So I went down to CPTWG in Los Angeles
today (March 3). According to Southwest's web site, it costs $97 each way
if you go down and back on March 3.
However, a round-trip with an overnight stay is much cheaper ($39
each way). If I went down on March 2 and back on March 3, or down
on March 3 and back on March 4, it would be $39 each way.
So Shari had asked "When is the next meeting?".
I booked a round-trip OAK-LAX flight leaving the morning of March
3 and returning the evening of April 14. I also got a round-trip
LAX-OAK flight leaving the evening of March 3 and returning the
morning of April 14.
So this morning, I flew out of Oakland on a long (over a month
long!) business trip. This evening, I flew out of Los Angeles
on a second long (over a month long!) business trip.
My business trips will run concurrently for over a month (as I
just said). Then, on the morning of April 14, I'll fly home to Los
Angeles from my trip to Oakland. That evening, I'll fly home to
Oakland from my trip to Los Angeles.
Sure enough, Southwest charged $39 per flight segment for the flights
I booked this way. But if I'd booked a pair of OAK-LAX round trips
(which would have me departing on the same physical airplanes at exactly
the same times on exactly the same dates), it would have been $97 per
flight segment, or up to $232 more.
I'm sure this trick has a name.
Cory and I had a lovely time recently meeting Charles Brownstein,
who runs the Comic Book Legal
Defense Fund. CBLDF (based in my hometown of Northampton,
MA!) is one of the country's recently founded civil liberties
organizations.
Well, OK, it's older than EFF. And like EFF, it's really stepped
up its litigation and membership efforts recently. The Fund and
ABFFE are the only non-profit
organizations I know that defend first amendment rights specifically
in a particular medium without also being an industry or trade
association. (I guess you can say EFF does the same for the
Internet. It's funny now to think of the Internet as a whole as
a "medium".)
Comics and video games are (like software, I might say) not most
people's prototypical examples of protected speech. (I'm thinking
in terms vaguely reminiscent of Lakoff here, but not in a
rigorous way.) Brownstein told me about many laws that are still
on the books that specifically target comics: some prohibit entirely
the depiction of particular subjects or points of view! A lot of
people have now heard about the extensive government and industry
censorship of comics earlier in this century, but it turns out that
some of the laws were never actually repeealed. Now the defense
of the video games and software will have to be left to others, but
you can do something for the comics by
making a donation
to CBLDF. It's a worthy cause.
I had minor surgery on my left big toe on Thursday of last week. (The
present discussion is about psychology and won't include any gory
details!)
One really remarkable result was that I had my first clear personal
experience of confabulation. Confabulation is a
term for the mind's creation of false-but-plausible explanations
for behavior, especially false memories that replace missing
memories.
For example, someone who's lost memories might make up other
memories to replace them (and then believe that the confabulated
memories were real). People who've suffered from some kinds of
paralysis, had split brain surgery, or (in a smaller number of
cases, as I understand it) people who've had amputations all
may sometimes confabulate explanations for how their body is
behaving. Someone will ask them why they did something, or
why they didn't do something, and so on. And the patients may
respond with a completely wrong story that they completely
believe. I don't have a good example of that, but I believe
Oliver Sacks and others have written about quite a few cases.
The other situation I know where people may confabulate is
posthypnotic suggestion. Supposedly people acting on or
influenced by posthypnotic suggestions will naturally come up
with rationalizations for their behavior that may have nothing
to do with hypnosis (and may not have been part of the
suggestion at all). But they don't think of themselves as
rationalizing at all. They think they're just providing
the correct explanation of what happened, of what they just
did. (Douglas Adams has a somewhat over-the-top example of
confabulation with hypnosis in one of his Dirk Gently books.)
My impression is that a key element of confabulation is that it is
seamless and unconscious. That is, a confabulator
isn't struggling to lie, or making any conscious effort to lie; and
the confabulation is indistinguishable from a true memory or
a correct explanation.
Here's how my confabulation went. My toe had been anesthetized with
a local anesthetic. When the procedure was over, I stood up and
started talking to Zack. I discussed with him whether or not I
could walk comfortably. "Well, I really don't want to put any weight
on my toe", I said. "I probably could, but I would rather keep all
my weight off it and keep holding it in the air."
Having said this, I looked down at my foot and found that my toe
was resting on the ground, and that I was already putting weight on
it. I had misinterpreted the anesthesia as a deliberate decision
on my part to hold my toe off the ground -- but of course I was
doing no such thing, and I had made no such deliberate decision.
In fact, I was standing perfectly normally. It was just the
anesthetic that prevented me from feeling any weight on the toe.
So I figured that if my toe felt like I was holding it off the
ground, it must be off the ground and I must have chosen to hold
it there.
Some people have suggested that most of our beliefs and most of
the things we say are confabulations, that confabulation is
actually our normal method of thinking.
We won Bunner again!
Oh, and we won Bunner again!
I love saying "We won Bunner". It's great that I get to say it all
the time, because it keeps happening. I'd better set up another
Bunner victory party soon.
I'm going to have a trusted computing panel at CFP in Berkeley on
the morning of April 22. We're going to have people from IBM and
AMD, and I've invited someone from Microsoft. The panel will be
moderated by Danny Weitzner from W3C.
Wendy and I got to take a
tour of
SLAC that was set up by Riana. (I'm really sorry that we messed
things up so that Riana herself didn't get to come.)
I occasionally wonder what the largest room I've ever been in was.
Previously, I thought it was probably either (1) an auditorium or
concert hall of some sort (like the San Francisco Symphony or
the War Memorial Opera House), (2) the Jacob Javits convention
center in New York City, (3) some kind of train station or
airport facility, or (4) the Infinite Corridor at MIT, if you
want to allow corridors. If you want to allow corridors and are
just measuring by volume, I'm sure SLAC set a new record for me
with the linear accelerator shed. But another room we were in (a
decomissioned detector facility) was also quite vast and had an
incredibly deep pit in the floor, so that it seemed to be a pretty
decent contender in the non-corridor rooms category.
