Vitanuova for 2001 June
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I had a long nightmare about being in a video game. This game took place in a strange old house which was supposedly a college dorm or the house of a friend from college or something. We thought in the beginning that the point of the game was simply to be able to leave the house -- since the exit door was locked -- but this itself was quite complicated. It turned out that it was possible to leave the house by finding a pair of glasses which one woman had owned and had lost years before; if they were returned to her, she would turn out to have the needed key, or she would know where it was, or something.

However, this was where the real troubles began: the game became a horror story as different approaches to actually leaving went wrong in various ways -- in one case by encountering a powerful monster who slaughtered the entire group of people in the house, but in the more common case by discovering, just as the game was about to be won (or so we thought), that one character had been murdered mysteriously.

This was entirely deterministic: what we did directly decided which character was murdered, how, and when, even though the characters were definitely not murdered by other characters but by some evil forces within the house. But if a character was found dead, it was necessary to start over again and try a different strategy; having someone in the party killed was tantamount to losing. Because the results were deterministic, we could try a different approach and see what difference it made.

Actually, it was a big logic problem, quite possibly the infamous SATISFIABILITY. The odd thing was that the inputs here were things like "my character takes the golden key", "my character remembers to obtain the rope", "my character finds the spectacles", "my character gives the spectacles back to the woman", "my character also finds the comb"... there was rarely actually a visible connection of any sort between our actions and the results. (Some actions, like obtaining keys and unlocking doors, were actually targeted specifically to accomplish something in a way that we could see. However, almost all actions had hidden effects which had no apparent connection to the actions themselves: for example, when you take the comb, your friend is subsequently found strangled in a different room on the other side of the house, even though taking the comb was not visible to anyone -- still, somehow, it led to or allowed your friend's murder. It seemed that the game was one big Butterfly Effect demonstration, except that you could repeat it and try something else. "Opening that door at the beginning seems to result in the presence of this monster later on -- though for no apparent reason -- so we'd better not do that next time. Except, wait, it wasn't a controlled experiment, because we also tried retrieving the spectacles first, before obtaining the other key. That was another change, maybe that was what did it."

It was very scary; we had to do the same thing over and over again, like the movie Groundhog Day, except instead of outcomes like the girl not liking the main character, the bad outcomes always involved the death of some character. (The main character in Groundhog Day almost never died accidentally.) And unlike the movie, the things we did rarely had any apparent connection to the outcome, except for the two rules that performing the same actions a second time would still result in the same outcome, and that some combination of actions existed which would produce a successful outcome.

We also had the sense that what we did was related to the outcome by some Boolean logic expression, or a family of them: if you've taken the spectacles and the rope but not the comb and you have the silver key and the rotten floor hasn't collapsed yet, and you try to give the spectacles to the woman, then this one character will die at that moment in the far room. And so on. The thought that the death of all of us in the scary house was actually determined through simple Boolean algebra was not in any way comforting to us as we were immersed in the game. It was still terrifying.

It's also pretty clear that, if you have an unknown expression you're trying to satisfy, there isn't any strategy other than brute force which is guaranteed to work. In theory, this meant that we might be in the house, dying in strange ways, for thousands of years, until we finally hit upon the particular random combination of actions which alone allowed everyone to survive and escape. (What was worse, we didn't necessarily know about certain variables until we had tried a number of combinations of other variables: the fact that whether or not you picked up the comb caused someone to die didn't even come up as an issue until we had already done the things that were necessary in order to discover the comb.)

Most adventure games which are deterministic are fun or interesting to play because you can use logic and reason to solve puzzles. In this one, you use brute force to solve puzzles, and meanwhile, this being a dream, there wasn't a clear division between the player outside the game and the players inside the game, so when you found your friend lying on a platform with a rope drawn tight around his neck, you didn't say "Aha, the logical expression has failed to be satisfied this time and we'll have to start over and try the next combination"; you said "Oh my God, he's been murdered!".

I never got out of the house with everyone alive; instead, I woke up, and that was a different ending for those characters, like turning the computer off.

There was a definite sense that there was an "underlying reality" within which an omniscient observer could see that everything was happening for a perfectly sensible reason. At the same time, it wasn't clear at all whether the game had been structured so that we would eventually gain any real knowledge of that reality; the source code was completely closed off to us.

I went to various appointments and my arms continued to hurt. I also took care of some errands.

I plan finally to go into EFF tomorrow. They have been keeping up the good work this week.

mike dillon discovered that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society was not endowed by the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman. Go figure.

Brita is in the Bay Area; I look forward to seeing her.

I managed to mail two letters, one to Davis and one to South Africa. Tomorrow I need to try to send one to New York. It's lots of fun to mail things, except maybe checks to pay bills. I have a fair number of those accumulating, between credit cards and COBRA insurance coverage and other things; I'll have to see how my unemployment benefits hold out there.

When I looked in Pirke Avot to try to find something, I happened to open to the lines

Any love that depends on a specific cause, when that cause is gone, the love is gone; but if it does not depend on a specific cause, it will never cease. [...]

Any dispute that is for the sake of Heaven will have a constructive outcome; but one that is not for the sake of Heaven will not have a constructive outcome.

Zack and I had dinner and got to talk for a while. And I managed to clean up a little.

I did some work on the new BBC.

I did some more work on the new BBC.

I wrote the end of "Existence and Uniqueness"; I only have to write the second-to-last book now, book XI. I also added a few lines in other places and made some slight edits; I think I'll be able to finish the poem tomorrow.

I talked to a telemarketer for a full five minutes because I don't like to hang up on people. I tried to explain in detail why I don't want to subscribe to a daily newspaper, even one I like to read, because then I end up with another bill that I have to pay no matter what, regardless of whether I can afford it or whether I'm interested in the paper at that particular point. There is something to be said for impulse purchases, from the consumer's point of view, although perhaps not from the retailer's point of view.

I went in to the EFF.

I had a chiropractic appointment, and my wrists are very sore. I think that's temporary; I hope that's temporary.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is still one of the best books I have ever read.

I ended up going to Robyn's place to play Scrabble, which was lots of fun. This was a surprise, because I didn't even know that Robyn was back in the City yet. I guess summer has arrived, somehow, because all these people who said they'd be in San Francisco in the summer now actually are. Welcome back, Robyn!

On Friday, my arms were a little less sore, but still hurt. At some points, they hurt quite a bit.

I read some of the writings of the Dutch anti-liberal and relativist Paul Treanor. He specifically criticizes the EFF by name. :-)

He has some things to say which would appeal to me, but I don't think he would like the uses to which I would put them. One interesting question which his site reminds me of: is it better that there should be fewer countries, or more? In the traditions of political thought which I care for and Treanor doesn't, both answers can be found, for many different reasons. Furthermore, if you say "fewer", is the ideal that there should be a handful of them, on some geographic basis, or one, or none, or that there should be parts of the world that are not part of any country?

On the other hand, if you say "more", is the ideal that every ethnic group should have a country, that every ethnic group that is somewhere persecuted should have a country, that every group that wants to should have a country, that every ethnic group that predominates in a particular territory should have a country, that every cultural group should have a country, that every person should have a country, or what? That every part of the world should be a part of some country (only true this century, and still perhaps not including Antarctica).

Or is it that there should be about 200 countries forever, as there are now? I agree with Treanor that this suggestion seems ridiculous (although I don't agree with all of his reasons why it's ridiculous).

Some of Treanor's ideas sound very exciting to me, others horrible.

He also suggests that the world should forget the Holocaust.

On the other hand, there is the motivation of Avi in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which I found one of the most interesting parts of that book:

"Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?"

This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging around with Avi. "The Holocaust," Randy says dutifully.

Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint. [...] Randy and Avi are sitting on a black obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.

Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on, and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear view of the sky. "Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?"

"Uh ... enhancing shareholder value?"

"Very funny." Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.

"Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?" Randy asks.

"This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi says, even more irritated. "No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves."

"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves," Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.

"To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs controlled." Avi scoops the GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. "I was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"

Randy uses his hands to squeegee sweat from his face. "Something unspeakable?"

"I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."

"Speak then."

"The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."

"Why?"

"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that's why."

"Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."

"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there."

[...]

Randy says, "You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is 'to prevent future Holocausts.'"

Avi laughs darkly. "I'm glad it's obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one."

I cleaned up a lot more.

I didn't go to the meeting, because the people I might have been going with didn't go.

I finished "Existence and Uniqueness". It is over 5,000 lines and over 45,000 words. Writing that was quite an experience -- one of the longest things I've ever written, certainly the longest poem, and I wrote it largely on a whim, or so it seemed at first. (I was was on BART, thinking about the beginning of the Iliad, and I thought "I should write an epic poem". So I did.)

I heard from my former boss at NERSC and am going to talk to him about job opportunities where he's working now.

I wrote to Red Hat to ask about how to apply for jobs there.

In the evening, I read most of The Once and Future King, skipping over several chapters in my haste to get to the end and see how things turned out. After I finished, I felt very, very sad.

I had lunch at Tandoori Mahal. I went to play Scrabble with Robyn, but we didn't play this time. I ended up meeting Lucky Green. Very much fun.

My arms really didn't feel well.

I had a dream that related to looking for work, but I don't remember anything else about it.

I worked on the BBC, and I cleaned up a little. I got an unemployment check, when I had been expecting two; the other was cancelled because of a mandatory waiting period before these benefits begin.

My arms felt better than Saturday, but still had some trouble.

I really finally managed to clean up. My room is "clean", for, as we say, small values of "clean". If I had a whiteboard out, it would still say "clean room"; my to-do list still says so; but my room feels clean to me anyways.

I went in to the EFF briefly.

I went to the Exploratorium with Brita! That was great.

I read more of The Name of the Rose. That is an awesome book. I'm remembering a compliment I once gave -- "like reading The Name of the Rose". Strong praise indeed.

Job hunting continued. I seem to have some good prospects now.

I heard back from Linuxcare about my severance agreement. I'm thinking about their reply.

For various reasons, it might be tough for me to use up all the BART fare on my BART Plus ticket. I guess eventually I'll figure out the right equilibrium to allow me to get a good deal on transit passes.

There is no "662" area code in the United States.

(Pacific Bell operator, June 4, 2001)

(This is ridiculous mostly because there is one.)

Today is the "20th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS" because the first scientific publication on AIDS was released (by the CDC) on June 5, 1981. I was one year old at the time.

I went to the EFF. Keep an eye out for upcoming stuff from them tomorrow morning; they will have an announcement.

I met Bill, my old boss at NERSC; he now works at Scale Eight. They're pretty cool.

I got a substantial haircut, and my beard is now at about the lengths it was when I was a junior in high school, so maybe I'll resemble some of those old pictures.

Still re-reading The Name of the Rose.

The EFF has announced Professor Felten's lawsuit against the RIAA!

Here's the Complaint (Felten et al. v. Recording Industry Assn. of America et al., filed today in D.N.J.).

That was very exciting. I attended the press conference and was at EFF all morning, watching news articles come out (some of them by reporters who had asked questions during the conference).

In the evening, I went to the SVLUG meeting with Biella, and stood up to announce the lawsuit on behalf of EFF, also asking people to join and contribute money. When I said "This morning, in the District of New Jersey, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the first-ever lawsuit affirmatively challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act", everyone in the room broke into cheers. And a few dozen people took copies of the press release and membership forms.

The speaker was Jon Callas, and his topic was the DMCA and computer security, so it was extremely good timing. (Callas didn't know about the lawsuit, and the EFF didn't know about his talk. But there was a huge amount of overlap; he gave a lecture about how the DMCA harms security research.)

So things relating to the lawsuit took up the vast majority of my day, and I can't say I was at all unhappy about that. It's great to see this see the light of day, and I have vast confidence in the excellent legal team EFF has pulled together for this case.

In the afternoon, I got a demo of a fine cutlery set, which I can't afford to buy, but which is very well-made.

from the in-the-second-century-of-the-Christian-era-the-Empire-of-Rome-comprehended-the-fairest-part-of-the-earth-and-the-most-civilized-portion-of-mankind-and-then-they-invented-Napster dept.

As Americans we have seen many industries and the jobs they create move off shore. We have so far managed to replace these jobs with new and better jobs, particularly in technology. We have moved from a society based on brawn power to brain power. To survive and prosper we must be able to make money from this brain power. If creativity is easily stolen and doesn't have to be paid for, our brain-based businesses will die and our society will go the way of the Romans. They were technology advanced and lost to the barbarian hordes. Don't think it can't happen again. Napster is only the tip of the iceberg. It's the mentality that sees nothing wrong with the theft of intellectual property that will sink many a Titanic.

(Miles Copeland)

begin Seth David Schoen quotation of Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 01:19:16AM -0700:

> If you can't give money, there's a lot else that would help, including
> publicity.

Moviegoers, if you give money to the MPAA, you should give money to the EFF to make it fair.

And if you pay a certain amount per month for your Internet connection, you should pay something for your _freedom_ connection.

Remember, Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." Oh, wait, that doesn't apply here at all. EFF isn't asking for _blood_ or anything, just some goofy little plastic numbers on a plastic card.

I worked at EFF for a bit, and then went to dinner with BBC developers and had a dinner meeting at an Ethiopian restaurant (Cafe Ethiopia on Valencia). That was delicious.

