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.