In which, if it were to summarize the prodigious revelations of which
it speaks, the title would have to be as long as the chapter itself,
contrary to usage.
(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
I did meet Rachel,
go to SVLUG, and learn that the world's leading peer-to-peer file-sharing
networks have been sued by
both the motion picture and recording industries.
I got a letter from a fellow HCSSiM alum who found my
July 17 entry by way of a web search. I
would like to send her a BBC.
John Young (speaking
of "prodigious revelations") had a run-in with the New York City police,
but, true to form, still produced
a series of shocking original
documentary photographs of the World Trade Center disaster.
I've now written something which is
published
on the EFF web site, and
included in the
EFFector.
I stayed over in Berkeley.
Leonard had superlatives
for my party -- "Seth has the best library in the world; it's better than huge
libraries which contain millions of books". Hey, just call me Alex.
I've been talking to some press people about Carnivore and surveillance.
Apparently I'm going to be quoted as a technical expert on the subject.
I've also been busy reading "Patenting Speech" by Dan Burk, and
"Publishing Software as a Speech Act" by Lee Tien.
I'm going to go to dinner with Ren and Gwen, two thirds of the people
in the largest name-rhyming group from my birthday party. The other,
Ben, is sick; I hope he feels well soon.
Zack taught me a very elegant method of taking square roots by hand.
I did some EFF work -- productively, I'd say -- and typed a little too
much. It's the beginning of a long weekend for me; on Monday, I'm
going to hear Siva Vaidhyanathan
at Stanford.
In Walgreens -- where they play
nominally uncontroversial music all the time -- I heard the following song,
which I tracked down later on, thanks to Google.
Love to some is like a cloud, to some as strong as steel
For some a way of living, for some a way to feel
And some say love is holding on and some say letting go
And some say love is everything, and some say they don't know.
(John Denver, "Perhaps Love")
After that, I heard Zack talking about computer chess for a while. He
thinks chess strategy is well-understood, such that computer programming
has relied too much on deep searches and too little on high-level
positional analysis.
All of this makes me wish to teach some friends or some children about
game trees.
Sumana called up to ask about "Eastasia" (as in "Oceania has always
been at war with..."), and we talked for a little while.
I'm trying to make some plans to go to that upcoming
Dar Williams concert.
A problem about an arbitrary number of people in a line, wearing either
white or black hats, reached me last year through a chain involving
Danyel; now
Sara has posed it.
So I thought of a generalization. Suppose that there are p people
arranged in a straight line. Each of these people is wearing a hat;
each person can see the hats of all those in front of him or her,
but not his or her own hat or the hats of anybody behind.
Each hat is any of n colors, which are identified and known in advance.
(Each person can recognize each color and tell what it is; nobody is
colorblind or lacking the ability to distinguish any color from any
other color.) The people get to confer on strategy before
the hats are assigned to them; the malicious (adversarial) hat-assigner
eavesdrops on all of these conversations (and they don't get to use
public key cryptography or anything to achieve confidentiality).
After deciding on a strategy, the row of people will be asked, in
order, from back to front, to guess their own hat colors. Everybody
can hear all of the guesses; nobody may turn around or remove his
or her own hat.
Each guess must be stated in the form of a color name ("I think
my hat is...") and we assume that there is no other communication
channel available outside the information in the guess itself.
(For example, you can't use the timing of your guess, or the
intonation, volume, or duration, in order to convey some kind of
information. Nor can you cough, breathe, etc., in a manner
calculated to send a message.)
After all the guesses have been made, the people who guessed incorrectly
are all killed.
How many of the p people can definitely be saved? What strategy should
they use?
This is a better problem than the original version, in which the hats can
have only two colors!
Wow, I got a "Green Card Lottery" spam message for the first time in years.
I took the opportunity to complain about it, just for old times' sake.
A journalist interviewed Zack and me about open source.
I played a lot of the games in the
IF Competition which Leonard mentioned
recently. Somehow my hands held up pretty well through all that computer
use. I've also now provided jzip, a z-code interpreter, as an LNX-BBC
downloadable package (so you can conveniently play your favorite z-code
games under the BBC).
I wanted to go down to Stacey's,
because Bill got me a
gift certificate for my birthday (I thought I'd either get the new
Gardner book, or Copyrights and Copywrongs), but I was
so busy playing IF games that...
Happy birthday to Dave Barry's son (see Dave Barry Slept Here).
I went off to Stanford Law School
for the talk by
Siva Vaidhyanathan, which turned
into a long discussion. I
felt a little young and out-of-place (notwithstanding that I work alongside
leading copyright and free speech lawyers) and not particularly emboldened
by the EFF business card in my pocket. Stanford's law students and
professors are very sharp.
I think one of the people in the audience was
Paul Goldstein,
but I'm not positive.
Copyright is policy, not property.
(A free-Sklyarov chant? "Po-li-cy not prop-er-ty! Po-li-cy not
prop-er-ty!")
The Stanford campus is much prettier and more pleasant than I remembered.
I had a nice time walking around there. It was strange to see how
students dressed; almost nobody was wearing a t-shirt. Typical Berkeley
attire and typical Stanford attire are very different. (I wore my
"got slack? Slackware Linux" shirt signed by Patrick Volkerding. The
pipe-smoking penguin stood out more than a little in the halls of
Stanford Law School.)
After the talk, I wandered into
the bookstore to try to get
a copy of
Copyrights and Copywrongs; I was browsing through the law
section when Professor Vaidhyanathan himself turned up next to me and
grabbed a (blue and gold!) book off the shelf. "The last copy!" he
exclaimed. I groaned; I hadn't found it yet, and now the author
was about to buy it instead. (Darned scarcity of physical objects!)
But he gave it to me and asked whether I were
one of Lessig's students. I should probably have answered "In a manner of
speaking". I ended up buying the book (but didn't manage to get it
autographed).
So I bought three books today, in all: Copyrights and
Copywrongs, the O'Reilly
sed and awk
(now I finally
know the difference between a pattern space and a hold space, thanks to
a couple of CalTrain rides), and Gardner's new Colossal Book of Mathematics
(which is actually pretty big). The latter two were purchased at
Stacey's in San Francisco using the gift certificate Bill gave me for my
birthday.
