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Welcome to the Cloudchaser wiki! #Introduction#

Cloudchaser wants to bring all the most valuable content online to your fingertips, customized to your interests and in real-time. It's not going to happen all at once. I'm not too shy to admit the goal is utopian. That is, if you truly understand it. Cloudchaser will mean different things to different people. To a person like me, the goal was to find the best "stuff" online as quickly as possible. And not only that, but for the process and experience to be meaningful and fun. "Stuff" mainly meant music to me. Once I finally got into using Twitter (Universe shine upon them) it became clear to me that a genuine connection to really awesome stuff - and, how about it? the people who made it happen - is just a graph theoretical hop, skip, and a jump away. Wait, did I lose you there? Probably not; you likely know more about about this sort of stuff than I do. Or maybe you don't; that's OK. Some people see the word "graph" and think of something like this:

In mathematics (wait, wasn't that mathematics? So, OK, formal math, whatever that means), graphs refer to something more like this:

Or this:

Or this:

So you see, graphs are just networks. Almost everybody has some intuitive understanding of networks because they arise so often in our daily lives. The brain is apparently something like one, though that's a rabbit hole I cannot say I have the intellectual stomach for as of yet (though, if you geek out on that sort of stuff like I do, peep this: ) In any case, the sense in which the word "network" is most used in common speech refers to social networking. We have friends and family, and they know each other to some degree, and onward and outward, and the dynamics of this "network", this widespread linking of people apparently puts any two people together in 6 jumps or less (you've heard the saying).

Far more crucially, they affect our lives in ways we would like to manage but usually cannot control. Maybe it's the try-hard friend from college getting you a job so you can ditch your dead-end Ph.D five years later. That's the one everyone likes. But maybe it's an all-white frat keeping on with their incessant subtle demonizing of minority students, keeping them out of campus power positions and perpetuating stereotypes throughout the unwitting student body, and preying on its increasing awakened women, while the administration turns a deaf ear, because daddy is a trustee. Totally hypthotetical scenario, but just saying these things could go either way.

Especially when it comes to taste, or "preference", as some will. People like things for often misplaced, irrational, or downright wrong reasons, and then there's that nasty gut reaction we get whenever someone likes something we don't, or vice versa, even when there's no violation of any law, code or ethic on either side. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but the point is because people operate largely in networks, small perturbations in biased preference, intentional or not, can get ahead of itself and infect society, like a disease or a virus. When I think "viral" I think Riff Raff, but what if we thought of all human social behavior or affect as a meme. Memes get annoyinng, don't they? Sometimes they entirely replace people's personalities. If we're strictly talking internet memes, that was the MO at my alma mater, Caltech. From music and fashion sense to manners of speech (I'm going to say some people went TOO FAR with the latter on this, especially in certain fine houses, but you can research that yourself), but every student I met defined her or himself with relation to content on the Internet, to some degree.

Maybe you say that's a lot of college kids - yeah, I'm hoping so. It will at some point be, well, a lot of every kind of "kid". And we're all kids. We like to play. We like to have fun and we like for things to go right. The vast majority of us don't wish harm on one another. Those that do, probably want or even need something they can't have. In any case, pretty much all of us would like for things to go down fair and square, from the start. Everyone should have the best shot possible at doing it up. Being the best they can be. Self-actualizing, and all that. Whatever you call it, clearly it would benefit us all if, for whatever we've got, we optimizing what each person can gain, for her and himself, and the rest of us.

But what do we got? Let's go back to the networks. I lot of you probably got the idea that I thought social networking was bad and aren't even reading this. Then again, if I thought SN was all bad, why would I be building this app? People don't have all day to make decisions, and things are doing down in the meantime. You've gotta go with what you've get from the start, and how could anyone really know what to do with it. Usually it's our family, or some synonym thereof, but not always; people go down so many different paths from birth I couldn't write a catch-all, but across nations and cultures there is also much consistency in societal structure. Or is that even true? Is that a fluke? I can't seems to imagine a society or person who would think that having skills and being sharp in the mind is not essentially a good thing. Edge cases come into play with that statement that may not make it the most politically correct, but it's interesting that I'm trying to have this conversation about graphs but all these more touching subjects come into play. These traits have appeal because we generally detest suffering, and more than that, would like to grow and prosper and keep the good feelings rolling.

In order to avoid suffering and rather ball outrageous, certain problems need solving. In economics (the actual topic of conversation thus far, with the connection to graphs is coming immediately), we'd like to somehow think of Person in a vacuum of nature to analyze what her first preferences and actions would be, and how these would systemize her decision-making process over time. But of course, that would be fruitless in the first place, because every person is born into whatever material circumstance, and some might argue that what happens after that is all some quantum time evolving state whose say we have in is flimsy at best.

This brings me to another half-baked intellectual obsession I must confess, which is the application of network theory to, well, everything. Humans aren't the only things that organize, obviously. Physicists have pondered the organization of the universe with the state of the human being mostly a trifling concern. Networks are the most intuitive formal characterization of experience I've come across. There are entities - atoms, people, objects, ideas - and relations between them. In order to characterize these relationships, many incredible young men and women have thought very hard for very long. Some say we do it because it's good for humanity to know that stuff, to make life better for us all or at least those that "deserve" or "earn" it. Others say people just get off on whatever they get off on, and a few of us have done great good but most of us just live and die. People simply want to continue eating, heating, breeding and seeing their sons and daughters live good lives and all the same things that drove anything since ever, so it all goes on. Lots of shitshows, yeah, but it goes on.

The thing I think the world will someday realize is, computers work really with networks. Again, redundant, but we haven't really taken a step back and asked ourselves, "What are we going to do with the Web?" Because, c'mon, aren't you tired of the bullshit? From telling the homeless man you have no money and having to think, what happened to that guy, to knowing that they best necklace designer, the best green tea, the best new gadget or the best new experience is often buried deep in oblivion or not even created yet because the right hook ups weren't exploited from day 1? It may be some time before virtually everyone on earth has direct access to computer, but if people can trust computers to do as they are told, then our devices can facilitate revolutions.

But what should we tell computers to do? Well, keep us alive would be nice. They already do that, with pacemakers and such. Then again, perhaps a query into the genetic history of the patient's family might have detected a risk of heart disease, and coordinate a health plan such that he avoids the heart attack. With a graver risk, maybe the parents decide not to conceive the patient at all. These are just the things I ponder.

We also use computers, I assume, to ensure we produce the proper amount of food. Here "proper" usually refers to profit maximizing according to commodity derivatives and futures (don't ask me), but from what I understand, if we don't produce enough food to feed everybody we easily could, and we waste a lot of food. I'm not talking about half-eaten food, though if I could zip away my leftovers to a malnourished Asian kid I would, or really wherever the system said it needed to go, cuz I was full. I'm talking about fresh grown food, straight up burned by produce companies with surplus. Crazy idea, allowing people to starve when there exists a configuration such that everyone eats properly is not only morally objectionable but strictly suboptimal. Crazy, because this may not have been true at all time in all places but I judge that now we do so at the detriment of each and every human on Earth.

But it's about everything in the Universe, not just every human on earth. Any time things don't go as well as they could have it's a travesty. How well could things have gone, though? How do we measure this? Well, it's something like the best we could have gotten out of everything needing getting done, constrained by all the time and labor and resources we had to execute.