In the evening, I went to a meeting at EFF at which were many exciting and interesting and noteworthy people. I got to meet my friend Jim Tyre, who is fond of remarking on the many occasions when he meets friends for the first time.

I also met a number of other people, including some of the plaintiffs in the Felten case. It was a great time.

Faux pas: complaining about "exporting the concept of software patents to Europe" to a woman who turned out to be a software patent lawyer. She was a very nice software patent lawyer, though, and not easily offended, and I do think exporting software patent law to Europe is a bad thing.

has had a lot of interesting stuff recently.

I had a dream that I was on the Enterprise, from Star Trek, and that I had become friends with someone who turned out to be a murderer. His murders were very clever and all of them involved funny anecdotes, which he told to a number of us, who started laughing.

After about five minutes of this, I became furious and started screaming at my friend and telling him that murder wasn't funny.

"He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to signify something else."

[...] "But what would that sign be?"

"This is what I do not know. But let us not forget that there are also signs that seem such and are instead without meaning, like blitiri or bu-ba-baff. . . ."

"It would be atrocious," I said, "to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!"

"It would be atrocious," William remarked, "to kill a man even to say 'Credo in unum Deum.' . . ."

(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, pp. 106-7)

William, in that book, is the very best example I can think of if I want to show what's meant by a humanist (see below).

At the EFF event yesterday, I exchanged accordion trivia with one researcher: what the finish on an accordion is called, why fraudulent spiritualist mediums liked to use accordions in their seances. We didn't reach the issue of how Charles Babbage felt about accordions.

I also finally got to trade a CS book for a law book, as I hoped to do almost a year ago. I sent Wendy Seltzer my copy of the Lions book, in exchange for the Blue Book she sent me last year.

Attach book (B) to door (D) of cage (C) containing trained attack rabbit (R) by string (S)... when a potential infringer (i.e. our customer) (I) attempts to copy book (B) without use of authorized carrot (AC) to pacify rabbit (R) or cutting the string (S) with authorized scissors (AS), rabbit (R) will be released.

(slightly edited version of John Zulauf's Rube Goldberg TPM)

My mom is in London!

This is the title of a book by Thomas Burnet, who also wrote a famous book called Archaeologicae philosophicae, which is where Coleridge got the epigraph for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit, et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.

The other book, Telluris theoria sacra, means "The sacred theory of the Earth" -- it's a book of natural history from a supernatural perspective. The theory is sacred because it is religious (like the NMH "Sacred Concert", where the music is all of religious origin); so the title means something like "What religion tells us about where the world comes from", and it could be contrasted with a book called Telluris theoria profana, although Burnet never wrote such a thing.

So Burnet gave some influential theories about the history of the world, himself influenced by Christian scripture and theology. He argued that the Earth used to be very smooth, in the old days, and its surface has become rougher over time. ("Antiquitas mundi iuventus saeculi: nostra profecto antiqua sunt saecula non ea quae computantur ordine inverso initium sumendo a saeculo nostro." Francis Bacon.) The very first geologists agreed with Burnet that mountains had been formed over time, and hadn't existed at the creation of the world.

A strange idea, really, because the more common religious theory had been that the physical features we see in the world today had been created this way; Burnet's account of the true religious theory was that the world actually changes over time, as it ages.

Geologists nowadays don't usually quote scriptures. But it's interesting that Burnet thought that there was a "sacred theory of the Earth" and tried to find it. Obviously, his attitude was that, because religion is true, facts about it can serve as evidence or as hints about other aspects of the world; religious evidence will be admissible, in this view, because the religious evidence is true. (On the other hand, scholars who are not Christian will not necessarily be expected to believe the sacred theory.)

It's interesting to consider where in life religious belief or disbelief shows up. I remember always going to synagogue when I was young on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. (My father also took me at other times, and I went voluntarily by myself at other times when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah.) The rabbi's sermon on Rosh Hashana always, every year, included a plea that people in the audience should come to synagogue at other times of the year, not just on the high holidays. (I'm fairly sure that Easter sermons in Christian churches often suggest that it's good to come to services more regularly.) So the phenomenon was that people identified in a way that seemed to me to be superficial with Judaism (and I think this would not happen in an Orthodox Jewish congregation), enough to want to go for "family reasons" or from a sense of guilt to services at the high holidays.

But at the same time, it wasn't clear that Judaism (at least Jewish liturgical worship) was integrated into their lives very much. I mean, it's a common statement that you can't tell "what religion someone is" by looking, or even by observing the person for a while. (I've often gone months without hearing about someone's ideas about religion -- a situation I hear is more common in the U.S. than many other places, where people feel more comfortable discussing religion with one another, or where religion is more thoroughly integrated into popular culture.) So there was a point that people shouldn't compartmentalize religion and shouldn't make it something they "only do on Saturday" (heh!) or only on certain holidays and only at certain events. It should be taken seriously if it is believed at all, and this means that it affects every part of one's life. Concretely, the rabbi would suggest that regular participation in community prayer services was important for people who took their religion seriously.

Jesus, we hear, didn't see a problem with Jews whose practice of religion was private:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

(Matthew 6:5-7 (NIV))

But elsewhere he says to be evangelical and tell other people about the news:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

(Matthew 28:19-20 (NIV))

(This is called the Great Commission.)

Clearly there is a difference between public prayer and evangelism, although I think that distinction has blurred and plenty of evangelists have been accused of ignoring Matthew 6:5. But possibly these two instructions are compatible.

So religion can show up or not show up in many different places in a person's life. It's most evident if someone is wearing an "I agree with Paul" shirt or asking us if we're saved, or handing out Jews for Jesus flyers in the subway. And some people are professional evangelists or professional clergy, and we know (supposedly) how they think about things and how their lives are affected. But other times things show up only in unusual circumstances -- for example, during the Vietnam War, a lot of religious people who had rarely had occasion to talk about their beliefs felt an obligation to criticize the war, or to assert their beliefs so as to obtain C.O. status.

And others, like Daniel Berrigan, for whom we had that birthday party not long ago, felt compelled to make a whole career out of religious opposition to wars.

Other times, people might be presented with something to eat and refuse for religious reasons. Dietary laws seem to be one of the longest-surviving aspects of religious practice among people who are otherwise completely disconnected from religious communities. Many people (including many believing Jews) say that Jewish dietary laws were constructed -- by God or by people -- to make Jews feel a sense of difference. (There are other theories, such as that they have a sanitary benefit or a nutritional benefit, that they are arbitrary and intended as a test of faith, or that they represent a hidden order in the world which is not yet intelligible to people.) And they've been remarkably successful at creating a sense of difference, so that today many assimilated and secular Jews who are not vegetarians refuse to eat pork, and practically their entire sense of being Jewish may well be "I don't eat pork". (I don't know why that corner of kashrut is more firmly entrenched than not eating shellfish or not combining milk and meat.)

We should not neglect (as Sumana pointed out in connection with the Annalee Newitz article I wrote about recently) that there are vast numbers of people who refuse to have sex before marriage for purely religious reasons, who otherwise might well behave totally differently. Newitz seemed to be totally uninterested in this phenomenon -- it seemed that, for her, the only interesting reason not to have sex was a lack of attraction or interest. (She did deal with the idea that people should only have sex with people they love, but Sumana noted that religious ideas about marriage can be quite different from this. For example, there are few religions which say that you have to love someone whom you will marry or whom you have married. For many people, whether two people are married is a far more important issue than whether they love one another in judging whether they should have sex.)

But these things are obvious and direct; nowadays, without a single orthodoxy in charge of a religion world-wide (even the papacy has gotten much milder about proclaiming doctrines and about dealing with dissenters), a lot of things about how religion works in people's lives, and how they think about it, have gotten really subtle. (It's not that religious belief wasn't subtle before, it's just that, until recently, orthodox organized religions had much more influence about how people talked about their beliefs -- that in many communities, expressing a variant view would have been seen as such a big deal, perhaps leading to excommunication and even wars. Don't forget that religious wars were the longest-lasting and bloodiest wars in European history until this century. "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum." I think that people were much more afraid about "novelty" in religion in those days, and about preserving a claim to orthodoxy. They would try to speak of the sacred theory about a particular topic -- although the definite article isn't actually part of Burnet's title -- and there can perhaps only be one sacred theory about a particulartopic, the rest being heretical.)

What a change it is that heresy is treated so differently today! It sounds as though, at some times and places, calling someone a heretic was like calling someone a child molester today. But without this stigma, people really show the diversity of their thought, and life gets very confusing.

I was writing yesterday about religious belief and personality and the lack of a direct connection. I have a dear friend whom I met a few years ago. When we met, I wrote, she was a religious person who was a humanist at heart. I was an atheist who was a religious person at heart. In her personality, in the way she thinks about things, she was deeply involved in the secular, the here and now, the indepedence and critical judgment of the individual; she embodies many of the ideals of the Humanist Manifesto. (See Humanist Manifesto I, Humanist Manifesto II.) But she professed beliefs about how and why we exist that placed her in a church, and she was uneasy with the traditions and interpretations of theology that that church had often employed, and what people had done with their beliefs. I think a lot of her concerns were that the church had not been pluralist enough, had not been tolerant enough, had not been adequately and vocally concerned with the health and well-being of everyone in this physical world...

And I was an atheist whose personality turned toward the theoretical and the absolute, and toward reverence for impersonal law ("the law is not a respecter of persons"! "a government of laws and not of men"! "avia mens hominum audet insectas leges adamante perenni assimilare suas"!) and abstract principle. And I was known to say that organized religions were the great triumphs of human culture and effort except that they were wrong about all the facts, which was their great tragedy. And I was attracted to systematic philosophy, especially idealist philosophy, and I admired the efforts of systematic theologians except that I thought they were all wrong. Also I wanted things that were permanent, perfect, and complete -- and only religion and mathematics have made serious claims to possess truth like that. (Gödel eliminated the "complete" part from mathematics; there is a great interview with Chaitin about this.)

I was not a humanist at heart. I thought that we should live according to laws not of our own devising; I thought that we should wish for certainty. But I just thought that the religions of this world have never found what they claim to have found, that they were founded on historical errors and misperceptions, and they did a good job within the constraints of being wrong, and they made sense.

I think my friend and I admired, even chased after, one another's traditions, in the theoretical sense: maybe she wanted to be free of theology, and I wanted to be subject to it. (Mortimer Adler says somewhere that theology is the Queen of the Sciences -- which is what Eric Temple Bell said about mathematics -- and that one reason universities are in such a mess is that they've stopped teaching theology. And without theology, he says, nobody can really help to understand the unity of all other disciplines: so the universities have become fragmented this way. I think this is complete nonsense, but it's such attractive complete nonsense!)

I wrote in two works which I've mentioned in my diaries -- my essay "Romance and Failure" and my epic poem "Existence and Uniqueness" -- about the fact that I had explicitly religious conceptions of dating. I think I first noticed that when I was a junior in high school, that I had religious attitudes relating to dating, that I thought it called for religious faith, that I was comfortable thinking about romance in religious terms. But I didn't really have much to say about it until recently, when I wrote those two pieces and had lots to say.

Let me say that I had an "Amoris theoria sacra", a sacred theory of love. And one of my main points here is that it's not really unusual to have a sacred theory of things that aren't subjects of traditional theology. It's not unusual to have sacred theories about the things that are most important to us: I had a sacred theory of love and a sacred theory of knowledge, and I think Bertrand Russell did, too:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

Isn't this obviously sacred theory, even though Russell doesn't care for scriptures? "I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined"?

(I haven't shared Russell's "unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind" all the time -- not to the extent that I have shared his other passions -- but perhaps I will when I'm older.)

I wanted things that were unique and permanent (as God is) and yet also really existed (as perhaps God does); I wanted to have perfect love and devotion (as religious believers are often told to do); I wanted to have purity. I wanted to have faith.

It seems that I am a very religious person, although I don't believe in God. ("Would you want to see it if seeing meant that you would have to believe?") I'm certainly very evangelistic; Sumana said I'm one of the most evangelistic people she knows. Evangelism just makes sense to me, although there's the funny question of why it's one particular person's job to convince another. The thing that most irritated me about talking to some religious evangelists was the sense that it was their social role to convince me; I was merely the subject of their evangelism and they would succeed if they convinced me and fail if they did not. There was no other possible outcome -- how different from an ordinary conversation this is. I wrote in an earlier diary entry that Linux evangelism normally assumes that people have never heard of Linux before, not that they have heard of it and rejected it. It seems that this was historically true of Christian evangelism -- the overwhelming majority of people had never heard the Gospel, the euangelion, at all! So it supposed to be this surprising thing, like "You have been living in ignorance all this time, but I'm hear to tell you the good news which you don't yet know about".

This was literally true of the famous speech on the Areopagos, in Acts 17, which I've been very interested in lately. The Athenians said to Paul: "May we hear what this new teaching is?" (Acts 17:19) -- in other words, they were actually asking Paul to evangelize because they didn't know what he had to say!

This is the classic paradigm of evangelism, that it's like teaching, because if you know about some good news that other people haven't heard, you want to share it with them. And this is why evangelists are angeloi, messengers: they have news which is actually news.