Machines that don't work well are especially frustrating to people who
can't read English, because they have no way of telling whether they
are making a mistake or whether the machines are broken. At the Palo
Alto CalTrain station, I watched a person who was not proficient with
English struggle with the ticket-vending machine. He couldn't tell
that it was broken; he thought he must be misunderstanding the directions
or doing something wrong.
If I were Phil Agre or Peter Neumann, I'd say something interesting
and original at this point.
Such good stuff in
the latest
NTK.
"There is NONE. IT IS THE NULL SET. VENN DIAGRAM THAT LOOK LIKE TWO BIG
CIRCLES EQUAL BAD PUBLIC POLICY."
"JEDI now an official UK religion"
etc., etc.
Also in Palo Alto, I bought a classic "15 puzzle" (a la Sam Loyd). This
should be fun, although I've never been any good at them.
I got a message from a UCSB student who is opposed to the loyalty oath.
I hope I can help her somehow.
I went to the BayFF meeting at the Public Library, saw Biella and many
co-workers there, and played with my 15 puzzle a lot.
I submitted the long-awaited EFF comments on the W3C patent policy
draft.
I'm going to Las Vegas this weekend with Michelle, Lia, and Kate.
My father sent me a picture which shows him holding me (a baby) across the
river from the World Trade Center, probably some time in 1980.
Dan Bricklin scooped me with his
article "Copy Protection
Robs the Future" (VisiCalc could have been lost to the world forever!).
The Senate passed the "USA Act".
Via Richard Stallman's page, I
found the Edible Ballot Society,
a group of Canadian anarchists encouraging Canadians to eat their ballots.
Zack has done a lot of impressive cleaning up.
I did some interviews. I'm likely to be on
TechTV at some point (or maybe I
already was today); Lee and I
were mentioned in the Red Herring's "Catch of the Day";
and I'm going to be on the radio tomorrow (Friday):
The radio piece on Free Software finally weighed in at 30 minutes and will be broadcast tomorrow, Friday, October 11th, between 6
and 7 p.m. PST. We have a decent webcast----
http://www.kfjc.org (click on "tune in")
I was able to use several clips of yours--one went neatly into Lawrence Lessig (I found an .mp3 of him on the net thanks to the
architecture of cyberspace), another on the 1st amendment, and a few where you and Zack talked across each other.
At some point a compressed audio file will be placed on the KFJC server. I'm going to ask for .ogg format....
What a great trip to Las Vegas!
Michelle's family was in town and took us to a couple of all-you-can-eat
buffets. Mmmmm.
Kate and I took a late-night walk along the Strip, almost its entire length,
from
Mandalay Bay to
Circus Circus. (Since we were staying at Circus Circus, we
didn't continue all the way to the
Stratosphere.) We walked for
about three hours, stopping along the way for various purposes.
At the
New York New York,
people had spontaneously left dozens of flowers, cards, and
signs by the fence in front of the replica of the Statue of Liberty. I took
out a BBC and inscribed it for Christoffer. Then I left it in that pile.
On the way there and back, we stopped in Boron, CA, for sight-seeing,
lunch-eating, mineral-purchasing, and postcard-mailing.
10 Reasons Why the
Internet is No Substitute for a Library, from the ALA.
Libraries are icons of our cultural intellect, totems to the totality
of knowledge. If we make them obsolete, we've signed the death warrant
to our collective national conscience, not to mention sentencing what's
left of our culture to the waste bin of history.
So, if you were an Afghan man who could read English, and you were getting
bombed all the time, and a flyer fell out of the sky which said that
"The Partnership of Nations is here to Help" and "The Partnership of Nations
is here to assist the People of Afghanistan", would you believe it?
In a mineral store in Boron, I bought specimens of
borax,
colemanite,
and the very bizarre ulexite. All these were collected by the proprietor
of the shop in the Mojave Desert.
Ulexite is really bizarre; it's a "natural fiber optic" and allows one surface
of the crystal to form an accurate, clear, and full-size image of an object
placed against the opposite side. They call it the "TV rock".
In a casino in Las Vegas, we watched a high-stakes baccarat game. This was
interesting in part because it was separated from the rest of the casino
by a low but intimidating wall -- so you could see the game table and
surrounding lounge easily enough, but the idea of entering this
space was scary. The players were dressed in relatively fancy clothes
(but things that looked comfortable, not ostentatious); they looked
very intense.
At each of the two high-stakes tables, there was a dealer and a cashier,
and three pit bosses standing around watching the play. (For
extra security, there were dozens of cameras built into the ceiling of
the high-stakes room.) Although the pit bosses chatted with each other,
at least one had his eyes on the players at all times.
When a round ended, a remarkable procedure took place. A group of
cocktail waitresses emerged from a door and led the players away
from the table and into a rest area, where they supplying drinks and
snacks. A casino staff member then came out carrying a pile of fresh
decks of cards and a silver wastebasket. The cashier gathered up
all the cards from the previous round, took out a large permanent
marker, and drew a huge "X" on each side of the pile, then bound the
cards with a rubber band and tossed them into the wastebasket. Next,
as the pit bosses watched especially closely, the dealer took
each fresh pack, opened it, showed it to the pit bosses, removed all the
cards except for the jokers, and set them in a pile on the table. Then
he passed the card case across the table to the cashier, who looked
inside, verified that both jokers, and only both jokers, remained in
the box, and then threw the box into the wastebasket.
After all of the fresh packs had been opened this way, the staff member
took the wastebasket away, and then the pit bosses supervised an
elaborate shuffling procedure which included (if I remember correctly)
both overhand and riffle shuffling, spreading the cards around on the
table and gathering them again, and finally summoning a cocktail waitress
to choose a cut location, which she marked with an index card. Then the
cashier made a complete cut and placed the cards into a card shoe, which
he passed across the table to the dealer. (The pit bosses never took
their eyes off of the cards during the entire procedure!) Finally, the
players were called back from the rest area, and play began anew.
The whole thing was done quietly and efficiently. Each person,
including the gamblers, seemed to know his or her role thoroughly;
there were no signs and no directions, nothing showing off or
bragging, but we imagined that hundreds of thousands of dollars were
being wagered.
Teach for America:
I have a friend in TFA who liked it, at last report. TFA is one of these
things for aimless college grads in the way that the Armed Forces are one
of those things for aimless high school grads. Going to college supposedly
made these students antagonistic toward, or suspicious of, the military,
so they have to have a different organization to deal with their aimlessness.
