"In the book of my memory, after the first pages, which are almost blank,
there is a section headed Incipit vita nova."
On Wednesday and Thursday, I read Dante's La Vita Nuova, which
I'd long been curious about. It's very interesting that Dante feels compelled
to explain his own poetry, even in a very formulaic way. ("There are four
parts in this sonnet. In the first, I...")
There are definitely some interesting parts in the Vita Nuova.
It's good to get the inside story on Dante's love for Beatrice -- something
commentators on the Divina Commedia always write footnotes
about, something my father has often mentioned, but never something I read
a primary source about.
After the vision which I had described, when I had composed the
rhymes which Love had commanded me, a number of conflicting thoughts
began to contend and strive one with the other, all of them, it seemed,
unanswerably. Among them were four which seemed most to disturb my
peace of mind. One was this: "The domination of Love is a good thing
because he guides the mind of his faithful follower away from all
unworthiness." Another thought was this: "The domination of Love is not
good because the more faithfully a follower serves him, the more
burdensome and grievous are the moments he must endure"; yet another thought
was as follows: "The name of Love is so sweet to hear that it seems
impossible that it can be anything but sweet in its effect upon most
things, for it is known that names are a consequence of the things which
are named, as it is written, Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"; the
fourth thought was this: "The Lady for whom Love holds you so enthralled
is not like other women whose hearts are easily moved." Every one of these
thoughts so contended within me that I became like a person who does not
know which road to take on his journey, who wants to set out but does not
know where to start.
(Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, XIII (trans. Barbara Reynolds))
Dante's self-condemnation on account of his love for the "compassionate lady"
who appears after the death of Beatrice is remarkable. Dante was a very
serious man and really felt things deeply; I think this is something that
leads people to compare him with Vergil, whom he put into his own poetry
later on as a character or as an inspiration.
People are remarkably divided in their views of Dante's love for Beatrice.
La Vita Nuova records that (as has become legendary) he saw
her when they were both nine years old -- we could presume before puberty,
when they were both children -- and he fell in love and remained deeply
in love with her for the rest of his life, although they barely spoke.
(Dante remembers being greeted once by Beatrice some years later, and
wishes at length that she would greet him again. So they did actually say
hello to each other, at least once.) But Dante had a series of visions
which convinced him of the validity of his inclination that Beatrice was
unique and special and that he ought to love her for his whole life.
("And some in dreams assured were...") And when he did waver from this
commitment (after Beatrice was dead!), he couldn't live with himself:
Your levity I contemplate with dread [...]
While life endures you should not ever be
Inconstant to your lady who is dead.
(id., XXXVII)
and again: "often I grew angry in my heart and reviled myself greatly [a]nd
often too I cursed the vanity of my eyes [...] 'for never, this side of
death, ought your tears to have ceased!'". Finally "my heart began to
repent sorrowfully of the desire by which it had so basefully allowed itself
to be possessed for some days against the constancy of reason; and when this
evil desire had been expelled all my thoughts returned once more to their
most gracious Beatrice".
So you can see how Dante's view really polarizes people; few people reading
this are neutral in their assessment of Dante's behavior. (It's interesting
that I say "behavior", because Dante barely did anything observable in
the entire book, except visit another city, get sick, cry, and write poems.
He's very concerned with his inner life, which continues in parallel to
and separate from what people can see about him. It's of consequence to
him whether his feelings are noble or base, whether his thoughts are
reasonable or unreasonable -- whether inside himself he is virtuous or
vicious. Certainly Dante, as a Christian, kept in mind the admonition of
the Gospels about looking at women the wrong way, as opposed to the Jewish
emphasis on good deeds, what Christians ended up calling "works". In
La Vita Nuova, Dante's only works are his poems, and he never
does anything that most people today could call "real". This is a source
of continuing controversy. Dante's concerns make lots of sense to me;
I can relate.)
By the way, there is a company called
Vita Nuova which sells support
for the Bell Labs
Inferno operating
system.
I always associated the title of La Vita Nuova with
Christian apocalyptics -- "Ecce nova facio omnia", which I remember
acutely from a love story of my own, and the New Jerusalem and the
New Heaven and New Earth, and then of course in the Symbolum Nicenum where it
says "et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi
saeculi, amen". So the phrase has this really strong eschatological
significance for me, which really affects how I would read a book called
La Vita Nuova -- but the notes in my edition say, to my
surprise, that "[t]he literal English translation, 'The New Life', has
religious overtones which are probably not in the original". Hmmmmm.
On a very different note, on Tuesday I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon with Zack and two ladies whom I presume are gracious. It's
definitely a beautiful movie, and I agree with the praise for the fighting
scenes, especially in the forest.
Crouching Tiger is interesting for addressing ancient mythical
Chinese sexism: Jade Fox becomes evil because the founder of the Wudan
school rejects her as a student and sees her only as a sexual partner (we
could probably even say "sexual object"). And
Jade Fox's student in turn rejects Wudan for its continuing sexism and
begins to turn toward evil. There is the sense that Wudan is to blame for
all this: if Wudan's founder had been willing to teach Jade Fox as an
equal with his male students, the policeman's daughter would not have ended
up as an orphan.
A lot of artistic works have been addressing sexism in somewhat cliched ways.
The classic example for me is actually a Dar Williams song, "The Babysitter's
Here":
And will they get married with kids of their own? He says
"Not if she's going to college we won't,"
And he kisses her, oh... some day I'll have a boyfriend just like that...
(Emphasis in original.) The young girl's misunderstanding of her babysitter's
life
She says, "Do me a favor, don't go with a guy who would make you choose,"
And I don't understand, and she tries to explain
And all that mascara runs down in her pain
Cause she's leaving me...
(emphasis added) is tragic, but I think the presentation is a bit heavy-handed.
Every single time I hear that song, I find it really jarring: it's the core
and key to the song, but the little girl narrator has no idea of that. This
is a traditional literary device, which Dar Williams wields powerfully, but
what's being revealed this way is somehow too much for me.
Another sexism plot showed up at the beginning of Carl Sagan's
Contact, which I read recently. The daughter wants to be a
scientist. Her father encourages her and then dies tragically. Her
(wicked) stepfather thinks women shouldn't be scientists. She keeps on
studying
science and nature against his wishes. So she becomes endearing, appealing,
interesting; her stepfather rapidly becomes the bad guy, ignorant, even
cruel. This is all laid out in just a few pages, but we can so quickly
identify with the young woman in her enthusiasm and independence (we know
that this is a character who will not care about convention, who will find
her own path).
When I read the beginning of Contact, though, I felt
manipulated, as though Sagan had picked out an unreasonably extreme
situation just to polarize the beginning of the story and draw us in. But
the problem is that I actually know of a young woman in real life who wants
to be a scientist and whose parents are actively discouraging her because
they believe women shouldn't be scientists. So "this is real, this is
something that happens", and Sagan isn't just making it up.
I had lunch with Art Tyde, one of the founders of Linuxcare, on Wednesday
at an Indian restaurant on Folsom (it's actually under the same management
as the Tandoori Mahal on Kearny, where I always used to go for lunch
buffet -- and they have exactly the same menu, including the lunch buffet)
by 8th or 9th.
One of the things we talked about was the effect of business involvement
in the Linux community. I reminded Art that this had been a subject of
really active controversy in 1998 -- "is business good for Linux?" -- and
that there had been all sorts of different views. The most prescient, I
think, was the view that "business involvement won't hurt the Linux
community as a whole, but personal relationships will suffer". I don't
remember whose idea that was, but I'm sad to say that it seems to have
been true. I've lost no friends, as far as I know, through business and
the "Linux industry", but many of my friends have lost friends that way,
sometimes very close friends.
I really do miss the casual and enthusiastic local Linux community from
1998, but I'm glad that I'm still in touch with so many people despite
all the turbulent events since then.
I did work for Linuxcare at home. In very classical teacher style,
I actually graded a bunch of written multiple choice tests.
I also got my beard cut.
Doesn't it make sense to use the <H1> and <H2> tags here
instead of <BIG> and <STRONG>? I got into the habit of
using <STRONG> for section headings on Advogato.
My arms really hurt, from moving a filing cabinet last weekend and then
typing during the week.
I noticed that
RyanMuldoon on
Advogato was a co-founder of the ARHS
network, with Gabe Ricard, whom I met and corresponded with a bit when
I visited ARHS in 1999. It's
quite likely that I actually met Ryan, too. Their advisor in this
undertaking was Peggy Westcott, who was my computer teacher in
elementary school at the Smith College Campus School. (She taught Logo
to 4th through 6th graders, including the really exciting LegoLogo unit
in 6th grade, to which I looked forward for years and about which I once
had a very dramatic dream. It was a dark and stormy night and a few of
us, students all, took shelter at Peggy's house, where she let us do
experiments with LegoLogo. I think I had that dream in 5th grade, and I
wish I could remember who the other students in the dream were, because
I have a guess.)
Peggy was a computer teacher at ARHS (one of the best public
high schools in Massachusetts) after that, and she had a group of really
motivated students who set up a network with a Linux box and did
technology projects. I am very much reminded of
GEECS, and it seems
to me that every high school should have a project somehow along these
lines, if students are interested.
After work, in Jamba Juice, I heard the song "Closer to Fine" by the
Indigo Girls on the radio, but I think it was more like
"closer to crying" for me, because it made me want to cry.
I went to the doctor, I went to the mountain
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
I guess I've done all of those things lately except for drinking from the
fountain. The Indigo Girls continue:
I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
so when I walked out of Jamba Juice, closer to crying, I thought "Everybody's
looking for salvation" but also that I was unlikely to ever have a Ph.D or
a beard to my knee -- where other times I seemed to be on track for both of
those things.
Well, I remembered the bit from Thornton Wilder's The Bridge
of San Luis Rey:
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are
like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on
the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has
not been brushed away by the finger of God.
I liked this because I always associated ignorance with cruelty and knowledge
or certainty with kindness.
But the Indigo Girls associate ignorance and uncertainty with health,
which would certainly have been anathema to me once. (I suppose there are
other ways of reading that Wilder quotation, like associating polytheism
with cruelty and monotheism with kindness.)
If we take the straightforward interpretation of the list of activities
in "Closer to Fine" as metaphorical for all the things that people attempt
or look to in order to find meaning, health, happiness, or wisdom, then I
think it's easy for anyone to sympathize with the story in that song. Sure,
the list there is pretty "New Agey", for the most part. (It does mention
the Bible later on, and a "revival", presumably mixing some Christianity
together with mountains and fountains in the catalogue of salvationist
technique.) But the message of the song is "I did x, y, and z, and nothing
worked" (but now the person to whom the song is addressed has allowed the
singer to feel more comfortable with ignorance and thereby "closer to fine").
Well!
Isn't it just a little strange for a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to have a
safety seal on it, saying "Sealed for your protection"? Isopropyl
alcohol doesn't exactly go bad, and you're not supposed to drink it, as
it's already a poison. Yes, there are ways of tampering with it that
could make it dangerous to people, but it's not exactly a bottle of pills
or something.
mike dillon (I'm conflicted about whether to capitalize the names of
people who don't capitalize their own, like bell hooks and e. e.
cummings; it involves a judgment about whether or not capitalization
is part of orthography so that somebody can say "You are misspelling my
name!" if you use a capital in a standard place where that person
doesn't) is preparing
an edition
of Ferrer's The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School.
I had dinner with Zack and worked a bit on getting this diary set up.
zork is still down, but this is hosted on homer, so this is
available even though my home page is not.
My arms felt marginally better in the morning, but that didn't last too
long. zork has come back up.
I had a dream last night that I lost a tooth; I definitely hope that
doesn't happen in real life. At a few points in my life, I haven't
taken good care of my teeth. There are consequences to that.
I'm thinking about various possibilities for interface for this diary.
One is to have month pages (2001-03.html) with concatenated day pages
together, separated by horizontal rules. Another is to take the
output of cal, like
March 2001
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
and generate links to entries for days where entries exist. Another is
to have "next" and "previous" links. I'm just not sure what to do.
I've been hearing a lot (from five different sources!) lately about solar
activity and likely storms on Earth. I'm told I might even be able to
see the aurora down here in San Francisco this evening, and then that the
power grid may be even more unstable. And my cell phone may not work.
Good thing I don't have a cell phone!
With my right arm in lots of pain in the afternoon, I read E. L.
Doctorow's City of God.
This is one of the best books I've read in years, but also one of the most
painful, maybe more so than The Last of the Just -- solid
competition, anyway.
Reading a book was good for my arms. So, in many ways, was talking on the
phone. I had a great conversation with my father and managed to catch up
with some friends.
I made it back into Daylight Saving Time all in one piece.
I did look out on my porch to try to catch sight of the aurora. No
aurora, just lots of wind and fog and the moon.
I listened to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which I hadn't
listened to for a year or two. I first encountered this work in a music
class at Berkeley, and I went out and bought a copy, and I even
transcribed the words once and put them up on the net on a machine which
has since crashed twice over.
(Not the free software kind.) The streets between here and the 24th Street
BART station are fairly covered with evangelical Christian literature, some
in Spanish, some in English, including Jack
Chick cartoons. I saw a notice about how there was going to be a
"campaign" in honor of Holy Week, so probably I'm just seeing some of the
advance publicity work.
The Mission and the South of Market are really different in visible ways,
like what kinds of things typically happen in public. In the South of Market,
I've never seen anyone engaged in any kind of religious proselytizing or
debate (or a house of worship, except the church across from the Metreon).
In the Mission, religion and religious evangelism are relatively large,
active forces. (Biella, approximately: "There's a reason it's called the
Mission District...")
The Chronicle or the Examiner (am I the only
person who still can't tell them apart readily?) had a strange juxtaposition
pretty recently. At the bottom of one page was an article which proclaimed
that, "for the first time", whites were not a majority in the state of
California. At the top of the same page was an article about a research
result that the San Francisco Bay is the saltiest that it's been "in 400
years".
This is a little bizarre, I thought. Clearly, the top article is admitting
that California history does extend at least 400 years (OK, it wasn't a state
then...), because there was this San Francisco Bay here then and it had a
certain salinity and that salinity 400 years ago is a part of California
history. And it's interesting! All this time all of these other things
were happening, and you know, San Francisco Bay kept on having a
salinity! The Bay continued having various amounts of salt in it all that
while, and there's this amazing sense of continuity over four centuries of
San Francisco Bay saline history. But the bottom article is saying that
California history is much shorter, really, because this year is "the
first time" that whites haven't been a majority of the people in
California. But 400 years ago, whites weren't a majority in California.
I'm sure that the Associated Press would say that they just meant "since
California has been a U.S. state" and that of course whites haven't always
been a majority in California, the place. This still raises a question,
though: why are racial demographics only interesting since California
became part of the U.S., but environmental factors, geophysical factors,
are interesting before that too?
... was April Fool's Day.
There are a pretty good assortment of hoaxes on-line, although I don't
think I've been fooled by anything yet.
In other news, Zack and I went to CompUSA and I got a new sound card,
which I set up (after compiling Linux 2.2.19, which was remarkably easy).
It's a SoundBlaster 16 PCI -- the cheapest common 16-bit PCI sound card with
line in and line out. It uses the es1371 module; Creative Labs bought
Ensoniq...
Oh, I got to try Mac OS X in CompUSA. It's very pretty, and I managed to
find the shell (the default shell is tcsh!) without too much
difficulty, and run ls, ps, df, and all -- on a Mac, running MacOS. So I
can see how a lot of people will like this and will want to switch. And I
do have a Mac that I'd be running MacOS 8.5 on if the hard drive hadn't
crashed... but I do want to stay focused on free operating systems, not
just Unix in its manifold glory.
I bought the sound card because I wanted 16-bit line in so that I could
record a CD of myself singing. No, you can't have a copy (unless perhaps
you are Wolfgang), but I'll probably publish the recording of
"If I Were
in Rescomp". It's turning out that there's a Jewish theme because the
two other things my original plan calls for me to sing are "Eli, Eli"
and "Shir Hamaalot". I really think that's just a co-incidence, though.
A side effect of having the sound card is that I can play WAVs from my
little collection of ripped CDs. (I ripped some of my own CDs so that I
could have them in digital form. I don't habitually trade illegal copies
of music, even though I agree that the impulse to do that is very natural,
but I think having access to music in an unencrypted digital form is
very important. People reading my diary will probably already be aware
that I think that.) So I can actually give a simple command like
cd /mnt/bigger
echo So/*.wav | xargs -n1 play
and I immediately get a CD-quality rendition of Peter Gabriel's
So. But of course I can script things so that tracks play
in a particular order or in response to a particular event.
If we give up control over digital media, we will be limited to the
applications the people who control it can think of, minus those they
think it's not in their business interest to permit, minus again
those they think they can extract extra payments for.
I had a great time with Biella, who came by for dinner. We had a
wide-ranging conversation, although supposedly we were talking about
"Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry" by Cohen and
Lemley.
Patents are an absolutely vast risk for the free software community.
Aux armes! Fortunately, there are some more encouraging things
going on in the world than just software patents.
I'm sorry that I still have secrets from my diary readers, that I can't
remark on every single interesting or amusing thing that happens. I
remember at dinner how something happened that I thought was funny, but
it was already secret there; quo magis here. So if you read this,
imagine some funny and interesting things happening that I don't mention.
Thanks.
Actually, not only do I not generally trade illegal copies of music,
but I even accidentally buy multiple copies of the same CD! For example,
I have two store-bought legal copies of The End of the Summer by
Dar Williams, two of The Green World (eadem), and two of a
particular recording of Bach's Mass in B minor. So I'm even
sometimes buying CDs where legally I wouldn't even be obliged to.
That said, if you want my duplicate copy of any of those, let me know!
Just over four years ago, Alan Hale
said:
How many more of these types of reports are we going to
have to listen to before we finally decide that we are going to use
the candle of science, and the reasoning skills that we have, to take
back the darkness from the ignorance and superstition that is
enveloping us?
I hate to sound like I'm saying "I told you so," but I'd like to
read the last paragraph of the explanation I posted to the Web after
this business of the Saturn-like object broke out last fall. I remind
you that this is dated November 16, 1996. After explaining that the
"object" was nothing more than a bright star, I wrote: "There are many
`fringe' people who are trying to attach apocalyptic significance to
Comet Hale-Bopp, and incidents like this one . . . are sure to
increase as we get closer to the comet's perihelion. I ask readers to
treat all these irresponsible reports with the disdain they deserve,
and instead enjoy the beauty of the comet for its own sake."
I really meant that last sentence. What I want everyone to do -- and
I mean everyone who is here today, and everyone who is seeing my image
and listening to my voice -- is, tonight, to drop what you're doing,
forget about the world for a minute, go outside, look up in the
northwest, and take a look at this comet. It's a beautiful object.
It's lovely. It's one of the most magnificent celestial objects you
will ever see. But for all its beauty, its magnificence, its splendor,
all it is is a dirty snowball that's orbiting the sun. Nothing more.
It has no influence on Earthly events. It has no power to affect
anything that happens here on Earth. It has no power, but we
do. We
have the power to build a world for the 3rd Millennium that is free of
the ignorance and superstition that is so rampant in our society
today. We have that power. What I'd like you to do when you're looking
at the comet tonight is to think of some ways to make that happen. I'd
like to hear what you come up with.
I'm sure Dr. Hale would still appreciate your comments.
My machine pie was broken into by the Ramen worm, which is the first time
an automated computer program has ever compromised my system. Alas, I
hadn't applied the BIND update I was supposed to, because the Debian
dist-upgrade didn't work for me and I got lazy about patching it by hand.
So no human had the patience to discover my negligence, but a computer
program did.
I think in the future some worms will be much nastier and more virulent.
I think we'll see viruses and worms as the pre-eminent source of security
threats. I mean, if a machine can beat the world chess champion, surely
machines will be better than people ultimately at breaking into other
machines. (There will be cases where judgment and background knowledge
is important, but many attacks can be automated.)
By the way, I was literally months behind in applying the security patches
in question. I saw them the day they came out, and I didn't do anything.
So mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I'm moving everything over to this machine homer, which Trey runs in
Berkeley. I'm just waiting for some things to go through with Network
Solutions. They tend to do an incredibly bad job with a lot of things
they used to do well, so that it's become boring to complain about them.
I'm contributing a list of "non-kitten items" to the
robotfindskitten project.
The sound quality on my new sound card was fine for playback but awful
for recording. But now I've got a program called rawrec which lets me
make raw samples at any sample quality. So I can explicitly record at
16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo; with the input gain turned down a bit, it
finally sounds very good.
If Zack gets sound working on his machine, we could have a little intercom
over the local LAN.
Surprising things caught on MiniDisc: myself crying in January. I recorded
myself singing a couple of songs and then I recorded myself bursting into
tears after one of them. I think I'm going to erase those tracks, not burn
them to CD-R.
I wrote a long piece in response to
ishamael's
complaint on Advogato about police enforcing laws against victimless
crimes. But I haven't finished it or posted it anywhere.
Zack wonders (along with a political science professor I met about two
years ago) whether there aren't duties to the self (in the sense of whether
people have moral obligations to themselves or can be acting immorally
in their treatment of themselves). The political science professor
suggested that submitting to coercion might be wrong even if
the coercion itself is wrong -- because we should not permit ourselves
to be so abused if we can find an alternative. (The song says, by way
of example, "You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith, you
better keep the faith and run away. It's time to break free, oh oh oh oh,
run away...") In libertarian thought,
this would be a very foreign concept, although not as foreign as the idea
that somebody else could legitimately help enforce these duties (maybe by
forcing someone not to use drugs or something).
I remembered the good old days of arguing with Kevin Sabet on the
opinion page of the Daily Cal. I would write a piece to
the effect of
Let's first get out of the way the myth that drugs are
not harmful. They are, at least potentially. They are very dangerous
and using them is typically a poor choice and a great risk. Now,
everyone has a fundamental liberty interest in doing whatever he or
she wants with his or her own body. Governments and the societies they
claim to represent have no right to legislate over what people do to
themselves; when they try to create restrictions like this, they are
overstepping what legitimate authority they might have. If you try to
force someone not to use drugs just because they are risky, you are
infringing on that person's rights.
I would really take pains to emphasize that I thought that drugs were
really bad and recreational drug use was a really big problem. (In
that sense I think I came close to suggesting that I thought that there
were duties to the self -- because most of my published criticisms
of drugs were based on what they do to their users. But I argued at
length that there is no right on the part of anyone else to enforce
those duties, if they exist.)
So Kevin Sabet would always write in and respond to my letter, except
what he would say was always along the lines of "But drugs are really
dangerous, and really harmful". And it was really bizzare, because I
took such pains to agree to that and to support his contention that
drug abuse was a real problem and was really upsetting. But his
responses always seemed to be limited to citing statistics about
health risks from various drugs or correlations between drug use and
poor academic performance or the likelihood that people would become
addicted to something.
And (as often, as very often, alas) we were really talking at cross
purposes, because we weren't contradicting each other (although I did
think that Sabet overstepped in his categorical denials that
marijuana had legitimate medical uses; however much medical marijuana
in California may be used as a cover for recreational drug use, it
seems that there is no reason to dismiss the potential benefits of a
drug when that drug is surrounded by a recreational-use tradition).
But Sabet would conclude that because drugs were so dangerous, it was
vitally important that society act forcefully to suppress the
depredations... and I would conclude that there is no right to compel
individuals against their will and the government should get its laws
off of everyone's bodies, as the emotionally tinged slogan runs.
It was frustrating to argue with Kevin Sabet. Our perspectives were
apparently so different that we couldn't even disagree with each other
effectively.
(That happened with affirmative action too, although not with Kevin
Sabet in particular. It took me a long time to notice that the most
fundamental disagreements were not even about affirmative action, but
about what a university is for. Some people thoughts of
public universities as instruments of public policy or social welfare.
So therefore if a government had a socially useful policy, it could
implement it through a university. Other people were just horrified
that politics could get involved in a university at all and thought
that universities should have a remarkable detachment and independence
and promote knowledge in general rather than specific social goals.
And then it just so happened that governments sponsored universities,
because universities are good and it's difficult to get people to
found enough of them, but the governments should not expect anything
back from the universities, but should leave them alone to be
universities. I mean, if people are intermittently horrified that
religious universities compromise their independence by trying to
promote religious beliefs, why should they not be horrified when
government universities compromise their independence by trying to
promote government economic policies? Do I overstate the point?
I've barely gotten started here exploring the depths of the disagreement
on this issue! People who argue about affirmative action in public
universities have virtually no common ground and they
completely misunderstand each other or talk, again, at cross purposes
because of their different starting point.)
What is a university for? In precisely the same vein, what is
a romantic relationship for? When we've solved those, we can
take on Wendell Berry's question, because founding universities and
creating romantic relationships are prototypical human activities.
(I remember talking to Biella about Don Marti's complaint that
universities were becoming fancy tax shelters for startups and for
proprietary corporate research. Too simple,
she said. Universities are more complicated and multifarious than that.
So there would be an element of this sort of thing, but we would have
to look at the whole picture and see what all different kinds of people
were up to in the context of a university.
But if we believe, as some people do, that things have a particular
essential purpose -- which is one of the oldest academic traditions in
the world! -- then it's worth asking what universities are really
supposed to be about. And you'll find that people have absolutely no
consensus about that. The people who are there don't agree on what
they're there for and the people who pay for it don't agree on why they
pay for it and the people who examine and criticize the universities
don't agree on what the universities were supposed to be doing in the
first place.)
My arms feel messed up and I feel very tired -- I think the latter is
either due to not getting enough sleep or to not eating regularly
enough. All of these things are somewhat longstanding problems --
should I say "chronic"? -- but it doesn't mean that I always do anything
about them.
I'm trying to do or locate some paperwork to re-open a claim and go to
see a chiropractor downtown. I saw her last year but didn't go back;
she's been very helpful to many of my friends who had various degrees
of repetitive strain injuries. I don't think any of their cases were
as bad as mine, but still this chiropractor is well-regarded and maybe
she can help me.
I'm going to CalLUG tonight.
I'm working with Andrew in person at Linuxcare today to produce a new
BBC, which Mike will give out at the upcoming SCLUG
LUG Fest event. Then we will burn
some more BBCs to send to LUGs that request them, and we'll do a new
revision to give out at LWCE in San Francisco in August.
Andrew is typing for this BBC revision -- I'm not.
At work, I happened to hear the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which
my friend Eric used to play in high school and which I hadn't heard in
some years. I think I'd better get a recording of it.