But nowadays, the Christian gospel has been preached almost everywhere in the world -- it's not news any more! So the role of evangelists changes in a strange and interesting way, because they go out and argue with people who have already heard them long ago. Once an evangelist in New York stopped me and asked me whether I had heard the gospel of Jesus. And I told her "Yes". Then she asked me whether I believed it, and I said "No". What a strange situation! What is an evangelist supposed to do about this? How can this be, that someone would hear the gospel and not accept it?

(But who today would not know what Paul had to say? What Athenian has never heard the Gospel?)

Someone once told me that the Great Commission is just supposed to mean that the Christian church should be international -- in other words, that evangelists are supposed to go out to all nations and find disciples from each one, but not that everyone is supposed to be a disciple. (So it would be translated "make disciples from among all nations", not "make all nations into disciples".) That interpretation allows for the possibility that some people who hear will believe, and others won't.

But to the extent that evangelists think that everyone is supposed to believe -- which makes sense if you're preaching an important truth -- the situation with regard to people who don't believe is very tricky! Most evangelists I've met have taken the position that it is their job to convince me and my job to be convinced; so they're content to keep on trying until I'm actually convinced. This is very tricky: there's clearly some difference between a person who has never heard news and a person who's heard it and disbelieved it, isn't there? Is a messenger's job to report news or also to advocate and to debate on its behalf?

If facts aren't self-evident, someone has to gather the evidence for them.

(And then "martyr" means "witness" -- do witnesses just testify or do they also argue a case? In some legal systems, they certainly do both at once.)

Getting back to my theme, since I've been such a religious person at heart, I should never condemn people for religious faith, although I'm happy to argue against them if they suggest that a religious belief is justified or that other people should believe it. But when someone says "Credo quia absurdum", I suppose I can only reply "Credis ergo absurdum".

In fact, I was in a cafeteria at Davis at the beginning of this year and I was telling my friend something about my theory of love and how things were supposed to work: and she burst out laughing and said "Seth, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!". Far from being offended, I was on the verge of saying "Credo quia absurdum" or, much more likely, "Certum est, quia impossibile est". And it was amazing that I (and I belong to JREF and to the 2000 Club) could have said that. But it's true. I almost did. I came so close. I could have said it.

What business do I have saying that? But there was nothing else that I could have said; all I could think of in reply was "This absurdity, this impossibility for you is the structure of the world in my mind".

So it's amazing how little connection, or how much connection, our stated religious beliefs can have with our personalities and with how we think about things. It's amazing to see what sacred theories there are and where they enter into life. The "religious" person defends humanist values, the "atheist" defends religious values. Or in some far corner of life which is actually very central and key to how we think, we discover who we really are and how we really think about things.

Everyone, go take a train across the country. Alone there by yourself, just after midnight, read "Surprise" by Martin Gardner. Who are you? Are you surprised?

I did laundry, went to the EFF, and went to Berkeley.

My friend Michelle visited, and we had a nice time.

I went back to Berkeley and then to Maciej's birthday party.

My arms hurt a lot.

I wrote some more scripts for this diary, so that I can have a table of contents showing all of the subject headings I've ever used in writing this diary.

I had a dream that Linuxcare had released a new Bootable Business Card, called version 1.6b.

Zack and I went to Office Depot, where I got a nice chair. It may improve my posture. It's fun to go to Office Depot.

I also started using my IBM keyboard instead of the weird one I was using before. The IBM keyboard is unbelievably comfortable -- it's the same model I achieved my all-time record typing speeds on, and the model I've used more than any other -- but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be better for my hands.

My hands hurt a lot during the day, maybe a delayed effect from earlier typing. I took a long nap, which seemed to help a bit.

Zack's Debian installation is messed up -- he upgraded from potato to woody and a lot of things broke. I, on the other hand, did a recent woody installation and upgraded it to sid, and it was basically fine. It seems that the potato to woody upgrade is particularly challenging; we're still working on it at the moment.

Brita is going to visit again tomorrow: I'm going to meet her over in Berkeley.

Of course, I'm still reading The Name of the Rose, mostly on public transit.

When I mentioned software patents being a bad thing the other day, I meant to link to the Petition too. Please -- especially if you are in Europe or can set policy for a company or organization working in the computer industry -- support the Petition.

Some time I'm going to write more here about harmonization of national laws. This is a tiny subset of the bigger question: Is friction good or bad?

There is a military cemetery in San Bruno, the Golden Gate National Cemetary. It turns out that Dan White is buried there.

Sumana, I happened across this just before reading your diary entry:

Just as memorials devoted to Americans killed in war do not focus on the countries they fought against, the Oklahoma City memorial is devoted to the victims and the rescue efforts rather than McVeigh [...]

(Oklahoma City Somber As McVeigh Execution Nears, Reuters)

While Timothy McVeigh was waiting to die, I was reading "So, Say Goodnight to Joshua: Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell" by Deborah Natsios. Here Natsios shows off her knowledge of cartography, geography, and history by connecting the history of the U.S. Pacific Northwest (where I still want to visit, much as my plans to do so have repeatedly failed) with the recent trial of Jim Bell, much watched by Cypherpunks and people who are curious about Cypherpunks. The writing style is interesting and thought-provoking; I can't say that I read the piece objectively, since I'm already familiar with several of the sources cited and have already formed some of my own opinions about them.

Natsios mentioned McVeigh and contrasted McVeigh with Bell. A major difference: Bell has never killed anybody. Instead, says the government, he placed people "in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury".

I have to admit that, when I first saw the link to "So, Say Goodnight to Joshua" on Cryptome, I thought "Why the hell would somebody write an academic paper about Jim Bell's trial? What's the interest?". But it made good reading. I hope to meet John Young and Deborah Natsios eventually.

One of the media articles about McVeigh led me to a site where Federal death row inmates have their own web diaries. One thing I learned there was that there is a Federal death row inmate younger than myself -- a very strange thought indeed. (There is a quotation from Tom Lehrer which is given in many different forms, all of which are along the lines of "It is a sobering thought that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years". I don't know the original source or the exact text. But it is a sobering thought that, when Christopher Vialva is my age, he will have been under a death sentence for three years.)

The EFF is sponsoring a protest at Macy's in San Francisco on Tuesday over Macy's privacy policies: allegedly the company shares detailed personal information from bridal registries with other companies without the knowledge of those who submitted the information.

Several people -- almost all male -- will dress up in wedding dresses and picket Macy's at Union Square.

I'm sure that the EFF position on the general issue will spark some debate among EFF supporters, because EFF has said that not only is opt-in the preferred practice, but it should be required by law. I don't think that this is proper, but protests against companies that don't respect their customers are pretty cool.

I followed a link from Sumana's diary and read most of Joel Spolsky's essay "User Interface Design for Programmers".

Many entire concepts of professional user interface designers and researchers have long irritated me, for many reasons which might be interesting to talk about. I suppose that it would be easy for me to say things at parties which would make it just as embarrassing to me for the person I'm talking to say "I'm a UI designer" as "I'm a software patent lawyer".

I enjoy the occasional excellently-designed GUI app as much as the next person, but much of the time, when I'm using proprietary software that integrates a lot of features into one UI, I feel confined. (Isn't it funny that some people claim to feel this way using command lines?)

Often, with GUI software, I feel as though I am playing a video game. (Nick, on the other hand, used the metaphor of cartoons to make fun of the strongest enthusiasts of GUIs: he said that literary culture had survived for thousands of years, and cartoons were quite worthwhile, but who could suggest that cartoons should supplant printed books in general?)

Interesting concepts: Luke 22:42, expectations, learning curves, social context. What is the purpose of computing? How does the question "What is a perfect society?" compare to "What is perfect computer program?" or "What is a perfect collection of computer software?" in various ways?

I actually think the idea of a perfect computer program is fascinating, because nowadays there is usually no lack of programmers willing to implement various ideas (for example, consider how many free versions of the vi editor exist!), but there may be a lack of ideas.

There is also the "program as device vs. program as literary work", which is coming up in court regularly now, and about which I wanted to write a long section on my home page. It seems to me that only people who see a program as a device will be willing to accept the censorship of code -- but perhaps this is the view of most computer users, and only a few programmers see software as literature. It also seems that the expectations people have for devices are quite different from their expectations of literature, and the sense of what makes a good device is different from the sense of what makes a good literary work. (Why should this be so? Is it only that devices are so regularly used for a useful purpose extrinsic to themselves?)

Also, there are two different ways "software is literature" can be interpreted: one is that software is literature when we're reading it (for example, when we read source code). Another is that software is literature when we're using it (for example, when we interact with a computer on which a particular program is running -- or, we could say, taking a different view, when we use a computer to interact with a particular program).

I actually think that distinction is interesting, too: do you say "I'm using this computer to interact with vi" or "I'm using vi to interact with this computer"? The second form is much more common, and I probably talk that way most of the time, but the first form is very exciting to me. We use computers to get in touch with programs (don't we?), in the same way that A. K. Dewdeney used computers to get in touch with the inhabitants of Flatland in his book The Planiverse.

I want to re-read the section "For Whom Does One Write?" in Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?, thinking about the question "For whom does one write computer software?". Sartre had fascinating things to say there, and I don't doubt that these could have an effect on how I think about computer programming too. Possibly I should write my own essay "For Whom Does One Write Programs?".

I managed to get a lot of cleaning done. My room is the cleanest it's been since I moved in here.

I went to Berkeley, met up with Brita, came back to the City, went off and took a ferry across the Bay to Larkspur with her, and then rode the ferry back home.

My arms felt better through most of the day, but I still had some trouble with them.

I meditated on Pirke Avot 2:7 without obtaining any particular insight into it.

I had dinner with Zack.

"Why are you a vegetarian?"

"I have an original reason, a fundamental reason, and a supplemental reason."

I had a dream that I went back to work at LBL as a contractor in a new research group which was being founded. We had to set up offices in an old shed which hadn't been used since the 1950s. One of the people in the research group was keeping an iguana in a cage in the office, and I ended up having an adventure around cleaning the iguana's cage.

I had another dream that I got a different job and that it didn't pay enough money, and I worried about how I would get more money.

During an afternoon nap, I had another dream which I don't remember.

I went to the chiropractor on Tuesday and then went around the corner to the EFF protest at Macy's (after a quick lunch at VegTime). It was pretty exciting -- a bunch of EFF staff members were dressed up in elegant wedding dresses, and we picketed with signs criticizing Macy's privacy policy for about an hour and a half while playing wedding songs and songs about weddings ("If You Want to Be Happy For the Rest of Your Life", "White Wedding", "Chapel of Love", etc. -- unfortunately not "Love and Marriage"). It was very entertaining, and lots of people took copies of a little information sheet about consumer privacy issues. (Macy's shares bridal registry information with other companies -- hence the bridal theme.)

Stanton McCandlish was the only person to dress up in something other than a wedding dress; he wore an elegant full-dress kilt.

People walking by were most likely to take printed information from men in dresses, but they were most likely to stop and talk to women.

At one point, a little girl started laughing and pointing at Will Doherty, who was in a dress. I can easily believe that it was the first time she'd ever seen a man in a dress. She seemed to be laughing frantically. As soon as she had passed Will, the adult man she was with -- it seemed to be a school field trip -- took her to task and shouted at her "That is so disrespectful! How dare you?". I don't think Will was offended, though, although no doubt he would have liked the girl to have gained the insight that sometimes some men wear dresses. (I remember the Cross-Dressing Dance at NMH sponsored by HBH -- and I remember going to college thinking "Doesn't everybody's high school have an annual Cross-Dressing Dance?". Answer: nope.) But this man was really worked up that the little girl had laughed and pointed at somebody; he really wanted her to show respect and decorum. It's an interesting issue, because Will was wearing that outfit that day specifically in order to attract attention, and indeed he'd just given a long interview to a couple of TV stations, had received marriage proposals from men walking by, and I had been dancing around to "Chapel of Love" waving two big signs saying "Protect Pre-Marital Privacy" and "Honey, I'm sorry I helped Macy's violate your privacy". So it seems that a little girl laughing at him was the least of Will's problems, and indeed that little girl's friends all enthusiastically took flyers from one of the EFF staffers on their way past. It's an education!

After that, I went by the EFF office.

I finally went to the BART ticket exchange window, for the first time in the almost four years I've been accumulating BART tickets. I turned in 30 tickets and got back two tickets with a combined value of $36. The only trouble is that I had various notes to myself written on the backs of some of those tickets, so unless I've copied them down elsewhere or acted on them, I've lost that information.

The postal format formerly known as "Book rate" is now called "Media mail" (which I noticed because my father sent me some books, about which more below).

I was going to write something here today, and I took it out because I remembered another line from Pirke Avot, the one I quoted here on June 1: "A controversy that is for the sake of Heaven will have a constructive outcome, but a controversy that is not for the sake of Heaven will not have a constructive outcome."

My controversy was not for the sake of Heaven.

Steve Robertson pointed out that the Tom Lehrer quotation I mentioned yesterday comes from his song of Alma. (There was such a person and Lehrer didn't just make her up, although I don't think that would have been beneath him, or he above that.)

Speaking of Alma, I'm sad that I didn't graduate from college.

Downtown, I picked up a copy of The Good News: A Magazine of Understanding (ISSN: 1086-9514) http://www.gnmagazine.org/. It's published by the United Church of God.