Good, motivated teachers are one of the world's most precious resources.
If you can be one, you'll be doing something very real.
However, jumping into that position of responsibility could be a big
shock (perhaps in the way that jumping into a position of responsibility
in the military could be a big shock, only as a result of different
sorts of problems). For example, you might have to deal with some of
your students getting pregnant. Are you ready for something like that?
"To be": Korzybski's linguistic philosophy of
General Semantics holds that you
should avoid the verb "to be", because it's philosophically misleading;
the modified English which follows that direction is called
"E-Prime",
and Gardner mentions it critically in some of his skeptical essays.
I've tried writing in E-Prime; I found it difficult. Value judgments
are harder to convey with any apparent impartiality; in fact, impartiality
in general is a difficult sort of thing. (This is deliberate.) Without
"to be", almost all
statements pertain to some person's or some groups perceptions, decision,
or actions -- not to the way the world is in itself (Ding-an-sich
and all). Possibly this is very Existentialist in its implications.
I had a discussion once, either in my diary or in a letter, about the
difficulties I would have had talking, thinking, about girlfriends
without "to be". This is because I thought of boyfriend/girlfriendness
as a status and not as an iterated interaction (which some people call
a "relationship", meaning a pattern of relating or of interacting).
I thought of it as something you are, not as something you
do.
To make a claim or ask a question about a status, you normally need
"to be": the temperature is 30 degrees, it is
raining, I am 22 years old, etc. (Although: accurate
thermometers show a temperature of 30, rain falls from the sky, I
survived 22 years.)
I did make an argument that almost all of what I had to say about
romantic relationships for the past ten years would have been difficult
or impossible in E-Prime. It would have had to be more limited and
skeptical statements, more observer-relative statements, more
historical, more contingent statements. And these trends don't
necessarily bother General Semantics enthusiasts; they might say that
statements like those are more specific and more accurate and more
meaningful. They were not the statements I wanted to be able to make.
"Free": The issue of whether things are "free" when you give out information
to get them is still murky. The
SEC decided a few years ago that
personal information has intrinsic value
(example)
so that people who offered stock in exchange for personal information
could be accused of "selling" stock (whereas such people often argued
that they were giving away the stock for free).
I always thought that entering a sweepstakes was "free" if you just had
to fill out a card; I didn't even realize that the whole purpose of
holding a sweepstakes is to gather personal information. (Before I had
any disposable income, I didn't see any reason why anybody would want my
personal information in the first place.)
"Existence and Uniqueness": Apparently my poetry contains Umberto
Eco spoilers, if only the word "ecpyrosis".
Burning books or libraries is such a vast and deep cultural idea that I think
Eco could hardly have failed to use it. See, e.g., "Burning Libraries",
in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by
Stewart Brand. Also, Eco's villain is none other than a censor, who is
willing to destroy culture and civilization in order to save them.
I participated in a private yoga lesson, organized by Zack, and attended
by four people.
My arms hurt (not because of yoga, I think). My father sent me a
historical atlas of Judaism, in which I read a few dozen pages and
started to feel overwhelmed.
Somebody stenciled some hate speech on the sidewalk at several
places along Shotwell Street (between 23rd and 22nd and between
21st and 20th, if I remember correctly). I saw it every day on
my way to and from work.
After a few days, someone came along with some white spray paint
and blotted out a couple of the messages, adding the new inscription
"GOD FORGIVE U.S." (perhaps it was originally "GOD FORGIVE US"
and someone added some periods?). But another of the stenciled
inscriptions popped up and nobody's gotten rid of it so far.
(No, not like opportunistic infection.) We've been having some discussions
about Brad Templeton's
opportunistic encryption idea, which is approximately based on using
public key cryptography without PKI or formal key exchange or
key verification. It gives you security against passive eavesdropping,
but not against man-in-the-middle attacks. Brad argues that this is
still worthwhile because man-in-the-middle attacks against public-key
exchange in e-mail are rare, difficult, and expensive, and because most
people's privacy can be invaded in other ways. In addition, doing away
with key-infrastructure requirements would allow you to have a "zero UI"
system, which Brad thinks could dramatically increase the number
of people willing to use e-mail encryption, in that you could then have
e-mail encryption without needing to know about it.
One scheme which is along the lines of what Brad has in mind is called
Herbivore, and he also found one by the name of
Passive Privacy System, or PPS.
It seems that doing away with key verification is a cryptographic heresy
of the highest order: aren't we all supposed to be more worried,
not less, about key exchange? Aren't we supposed to become
more aware of the
risks associated with even sophisticated uses of PKI? How can we
throw away PKI, fingerprints, certificates, keysigning, and
webs of trust altogether?
Brad's answer is more or less that these things are solving different
sorts of problems: public key cryptography with something PKI-ish
protects you against certain kinds of adversaries, and public key
cryptography with automatic, unverified key exchange protects you
against fewer adversaries, but still against all the adversaries
most people are likely ever to encounter. (When was the last time
someone even attempted an active man-in-the-middle attack
against the average e-mail user? When was the last time a law
enforcement agency, intelligence agency, or criminal had a motive,
means, and opportunity to perform passive surveillance against such
a user? I guess my answers to those questions would be "never" and
"routinely".)
On the other hand, practical MITM tools are being published.
dsniff was
notable for containing convenient, practical, free MITM tools you
can use against popular public key cryptographic protocols. If
doing MITM is really becoming easier for attackers, won't it be
more and more important to defend against it?
There's a real conflict between the effort to devise simple schemes
which a novice computer user would feel comfortable using, and the
effort to devise truly secure schemes which an expert would feel
comfortable trusting.
Fred was talking about the conflict between the good system and the
perfect system -- he regrets that people have held off on deploying
good technology because they were waiting for perfect technology.
This argues for a cost-benefit analysis, in which passive eavesdroppping
appears as a huge risk and active eavesdropping as a relatively small
risk. On the other hand, frustratingly, we know how to solve active
eavesdropping too! We just make everyone go to keysigning parties!
We provide them with free beer and pizza!
I wrote some code (called 15.py) which simulates a 15 puzzle,
allowing you to generate puzzle instances, see the result of
particular moves, and scramble the puzzle (through a series of
random moves of a specified length).
