"That guy is very clever. I bet if he were working for the good
guys, he'd be in jail by now."
CPTWG and BPDG were reasonably interesting, and it was nice to
travel with Fred, who put up with all sorts of legal questions
about things related and unrelated to CPTWG.
BPDG is on a fast timeline to do things which affect many
interests. Their work needs public documentation and public
scrutiny quickly.
On the planes, I read most of Software, Shamans, and
Spleens (Boyle) and Entertaining Ourselves to
Death (Postman). Both are full of fascinating anecdotes.
Postman identifies particular things which are wrong with TV,
but suggests that the problem isn't necessarily the content of
TV programming as much as the expectations and habits we get
from TV (such as a short attention span and a difficulty
in following subtleties). He tells some amazing stories about
the implications of literacy in the past. For example:
The first of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and
Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858, in
Ottowa, Illinois. Their arrangement provided that Douglas
would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an
hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut
Lincoln's reply. This debate was considerably shorter
than those to which the two men were accustomed. In
fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of
their encounters had been much lengthier and more exhausting.
For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois,
Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln,
by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came,
he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that
he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that
Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He
proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner,
and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. The
audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as
Lincoln had outlined.
(Entertaining Ourselves to Death, p. 44)
On the plane coming back, a passenger got into an argument with
a flight attendant (as the plane was about to depart the gate).
The passenger ended up swearing at the flight attendant, which
made the flight attendant decide the kick the passenger off
the flight. As soon as the passenger heard that,
he got even more upset. "Why do I have to leave? I just want
to go to Oakland! Just take me to Oakland!"
The flight attendant said again that the passenger had to leave,
and the passenger said he wasn't going anywhere. Immediately,
the flight attendant called out to another attendant, who
radioed the gate and asked for the police. Within about a minute,
a police officer and two baggage handlers had boarded the plane.
"Sir, you have to leave the plane right now." "Why do I have
to leave? I just want to go to Oakland." "The airline doesn't
want you on this flight, so you'd better finish your conversation
with them outside, at the gate." "I'm not going anywhere. Why
do I have to leave?" "If the airline says that you're off the
flight, sir, you're off the flight, and you're going to need to leave
the aircraft right now."
"Can we have backup units to gate 4B? Backup units to 4B,
please." "Roger, we're on the way."
"Now, how do you want to handle this? If you'll get off now,
it's going to be a lot easier than if you wait until they come."
"I'm not going anywhere, I just want to go to Oakland. Why
can't they just take me up to Oakland?"
The passenger and the police officer continued to argue for about
three minutes, and then the police officer picked up his
radio again: "Can we have our backup units on 4B right away
please?"
Within a few seconds, two more armed police officers and
a National Guardsman in combat fatigues carrying an automatic
rifle came running down the aisle. The first police
officer pointed at the passenger and said something like "This
man needs to be off the plane right now"; when the passenger
saw the National Guardsman, he said something like "OK, I'm
coming" and stood up. As soon as he reached the aisle, the first
police officer grabbed his arm; the passenger began to
struggle, and the officer became much more forceful. In a
quick motion (like a magic trick, as they say), one of the other
police officers handcuffed the passenger behind his back (even
though nobody had been able to see the handcuffs), and all
three officers grabbed hold of him. The Guardsman led the way
as the police hustled the man off of the plane (and then one
of them, or maybe the baggage handler, started gathering up
his carry-on items).
That was the biggest adventure of the day, I suppose, much
greater than hearing and inquiring about the various DRM schemes
which were being peddled or hashed out in the Renaissance
Hotel.
Some book on technology quoted a few of these lines from Blake:
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep
I was thinking a lot about "single vision" over the past couple of
weeks. (The book emphasized the "Newtons sleep" part more than the
"single vision" part. Blake was extraordinarily unhappy with
Newton's vision of the world as a deterministic dynamical system.
I remember being excited when I first understood that vision, in
a high school physics class -- to us Newton was a hero almost as
much as to Blake he was a villain.)
I wrote earlier this month in a brief letter (the second brief
letter I sent around the new year) that I used to have the gift
of single vision more strongly than it seems I do right now. I
did conceive it as a gift, where Blake considered it a curse. But
now my single vision seems to be slipping away from me, mainly
against my will.
If I should again write an epic poem to match "Existence and
Uniqueness", maybe it would be called "Loss of Generality".
(I wrote a poem with that title in June of last year, but it
wasn't particularly good, or particularly long.)
Don Marti has a plan to make Google
searches for
"unisys" point searchers to the
Burn All GIFs campaign
web site, which protests the LZW patent.
One tactic to do this is to get people to make links like
Unisys instead of
the more conventional Unisys.
Another possibility, which seems vaguely less manipulative, would
be to write things like
Unisys has gotten the
U.S. government to give it proprietary control over part of
discrete mathematics or
help fight the Unisys
patent on LZW by making the GIF format obsolete or
beware of license fees
charged by Unisys on the GIF format or
software patentees like
Unisys threaten free speech and innovation or
Unisys lawyers say that
sharing and co-operation are "not the American way".
But in general I've been very wary of this approach; it's
close in some sense to what Altavista called "spamming the
index" (although I'm certainly not creating fraudulent web
sites in order to boost something's popularity, as a few porn
sites have done). It seems that it might undermine the
reliability and accuracy of Google, and that reliability
and accuracy is very important.
On the other hand, the enforcement of the LZW patent,
and criticisms of the patent, are real and salient facts
about Unisys. Don said that his opinion about Unisys
was as relevant to web searchers as the opinion of Unisys
itself about Unisys, and it's hard for me to dispute that.
Speaking of Google, various challenges have been floating around
the Crackmonkey list -- one was to find a set of three words,
or two words, which are "common English words" and which together
yield no search results at all. The new challenge is to find
a set of three words (I would say "not including proper nouns")
which yield a single search result which was written by you.
Or two words. I found "suadere superstitiores", searching
for which on Google leads you to
my discussion
of "sex".
She wasn't satisfied with hearing that it was the radiation symbol,
because she didn't have a feel for what radiation is. That one sort of
floored me, because radiation is one of my "basis concepts" that I use
to explain other things. (Yes, I think of my scientific knowledge as
being spanned by a basis set of conceptual eigenvectors. The basis set
idea is also one of my "basis concepts". Yes, I also know that I'm
weird.)
(Steve's
diary, via Sumana's diary)
Subterfugue is great!
It is a Linux program which allows you to intercept and arbitrarily
rewrite or alter the system calls made by any other program. It's
"strace meets expect" -- it's scriptable in Python. So you can
write sandboxes and you can write scripts and very much more. I
spent a while playing with it and will probably spend longer soon.
BPDG rather abruply reached public attention on Thursday with
a
CNet article (which has reached slashdot) closely followed by the
EFF BPDG overview (which I wrote on Tuesday night but which
we didn't get completely finished until Thursday evening).