Here are my submissions to the robotfindskitten project:
"A book with \"Don't Panic\" in large friendly letters across the cover.",
"A compendium of haiku about metals.",
"A discredited cosmology, relic of a bygone era.",
"A hollow voice says \"Plugh\".",
"A knight who says \"Either I am an insane knave, or you will find kitten.\"",
"A neural net -- maybe it's trying to recognize kitten.",
"A screwdriver.",
"A statue of a girl holding a goose like the one in Gottingen, Germany.",
"A tetradrachm dated \"42 B.C.\"",
"A voice booms out \"Onward, kitten soldiers...\"",
"An eminently forgettable zahir.",
"Apparently, it's Edmund Burke.",
"For a moment, you feel something in your hands, but it disappears!",
"Here is a book about Robert Kennedy.",
"Hey, robot, leave those lists alone.",
"Ho hum. Another synthetic a posteriori.",
"It's Asimov's Laws of Robotics. You feel a strange affinity for them.",
"It's Bach's Mass in B-minor!",
"It's a bug.",
"It's a synthetic a priori truth! Immanuel would be so pleased!",
"It's the Tiki Room.",
"Just some old play by a Czech playwright, and you can't read Czech.",
"Kitten is the letter 'Q'. Oh, wait, maybe not.",
"Quidquid Latine dictum sit, kitten non est.",
"Sutro Tower is visible at some distance through the fog.",
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.",
"The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.",
"The non-kitten item like this but with \"false\" and \"true\" switched is true.",
"The non-kitten item like this but with \"true\" and \"false\" switched is false.",
"This is the chapter called \"A Map of the Cat?\" from Feynman's autobiography.",
"This is the forest primeval.",
"Werner's \"Pocket Field Guide to Things That Are Not Kitten\".",
"You found nettik, but that's backwards.",
"You have found some zinc, but you must not stop here, for you must find kitten.",
"\"50 Years Among the Non-Kitten Items\", by Ann Droyd.",
"\"A robot may not injure a kitten, or, through inaction, ...\"",
"\"Address Allocation for Private Internets\" by Yakov Rekhter et al.",
"\"Mail Routing and the Domain System\" by Craig Partridge.",
"\"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism\" by Emmanuel Goldstein.",
"\"201 Kitten Verbs, Fully Conjugated\". You look for \"find\".",
I saw various people in Berkeley, including Sumana and Ben. It's nice over
there. ASUC election season is in full
swing.
The Cheese Board collective and their pizza shop are really good (on
Shattuck by Vine).
I have an ear ache.
I read To an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, by
Garrett Epps.
It's the story of Employment Division v. Smith, the case about
whether Native Americans had a legal right under the First Amendment to use
peyote in religious ceremonies. The Supreme Court's answer was "no"; I
think the issue is remarkably subtle and important, and it brings into focus
or digs up a lot of other interesting topics.
Epps doesn't talk in much detail about the history of the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, which was passed (and overturned) after Smith
was decided. He gives it a few pages but barely mentions why the
Supreme Court decided to throw it out in City of Boerne v. Flores
(the famous "art gallery owned by an atheist" argument).
I think somebody should open an art gallery called Art Gallery Owned By An
Atheist, but I don't think many people would get the joke.
I was particularly interested in RFRA because it was used as a basis for the
only recent successful court challenge to the California loyalty oath, in
Bessard v. California Community Colleges. But
Bessard was almost immediately overruled by City of
Boerne. As I've written elsewhere, I had mixed feelings about this,
because I thought that Smith and Boerne were
correctly decided, but I thought that the laws to which religious
objections were asserted in Smith (drug prohibition),
Bessard (loyalty oath for public employees), and
Boerne (zoning ordinance) were all unjust!
Bessard actually came close to eliminating the loyalty oath entirely,
because under other precedents, someone who claimed a religious objection
would likely not have been required to provide much more detail. On the
other hand, we have United States v. Seeger (where the
Supreme Court said that atheists could be conscientious objectors to the
draft) -- so the logic of Bessard together with
Seeger could almost have created a plausible argument
that nobody could be forced to sign the oath!
Except...
Except that that's a complete end-run around the purpose of the RFRA, which
was to create special privileges or exemptions based on religious
beliefs and not simply based on sincere beliefs. And because the
RFRA (under which Bessard was decided) really did set out to
create that special status for religious beliefs, it was invalided by the
Supreme Court.
(I think I'm overstating what Seeger held too -- it's a long
time since I read that opinion, and when I glance at it, it looks much
narrower than I'm making it out to be.)
I wrote a lot on patents to Biella. I really disagreed with Professor
Lemley's piece on "rational ignorance" and his critiques of patent reform
proposals.
I bookmarked this when I read that book a few days ago, meaning to quote
it here:
Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe
the laws by which the universe operates and suggest in equations that
a balance is possible even if things are in apparent imbalance. So do
songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do
this to me, why did you break my heart . . . the inhering formula is
that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry
of pain. [...] And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as
expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just
the singer.
This passage actually has relatively little to do with the rest of the
book, although it does suggest a connection between a couple of themes
which do show up repeatedly.
The mozilla not party (kind of like the
mozilla dot party except,
you know, not) was at Zeitgeist today. I had a great time! I saw a
bunch of people I know and got to talk to Jack Moffit about Vorbis for
a while.
My right arm got a bit sore again, but I got documentation about being
discharged from treatment last fall, and we're sending that off to the
insurance company.
I'm trying without any success to break a encrypted message which is a
very short message in English in some kind of cipher like a substitution
cipher which can be worked by hand. But no luck. I think I have some
evidence that it's not a simple substitution cipher: there is a word
which has a pattern of letters like AABCCDE. It doesn't seem to me that
there is any English word which has that pattern, so I think the cipher
is more complicated than simple substitution.
How do people go about breaking ciphers given only the ciphertext? Bruce
Schneier is always telling us that we should assume that the
cryptosystem is known and only the key is unknown; here I don't actually
happen to know the cryptosystem, but I still want to break it.
I suspect this might be a Vignere cipher -- I do know that it's a cipher
that has a short English "password" or key. The Vignere cipher is one of
the most obvious possibilities beyond simple substitution in that case.
I know that the Vignere cipher is supposed to be readily broken, but I
don't have a whole lot of ciphertext and I don't even member the standard
technique for breaking it.
I did generate Vignere encryptions and decryptions of the ciphertext,
plus slight variations, for every word in /usr/dict/words. So now I
have this file of about 300,000 possible decryptions, and I don't know
a good way to search for a possibly valid decryption.
Somewhere or other there is a research project with a good statistical
test for the presence of English text. One approach is to figure out
(somehow) the probability that a certain text could have been generated
by a Markov chain model for English text. If the probability that the
text could have been generated by the model is high, then perhaps the
probability is also high that the text is English.
How did John Gilmore's DES cracker recognize that it had decrypted its
text when it did?
It's incredibly windy here. (And cold.)
And I felt you slippin' away
And I felt myself slippin' from you
And I wanted more than anything else
For it to rain for one whole day like it used to
(Dan Bern, "Wasteland")
... were it not that I have bad dreams.
(Hamlet, II, 2)
I saw Mr. Bad for the second time in two days and again had lots of fun.
This time it was
BayFF,
where Chuck D (the musician) spoke about on-line
music. Mr. Bad, Biella, Mike and I sat together, heard Chuck D say
various extremely funny and in some cases extremely provocative things,
and then went off to the BAD meeting (no relation to Mr. Bad except that
he is a Bay Area Debian developer) where
I saw Joey, Justin, and Ian Jackson (special guest) as well as some people I
didn't know. Then we went to dinner.
I got Ian Jackson's business card, so I could conceivably sign his PGP key
now.
One interesting thing at the BayFF meeting was that somebody mistook me for
Seth Finkelstein and congratulated me on
winning
an EFF Pioneer Award. So I said I wasn't sethf but that I would
accept the congratulations and forward them along, which I will.
There was actually an e-mail thread about how people at BayFF thought I was
Seth Finkelstein. I guess the confusion was for real.
The rain didn't seem to damage my filing cabinet, which is still outside.
Salomon
saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So
that as Plato
had an
imagination, That all
knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon
giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion.
(Francis Bacon, "Of Vicissitude of Things"; quoted by Borges)
I walked up to Sutro Tower and back in the afternoon. It's really big!
I remembered writing a poem in college about an antenna; it was a sad poem
and I wish I still had a copy. (It might be on that hard drive over there,
if I could recover it.)
Sutro Tower is always bigger than you think, or always further away than
it looks. It's the tallest structure in San Francisco, and visible from
more places than any other -- for example, you can see it at any time of
day from my bedroom window, and probably from tens of thousands of other
bedroom windows in the City.
I brought back a stick, like a walking stick, from a dead branch of a tree
that grows right by Sutro Tower, perhaps in its shadow. The branch is
unusually lightweight, like bamboo or balsa wood -- closer in appearance to
bamboo.
The composition of this diary entry was interrupted by a blackout on my
block which lasted for at least several hours (the power came back on after
I went to bed). I was told that a transformer exploded somewhere nearby.
Our UPSes lasted for an hour or so, but after that, no more Internet access,
no more computer use, no more electric lights. "It was like another century",
but not really.
I tried writing a letter by candlelight, which was an unusual experience,
but I guess the only real benefit was that I got to write truthfully that I
was writing that letter by candlelight. I suppose I could do that any time
I want, since I have candles (I no longer
live in
the Berkeley dorms). But I wouldn't usually think of it; if it happens,
it probably happens by accident.
The Moon is Full
and today is Palm Sunday. I wonder if
Berkeley SANE deliberately
invited Richard Dawkins to speak during Holy Week (and Passover).
Zack and I did laundry and went to CostCo. On the way back, we stopped by the
new EFF office, which is still under construction down the street on Shotwell.
I fixed a DNS outage; if you couldn't resolve vitanuova.loyalty.org recently,
it was due to my error. I'm still trying to get DNS over to homer properly.
It's really a pain to deal with Network Solutions.
I had a dream that I was involved in a huge project to build an Inform
model of the South of Market and the Mission, to be used in a very
sophisticated adventure game. One thing that made the dream more exciting
was that I was inside the model the whole time, although it was
clear that what I was seeing was somehow generated by Inform, and I could
converse with other people about the progress of the model ("This is
so-and-so's apartment -- in the next version we're going to add a door over
here and a daemon that shows changes in the apartment over time"), which
was actually kind of like David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds,
although I didn't think of that at the time.
My virtual South of Market is a very exciting and dramatic place!
It's great that there are people who critique pop songs by reference to
ancient philosophers.
I'm going to the Richard Dawkins lecture at Berkeley tonight (VLSB, 8:30p).
I may try to get my copy of The Selfish Gene autographed.
Some years ago, I made a t-shirt that says "Life results from the non-random
survival of randomly varying replicators. -- Richard Dawkins"; if it still
fit me and if it looked decent, I'd wear it to the talk. But I can't even
find it, which is yet another problem. (That was what Richard Dawkins said
was the "t-shirt slogan" version of his work.)
On Crackmonkey, I wrote that the intricacy of ancient Greek verb structure
led to many British prep school students learning things like the
present subjunctive first-person middle dual of "luo", no doubt so
that, if two of them were ever captured by extremely ancient Greeks,
they could sing a duet in which they discuss with their captors the
possibility that they might ransom themselves.
This led indirectly to the relevation that Mr. Bad (who else?) is the holder
of eleutheria.org.
The lecture by Richard Dawkins was very amusing; Dawkins got in any number
of cheap shots against organized religion, but several of his points were
really compelling. He actually re-iterated with a picture his old point
about religion running in families and the assumption that children of four
know their religious beliefs (or can be assumed to share their parents'
religious beliefs).
The use of fundamentalist tracts in his slides produced a lot of comedy (he
was even the target of one cartoon he reproduced), but I don't think he was
arguing against his strongest opponents. If all you knew of religion was
what appeared in that presentation, you would certainly think it was
absolutely ludicrous, but there are some more intelligent presentations of
religious ideas out there.
In some places, Dawkins was quite moving, especially when he quoted from
the late Carl Sagan.
The audience was mostly non-religious; the best question by someone who seemed
to disagree with Dawkins seemed to me to be based on an argument due to
Phillip
Johnson (who conceivably could have been somewhere in the audience) -- whether
scientists view naturalism as a prescientific commitment (or as part of
science) or whether they find naturalism to be an empirical conclusion from
their research.
Dawkins didn't quite understand the question; I did, I think, only because I
read Johnson's books which advised people to ask pro-evolution scientists
a question just like that. For example, Johnson's Defeating
Darwinism by Opening Minds invites audiences to ask
one simple question:
What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are
going in different directions?
I think that's what this audience member was asking -- did you come to
naturalism empirically, or do you believe that the world has to be like
that? And this is a seriously valid question and the answer Dawkins
gave was very capable even though he didn't quite understand it.
Dawkins said that there are likely things other than matter and energy
as we understand them but that our understanding will improve
in time and there's no particular reason that we shouldn't understand
the nature of the other things we discover in the future which we don't
understand now. (Perhaps he had dark matter in mind, for instance.)
And this is certainly what I generally thought in the past: if there
were a "supernatural" realm, it wouldn't even be supernatural because
it would have laws by which it operated and those laws could be
investigated and learned and then, what do you know, the supernatural
realm is actually just a particular corner of the natural realm which
hadn't been discovered or studied before!
(One argument in support of this idea is the discovery of things like
radio, which would have been considered supernatural if they had been
observed or demonstrated a long time ago. Near-instantaneous
communication around the world through the air? That's like
divination, or telepathy! But with Maxwell's equations we understood
radio pretty well for a while, up until Einstein.)
On the other hand, proponents of the supernatural may argue that we are
unfairly defining the supernatural out of existence by asserting that
everything that exists operates through, well, natural laws. So one
claim would be that there are things which aren't subject to any laws
(some theology would say the will of God, and some people say that
supernatural magic works for supernatural reasons not described by any
intelligible natural law), and another claim would be that supernatural
laws exist but are of a totally different character than natural laws
(for example, that they can't be defined through or reduced to
mathematical formulae showing definite relations of entities).
Dawkins complains that actual theistic proponents of supernatural
explanations aren't really giving an explanation (a slightly subtler
formulation of the "God of the gaps" argument). For example, he says,
the Christian God is much more complex than a human, so saying
that God created humans fails to "explain" how something as complex as
a human exists, because it raises the new and even more difficult
question of how something as complex as God exists. Ignotum per
ignotiora. (Dawkins seems to be suggesting that it is more
plausible that humans have always existed than that God has always
existed, because humans are much simpler. I should read Lovejoy's
The Great Chain of Being.)
And I think that Dawkins has an extremely strong point there, and it
was a new one to me. Still, if a true supernatural is not logically
contradictory, it could exist, right? And that could be the way things
really are. But Dawkins would probably exist that there is no
credible evidence for it and no reason to believe it -- and "science
can't explain X" is not one. (He mentioned "directed panspermia",
the theory where life on Earth was seeded by intelligent aliens, as
more likely than creation by God, in that the aliens are more likely
to exist or require less explanation or less departure from things we
already know about.)
On Monday, I saw the car with the California license plate FNORD parked
by the 4th and King Caltrain station. That was amusing.
Andrew and I worked on the BBC for a long time Tuesday, and finished up the
1.6.0 release version. It's a good feeling to get a BBC done!
We fixed a lot of things. But I know of at least one bug left.
Hail, brave Knight! You completed your divine Task[...]! Yet it seems you
left a great Riddle behind.
(Leonard Richardson, Degeneracy)
Like a work of fiction, the value of a sophisticated work of software is not
in the simple plot idea, but in the complex telling of the tale. It is only
those unfamiliar with the strong feelings, beliefs and preferences which
exist among writers of software regarding alternative expressions of the
same software ideas who could believe that differences in expression of
the "same" idea are unimportant to those who write software, or to those
who use software written by others.
Imagine if, for 17 years, only one author was allowed to write about the
plot line "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl". Or that once
some consortium of artists has invented rock and roll or string quartets
(and produced an initial "reduction to practice"), no one else could write
music in those styles for 17 years without their permission. Or that once
the first mathematician has invented a technique for dividing numbers, all
other mathematicians must for 17 years request permission before
inventing their own techniques, for fear of accidentally reinventing or
coming too close to reinventing what another mathematician has also
thought about. In each of these cases, imagine the arrogance of someone
claiming a right to bring before a court of law and convict of a civil crime
all others who choose to think for themselves and write independently.
(Phil Salin, "Freedom of Speech in Software", 1991)
Everybody please go read
Salin's letter
and
John Gilmore's speech
with the same title.
Jim Bell was
convicted
of interstate stalking and the European Copyright
Directive was
adopted (this is the "European DMCA" which could lead to DeCSS
being banned in EU countries, among other things).
Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does
it.
I had a very encouraging dream about nanotechnology. It was basically
about being in a space colony which looked like Smith College on the outside
and like Trader Joe's on the inside. There were various buildings, each
run by a benevolent Emperor who had a certain color associated with him (like
ancient China?) --
the building I was in was the domain of the Purple Emperor, who gave people
all kinds of food and technology and explained various technical things to
me. Because nanotechnology had been so far developed, everyone's physical
needs were met, but there were still very interesting challenges remaining
(which I don't remember).
The people who lived in the building run by the Purple Emperor slept in the
aisles of what looked like a supermarket (Trader Joe's, as I said), and then
the Purple Emperor periodically used nanotechnology to provide them with
things they needed.
The Emperor told me that most people there didn't understand the technology
involved, which was a disappointment to me.
My high school teacher's son has died while a college freshman. A healthy
19-year-old, he suffered heart failure as he slept. He died
as I was leaving the Dawkins lecture on Monday. I can't
make it to the memorial service because it's Easter weekend and almost
all airline flights are already booked.
I wrote a Latin free verse poem called "In obitum filii magistri mei,
apice iuventutis". It is very depressing; maybe it's good that it's in
Latin so that few people will ever be depressed by it.
I tested the BBC extensively on my home machine and was pretty impressed,
although I found three serious bugs. I think we've made a lot of
progress. I'm still playing with it.
I think that free software in general is losing momentum and reaching a
momentary peak in market share or mind share. I associate this with the
lack of business success of most large and prominent Linux and free
software. It's upsetting to me; I remember that a few years ago, we may
have had a touch of the "historical inevitability" disease which is one of
my least favorite characteristics in an ideological movement. Like "Linux
will definitely take over the computing world because it's better in every
way, and people just have to see this...".
But a large portion of the people who are also a part of the computing world
don't share our values. I'm really torn between the point of view that says
"So let them suffer" (or perhaps "Shall I at least set my lands in order?"
or "As for me and my house, we will worship the Lord") and the point of view
that says "I will not enter nirvana before all sentient beings do so" (or
perhaps "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations"). Interestingly, the
more conventional views "Find out what those people want and figure out how to
give it to them" and "Different strokes for different folks" don't even seem
to enter the picture for me.
I'm reminded of the relativist view that different peoples (a euphemism for
"countries") should have different political systems. And that kind
of diversity, I always thought, we don't need.
It's interesting to talk with people who have a less moralistic outlook on
things.
Anyway, I noted about a year ago that finally lots of people are trying Linux
and not deciding to keep using it, whereas back when I got started
in the Linux world in 1995, almost everyone who tried Linux
immediately switched over or at least kept on using it regularly. So the
people who tried it back then, I've realized, were people who were really
disposed to like it, people who were on the lookout for something more or
less just like Linux, in search of a better way and a movement to which
they could hitch themselves. ("That far within our faith we were all
waiting"! Dar Williams.)
So when we saw Linux, it was "Yes I said Yes I will Yes".
And we thought that if other people would just try Linux, they
would also immediately recognize what they had been missing. (That was
actually what I personally thought about a lot of issues until I was in
college; I thought that truth and beauty were much more obvious and more
accessible than they are.) But the problem is that there's been so much
hype about Linux, for various reasons, that people got spurious
expectations that had no connection with the technical reality. So a lot
more people with different ideas and backgrounds were moved to try Linux,
and many of them actually said they didn't like it! Quite the shock for
Linux advocates, that someone might have tried Linux and disapproved.
But these people had (for the most part) different values and expectations
in the experience of computing. Many of them were content or at least
numb in the proprietary Windows world, and weren't hoping for any of the
particular technical virtues which pertain to the free software world.
But it's tragic, because there was a big miscommunication about Linux,
where Linux geeks said that Linux was the be-all and end-all of the
operating system world at the moment (I recognize that Linux can benefit
from new technology, but we could say, as they say in Hemingway, that it
was "less bad"; remember what Michael Elkins says about mutt). And we
said this because that was actually our experience.
But if people have totally different ideas about what they're up to or
about what's virtuous and vicious, it's not completely shocking that they
would not see why we said that Linux was so great; certainly Linux is
very different, which wasn't emphasized enough in its full generality.
Sometimes I've thought that I didn't want to convince people to like
Linux: I wanted to make them be people who would like Linux.
From that point of view, when Linux and the general public's values in
computing don't get along, then typically or more often the public's values
-- not Linux -- need to be amended. (And here I'm speaking only of things
that were deliberate decisions, not of things that happen not to have been
implemented...) I guess that qualifies as an elitist point of view, but
it's not so far from what people say on dvd-discuss: "We have to get
the public to see the importance of the public domain", "We have
to get the public to see the problems with copyright extensions
and anticircumvention legislation". Not "the public doesn't care"; not
"the public won't care"; not "the public will believe that the public
domain is not important". But "the public domain is important, and we
will explain that to the public, and they will see it". Or "Linux is
good, and the public will see that".
A rather wise comment in opposition to several of the ideas above:
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science
keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun.
Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and
after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to
feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free
perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're
responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and
keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never
loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become
missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salemen. The world has
too many of those already. What you know about computing other people
will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only
in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence:
the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to
it, that you can make it more.
(Alan J. Perlis, quoted in Abelson and Sussman, Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs)
Someone I mentioned in my Advogato diary last year found my diary and
wrote me a paper letter to thank me for endorsing his product.
A very exciting thing happened which I can't discuss here. But I think I
got two more points on the Hacker Test.
I bought a copy of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which I
mentioned here recently, on CD.
I wish I were a better poet. I'm a decent prose essayist and a decent
programmer, but it seems to me that poetry is what really changes people's
lives; I wish I could write a poem that had a real effect.
I had a good time trying out
Vorbis on Thursday. I recommend it
all the time, so I thought I should actually find out how well it works.
I thought it worked well. I don't have a lot of experience with MP3s to
compare it, but it sounds pretty good. I tried to compress a few CD
tracks (remember: when CDs are all encrypted "to prevent piracy", you
can't even try these experiments for yourself!) and I could hear the loss
of quality, but they still sounded acceptible to me.
The compression I saw at default bitrates is better than 10:1, which is
pretty cool.
The proximate cause of my trying out Vorbis was writing to Dave Farber
about how it's good, in response to an instantly-infamous Wall
Street Journal piece recently in which he was quoted. The piece
reports that Microsoft is trying to get rid of MP3. Why? You guessed
it: because MP3 doesn't include copy protection! ("You" who guessed it
are anyone who reads dvd-discuss or goes to BayFF or knows Don Marti.)
The article was actually incredibly depressing, because all of these
companies blatantly stated that they were going to put their own business
interests ahead of consumers' interests and try to seize control of the
market and such. I think more people should read the Wall Street
Journal (and that's not the only reason). Dave Farber was quoted
to the effect that consumers would mostly not know better and would use
the software that they were given (although he wasn't happy about that).
So all of these representatives of various companies said that the whole
problem with MP3 was that the format was too open!
My view, of course, is that MP3 is not open enough, and we need to
get rid of MP3 as quickly as possible -- but we need to replace it with
something like Vorbis, not with something like WMA! Replacing MP3 with
WMA wouldn't be a step backwards, it would be a 100-yard dash backwards,
tripping over one's own feet in the process.
Mr. Bad writes:
- Esperantistaj Maldesktrulaj Vegetaranaj Linuksamantoj (EMoVoLo)
(Unuan Sabaton Chiu Avrile, 12:00 atm, Tandoori Mahal, 941 Kearny,
SF.) Ni kunvenas chiujare por Esperantlingvaj diskutoj, precipe koncerne
maldekstruloj kiu amas Linukson kaj ne manghas la viandon. Chiuj
estas bonvenaj, chu barbhava chu ne.
That's the funniest thing I've read all day! (But I thought it was a
Linuksamantaro.) For "Maldesktrulaj", read "Maldekstrulaj".
If Leonard Richardson is going to
link to my diary saying that I've provided a "summary of the Richard
Dawkins speech", I guess I actually ought to provide one.
But I think it's a bit late for that. I've forgotten a lot already.
Dawkins said that there were five ways of knowing things: Evidence,
Tradition, Authority, [personal] Revelation, and Faith. He said that
science only uses Evidence, while organized religions use the other four
and don't care much for Evidence.
Dawkins has dealt elsewhere with some religions' claim that Faith is
good, but he didn't address it directly in this talk (except
along the lines of "why do you have faith in X instead of Y?", kind of
like the old standby Invisible Pink Unicorn argument). (It is interesting
to note that some atheists purport to believe in invisible pink unicorns
and some in invisible purple unicorns. I wonder whether this schism
will have tragic consequences for the atheist worldview.) Some argument
in support of religious faith is given by arch-rationalist and skeptic
Martin Gardner (a self-proclaimed philosophical theist!) in some of his
books; I guess The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener and
The Night is Large would cover it, but you'd probably also
want to read The Flight of Peter Fromm.
There are some traditionally religious people who believe that Evidence
does support their religious beliefs. This is actually an abiding
division in Christianity, where a huge proportion of believers suspect
that they can't prove their religion empirically (although I've heard
some people say that this is because the proof isn't there, and some
that this is because the proof is there but evil prevents
unbelievers from accepting it). Judaism and Islam have strong
rationalist apologetics traditions which I think are mainstream,
but I'm not sure. (One source of apologetic evidence is the "unparalleled"
item or event -- in Judaism, the unparalled character of the national
revelation at Sinai, and, for some, the unparalled accuracy of the Torah.
In recent times a few groups have added unparalled statistical anomalies
in the text of the Torah. In Islam, the unparalled literary character
of the Koran. In Christianity, the unparalled nature of the reported
statements of Jesus -- the "trilemma" argument -- and of the broad public
consensus on the truth of the miracles attributed to him.)
Phillip Johnson is one of the leading advocates in the American Protestant
world of the view that Evidence does support his religious beliefs.
But that view is common to a number of authors who share his publisher,
InterVarsity Press. The word "Evidence"
even shows up in the title of one of the best-selling apologetic works being
given out in vast quantities to American college students -- Evidence
That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. (Postscript: I mistakenly
thought that IVP also published Evidence; it was actually
published by Here's Life Press.)
Nobody seems to endorse Tradition and Authority, although Dawkins
associated them strongly with religions, and quoted some statements like
an ex cathedra papal teaching on the Assumption of Mary.