Contents:

This magazine attacks the separation of church and state and blames social problems on the abandonment of religious belief and religious laws.

I was also handed a pamphlet called "The Only Doorway" published by the Fellowship Tract League in Lebanon, Ohio, and distributed by the Iglesia Roca de Salvacion here in the Mission District.

My father sent me some books, including an interesting book on political philosophy which spends most of its energy dividing value-cognitivists (who think that an ethical statement attempts to express a truth about the world) from value-noncognitivists (who think that making an ethical statement is just expressing an emotion, and doesn't say anything more about the world than laughing or crying would). The book is Moral Principles in Political Philosophy by Felix E. Oppenheim.

In The Name of the Rose I read this description of books:

"True," I said, amazed. Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

(p. 286)

I went to dinner with Zack, and he read the beginning of the Aeneid to my in English, which took a long time because I'd interrupt him about every two or three lines to make some comment about the text or its context. Possibly I should be a Latin teacher. I have a whole lot to say about the Aeneid.

My arms felt well in the morning and hurt in the evening.

I'm listening to Loreena McKennitt addressing night:

Oh night thou was my guide,
oh night more loving than the rising sun.
Oh night that joined the lover to the beloved one,
transforming each of them into the other.

The text I quoted yesterday from Loreena McKennitt is actually by St. John of the Cross; she interpreted it and sang it. It's from his "Dark Night of the Soul".

I took the BeliefNet "What's your spiritual type?" quiz and got a "25: Hardcore Skeptic". What, just because I don't believe in the supernatural?

I should try the Hacker Test again. I remember that I got another two points in April.

On the license-discuss mailing list, a message from John Cowan:

Brian Behlendorf scripsit:

> I can modify it to fix a bug which crops up under certain conditions and
> causes a core dump, which doesn't change its behavior, it just makes it
> more robust. I can then build that, and create a var-qmail package, and
> redistribute that, under DJB's terms.

Nope, that *does* change its behavior. If the original qmail core dumps, you have to core dump too.

"If Parliament does not mean what it says, my lord, it must say so."
     -- A.P. Herbert

I went to Berkeley and visiting with Michelle and then went by and saw the BookFinder crew. Then Dan dropped by and I visited him briefly; he gave me back my Feynman Lectures and, as a bonus, let me borrow his own audio version of the same.

In the evening, I went to the BAD Keysigning party in the City. This was my first keysigning, and I was trying to explain to some friends about what a keysigning is. To me, it's a natural and normal thing, and very important, but quite a few people have never heard of PGP or GPG or public key algorithms or hash functions...

The party was a real party, with a bunch of people holding lively conversation for some hours. It was punctuated by sheets of paper and photo ID passed around the table, and notations made by individuals about which keys they considered properly validated. I returned home with a full page of notes and scribbles, which I then duly translated into a collection of digital signatures I sent back to Evan.

I also saw five or six people I knew there. It was fun.

On transit and sitting on a couch at BookFinder, I finished The Name of the Rose. It is a tragic story, even if a tragedy written in praise of comedy.

My arms felt much better than on Tuesday.

Cody's has so much new since I was last there; it was very overwhelming, because I've promised to buy no books until I get a job. So I'm generally avoiding bookstores, but they really accumulate exciting new inventory in my absence.

Something can be colder than absolute zero? Or at least have a lower temperature?

I got to participate in my first-ever Gallup poll (at least, I think it was Gallup), a marketing survey for Disney. They've opened a new theme park in Southern California, and they want to know what people think about it. I guess I'm a great expert because I've actually once heard about this theme park (a newspaper article about how the park's neighbors didn't like it too much).

Actually, now that I think about it, I did hear about the California Adventure park. My friend made fun of it for being a California theme park in California -- so rather than seeing the actual California, you can go to Disney's virtual version of it! ("Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest...")

I went to the chiropractor, went back to VegTime for lunch, and then worked at EFF for a couple of hours. The highlight of that was that I solved the big problem which had led to all of the EFF's mailing lists not working. They're now working again.

I'm also working on an essay about standards, largely a recapitulation of EFF's position on copy protection.

In VegTime, I saw a copy of The Animals' Agenda. I haven't seen that magazine for years; it was fascinating.

In the afternoon, I went to Stow Lake (in Golden Gate Park) with my cousin and her dog. I'd never been there before, and I don't know Golden Gate Park well in general. It was a nice walk; we walked around the lake three times, and it made me want to come back and take a paddleboat out on the lake. (You can rent them there, just as you can on the lake in Look Park back in Florence, MA.) We had a nice chat, too.

My cousin has some old letters that my mom sent her just before and just after I was born. There's also a copy of the old picture of me stirring applesauce; I need to scan that and put it up on my web page.

If my arms would permit it, I think it would be neat to get into taking bike trips. There's so much to see in the Bay Area, and so much of it can be seen well by bike.

In the evening, I had some miso soup, and then I visited Robyn and played Trivial Pursuit. She beat me easily. My arms felt pretty much OK.

Some other things happened too, but I don't remember anything else offhand to mention here.

OK, why is it that electrical stimulation of muscles doesn't increase their strength? What does this claim tell us about how exercise works to make us stronger? (Today I heard that, even though external electric shocks can make muscles contract, just as ordinary nerve impulses do, they won't increase muscle mass! So how do the muscles know when they're supposed to get stronger? What's telling them?)

This TechTV story has a substantial amount of video footage from the protest (you need RealPlayer to view it, unfortunately) and I show up in the background in a couple of scenes (in a 2600 DVD lawsuit shirt, holding two signs). You can also see pretty much everyone who wore a wedding dress, plus Stanton in his kilt.

Here's the EFF list of media coverage of the event.

On Friday I read "Agrippa: A Book of the Dead" by William Gibson for the first time since high school. The poem doesn't actually do that much for me, but it gives off a sense of artistic perfection, so that ever since I first saw it, it has been a model for so many things I have wanted to do. And is it possible to have a life as subtle as the ones Gibson's poem reveals? No doubt.

I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.

About five years ago my father sent me an e-mail message in which he compared emotions to musical instruments and said that he hoped that I'd have a whole symphony playing for me in the future. So as I was reading a poem of mine which mentions Carmina Burana, I put on a recording of that and I guess it happened. (But not "trumpets and timpani, violins, basses and woodwinds and cellos", as the Dar Williams song has it. Just a couple of those instruments at once.)

I learned a lot about majordomo and fixed some EFF list stuff. It's too bad that majordomo seems to be going obsolete, because I know a whole lot more about it now. (Dissonance reductions?) I had a series of interesting insights and managed to make good use of the handy strace program.

I got an EFF e-mail address!

I also got the latest catalogue from Simon Finch. I couldn't afford any of those books even when I had a job, much less now. But it's wonderful to see what sort of things exist. If you ever want to buy a Gutenberg Bible or a First Folio Shakespeare, Simon Finch is your man.

I walked up Bernal Hill to see the sunset from there. I took along Dan's Feynman Lectures CDs, and all the way up the hill I listened (with the wind blowing wildly!) to Feynman explaining vectors, and writing equations on an invisible blackboard. It was very educational, even though I could barely hear Feynman and even though I couldn't see the equations and even though I learned about vectors five years ago and longer. Still, I learned new things about vectors and symmetry that I hadn't known. (This is from the collection that was published as Six Not-So-Easy Pieces.)

I did think about attachment, as the Dar Williams song says; I also thought about vectors, but not about the Buddhist king.

By the time I got back home, it was about 9:30p. I didn't manage to catch at 67 bus; they always come less often than you would like. (The 67 is the convenient bus between Biella's place and mine, but also back down Bernal Hill if I don't want to walk, because Biella's place is on the other side of Bernal Hill from here.)

I got a postcard from Sumana, which she sent from Washington, DC. Subsequently, I see from her diary that she's made it to St. Petersburg.

This postcard was very literary because it didn't have a picture of anything on it -- it was blank on both sides, the first such postcard I've ever gotten. Well, actually, it had writing on both sides, but when it was written, or rather before it was written...

So this postcard was once blank on both sides...

Hmmmm, this is getting as challenging as the famous problem of defining a bachelor. There are always counterexamples to undermine a seemingly-reasonable definition.

When Sumana started to write on that postcard, it was blank on both sides.

I built ngrep, at Ian's suggestion, but I haven't included it yet because I haven't included libpcap yet, and we want to include a shared libpcap and make all the sniffers of various descriptions link against that.

There's also interesting stuff around including dsniff. dsniff and associated tools are very powerful and can easily be used to compromise security of many networks (especially wireless 802.11 networks, I guess). But we do want to include some of this because it's extremely useful software. We just have to convince people that they really need to take proper security precautions. Certainly the BBC will be very convenient for people who like to break into other people's computers.

Abusus non tollit usum; we'll need to include things for which we know constructive uses, and hang on tight...

I also tried out Skipstone, at Heather's suggestion (not to be confused with Capstone, which perhaps totiens iam effugimus, as Cicero says). Skipstone is pretty nice, and very small compared to other comparable browsers, many of which try to do lots of things other than web browsing. But unfortunately it doesn't seem to have any SSL support. I wonder whether someone is working on that.

My BART Plus pass expired Friday with about $7 of unused value on it. So that was a misjudgment -- probably because a couple of people were on vacation and I couldn't visit them.

I hear there was a Wall Street Journal article about the Felten case, and I wish I could see that.

mike dillon visited and I went up Bernal Hill with him. Then we went by Bolerium Books, a book dealership specializing in labor and radical history and social movements. There was lots of amazing stuff there. And I thought my father had a lot of books about the Spanish Civil War! His inventory of Spanish Civil War material is nothing compared to Bolerium's.

They have almost every single book on my want list (unfortunately very out of date) about anarchist history or political theory. Sad to say, the first one I saw (Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians) was going for $125 -- tough to afford on unemployment. :-)

Bolerium is in a building I would probably describe as "nondescript", on Mission near 16th (right by EFF, actually). There are three other used and rare bookshops in the same building; they get almost no traffic off the street. I think the address was 2141 Mission.

That was the first time I'd met mike in person.

I got two postcards from London: one from my mother and one from my friend Seth.

I went to dinner with Zack. We also got Tofutti Cuties again. Mmmmm.

I listened to the "Song for the Unification of Europe" on the Bleu soundtrack (I haven't seen the movie). The text is 1 Corinthians 13, in the original Greek.

After a story about some of the benefits of hemp products:

"Wow, it sounds like we should have some hemp legislation."

"Well, we had some, in 1937."

In an explanation of how I came to volunteer at EFF:

Seth: "I traded one of the lawyers in this picture a copy of the Lions Commentary on Unix for her spare copy of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation [... and] the other [lawyer] got me started volunteering at EFF."

Jim: "I think you got a better deal from Wendy."

Don't let me forget once again to mention my lawyer joke.

I had a dream in which I was at the Supreme Court eating pizza with Justice Ginsburg in a conference room where the Court was about to hear a lawsuit I'd brought against the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. (People who knew me well in high school will know why I might have wanted to sue them, or at least had a dream about it, in real life, but in this dream there was an added affirmative action piece because they were giving out scholarships they called "merit" scholarships to people who had lower test scores than mine on account of their membership in certain minority groups.)

I was telling Justice Ginsburg about how I used to have a long beard, and how some people might have discriminated against me because of that, but, I said, "I trimmed it in order to appear before this Court".

My argument was that a scholarship which was awarded based on racial groups couldn't be called a "merit" scholarship, and I wanted the Court to say either that NMSC had to give the scholarships based only on test scores or grades, or that NMSC had to change the scholarships' name.

(This dream had no connection to my real-life dispute with NMSC, and I don't have any idea about whether the real-life NMSC does anything on racial grounds or not.)

My lawyer came in and asked me whether I wanted to sit next to him, and then I realized that this was a polite way of telling me to sit next to him. He started to talk to Ginsburg about how the case was about how NMSC would divide up a pizza, and I worried that the fact that I'd already eaten some of the pizza there would make the other Justices think unfavorably of me, even though Ginsburg hadn't seemed to mind that I was sharing it with her. It wasn't obvious whether the pizza was there as a snack or as an exhibit.

I woke up before the Court heard my lawyer's arguments.

If you run your desktop computer on the floor with the case open, DON'T accidentally drop pennies off the desk onto the motherboard. Unnoticed pennies resting on your computer's motherboard may cause erratic operation.

After much delay, I went off to Berkeley, and visited with Michelle, who was cleaning. This was fun; we had a very late lunch at a Japanese restaurant, so late that I got asked whether I realized that what I was ordering was a lunch special, not a dinner special. I hadn't even realized that anybody would consider it dinnertime.

I think the exercise ball is probably helping my hands, because they've been doing a bit better for most of the past day or two, and I've been pretty scrupulous about using exercise balls recently. Maybe I can try other various exercises.

Michelle's cousin is apparently a fan of "Biologically Impossible". Maybe I can get her to send some fan mail to Peter Peterson.

I borrowed a Ray Lynch CD, "Best of Ray Lynch", from Andy; it has a remix of "Celestial Soda Pop", along with the original. Interesting.

Berkeley Bowl closes early on Sundays. Berkeley bookstores still have interesting stuff I want to buy. I need to get a job. Multiplication is still commutative.