The whole reason I really wanted to have code like that was to
do a brute-force or random search for a useful solution to the
puzzle form "15-13-14", or
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 15] [ 13] [ 14]
which I've often obtained after solving the rest of the puzzle. The
15-13-14 has been particularly frustrating, because I've had no idea
how to solve it systematically, and usually had to resort to random
guessing to complete the puzzle.
I thought that I could ask the computer to search for solutions to
the 15-13-14 so that I might understand or memorize such a solution.
The key to an efficient computer search here is not to make moves
entirely at random, but to follow two constraints:
- Never immediately undo a move you've just done. For example, never
move up and then immediately down, or left and then immediately right.
(A stronger form of this constraint: never bring the puzzle into a
form which it has previously occupied. This constraint can be
implemented in software, but it needs a hash table in order to be
efficient; sequential comparison to items in a list would be
extremely slow. So I settled for "never undo your last move"; if we're
looking for solutions which are as short as possible, they shouldn't
contain any backtracking.)
- It is (according to my experiments) never necessary to move anything
in the top half of the puzzle in order to solve the 15-13-14. Therefore,
never move down if you've already moved down once (until your most
recent up or down move is an "up").
Implementing these two constraints, via a class called the
ConstrainedMoveGenerator (which remembers its own move-generation state, and
imposes the constraints mentioned above on its choice of new random moves),
made the search pretty quick. One result of this was the generation
of several different 18-move solutions to the 15-13-14. Another result
was an experimental conclusion that there are no shorter solutions
(unless the shorter solutions disturb the tiles in the top half of the
puzzle).
The 18-move solution I prefer so far is "R, R, R, D, L, U, L, L,
D, R, R, R, U, L, L, D, L, U". If we write "+" after a move to mean
that the move should be repeated as many times as possible (which I've
been calling a "column move" because the tiles of an entire row or
column move together), this can be expressed as "R+ D L U L+ D R+ U L L"
from which point the solution is obvious.
There is one other 18-move solution found by my program, and it is
"D, R, U, R, R, D, L, U, L, D, R, R, U, L, L, D, L, U"; this and my
favorite solution have their last eight moves in common, and differ
only in the first ten moves.
Here's a typescript of what the original solution looks like in practice:
>>> print a # FifteenPuzzle object preconfigured with 15-13-14
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 15] [ 13] [ 14] [ ]
>>> a.right(); a.right(); a.right(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
[ ] [ 15] [ 13] [ 14]
>>> a.down(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ ] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 9] [ 15] [ 13] [ 14]
>>> a.left(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 10] [ ] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 9] [ 15] [ 13] [ 14]
>>> a.up(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 10] [ 15] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 9] [ ] [ 13] [ 14]
>>> a.left(); a.left(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 10] [ 15] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 9] [ 13] [ 14] [ ]
>>> a.down(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 10] [ 15] [ 11] [ ]
[ 9] [ 13] [ 14] [ 12]
>>> a.right(); a.right(); a.right(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ ] [ 10] [ 15] [ 11]
[ 9] [ 13] [ 14] [ 12]
>>> a.up(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 15] [ 11]
[ ] [ 13] [ 14] [ 12]
>>> a.left(); a.left(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 15] [ 11]
[ 13] [ 14] [ ] [ 12]
>>> a.down(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ ] [ 11]
[ 13] [ 14] [ 15] [ 12]
>>> a.left(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ ]
[ 13] [ 14] [ 15] [ 12]
>>> a.up(); print a
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
[ 13] [ 14] [ 15] [ ]
>>>
I'd like to publish my FifteenPuzzle class when I can get it a bit
cleaned up. I also have some card classes sitting around which are
supposed to simulate a spectator's behavior for a non-interactive
("batch" or "off-line") card trick described in Gardner. (You can search
for "casual_shuffle" in my Advogato diary to find some information
about that.) I should dig out some of that stuff and publish it
too, and then I fondly remember writing a Kruskal count simulator in
BASIC to test co-incidence rates with well-shuffled decks of various
sizes.
Computers are actually really neat for experimentation. Never let it
be said that computers are precise and logical and predictable; there
are so many things they can simulate for which you really don't
know the answers in advance.
If computers were predictable, people would probably not be interested in
them, much as if people were predictable, other people would probably
find them boring (so much so that "predictable" is often a synonym for
"boring"). To some extent, we like to interact with other people
because we don't know what they're going to do, and we want
to find out.
People are definitely better than computers for this.
I wonder what else might be in the off-line card trick genre. The particular
trick I'm thinking of is described in Mathematics, Magic, and
Mystery as "Magic By Mail"; do we know whether other off-line
card tricks exist? I guess this category could be further sub-divided in
various ways.
Ren and I went to Biella's place and watched Harold and Maude
there for the first time. It's a touching movie.
Some people said some very funny things, but they are attorney work product
privileged and I can't repeat them here. :-( :-(
43 successive column moves equal the identity -- or "there are only 42
different positions which can be reached on a 15 puzzle in its default
condition by successive column moves". Another nice appearance of
the number 42.
Argh, I noticed that there's also the 14-15-13, which is different from
the 15-13-14; how do you solve a 14-15-13 easily? Were some of my
automated solutions actually solutions to 14-15-13?
OK, if you take my standard solution and do it to a solved puzzle,
you get the 14-15-13. Then if you do it again, you get the
15-13-14. Then if you do it again, you get the solved puzzle.
This is to say that the standard solution (the 18-move "R, R, R, D, L, U"
thing given above) is a macro which swaps the leftmost tile in the bottom row
into the rightmost position (XYZ --> YZX), so it takes 13-14-15 to 14-15-13
to 15-13-14 back to 13-14-15 (and has a period of three). This also means
that the shortest solution to the 14-15-13 is the inverse of the shortest
solution to the 15-13-14, to wit:
D, R, U, RR, D, LLL, U, RR, D, R, U, LLL
or, with the "plus" notation,
D, R, U, R+, D, L+, U, RR, D, R, U, L+
Learning both of these would be marginally useful; I don't see any way to
predict whether you'll end up with 15-13-14 or 14-15-13 as the last step in
solving a 15 puzzle. On the other hand, if you can do either macro
quickly, you can solve either 15-13-14 or 14-15-13 by doing the
macro you know at most twice. I think I could do it in three or four
seconds, with practice, so maybe that's good enough.