There are definitely people who endorse Revelation, in the sense of belief
informed by personal religious experience which is not shared as Evidence
with others. Dawkins suggested (I think) that Revelations might be
unreliable (as they seem to contradict one another) and that in any case
they didn't count as Evidence.
The audience repeatedly burst out laughing at some of the parodies Dawkins
put together showing scientists behaving in some of the ways he
attributed to religions -- for example, a mock journal issue on extinctions
where scientists reported that they had faith in or had experienced
revelations in support of or had been raised to believe the theory that
a comet killed the dinosaurs. He showed a scientist issuing a fatwa
condemning to death a rival; he showed a world map and reported on the
scientific wars that had broken out between countries where scientists
believed contrasting doctrines. He showed a preacher telling an audience
that "The Origin of Species is the inspired Word of the
Prophet Darwin (peace be upon him); every word of it is true!".
Dawkins thought that American scientists who disagreed with religious
belief were generally afraid to speak out and were under social
pressure to say that science and religion were not incompatible. He
criticized Gould's Rocks of Ages, with its "non-overlapping
magisteria", on two grounds: first, he said that religions do routinely
make factual claims which scientists should consider false on the basis
of evidence. He said that it is definitely the place of scientists to
dispute these claims, just as they could dispute any other claims about
events in the natural world. (He quoted various lists of miracles which
the Roman Catholic Church teaches as fact and argued that scientists
could definitely disagree.) Second, he doesn't think that science can
give any insight into the "magisterium" of morality and values, but he
doesn't think that revealed religion can either -- so while he accepts
that science can't teach us about right and wrong, he would dispute
that Christianity can.
Dawkins also took issue with the claim that religious doctrines about
historical events are "symbolic" (and so immune from criticism as
historically false). First, he said that these doctrines used to be
believed as fact and that only scientific progress has made that
belief less tenable. Next, he suggested that the idea that something
formerly considered real and then disproved should live on as "symbolic"
was silly. He gave the example of a scientist in the future responding
to hypothetical news that the theory of the double helix structure of
DNA was mistaken: "Well, it's true that DNA isn't really a
double helix, but look at the wonderful symbolism in this picture, what
it shows us about human Love!"
Additionally, Dawkins said that many religious leaders would claim that
their doctrines were symbolic "in front of sophisticated audiences
like this one" and then tell their (unsophisticated?) religious communities
that the doctrines were actually literally true after all. So he accused
these leaders of being disingenuous and wanting to have it both ways --
shielding their beliefs from hostile criticism, yet maintaining them
firmly among friends.
I've already mentioned the "religion runs in families" argument, so I
won't repeat it. But Dawkins showed a slide arguing that, once a
particular religious belief is started, it continues to be passed down
by tradition and is generally not questioned or examined. By contrast,
he said, scientific beliefs are held in conflict and fight against each
other on the basis of evidence, so that mistakes are detected and science
makes progress.
This isn't true for everyone, though! There are lots of religious converts.
Jack Chick converted to his Protestant views from Catholicism and retains
great animosity toward Catholic belief and practice. But I think Dawkins
is saying that religious conversion doesn't happen as often as it would if
people really routinely seriously questioned the religious beliefs they
acquired as children. Also, religious belief doesn't appear to make the
same kind of progress that scientific belief does (in the sense of
detecting and refuting errors and finding a consensus based on public
evidence). But maybe that is a matter of perspective; maybe religious
belief is making progress and it's just the people with mistaken beliefs
who don't see this. Still, the process seems very chaotic; it's at least
the case that the mills of God grind slow.
I did say there were some "cheap shots", and I think that's the case; in
particular, some parodies directed at one religious group raised
laughter directed at all religious belief -- unfair stereotyping. There
is greater diversity of religious belief in the world than Dawkins seems
to admit; not all of it is subject to all of his criticisms.
And the "sophisticated audience" thing was a bit much -- Dawkins kept on
saying that the Bay Area atheists and geeks who turned out to hear him
were a "sophisticated audience", unlike religious believers. What an
appeal to vanity! "Ah, but ye, the Elect..."
Yes, that audience was sophisticated, and there are lots of unsophisticated
audiences in the world, but it's not as though all religious believers are
uneducated and backward congregations driven to a frenzy by preachers of
(R.) Hofstadter's "religion of the heart". Some of the smartest and
best-educated people in the world and some scientists (including some working
evolutionary biologists) are believers in traditional organized religions.
Dawkins should not appeal to vanity and stereotypes by suggesting that we
all who came to hear him are sophisticated and that everyone else is
unsophisticated.
There is a negative correlation between education and some forms
of religious belief. And this is important. But remember that Francis
Bacon (an unbelievably powerful advocate of science whose works may
have undermined religious belief on more than one occasion) said "A little
philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy
bringeth men's minds about to religion". Can anyone doubt that this is
a serious charge, coming from Francis Bacon? (Oops, is that an appeal
to authority?)
I filed a new Worker's Comp claim. The bureaucratic elements of this are
confusing to me, but they provided for me to put off going back to the
chiropractor. I guess I'll be going back next week.
Sumana, breakfast.com is registered, it's just that there's no machine called
www.breakfast.com. It's entirely possible to register a domain and not run
a web server there called www. The registree of that domain is
[whois.domaindiscover.com]
This WHOIS database is provided for information purposes only. We do
not guarantee the accuracy of this data. The following uses of this
system are expressly prohibited: (1) use of this system for unlawful
purposes; (2) use of this system to collect information used in the
mass transmission of unsolicited commercial messages in any medium;
(3) use of high volume, automated, electronic processes against this
database. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this
policy.
Registrant:
The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
1560 Sherman Ave
Evanston, IL 60201
US
Domain Name: BREAKFAST.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Rotary International
The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
1560 Sherman Ave
Evanston, IL 60201
US
847-866-3000
klimess@ROTARYINTL.ORG
Domain created on 30-Jul-1997
Domain expires on 28-Jul-2001
Last updated on 28-Dec-2000
Domain servers in listed order:
T.NS.VERIO.NET 192.67.14.16
B.NS.VERIO.NET 129.250.35.32
If you want to see whether a domain is registered, use whois, not a web
browser. (Or you can use a DNS query tool like dig or nslookup.)
I try not to let people answer that they don't have access to these tools;
if they say that, I'll generally give them Unix accounts.
Also, although there are definitely vegetarians who are bad people, the
idea that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian is largely a mistake. Hitler went
on a mostly vegetarian diet for part of his life for medical reasons, but
he was very fond of certain animal foods for his whole life and continued
to eat some of them even while he was on his health food diet.
You can find some references on this from a Google search for "Hitler
vegetarian".
I have so many complaints with some of the ways I've seen the
"Hitler was a vegetarian" story abused, it's not even funny. So I would
like to point out to people that there's a grain of truth in it, but it's
a rather small grain.
I guess people use that as some strange sort of antidote to the lists of
celebrity vegetarians which includes a fair number of people who are
considered moral heroes. I've seen lists of celebrity vegetarians and
lists of celebrity atheists, and I think the message conveyed by these
lists is supposed to be along the lines that being such-and-such is
normal or socially acceptible. In some cases it may go beyond this and
try to associate the behavior or belief with positive characteristics of
the celebrities -- for example, Gandhi being vegetarian (I have his
pamphlet The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism somewhere) and
Gandhi being a good person and these having some connection.
I guess one goal could be to show that being good tends to make you a
vegetarian, or that being a vegetarian tends to make you a good person.
These two conclusions are not at all the same thing ("'Not the same thing a
bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat"
is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!' 'You might just as well say,' added
the March Hare, 'that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I
like"!'") unless vegetarianism is identical with goodness.
A bad person being a vegetarian would count toward disproving that
vegetarianism makes you good, but not toward disproving that goodness
makes you vegetarian. Other possibilities from the set of things that
someone might be trying to establish with celebrity vegetarian lists
include that vegetarianism does not make you bad.
I don't know how many times I've seen the puzzle about the four cards,
and "How many cards do you have to turn over in order to know for sure
whether..." -- a famous puzzle to show how bad most people are at formal
logic. I've seen it attributed to many different people, and I'd like
to know something more about its history. I'm sure it's in several
Gardner books.
Here's one version. You see four cards on a table and you already know
that they are standard playing cards and have either red backs or blue
backs. The cards -- as you see them -- are
- A Queen of Spades
- A King of Hearts
- A red-backed card
- A blue-backed card
Now the question is, how many cards (and which) do you have to turn over
in order to be sure of knowing whether it's true that "All of the spades
on the table have red backs"?
The analogy in this particular case is if you had
- a generally good person
- a generally bad person
- a vegetarian
- a non-vegetarian
then how many, and which, would you have to "turn over" in order to resolve
(prove or disprove) various claims about "All X are Y" (all good people are
vegetarians, all vegetarians are good people, all bad people are
non-vegetarians, all non-vegetarians are bad people)? Or "No X are Y"
(no bad people are vegetarians, no vegetarians are bad people, no good
people are non-vegetarians, no non-vegetarians are good people)? (Some of
those statements are equivalent to others.) There's a general rule
involved here.
Of course, in informal propaganda argument, you don't generally try to
explicitly prove a universal -- you just try to produce a statistical,
empirical inference. But some philosophers of science think that the
rules of what lends support to an empirical inference are related to what
proves the corresponding universal claim or what disproves its negation.
(E.g. evidence akin to what would prove that "All Berkeley students are
blue" or what would disprove that "Not all Berkeley students are blue"
would tend to support the weaker claim that "Berkeley students are
generally blue" or "Berkeley students tend to be blue" or various other
versions that aren't categorical.)
It's fun to discover the basics of quantifier logic if you've never been
exposed to them.
Today is Good Friday and Friday the 13th. Someone at work said that those
should cancel out to make this just a plain old Friday.
Yesterday I bought a very old copy of
The
World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Or, Christianity Before Christ
(which you can read on-line). It seems that Kersey Graves is doing one of
these "extremely excitable 19th century authors getting carried away" things,
but the book is interesting. It pretty much accuses Christianity of
plagiarizing a number of other earlier religions, and seems to argue on
this basis against what Thomas Paine called "fabulous theology" and against
Christian religious tradition. (Did I mention that I was reading Paine's
The Age of Reason the other day?)
I think that Graves ends up at a non-religious position, very much unlike
Paine, who famously said that "I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope
for happiness beyond this life" (but that revealed religions were all
"fabulous", which is to say false). But I haven't finished Sixteen
Crucified Saviors to know for sure.
The trouble is that Graves can't back up some of his strong claims -- so
the Internet Infidels edition I linked
to above says that "readers should be
extremely cautious in trusting anything in this book".
I threw together a proof-of-concept version of a downloadable packages
script for the BBC, and burned a BBC and put up two packages -- aumix and
ogg123 -- on the net. Then I booted the BBC and asked it to download those
packages and install them in a ramdisk. After about twenty minutes of fixing
bugs related to library
paths, I got the BBC-booted system to load the SoundBlaster module and to
play the Ogg of Total Eclipse of the Heart (well, I had it sitting around)
over an SSH connection, and then to play one of the Oggs from
Vorbis.com over an HTTP connection. Streaming media using protocols that
weren't designed for streaming media is really cool. It's very easy --
ssh foo cat Total_Eclipse_of_the_Heart.ogg | ogg123 -d oss -
Sorry if that doesn't look easy to non-Unix geeks. It's really
straightforward.
When I visited Ben, I saw a demonstration of a streaming media server that
used HTTP and MP3s -- it was really neat, and it worked over an 802.11b
wireless network, so you could take a laptop anywhere in the building, not
plugged into anything at all, and then at any time choose a song or album
from extensive menus on a web site -- and the song would be "broadcast"
(it's actually just an HTTP GET) to you through the air and your laptop
would start to play it. Very cool.
So now I just have to get Ben to convert all that over to Oggs instead of
MP3s, and it will be even better.
I thought I saw a way to use netpipes to make what would look like a circular
(bidirectional) pipe -- really a socket, you know -- in the shell. But no
such luck yet. I'll have to figure it out, because I promised it to some
people on the SVLUG mailing list.
"Paperwork Reduction Act Notice, see page 4."
Zack told me about Ben Franklin's 13 virtues. I think I definitely have
four of them, definitely don't have six, and I'm not sure about the other
three.
The Esperanto meeting notice of yesterday from Mr. Bad, in English:
- The Left-Handed Vegetarian Esperantist Linux-Lovers (EMoVoLo)
(First Saturday of Every April, Midnight, Tandoori Mahal, 941 Kearny, SF.)
We gather each year for Esperanto-language discussions, mainly
concerning left-handed people who love Linux and don't eat meat.
Everyone is welcome, whether bearded or not.
I got a copy of Word on the Street by John McWhorter,
which I think was highly recommended by Phil Agre once upon a time. This
is a book about Black English and about linguistic change and dialects; it
was originally published as Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About
American English, and now as Word on the Street: Debunking
the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English.
I thought this book would be upsetting to me, and it is. (The
less-than-one-sentence account of why: I use "whom". Of course, that's
not the whole story.)
It's a very good, very stimulating book.
I got a bunch of other books, including a civil procedure textbook. Who
knew that I would be buying law books?
My father sent me a retrospective catalogue by H. P. Kraus, showing
some of the highlights in what Kraus had dealt with in his bookdealing
career. (Mr. Kraus died in 1988, but his bookdealing business is
still
around as H. P. Kraus, Incorporated, of New York City. Kraus dealt with
standard unbelievably rare books like Shakespeare folios and Gutenberg Bibles,
but he also was involved with even rarer materials -- he was the owner
of the Voynich Manuscript before he donated it to the
Beinecke Library at Yale.
(I've visited the Beinecke and seen a Gutenberg Bible there, but not the
Voynich Manuscript.)
I'm getting more interested in bibliography and book dealing. When I
was younger, my father sometimes said that he hoped I might join him in
his business. I wasn't really interested then, because I was looking
to work with computers. But I really like books, and now I think I could
see going into book dealing.
The book business is extremely colorful, full of extremely colorful
characters. There's so much amazing stuff that's being sold privately
and is of great interest but only to a very few people who know its
significance. (In many cases the significance will be of the book as
artifact rather than the book as text, still something I have a fairly
hard time with.)
One of the nice things about used and rare dealers is that they sometimes
have the opportunity to preserve things that otherwise might be thrown
away or lost -- and sell them to collectors who'll appreciate them, or
sell them or donate them to libraries that will preserve them and make
them available to the public.
My father doesn't have the world's most dramatic stories about this, but
he does have a fairly good collection of German Jewish prayerbooks (in
Hebrew and German) from before the Holocaust. He's been donating some
of these recently to synagogues and Jewish organization in Germany.
Some of them were preserved by refugees whose children might well have
thrown them away if my father hadn't expressed interested in them. So
that's something.
He also goes to library sales and library basements and tries to take what
he can of pre-20th century materials that are being discarded ("pulped",
you know; that recycled paper you're using might not be utterly
innocent, and "the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers
of paradise"). So I have a little collection of ex-library 18th and 19th
century Latin and Greek materials, most of which are of no great historical
significance, none of which are in very good condition, but almost all of
which are very hard to find. On Advogato, I mentioned in some detail my
copy of De Vita Pythagorica by Iamblichus in Greek and Latin,
together in one volume with various other ancient biographies of Pythagoras.
When we hear stories about the life of Pythagoras, they probably come to
us third-hand or fourth-hand from one of the authors reprinted in that book.
Some day I hope to read them (at least the Latin, if not the Greek).
As I write this, it's after dawn in Jerusalem (IDT=UTC+3). The year 2001
was supposed to be one of the best ever for Christian religious tourism in
Israel (I won't count the Crusades, which weren't so great for the Israeli
economy). I wonder what effect all of the recent violence there has had.
I bet a lot of trips were cancelled and a lot of people are regretting not
being in Jerusalem this morning.
My stepsister is getting married in Israel (where she lives) this summer.
Unfortunately, I can't make it; a lot of my family is going to the wedding.
I hope everything is OK for them.
Here are my latest submissions:
"A card sharp sits here, practicing his Faro shuffle. He ignores you.",
"A copy of DeCSS. They're a dime a dozen these days.",
"A demonic voice proclaims \"There is no kitten, only Zuul\". You flee.",
"A lotus. You make an interesting pair.",
"A milk carton, with a black and white picture of kitten on the side.",
"Any ordinary robot could see from a mile away that this wasn't kitten.",
"A stegosaurus, escaped from the stegosaurusfindsrobot game. It finds you.",
"Baling wire and chewing gum.",
"Chewing gum and baling wire.",
"Here is no kitten but only rock, rock and no kitten and the sandy road.",
"Hey, I bet you thought this was kitten.",
"It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three.",
"It pleases you to be kind to what appears to be kitten -- but it's not!",
"It's a blatant plug for Ogg Vorbis, http://www.vorbis.com/",
"It's a business plan for a new startup, kitten.net.",
"It's a revised business plan for a new startup, my.kitten.net.",
"It's a square.",
"It seems to be a copy of \"A Tail of Two Kitties\".",
"It's the Donation of Constantine!",
"It's this message, nothing more.",
"Lysine, an essential amino acid. Well, maybe not for robots.",
"No kitten here.",
"The score for a Czech composer's \"Kitten-Finding Symphony in C\".",
"This looks like Bradley's \"Appearance and Reality\", but it's really not.",
"This non-kitten item no verb.",
"You feel strangely unfulfilled.",
"You hit the non-kitten item. The non-kitten item fails to yowl.",
"You suddenly yearn for your distant homeland.",
"You've found the snows of yesteryear! So that's where they all went to.",
I went to Berkeley last night and had a nice time visiting friends there.
They were relatively unafraid of my lingering cold; I just thought that
spending a lot of time face-to-face with them and even staying over would
be a risk. But some people don't dread colds, and actually some people
already have them.
I wondered what the effect would be if you had a cold and then got another
cold at the same time. Assuming that each cold in isolation would produce
approximately the same symptoms, what happens to the symptoms if you get
both at once?
Suppose that each cold -- unlike this one -- would produce a 102 F fever
on its own initiative. If you have both, would you get a 102 F fever (because
that's good enough to attack either cold) or would you get an even higher
fever?
In that sense, I guess the question is whether your cold gives you a
<BODY TEMPERATURE="102F"> or a <BODY TEMPERATURE="+3F"> (by
analogy to the HTML absolute and relative font size tags
<FONT SIZE="4"> or <FONT SIZE="+2">, one of which sets
the font size and the other of which just increments it).
This reminds me of the "twice as hot" incident.
Once some Transmeta representatives gave a presentation at Linuxcare about
the Crusoe architecture. One presenter noted that a particular Transmeta
chip ran at (say) 60 F and that a similar Intel chip would run at (say)
120 F. So the presenter then said that the Intel chip ran "twice as hot"
as the Transmeta chip.
I immediately objected that 120 F is not "twice as hot" as 60 F in any
sense, and that "twice as hot" is a meaningful statement but that "having
twice the Fahrenheit temperature" or "having twice the Celsius temperature"
is not the same thing as "being twice as hot".
The reason for this is that the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales are not
multiplicative. In the same sense, if we measured weights in Bernardine
units (how many more pounds something weighs than the average Saint
Bernard), a 2-Bernardine object would definitely not weigh twice as much
as a 1-Bernardine object.
If you want a multiplicative scale for temperature, you have to use an
absolute scale like the Kelvin or Rankine scales. There, when an object
has twice the temperature, it also contains twice as much heat. (However,
maybe not "twice as much energy", because there are also things like
energy of liquefaction and energy of vaporization. Something which
undergoes a phase change absorbs or releases thermodynamic energy associated
with that phase change as well as the energy associated with the
temperature change, if any. This makes me predict that superheated water,
which exceeds its normal boiling point but which has somehow been
prevented from undergoing the phase change to turn into a gas, has less
energy than the same amount of steam would at the same temperature -- and
if you allowed superheated water to boil and turn into steam, it would
actually immediately get significantly colder, even without losing any
heat to the surrounding environment.) So there is such a thing as "twice as
hot", but you can't just double your Fahrenheit numbers.
How hot is something which is twice as hot as room temperature (70 F)?
Well, 70 F is 529 R. (I knew that Rankine scale would be useful
for something some day! It's more usual to use Kelvin. The Rankine
scale is the equivalent of the Kelvin scale, with the zero point at
absolute zero, but graded in Fahrenheit degrees instead of Celsius
degrees.) So twice as hot is 1058 R, which is 599 F. Wow! The reason
it's so hot is that room temperature is already extremely hot
on the absolute temperature scales, far hotter than the overwhelming
majority of the universe. We're very nearby a hot star which heats us
up quite a bit. Now, maybe 40 F feels chilly to Californians, but it's
only a loss of 30 F degrees or 30/529=5.6% of the thermodynamic
temperature.
A concrete significance for this "twice as hot" fact about room
temperature: an ideal gas would have twice the volume at 599 F that it
has at 70 F (assuming you kept its pressure the same), or it would have
twice the pressure in an enclosed container. Ideal gasses, though they
don't exist, are an excellent way to calibrate the absolute temperature
scale thermometers...
Some people object that "how hot something is" in the ordinary sense of
the phrase is not a measurement of thermodynamic temperature, but of
human subjective perception of heat. One objection to this would be
that we should then say that something "feels twice as hot to a person",
to emphasize the subjective part. For example, there is a famous
experiment with three basins of water. (You can do this at home, perhaps
unlike heating an ideal gas to 1058 R.) The left basin contains cold
water, the right basin contains hot water, and the middle basin contains
warm water. ("This basin is too hot!" "This basin is too cold!" "This
basin is just right...") You put your left hand in the left basin for
one minute, your right hand in the right basin for the same one minute,
and then you put them both together in the middle basin. The result is
that the same water will have a different subjective temperature as
perceived by each hand! (This is a really weird sensation; you should
definitely try it if you've never felt it.)
So subjective temperature is really subjective, but still... people feel
that there is something to it and there is such a thing as "this feels
twice as hot as that" or "this sounds twice as loud as that".
OK, so there actually is a discipline of experimental perceptual
psychology where people have experimented with these claims and tried
to find the relation between an objective stimulus and a subjective
sensation (or harder yet, a subjective perception). One source of
experimental data is the infamous "just-noticeable difference" or JND,
whence all those psychologists and doctors who will poke you with a
certain number of pins and ask you how many pins you are being poked
with at any given time.
The most famous
rule of thumb is Weber's Law (actually the Weber/Fechner law, a more
general form due to Fechner) of physiology, which says that the
intensity of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the intensity
of the stimulus that produced it. This seems to be true in an amazing
variety of cases -- at least to some extent in each of the five standard
senses and also in other perceptual cases (I remember that Frank Tipler
had this long and kind of bizarre argument that it applied to sexual
attraction; we definitely have more than five natural senses, because you
need to include things like balance and proprioception).
One consequence of Weber's Law is that if you use a logarithmic scale to
measure stimulus intensity, your measurements could actually be
proportion to the intensity of the sensations they produce. So the
Bel scale from which we derive decibels is a logarithmic scale, so
conveniently people tend to say approximately that a 20 dB sound is "twice
as loud" as a 10 dB sound, and a 40 dB sound is "twice as loud" as a
20 dB sound. And people are right from the point of view of their
perceptions, although they're completely wrong from the point of view of
amplitude or power transmitted in the underlying sound wave (which I think
is why they warn you about the fact that a 110 dB sound is much louder than
a 100 dB sound even though it might not sound much louder to you
-- it can do much more damage to your ears, out of proportion to the increase
in volume that you hear).
The Richter scale is another logarithmic scale, so that Richter intensities
might be proportional to some aspects of human perception of earthquakes
even though they are not proportional to the actual power of the earthquakes
themselves.
If this simplification of Weber's Law applies to temperature, then I guess
that we would need a logarithmic scale for human subjective perception of
temperature. One interesting question is where the "zero" (which is
actually not zero, but rather the reference stimulus, which is a more
involved point about logarithmic scales) should properly
go -- especially considering that, as far as I know, the human warmth
and coldness senses are actually separate.
It's interesting to me that the temperatures that you don't really notice
as warm or cold are in the range of "room temperature", well below human
body temperature! If you have air or especially water (which transfers
heat more efficiently) at human body temperature, it will feel really
warm. (You can see this not only with a water faucet and thermometer and
not only by touching other people's bodies in various ways but also simply
by sitting down on a seat where someone else has just been sitting for a
long time -- it feels warm, even though of course its temperature
is still below your own body temperature.)
I don't actually quite understand this. Is it just that the surface of
your skin is at a much lower temperature than the inside of your body, so that
your effective body temperature from the point of view of your perception
of the environment is actually much lower? (In support of this are my casual
observations that the chair I'm sitting on actually feels slightly warm to
me from my own body heat, and that if I open my mouth for ten or fifteen
seconds without breathing, the inside of my mouth feels slightly cold on
exposure to the room-temperature air.)
Or is it something about the rate of heat production by body metabolism and
the rate of heat loss by conduction and other mechanisms? That was what I
always thought -- that to some extent your body is accustomed to losing heat
at a certain normal rate and replacing it with new heat, so that if you
are in an environment where the heat loss rate is dramatically reduced or
dramatically increased, you notice the heat buildup or heat loss as the
temperature of that part of your body changes away from its normal
temperature. I don't think this theory is completely implausible, but I
would be happy to hear from somebody who knows or can suggest a way to
figure this out. (Why do people in isolation tanks, sensory deprivation
tanks, have the tanks set at body temperature? Wouldn't that be
uncomfortably warm? -- OK, after a couple of minutes of experimation with
a medical thermometer, a kitchen sink, and my arm, I take that back.
Body-temperature water does feel normal, water below body
temperature feels cold, water above body temperature feels hot, more
or less. But the situation with air is quite different -- air at body
temperature feels really warm. So there must be something going on with
the heat capacity of water versus air that affects this, for the same
reason, I guess, that a swimming pool at a given temperature feels quite
cold when the air at the same temperature feels perfectly comfortable.
As Neal Stephenson so wisely put it in In the Beginning ... Was the
Command Line, "What the hell is going on here?".)
Anyway, to talk about typical human subjective perception of how hot
something is, you obviously don't want to use absolute thermodynamic
temperature, but probably a logarithmic scale based on the assumptions
of the Weber-Fechner law with the reference temperature set not at
absolute zero, not at the freezing point of water, but at the temperature
that a person would not particularly notice as providing any sensation
of heat or cold. (Hmmm! Of air, or of water, or what? I still can't
resolve this without understanding what it is that actually makes us feel
hot.)
And so then you would have a basis for saying that one microchip feels
twice as hot as another, the sort of perception that a person definitely
could have. But I'm afraid that the Transmeta representative didn't
understand this, and I really regretted this (and I had to explain absolute
temperature a bit on some Linuxcare mailing lists afterward).
In any case, Fahrenheit or Celsius temperature is not a multiplicative
scale for the intensity of human perception of warmth! If you put your hand
in something at 0 F, it will feel extremely cold. No good as a basis for
comparison of things that feel warm.