It seems that my mom's presentation in Wales went really well, and also the international Virginia Woolf conference for 2003 will be held at Smith. Cool! I'm sure my mom will be active in putting the conference together.

It's interesting to see that The Wind Done Gone made it into Cody's: that was awfully quick, considering the ongoing legal battles. They also have other things of interest, and they're going to have a reading for Not in Front of the Children, which promises to be a major rallying work for free speech and youth rights advocates.

I read more of the Feynman Lectures; I finished the Six Easy Pieces on paper, not understanding much of the relativity material which rounds out the book.

Various other things are going on.

I set up ht://Dig to search this site, as well as Kernel Traffic. The search here is public and the search at KT is not yet public. (I'm trying to figure out a suidexec problem that requires CGI scripts here to be in a UserDir. Hmmmm.)

I think that if you find a typo in a Supreme Court decision, you should get a free writ of certiorari.

I had an upsetting day. I went back to "Existence and Uniqueness", which I'd considered done, and added more to it. Then Zack and I went for a long walk over Potrero Hill and had a long conversation; he gave me some very interesting ideas. We had dinner at the Cafe Ethiopia.

Other things happened today, but they are all so much less interesting than the big stuff.

Have you ever read the scene in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where Dirk says something or other and his friend Richard suddenly jumps off a foot-bridge into a canal? Richard promptly climbs out and tries to dry off. Dirk stands by amused as Richard provides a completely plausible explanation for why he likes to jump into canals at random moments -- an instance of what's technically known as confabulation, because Richard had actually been under a post-hypnotic suggestion. So Dirk finally explains to Richard that the whole thing was set up in order to make Richard learn what confabulation is, and in order to make him doubt that people actually understand their own motivations.

So today, although I stayed dry, I felt like I was in that scene.

On Monday night, I tried hard to find a quotation I was pretty sure was in the Gospel of Luke. No luck. That means I have no idea where it came from.

Then I went and looked up something from last May. "I hesitated / before untying the bow..." What can I say? I've already said everything and I still have more to say. I read this old e-mail as though with new eyes and an old heart. What can I do?

Earlier, Zack and I were looking at a poster which is still on my door, and he thought he'd found a contradiction in my life. He did find such a contradiction, I suppose, but it's not one that's evident on the door.

Eleison, eleison.

"I have ... striven ... for more consciousness" but only found it, most often, through pain, which does not necessarily dissipate if the consciousness is attained. I'm repeating myself. Pain is a signal to action, a warning to change something, but it must also have other functions. It inspires fear, it inspires poetry, it conditions us, it is expressive. It brings empathy: "Non ignara mali". It creates solidarity, it provides justification. It drives people to make great art and bad art.

I have a lot to apologize for, in the modern sense of "apology", not in the classical sense of defending something. (How did people in ancient times apologize, if the word itself meant giving a defense speech? I remember "doleo", but this just means "I'm sad", expressing condolences, not taking responsibility or begging pardons.) I have other things to defend, of course. Certain things I see and I say "That's exactly who I am" or "I am that" -- not in the "tat tvam asi" sense, but just in the identity sense, "yep, that's me".

I'll start by apologizing to two people for not having recited to them, at the right moments, the "Whoever You Are" of Walt Whitman.

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air
(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead),
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any
person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you.
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.

Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

(L'havdil.)

I had some dreams, but I don't remember them.

I picked up my laundry, which I'd left overnight because I was off talking to Zack instead of picking up my laundry, and it was all there, but my "SDS" bag had been stolen. That's the second such bag I've lost in six or eight years. It was a good bag. It was a gift from my stepmother, an L. L. Bean bag.

My father sent me some very cool books: the DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary 2000 and Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition.

I wrote something for the EFF, I cleaned up a bit, and I met Biella in the afternoon.

The quotation I was looking for yesterday is

But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?

(Mark 10:38 (KVJ))

Wow, I was on an ASF committee, and I didn't even know it.

I re-iterated the argument on dvd-discuss in favor of compulsory licensing for all copyrighted works in any medium. The basic concern is that copyright can be used to suppress a work, to stop it from being reprinted or reproduced at all. This is not the purpose of copyright; the purpose of copyright is to get money for authors and artists, not to let them (or their business partners, or their employers, or their heirs) keep works away from the public!

It seems scandalous to me that any work should be out of print simply because a copyright holder refuses to allow it to be reprinted. It's hard to understand how this could serve the public interest, which copyright is supposed to do.

I want to collect stories of cases where works were withdrawn from print using copyright. Sometimes the reasons are rather scandalous -- for example, an author's heirs may be embarrassed by a particular work, and want to protect the author's public image by burying something that the author has done. (Sometimes the author would have agreed, sometimes not.) One famous story concerns early Disney comics, which were often quite racist. Historians want to point out how pervasive racism has been in American culture by reproducing some of these comics for everyone to see. But the comics in question are extremely rare (so public libraries wouldn't have them, for example). Disney won't readily grant reprint permissions, presumably because it doesn't want people to see the kinds of attitudes it once shared with much of the public. If historians or critics do reprint these early Disney comics without permission, though, they may be sued.

Can the public interest be served by allowing copyright holders to inhibit the study and preservation of important pieces of history? Sometimes the issue shows up around personal letters: a famous person or the famous person's estate may not allow letters now in someone else's possession to be printed. Privacy invasion? No, copyright infringement. It's easier to sympathize with an individual letter author than with Disney, perhaps, but we know that copyright has hurt historians' and biographers' work here.

I thought I remembered that there was a famous person who died and who turned out to be gay but whose family blocked publication of a letter of his that would have substantiated this. So, as I said, I really need to find some specific documentation to substantiate stories like that.

There's quite a debate about which reforms are most appropriate; I just think it's an absolute scandal of copyright that things, once published, should go out of print if people are still willing to buy them.

Take some thermal printer paper -- I noticed this with a Cala Foods receipt, for example, which is printed on a thermal receipt paper. Make sure you haven't just washed your hands, and find a blank spot on the paper. Now press firmly to leave a fingerprint on the paper. You probably can't see your fingerprint. But now hold the paper carefully over a candle flame. Your fingerprint is revealed!

The oils in your fingerprint must either do something chemically to the paper or else prevent that part from getting quite as hot as the surrounding parts. It's like lemon juice, without the need for a lemon.

Thermal paper is getting much rarer; it used to be one of the most popular printing technologies, especially because it was pretty fast and quiet compared to things like daisy-wheel or dot matrix printers. But now it's mostly been displaced by inkjet and laser technology.

Why was I holding a receipt over a candle flame, you ask? To destroy the credit card information there, of course. A candle flame "prints" on thermal paper with huge black splotches; if you're careful, you could write words by moving the paper quickly. Interestingly, but not too surprisingly, thermal paper doesn't catch fire as readily as regular paper. This feature is very important. :-)

Now, if only I could find that kind of plastic bag that Krazy Glue burns holes in...

Sumana, you can find one version of Leonhard Euler's story in Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics, although where you would find a copy of that in English in St. Petersburg, I don't know. The chapter on Euler is called "Analysis Incarnate".

Singapore Scientists Find Way to Fix Broken Hearts

(Reuters headline)

I added something to "Existence and Uniqueness" which paraphrases the Somnium Scipionis and something by Karl Barth. Amusingly enough, when I searched for "manare nihil" on Google, the very first match was a web page I myself wrote in high school, which provided exactly the quotation I was looking for.

There's a famous line by Linus Torvalds about how he doesn't make backups, he just posts important things on the Internet and lets everybody else make copies for him. Then he's certain to be able to find them again when he needs them.

The passage is VI, 20 in the de Re Publica:

Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."

Three comments:

  1. This is really depressing.
  2. It's not clear that it's less true today than it was in Cicero's time.
  3. It's complete nonsense to say that Columbus was the first person to believe that the Earth was round. Cicero knew that the Earth was round, half a century before Jesus. (And Eratosthenes of Cyrene not only knew that but had measured its circumference more than a century before that.)

(After reading my own description of the Fall of Saigon in "Existence and Uniqueness".)

It's amazing that when Hector says "sat patriae Priamoque datum", Aeneas refuses to believe him. But on second thought, it's not incomprehensible; it makes sense. It has everything to do with who Aeneas is, and what Troy means to him.

I've thought about how Hector is telling Aeneas to "keep the faith and run away". The song I mentioned in April, and am now mentioning again, is by Real McCoy and is called "Run Away".

Run away, run away, run away and save your life,
Run away, run away, run away if you want to survive,
It's time to break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh,
You better break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh

[...]

You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith,
You better keep the faith and run away.

(I want to go buy this song on CD; I miss the New Year's parties at Eric's place where I'd always hear it.)

Isn't this exactly what Hector is saying to Aeneas?

It seems that part of Aeneas's initial refusal to "keep the faith and run away" is the desire to prove his loyalty:

Iliaci cineres et flamma extrema meorum,
testor, in occasu vestro nec tela nec ullas
vitavisse vices Danaum, et, si fata fuissent
ut caderem, meruisse manu.

(II, 431-4)

Aeneas doesn't want to be called a coward for having fled Ilium merely to escape hardships to himself. More than that, he doesn't want to be a coward, even if other people would still have called him brave. He has to prove, both to his various audiences and to himself, that he had to flee, that it was the will of the gods, that he had no choice (so that later when he says "Italiam non sponte sequor" (IV), he is not just referring to leaving Carthage, but also to leaving Troy!). So he tries repeatedly to fall with Troy: "pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis" (II, 317), "moriamur et in media arma ruamus" (353). And his father takes just the same attitude: "me si caelicolae voluissent ducere vitam / has mihi servassent sedes" (641-2). There are many other examples; over and over again, Aeneas either tries to die fighting, expresses a wish to die fighting, expresses regret that he didn't die fighting, or expresses admiration and envy for those who did die fighting: "O terque quaterque beati / quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis / contingit oppetere!"

It's clearly only with vast difficulty that Aeneas accepts the advice of Hector. And this advice is repeated over and over -- by Hector, by Panthus, by Venus, by Creusa, and by others. "Fuit Ilium, fuimus Troes", but who can stand this? "Si Pergama dextra / defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent", but who can stand that? Ilium and its defense are Aeneas's life, up to this point, as he has understood it. Outside those walls is nothing for him. It's strange to expect that he could imagine the value in saving his life if he loses Troy. But here he hears that Troy, his beloved city, is in ashes, is in flames, is shattered, is falling from its height ("divum inclementia, divum!"), and those who stay behind "deseruere omnes defessi, et corpora saltu / ad terram misere aut ignibus aegra dedere"! Troy is not only ruined but has become a trap which will destroy Aeneas if he stays. Yet even when he knows this, when dead Hector and dying Panthus warn him of the trap, his loyalty to the lost city is so great that he can't say for sure that he will "run away and save [his] life".

Aeneid II is incredibly powerful. Not only is the story of the fall of Troy suspenseful, exciting, and tragic, but the story of Aeneas is so real for me: arma virumque. He is presented with the mission of the fugitive hero who must utterly abandon his lost and burning world "dum conderet urbem" and must take up his gods

hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere
magna, pererrato statues quae denique ponto

for another time and place. And we can relate perfectly well to this mission because we've heard all about it beforehand, but Aeneas doesn't know how to deal with it, raised as a warrior and abruptly separated from the fate of the "beati / quis [...] contingit oppetere" fighting for something already ruined.

I could and should say much more about this, yet I'm already repeating myself here; I'm just so moved by the description of his experience. This isn't critical exegesis, really, this is just Seth saying that Aeneid II is real life. It was real for Vergil and it's real for me just the way the epigraph to Gardner's Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner says it:

But I do not think "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an escape from reality: I think it was reality, I think he was on the ship and made the voyage and felt and knew it all.

(Thomas Wolfe, in a letter of 1932, included in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p. 322)

"You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith..."

I went back to visit Scale8 again.

I'm probably going to work on the HealthHacker Symptom Tracker project, a free software project Biella is creating to monitor chronic illnesses and injuries. I keep wishing that I kept a health diary, to see what's really going on with my arms, and what it has a connection to, so maybe if I help write some health diary software, I'll end up actually using it, too.

After writing all day, I went off to play an eleventh-hour (OK, actually twenty-third hour) game of Scrabble with Robyn. My arms hurt a bit, but I have a chiropractic appointment tomorrow which could help.

I finally finished the standards paper draft, with much regret that it was later than I said it would be. I've sent it to EFF to see whether it can become a draft official EFF position, instead of a draft proposed official EFF position. :-)

I'm pretty happy with the content, although I think it could use some re-organization. I guess I've been steeped in copy protection debates for a while now, because large paragraphs about the evils of DRM seemed to flow naturally.

Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (briefly mentioned as an authority on the broad implications of design decisions) is quite fascinating.

While I was writing this position paper, I kept thinking of the epigraph to Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research,
technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.

(Paul Goodman, New Reformation)

I used the word "scandal" three times in my previous entry in connection with copyrights, didn't I? Oops.

A combined score around 540. My first word was seven letters. "COVER?" "LOVERS?" "CLOVERS!". I had the opportunity to form TEENAGER on a triple word score if Robyn had indulged me by turning RAN into RANT, but she didn't.

