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\".",