The idea that warm and cold are actually different senses may be a difficult
one, but they are -- so that "five senses" thing is totally going out the
window. When you feel warm, you want to get colder; when you feel cold, you
want to get warmer. When you feel neither, you're doing OK. For most of
human history, and most of our experience today, you most often don't want
to feel a significant amount of either sensation; in that way, they're
kind of like pain, which serves to warn us that something is a problem.
It's kind of amazing that people reached the abstraction of temperature as
early as we did, before thermometers. Modern scientific theory tells us that
cold is merely the absence of heat, just as dark is merely the absence of
light, but we tend to think of cold as a separate force in itself. (I guess
we tend to think of darkenss as a separate force in itself too; when I
complained about the approaching darkness and its evil plans for me in
"Tenebra Appropinquante: A Year 2000 Problem", I wasn't just talking
about the loss of the light, although that's certainly upsetting in its own
way. I was talking about the loss of the light and how it was replaced with
darkness. So psychologically we think in terms of antagonisms and pairs and
not just in presence or absence.) But in the case of our sensations, this
idea is justified -- the feeling of cold is definitely not the same
thing at all as the absence of the feeling of heat! There is a
real sensation of cold which is independent of the sensation of heat, and
you could actually even imagine feeling both at once in the case of some
strange neurological disorder. (You do feel both at once, all the
time, to some degree, but the brain has this strange idea that majority
rules or more specifically that sensations come in degrees, and what you
feel is the preponderance of your conflicting sensations and the degree to
which you feel it is the degree to which it prevails over other
contradictory sensations which you also have at the same time.)
By the way, the fact that some Transmeta sales representatives make errors
about thermodynamics in their presentations should not be taken as casting
any aspersions on the engineering abilities of that company. When I once
mentioned this incident to some Transmeta engineers, they immediately saw
the problem and understood all the technical issues (and were also
generally extremely smart people). So the problem here arises just from
the fact that people speak informally and language is overloaded, and
not anything about Transmeta. (But if you are going to give a presentation
to a bunch of geeks, do watch out for the accuracy of anything that looks
like a technical statement. Geeks' love for technical statements is second
only to geeks' love for criticism of technical statements.)
F=(9/5)C+32
K=C+273
R=F+459
By simple algebra, you can convert from any scale to any other. (Actually,
the Kelvin/Rankine formula is really simple and could be given too --
R=(9/5)K.) For example, my friend's web design company is called
3000K, Inc., which is to say
2727C, Inc., or 5400R, Inc.
(How did they choose
that name?)
Amuse your friends by saying "It's a balmy 510 degrees Rankine here in San
Francisco this evening!".
(from seth-trips)
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 23:53:50 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen
To: seth-trips@zork.net
Subject: [Seth-Trips] Unix time at 987654321, Wednesday, April 18
For those of you who follow such things, you have a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity this week to celebrate the Unix time reaching 987654321!
bash-2.03$ date -d 'April 18, 2001 21:25:21 PDT'
Wed Apr 18 21:25:21 PDT 2001
bash-2.03$ date -d 'April 18, 2001 21:25:21 PDT' +%s
987654321
Some people have suggested having a party at Zeitgeist, the bar in the
Mission were TNIPNAZ/TNICNAZ gatherings and the like take place. I
would rather have a party someplace else, if I'm organizing it, though
I'll definitely go to things at Zeitgeist.
The Unix time is the internal representation all Unix systems use to
tell them what day and time it is; it's measured in seconds since
midnight GMT (now UTC) January 1, 1970. Whenever a Unix system stores
or manipulates a time value internally, it's using this particular
count.
A lot of people use the Unix time for various purposes (I wrote a
script a week or two ago which makes use of it) and sometimes people
notice when the number reaches interesting values. For example, I got
an e-mail message when the Unix time hit 800000000 (in 1995) telling
me to celebrate this milestone. But the really big deal may be the
upcoming 1000000000 mark -- "one billion seconds of Unix!" -- this
fall (in September), which has been anticipated for _years_.
Tracking and using Unix time also trains you to think in terms of
seconds -- for example, I often have use for the fact that an hour is
3600 seconds and a day is 86400 seconds. It turns out that a
calendar year (non-leap year) is the somewhat more forgettable
31536000 seconds, although the "billion seconds is about 31 years"
(the square root of 10 is about 3.162) is not so hard. In fact,
there is a famous quotation about this situation:
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are
3.155x10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury?
(Tom Duff, Bell Labs)
(That is, 3.155 seconds is the billionth part of a century, not
counting leap years.)
If you'd like to celebrate the 987654321 seconds of Unix mark with me,
please let me know!
If you have a Unix machine, you can watch the seconds tick by with
watch -n 1 "date +%s | figlet -f big"
(You'll need figlet, too.)
Today is Easter (Western and Eastern), a fact I've been talking about a lot
lately.
One reader recently sent me a link to The Cure for
Christianity Library. I have a number of those books already, and
some others are on my want list. (Sixteen Crucified Saviors
is there.)
Today I wanted to ask someone, who lost something I never had in the
first place (depending how you think about it), how you could lose
salvation, revelation, and prophecy, and not cry about it, all the time.
Of course I really want to know because when I lost the corresponding
things in my own life (always and unavoidably the "sincere and meaningful
belief occupying in the life of its possessor a place parallel" of
United States v. Seeger, 380 US 163 (1965)), I started to cry, and
haven't stopped, as it seems.
"I don't know how I could not be sad." Then how could other people?
In Cody's today I saw the world's largest selection of Passover haggadot,
put together for sale every year by Ira Steingroot of the Cody's staff.
There's an amazing assortment there. I knew about the Liberated Lamb, but
how about a humanist haggadah which nowhere mentions God? (The Hebrew
blessings bless light, goodness, humanity, and similar things; the magid
tells the story of how the Jews left Egypt because of their own ideals
and inspiration, with no suggestion that someone told them to -- no, they
wanted to be free, says this haggadah.) On the other hand there was a
Chabad haggadah which probably went reasonably far in the opposite
direction.
I understand that people come from all over to see this collection; it's
definitely worth a trip, but Cody's always is, isn't it?
I bought Rebel Code and Open Sources from Cody's
mostly because I didn't happen to have a copy of either. Maybe I just
wanted to read about my friends. I think both of those are already on
Biella's list of texts for her class.
There's lots of other nice stuff at Cody's, as always.
Well, it's not many years that I file tax forms other than at the last
minute, and I'm afraid this year is no exception.
Last year I wrote a long political note about taxes in my Advogato diary
around April 15; you can go read it there if you'd like. I don't think
I have much to add.
I happened to talk to Zack about a couple of ideas for charitable
organizations that the IRS would not accept. One is the Voluntary Socialist
society where people are assessed membership dues according to their
incomes and then receive equal benefits -- this might also be implemented
in a more traditional Mutual Aid form, which is probably actually more
interesting and more practical in my view. Problem: the IRS would not be
willing to make this organization a 501(c)(3) or the redistributive
payments tax-free. At least they would probably be subjected to a gift
tax.
Another is a Left-Anarchist Charity proposed by another friend of mine,
where you give money for poor relief, and the charity hands out cash on
the street to poor people who come by and ask for it. (It's not quite
clear whether it would ask people to prove that they are poor. I'd think
not, but there are forms of this idea where people do have to give some
sort of assurance or evidence that they really need the money.) So this
is just a way of giving money directly to other people because they would
like to have it (something that many left-anarchists think is vastly
better than bureaucratic or paternalistic charity programs -- on the
theory that "the poor are just like us, only they have less money"). But
the interesting thing is that perhaps the Left-Anarchist Charity (a better
name would be the Free Money Foundation, I think; at the Bay Area
Anarchist Book Fair, there was a "free money basket" with the caption "if
you have some money, leave some; if you need some money, leave some",
like the "spare a penny" dishes by cash registers except with one and
five dollar bills) would want 501(c)(3) status, or its donors would. And
my friend's view was that the IRS would never ever grant 501(c)(3) to
a charity that handed out cash to the poor instead of handing out some
good or service, preferably one that was non-transferable.
I mean, they would like to be able to collect those gift taxes or maybe
income taxes on that transfer, and giving away money directly to the
poor erodes that tax base. So this point is very interesting. The
hypothetical charities that just give people money, either because
they sign up in advance or because they show up and ask, are in an
interesting situation. I doubt that the interestingness of the situation is
enough to make tax authorities better disposed toward these charities,
even though some people might really like to see these ideas implemented.
This year I will give some money to (among other things)
Hesperian,
the Ogg Project,
JREF,
EFF,
beggars on the street, and some other causes. So this money will go to,
among other things, public health education in the third world, development
of a non-patent-encumbered free audio codec, convincing people that the
evidence doesn't warrant belief in the supernatural, defending in court
people who publish DeCSS on the Internet, and letting beggars on the street
buy things that they want.
Question: which of these causes is not tax deductible?
I love culture, that gives everything its significance, long beyond the event
itself, and provides an illimitable supply of concepts and metaphors with
which to express aspects of grief.
Dave Farber sent my note about
the EFF's upcoming demonstration on Friday to his IP list. The
EFF will be protesting against the law called the Children's Internet
Protection Act.
In case you were confused by the recent proliferation of items of Federal
legislation on Internet regulation with extremely similar names, here is a
handy chart. (Sorry, HTML table here; I hope that's not an inconvenience
to too many people. I don't really like to use them unless I'm presenting
an actual table. If you use lynx and you want table support, you could
try switching to w3m or links instead.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Child On-line Protection Act [of 1998] |
105-277 |
COPA, "CDA II" |
Internet censorship |
Yes,
by ACLU and others; successful, on appeal |
| Children's On-line Privacy Protection Act [of 1998] |
105-277 |
COPPA |
Regulates collection of personally identifiable information about
children by web site operators |
None as yet |
| Children's Internet Protection Act [of 2000] |
106-554 |
CIPA, CHIPA, ChIPA |
Requires recipients of E-Rate subsidy who provide Internet
access to children to use censorware |
Yes, by ALA and by ACLU; pending |
So this protest is against CIPA, also known as CHIPA, not against COPA or
COPPA. I hope that's clear.
All of these acts mention children in their titles, but none of them were
enacted by children.
I think I'm going to go to the protest with a sign with the immortal line
from Marc Rotenberg:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the
right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the
government for a redress of grievances.
(I actually helped out a bit with that; there was one "XXX" added since the
most original version.)
Carefully engineered, deliberately crippled proprietary software
comes
standard with your IBM ThinkPad(R) thanks to legal threats from the movie
industry!
Shipping LinDVD is not primarily progress or success (although it lets
some users play DVDs out of the box without having to download additional
freely-available software). Instead, it's a bad precedent -- if the
copyright industries feel threatened by something, IBM will accomodate
them by crippling its own technology.
Also, now Jack Valenti can do demos where he plays DVDs on Linux "legally" --
in other words, in such a way that he wouldn't sue himself over it. This
is progress?
If I bought a ThinkPad, I would be willing to pay extra for LiViD, because
freedom isn't free.
OK, I have a new worker's comp claim, so I'm going off to the chiropractor
soon.
I made tax estimates and filed for extensions (IRS 4868, CA FTB 3519).
I'm still waiting for this one 1099 form which I think will show no
capital gains but possibly some interest income.
2000 was my first year working full-time for the whole year and also
my first year making a profit on the sale of securities -- it's amazing
how much greater my tax liability is than previous years.
I still haven't mentioned here that I actually got the DNS for loyalty.org
fixed. I still have other domains to fix, but I don't use them for
e-mail or anything. I think cssfaq.org should probably give links to a
variety of other people's information on CSS, because the dvd-discuss
people don't seem to be maintaining that FAQ.
Downloadable packages are the last major new feature that we'll include
before BBC 2.0. I think they will be very popular; I worked a bit on
trying to figure out a package format today. I even have a theory that the
Debian installer can be a downloadable BBC package on machines with 32
MB of RAM (using this elaborate chroot-into-ramdisk thing that's even
more convoluted than the old chroot-into-ramdisk thing).
I think the packages will be .tar.gz.pgp files with a description file and
postinstall script inside.
I think
I'm going to re-organize part of my home page around the theme that
software is speech.
One interesting thing about not having a long-distance carrier is that, if
a long-distance carrier representative calls you up asking you to switch,
you don't have anything to switch from! This situation confused
a representative so much that she just said goodbye and didn't try to
convince me to use her employer's services -- or maybe she figured it was
a deliberate decision, and maybe there is a policy not to try to sell to
people whodon't already have a carrier.
The fact is that I have actually saved a whole lot of money by using
VarTec's 10-10-811 service -- five cents per minute for California
residents for any long distance call at any time. (There are some
surchages and minimum time requirements and things, but they don't seem
to be too bad.) So I think I would recommend them to other people.
So I bought this bread that looked like a small local brand -- from a
"micro-bakery", with what looks like a cheap adhesive sticker for the
label -- and it turns out in the fine print that it's "a division of
Sara Lee Fresh [...] (C) Sara Lee Corporation 2000". Of course, that
doesn't mean the bread is bad; I'll have to try it and see what I think.
But when I saw the package, I thought of this one bakery in Berkeley
as a model for my image of where this bread was produced. And apparently
that model was totally wrong.
I still have this cold, a little bit. I think it's going away.
No luck yesterday reaching my friend on her birthday, but I sent her a card
and a newspaper clipping she might find interesting. I wish I knew when
more people's birthdays are; I always forget them.
I've got to get some sign-making supplies.
Why does Reuters (to single out one random financial news outlet)
try to give an explanation every day for whatever
the stock market does? "Stocks rose Tuesday on investor expectations that..."
or "Stocks fell Thursday, hurt by warnings that profits would not reach
analyst expectations". Do they really think that they can give an accurate
reason every day for whatever the market is doing? Or do they just happen
to mention a piece of economic or business news that seems relevant?
Sometimes stocks rise in the morning and Reuters will put out a piece about
why the stocks are going on; then they may fall in the evening and there will
be another article to explain this.
Couldn't a lot of the stock market movement be purely speculative and not
based on informed opinion about long-term business trends? As
Brian reminds
us, it's not as though there isn't a gambling element in financial
markets.
"Bets on red increased today at Las Vegas roulette tables amidst expectations
that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its meeting on Monday."
Since the rise of easy-to-use stock brokerages for the general public, a
huge proportion of trades are short-term transactions. Short-term
speculation is a powerful force in the stock markets, but it doesn't
necessarily have any direct connection with news about anything outside
of the stock market, except so far as speculators believe that this news can
be expected to influence long-term investors.
My cold is still here. Definitely.
I heard I should take
zinc supplements to make my
cold go away soon.
The zinc supplements
I have found so far are not
vegetarian. :-(
A careful reader noticed that there was a mistake in my description of the
free money basket at the Anarchist Book Fair. The principle involved
was actually "if you have some money, leave some; if you need some money,
take some".
July's description of neo-Pagans: "Noveau witch."
I had a dream about a bike ride around the Bay Area. (Unrealistically, a
loop around the entire area, crossing the Bay Bridge, the Richmond/San
Rafael Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge, took only a couple of hours.)
The ride took place at night with a large group and there were very
interesting social dynamics in the group which I don't quite remember.
There was one woman riding a bike whom I wanted to talk to, but she took
an alternate route and eluded me.
This dream reminded me of another dream I had about three months ago where
two friends and I were trying to cross the Bay -- using personal floatation
devices with our feet dangling in the water. That was pretty scary; the
only reason we did that was because (as in another dream I once
had) the alternative was not the Bay Bridge as we know it but rather an
open-air roller-coaster which holds you at frightening angles for a long
time high above the Bay.
If that roller-coaster is ever constructed in place of the Bay Bridge,
don't take it! (I don't recommend paddling across with a personal
floatation device either.)
Alas, not executed with human skill, but in a computer's memory:
[zork(~)] python -i cards.py
>>> d = Deck(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 2 of Spades, 3 of Spades, 4 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 6 of
Spades, 7 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 9 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Jack of Spades,
Queen of Spades, King of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts,
4 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Ace of Clubs,
2 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 8 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, King of Clubs,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, Ace of Clubs, 2 of Spades, 2 of Clubs, 3 of Spades, 3
of Clubs, 4 of Spades, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Spades, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Spades,
6 of Clubs, 7 of Spades, 7 of Clubs, 8 of Spades, 8 of Clubs, 9 of Spades,
9 of Clubs, 10 of Spades, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Spades, Jack of Clubs, Queen
of Spades, Queen of Clubs, King of Spades, King of Clubs, Ace of Hearts,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Hearts, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Diamonds,
4 of Hearts, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Hearts, 5 of Diamonds, 6 of Hearts, 6 of
Diamonds, 7 of Hearts, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Hearts, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Hearts,
9 of Diamonds, 10 of Hearts, 10 of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds,
Queen of Hearts, Queen of Diamonds, King of Hearts, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, Ace of Hearts, Ace of Clubs, Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Spades,
2 of Hearts, 2 of Clubs, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Spades, 3 of Hearts, 3 of
Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Spades, 4 of Hearts, 4 of Clubs, 4 of Diamonds,
5 of Spades, 5 of Hearts, 5 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds, 6 of Spades, 6 of
Hearts, 6 of Clubs, 6 of Diamonds, 7 of Spades, 7 of Hearts, 7 of Clubs,
7 of Diamonds, 8 of Spades, 8 of Hearts, 8 of Clubs, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of
Spades, 9 of Hearts, 9 of Clubs, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Spades, 10 of Hearts,
10 of Clubs, 10 of Diamonds, Jack of Spades, Jack of Hearts, Jack of Clubs,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Spades, Queen of Hearts, Queen of Clubs, Queen
of Diamonds, King of Spades, King of Hearts, King of Clubs, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 7 of Clubs, Ace of Hearts, 7 of Diamonds, Ace of Clubs, 8 of
Spades, Ace of Diamonds, 8 of Hearts, 2 of Spades, 8 of Clubs, 2 of Hearts,
8 of Diamonds, 2 of Clubs, 9 of Spades, 2 of Diamonds, 9 of Hearts, 3 of
Spades, 9 of Clubs, 3 of Hearts, 9 of Diamonds, 3 of Clubs, 10 of Spades,
3 of Diamonds, 10 of Hearts, 4 of Spades, 10 of Clubs, 4 of Hearts, 10 of
Diamonds, 4 of Clubs, Jack of Spades, 4 of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, 5 of
Spades, Jack of Clubs, 5 of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds, 5 of Clubs, Queen
of Spades, 5 of Diamonds, Queen of Hearts, 6 of Spades, Queen of Clubs,
6 of Hearts, Queen of Diamonds, 6 of Clubs, King of Spades, 6 of Diamonds,
King of Hearts, 7 of Spades, King of Clubs, 7 of Hearts, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 4 of Hearts, 7 of Clubs, 10 of Diamonds, Ace of Hearts, 4
of Clubs, 7 of Diamonds, Jack of Spades, Ace of Clubs, 4 of Diamonds, 8 of
Spades, Jack of Hearts, Ace of Diamonds, 5 of Spades, 8 of Hearts, Jack of
Clubs, 2 of Spades, 5 of Hearts, 8 of Clubs, Jack of Diamonds, 2 of Hearts,
5 of Clubs, 8 of Diamonds, Queen of Spades, 2 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds,
9 of Spades, Queen of Hearts, 2 of Diamonds, 6 of Spades, 9 of Hearts,
Queen of Clubs, 3 of Spades, 6 of Hearts, 9 of Clubs, Queen of Diamonds,
3 of Hearts, 6 of Clubs, 9 of Diamonds, King of Spades, 3 of Clubs, 6 of
Diamonds, 10 of Spades, King of Hearts, 3 of Diamonds, 7 of Spades, 10 of
Hearts, King of Clubs, 4 of Spades, 7 of Hearts, 10 of Clubs, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 9 of Spades, 4 of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, 7 of Clubs, 2 of
Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds, 6 of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 9 of Hearts, 4 of Clubs,
Queen of Clubs, 7 of Diamonds, 3 of Spades, Jack of Spades, 6 of Hearts,
Ace of Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 4 of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, 8 of Spades,
3 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, 6 of Clubs, Ace of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds,
5 of Spades, King of Spades, 8 of Hearts, 3 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, 6 of
Diamonds, 2 of Spades, 10 of Spades, 5 of Hearts, King of Hearts, 8 of Clubs,
3 of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, 7 of Spades, 2 of Hearts, 10 of Hearts,
5 of Clubs, King of Clubs, 8 of Diamonds, 4 of Spades, Queen of Spades,
7 of Hearts, 2 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 5 of Spades, 9 of Spades, King of Spades, 4 of Hearts, 8 of
Hearts, Queen of Hearts, 3 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, 2 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds, 2 of Spades, 6 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Ace
of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts, King of Hearts, 4 of Clubs, 8 of Clubs,
Queen of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, 3 of Spades,
7 of Spades, Jack of Spades, 2 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 10 of Hearts, Ace of
Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 9 of Clubs, King of Clubs, 4 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds,
Queen of Diamonds, 4 of Spades, 8 of Spades, Queen of Spades, 3 of Hearts,
7 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, 2 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Ace of
Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 3 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 7 of Spades, 9 of Spades, Jack of
Spades, King of Spades, 2 of Hearts, 4 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, Ace of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 7 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, King of Clubs, 2 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, 2 of Spades,
4 of Spades, 6 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Queen of Spades, Ace of
Hearts, 3 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts,
King of Hearts, 2 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 8 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs,
Queen of Clubs, Ace of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds,
9 of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>> d.out_shuffle(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 2 of Spades, 3 of Spades, 4 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 6 of
Spades, 7 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 9 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Jack of Spades,
Queen of Spades, King of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts,
4 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Ace of Clubs,
2 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 8 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, King of Clubs,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>>
I'll spare you the 52 in-shuffles, but you can watch them if you want. I
can give a quick confirmation that 52 in-shuffles are equivalent to a null
(identity) shuffle:
[zork(~)] python -i cards.py
>>> d = Deck(); print d
[Ace of Spades, 2 of Spades, 3 of Spades, 4 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 6 of
Spades, 7 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 9 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Jack of Spades,
Queen of Spades, King of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts,
4 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Ace of Clubs,
2 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 8 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, King of Clubs,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>> for i in range(52):
... d.in_shuffle()
...
>>> print d
[Ace of Spades, 2 of Spades, 3 of Spades, 4 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 6 of
Spades, 7 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 9 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Jack of Spades,
Queen of Spades, King of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts,
4 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Ace of Clubs,
2 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 8 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, King of Clubs,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds, King of Diamonds]
>>>
Now, that was anticlimactic, wasn't it? But it would have been too much to
reproduce all of the intermediate steps. I assure you that the in_shuffle()
function is actually doing an in-shuffle.
One of the coolest things in the world is the discovery by Elmsley (reported
by Gardner) that the binary number system directly gives you the sequence of
perfect shuffles needed to displace the top card down a certain distance:
| To move the top card down | Use this sequence
(O[ut]/I[n]) |
| 0 | O |
| 1 | I |
| 2 | I, O |
| 3 | I, I |
| 4 | I, O, O |
| 5 | I, O, I |
| 6 | I, I, O |
| 7 | I, I, I |
| 8 | I, O, O, O |
| 9 | I, O, O, I |
| 10 | I, O, I, O |
(Of course the pattern continues: to bring the top card to the bottom,
you can use I, I, O, O, I, I -- 110011 is binary for 51.)
Isn't that beautiful? Of course, the bottom card moves up by exactly the
same amount that the top card moves down.
Using Elmsley's principle, to move the top card of a deck down by 17,
you need I, O, O, O, I. Let's try it (emphasis added):
>>> d = Deck()
>>> print d
[
, 2 of Spades, 3 of Spades, 4 of Spades, 5 of Spades, 6 of
Spades, 7 of Spades, 8 of Spades, 9 of Spades, 10 of Spades, Jack of Spades,
Queen of Spades, King of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts,
4 of Hearts, 5 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, 7 of Hearts, 8 of Hearts, 9 of Hearts,
10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Ace of Clubs,
2 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 8 of
Clubs, 9 of Clubs, 10 of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, King of Clubs,
Ace of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 5 of Diamonds,
6 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 8 of Diamonds, 9 of Diamonds, 10 of Diamonds,
Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Diamonds,
]
>>> d.in_shuffle()
>>> d.out_shuffle()
>>> d.out_shuffle()
>>> d.out_shuffle()
>>> d.in_shuffle()
>>> print d
[9 of Clubs, Ace of Clubs, Queen of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, 2 of Hearts, 7
of Spades, 6 of Clubs, 10 of Hearts, 9 of Diamonds, Ace of Diamonds, Queen of
Spades, 4 of Spades, 3 of Clubs, 7 of Hearts, 6 of Diamonds, Jack of Clubs,
9 of Spades,
, Queen of Hearts, 4 of Hearts, 3 of Diamonds, 8
of Clubs, 6 of Spades, Jack of Diamonds, 9 of Hearts, Ace of Hearts, King of
Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 3 of Spades, 8 of Diamonds, 6 of Hearts, Jack of Spades,
10 of Clubs, 2 of Clubs,
, 5 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 8 of
Spades, 7 of Clubs, Jack of Hearts, 10 of Diamonds, 2 of Diamonds, King of
Spades, 5 of Spades, 4 of Clubs, 8 of Hearts, 7 of Diamonds, Queen of Clubs,
10 of Spades, 2 of Spades, King of Hearts, 5 of Hearts]
>>> print d.cards[17] # the 18th card in the deck; the card with 17 above it
Ace of Spades
>>>
Notice that the King of Diamonds has moved up 17 positions, too!
I put up my collection of bookmarks and business cards from bookstores. I
have 64 of them. Of course, I've been to more than 64 bookstores, but I
didn't always collect their bookmarks, and some bookstores don't have a
bookmark or business card to give out.
There must be about a dozen bookstores in Western Massachusetts that I've
been to that I don't have a bookmark from.
One rule about this collection is that I won't display bookmarks if I
haven't been to a bookstore in person (or met a dealer who was displaying
wares); I haven't quite decided about mail order, because I have bought
books from five or six dealers through the mail and never met them in person.
I had my Linuxcare annual review.
I got a bunch of sign-making supplies, tried to keep them dry on my way home
(for it was raining) and made a sample anti-CIPA sign, with the quotation
from Marc Rotenberg.
I wonder if there will be a counter-demonstration or anything.
We missed it! After all that, we let that particular second go by.
OK, anybody want to celebrate MJD 60000? Friday, February 24, 2023. Maybe
MJD 55555 is easier (Christmas Eve in 2010).
18 USC 333, one
of the easiest possible Federal laws to break.
If you have a CD burner, you can burn a copy of the new 1.6.0 BBC,
because it's been
released.