I've often thought that it would be nice to play Scrabble allowing

Unix commands would be great for those two-letter words. ae, at, bc, cc, cd, cp, dc, df, du, ed, ex, ln, ls, mt, mv, nm, od, pr, ps, rm, tr, tt, vi, and that's all I can think of at the moment. (ae is an editor, tt is Tetris for Terminals.)

The common commands that I missed: ar, as, ci, co, dd, id, ld, su, wc. I suppose that this two-letter command thing does contribute to the alleged steep Unix learning curve. I don't even know what all of those stand for (in particular, I don't know where "bc" and "dd" come from; I know expansions or etymologies for all the others.)

My arms hurt and I had other RSI problems; still no health diary to make clear comparisons.

Lots of vacation travel these days -- for instance, Michelle, Robyn, Biella, my mom's family and friends, my dad's family and friends, and others have all either gone somewhere far away or come home this week. It seems to be a real vacation season, but even though I'm out of work, I didn't go anywhere.

I went to EFF, hung out with lawyers, tried to hash out conceptual things about technical standards as process and as product, and did some sysadmin stuff. There are now long speeches I could give about political and public-interest implications of standardization. Goodness knows I've already written the long essays...

I read the new novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Very interesting; some parts are really frightening. (We know Gaiman can do horror -- in novels, it seems, as well as cartoons.) The book actually felt progressively less and less compelling to me as the presence of the gods was revealed in more explicit detail and their plans laid out for us -- so in the beginning there was very powerful suspense, and later on you actually see the gods hanging out, and many of them are not the most exciting or sympathetic characters. Much more enticing, to me, when they are shrouded in mystery.

And then also

"That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then."

(p. 286)

It took me a long time (as in hours) to get some of the jokes, like why the protagonist's boss was named Mr. Wednesday. Plenty of puns and allusions to keep you busy in this one, though Joyce or Eco it ain't.

Some reviewers are impressed with the exploration of American culture here: first, who are the modern gods (Media?); second, do we really think that all of the immigrants -- which is everybody -- left their gods at home? And it's a remarkable thought, and amazing to see a description of religious life in America in which Christianity is scarcely even mentioned. (By the same token, the scorn heaped on the pagan woman from San Francisco, pp. 243-4, seemed malicious but was also funny.)

I found a little hokey the premise that the gods are real beings yet created and sustained only by continuous local human belief and worship. It just had the Peter Pan feel to it:

"Do you believe?" he cried.

Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.

She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn't sure.

"What do you think?" she asked Peter.

"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."

There is actually a connection back to Aeneid II -- the more literal story rather than the aspects of Aeneas's experience I wanted to focus on the other day -- because Aeneas is told to take up his traditional gods and carry them with him across the sea. (What would have happened to the lares and penates of Troy if Troy had fallen and Aeneas had not carried them away with him? Do lares and penates need human worship to survive?) There is no suggestion that the Italians are going to object to the fact that Aeneas shows up with these gods, or that the Italians will have any gods of their own who don't like the Trojan gods. (The Italians will fight, some of them, to keep Aeneas out; but their gods, if any, have no objection to his presence there.)

By contrast, in Gaiman's story, all those who carried their gods across the sea (or the land bridge) to America had a hard time of it, or at least the gods did -- here were, or were being born, other gods who would be jealous, other people who would be skeptical...

I did some errands.

I had a long conversation with Michelle on the phone.

I had a dream that I was visiting Leonard and that complicated things happened which I don't remember now (I think somebody was having a really bad transit day, and a different person was having a really bad romance day); then Leonard showed something exceptionally clever he had done, and it was exceptionally clever.

I also had a dream that someone brought back my "SDS" bag. This didn't happen in real life.

Let's think about some related and famous contrasts:

An amazing number of disagreements can be lined up this way, although it's sometimes hard to tell who should be attributed to a particular side of a particular conflict.

A few examples.

Standards committees. This is probably the whole reason I'm thinking about this right now, unless it's because of other things that happened this week. I'll writing something else about the process/product issues in standardization, and I'll post that here later on.

Affirmative action. I remember thinking about this sort of issue in relation to affirmative action -- you would hear about the formal/substantive equity division in the literature of affirmative action supporters, in contexts like "They (affirmative action supporters) desire merely formal equity; we desire substantive equity". (Also "equality of treatment versus equality of outcome", which is not exactly the same thing but which is pretty closely related.)

Being accused of wanting something merely formal or being in a situation merely formally is never fun; the implicit implication is that there is a real way to want or be things, which goes far beyond the merely formal. I'm somehow reminded of Sartre's accusation against the detached scholar and critic:

It must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether cemeteries are peaceful; none of them are more cheerful than a library. The dead are there; the only thing they have done is write. They have long since been washed clean of the sin of living, and besides, their lives are known only through other books which other dead men have written about them. Rimbaud is dead. So are Paterne Berrichon and Isabelle Rimbaud. The trouble makers have disappeared; all that remains are the little coffins that are stacked on shelves along the walls like urns in a columbarium. The critic lives badly; his wife does not appreciate him as she ought to; his children are ungrateful; the first of the month is hard on him. But it is always possible for him to enter his library, take down a book from the shelf, and open it. It gives off a slight odour of the cellar, and a strange operation begins which he has decided to call reading. From one point of view it is a possession; he lends his body to the dead in order that they may come back to life. And from another point of view it is a contact with the beyond. Indeed, the book is by no means an object; neither is it an act, or even a thought. Written by a dead man about dead things, it no longer has any place on this earth; it speaks of nothing which interests us directly. Left to itself, it falls back and collapses; there remain only ink spots on musty paper. And when the critic reanimates these spots, when he makes letters and words of them, they speak to him of passions which he does not feel, of bursts of anger without objects, of dead fears and hoped. It is a whole disembodied world which surrounds him, where human feelings, because they are no longer affecting, have passed on to the status of examplary feelings and, in short, of values. So he persuades himself that he has entered into relations with an intelligible world which is like the truth of his daily sufferings. And their reason for being. He thinks that nature imitates art, as for Plato the world of the sense imitates that of the archetypes. And during the time he is reading, his everyday life becomes an appearance. His nagging wife, his hunchbacked son, they too are appearances. And he will put up with them because Xenophon has drawn the portrait of Xantippe, and Shakespeare that of Richard the Third.

(What is Literature?, pp. 41-2)

This is such a powerful indictment that it's stuck in my mind (in the image of the scholar in the cemetery, practically dead himself) for almost five years. It's not that I sympathize with Sartre's view but that it's so terrifyingly powerful that it makes me listen.

This accusation is what the accusation of "merely formal" brings to my mind: you are merely formal and there is a whole world out there which is so much more real, and you don't even believe in it!

And indeed, back in the affirmative action debate, affirmative action proponents tend to have little time for formal equity (everyone bound by the same rules, everyone, we might say, input to a single vast function or algorithmic process); opponents have little time for substantive equity (everyone gets the same chances, or everyone ends up in a comparable experience, depending on which kind of substantive equity you're looking for, substantive equity of opportunity or substantive equity of outcome). People don't believe each other that the other kind of equity is really equity, that it is a part of real life. But I feel that the most painful criticism is directed against the "formal" side, by the way it's accused of being unreal. (Maybe I feel this because I usually tend toward the formal.)

I've also heard this about free trade, accusations that free trade supporters are too theoretical and ignore practical harms that result from trade treaties. So, one time I wrote to my friend Helen about the Unix security model (with various aspects like file permissions, certain system calls only executed by root, processes not able to send each other signals or read or write one another's memory, etc.) and how it had a strong internal consistency, and that there was a "big picture" about why Unix was secure.

That's interesting, remarked Helen, so it makes sense to believe that Unix can be secure, but don't people still break into Unix systems sometimes?

Yes, I replied, because historically all implementations of Unix have contained software flaws which were defects of implementation or configuration rather than of the design of Unix itself. So really Unix is secure, just not as implemented.

At this point, Helen began to ridicule me somewhat mercilessly, because I'd said that Unix itself was secure, although no implementations of Unix were secure. It made sense to me, but Helen thought it was a good joke.

Free software. One time the following exchange, involving Eric S. Raymond, Richard M. Stallman, and Linus "B." Torvalds, actually happened:

Audience: What do you want, Eric?

Eric: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.

Richard: Any software that isn't free sucks.

Linus: I'm interested in free beer.

This is a remarkable summary of the different positions that divide these folks (and most readers of this diary don't need to be reminded of the details of these positions). But Eric supports free software for what it does, Richard for what it is (and perhaps Linus for what it gets you, or because it's fun!).

Now, Richard has said that, because freedom is a paramount virtue (elsewhere, you know, called a "primary good"), he would certainly use low-quality free software, software with more bugs or fewer features or whatever, rather than technically excellent, polished proprietary software. Eric generally advocates using the best available tool for a job, and can tolerate proprietary software where it's technically excellent and well-implemented. But he thinks that the trend is for free software, in practice, to produce better results most, but not all, of the time.

It's really a pretty significant division. We could say that, for Richard, free software is a way of life; for Eric, it's a methodology, a technique, something empirical you can apply to a situation to make progress. Or, again, I could also suggest (hinting at the status vs. contract thing) that free software for Richard is who you are, and for Eric is what you do.

For Eric, if the methodology makes good software, it's a good methodology. For Richard, if the process is corrupt (unfree), the results are automatically to be considered corrupt, even if they're technically excellent.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

(Matthew 7:16-20 (KJV))

Well, it seems to me that good trees do bring forth evil fruit, and corrupt trees do bring forth good fruit. (It's not quite clear whether this passage lends more support to Eric's views or to Richard's, although when I first considered it, I thought that it tended to support Eric, by giving a theoretical reason why it's acceptible to focus on outcomes.)

Actually, this is a fascinating question: is the passage above giving a definition of "corrupt tree" (the Greek is "outos pan dendron agathon karpous kalous poiei, to de sarpon dendron karpous ponerous poiei"), or is it merely an observation about corrupt trees, or a rule to help detect them?

To me, this seems like a big difference! A practical implication is that the difference produces potentially different responses if a tree thought to be good appears to produce bad fruit: someone who says that the definition of a good tree is the production of good fruit will say that, clearly, this tree can't be good. (There is an assumption that all the fruit produced by a tree will be of one particular type. If that doesn't happen, there's another problem here...) But someone who says that the production of good fruit is just a usual way to recognize good trees might say that this tree is still good, and the production of bad fruit is in some way accidental and not inherent to the tree, or other responses which account for the inapplicability of the general rule in disqualifying this tree as good.

In some sense that idea shows up in Johnson's "wedge question": "What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?"

One possible answer is that this is impossible, and that Johnson just made it up because he can't actually discredit science but he wants to plant spurious doubts in people's minds.

Another possible answer is that the evidence ("bad fruit", or at least fruit not compatible with production by the tree in question, even if it might otherwise have seemed good) does not actually invalidate the philosophy ("good tree"), and that there will be other things accounting for the bad fruit.

Another possible answer is that the evidence ("bad fruit") does invalidate the philosophy ("bad tree"), because it's not possible for.

There are other answers which might be more subtle than these, but my point is to show the rivalry between the definition perspective and the advice perspective.

(Environmentalists today might have some concerns with the advice about hewing down and burning all trees whenever they don't give "karpous kalous".)

Back in the free software world, I joined in a thread today on the fsb list about how Microsoft claimed that they would license code for Microsoft Word to some of their customers (under a nondisclosure agreement). Some people said that this was a good occasion to make Microsoft prove this, by getting some company to request a license. I said that, the fewer people see Microsoft code, the better, because seeing Microsoft code contaminates you, so that you are at legal risk if you try to work on related free software projects another time. (This is true whether the Microsoft code was stolen by people who broke into Microsoft's network, or whether you saw it legitimately under a nondisclosure agreement.)

Then I added that

The point is not that Microsoft wasn't serious [about their offer, but] that "shared source" is not even remotely comparable to open source and provides virtually none of the latter's benefits.

When I was writing this, I felt that it was a very strong statement. (I guess I could say that it's saying that "shared source" is a "corrupt tree".) After I had sent it, it was quickly followed up by a repected fsb member who strongly admonished me not to exaggerate.

Did I exaggerate? It seemed to me that the benefits of open source that were of interest to me are all abolished by "shared source". So I suppose what I was really saying was either something about what open source is really about, or what I think is really important about it. And on that account there really isn't anything to speak of in common between open source and shared source.

But there do exist other things that people are interested in about open source, and some of those things -- for example, the idea that some people other than its authors ought to review code, because the quality of the code will be higher -- are potentially shared between open source and shared source. Yet to me these things seem quite trivial in comparison to the differences, so that my statement, although it is strong, doesn't seem like an irresponsible exaggeration.

I suspect that Richard Stallman would agree with my statement and Eric Raymond would disagree with it. (See "Why ``Free Software'' is Better than ``Open Source'' (Free Software for Freedom)" and "Shut Up and Show Them the Code"; if ever there were a greater pair of process/product contrast examples, I haven't thought of them today.)