By the way, this is the 15 puzzle I bought at
Restoration Hardware;
it's made by Binary Arts. Is
"leatherette" leather?
Thanks to Marc, I got two interesting pictures of me from when I was
much younger scanned in. (I'll probably make smaller versions and
put them up on my home page.)
This is the only existing picture of me and the New York World Trade
Center. My father carries me on the Brooklyn Promenade (1980?).
This is the first time my picture was published in the newspaper.
Daily Hampshire Gazette caption: "Seth Schoen got the best
job of the day -- watching the apples cook" [when my cooking-for-kids class
at the Northampton YMCA made applesauce] (1985?).
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Leatheret \Leath"er*et\, Leatherette \Leath`er*ette"\, n.
[Leather + et, F. -ette.]
An imitation of leather, made of paper and cloth.
From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:
Leatherette
n : a fabric made to look like leather [syn: {Leatherette}, {imitation
leather}]
Somebody broke Microsoft DRM
(encryption on WMA files). Perhaps this will lead eventually to WMA support
for all platforms -- like Linux -- without the need for developers to obtain
Microsoft's approval for their software.
Unfortunately, given the present legal climate, that doesn't feel very
likely.
I wonder how to get to Yreka, because I want to see the new
Yreka Bakery. The Yreka Bakery has re-opened next to the Yrella Gallery,
which occupied the old bakery's premises when it closed down (thirty or
forty years ago).
People on seth-trips suggested that the Greyhound and the Green Tortoise
both go there.
I seem to have learned that 15-13-14 macro, because I've been able to do
it a couple of times without looking at the directions. It's wonderful that
what once took me four or five minutes can now be done in four or five
seconds, although one could argue that the puzzle is less exciting as a result.
I'm curious whether I could figure out a purely mechanical algorithm for
solving the 15 puzzle from an arbitrary state. I do have a pretty effective
search program to tell you how to get from one state to another (assuming
they're reasonably close and you can code up some useful constraints).
But it would definitely take too long to ask it to do something like
my_puzzle.unconstrained_search_match(FifteenPuzzle(), 500, 1000000);
you could be waiting for days, at least.
It usually seems straightforward to get the
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
although there are some odd things that can come up (in particular
around placing the 4, 7, and 8, assuming you start in numerical
order).
It never seems to take long after that to get
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 7] [ 8]
[ 9] [ 10] [ 11] [ 12]
but I can't say exactly how I do it!
Add your web diary to the input data for
Blogdex! It's cool!
I went over to Lia's going-away party in Berkeley and saw lots of
people I knew there. Take care, Lia!
I went to hear Dar Williams at the Warfield with Sumana. Dar
performed lots of old favorites as well as two new songs -- "Farewell
to the Old Me" and
"O
Canada Girls" (why does this person say that this song is on
The Green World? I have three copies of that CD and none contains
"O Canada Girls" or its lyrics).
My favorite part was Dar's cover of the "Finlandia" by Sibelius at the end.
(She sang a version with words, which I'd never heard before: "This is
my song, O God of all the nations"; apparently the Indigo Girls have
popularized this version. It was beautiful.)
Mol Day is coming up soon (Tuesday).
I caught up with Kate at
Grace Cathedral, where she was
trying to
lead a bunch of people on a trip from her dorms (she's on dorm staff at
Berkeley) as a part of her series of trips on "Spirituality". Apparently
five people
tagged along with her but none of them ultimately chose to attend the
Evensong service. Everyone explored the cathedral for a little while,
but, except for Kate, all were gone by the time I found her.
I walked the outdoor labyrinth at the cathedral, which is the second
time I've done that. Many people who come and try the labyrinth don't
anticipate how long it's going to take. I think you should plan on at
least ten to fifteen minutes if you don't rush it. But, since I didn't
time my trip through the labyrinth, I can't say whether that estimate
is really reasonable or not.
It's interesting to find a labyrinth without walls. One could say that
this labyrinth, like the "Unix Virus" chain letter, works on the honor
system.
Grace Cathedral is gorgeous; my visit there on Sunday was my first time
inside a cathedral, as far as I can remember. You can't quite get a
sense of how high the ceiling is from outside, because, living in
cities, you come to expert tall buildings to have multiple stories. At
Grace Cathedral, much of what you see from the outside is a single room.
The stained glass windows in the Cathedral show, among other things,
"human endeavour" -- like science, social work, literature, agriculture,
and other things. I'm getting more of a sense that art can be political
or ideological because I had a strong sense that this church was making
a value judgment in favor of the things which were included on the
"human endeavour" panes, and slighting (deliberately or accidentally)
things which were left out. For instance, many people would have forgotten
about social work and agriculture; I would have been wary of including
government. And most church stained glass windows probably don't
honor natural scientists; these did.
So there's a question, in making art works, not only of
how to represent something but of what is going to be represented. Some
works of literature have been seen as shocking, or as "activist", or
"crusading" (an unfortunate word, recently) because they described
people or cultures or living conditions which definitely do exist
but which simply weren't major parts of most readers' mental landscapes.
So representative art says "I paid attention, so you pay attention, too",
and it can set an agenda that way. As debaters know, and as people who've
read transcripts of Senate hearings or courtroom procedure know, the
ability to set an agenda is a powerful thing.
One of my recent frustrations along these lines has been that so much
press coverage of things like
Beale Screamer's work
focuses on
"hackers"
and "security" and "protection" -- not legislation, not cultural
preservation, not education, and certainly not freedom of speech. (Not
"why does Beale Screamer feel a need to be anonymous, instead of presenting
a paper at a conference?"; not "why is Beale Screamer called a 'hacker' --
in pejorative sense -- when he hasn't broken into anybody's computers?".)
When I am an artist, and make cartoons or stained glass windows, they'll show
scholars unable to listen to twenty-first century music because it's
copy-protected; they'll show scholars in jail because copyright industries
put them there.
We need to see, as Howard Beale would tell us, more than we are seeing.
I need to see the movie Network, and I need to learn to
make stained glass windows, or to draw cartoons.
After our visit to Grace Cathedral, Kate and I went to
Acorn
Books, where I'd never been before. I got Weinberg's Psychology
of Computer Programming and a first edition of Gardner's
Ambidextrous Universe. Each edition of that book seems
to have a new subtitle.
The Psychology of Computer Programming comes across as very
dated, partly because it's so batch-oriented. You hear descriptions of
computers as very expensive, of people lining up to submit "jobs", and in
general of non-interactive work to which programming is a preliminary.