I'm trying to make a little kit for people who want to make modifications
to a BBC, to get them started quickly.
I still have my cold, now in the form of a cough.
I bought some zinc pills:
Source Naturals(R) OptiZinc(R),
thirty milligrams.
I hope the zinc and
Vitamin C help my cold
go away faster.
"Own the
polycarbonate disk that contains, but does not convey ownership of,
one copy of Disney's The Kid, the use of which is limited to
playback only on licensed authorized DVD players" today!
"In
my version of TomorrowLand, you really
are no-kidding illiterate in a fundamental way if you have
no programming skills whatsoever."
After a Politech article, I read a bit about the Singularity, especially
at the Singularity Institute for
Artificial Intelligence. This isn't my first exposure to the idea of
the Singularity, but I haven't heard much about it for a year or so.
If I had gone to MIT, I'm sure I would have heard a lot more about the
Singularity and transhumanism and nanotech and associated ideas. Phil
Agre
wrote about transhumanism in MIT culture:
I'm particular[ly] sensitive to
this stuff from having gone to graduate school at the MIT AI Lab,
where I stewed in every last cliche about intelligent computers. In
that context, "Pi" is hardly an innovation. The guy who supervised
my master's thesis, for example, wanted nothing more than to have his
mind downloaded into a computer that was mounted on a large telescope
that could be launched into space. He figured that if the clock on
the computer was turned down really slow then he could float around
and watch galaxies evolve. This was not considered a strange thing
to want.
And it's not considered a strange thing in the transhumanist world. Truth,
in the view of many Singularity proponents, is literally stranger than
fiction, in that science fiction is supposed to give a good idea of
some things that are possible in the near future -- but science
fiction, being written as it is by ordinary people, doesn't actually
include the sorts of possibilities (in several senses) that post-human
intelligence could devise.
Without meaning disrespect for the intellectual foundations of transhumanist
thought, although I do consider them suspect, I'd like to hear what other
humans have thought about the cultural significance of transhumanism. I
mean, it is apocalyptic; it is millennarian. But it tries to go beyond
normal religious or secular millennarianism -- "come on, is that
the best you can come up with?". Or Paine's "we have it in our power to
begin the world over again", but on such a grand scale!
I doubt that there was ever an apocalyptic movement that thought otherwise
that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again", and was
inspired by the thought that this might be right. And I doubt that there
was ever a public but that was afraid of the same possibility.
People are so different from one another! Go read Life is a
Miracle by Wendell Berry, and maybe his What Are People
For?; read Commodify Your Dissent (Frank) and
Libertarianism: A Primer (Boaz) and The Future and Its
Enemies (Postrel) and The Future Does Not Compute
(Talbott) and The Spirit of Community (Etzioni) and The Machinery
of Freedom (Friedman)
and Engines of Creation (Drexler) and Consilience
(Wilson) and Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky) and
The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil) and Robot
(Moravec) and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Bernal)
and Reason in the Balance (Johnson) and The Selfish
Gene (Dawkins) and The Demon-Haunted World (Sagan)
and maybe a couple of things by Cass Sunstein. (No, I haven't read all of
these.)
Then tell me, are all of these people actually writing about the same world?
How is it possible that their views of what important issues concern us and
what kinds of things are to be taken seriously diverge so widely?
Echinacea tea
from Celestial Seasonings
contains zinc sulfate!
Ten milligrams in
one tea bag, or seventy
percent RDA!
But why does the tea
claim the RDA of zinc
is 14.3?
Supplement bottle:
15 milligrams a day
is what you should get!
Although I should keep a health diary, I have a very definite impression
that I've been sick a lot more often since last April than I
usually have been. And sometimes I worry that this is a general trend from
getting older -- but the "good news" is that it's probably "only" because
I've been depressed a lot of that time.
I put "good news" and "only" in quotation marks for a reason: being
depressed is real and getting sick because of it is real too. And illness
can be expressive (although I don't expect any court to support that
particular theory). Is this exclusively a "new age" view? I don't think so;
when I was growing up, the canonical source for the idea that illness was
expressive was supposed to be Sigmund Freud. So Freud is not particularly
"new age".
He claimed that, in his experience from treating various patients,
they were often getting sick for a reason, but not the kind of reason that
doctors normally look to.
I think there's a famous book on this theme, and I'd be interested in
finding it, if I could remember what it's called.
But in the past year, I've felt sick somehow about once a month, which is
significantly more often than ever before (if you don't count two months in
early 1998 which are kind of a special case).
"Animal" is a pejorative term, but only because "man" has been made
spuriously honorific. Krutch has argued that whereas the traditional
view supports Hamlet's exclamation "How like a god!," Pavlov, the
behavioral scientist, emphasized "How like a dog!"
(B. F. Skinner, Beyond Dignity and Freedom, pp. 191-2)
"Wie ein Hund!" sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.
["Like a dog!" he said; it was as though the shame should outlive him.]
(The last sentence of Franz Kafka's The Trial)
"A spectrum is haunting Europe..."
(The original joke from which this is derived asks whether spectral
analysis is an attempt to find ghosts in data.)
I didn't make it to the protest in Pleasanton because of the rain which
fell over the Bay Area today. That's disappointing; I never expect that
people in California should have to make rain contingency plans. But we
should, especially in the winter and spring.
Nick told me about the
Comprehensive List of Ribbon
Campaigns (which isn't really comprehensive, but which is pretty
amusing, if you have a graphical browser).
Skinner was trying to use "how like a dog" to convince people that some
things we think of as special about ourselves aren't (or don't have the
significance we attribute to them, or are illusions).
Matson has argued that "the empirical behavioral scientist ... denies, if
only by implication, that a unique being, called Man, exists." "What is now
under attack," said Maslow, "is the 'being' of man." C. S. Lewis put it
quite bluntly: Man is being abolished.
There is clearly some difficulty in identifying the man to whom these
expressions refer. Lewis cannot have meant the human species, for not
only is it not being abolished, it is filling the earth. (As a result
it may eventually abolish itself through disease, famine, pollution, or
a nuclear holocaust, but that is not what Lewis meant.) Nor are
individual men growing less effective or productive. We are told that
what is threatened is "man qua man," or "man in his humanity,"
or "man as Thou not It," or "man as a person not a thing." These are not
very helpful expressions, but they supply a clue. What is being abolished
is autonomous man -- the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon,
the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity.
His abolition has long been overdue. Autonomous man is a device used to
explain what we cannot explain in any other way. ["Man of the Gaps"? -- Seth]
He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding
increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does
not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to
prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man we
readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the
real causes of human behavior. Only then can we turn from the inferred to
the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to
the manipulable.
(Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp. 190-1)
One of the interesting representatives of "the literatures of freedom and
dignity" is Mortimer Adler's The Difference of Man and the Difference
It Makes. (Adler is a very interesting figure to me, maybe because
of his influence on Martin Gardner.)
Adler manages to alienate me rapidly in almost everything he writes with
his deep-seated and thoroughgoing religious worldview, and to some
extent with his social conservatism (the "throwback to a bygone era"
syndrome, I suppose). But...
A lot of Adler's concerns are my concerns. A lot of Adler's attitudes are
my attitudes.
I have basically no sympathy with the idea that other animals are
unconscious or that we owe them no moral duties or that we can do whatever
we want to them (without behaving wrongly). And this is a major tendency
in the tradition of "the difference of Man": us vs. them, we are
like this and they are not, so don't worry about how you treat them,
don't find any difficulty in using them for your own purposes...
But even though I really dislike that moral or political inference, I almost
always agree with Adler's idea (and with the Western tradition, which he's
right to say that he belongs to) that there are fundamental, qualitative,
significant differences between humans and other animals. That we humans
are special, that we have a "human nature", that this human nature has many
of its most interesting and important features separate from the natures of
all other animals on Earth.
Skinner, of course, doesn't believe a word of that; he thinks that view is
obsolete. And a lot of people who aren't as extreme as Skinner also agree.
But Adler, for example, would probably say that human nature is the source
and is the only source of the fact that we deserve and desire
freedom and dignity. Skinner thinks that idea should have perished with the
medieval Church.
It seems to me that it's hard to make a really strong case for freedom
and dignity outside of some kind of idea of human nature. It's hard to take
them entirely seriously.
But Adler and Plato and some of their friends said that the origin of human
nature was in a soul, which all people have and (here traditions start to
disagree) nobody else has. So you worry about your soul's progress and you
worry about your soul's condition and integrity, and if you have access to
a religious revelation or teaching about how souls can be improved, you
try to practice it and tell other people about it. You also try to avoid
offending against others' souls, and perhaps whether or not another being
has a soul becomes a significant moral consideration in assessing your
behavior toward that being.
I expect that Skinner would call the account of the soul "nonsense upon
stilts" (as Jeremy Bentham attacked people he called anarchists: "Natural
rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical
nonsense, nonsense upon stilts."), in that the soul even more than
the mind is an unnecessary hypothesis invoked to account for
(currently) unexplained behavior. (B. F. Skinner as latter-day Pierre
de Laplace: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis".)
I think the soul is just a misconception, but not nonsense. And my real
concerns with the idea are just its supernatural and theological
connotations -- that the soul survives death, that the soul
is provided by God -- in that I believe in the mind, the self,
the personality.
I want to be somewhere in between Adler and Skinner, or Plato and Bentham.
Is that possible? (Well, actually, I don't particularly want to be anywhere
near Bentham.) I want to get rid of the supernatural while preserving
ideas like human nature which were originally formulated in a way quite
closely linked with supernatural ideas. Is that possible? Do we end up
haunted with ghosts, or in some sense with the ghosts of ghosts?
I do think of other animals, and sometimes other people, as "what
I'm not like".
I tried to install Debian potato on Friday using boot floppies (I also wanted
to look at the install process to see whether it can be incorporated in the
BBC). No luck -- I get a "crc error" while the kernel is loading the RAM
disk image from the second disk, every time, even trying a different floppy
or two.
I went to Berkeley on Friday night and stayed over there. At Cody's, I
bought TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 and Expert C
Programming: Deep C Secrets, which David Welton recommended highly
(and I can understand why).
How did I ever get into a situation where I would have to worry about whether
I would see my ex-girlfriend at an event? Well, I think I know how I got into
that situation. So maybe that "?" should be a "!". ("What a piece of work
is man!" not "What a piece of work is man?", you know.)
I'm off to Rainbow Grocery
with Zack (it's the health-food on Folsom by the freeway, near CostCo.) They
might be fairly crowded because it's Earth Day tomorrow. How many people will
say "Hey, it's Earth Day weekend! Let's go to the health food store!"?
(As opposed to going outside or anything, of course.)
In talking about missing yesterday's anti-CIPA protest,
I met somebody who supports CIPA. Obviously there must be a lot of CIPA
supporters in the U.S., but that doesn't mean I meet them all the time.
Yesterday was also Cal Day
at UC Berkeley. If I had known and if I hadn't been going to Rainbow with
Zack, possibly I should have gone to some events, like the Fermat's Last
Theorem talk.
I had two elaborate dreams last night. The first involved being in an
adventure game whose goal was to recover or discover some kind of treasure
in a series of man-made undersea caverns without being killed by various
traps. (I think the caverns were actually someone's base or fortress.)
I forgot whether I could start over if a trap killed me, or whether
I would die and lose. (Having dreams where I was "in a video game" is not
a new thing for me, but it's not usually clear whether I'm the player
of the video game -- sitting back and watching -- or the character
in the video game -- there amidst the action. Sometimes this changes in the
middle of a dream, and I don't even notice.) There was also a complicated
plot about how the treasure got there and who else was looking for it or
helping me.
In the second dream, I was using all kinds of public transit and vans in a
futuristic San Francisco full of huge malls. I was just trying to get home,
but the transit lines were much more complex than they are today, so I was
having a pretty tough time of it. One electric shuttle bus drove through
many different floors of a mall (which was kind of a cross between
Embarcadero Center, the Metreon, and the interconnected malls with walkways
in downtown Boston) and still failed to bring me to the transit line I was
looking for. So it was very exciting to see this complicated, futuristic
city, but I still couldn't manage to get home!
(Compare "World Views in Collision", in Metamagical Themas.)
Today, "cuius
regio, eius religio" doesn't apply so much to countries
as to cultural and subcultural groups.
I thought of this while considering going to an acupuncturist. My
subculture, in support of which I want to ask people to donate money to
JREF, really frowns upon going to
acupuncturists -- although perhaps there is a continuum in assessment of
non-standard medical techniques, running from chiropractors and
acupuncturists, who "may actually do something to stimulate muscular
or nervous reactions", to homeopathy and TT, which are "contrary to
established physical principles", to psychic surgeons and a bunch of
old-time patent medicine advocates, who "have been exposed as outright
frauds". (Note that I believe all the things I put in quotation marks;
I'm just trying to look at them with a bit more detachment.)
One reason that we might frown upon consulting chiropractors and
acupuncturists, even though a lot of them provide remarkable pain relief,
is that many of them persist in advocating the founding theories of their
schools, even where these theories are in strong contrast with empirical
physiology and experimental biology ("have been discredited"). Many
chiropractors -- not all -- still maintain that their business is curing
subluxations. Many acupuncturists -- not all -- still maintain that
their business is improving the flow of the qi energy.
The fact that these practitioners advocate these theories is taken to be
enough to make them quacks, or harmful opponents of the progress of
medical knowledge, even if they happen to be effective healers.
(I haven't asked my chiropractor whether she thinks she treats
subluxations. I don't know whether I should. She also has sound standard
medical qualifications and a great track record.)
I have mixed feelings about this, but I can understand why we have such
resentment against non-standard medical theory (and why doctors
maintain that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine -- only
medicine that works, and medicine that doesn't; I should find the citation
for a very recent essay on that topic by a former JAMA
editor). One of the sources of the triumphs of experimental medicine was
its insistence that we should try to understand exactly why a treatment
works (which was second to the insistence that we should try to determine
for sure whether a treatment works. Here tradition and
obscurantism were big obstacles to things like the germ theory of disease,
even though lots of people who weren't doctors knew very effective remedies
and techniques doctors didn't. So doctors acquired a strong insistence
that people shouldn't cling to traditional theories about the reason for
the efficacy of some treatment; no, the explanation for the treatment had
to fit into proper empirical medical theory, or the progress of theory would
be held back (and it wouldn't be able to make the best possible use of
treatments that were suggested).
Since there is an active controversy today about whether qi
exists -- and from my point of view I would hesitate to say "a serious
controversy", but I'd definitely say "an active controversy", it's a
big setback for qi opponents when effective healers attribute
their cures to qi. Not necessarily because strong scientific
evidence is provided, but because if I'm healed by someone who says a
restoration of the balance of my qi healed me, it's much harder
to doubt.
I know that the general debate about alternative medicine is much broader
than this, but I'm concentrating on the specific issue of the validity and
the explanation of non-standard techniques. This provokes such passion!
And it seems like such a serious and weighty issue to me.
But other people are completely untroubled by it, and would feel no
compunction about going to an alternative practitioner (on a suitable
recommendation), regardless of the specific techniques or theories that
practitioner advocated. (Indeed, many people went to psychic surgeons,
whom I put way out at one end of the list, and people are still
going, notwithstanding that American magicians can
perform psychic surgery much more cheaply and apparently with even more
refined technique.)
The interesting thing to me here was the different kinds of attitudes
people have and the weight they attribute to different concerns. And I
know people, I have relatives, who just don't worry about this at all;
I could say it's not in their culture. They won't lose sleep over
"how did the acupuncturist cure me?" or "is how the acupuncturist cured
me different from how she said she cured me?". It's perhaps more like
"this helped, this didn't help", which is what everyone normally feels
is the point when we're not busy owing allegiance to, having investment
in, and receiving guidance from larger practices and institutions.
For some people, there is no concern about certain contexts in which they
(might) place certain experiences. Other people are filled with
trepidation.
I wrote a message to some right-anarchist mailing lists on the theme that
international trade treaties aren't only about free trade. This is an
interesting topic; one friend argued that these treaties are just
called "free trade" treaties but actually touch on a lot of
other subjects (and also don't necessarily establish free trade).
So it's interesting: I might end up opposing some treaties like the FTAA
treaty (I was always in favor of them in the past, with things like NAFTA
and MAI) not because I don't support free trade but because these may not
really be free trade.
On the mailing list, I suggested that a libertarian adaptation of the
anti-World Bank slogan "more World, less Bank" could be an anti-WTO
slogan "more Trade, less Organization".
Maybe I'll quote a copy of my mailing list post here.
One of the paraphrases I made of a few recent points: we don't assume
that a law called "The Children's Internet Protection Act" protects
children (or the Internet) just because it has "protection" in its
name. So why should we assume that the "Free Trade Area of the Americas"
provides free trade in the Americas just because it has "free trade" in
its name?
So there is the important prospect that one can oppose "free trade"
treaties without opposing free trade, although this wouldn't mean that I'd
suddenly be in agreement with my friends on the left who do oppose free
trade.
It must be fun to be a
professor and be able to do sophisticated, interesting research and
have your opponents "appreciate your position" before they threaten to
sue you.
I wrote:
Daniel C. Burton writes:
> By the way, I think it would also help immensely in
> promoting our ides [if] individualist anarchists and
> anarcho-capitalists were right up on the front lines of
> these actions along with all the other anarchists. [...]
> We may not agree with the people there in opposing free trade,
> but we would approve fully of shutting down the FTAA or any
> other budding global government regulatory organization.
>
> We need to show people that real free trade involves getting
> rid of the border control, not setting up multinational
> government regulatory agencies, and that the approach of
> Bush and others is a throw-back to mercantilism. We don't
> need multilateral treaties and we certainly don't need to
> punish countries that don't comply by cutting off trade with
> them. We need to show that opening up borders is to the
> advantage of a country whether or not other countries follow
> in their footsteps.
I've had lot of debates recently with friends, because I'm the only
person (aside from people I met through libertarian connections) who
is really enthusiastic about free trade. Of course I think it has
advantages and disadvantages, but, like Daniel, I'm unhappy with
national borders and the view that governments are entitled to impose
tariffs (and other fees and taxes) on imported or exported goods.
One common response I get is that "free trade is bad", but there's
another one of far more interest to me: "The FTAA and other treaties
aren't just about free trade!" -- in the same sense that just because
a law is called the Children's Internet Protection Act doesn't mean it
protects children (or the Internet).
Some of my friends who are not particularly sympathetic to
libertarianism but do have some understanding of libertarian ideas
suggested that we need to look beyond the titles of treaties to
see what provisions they actually contain. And indeed a lot of the
content of trade treaties can be very intricate and very offensive to
people of many different political persuasions (sometimes, oddly, for
almost opposite reasons).
This reminds me that I should be careful not to blindly support a
treaty with "Trade" in the title, any more than I would blindly
support a bill in Congress with "Freedom" in the title.
Some treaties do give regulatory power to treaty organizations instead
of governments. People on the left tend to hate this, because the
treaty organizations are not transparent (which should bother
libertarians) and are not democratic (which won't necessarily bother
libertarians), and also because they may regulate less, on the whole,
than governments would, and their regulations may not be formed along
the same lines that government regulations would be.
(If governments charter commissions or independent organizations with
regulatory power, those organizations can be even less accountable
than governments. Libertarians don't all agree that all forms of
"accountability" are necessarily desirable, but we can still imagine
some important risks here.)
Some more libertarian concerns might be that these regulations could
be discriminatory (favoring large organizations) or may be subject to
corruption in some of the ways that governments are. (Most protestors
say "in vastly more ways", but I'm skeptical.) For example (something
Daniel's comment reminds me of), I may not be able to trade freely as
an individual even though a large company (which is able to comply
with a significant regulatory burden) might be able to avoid tariffs
and quotas for what is (to it) a "nominal" fee. But that doesn't help
me when I want to sell some item and the Customs agent at the border
considers it subject to a duty. (Does the FTAA actually contemplate
avoiding customs inspections of individuals travelling between FTAA
member states?)
I'm a little shocked to find myself joining anti-treaty protestors in
some of my sympathies, but the emphasis on problems in the
treaties and treaty organizations rather than in "trade" in general
makes the possibility reasonable to me.
Maybe libertarians should take a page from the protestors who said
"more World, less Bank" -- we could say "more Trade, less
Organization". :-)
Another interesting issue which libertarians who are skeptics of
intellectual property legislation may find interesting: trade treaties
are one of the major sources of extensions and expansions of
copyrights and patents. For example, extensions of the term of
copyright and patent in the U.S. used "harmonization" and trade
treaties as a major rationale; similarly, the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and the European Copyright Directive were supported with
similar rationales, and patents on software (and genome patents) are
being pushed through "trade" negotiations (even though they will
actually create new barriers to trade by banning imports and domestic
production of previously legal goods!).
After this, I read an article on the Declaration that the FTAA conference
produced -- and indeed it was not especially libertarian and addressed all
sorts of things other than trade. For example, it included a pledge for
multilateral government co-operation to fight drug trafficking (which should
probably be called an anti-trade measure). Which government do you suppose
proposed that?
I wrote a letter to my high school English teacher Sunday night.
I then had a dream about being back in high school. What do you know?
My friend who visited Monday once posed this problem (she no longer
needs the answer).
There are r regions R_1, R_2, R_3, R_4, ... R_i ... R_r. Each region
has two properties (or "attributes"), A and B, which are integer values --
perhaps A(R_1)=5. We are given a complete list of A(R_i) and B(R_i) for each
i, for a total of 2r integer values. There might not be any discernible
pattern here, but we get a complete table.
Now, we want to divide these regions into g non-overlapping groups so
that "each group has about the same total for A values" and "each group has
about the same total for B values".
There are several possible definitions for these criteria. If you pick your
favorite definition of what the goal means, can you give a good non-brute-force
way to form groups?
I think I asked about this on Advogato at one point.
I never figured out a really useful answer, even though I did describe some
possible clarifications of "each group has about the same total". Again, my
friend no longer needs a solution to this problem, but I'd still like to solve
it.
I was interested to note that the only posters in
the little station were ones informing travelers that they had Human
Rights. That was all. It intrigues me to think that there might be
someone going through the border who is confused and thinks that,
perhaps, he does not have human rights and needs a poster to tell him
otherwise.
(Helen spends fall break at the Namibian border)
that George W. Bush is a conservative: via Politech Monday morning.
From TLJ:
4/20. President Bush announced his intent to nominate Robert Flores to
be Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention (OJJDP). Flores is currently the VP and Senior Counsel for
the National Law Center for Children and Families. He also served on
the COPA Commission. He is one of the leading proponents of
prosecuting obscenity on the Internet, and requiring schools and
libraries receiving e-rate subsidies to use filtering technology.
However, the OJJDP is not a prosecutorial office; it collects and
disseminates information, and provides grants and other assistant to
state and local authorities. It also has no authority regarding the
e-rate.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/04/20010420-1.html
That national law center should really be called the National Law Center
Against Pornography, because that's what they do. For example, they were
one of the recent amici supporting the idea that realistic depictions of
children having sex should be illegal. This is a contentious legal issue
now before the Supreme Court, because of course some people can
draw sexually explicit depictions of children, or create them
with computer animation software, without any actual children being
involved. (Search for Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Reno
and you can find some material on the current case. This is different
from ACLU v. Reno.)
Thus civil liberties advocates say "thought crime" and the National Law
Center and others say "the elimination of one more obstacle in the
prevention of child pornography".
I think many civil libertarians have gotten this idea from mathematics
about epsilon-delta proofs of limits and thought that you could have a
moral bounding box around an act. If the bounding box can be made as
small as you like while still containing the act, and then if it
contains only the actor (some say: and other consenting parties) (some
say: and the actor's property), the act will be legitimate.
There is this fascination with "the privacy of one's own room" (for example,
oral and anal intercourse are still illegal in many states and
the U.S. Supreme Court
approved
of state laws with this effect,
because it didn't agree with "the privacy of one's own room" argument). I
think that's the most common kind of mental moral bounding box: this act was
bounded in the most private place (this side of the grave, Emily Dickinson
fans) with consenting parties and perhaps left no traces afterward, yet the
court did not protect it. How could that be?
I went to a rehearsal of a musical improv at
Mills College in Oakland. It was
very good; in some parts, it was very funny.
After this, we went to a crepe place on College Avenue near the Rockridge
BART. I suppose I could have tried to meet Nick around there to cash a
check, but it didn't even occur to me until I got home. At the crepe
place, we had a very nice time with much merriment. It reminded me of
good times around dinner tables with friends back in high school. (In case
anyone reading this doesn't already know, I have a wonderful high
school experience.)
In between Mills and College Avenue, we crossed Broadway and I immediately
thought of exactly what I had been saying the last time I crossed that
particular intersection (a few blocks south of College and Broadway), more
than a year ago. Spatialization of memories? Method of loci? Or just
the strength of memories themselves?
The people I was with were really interesting.
I worked on some paperwork for my Worker's Comp claim.
I feel all better from my cold, no longer sick at all, but I still
feel funny in my nose and throat. (Curtis says symptoms from a cold will
last longer than the pathogens themselves that provoked them.)
I don't want to go to the chiropractor until I feel completely well (and
some people would say: then there would be no need for you to go to the
chiropractor).
I had several dreams Monday night, but I don't remember them.
I'm experimenting with some things, like trying to compare the size of a
cramfs with the size of a cloop-compressed ext2fs. On reflection, I think
cramfs is going to win.
I may go to the drug policy debate in Berkeley tonight. The president of
Students for a Sensible Drug Policy is debating Kevin Sabet. If you don't
know who Kevin Sabet is, and you don't have a bunch of back issues of the
Daily Cal lying around to look up his letters to the editor, try
a
Google
search for "Kevin Sabet".
For a particular tree where I tried both, cloop came out around 46 million
bytes and cramfs came out around 49 million bytes. So cloop wins here, and
I suspect its compression can be further improved.
Mike Goldman, with whom I have various interesting things in common, made
an offer of $5,000 for anyone who could compress random data. (One of the
interesting conclusions of information theory is the impossibility of
compressing random data. I've tried to explain this before from a
theoretical point of view, but I didn't manage to hit all the facets of
this conclusion. But it is a very important point, and it's important
to be clear about the senses in which random data can't be compressed.)
So he set up a contest, and someone entered and cheated in a somewhat clever but
"well-known in the literature" way.
Mike didn't pay up. But you have to be so careful when you make a challenge.
Somebody will be happy to "win" your challenge and not actually do what you
were looking for.
I didn't make it to the drug debate, but it reminds me that I should post
here that piece I wrote about externalities a while ago.
BART is distributing
proprietary
software with an anti-reverse engineering clause, a license revocation
clause, and other such bad old memories from the 1980s software industry.
Why isn't government-provided software freely licensed to the public? (Yes,
I know that state governments receive copyright in their original work, and
all governments can be recipients of copyright assignment.)