Religious belief. OK, Fish gives the examples of the difference between the view that if you follow a particular procedure for acquiring your belief, your belief will be justified (whatever it is), and the view that if you end up with a particular belief (for example, Christianity), your belief will be justified (regardless of how you came to believe in it). And indeed there are some real arguments where some people say that it's important to examine how people came to believe (for some means of transmitting or acquiring beliefs are looked down upon, as particularly suspectible to error or as not providing any guarantee of a connection between the belief and the truth), and some people say that it's only important what they believe, and not why or how. (For some people, if I believe in Jesus because I kind of felt like it after I saw a tacky evangelistic billboard one day, that's cool, but if I don't believe in Jesus because I read the Bible in three languages and read 30 other books about the history and philosophy of religion and argued with 16 believers and unbelievers and was unpersuaded -- not that this is my situation or anything -- then that's still not cool, because, say such people, despite my great procedural efforts, I have still reached the wrong belief, and, as hackers might say, I still lose.)

Work and school. People get paid for the amount of time they spend at work. (Marx calls this selling labor power, a concept I still don't understand at all.) Very few people get paid any more if they do something particularly useful, or any less if they don't. If you work hard on a project, that's good; if the project succeeds or fails, that's almost irrelevant. (I should note that this is not so much true for managers and executives, who do get promoted or fired or receive bonuses or whatever when projects succeed or fail. So maybe the point is that relatively few people in the U.S. today are considered "responsible" for the outcome of their work; their responsibility is limited to working hard on the particular tasks someone else assigns to them, and if they do work long and hard, they have done well, even if those tasks fail, or are ridiculous or evil. Maybe this is related to what Marx and others call alienation.)

There is some dispute in schools about whether people need to be encouraged to work hard on things, to spend a long time studying, etc. I often finished my work very quickly; people couldn't agree about whether to praise me for that or to send me back to do more work, because they couldn't quite agree about whether we were supposed to be learning X, Y, and Z, or whether we were supposed to be spending N hours studying. (So if someone can't learn X, Y, and Z in N hours, what then? If someone could learn T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z in N hours, what then? Some people said that the person who had difficulty and spent twice the time to learn the regular material was especially virtuous, which I think takes me off into some Nietzschean issues I don't want to pursue.)

This is even weirder in elementary school where many people say that the point is not to learn material by studying but to acquire general skills gradually by socialization and incidental experience. (That's one reason elementary schools often don't assign homework.) In this case, the point is largely being there and being exposed to things; the expectation is that the experience is more passive than later, when a person may, for example, write a PhD thesis.

Court cases. Sympathetic defendants acquitted where the language of the statute was overwhelmingly against them: the statute has to be re-examined and critiqued, its scope or applicability limited. Unsympathetic defendants convicted by a weak case, statutory language favors them, it's stretched to reach their conduct and punish them. This is not formal or procedural justice, which is blind and looks at factual merits (it does allow abstract arguments -- but not anything about the character of the parties, or the larger context of the case). But if judges are actually good at assessing a situation, it might seem to be a kind of substantive justice. (One lawyer I spoke to not long ago called this "results-oriented judging": a judge wants a certain practical outcome, thinks that outcome is most just or desirable, and so tries, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve it by interpretation of the law.)

Almost everything in Fish's book The Trouble with Principle is on these themes: criticizing people who feel that formal principles or good (general, fair, blind) procedures, impartially applied, are more important than the success of their own values and judgments. Fish analyzes a couple of court cases and is astonished to find judges who apologize for their decisions, calling themselves compelled by principles to reach conclusions they detest. The most famous such cases surround the legal protection for Nazis' speech.

So judges would write decisions in which they talk about how clear it was that the Nazis were bad and that their speech was harmful, and at the same time how committed they were to principles which implied that the Nazis could speak. Fish, for various reasons, finds this sort of situation "incoherent, or filled with a coherence I don't like". (He doesn't believe that the distinction people like to make between "public" and "private" is clear or universally shared or stable.)

Some people say that every formal principle is still substantive at a different level of analysis, that every nonconsequentialist principle is still consequentialist if you look at a particular set of consequences. This is to say that everyone cares about what actually happens, but people just worry about very different features of reality (welfare, intent, rights, universalizability, agreement with the word of God, approval by the gods, authenticity, healthy and productive community, transparency, and so on).

So, actually, I'm going to stop talking and tell interested parties to go read Fish's book, and them come back here when you're done. (Then you can read Anarchy, State, Utopia, too. Bear in mind that Nozick doesn't believe himself any more, but that doesn't mean that other people don't. Remember that Marx is supposed to have said that he was not a Marxist.) Meanwhile, I'd best read Paradise Lost.

I tried to dig up all the poems I've written that I still have copies of. If I could find this hard drive from college, I might be able to recover a few dozen particularly important ones. As it is, I managed to find nineteen on my current hard drive and in my account on zork. Usually I like to give lists of titles even when I'm talking about very personal things, but a few of these have somewhat private information even in the titles themselves.

I also remembered three poems whose text I seem to have lost. Some of them might possibly be on another machine somewhere, but I doubt I'll ever get back "Sympathetic Magic".

Reading one poem, "Catullus and Social Psychology", from February of 2000, was a major shock, stronger far than the muscle stim machine at the chiropractor's. I had totally forgotten about that one. The eleven syllables per line -- nice touch.

Maybe I'll post "II. Illusion" here from the "Six Poems for Maya", at some point. I'm really into titles, really into titles and epigraphs.

Yesterday I said that the people in American Gods who carried their gods across the sea to America "had a hard time of it, or at least the gods did", by contrast with the Aeneid. My point was not, of course, that Aeneas didn't have a hard time of his sea-crossing -- obviously he did, "multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / [...] multa quoque et bello passus". My point was that his gods had a pretty easy time; they just got to hang out, they didn't have to fight the wars, they just got free transportation, and when they finally arrived at Lavinium, they found a whole budding civilization unanimously eager to worship them.

This is not the gods' experience in Gaiman's book.

The hero of the Aeneid is a refugee ("profugus"), unlike the hero of the Odyssey, who's going home to a city already built. (And also it wasn't really a city Odysseus was going to, but that's a whole other matter.) Aeneid as refugee/exile literature? Hmmmm.

The Wells Fargo ATM statements are also printed on thermal paper such that you can leave fingerprint impressions which turn a different color than the paper itself under a flame.

I have this feeling that the old lemon-juice invisible ink trick would be relatively effective as a means of secret communication for spies today. I mean, they could write a whole page of hex digits like 

0661 9e2b d9f8 7ae5 4c69 4bd0 703b f4f1
8631 7782 132b 1e38 4381 9ca5 126d e837
d69c 67b8 8c88 a291 448c a10e c132 b030
8ba5 3380 7f06 57c8 78f9 44ed e857 4b7a
e7cd 31c5 6ec0 ee55 466b bd59 87a6 3a4c
7fd9 b778 bd87 03d0 5728 0add 9f42 ef59
190a 24bf 4724 db15 9caf 5057 5319 5d34
4bec c890 c7e6 de37 8467 b151 6a9a 2b43
ba87 fa94 44db 798b afdc f3de 90c1 b995
e25d a9fa e722 0d33 2468 7238 d3f6 c8b0
c4f0 ce32 2754 6094 6cd5 051f f0fb f121
b97e a84e 8262 90c2 1cda d6fe 71dc 0ca3
b79b 7f36 e452 3e1c 8523 03c9 b279 6e78
59ad fa18 8ce5 7323 4712 2398 9114 124a
63f8 bc6d cf19 fa2d 9f46 916c 227f 282f
80e2 fbbb 4601 7ee0 a558 ed42 710f 66aa
739c 83d5 b136 ee6a 0c30 6b9d 8132 65a3
6b65 18a0 965c b84f 84dd 7997 71ca ccf3
87e9 f75f de4c ad66 71ce 7639 e89d 4e7e
adf1 d491 ca87 fb4a fa6a d5f8 80a5 2e64
5f2f 0739 fe2d 727e 73db 4259 edbb ff86
70c5 c6f3 eab7 72eb 586d 058e a150 8392
4cc8 fe5b f895 9c93 9c7b 9c81 c659 2238
65df 260b 89f2 c322 555c 906f 3ea4 6b7f
ee65 8b9f 463c 6acd 8ccb 655a 7d9f a203
5369 c659 0067 7667 a97d bba0 cc10 98c1
7294 fc00 36c0 d755 972a 16f6 4c0d 935b
294e a2d3 201e 7db6 3038 238a 0532 d6d2
cff7 d8f0 692b b29b fe40 c2fb bece e2ae
af30 a44b e7e7 efc2 befd c186 03ec f7ae

and send that in the mail, and really what the message would be was something written in lemon juice on top of this. The spies would be so busy trying to crack the cipher (and there wouldn't be any cipher) that they would hardly even look for the lemon juice message.

[...] not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.

(William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic")

It's interesting how things can be too easy or too obvious and therefore successful, like the "Purloined Letter".

I typed too much, did too little cleaning, and too few errands.

I tipped over a candle in a jar after I'd put it out, but that didn't stop hot wax from spilling over my AppleVision monitor (sitting unused on the floor until I can get a new hard drive for that Mac at some point) and the floor. I seem to have bad luck with candle wax.

I couldn't find that hard drive from college days (it was the hard drive of my old computer called requiem), though I did find some other interesting things.

I went out to Extreme Pizza in the South of Market for dinner, and I walked all the way back (Yahoo! Maps seems to think that was about 2.4 miles). I had often wanted to try Extreme Pizza, so the trip got me out of the house, got me some food, fresh air, and exercise.

It was Pride Weekend and I saw tons of same-sex couples along Folsom, and heard lots of firecrackers going off. I was inside almost all day, though, so I missed the parade.

I had some very vivid and powerful dreams. I wish I had a place to record dreams whose details I don't want to publish here.

As it is, I basically just don't write down anything I don't publish nowadays, unless it's a poem or a very brief notation in a notebook.

I forgot to mention the other thing I saw as I was walking home on Folsom: Petopia closed, locked, shuttered (more or less), and with a NO TRESPASSING sign in the window. It looks a lot less cute this way than it did before.

As I've said, it's not that I had a great investment in the success of these businesses, or even thought that they were particularly sound, but it still makes me sad to see failed startups (actually, I don't know whether Petopia is out of business or just moved or something), because all of these startups were somebody's dream and somebody's job. And silly some of them may have been, and impractical, but someone believed in them.

I also forgot to mention that I wrote a letter to Wolfgang, and one to Michelle.

Yikes. Next year's CTYers will have been *born* after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time flies when you're having fun.

(Tien Chiu)

I spent a long time arguing various points on the fsb list. A productive thing that I did was to write a cellular automaton program in Python, because I wanted to give a hypothetical example of a computer program for a copyright argument. So I wrote this program, sent it to the list, and proceeded to discuss various implications of my copyright in it.

The fact is that there are things you are allowed to do with copyrighted works without infringing the copyright; if you are not infringing the copyright, the question of fair use does not even arise.

(Kragen Sitaker, in support of one of my points)

I was emphasizing that, once people had legally obtained copies of my program, they could legally run it without my permission, and even if I specifically told them not to. The copyright limits the ability to make copies but (we claim) does not limit the right to use, study, transfer, or do various other things with existing copies.

The rights of copyright holders -- the legal restrictions on the behavior of others with respect to copyrighted works -- are carefully enumerated, and are at once very broad and very narrow: they can reach many different acts which involve duplication, public broadcasting, or public exhibition, but they almost never reach any of the many other things people routinely do with copyrighted works. There are also a lot of restrictions on the scope of copyright, in an attempt to reduce some of the harm copyright does to scholarship, criticism, parody, and research. I have to admit that many of these exceptions mitigated a lot of the potentially severe harms, in the most common cases. But their existence means that they need to be defended: copyright is not "ownership" and is far from a general right to require permission for any use.

This is more of a controversy in software than it is in something like book publishing: when do book publishers ever try to prevent you from lending, reselling, criticizing, studying, pulping, or writing marginal notes and annotations on their books? (Well, they do with advance review copies and galleys, but often with little legal foundation.) When do they try to stop you from writing other books inspired by the originals, or using information you learned from them? (Well, using fictional characters or places or certain other narrative elements from a work of fiction may get you in trouble. But using facts you learned from an encyclopedia never will.) They try to stop unauthorized duplication; by and large, it ends there.

Software publishers have gotten enthusiastic about the idea that they can impose conditions on your use of their programs. This is strange, as far as some of us are concerned, partly because they rely on the same copyright law book publishers do (with certain differences, most of which appear to give more rights to consumers), and yet somehow many people accept the idea that you normally acquire one kind of work subject to a "license" which limits your use of it in many ways, and the other kind without any sort of license at all. It's a puzzling situation.

There is now a lot of debate among lawyers and people who hang out with lawyers about whether or not "shrinkwrap" or "clickwrap" licenses are valid -- that is, if you buy a copy of a program and you take it home and you open it up and you see this big long END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT -- YOU MUST READ AND ACCEPT THIS BEFORE USING THE PROGRAM IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS LICENSE YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO USE THE PROGRAM...

Well, if you see such a thing, is it any different from my old hypothetical "by reading this sentence, you agree..." or the story about the sign on the building "by driving past this building, you agree..."? Is there any reason you should have to follow it? Obviously plain old copyright law forbids you to make illegal copies, but these license agreements tend to go way beyond that. So if you don't plan to make illegal copies, but you do want to make some other use which is supposedly regulated by this license agreement, is that OK?

