieces.

rambling.  i ran into jorge luis borges “the library” recently, and i started to consider the possibilities.

ok, what of the symbol set itself ?  that direction leads into information theory.  the requirement is for at least two contrasting symbols - ? [actually, strings of single symbols of varying length can be considered contrasting symbols, but this seems to be a non-atomic construction]  and that seems to be a necessary and sufficient criteria.  00010010011110101....., that sort of thing.  is the degree of contrast important [ililliiillill] ?  assuming the signal to noise ratio (snr) is adequate, probably not.  although, there really is no such thing as “noise” ...

which leads to two final fumblings: one very subjective, the other (hopefully) at the objective extreme.

subjective / psychological: the human conceptual machinery, pattern recognition, almost arbitrarily assigns “meaning” to perceptions.  and “knowledge” is largely a feeling of familiarity (which is itself a relative learned reaction).  there are limits then to a human sense of knowledge in this n-symbol semantic sense as well; we can only comprehend in toto n below some threshhold.  meta-symbols (with higher density of semantic content) are no help, because it's the total base irrediucible semantic content that is at issue.  however, that doesn't stop us humans from forming the illusion of knowledge to whatever satisfaction we desire and accept in our consensual reality.  however, the full semantic content is missing, in an information-theoretical sense.

objective/physical: contrasts [and reference] ? how about any sense of relation ?  as in a finely-grained spacetime sense.  there is information encoded in the set of all possibile relations between “points” (events).  a “particle” would be a set of “points” in conjunction with certain state information - mass, charge, spin, etc.  but that is illusory.  state is information about relations.  considering particles themselves as spacetime defects or structures, again we are talking (“internal”) relations.  relations betwen what ?  there is no “thing” there.  of course, this is what quantum physics is about as well.  in terms of semantic content, then, there are no “symbols”, the information is contained in relations, local and global.

so it's not the symbols that are important, it's their combination.  and there is always information present, determined by context.  more relations.  no entropy.  that seems to be a peculiarity arising from our own selective assumptions.  still useful for what it is, but misleading in the end.

speaking of entropy, one final silly thought: i wonder about spacetime topology.  entropy seems to contradict continuity.  i'll leave it at that.