By contrast, sometime CalLUG member
Michael Wittman
created an excellent free software application
called BART
Scheduler (link is temporarily broken Tuesday evening). Why couldn't
the BART District follow his example?
Janet Reno is going to be the commencement speaker at Berkeley this year. Lots
of people like to protest commencement speakers. When I think about how
often Janet Reno was the defendant in civil liberties cases, I think maybe I
should protest too.
Then I thought "Well, she was just doing her job, defending those
cases -- she was required to argue that the CDA was constitutional,
she was required to argue for all these other laws..."
Then I thought "Nobody made Janet Reno be Attorney General. If someone told
me that I had to defend the Communications Decency Act as part of my job, I
would be wondering how I got into that job in the first place. Of
course we
should protest people who do bad things while 'just doing their jobs'!".
So, yeah. Protest Janet Reno at the Berkeley commencement. Good idea.
Maybe there will be a counterdemonstration: "Janet Reno: She's not as bad
as John Ashcroft!". :-)
There is a lot of humanism if not a lot of humanity in these lines from
Ecclesiastes, which were recommended to me on Tuesday:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a
time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a
time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a
time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones
together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time
to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and
a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time
of peace.
(3:1-8 (KJV))
For my part, I identified with the universalist god "who was away on
an errand" in Daniel Quinn's paraphrase of the Fall:
While the gods were debating this point, a fox came out to hunt, and they
said, "Let's send the fox a quail for its life." But these words were hardly
spoken when one of them said, "Surely it would be a crime to let the fox
live at the quail's expense. The quail has its life that we gave it and lives
in our hands. It would be infamous to send it into the jaws of the fox!"
Then another said, "Look here! The quail is stalking a grasshopper! If we
don't give the quail to the fox, then the quail will eat the grasshopper.
Doesn't the grasshopper have its life that we gave it and doesn't it live
in our hands as truly as the quail? Surely it would be a crime not
to give the quail to the fox, so that the grasshopper may live."
Well, as you can imagine, the gods groaned heavily over this and didn't know
what to do. And while they were wrangling over it, spring came, and the
snow waters of the mountains began to swell the streams, and one of them said,
"Surely it would be a crime to let these waters flood the
land, for countless creatures are bound to be carried off to their deaths."
But then another said, "Surely it would be a crime not to let these
waters flood the land, for without them the ponds and marshes will dry up,
and all the creatures that live in them will die." And once more the gods
were thrown into confusion.
Finally one of them had what seemed to be a new thought. "It's clear that
any action we take will be good for some and evil for others, so let's take
no action at all. Then none of the creatures that live in our hands can
call us criminals."
"Nonsense," another snapped. "If we take no action at all, this will also
be good for some and evil for others, won't it? The creatures that live in
our hands will say, 'Look, we suffer, and the gods do nothing!'"
And while the gods bickered among themselves, the locusts swarmed over
the savannah, and the locusts and the birds and the lizards praised the
gods while the game and the predators died cursing the gods. And because
the gods had taken no action in the matter, the quail lived, and the fox
went hungry to its hole cursing the gods. And because the quail lived, it
ate the grasshopper, and the grasshopper died cursing the gods. And
because in the end the gods decided to stem the flood of spring waters,
the ponds and the marshes dried up, and all the thousands of creatures that
lived in them died cursing the gods.
And hearing all these curses, the gods groaned. "We've made the garden a
place of terror, and all that live in it hate us as tyrants and criminals.
And they're right to do this, because by action or inaction we send them
good one day and evil the next without knowing what we should do. The
savannah stripped by the locusts rings with curses, and we have no answer
to make. The fox and the grasshopper curse us because we let the quail
live, and we have no answer to make. Surely the whole world must curse the
day we made it, for we are criminals who send good and evil by turns, knowing
even as we do it that we don't know what out to be done."
Well, the gods were sinking right into the slough of despond when one of
them looked up and said, "Say, didn't we make for the garden a certain
tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil?"
"Yes," cried the others. "Let's find that tree and eat of it and see
what this knowledge is." And when the gods had found this
tree and has tasted its fruit, their eyes were opened, and they said,
"Now indeed we have the knowledge we need to tend the garden without
becoming criminals and without earning the curses of all who live in
our hands."
And as they were talking in this way, a lion went out to hunt, and the gods
said to themselves, "Today is the lion's day to go hungry, and the deer
it would have taken may live another day." And so the lion missed its
kill, and as it was returning hungry to its den it began to curse the gods.
But they said, "Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today
is your day to go hungry." And the lion was at peace.
And the next day the lion went out to hunt, and the gods sent it the deer
they had spared the day before. And as the deer felt the lion's jaws on
its neck, it began to curse the gods. But they said, "Be at peace,
for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to die just as
yesterday was your day to live." And the deer was at peace.
Then the gods said to themselves, "Certainly the knowledge of good and
evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world
without becoming criminals. If we had yesterday sent the lion away hungry
without this knowledge, then indeed it would have been a crime. And if
we had today sent the deer into the lion's jaws without this knowledge,
then indeed this too would have been a crime. But with this knowledge
we have done both of these things, one seemingly opposed to the other,
and have committed no crime."
Now it happened that one of the gods was away on an errand when the others
were eating at the tree of knowledge, and when he returned and heard what
the gods had done in the matter of the lion and the deer, he said, "In doing
these two things you have surely committed a crime in one instance or the
other, for these two things are opposed, and one must have been right to do
and the other wrong. If it was good for the lion to go hungry on the
first day, then it was evil to send it the deer on the second. Or if it
was good to send it the deer on the second day, then it was evil to
send it away hungry on the first."
The others nodded and said, "Yes, this is just the way we would have
reasoned before we ate of this tree of knowledge."
(Ishmael, pp. 158-60)
Daniel Quinn, like John Milton, probably doesn't want us to identify with
his villains. How can I help it?
(It's easy to get out of sync so that I'm not writing about things on the
days they happened. The date at the top of the file, and in the filename,
is normally the day on which I post the diary entry or the day in which
almost all of it was written; the days in the section headings refer to
what's being documented in a particular section. I hope that's clear.)
Today I talked about ISOLINUX
(a version of H. Peter Anvin's
SYSLINUX
which
can boot CDs in El Torito "non-emulation mode", where the BIOS admits that
the CD-ROM is actually a CD-ROM, not a floppy drive) and then about
contingency and life history. I narrowly missed the book-signing for To
an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on
Trial, but I did buy a lot of books at Black Oak.
Interesting finds include Structure and Interpretation of Classical
Mechanics, published just now by MIT
Press. One of the co-authors is a co-author of Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs, so this is probably destined to
be a classic. It's pretty difficult -- it jumps right in to Lagrangians
and Hamiltonians, while making some of the sorts of broad high-level points
that we would expect from SICP.
I also got Hardy's Course of Pure Mathematics and Ramanujan's
Collected Papers and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage
Out (which my mother is going to Wales to present a paper on!),
Thomas Kuhn's The Essential Tension, and
a commentary on Aeneid II. (There are whole series of books
where each volume is a commentary on just a single book of the
Aeneid.
A book of the Aeneid, without notes, is about twenty printed
pages. It's like the Bible or something! Actually, my "Aeneid" shelf in
my new apartment is right next to my "Bible" shelf, and they are about
equally full.)
Reading Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity would
make Seth:
- Throw up
- Cry
- Laugh
- Become a progressive social democrat
(It's not like Kuro5hin or
anything -- you can't actually answer the poll on-line.)
(All of the material in this diary entry describes Thursday.)
It was very overcast and foggy in San Francisco today.
Fear of heights. Skyscraper apartment complexes built out of lawn chair
mesh (which doesn't look strong enough to hold people's weight). Buried
alive in popcorn at a mall arcade complex.
Employment situation.
We got an ISOLINUX-based BBC working. I still haven't been able to find
a machine that it didn't boot on (among the set of machines that boot
a SYSLINUX-based BBC from CD). I also talked about md5tee; I think I'm
finally going to implement that.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/sdmimessage.txt
"Reading Between the Lines"
has been available on Cryptome for several days. Presumably someone who had
access to it leaked a copy to John Young.
(According to a message Jack forwarded to linux-elitists, the SDMI Foundation
says it didn't actually mean to sue Professor Felten; instead, it was just
letting him know that Verance might sue him.)
LinuxWorld Conference and
Expo has accepted my presentation, "Bootable Rescue, Demo, and
Application CDs", for the upcoming conference in August. (This is an
industry technical conference rather than an academic conference; the
program committee
is made up of technical people working in the Linux
industry rather than of researchers. The conference is sponsored by
IDG, not by an academic consortium.)
This will be my third time speaking at LWCE. Conceivably I could submit
presentation proposals to some other conferences.
Thursday, April 26, is World Intellectual Property Day. Don Marti tells us
that WIPO wants university students to
write
essays on "What does intellectual
property mean to you in your daily life?". The prize is 1,000 Swiss francs.
I'm not a university student, but in my daily life intellectual property
means censorship, repression, litigation, fear, arrogance, political
corruption, and duplicity. Thank you for asking.
The longest letter I ever wrote anybody was about 150 pages, and I finished
it in late December 1999. Certainly I felt much happier in December 1999
and more confident about the "journey of our life", and I'm sure the letter
would provide interesting clues to that, but at the moment I'm trying to
remember some of what I wrote then about "practice". I remember suggesting
that it's possible to practice at every moment, even, perhaps, as one is
just walking around. I wasn't specific, in the text of my letter, about
what was being
practiced. I know I had a couple of concrete ideas -- for instance, this
practice could
include something like counting in binary on one's fingers, which I did
actually practice while walking around. But I don't mean to limit it to
readily observable things like binary counting. It was supposed to be
more than that sort of thing; it was supposed to be general.
What I realized only recently was that my discussion on practice was right on
target, and, in fact, I had been doing it for years before I wrote that
letter. As a result, I had become very accomplished.
So it's true, and my letter was correct. And you too can practice, even
all the time, if you want.
I mentioned the other day this idea that people would be uncomfortable
with a medical practitioner's ideas about why something works. For example,
I might be healed by acupuncture but be very concerned that the
acupuncturist claimed that the cure was effected by qi energy,
because I might think that the existence of qi was disproven (or
at least not proven).
So, Wolfgang has me reading this book Personal Knowledge: Towards
a Post-Critical Philosophy by Michael Polanyi, and it turns out
that Polanyi expressed exactly this issue back in 1958 (look especially
at his description of the "desperate situation"):
This example [of the actual existence of pianists' "touch and tone" skill,
for a reason pianists themselves didn't understand] should stand for many
others which teach the same lesson; namely that to deny the feasibility
of something that is alleged to have been done or the possibility of an
event that is supposed to have been observed, merely because we cannot
understand in terms of our hitherto accepted framework how it could
have been done or could have happened, may often result in explaining
away quite genuine practices or experiences. Yet this method of
criticism is indispensable, and without its constant exercise no scientist
or technician could keep a steady course among the many spurious
observations which he has to set aside unexplained every day.
Destructive analysis remains also an indispensable weapon against
superstition and specious practices. Take for example homeopathy. In
this case the efficacity of an alleged art, still widely practised
today, can be wholly refuted, in my opinion, by a mere analysis of
its claims. Medicinal substances used homeopathically can be
shown, on the evidence of homeopathic prescriptions, to be diluted
to concentrations as low as, or below that, in which they are present
in ordinary food and drinking water; it seems impossible that an
additional spoonful of them administered in a similar dilution would
be medically effective.
A desperate situation may arise if a new skill, the efficacy of
which is open to doubt, is given a false interpretation by its
discoverers. This is illustrated by the tragic failures of the
pioneers of hypnotism during the century from Mesmer to Braid.
The critics of Mesmer and later of Elliotson found it easy to
demonstrate that the manipulations which these men said they were
performing were in themselves ineffectual. Elliotson had expounded
a whole system of laws governing the alleged transmission of
animal magnetism. He claimed that the magnetism of a glass of
water, the drinking of which caused cataleptic trance, could be
graded by dipping one finger into it, or two fingers, or the whole
hand. Another "law" declared that mucous surfaces of the subject,
like those of the tongue or the eyeball, were capable of receiving
a greater mesmeric stimulus than the skin. Later Elliotson
announced that gold and nickel were more sensitive to mesmeric
influences than base metals like lead. All this was nonsense and
was easily proved to be nonsense. And since the assumption had
not yet dawned upon anyone that hypnotic suggestion was the effective
agent of Mesmerism, the conclusion seemed inevitable that Elliotson's
subjects were impostors, who were either deluding him or colluding
with him. In vain did Elliotson bitterly appeal: "I have given
details of 76 painless operations in the name of common sense and
humanity, what more is wanted?" Not until the concept of hypnosis
was established as a framework for the facts, could these facts be
eventually admitted to be true. Indeed, whenever truth and error
are amalgamated in a coherent system of conceptions, the
destructive analysis of the system can lead to correct conclusions
only when supplemented by new discoveries. But there exists no
rule for making fresh discoveries or inventing truer conceptions, and
hence there can be no rule, either, for avoiding the uncertainty of
destructive analysis.
I went out for sushi with Zack and had a discussion about the ethics and
propriety of sit-ins and "direct-action protests". This is an issue I've
had a hard time with in the past, and this time was no exception.
One interesting thing is that I think that sit-ins shouldn't have any
first amendment protection (except, I guess, to the degree that they are
suppressed in a non-content-neutral way or for non-content-neutral
reasons). It's surprising to me that so many people think that people
doing a sit-in have first amendment protection.
There are also some issues around how to judge police behavior with
respect to protestors. I ended up saying that police, in enforcing some
law, might have a mixture of legitimate and illegitimate interests. This
reminds me a lot of what I quoted yesterday from Personal
Knowledge about the mixture of truth and error in some new medical
theories. I suppose that understanding the situation of the police will
be at least as difficult as understanding the situation of the nonstandard
medical theories...
Daniel Berrigan's birthday is coming up. Writing this diary entry led me
to suggest convening a party
where people can talk about civil disobedience, direct action, and whether
there is a duty to obey the law (and in particular what duties we have
with respect to our actions toward people who genuinely have opposing
moral beliefs).
I'll probably have that party on May 9, Berrigan's 80th birthday; if you
read this diary and don't read
seth-trips
and want to come, let me know.
(All of the material below describes Friday.)
A telephone argument about my ex-girlfriend -- at one point, a conference
call where I didn't speak directly to my ex-girlfriend, but the person I was
speaking to relayed messages back and forth between us.
Going back to my high school, staying in my old dorm, seeing teachers, trying
to catch up with members of the classics department, participating in
festivities, meeting a female student in the chapel after the end of the
festivities, and starting to date her.
Experiences of alternative medicine and the paranormal; publicity campaigns
for each and meetings with leaders of organizations formed to propagandize
on their behalf. (I don't remember what the point of the meetings was.)
I finally wrote md5tee. It's a very simple program, thanks to the
convenient availability of Peter Deutsch's MD5 implementation. To my
irritation, the program runs about 25% slower than md5sum just for
calculating a checksum (omitting the "tee" feature). I think this is
not too serious because most programs that compute a checksum of a
large quantity of data will probably be I/O bound (right?).
I'm trying to figure out the best ways to use md5tee, and situations in
which it can be useful where regular tee wouldn't. A couple of months
ago, it seemed obvious to me. Now I'm thinking that it's only particularly
helpful in specialized situations.
I had an interesting telephone conversation with my family.
In the evening, I corresponded a bit about DVD litigation. The 2nd
Circuit appeal of Universal v. Reimerdes is coming up on
Tuesday (yes, Tuesday!); if you'll be in Manhattan, you should go.
I wrote to some lawyers about the fact that IBM is shipping a ThinkPad
with DVD support on Linux (using a deliberately cripped player; I've
already written about that in my diary). The defendants will need to
explain to the public, if not to the appellate judges, why this is (in
my words) "woefully inadequate" -- maybe I should have said "far too
little, far too late".
I also wrote a message to the Python edu-sig mailing list and ended
up being pretty proud of it. So, some time I have to become a teacher,
I suppose.
More reasons to have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers department:
I left some water boiling unattended for long enough that it boiled
away. The smoke detector quickly detected the situation (but not in
time to save the pot, I thought; it seems to be OK after a thorough
washing).
I'm going to go to Santa Cruz tomorrow (Saturday) to celebrate Taska's
birthday.
A very long and busy day.
Invited an archconservative activist to give a lecture somewhere (in a
library; I don't remember where it was). I don't remember whether the
lecture was supposed to be on the conservative view of abortion (which
most of the attendees were expecting to hear about, considering their
knowledge about this activist) or on
the history of music, but it turned out to be on the history of music,
and the archconservative activist was an accomplished pianist who played
beautiful music to accompany and illustrate his comments.
As he played one minuet, I saw the motions of his left hand, perceived
a pattern, and told him that it made sense to me and that it felt as
though I had once played that minuet in another life. (Both of us
understood that as a metaphor, because in the dream he was a fundamentalist
Christian and I was a materialist atheist, neither of whom thought we had
lived earlier lives.)
One of the themes of the dream was that all of the people who came to
hear him expected to be horrified by his lecture and actually found it
very beautiful, because he talked about something other than the part
of himself they found horrifying.
I started re-reading The Trial -- my father sent me the
Modern Library edition. There are marginal notes in this copy; it
looks like my stepmother's handwriting.
Maybe there is a connection to the Second Circuit arguments coming up
on Tuesday, although they are much more mundane, I'm afraid.
"In the writings which preface the Law that particular delusion is
described thus: before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this
doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance
to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at
the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to
enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at
this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as
usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to
peer through the entrace. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs
and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my
permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest
doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more
powerful than the other. And the sight of the third man is already
more than I can stand.' These are difficulties which the man from
the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be
accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more
closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his
huge pointed nose and long thin Tartar beard, he decides
that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The
doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of
the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He
makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper
with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief
conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters,
but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put
questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man
cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself
with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however
valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper
accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this
only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.'
During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost
incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one
seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the
first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old,
he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his
prolonged study of the doorkeeper he has learned to know even the
fleas in his fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and
to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes
grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening
around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in
the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams
inextinguishably from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing
to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the
whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question,
which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the
doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body.
The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the
difference in size between them has increased very much to the
man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper,
'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers
the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years
no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives
that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so
he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through
this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut
it.'"
I think that's my father's favorite passage in The Trial.
Andrew took me to Santa Cruz for Taska's birthday party. Happy birthday,
Taska! Thanks, Andrew!
I hadn't been in Santa Cruz in over a year. It's beautiful there. We
went to the amusement park at the
Santa Cruz Boardwalk; my arm
injuries kept me off of even more rides than my general anxiety and
conservatism about
such things normally would have. I rode the skyride (sky chairs suspended
from a cable), and felt somewhat afraid of the heights involved, even though
I used to do the same thing when I was eight (at
a
now-defunct amusement park in Holyoke, MA). Of course, I didn't go
anywhere near a roller coaster.
Well, I actually went very near four roller coasters. I didn't go anywhere
near the intent to ride a roller coaster.
I also wandered out on the beach for a while and saw people and sand castles
(some on pretty grand scale), and tried to learn to predict in advance how
far in a particular wave would come along the beach. I did get some skill
in that -- the two immediately obvious factors are the height of the wave
while it's offshore, and whether or not a previous wave is retreating.
If there's no previous wave rolling back out, a new wave will come much
further inland.
I proved once again that it's impossible for me to take a car ride to or
from Santa Cruz without falling asleep at some point.
We went to dinner at a fish restaurant in Moss Landing. I would never
deliberately go to a restaurant with such a strong focus on animal foods,
but I ended up getting a nice vegetarian meal there. The party went on
for a long time, and I was gone for almost twelve hours and still missed
out on some of the festivities.
I spent lots of money on junk food at the boardwalk -- ice cream and
pretzels, mainly, because I wouldn't touch the fried stuff. I also got
to play Addams Family Pinball in the arcade there. I think everyone
knows that Addams Family Pinball is far and away my favorite pinball game.
If you don't know that, consider yourself informed; there will be a quiz.
What's Seth's favorite pinball game?
- Black Knight
- Theatre of Magic
- The Addams Family
- Cyclone
Someone should make a pinball game called Civil Procedure. It would work
really well.
I realized that I missed Santa Cruz, and I'm wondering what ever happened
to some of the people I knew down there.
At the boardwalk, I wore my "California Berkeley" sweatshirt for the first
time since dropping out of that
institution at the start of 1999.
My hands were pretty sore during the day. I think the correlation with
typing is not perfect.
My hands are again sore. I hope this is not going to be a permanent situation;
my only encouragement there is that a doctor told me it wouldn't, and that I've
had next to no treatment as yet.
It will be a year in two weeks. My experience of magical thinking around
anniversaries is mixed.
This is also a month of keeping a diary here. I thought of trying to publish
my Advogato diary here too, but I'd have to figure out a good way to
convert from XML to HTML (and implement the <person> and <project>
tags in that conversion).
You can
download my
entire Advogato diary in one file -- but it's XML, not HTML.
Actually, the <person> tags were expanded already. So there are
issues about character entities about about relative HREFs.
I re-read most of my Advogato diary. There's a lot there. And there's a
lot of text:
12644 99875 614861 diary.txt
by one method of converting to plain text. So just short of 100,000 words.
And if you printed this out on my old dot-matrix printer, you'd get over
200 printed pages. My Advogato diary could be a book, but it would be a
poorly-edited book, devoid of much interest in many places to many people.
If I kept a private diary, you'd see a lot more that people would
theoretically be interested in in diaries. I would actually explain in
detail some of the things that I just allude to, or don't even mention.
Learning about the
subpoena process has made me even more wary of
putting things down on paper. In some cases, subpoenas have resulted in the
disclosure of private information not related to a case, by people who were
not parties to a case.
Sometimes
private e-mail gets
disclosed because someone thinks it might relate to a lawsuit.
I guess there is always the romantic high-tech solution of "PGP-encrypt
your diary and keep the key on a machine in Anguilla and keep the actual
diary in Norway and tell the machine operators that if you don't check
in once a week they should disable your account", but I don't actually
feel like trying to set up that kind of stuff.
I may have mentioned that my father sent me some old diaries of mine, from
junior high. They are fascinating. They're somewhat private, but
I know there is so much I didn't talk about that I could have; I don't think
my sensibility about what to write there was particularly different from
my sensibility in the past year about what to write on Advogato, or my
sensibility today about what to write here. But I didn't talk there about
big parts of my inner life that I was aware of.
So I do have a lot of documentation there which is very interesting to read.
But the omissions are also interesting: "cum tacent clamant".
Reading The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin.
OK, after some work with sed, I managed to make a somewhat reasonable HTML
presentation of my entire Advogato diary. First I made an "apostrofree"
version, with the annoying "'" entities replaced with "'" (instead
of "`", which is what lynx does to render those), and then I ran some things
to turn the XML directory stuff into things like horizontal rules.
So the result is here.
Zack and I did laundry. Unfortunately, the colors of one piece of clothing
ran in the washing machine and stained some things, including my favorite
shirt, which is a beige Free Software Foundation shirt signed by Richard
Stallman.
I wrote the Python script to make my diary look nicer. That only took
a few minutes, but I think the results are very nice. More arguments for
people learning to program and using Unix.
(I probably did duplicate a lot of people's effort, but at the same time
I can change and improve this minimal publication system any way I want.)
I think all of the links should still work, or at least shouldn't have
been broken by this.
When I looked at my own diary with a graphical web browser and saw the
pictures of Mountain Park, I started to cry. Especially because of
the green train and airplane rides. And the sky ride. The little
train was my favorite. Mountain Park was my favorite. And now it's all
gone.
I forgot to mention that, while I was at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, I
looked up and down for the quarter-shining machine on the midway, but
couldn't find it.
I wrote a little mirroring script for Zack.
Google Groups put the old DejaNews
Usenet archives back up, so you can search for me there and find out some
of what I said on Usenet between the ages of 15 and 20. The oldest hit
I can find has a .signature with a Geek Code and a quotation from the
anonymous "amica
D. Barkalonis", who
provided the Latin translation of
"You wanna buy a
duck?".
I actually posted to Usenet a bit before Deja was founded; I'm sure I
appear in even older archives, which used to be sold on CD-ROM. You can
look for me in rec.food.veg in 1993 or 1994.
There's a Linux hardware question I asked when I was working for Paul
Abrahams. We couldn't get his ESDI controller to work. We thought Linux
couldn't support it -- a message claimed it was detected, and then we
would try to access partitions on "/dev/hdb", the second hard disk, and
they wouldn't show up.
It turned out
that the second IDE or ESDI controller in a system has drives starting
at hdc rather than at hdb.
I have to explain this in classes, actually. So you hear that the "first
hard drive is hda", "second hard drive is hdb", "third hard drive is
hdc", "fourth hard drive is hdd"... but this isn't true.
The first hard drive on the first controller is hda. The second hard
drive on the first controller is hdb. The first hard drive on the second
controller is hdc. The second hard drive on the second controller is
hdd. I think the first hard drive on the third controller is hde.
(To use another nomenclature, the primary master is hda, primary slave is
hdb, secondary master is hdc, and secondary slave is hdd -- regardless of
whether any of those is absent. Paul and I did not know about
that, once upon a time.)
This is true for IDE, where you can only have two hard drives per
controller. It isn't true for SCSI.
The really funny thing I found was an article in rec.games.roguelike.nethack
where I said
ObYKYBPNTLW [obligatory You Know You've Been Playing NetHack Too Long When]:
you're in a car and the driver asks you to "pray for a parking space" and
your fingers involuntarily reach for "#" and "p".
Then you imagine:
You feel that Odin is well-pleased.--More--
Suddenly, you notice a parking space.
This really happened to me, in Berkeley in the fall of 1997.
Zack gave me a book on XML, so I'm taking a look and trying to learn it. It
looks like nice stuff.
I inaugurated bbc.loyalty.org, where
you can download various BBC-related things, including the ISOLINUX test
version. For all of what's available there at the moment, you'll need to
have a CD burner. I'll try to make more available there.
I'm also told that BBC 1.6.0 will be coming out soon on CD. So I'll try to
pass some copies out when I get ahold of them.
Today is May Day and International Worker's Day (was it originally called
International Workingmen's Day?).
The 2600 appeal was heard in New York. I don't know how it went.
Reports on yesterday's 2600 appeal are mixed. Unfortunately, it seems that
the judges weren't sympathetic to the first amendment arguments.
This is upsetting. I thought the great arguments from the amici
would make them pay close attention.
Andy Hertzfeld:
"Code, whether it is source or object,
is speech and should be
protected.
That's the truth, and there is no ambiguity. I abhor what the
MPAA is doing
to bend the facts to fit their commercial ends."
I wrote a little README and improved things a bit.