The book mentions that interactive debugging systems, and time-sharing
systems, and terminals are becoming available, but doesn't treat them
as ordinary. There is no thought of desktop computing.
(Is somebody going to say that my writing seems dated in a few years
because I don't usually acknowledge the existence of graphical user
interface?)
Some of the discussions in the book are still very relevant -- for
example, the emphasis on programming as a social activity, and some of the
accounts of conflicts between managers and programmers -- but I think it's not
quite what I was hoping for. On the other hand, I think Weinberg was successful
in inaugurating a field of psychology of computer programming. Who
else has written about that?
Kate is going to Washington and might visit the
National Cryptologic
Museum (except it seems to be closed).
Inter arma silent musea.
There's a new
PEA News out for October
(thanks, Helen).
I was thinking about transportation safety because of a thread on the
Crackmonkey list. One issue is what constitutes a valid measure of the
safety of a travel mode (e.g. annual fatalities, fatalities per
passenger, fatalities per trip, fatalities per vehicle-mile, fatalities per
passenger-mile, fatalities per hour, fatalities per passenger-hour, or something
else?). Fatalities per passenger-mile is
usually used when comparing modes, but is it the most defensible?
(Some modes encourage people to take trips which they would otherwise
not make at all! For example, I wouldn't go to Philadelphia for the
SPDRM conference next month if it weren't for planes. OK, so I'm
probably not going to go even though there are planes. But still...)
Another issue is what constitutes a rational preference with respect
to different kinds of risks. For example, I argued that automobile
fatalities are typically "nicer" than the much-less-frequent
airplane fatalities, because automobile passengers who are about to
be killed are usually only aware of that fact for seconds, at most,
whereas airplane passengers who are going to be killed might have
to deal with that situation for minutes or longer. Fearing
imminent death is often considered worse than actually dying, so
travel by plane represents an added risk of having to wait for a
hypothetical forseen accident to happen.
Given things like this, is it possible that there is actually some
rationality behind the feeling that travel by car is "safer" than
travel by plane? You get an increased chance of dying but also
an increased chance that, if you do die, it will happen suddenly.
The basic point here is that maybe fatality statistics in themselves
aren't the be-all and end-all for making decisions about safety.
Where do you get fatality statistics adjusted per passenger-mile?
I looked in the Statistical Abstract of the United States
and found only overall annual statistics (around 1,000 times as many
people die in car crashes as in plane crashes in the U.S.) but not
statistics adjusted for the relative frequency of the different
travel modes. I looked at the NTSB
and BTS sites -- no luck. Maybe I
just didn't look hard enough.
Happy Mole Day.
I went to a Mole Day party in Berkeley and saw some people I hadn't seen
for a long time. We also went out and watched the Space Station fly
by overhead -- a
post on interesting-people
advised that it was going
to be passing over the Bay Area at a certain moment, and sure enough,
there it was, right on cue, and very visible.
This world is large, but parts of it are small, and people are connected
to each other in such unexpected ways.
I tried to go see Sumana performing at the Comedy Night event at
Blake's
on Telegraph, but I was turned away for not having photo ID. The bouncer
seemed surprised that I had none: "What happened to your ID?" Ahem.
I'm debating whether to write a letter telling them that they lost $10
(and some customer goodwill) by carding me. On the other hand, surely
they wouldn't have carded me if they didn't expect to gain more than
that, say through diminished liability. I want to say that litigious
people -- parents? -- are making it harder for me not to have ID and
still to do things that I want to do. On the other hand, terrorism
could easily make it even harder.
Much as my sysadmin's intuition is to want to authenticate people, or
to want to have the ability to authenticate people, my civil liberties
intuition is that generating documentation (or a culture or technology
which expects documentation) about people is not such a good
idea.
Maybe it's a matter of "expecting me to have ID would allow you to
make distinctions and divisions between people that I don't want
you to make". But if I'm talking about bad guys committing
genocide, this sounds reasonable, and if I'm talking about (l'havdil)
bad guys preventing teenagers from going to comedy shows, this supposedly
sounds ridiculous.
At night, I talked to Zack about how to make my arms get better. So now
I have an agenda.
The racist graffiti on Shotwell Street came back -- the black-spraypaint
person has returned and written over the "GOD FORGIVE U.S." with a new
anti-Arab message.
In addition, it seems that the same person defaced the house of a person
nearby who had constructed an outdoor peace shrine last month. (Possibly
the graffiti was there in the first place as a reaction to the shrine?)
A strange thing is that my first reaction was to think "A small
surveillance camera could catch this vandal!" (since there's now
apparently a running war of words playing itself out on the sidewalk
across the street from this neighborhood's elementary school, and
the original spraypainter seems almost certain to return to the scene of
the crime).
I wonder if this has any connection to the message written on the mailbox
at 24th and South Van Ness, which I also viewed as hate speech
(although its author could no doubt say something like "I don't hate
anyone, I just want the laws enforced"). I don't think the mailbox
defacement was spraypainted; it looks like it could have been done with
a Sharpie.
Low-tech, those folks, but see how much fear and anger they've
produced. Does that remind you of anyone else you know?
The Mission District is famous for its gorgeous murals; I hope it doesn't
become famous for its hate graffiti.
The Duke conference on the public
domain included among
its papers a
paper by James Boyle, accomplished pro-public domain copyright scholar, who
quoted
the famous poem beginning
The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
(Boyle quoted a slightly different version of this poem; the version above
is as I remember it.)
When I read this in Boyle's paper, I found it very catchy. He included
other stanzas I'd never heard:
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Boyle is drawing a parallel between the Enclosure Movement and the recent
legislative effors of copyright maximalists; his paper is called "The
Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain".
I learned a general way to deal with
[ 1] [ 2] [ 4] [ 3]
and exactly the same technique works for
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4]
[ 5] [ 6] [ 8] [ 7]
You can do it two different ways (and other minor variations are
possible) depending on whether you start with the empty square
along the right edge or one position left of there. Either way is
just as easy. With the empty square on the right, e.g. on a board like
[ 1] [ 2] [ 4] [ 3]
[any] [any] [any] [ ]
[any] [any] [any] [any]
[any] [any] [any] [any]
the moves are
D R U L U R D D L U R U L D D R U
although, again, other choices are possible.