The view I'm most sympathetic to is that these license agreements are most often simply false statements, placed in a box and sold to you. So you get this box and inside there's a piece of paper that says "END USER MATHEMATICS AGREEMENT -- THE EXPONENTIAL FUNCTION IS NO LONGER ITS OWN DERIVATIVE". Does this situation mean that the exponential function is no longer its own derivative? No, it means that some person managed to get a piece of paper in the box that makes the false claim that the exponential function is not its own derivative. But it's wrong. If you disagree with the agreement, it doesn't affect your right to use what you bought. (To make an extreme argument, using the non-lawyer misconception that any contract is just as enforceable as any other, what if the agreement says that, by using the program, you agree to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? I'm pretty sure some programmer in this wide world has attempted such a thing.)

So this view continues to the effect that, if you do not agree to the license, you still have a right to use the copy of the program, because you bought it, so the license is just wrong, and it's trying to intimidate you because it was written by a lawyer and you weren't, nyah nyah nyah. Such is the view of D. J. Bernstein in the short article I've linked to about.

I went and bought a few small items of clothing. It was frustrating to hang around the belt and tie racks: for some reason, clothing made of animals, except of course fur, is still considered higher-quality and higher-status than clothing made of plants or petroleum. So you see all these belts which are advertising "GENUINE LEATHER" or "100% GENUINE LEATHER" or "ALL LEATHER" or some such thing. And all these ties say "100% SILK" or "73% SILK 27% RAYON" or "IMPORTED SILK" or something.

And then you look around for some clothing that isn't made out of animals, maybe, and "maybe" is the best you get, because the clothing that's made out of synthetics, or mostly, considers this something to be ashamed of, so instead of the convenient tag legend "ALL MAN-MADE MATERIALS" (which I've seen just a few times in my life), you get things like "IMPORTED FABRICS" or "MIXTURE" (which might in fact make the article unkosher, but says nothing about whether there are animal byproducts in it) or "GENUINE" or "QUALITY" or something. But they just stay totally silent about what the thing is actually made of, lest they should admit that it's actually synthetic!

(I admit that I've managed to buy ties which advertised their contents, but it still seems clear that silk ties are thought of as the best and other ties are embarrassed.)

Does anybody remember the passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder about how great it was that somebody had given machine-made clothing as a gift? Everyone had only hand-made clothing, and the machine-made clothing was this wonderful novelty.

You see the brand name "Anatomotor" on some medical equipment and you immediately think that it must mean "Duck Motor" because "motor" is a Latin root and the Latin "anato-" means "duck". So, you'd expect that an anatomotor is something that moves ducks around, or something that ducks use to move themselves around.

But why would this medical equipment have to do with ducks?

Then you realize that there is also a pair of Greek roots "ana-tomo-" which has to do with anatomy (literally, with cutting things up). You silently chastise the creator of this brand name for mixing Latin and Greek roots, to the detriment of easy translation.

Yesterday I said here that Eric Raymond was a good example of a particular type of thinking about process vs. product, in the free software world.

Today he sent this message to me and the fsb list:

Seth, allow me to make a suggestion.

The best way to fight "shared source" is to point out that under Microsoft's license terms, it appears that any developer that looks at Microsoft's code makes his company subject to an IP-theft lawsuit if they ever develop software that competes with or resembles a Microsoft product.

Make them fear "shared source". *That* will work. Don't even mention the GPL. Allow your listeners to notice on their own how much nastier the Microsoft trap is than the scare scenarios Microsoft is floating about the GPL.

When doing open-source advocacy for a business audience, remember this:

1) Your worst enemy is your own idealism.
2) Your best friends are fear, greed, and the desire for dominance.

I say that your own idealism is your worst enemy because it will lead you to talk about things that won't help -- to argue from your moral position rather than from the audience's business issues.

On the other hand, if you can learn to push the fear/greed/dominance buttons you will win. And keep winning. This may seem like an ugly way to win, but ask yourself what it is you really want -- to feel virtuous but argue ineffectively, or to win the argument and change behavior.

I rest my case. :-)

"By doing X, you agree to Y."

"Doing X indicates consent to Y."

Don't people already have a hard enough time understanding each other and agreeing on the implications of actions or statements, without software license authors making up claims about what actions mean?

I still can't agree about whether signing a contract on paper really indicates consent (some of my friends believe it is "merely formal" consent and not true or substantive consent; see previous days' diary entries on this point). But at least a contract on paper has serious historical, legal, and social credibility, going back thousands of years. The Hebrew word for "covenant", brit, is also translated "contract", and the Biblical covenants have a fair amount in common with modern ideas of contracts (and some contracts are still called "covenants" today). There is a pervasive idea that such a contract is actually expressive of a certain state of mind which corresponds to accepting an obligation ("intending to be bound", as they say).

In this sense, contract-signing is symbolic, and we remember from Austin and since Austin that it is a way of doing something with speech. (Becoming metaphysically or legally bound, that is, by saying or writing words.) These novel indirect "indications of consent" turn this on its head and claim that we can speak by doing something. This is no doubt true in some cases -- for example, the famous United States v. O'Brien, 391 US 367 (1968). (And there is also the issue of whether a sit-in is speech, for legal and moral purposes; O'Brien is a strong precedent that it is not, legally, even though what those who sit in usually hope for is to communicate something. I recently quoted Eco: "He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to signify something else." Murder can be expressive, but it is still murder. How about mines as text?)

The thing that really gets to me is not that actions can be expressive, but that the "indicated consent" theories allow someone else to decide for you what your actions will mean. You can't say "By doing X, I indicate Z", because someone else has already said "By doing X, you will indicate Y, whether you want to or not".

The incredibly tragic belated lesson of public key cryptography is this: Trust means trust. There is no shortcut and no substitute for it; if you trust someone, you are really trusting someone. If the person you trusted is abusive, you are really subject to the consequences. If you don't have a reason to trust someone or something, software cannot provide one.

[...]

In the blurbs for PGP, it used to say "Communicate securely with people you have never met!", which was the amazing technical achievement of public-key crypto. However, it should have added "Still have absolutely no idea whether they are who they say they are, or whether you should trust them!".

(on peacefire-technical)

(Speaking of that, my GPG key is on Drew Steib's keyserver (although I didn't put it there! Do you trust that key? As a great cryptographer once said, "Why?".).

I spent a long time talking about PKI and I think I now understand it well enough to substantiate my claim that it's "incredibly tragic". See also Carl Ellison's padlock page and the 10 Risks of PKI.

Today on Katzdot: Why Do Students Learn?

(Crummy)

Why do light bulbs always come unglued when you don't want them to and never when you do want them to?

stephane (who also had that bad light bulb experience) has created a Seth-o-meter which shows how many copies of lynx I am currently running on zork.net. (I tend to do most of my work on that machine, and I use lynx most often for browsing the web, and because it's under screen, I often forget to exit them...)

The Seth-o-meter uses the "hanging out with lawyers" picture.

In other "Stephane and pictures of me" news, her pictures of Taska's birthday party in Santa Cruz include a relative recent picture of me (in the "California Berkeley" sweatshirt, strangely enough). That is still before I got my beard cut; I know that Duncan has a more recent picture from the BBC meeting, but I haven't seen that on the web, and Duncan's still in China right now.

I'm trying to listen to the Resurrection Symphony, but the only recording I have is extremely uneven in volume, so I have to keep turning it up and down to be able to hear it without (I hope) disturbing other people in the house. I think I'd better get a recording where the volume varies less.

On the other hand, what if people write music that's meant to be played back with a huge dynamic range? So you should barely be able to hear some parts, but at the high end they should hear them down the block? (Probably the 1812 Overture is like this, when performed with actual cannon.)

Music like that is really inconvenient to listen to, because although the dynamic range that home audio equipment can deal with has been growing, the variety that's actually convenient to listen to is not growing. Some things are too quiet to hear, some things are too loud to play. If music has a wide enough range, there is no single volume setting where every part of certain pieces will sound "appropriate"; then no technology will fix this, because it's a part of the music itself.

Should we ask people not to write or perform music like that? That's not a good solution. Maybe headphones, but then again you don't want the high end to injure you, which is a real possibility with headphones.

Sometimes I've thought that it's funny that some modern societies are rich enough that a vast number of our injuries come, not from the pre-existing natural environment (fires, floods, earthquakes, wild animals...) but from our own creations (keyboards! and headphones and lots of other examples).

Some of the literature about water safety is pointing out that most diseases now caused by drinking water in urban environments are no longer due to bacteria (indeed, outbreaks of illness due to drinking tap water in cities have become extremely rare) but due to industrial pollution! So nature hurts us less now, and in return we hurt ourselves more.

Finally, as we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.

Arver v. U.S., The Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366 (1918)

(Or, "we don't have to consider your argument when we can laugh at it instead".)

Harry Weinberger, the lawyer for one of the draft opponents in that case, was a famous free speech lawyer and represented such notables as Emma Goldman. He had an extremely distinguished career, defending some very important cases (often unsuccessfully). It would have been a very different U.S. history if he had won this one.

I have pointed out before that, not only did the Supreme Court ridicule the argument above, but it apparently felt so strongly that it sent a man to prison the following year for repeating this argument in public.

I guess I could just include pictures here, rather than linking to them. Hmmm. Sorry for using up bandwidth if you wouldn't have loaded these pictures.

[Hanging out with lawyer, CryptoRights Benefit Party]

"United States Patent 4,405,829 has just expired! Let's party!"

(or)

"I'd like to buy an ideogram, Cindy."

[People in a restaurant in Moss Landing]

Stephane's caption: "From the left: Mike Fleming, me (stephane), the non-floating head of Seth David Schoen, Rebecca, Simon, Taska, and John Harper, at Phil's Fishmarket, after a very large meal."

I tried quinoa. Not bad.

I was back at Scale Eight today and met some interesting people.

I mentioned "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Borges in a discussion of copyright, which might be a novel application of that story. I found a copy of one translation of the story on-line (this copy contains some typographical errors).

Wow.

While I was talking to Michelle about Disney's California Adventure, I heard the Dar Williams lyric about the incredible realism of a hypothetical "Western New York" theme park to be built in Southern California:

And the waitresses look like waitresses who want to leave for the West Coast.

The LNX-BBC project was covered in the current issue of Linux Weekly News.

I sent some presentation materials to IDG for inclusion on a conference CD. Trade show conferences aren't that academic.

I was sorry to see that the VegTime restaurant is closing, after it had previously cut back its hours. A letter posted there Thursday said the restaurant was losing money because people who used to go there a lot were getting laid off now.

Did Richard Stallman ever invest £50m in Linux? We did.

(Ransom Love, quoted by ZDNet)

I did some constrained writing, which I'll post here soon. I only have a copy on zork, and zork's network seems to be unavailable right now.

I had a bunch of really amazing dreams, most of which I don't remember. In one of them, San Francisco had been suddenly attacked with an atomic bomb, and I saw (from what might have been a place in Bernal Heights) a mushroom cloud forming over the Bay. I was terrified that I would soon be killed by the radiation or that I would breathe in or ingest some radioactive substance; I spent all my time trying to figure out the various risks and how to avoid them.

I'm pretty sure that almost all of my dreams in the past two days have either involved romance or war, death, or espionage.

I went over to Berkeley to try to visit the transit store with Lia. Visit the store we did, but they had no BART Plus passes or GGTA passes, so we didn't buy anything. We did manage to have a couple of meals with some neat people; a collaboration of three people beat me in a game of chess. Perhaps I should be ashamed because two of them were almost completely new to the game (still confused about rules like pawn promotion and castling), but they worked together well and were very clever about certain things. Often, one person would be an advocate pointing out a particular combination; later, a different person would take on the role for another combination. So you could say that, with enough eyeballs, all chess problems are shallow. (Didn't Kasparov play against the whole world one time? Did he win?)

That chess game revealed a lot about the importance of psychology in chess. Because they believed that I was very good (actually, I'm a novice chess player, although I learned to play at a young age), my opponents read a lot into everything I did. At one point, I made a severe blunder (losing a rook because I moved it under attack without defending it first), but my opponents felt that it must have been some kind of trap or tempo move or sacrifice or something. Nope, it was an error, but they didn't think I'd make an error like that. I did!

At another point, having seen this happen, I saw that they had a mate in two if I didn't defend my king. I seriously considered completely ignoring this and launching a bold attack, because I expected they'd say "he would never have made that attack if his king were in any real danger". But I wasn't that brave this time.

I had a nice time over there. My arms felt fairly well.

I read The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds by Jonathan Rosen. I found a lot of interesting bits there.

Something Catholicism has in common with Judaism (from a conversation today, not from Rosen's book): enumerated lists with particular numbers of items. For example, the charismata; the sefirot. There are lots of standard lists and (for some reason) students have been asked to memorize them and to be able to recite them.

I was also reading Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language. There are even more interesting bits there.

Poor John Wilkins!

His list was rather based upon empirical criterial and he sought those notions to which all rational beings might either attest or, reasonably, be expected to attest: thus, if everybody agrees on the idea of a God, everybody would likewise agree on the botanical classification supplied to him by his colleague John Ray.

Vitanuova for 2001 June
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