Here it is, if you
have a Unix system.
Linuxcare and Turbolinux aren't going to merge after all!
I was in Berkeley on Tuesday. I picked up a copy of
MIM
Notes,
the newsletter of the
Maoist
Internationalist Movement, which is a
revolutionary Communist party.
There are all sorts of interesting things in MIM Notes. The
biggest headline is about AIDS drugs and patents -- one of several examples
in the newsletter of issues where I agree with MIM. These just go to show
that political issues don't "belong" to a particular political ideology.
(I have to accept that someone might think that the DMCA is terrible but not
actually care about free software.)
The newsletter also includes (in the section about how "MIM differs from
other communist parties")
a claim that most workers in first world countries aren't the real proletariat
because they're "bought off" with an artificially high standard of living
based on exploitation of more genuinely oppressed workers in other countries.
I hadn't actually heard that one before; most Marxist writers I've run across
in the past did think that there was a real proletariat in the U.S. But MIM
says not really -- that the interests of U.S. workers aren't really
aligned with those of workers in other countries.
(Here I'm using "workers" in the left sense which doesn't just mean someone
who works. For example, I would probably not be considered a worker in this
sense, notwithstanding that I have a job. This is also the sense in which
most people mean the word in International Workers' Day -- the people in my
office aren't being celebrated by that day, nor are the financial industry
folks downtown who were the targets of protests.)
One of the most interesting:
The border also prevents the development of a real "free market"
in labor power. The internationalist section of the Amerikan bourgeoisie
complains about barriers to the free movement of capital, but you rarely
hear them complain about barriers to the free movement of labor (i.e.
people). This is because they -- and the privilege enjoyed by
oppressor nations generally -- depend on the depressed wages in Third
World countries. [...] In this context, the border is a tool to keep
the vast majority of workers in a situation of most brutal exploitation.
I thought this was an interesting point. It seems clear to me that all
supporters of free trade would be critical of borders in general
and also expect free immigration (in some sense "as the other side of the
coin"). But I'm afraid MIM Notes is right here in that probably
most people who say they support free trade do think that countries have a
right to prevent the free movement of people. And many of them
think that that right should be exercised.
I'm interested in how these correlation work. A lot of libertarians have
attacked "isolationism" and suggested that there is a connection between
opposing trade and opposing immigration. But there must be four
possible combinations.
Interestingly, I associate those combinations to some extent with the four
corners of the Nolan Chart -- much as I think the Nolan Chart is not very
reliable. The correlation in my mind with the Nolan Chart runs something
like this:
- No free trade, no free immigration (no economic freedom, no social
freedom): populist (Nolan "authoritarian")
- No free trade, free immigration (no economic freedom, social freedom):
left-liberal
- Free trade, no free immigration (economic freedom, no social freedom):
right-conservative
- Free trade, free immigration (economic freedom, social freedom):
libertarian
I'd be glad to hear opinions on subtleties of these issues.
The U.S. government has the Customs Service, which tries to prevent or tax
movement of goods across borders, and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, which tries to prevent or regulate movement of people across borders.
It seems strange to me that somebody would be offended by only one of these
functions, but possibly most people are.
MIM Notes also featured a review of an anthology on violence and
non-violence edited by a philosophy professor who's a friend of my father's.
So that was an interesting co-incidence. MIM's conclusion was that most
of the essays in the book are deficient because they fail to recognize that
capitalist property is violence. (In libertarian notation: they fail to
realize that defending property is coercive, so they don't realize that
infringing property rights is not an initation of force.)
Here, again, MIM Notes makes me think. MIM is making an
argument that, in carrying out the revolution by force, they wouldn't be
violent aggressors; they'd just be using the force necessary to prevent
people from upholding property by force. ("Now we see the violence
inherent in the system." This extends -- from MIM's perspective -- to
apologetics for the actions of the former Soviet Union and of the
Chinese Communist Party, because many of the opponents they were fighting
were quite willing to try to fight back. "No free speech for fascists",
anybody?)
An important theoretical question: what if libertarian ethical ideas are
correct (e.g. everyone has the right to act as he or she pleases as long
as he or she doesn't infringe on anyone else's equal rights), but there
is no such thing as a right to property? One idea is to
become a geolibertarian, but it's
not quite clear to me that solution can be justified (even though it
sounds very appealing).
David
Friedman's response to Mike
Huben's Non-Libertarian FAQ contains the following statement:
Early in [Huben's] FAQ he points out, correctly, that there
are problems with private claims to unproduced resources. But the
implication of that, insofar as there is an implication, is not
government ownership but commons--if I can't get ownership of the
land, and you can't, then we can't, so the land remains unowned.
Insofar as there are justifications for ownership, they start with
private actions and private ownership.
So, what ethical principles describe how people should behave towards one
another in connection with unowned land? That might not be a hypothetical
question, because maybe nobody owns land, so it would be a very real problem
that faces everyone.
My arms are fairly sore, not the worst they've been this week.
Don't let anybody tell you that experiences in early childhood don't really
have a huge effect on how people see the world. Or, when they tell you,
don't believe them.
One encounter or one conversation can have a vast effect.
I made some more updates to my companion site at
bbc.loyalty.org, including a bit
about how to find business card CD-R media, and what kind of CD-ROM drives
not to use these media with.
Maria Cantwell is back in Congress -- this time
in the Senate.
She was very popular with civil liberties folks earlier this decade when
she was in the House of Representatives; she sponsored an
unsuccessful
bill to allow exports of cryptographic software. After that, she went to
work for RealNetworks; now she's
been elected to the Senate.
I wonder if Senator Cantwell is still interested in cryptography. I'm
afraid her time at Real might not make her particulary sympathetic to DMCA
opponents: Real
used the
DMCA to suppress a program called StreamBox VCR, which allowed people
to save RealMedia streams to disk and to convert them to other formats.
(StreamBox subsequently settled with Real and agreed to modify its
software to comply with Real's demands.) This case was the earliest use
of the DMCA to prevent publication of a computer program; unfortunately,
StreamBox didn't attempt a first amendment defense and didn't get in touch
with people who were interested in first amendment protection for software.
Also unfortunately, a number of people on the dvd-discuss list weren't
sympathetic to StreamBox's position and some didn't even think that StreamBox
VCR should have first amendment protection!
I can't quite understand that; I think StreamBox VCR should be every bit as
legal as DeCSS. (You can find some of my arguments in the dvd-discuss
archive.)
Anyway, I don't think Cantwell was still at the company when that lawsuit
was going on, but I wonder whether she got the idea from people at Real that
the DMCA is good.
Even outside of the DMCA, regulation of cryptography is still definitely a big
deal; maybe she can take up the issue once again.
Her biography on her web
site says:
Maria's district contained many of the world's most influential
software and technology firms, and she applied herself to learning the
issues and standing up for this vital new sector of our economy. She
is well-regarded in Internet circles for fighting against archaic
export restrictions on software encryption products and for helping to
defeat the infamous Clipper chip proposal.
Having immersed herself in high tech issues while in Congress, Maria
joined a software start-up [that would be Real, which was
called
Progressive Networks at the time]
in 1995 and helped the
business grow to create 1,000 jobs in Washington state.
In November 2000, Maria was elected to the U.S. Senate, promising to
fight for reform and help expand opportunity for all of Washington
state. She knows that Washingtonians have come to expect a lot from
their Senators, and she is committed to giving them her very best
every day.
No, the "singularity" file in the BBC has no connection with the Singularity.
Chlorophyll, literally, is captured energy from the sun.
Green plant cells are the only ones capable of absorbing energy
directly from the sun and storing it as the chemical
chlorophyll.
[...]
In his book, Wheatgrass: Nature's Finest Medicine, author
Steve Meyerowitz explains wheatgrass' life and energy-giving
properties this way: "Inside the juice are photons, protons,
and electrons. Our living cells reach out for these charged nutrients."
(The Jamba Juice newsletter
Jamba Whirl, Spring 2001)
Wow, I heard cyanoacrylates have protons and electrons too! (I'm not
so sure about the photons.) Maybe our living cells can benefit from
eating CD-R media. I've also heard that there are protons and
electrons in plutonium -- in fact, even more protons and
electrons than in wheatgrass!
Thursday was World Press Freedom Day.
There was more interesting news I can't talk about. It isn't job-related.
Mr. Alter compared DeCSS to code that crashes airplanes, etc. Dave Farber
forwarded my
response:
> > > U.S.: DVD Decoder is Terrorware
> > > By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
> > > 6:16 a.m. May 2, 2001 PDT
> > >
> > > NEW YORK -- To the U.S. government, a DVD descrambling utility is akin
> > > to terrorware that could crash airplanes, disrupt hospital equipment
> > > and imperil human lives.
>
>Since the U.S. still has no Official Secrets Act, telling people how
>to commit serious crimes is still legal, unless you are conspiring or
>aiding someone in committing an actual crime (or breaching a special
>duty, etc.). Investigative journalists are constantly describing and
>exposing vulnerabilities and risks, even, sometimes, in military
>security.
>
>A recent "Boondocks" cartoon showed a student asking why it is legal to
>publish plans for pipe bombs on the Internet, but (supposedly) not
>information on decrypting DVDs. Although some politicians don't like
>it, it's legal to know how to make pipe bombs, it's legal to teach the
>public how to make pipe bombs, it's just not legal to make the pipe
>bombs (without proper pyrotechnics licenses) or to use them in a
>terrorist attack.
>
>Mr. Alter's comparison is extreme hyperbole. Still, I think U.S.
>legal precedent would support publishing details of serious risks and
>threats (which the breaking of CSS isn't), including computer
>software which could be used to exploit them. On the other hand, giving
>information out _in order to facilitate a crime_ is never protected. If
>I know that someone is trying to build a bomb, even providing a standard
>chemistry or engineering textbook might be actionable.
>
>Once again: if I know that somebody is planning to commit a burglary,
>simply looking up an address in a phone book could make me an
>accomplice. Intent is critical, and the burden of proof should be on
>the organization trying to suppress speech.
>
>With their "course of conduct" arguments, the government and the MPAA
>cleverly ask us to overlook that magazines and web sites _aren't_
>generally trying to facilitate crime by offering information to the
>public. And, by outlawing the information itself, they would relieve
>plaintiffs of the burden to prove otherwise.
>
>Jack Valenti said so in a speech on February 7:
>
> The minute you give one professor the keys to the kingdom,
> you're going to be ransacked.
>
>--
>Seth David Schoen | And do not say, I will study when I
>Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will
>down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/
Some clarification of the Official Secrets Act point: in some countries, like
the U.K., there are
government secrets which you're not allowed to tell anybody, regardless of how
you found them out. Even if you, for example, read them in a newspaper, or on
a web site, you might still get in trouble if you passed them along to other
people. In the U.S., there's no such thing -- if you learn a
government secret "legitimately" (in the sense that you weren't to blame for
its unauthorized disclosure), its secrecy is simply lost. This is true for
almost all categories of factual information under U.S. law; there are very
few things you could be punished for revealing if you learned them by
legitimate means. (It appears that the DMCA has created a new category
along these lines, though.)
My script is back on-line at
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/~schoen/cite.html, but I still need to make it so you can cite to
more things.
I'm planning to make posters out of the
DVD region code
map and the
Federal judicial
circuits.
It's amazingly easy to tell whether a particular long string of random
numbers is really random or was generated by a person asked to give random
numbers. You can use some of the same insights to predict random digits
sequentially generated by a person with better than 10% accuracy (if you
can hear the digits as the person generates them). Part of this is related
to the Gambler's Fallacy.
I had a dream that Wolfgang was visiting. Then I had a dream that I told
her I had dreamt she was visiting. Then I woke up, and she was, so I did.
Lots of parades and festivals today.
I went to the BayFF meeting at the San Francisco Public Library. There was
a panel including David Burt, who founded
Filtering Facts, and who now
works at N2H2.
The meeting was interesting. I'm not going to summarize it here, because
I've already written a long summary for peacefire-technical.
I made an attempt to represent Peacefire
there, by mentioning our work, by asking a Peacefire-interest question, and by
writing a report for Peacefire afterward.
This was a really good weekend. Wolfgang was here, we went to Kate's party,
and other nice things happened.
I went to eat with Zack in the evening.
"[...] We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and
not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present
one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house;
in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still
another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."
"In every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, "I am
grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden
of Ts'ui Pên."
"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time forks perpetually toward
innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths", trans. Donald A. Yates)
I got a sunburn on my neck over the weekend, between Tilden Park and Bernal
Park.
Zack and I got Speak Freely
working, even with encryption. But we only have half duplex, because
there is no free full duplex Linux driver for our sound card.
And she said, "I got this suitcase and I don't know what to pack."
And I said, "You can take anything you want: just wait and see.
It's not a release, it's not a reward, it's the blessings:
It's the gift of what you notice more."
(Dar Williams, "The Blessings")
Until further notice, I'm interested in hearing about job opportunities.
My resume is here.
"It seems that you would rather have chocolate donuts than moral realism."
I went to the chiropractor, and my shoulder felt a bit better afterward,
but of course I have lots of other arm injuries which are still giving
me trouble. I plan to go back regularly.
I went to Berkeley. It's pretty hot outside all around the Bay Area, and
I'm told there were some rolling blackouts, althugh nowhere I was during
the day had any while I was around.
But it sounds like the colocation facility where this machine is located
was affected -- there were messages from the UPS that Trey installed,
complaining that its batteries were running out.
As often, I understand more things after a trip to Berkeley.
I have no news about my job search yet. The only people who would
actually know that I'm looking for work are a few friends and family
members, and people who read this diary or my home page regularly.
I got invited to the Berkeley commencement ceremony tomorrow (Wednesday
Night is Commencement Night at Zellerbach Hall with Janet Reno?), but I
can't go because of a chiropractic appointment.
Reading a discussion on CTY-L inspired me to play my Alphaville CD. So it
so happened that "Forever Young" came on just as I was reading a later
message which quoted its lyrics.
Do you really want to live forever?
Hi everyone,
Effective immediately, I am forking the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card
project to create a new free software project. [...]
From Leonard:
Sic
transit gloria Mundie.
The Knapsack Problem.
"You could try to compel my testimony about that, and in your case I wouldn't
mind."
"That's what friendship's all about."
and later
Most golden tablets are designed to take away your freedom to share
and change religions. By contrast, the GNU General Golden Tablets
are intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
religions -- to make sure the religion is free for all its users.
There was a pretty good response to my announcement. A few dozen people
have joined up on the new
lnx-bbc mailing list in the first day. Of course,
if we make some successful releases, we should be able to attract a lot more
attention.
Today is Daniel Berrigan's 80th birthday. I had a birthday party at my
home; Anirvan and Zack came. We listened to the
Dar
Williams song and had a birthday cake with eight candles and the
inscription "Happy b-day Father Dan".
We also listened to an MP3 of Martin Luther King's speech on why he opposed
the Vietnam War. In the factual background section, there were a bunch of
pieces of history about the Vietnam War I hadn't known about. And this is
the source of a few famous King quotations:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of
values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights are considered more important than
people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are
incapable of being conquered.
(Alas, I'm pretty sure King would see me as part of the problem.)
Anirvan let me borrow Phillip Berrigan's autobiography, Fighting the
Lamb's War.
![[Book burning image]](/images/1933-05-10.jpeg)
(Books burning in Berlin, May 10, 1933, sixty-eight years ago today)
Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt
man auch am Ende Menschen. [That was just a prelude; where they burn
books, they will burn men in the end.]
(Heinrich Heine, 1820)
This morning I remembered my famous letter to my parents:
At Northfield Mount Hermon School,
I learned
how to order from a catalog,
how to read sheet music,
how to use Krazy Glue,
how to snap my fingers,
how to set up an Ethernet hub,
how to read the Aeneid and the Iliad,
how to make a proposal,
how to do line integrals,
how to understand optical illusions,
how to assemble audio cables,
how to put on a tuxedo,
how to remember IP addresses,
how to debate in the Oregon, Lincoln-Douglas, and Parliamentary styles,
how to expand acronyms,
how to participate in a protest,
how to send a sick person flowers,
how to found an association,
how to crimp an Ethernet cable,
how to read stock charts,
how to find the altitude of a model rocket,
how to arrange a meeting,
how to swim,
how to explain Gödel's Theorem,
how to give a public speech,
how to appreciate classical music,
how to set up a stereo,
how to graph costs and revenues as a function of output,
how to tie a tie,
how to read Greek and Esperanto,
how to throw a Frisbee,
how to take a derivative,
how to use an uninterruptible power supply,
how to host a radio show,
how to scan dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter,
how to order take-out food,
how to write a genuine note of thanks,
how to appreciate a sunset,
how to explain the philosophy of Plato,
how to understand the nomenclature of electrical cable terminators,
how to play badminton,
how to evacuate during a blackout,
how to circulate a petition,
how to use Unix well,
how to recite passages from classical texts,
how to do some card tricks,
how to participate in distributed collaborative computing projects,
how to pass on a tradition,
how to use a video editor,
how to write a bibliography,
how to loan people music,
how to create a to-do list,
how to arrange dial-up Internet e-mail,
how to translate the text of the requiem,
how to use a digital multimeter,
how to usher in a play,
how to write a newspaper article,
how to be a friend to a lonely person,
how to make an enormous poster,
how to analyze the efficiency of an algorithm,
how to make a collage,
how to decipher bar codes,
how to play the Prisoner's Dilemma,
how to sing along to music in other languages,
how to use the antiseptic betadine,
how to make advertising posters for various occasions,
how to use an audio or video mixer,
how to perform a titration,
how to install memory in a computer,
how to identify constellations,
how to reminisce about the past,
how to use a Macintosh,
how to design a solar car,
how to use a scanner,
how to write HTML,
how to read Catullus and Horace,
how to know more about the Los Alamos Project,
how to use the conservation of energy,
how to administer computer systems,
how to serve on a committee,
how to compete in a science competition,
how to win a rope pull,
how to give cross-examination,
how to build a binary search tree,
how to play music on a computer,
how to write a computer game,
how to manage a political campaign,
how to say "dishwasher" in German,
how to write letters to the editor,
how to use DSM-IV,
how to ask someone to be my girlfriend,
how to find a senior quotation,
how to count in binary on my fingers,
how to run a store,
how to read a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram,
how to install site wiring,
how to compete in triplespeak,
how to apply to college,
how to find the price at which a market will clear,
how to write an autobiography,
how to be Head of House for a play,
how to annotate Dante's Inferno,
how to describe the origin of seasons,
how to appear on a game show,
how to apply the mass-energy theorem,
how to host a party,
how to describe the outcome of chemical reactions,
how to find yearbook inscriptions,
how to build a regulated power supply,
how to use a CB radio,
how to audition for a play,
how to argue for free markets,
how to catch someone breaking into a computer system,
how to read the gospel of John,
how to compose a short piece of music,
how to tie a laundry bag,
how to memorize friends' initials,
how to calculate equilibrium concentrations of ions in aqueous solutions,
how to play an audio CD on a computer,
how to call an ambulance,
how to write vote-tallying software,
how to use a bullhorn,
how to calculate electrostatic potentials,
how to write a sonnet,
how to install Macintosh video input and television tuner cards,
how to like Moxie,
how to play a role-playing game,
how to throw pottery on a wheel,
how to create a routing table,
how to use a credit card,
how to make a decorated graduation cap,
how to be interrogated,
how to perform Sortes Vergilianae,
how to compare works of literature,
how to use the method of loci to remember lists of items,
how to submit to a literary magazine,
how to give announcements at a Campus Meeting,
how to use a video camera,
how to write a program to make pictures of fractals,
how to wear a martenitsa,
how to sing "Jerusalem",
how to use a blacklight,
how to use personality assessment instruments,
how to classify and identify logical fallacies,
how to make an iron-on t-shirt design,
how to thank the Speaker for recognition,
how to set up a recording studio,
and many other things as well.
Thank you for sending me to NMH.
What I thought about the list on this occasion was that I recant on "how to
ask someone to be my girlfriend". Just because I did it does not mean that I
knew how.
So, please explain how a bunch of people sitting around drinking coke,
listening to music, and playing Settlers of Cataan -- which is what went on at
the MIT fraternity party that I most recently attended -- heightens the
incidence of rape, domestic violence, and assault. And if you find no such
explanation forthcoming, then please stop over-generalising.
(Matthew K. Belmonte, on CTY-L)
I went back to the chiropractor; it feels like she's still making progress.
Today I talked to a Loya and to a lawyer. I also
had lunch with Alex, and Duncan visited in the afternoon. It's good to catch
up with him.
The 2nd Circuit has issued a number of
questions for the
attorneys for the appellants and appellees in the 2600 case:
1. Are the anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act content-neutral? See 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 328-29 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
2. Does DeCSS have both speech and non-speech elements?
3. Does the dissemination of DeCSS have both speech and non-speech elements?
4. Does the use of DeCSS to decrypt an encrypted DVD have both speech and
non-speech elements?
5. Does the existence of non-speech elements, along with speech elements,
in an activity sought to be regulated alone justify intermediate level scrutiny?
6. If DeCSS or its dissemination or its use to decrypt has both speech and
non-speech elements and is not subject to intermediate level scrutiny simply
because of the non-speech elements, is intermediate l.evel scrutiny appropriate
because of the close causal link between dissemination of DeCSS and its improper
use? See 111 F. Supp. 2d at 331-32.
7. If the District Court is correct that the dissemination of DeCSS "carries
very substantial risk of imminent harm," 111 F. Supp. 2d at 332, does that
risk alone justify the injunction? In other words, does that risk satisfy
the requirements for regulating speech under Brandenburg v. Ohio,
395 U.S. 444 (1969), thereby rendering unnecessary an inquiry as to whether
non-speech elements of DeCSS or its dissemination or its use (if such exists)
may be regulated under United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968)?
8. Are the three criteria identified at 111 F. Supp. 2d 333 the correct criteria
for determining the validity, under intermediate level scrutiny, of the use
of DeCSS that has been enjoined?
9. If not, what modification or supplementation would be required to conform
to First Amendment requirements?
10. Are the three criteria identified at 111 F. Supp. 2d 341 and the "clear
and convincing evidence" standard the correct criteria and the correct standard
of proof for testing the validity of the injunction's prohibition of posting
on the defendant's website and of linking?
11. If not, what modification or supplementation would be required to conform
to First Amendment requirements?
It's a relief (no pun intended) that the Court is considering the first
amendment issues seriously, because at oral argument they seemed to ignore
them, for the most part. Now the question is, among other things, how to
convince them.
It does seem that the speech and conduct distinctions are often artificial.
Professor Junger wrote a bit where he pointed out that speakers always
engage in conduct in connection with their speech -- for example, breathing
and wearing clothing (Junger's examples). And speech always has an effect,
and knowledge (and social relationships) may be more consequential than
"conduct".
It is said
that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement.
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if
believed, is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it, or some
failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference
between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower
sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire
to reason.
(Justice Holmes, dissenting, in Abrams v. U.S.,
268 U.S. 652 (1925), at 668.)
And if we didn't believe that what we said would do something,
would we bother to say it at all?
bvi is great! That's the very
first thing I'll add in the LNX-BBC 1.618 tree.
A very busy day.
I had several dreams, including one very upsetting one, but I don't remember
any of them now.
I went to the chiropractor and continued to feel better.
In Berkeley, I went by
Berkeley TRiP
and got a BART Plus
pass. This is really cool; I wish I'd known about it before. I can
ride Muni and AC Transit "for free" (at a significant discount) with this
pass.
I went to Michelle's Spanish and Portuguese graduation in Zellerbach. The
speaker was Prof. Robert Alter, who talked about the importance of reading
literature, and got in a plug for independent bookstores, even mentioning
Cody's and Black Oak by name.
My nose started to bleed just before the Italian Department graduated. Oops.
Maybe it's a good thing that I never finished that hypothetical double major
with Classics and Computer Science. If I had, I'd have been in that very
graduation ceremony, and then, if my nose had started to bleed, it would
have been extremely inconvenient.
I did think a lot about the fact that, if I hadn't dropped out of Berkeley,
I would have been graduating around now, and quite possibly would even
have graduated already. Things would have been very different for me.
In the evening, I went to a party at Sumana's house, which was lots of fun.
I met Leonard in person there.
Overheard: "Geeks need advocates."
Sumana has a comic book version of the Mahabarata, in which
the Bhagavad Gita gets an entire issue all to itself. She
also has a different comic book version of the Mahabarata
in which the entire epic is a single issue, and the Gita is
a single page. I should have written down the text of that page
so I could quote it.
I wish I were a cartoonist. Cartoons can be an amazingly effective medium,
and you can certainly draw cartoons on very serious themes (I've seen
physics and African-American history as examples). No wonder the
Comics Code Authority wanted to make sure that cartoonists drew nothing
offensive to faith or morals...
(The CCA is an amazing episode in the history of "industry self-regulation"
in America, and how much more powerful it can be than the government
censorship it seeks to stave off. What do you mean, you've never heard of
it? Well, I hadn't either until I came across some of
Seth's web pages.)
We played Trivial Pursuit, and our team lost. I went to sleep.
Douglas Adams has left this Earth,
Upon which he provoked much mirth.
Just forty-two plus seven he:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Leonard woke me up really early in the morning because he and Sumana were
leaving for a trip. Amusingly enough, I decided to go back to San Francisco
so Duncan could pick me up and take me to Foothill.
And that's exactly what I did, so I ended up at Mongomery and Market around
7:00 in the morning (the last time I was there that early on a weekend,
Rick Moen still lived in the CoffeeNet!). I waited around for a while and
bought a bagel, and then Duncan picked me up, with Simon, Duncan Jr., and
Daniel in the car.
"Foothill" means the Foothill
College Electronics Flea Market, a monthly tradition which I've heard
about for years but which I'd never experienced in person. It's run in
a parking lot at
Foothill College in Los Altos.
This thing is amazing! It starts before dawn and continues until sometime
in the middle of the day. All kinds of vendors -- most of whom are
just individuals -- show up and set up tables or carpets or junk piles
in the parking lot. Then you walk around and talk to them and buy things.
There's a big ham radio focus to the event, but that's not all that you
can find there. I bought a slide rule, a bunch of LEDs, a big 12-volt
rechargeable battery (like an electric scooter battery or a an electric
wheelchair battery), two 1-watt solar panels, and, last but not least,
a traditional IBM PC keyboard! The keyboard is the big heavy type with
the very loud keys which make a satisfying clickety-clack. I learned
to touch-type on one of those keyboards, and I can still type faster
on them than on any other kind of keyboard. Some people have also suggested
that the strong springs will reduce wrist injuries. I know I really
enjoy typing on a keyboard like that.
Of course, there were other neat things I didn't buy -- whole systems,
component kits, oscilloscopes, lots of other test equipment. There was a
PAL programmer -- if only I had some use for a PAL programmer!