I think I'm now "good at the 15 puzzle" (when I bought it, I said that I
was no good at those). Maybe I should take up the Rubik's Cube next; I
hear it's a whole other sort of challenge (was there an advertising slogan
which said it was a "whole new dimension"?).
The summer ends and we wonder who we are...
(Dar Williams)
Yesterday I was wondering who I was, so I thought about my high school's
old tradition, the "Who Am I?" paper. It seems that writing "Who Am I?"
papers is
not
confined to my high school, and, in fact, according to a letter advising
me about my high school reunion coming up, it's no longer even traditional
at NMH.
My last Who Am I? paper (in the Unix world it would probably be called a
whoami paper) was written in my 9th grade humanities class, which is to say
just short of eight (!) years ago. I still have it somewhere; it's a
fascinating document, for what it says and what it leaves out. (And I knew
when I was writing it that I was leaving a lot out.) I also had a paper
about myself called "Me: Then, Now, and Later" from 6th grade. So the idea
is that you can read these and say "Wow! I thought I was like that?"
or "Wow! That's so true!" or some of both. And you get a sense of
the course of history, or evolving personality, or something.
One criticism of the exercise of writing a paper like that (or of
autobiographical impulses) is that when you write about your life history,
you get a picture of who you were, not of who you are.
So my Who Am I? paper in 9th grade explained fairly well how I thought about
things, and what I cared about, as of the start of high school, but it
didn't prepare me for that experience, or explain it to me.
My two long retrospectives on my recent years of "politics of love and music"
-- my collage and my epic poem -- might be subject to the same kind of
criticism, except that they claimed on their own terms to be historical and
not to make claims about the present or the future. Anyway, I am still to
some extent obsessed with documentation, even if nobody reads it.
One thing I thought of last night was to try to do a new autobiographical
work at this point, considering how much has happened since I last wrote
something like that. I imagined trying to set down all of the
memories which seem significant to me. This is a big deal and requires
either not using a computer or actually curing my repetitive strain injuries
along the way (otherwise all that typing could be a problem).
Anyway, I started making notes about everything I could remember that seemed
important or representative or formative. It might not actually tell me who
I am, but it seems like it could be a good project anyway.
I went to a meeting with Biella about the
HealthHacker software and a
meeting with Lee to answer questions for the
SF IndyMedia folks about
legal issues.
The Senate passed the USA PATRIOT Act.
Wow!
Speaking of retrospectives --
Thanks to Brewster Kahle, I can now read the long-lost full text of the
original Californians for Academic Freedom web site. Maybe I should
put it back on-line.
I remember that I used to see his machines in my logs (alexa.com), and I
thought nothing of it at the time, but now the results of that are very
interesting. (At the time, I don't think he had announced any plans to
make the Internet Archive data available to the public on-line.)
I'm trying to read the copy of my web site on loyalty.org from January 2000.
Amazingly, I found a copy of my web from I was in high school, in 1997
(in English, Latin, and Esperanto). There seems to be a gap in 1999 and
2000, but otherwise, they have versions of my home page from 1997 up to
the present.
The Internet Archive is very controversial; one person I wrote to about the
launch objected that the project "is not respectful of people's privacy
and copyrights". (You can actually get your materials removed from public
searchability easily, but to a large extent it's an opt-out system rather
than an opt-in system -- you have to know that this archive exists, and you
have to contact them if you don't want to be part of it, unless you have or
had a robots exclusion file.)
I'm tempted to say that the Internet Archive is like the Google cache on
steroids. (The Google cache itself is not uncontroversial -- also on
account of privacy and copyrights.)
"Cipro Shortage:
An Invented Scarcity" is an article by a libertarian skeptical of patents.
Drug makers are not
permitted to respond to the street signs of the free market, to
profits. The law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from competing for
Cipro market share, supplying the demand, and, in the process of
creating competition, dealing a blow to the Bayer monopoly price tag.
Because of specific patents Bayer has obtained, other companies cannot
bring supply and demand into equilibrium, thus satisfying buyers.
Whether one thinks that granting to an inventor a near 20-year
monopoly on the manufacture, use, or sale of a product is the right
thing to do, is quite apart from acceding that a patent places a
barrier on entry into the market.
A comment from Scott Craver on the DMCA, in
a recent
Supplemental Declaration in the Felten case:
We do not write and use programs such as tinywarp.c
because we view breaking a technology as an
end unto itself. To the contrary, breaking a
technology is nothing more than a crucial step either in
attempting to improve the technology or in attempting
to prove that the technology cannot be made to
do what it is supposed to do. Both, of course, are
legitimate research objectives, and in either case,
writing and using tools to circumvent access or copy
control technologies is essential to our work. If we
can no longer use the necessary instruments
of science, then our field of scientific work will
be paralyzed.
(Supplemental Declaration of Scott Craver, para. 22)
I kept having the
"I
Thought We Knew That" techno song running around in my head -- "Whenever
there's a technology, whenever there's a way",
"I thought we knew that!", "Whenever there's a technology, whenever there's
a way", "I thought we knew that!". ("The American public believes they are protecting
themselves and Hollywood against a bunch of hippies and communists.")
Richard Hayes, in
Ireland, produced
a
technical report which gives a complete algorithm for solving the 15
puzzle, and in fact for solving the general "n squared minus 1" puzzle. It's
a recursive algorithm, which is a good idea which I hadn't thought of. So
you can solve the "3" puzzle pretty easily, and then you learn to solve the
"8" puzzle, and then the "15" puzzle, and the "24" puzzle -- and in each
case you solve the puzzle by doing certain things which reduce each puzzle
to the next smaller version.
Hayes provides a Java
applet which can solve any puzzle up to and including
the 195 puzzle, but you have to have a web browser which supports Java.
There isn't any source code given; maybe I should try to run the applet
through jad,
for which there also isn't any source code given.
I don't know anybody in this country who's afraid of their law enforcement
people at this time.
(Sen. Orrin Hatch)
My second dinner at Tu Lan in two days, and the second one which involved
a discussion of decentralized communications infrastructure. Hmmmm.
I had a number of dreams which I forgot, and one in which I had a somewhat
more severe arm injury than I actually do. It's nice to wake up and have
your arm injury be less bad than the one in your dream.
Only take heed, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget
the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from
your heart all the days of your life; make them known to your
children and your children's children.