Michelle does want to have an electric graduation cap, so we're going to
work on that. I dug out my Engineer's Mini-Notebook set
and looked up the 555 timer chip. I think I have a few of those sitting
around, so maybe I can figure out how to produce a good clock pulse with
a 555 and then drive a relay from that and make some LEDs flash.
Duncan gave me a ride back from Foothill to Berkeley, and we met up with
Michelle and had lunch. It was still early in the day; I'd thought that
Cristina's graduation was at noon, but I was wrong. Eventually we went
to the ceremony, the Berkeley English Department graduation in the
Greek Theater.
One of the speakers gave the following reason for studying English:
I became an English major because I love to read, yes: but I also
wanted to get credit for it.
Now that's really sensible, unlike the claim of another speaker that
recently scientists
have cloned the human genome.
I have a history of complaining about claims people make about the genome
in speeches. One hint: the Human Genome Project is not the same as
cloning or genetic engineering. My guess is that the speaker here meant
that scientists have mapped the human genome.
Cristina and Christine were both graduaing, and they
arranged it so they graduated one after another. Since their names are
pronounced the same way, it was amusing to hear the cheers from our
section: "Go Cristina! Go Christine!"
Some parties followed, and I went back to the City. I ran into two people
from Cal Libertarians on my way home.
As usual, Berkeley was a very educational place.
Overheard on BART:
- "I listen to Pacifica Radio and I
read the Bay
Guardian, so I know what's really going on."
- "Nobody ever falls in love, it's all a media-based lie to sell movies,
and to sell songs."
(If the second claim were true, it would give new meaning to the Dar Williams
lyric "whoever thought of love is no friend of mine".)
Saturday was the one-year anniversary of my first experience of arm pain.
It's amazing to think that I've had these injuries for a whole year.
The wisdom of Tim O'Reilly, as expressed on the Free Software Business
mailing list:
License terms like the right to fork, and the right to redistribute
under the same terms, are *protections* of open source effectiveness,
not causes of them.
Lao Tzu says:
Losing the way of life,
men rely on goodness.
Losing goodness, they rely on laws.
The laws or licenses we create are needed because people have lost sight
of or never understood why open source works (the way of life, the
science and market dynamics of why this is an effective software
development paradigm), or they have lost goodness, and look to subvert
the system for short term local benefit. They don't drive the system.
I didn't reach my mother until Monday, but I hope mothers in general had a
good day.
I had a nice time in Berkeley. Michelle wants an electric graduation cap,
and I'm trying to help out. I finally learned to use a 555 timer chip to
generate clock pulses (thanks to the Radio Shack Engineer's
Mini-Notebook on the subject), so now if I can find solid-state
relays, I can put together some really bright flashing lights.
It's amazing that someone can support free trade and oppose free immigration!
How can that be? Isn't your right to go somewhere even more obvious than your
right to sell things there? For that matter, isn't your right to sell your
labor in any market more obvious than your right to sell personal property in
any market?
It's strange that free immigration is an idea associated with the left and
free trade with the right. I can understand how you can believe in free
immigration without free trade -- if you think that the economic is not
the personal (I just wrote something on CTY-L about this issue) or that
property rights are
socially constructed. How can you believe in free trade without free
immigration? How can that be?
Is it just that free trade is good for business?
I'm getting pretty upset with trade treaty organizations, more so all the
time, for their failure to defend free trade in general, not just in narrow
areas (and for how they export bizarre U.S. intellectual property law through
"harmonization"). I wish -- this will be nothing new to readers of this
diary -- that opponents of treaties like the FTAA would take the approach
that free trade is good but that the treaty organizations don't achieve it
and mix in other things.
For me, free trade is particularly desirable, not because it's good for
business (which I do think is a benefit!), but because it erodes and
diminishes the relevance of the international system and of national borders.
National borders are so contemptible to me; free trade diminishes their
impact. So does free immigration. Today, we finally have half-decent
communication across national borders -- radio, the global telephone network,
the Internet, and the global postal system. Not so bad. That diminishes the
impact of national borders too.
I want to write something about the role of business, supporting the ideal
that politics should neither help nor hinder it, and the idea that it's (just)
one of many important parts of human life. This reminds me very much of
the injunction
You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be
partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness
shall you judge your neighbor.
(Leviticus 19:14 (RSV))
Donella Meadows too is
dead,
Who wrote about what lay ahead
For humankind in times to be:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The 555 timer circuit is cool; I'm just following a "cookbook" application,
but I have adjustible clock pulses which I can probably get to drive TTL
circuits.
I can't drive a relay coil directly, unless perhaps I use a very high
input voltage, or a transistor, and I still don't see how the transistor
would work, although there seem to be "cookbook" examples of that too.
It's more fun to understand the theory behind something than to follow
somebody's instructions.
I looked into how to get unemployment
benefits, but I haven't applied yet.
I need to do more to look for work. I'm likely to apply to
VA Linux and
Red Hat, two prominent free software
companies which have done a lot for the community. I have some concerns
about some of Red Hat's marketing campaigns, but I think the company has
done great things for the community and for the public's awareness of
Linux, not to mention
the public domain.
Perhaps they have work in the field of training.
I had a dream that I was on a trip and went to see a chiropractor locally
for my arm injury. I met the chiropractor in a cafe which looked a lot like
the old CoffeeNet and where various
doctors consulted with the patients who came in to drink coffee. There were
massage tables; it was set up a lot like the hair styling parlors where there
are lots of independent hairstylists who each rent space from the
proprietor.
This chiropractor was a woman, about 28, who was very interesting and had
a fair amount of health advice for me. Unfortunately, I've forgotten it
all.
"I haven't lost count."
"Have you started count?"
"Actually ... no."
If I may quote myself:
Linuxcare is a trademark of Linuxcare, Inc. Linux is a
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. United States copyright law is
a regulatory capture of the publishing industries.
My BART Plus pass started working. I saw my cousin.
I filed for unemployment benefits over the phone. I heard that people would
traditionally file in person in an unemployment office and that it would be
very depressing and take a long time. The telephone version was very
convenient.
Interesting question: "Do you have a disability?" Do I have a disability?
I've been listening to Handel's Messiah, which I had out because
I played a selection from it which was parallel to something Martin Luther
King said in his speech on Vietnam which we listened to at the birthday party
for Daniel Berrigan.
In the afternoon, I practiced my LaTeX, and my arm pain came back along
with other sorts of pain. I met Zack and his friend Noah for dinner.
For those not on seth-trips, you should go to Stanford on Thursday to hear
Professor Felten give his
censored lecture on SDMI
("Reading Between the Lines"), or at least an update on when the world can
expect to hear about his results.
Also, you should come with me to see Sacco and Vanzetti: A
Vaudeville at the
Marin Theatre Company sometime
soon.
The U.S. isn't going to support the International Criminal Court. Why not?
Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas,
contended it could be used against U.S. military personnel overseas
and, by endorsing the court, ``we would be abandoning the sacred
covenant between the Congress and our men and women in uniform.''
("Bush Says U.N. Dues Should Be Paid", Associated Press)
Think about this for a minute. The "sacred covenant" between the Congress
and the Armed Forces means that U.S. military personnel can't be tried
before an international war crimes tribunal?
When I first read this, I exclaimed "Tom DeLay says the U.S. military
by definition can't commit war crimes!". But one friend responded
"See how he didn't actually have to say that?", and it's true:
he didn't actually say that the U.S. Armed Forces can't commit war crimes,
just that the U.S. shouldn't implement a plan that would allow them to be
punished for war crimes without its consent.
For that matter, how come party leaders actually like to be called "Whips"?
Doesn't it have a bad connotation for them? What if they were called
"Majority Scourge" or "Minority Cattle Prod"?
I shold get more sleep, because I fell asleep on my bed in my clothes
surrounded by electronic components. Thankfully, I didn't squash them,
nor did they poke me. I was reading about op amps when I thought I'd
just close my eyes for a few moments; I didn't open them until
morning.
This was an aftereffect from lost sleep on Saturday, I think.
The electronics project is not done, but I'm planning to go work on it
and finish it in Berkeley tonight. I couldn't find solid state relays
anywhere. This, after buying all of them from every Radio Shack in
a large radius in New Hampshire just five months ago. Where have they
gone?
The ones I bought back then are in an attic in New Hampshire -- that's where
they've gone. But why would Radio Shack stores in Massachusetts and
New Hampshire carry solid state relays, and stores in San Francisco not
carry them?
I might use my exciting BART Plus pass to go to Berkeley in the afternoon
in search of relays, then come back for my chiropractic appointment, then
go back to Berkeley again.
I'm continuing to practice LaTeX.
Martin Gardner's Puzzling Questions About the Solar System
is a good book.
If you think I should have an accent,
well how do you feel about Ancient Greek?
I'm not quite sure how it's supposed to sound,
but my Swahili's far too weak.
And if you want me to talk backwards,
well oot taht od nac I llew.
And if you want me to speak gibberish,
well meeko weeko Taco Bell.
'Cuz I can do the linguistically ridiculous for you. (For you.)
And I can do the harmonically impossible for you! (For you.)
(Ben Beckstrom and Peter A. Peterson II,
"Biologically
Impossible", from Last Transmission
from Starbase XY003)
I was up all night, only the third or fourth time in my life that I've done
that. With the kind help of several people, I was working on an electronic
graduation cap for Michelle. I think it turned out extremely well! We
mounted a beautiful specimen of Michelle's papel picado artwork,
a papercut of a dragon, on her cap. Then we placed two LEDs over the eyes,
a blue and a gold (UC Berkeley colors), and made them blink alternately, so
that the dragon seems to have a glowing blue eye and a
glowing gold eye and to open and shut them alternately.
The graduation was pretty nice, although rowdier and less organized than
other Berkeley graduations I've seen. I knew five graduates (three
Cognitive Science, two Public Health) and managed to catch up with most
of them, though not all.
I got a sunburn and also got a bit dehydrated at the ceremony. In the
afternoon, I fell asleep while at the lunch table; I walked back to
Michelle's place in a daze (in one case almost falling asleep standing up),
and took a nap for several hours. I felt a lot better physically after
that nap, but still worn out for much of the day.
I hate surface mount soldering! I wasted over five hours trying to transfer
a circuit -- which worked perfectly on a breadboard -- onto a copper
perfboard. After hours of making poor connections and inadvertantly
shorting things together and struggling to separate them, I finally tested
every joint and every pair of adjacent traces; at last, I had connectivity
where it was supposed to be and not where it wasn't supposed to be.
But it still didn't work. Either some connections still had unreasonably
high resistance, or I damaged some of the components with the heat from
the soldering iron (which is very possible), or I made a mistake in the
wiring or in following traces (even though I triple-checked all the
connections).
I had to re-do the circuit from scratch on a breadboard in the morning, and
only finished at the last minute. But the dragon atop Michelle's
graduation cap, in my opinion, is lovely.
Parts: 7805 voltage regulator; 555 timer (556 in new version); 7404 TTL
hex inverter (7402 quad NOR gate in new version); capacitor and two resistors
(for timing); two more resistors (for LEDs); two LEDs; 9-volt battery.
The blinking LED scheme in this graduation cap was more or less equivalent
to, and probably inspired by, Jonas Klein's version for his 1993 NMH
graduation cap (although Jonas used many more LEDs, and tried to drive
them using transistors to increase the available current). Jonas also
used a 555; this impressed me, because I didn't know how to use that chip
until this past week.
I wrote about 1100 lines, about 10,000 words, of my epic poem, tentatively
called "Existence and Uniqueness". (Three books plus a section of a fourth,
out of what I expect will be either ten or twelve books.) Although some parts
are not so bad, in places it may be some of the worst poetry I've
ever written. (Not so much bad writing as merely much closer to prose
than poetry: some parts could well be long prose narratives pretending to be
poetry. There is no meter; I've almost never been able to write in meter.
I'm trying to keep it iambic where possible, but I haven't done anything
metri causa.)
Most of it seems like good storytelling to me. It helps to have a
meaningful story that you care about. The lapses there have to do with
trying to talk about inner states and thoughts rather than showing what
happened or recounting conversations -- the old "show, don't tell"
advice.
"Show, don't tell" is not good advice. It's just good advice for people
who aren't skilled fiction or narrative writers, while they're writing
fiction or narratives. If you're really good at using a particular
form, you can tell and it will still work fine.
Remember the Maine!
I went to two parties in Berkeley, and didn't go to one party in Berkeley.
"Thera-Band(R) and associated colors are trademarks of the Hygenic
Corporation. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. (C) The
Hygenic Corporation, 1998. All rights reserved. Made in USA.
Patent Pending."
They've really got all their bases covered, haven't they? This is on
a package containing an exercise ball
which you squeeze to develop hand and arm strength. It's the latest
instance of the idea that
colors
can be trademarks, which
courts seem to believe. (That thread on
the Crackmonkey list was the first time I'd heard of the concept, but then
I went down to my local office supply store and looked at the back of a
pack of Post-It(R) notes. Sure enough.)
One of the most exciting things about the first party in Berkeley was
getting to argue about the Monty Hall problem for half an hour with
Daniel Ellsberg, "a great hero of the American people".
I also met a doctor who's working on scientific studies of alternative
medicine, and is planning a randomized, controlled, double-blind study
of moxibustion for breech babies. There was
a
previous study which found positive results but didn't use any kind
of placebo for the control group. So this new study will include a
sham moxibustion treatment to see whether the effect could be due to a
placebo effect.
At the second party, I met a woman who managed to complete the inductive
proof of the formula for the sum of the first n integers in her head.
I've never seen anybody do that before; I kept offering her paper and
pen, and she kept on refusing, saying that she could figure it out. So
she did.
I also went swimming at that party for the first time in a couple of years.
It felt great, but I think I overdid it a little.
"You're a happening geek!"
(My sister Rebecca)
"Only people who
have something to hide should be worried," [about a legislative
proposal to keep complete archives for seven years of all voice and e-mail
traffic in the U.K. to allow retroactive searches] said a spokesperson at the
Department of Trade and Industry.
I thought that was just a parody, and actual government officials didn't
really say things like that.
Everybody has something to hide.
"Clearly, what you should do is help them [...] and then write a feature article
for slashdot."
(a slashdot reporter with an innovative response to an ethical dilemma)
"he
thought he knew better than the U.S. Government what was best for the United
States."
Meeting Daniel Ellsberg and thinking about his experiences made me ponder
the quotation above. It's
upsetting to me that this should be phrased so contemptuously, so so
condescendingly.
(The piece is not about Ellsberg but about a more recent case involving a
man named Frederick Hamilton, who leaked classified information for
altruistic reasons -- once again, to try to stop a war -- and went to jail
for it.)
Ellsberg also "thought he knew better than the U.S. government what was
best for the United States"; according to interviews, he still thinks
he knew better than the U.S. government what was best for the United
States:
[Q.] Do you have any regrets about releasing the Pentagon Papers or would
you have done anything differently?
[A.]
Yes. I regret that in 1964 or early 1965 I did not release the
documents in my possession at that time to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. These documents were in my safe in the Pentagon.
Later they were among the documents in the Pentagon Papers that I
copied and gave to the Senate in 1969 and later to the newspapers in
1971. But if I had released them during the 1964 presidential campaign
or before the open-ended escalation on the ground in mid-1965, I
believe that all the war that came afterwards could well have been
averted. That is a heavy burden to bear.
(Daniel Ellsberg, in a 1999 interview with Bay Area high school
students)
It seems to me that history will vindicate Ellsberg, so that people will
agree that he, in fact, knew better than the government. Perhaps
history will also vindicate Frederick Hamilton. It seems that the
Department of Energy doesn't consider that a possibility.
You know you've been reading the news media too long when ... you see the
news headline "Bush Energy Plan Not Universally Popular" and think "Oh,
that must be a new piece from The
Onion".
I wrote a few hundred more lines of "Existence and Uniqueness".
I went to the chiropractor and then I went down to the
EFF to meet with Shari Steele.
I'm planning to volunteer for EFF and work on technical projects there.
I wrote some more lines of "Existence and Uniqueness".
My friend Erik came to visit in the morning, and in the afternoon I went
to Berkeley to get a Feldenkrais lesson.
In the evening, I had dinner with Biella. That was very nice.
Erik discovered that the reason my old Ricochet didn't work was that
the power supply was failing. He also discovered that the Sony
4.5 V DC supplies (for a Walkman, Discman, etc.) work with it just fine.
That's cool.
What is the difference between freedom and justice?
I read the beginning of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
(most famous as the author of The Shockwave Rider). This
novel is interesting so far for its picture of overpopulation. There's
also some treatment of race relations. This novel is also known as
the source for quotations from Chad Mulligan's The Hipcrime
Vocab, which
perhaps plays the same role in Stand on Zanzibar that
Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism plays in 1984.
Some of these lines are fairly famous among Unix geeks (who may have
encountered them in fortune files). For example:
HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we
learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from
what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
I went to the chiropractor and I helped Zack put in a new hard drive
and then went to dinner with him. I still have a lot of things I have
to get done that I've put off.
As you might expect, I wrote some more of "Existence and Uniqueness":
currently almost 3000 lines, 25,000 words. I need to make a "records"
list: longest letter, longest written work, longest conversation,
longest walk, longest poem, etc.
My arms are a bit sore -- I think the chiropractor helped. Certainly,
writing that poem is a possible explanation for my arm pain.
I also read a little more about Ellsberg's Paradox and its interesting
implications. Maybe some time I'll read a bit more technical game
theory than I have; game theorists are certainly interesting,
colorful characters.
Intellectual property law
is government regulation
not free trade
(Not a haiku, but rather a memo to the BSA)
A powerful dream on the distinction between "dating" and "being boyfriend and
girlfriend".
Did I mention these lovely little stickers? I got a bunch at the EFF when
I went by there with Erik on Tuesday. They say "Free Jon Johansen", and
I have been wanting one for a while.
My dream Wednesday night was really very interesting,
and so was
Raph
Levien's.
"If you talk that way and don't make that distinction, they won't
believe you. They aren't going to believe you, they'll think you're
lying."
I ate a ridiculous amount of sugar on Thursday.
It's good that I returned to this subject after quite some time away
from it. Back in 1995, I got interested in why the well-known
digital root divisibility test works, and also in generalizations to
other bases. I managed to prove a pretty good generalization which
shows clearly why it works, and later I also showed when it won't
work.
Yesterday I also examined the last digit divisibility test, and once again
showed why it works and when. Interestingly, these results can be
used to establish the relatively obvious conclusion that the two tests
never both work for divisibility by a particular digit.
Another simple corollary: the last digit test works to tell
whether a number is even or odd in an even base.
The digital root test works for this purpose in an odd base.
Outstanding question: the digital root test "doesn't work" for
certain digits (in general, most digits), in the sense that it can
and sometimes will give wrong answers for those digits. (It's not
guaranteed to give a wrong answer every time -- if it were,
it would still be a perfectly accurate test, you'd just have to reverse
the interpretation of the results, much in the sense that someone
who can actually get a 0% on a multiple choice exam or a Rhine ESP test,
while still answering the questions, has something strange going on.)
The point is that it gives answers which are not directly connected
to what the test is supposed to be testing for: we would like to say
that the test result and the actual divisibility property are
"uncorrelated". But is this true?
I'd like to know whether the test gives you any information at all
in this case. (One example: adding the digits in a base 10 number
to test for divisibility by 6. We know that this "doesn't work",
but is it right more often than 1/6 of the time, wrong more often
than 5/6, or is it right exactly 1/6 of the time? Can you get
any information at all by applying this faulty test, or is it
completely useless?)
I wrote a program to experiment with this. It's not clear quite
yet what the result is.
I'm trying to write these proofs and explanations of them up nicely
in LaTeX. The slight problem is that I don't know a whole lot of
LaTeX. I guess this is a great way to learn more.
0 is divisible by everything, and everything is divisible by 1.
Sounds like blood types, doesn't it?
What cryptographic systems lack in subtlety, they
make up for in malice...
(Whitfield Diffie and Mary Fischer, explaining the difference between
cryptographic systems and God, "Deciphment Versus Cryptanalysis",
in Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and
Decipherment)
Sumana mentions
a piece by
Annalee Newitz (whose writing I've sometimes
read in the past; she likes to write about free software reasonably often).
This one, on the other hand, is about love and sex, and what they have
to do with one another. Newitz mentions the "scarcity economy of love"
and suggests that it's a problem that people either think that sex
must be connected with love, or that it must not.
This reminds me a lot of the divisibility problem: there, if the divisor
is a divisor of the highest possible digit, the divisibility of the sum of
the digits in a number must be the same as the divisibility of the
number itself. Either they are both divisible, or they are both
not divisibile. On the other hand, if the divisor is not a divisor of
the highest possible digit, then the divisibility of the sum of the digits
in a number will certainly sometimes be the same as and certainly
sometimes be different from the sum of the digits of that number,
depending on what number you choose.
So I guess Newitz is telling us that sex and love are like the
divisibility of a number and the divisibility of the sum of digits in
the number, where the highest digit in the base is not itself divisible
by the divisor of interest: they're sometimes the same and sometimes
different, sometimes both present, sometimes neither, and sometimes
either one by itself in the absence of the other, and if we assume that
they're one way or the other all the time, we're sure to be mistaken
eventually.
Of course, I am one of these people who are part of the problem, per
Newitz's view, on account of having a traditional (in two senses)
theory about the situation.
Yeah, I'm really far from being able to relate to her attitude. I go
far beyond what she criticizes as unreasonable.
And, separately, alas for us if her conclusion is right:
[O]ne often hears the
truism "communication is the key." The idea is that we can bridge that
gulf of relationship misunderstandings if we're just "honest," and
tell our sex partners up front what we expect from them. But
communication and honesty can't possibly be solutions to a problem
whose roots are self-delusion and plain old uncertainty. If few of us
truly know what sex means to us, or what we want out of our dates, how
can we be honest about our feelings unless we say something like,
"Duh, I don't know"? That's the sort of honesty we could all do
without.
We long to use words like "honesty" when it comes to love and sex not
because we are confident about our intentions but because we want to
ward off the disorienting ambiguity of desire.
I remember quoting, and I'll quote again, the lines from Aeneid
VI:
O tandem magnis pelagi defuncte periclis!
Sed terrae graviora manent. In regna Lavini
Dardanidae venient; mitte hanc de pectore curam;
sed non et venisse volent. Bella, horrida bella,
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
Non Simois tibi, nec Xanthus, nec Dorica castra
defuerint; alius Latio iam partus Achilles,
natus et ipse dea; nec Teucris addita Iuno
usquam aberit; cum tu supplex in rebus egenis
quas gentes Italum aut quas non oraveris urbes!
I'll try a quick informal translation:
Oh you who passed such dangers on the sea!
But graver ones remain on land: into the kingdom
of Lavinius you Trojans will come, so send that fear away.
But you won't wish that you had come! I forsee wars,
horrible wars, the Tiber flowing red with blood.
The rivers of Troy and the enemy camps will
come back again for you; another already in Latium
Achilles waits for you, his mother, too, a goddess. And Juno
who hates you won't leave you alone: when you in dire straits
go as a beggar, what cities won't you ask for help
in Italy?
I told Zack that the best figurative translation of "Non Simois tibi ...
defuerint" for Americans might be "It will be another Vietnam for you".
One reason this passage is so disturbing is its context. Aeneas has
survived a long war -- in which his country was destroyed -- and then
wandered for years at sea and nearly been killed there, too. He's
learned that his destiny is to go to Italy and to found a new
civilization there. So he dutifully heads for Italy, never having
been there before, and not entirely sure he'll make it. But in Italy,
he believes, "the fates offer us peaceful seats" ("Latium, sedes ubi
fata quietas / ostendunt").
So now, through much effort (the theme of the first half of the poem),
Aeneas has almost made it to
Italy at last, and he stops by to ask this prophetess to give him
more advice about his destiny. In some sense, he believes that the poem
is about to end, for he's on the verge of reaching Italy, and reaching
Italy was what he was supposed to do, wasn't it?
And then she says this!
She tells him that, not only will Italy not be peaceful, but that
he'll practically have to fight the Trojan war all over again from scratch
when he gets there. (Indeed, the entire second half of the
Aeneid is devoted to the war Aeneas does, in fact, have to
fight when he finally makes it to Italy; the Sybil wasn't joking around,
and the river Tiber does run run with blood.)
The great
Dryden translation has
Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign,
Yet more and greater ills by land remain.
The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event),
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent.
Wars, horrid wars, I view -- a field of blood,
And Tiber rolling with a purple flood.
Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there:
A new Achilles shall in arms appear,
And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate,
Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate.
To what strange nations shalt not thou resort,
Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court!
I believe that the line "Sed non et venisse volent" ("But they will
not also wish to have come", or Dryden's "but having reach'd, repent")
must have been the most shocking to Aeneas of everything he hears in
the whole poem. It's true that Aeneas gives a speech in reply in
which he denies being afraid of anything, but immediately beforehand
he's just expressed his state of mind and clearly shown that he was relying
on reaching Italy to be the end of the story. And, directly in reply,
the Sybil says
no, there is a second half of the Aeneid, books seven through twelve,
and in them you're going to fight your war again, another Vietnam...
Annalee Newitz is the Cumaean Sybil.
Speaking of having a theory, I wrote more of "Existence and
Uniqueness". This is starting to remind me of my collage
(which I started about a year ago), a private creative project
which I always mention in my diary that I'm continuing to work on.
Slightly edited from a post by Daniel Wang to peacefire-technical:
Did we also mention PanGo and GlobalTrack's customer tracking system?
In fact, over 2000 malls in the US have installed their marketing and sales
lead system that will allow them to detect and track transponder signals
from cell phones, PDAs, and anything that is enabled with WAP, 802.11b,
Bluetooth, CDMA, or GDMA.
Guess what? They're already working on getting the station to read phone and
PDA serial numbers too, so they can track where YOU specifically go every
single time you visit the mall.
Oh look, by the year 2010, it's estimated that almost everyone will have
some sort of wireless device, whether it's a Proximity card or a cell phone
or a satellite dish. Welcome to real-world persistent solid-state client
identifiers, or in other words, real-world cookies. Bum bum bum!
... there are some downsides to devices which easily and automatically
interoperate with other devices, aren't there?
My arms have gotten quite sore again.
I sent a letter to Linuxcare about my severance agreement.
I went to the chiropractor.
Tomorrow, I was
going
to go to HSC, but now
I'm
not.
I finished Stand on Zanzibar. The book's title is an allusion
to the overpopulation theme -- the idea is that at the start of the book,
the huge human species is still small enough to "stand on Zanzibar"
together, if, for some reason, it wanted to. But by the end, there are
too many people to hope for this.
Brunner predicted a lot of things that would happen, and many of
them correctl