(Deuteronomy 4:9 (RSV))
The epigraph on
Leonard's
Monty Hall simulator
is a piece of genius.
It's always fun to read declarations by cryptographers.
Check out the declarations
of Felten, Liu, Craver, Spafford, Anderson, and Wagner, which support Felten's
opposition to the motion to dismiss the case.
These pictures from my birthday party last month were taken by Amy
and are great. They show many of my friends, and most of my books. :-)
(You can click on a thumbnail image to see it displayed larger.)
Thanks to Amy for taking these and Andrew for letting me know about them.
Zack and I went looking for the Garfield Pool and tracked it down on
Treat Street ("it can't have gone far!"). It's $3 per swim, with
multi-visit tickets available. So I may start swimming again.
I worked on my documentation file, a sort of table of contents for my
possible Who Am I? project, and I wrote part of an explanation
called "What is vitanuova?", for unwary people who happen to find
this site accidentally or something.
I had lunch with Zack, and we went by Radio Shack and he got some rare
earth magnets. I also fixed a couple of vim problems for him (not by
using rare earth magnets).
I went over to Berkeley and had dinner with Michelle at Anzu; there I ran
into Brian, who told me that he
had just released version 1.0 of
vmips, his free software
program of about 3 years. It's a simulator for MIPS, a RISC CPU which
is very popular for teaching purposes (for example, it's used in UC
Berkeley's CS 61C course). At one point, I knew how to program in MIPS
assembly and could write things like printf for class assignments.
Currently, the traditional MIPS simulator is
spim, and every
current or former Berkeley CS student is probably intimately familiar
with that package. Perhaps some day vmips will supplant spim.
Congratulations, Brian, on your release.
After dinner, Michelle practiced her guitar, and she and I sang some
songs together.
Today was "fall back" day (the return to standard time) and I think it
was also the birthday of somebody I know, so happy birthday, if so.
I started taking MSM again.
How exciting!
This
web site in China is selling the LNX-BBC (or maybe an earlier
Linuxcare version?) commercially for what I'm told is the equivalent
of $2.18. I don't imagine that they ship internationally. :-)
It's really very wonderful to learn that this thing is being sold in
another country. Maybe I'll write to them and make sure they have the
most recent version.
I had my best-ever NetHack game; I died in the Castle within a few steps
of the Wand of Wishing (having visited the Valley of the Dead), by choking
on a red dragon corpse. (I killed all four dragons and was busy eating
them.) The silly part, in this case: (1) I didn't get a warning that I
was in danger of choking, and (2) I was carrying -- but not wearing --
an identified amulet of magical breathing, which would have let me eat
all four dragon corpses with no risk at all.
I put up my "What is vitanuova?"
document. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Leonard mentions that a certain argumentative tactic has been called
logical
rudeness. The author of that essay is Peter Suber, whose work
was praised by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas,
and who is the inventor of Nomic.
Sumana, another one is The Glass Bead Game (also known as
Magister Ludi). That and Siddhartha are
the only two I've read.
I got a forwarded message which included some of the famous
co-incidences surrounding the number 11 -- and attached to it
was a criticism by one David Pawson.
I did a web search, and I wonder if this is David Pawson the
evangelist, David Pawson the AOL user, David Pawson the XML
user, David Pawson the New Zealand architect, or none of the
above.
Pawson notes that there are 11 letters in his own name, and goes
on from there, finding elevens in ridiculous places.
Gosh, everybody's forgotten about the wonderful The Eleventh
Hour, by Graeme Base, definitely the source for my thoughts
about eleven up until I went to HCSSiM and saw it displaced by
seventeen as the most magic number. And then the Armistice --
"the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month".
They have just over eleven days until then to make the arms stand
still again; will they do it?
We had another yoga class here, with a different teacher. It was
very different.
At the end, she did a guided visualization thing, but instead of
following her imagery, I started to think intently about people and
ideas (along the lines of "thinkin' about women and glasses of beer",
possibly, except without the "glasses of beer" part), so you might say
that I missed out on the whole point and benefit of the guided
visualization, but it was very intense anyway.
Regular user wastes half an hour trying to get something to print
out right: "goddamnit! piece-a-shit computer!"
_Jakob Nielsen_ wastes half an hour trying to get something to
print out right: "Poor software quality prevents users from forming
a robust conceptual model of their systems, resulting in a loss of
control over their own destiny."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20011028.html
That's why they pay him the big bucks.
I always get Jakob Nielsen mixed up with Joel Spolsky, though.
Observant Jews allowing their interpretations of religious law to be prescribed
by angels? Hmmm, maybe they haven't read the story of Rabbi Eliezer and
the Oven of Achnai. (It's told in Bava Metzia 59b, but I don't know where
you can link to a Talmud in English on-line, so it might be easier to use
the Google searches for
oven of Achnai,
oven of Akhnai,
tanur Achnai,
or
tanur Akhnai.
You'll get a lot of different versions that way, for sure.)
Herbert Marcuse was an anti-liberal leftist scholar and social critic.
He wrote a lot of social theory and was a big influence on some political
movements of the sixties and seventies. His most famous
book is One-Dimensional Man (which I have, if anybody wants
to borrow it). Today conservatives,
libertarians, and FIRE tend to
strongly dislike Marcuse because of the perceived effects of his famous
essay "Repressive Tolerance" (which argued that the concepts of freedom of
speech and academic freedom had, in practice, become tools of oppression,
and argued that the left should have more free speech than the right,
or that certain enumerated views shouldn't be allowed to be advocated).
So today, when campus groups destroy newspapers that contain "reactionary"
views, some people say "Oh, you see, they're just doing what Marcuse told
them to do". (See generally "Marcuse's Revenge", chapter 4 in The
Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses,
by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate.)
The Shotwell Street war of words continues: the peace shrine has been
re-established (the anti-Arab text spraypainted there has been painted
over, at least partially), the black text on the sidewalk nearby has
been partly obliterated, and people came out and wrote new pro-peace
messages with chalk.
Maybe I should just call the sides here "black" and "white", because one
side always uses black spraypaint, and one side always
uses white spraypaint.
An interesting thing is that some people see "peace" and "tolerance" as
the same thing, whereas other people think they are completely different
axes. For example, the Congress, which passed a pretty much unlimited
resolution in sup