The Bunner injunction was reversed by the Sixth Appellate District!
Here is the decision; I was there in the court for oral
argument on this appeal, and I'm very excited to see it come out this
way. I plan to have a party to celebrate this next weekend.
Meanwhile, we can hope that the Second Circuit reasons along the same lines
in Universal v. Reimerdes -- if it does, we could finally
see the dissolution of all the injunctions against the publication of
DeCSS (and perhaps IBM will finally start shipping a proper Linux DVD
player).
The NewsBytes
article on the decision quoted Jeffrey Kessler to the effect that
the ruling was a "disaster for the U.S. economy" and "nationally
significant across industries". Personally, I think it just stands
for the proposition that trade secret protection can be lost once
something is no longer secret.
Maybe this decision will be discussed at CPTWG. It would be interesting
to be the only person in the room to support it.
I originally wrote a long commentary about the industries which are suing
Andrew Bunner, but I'm not going to post that. This is a great night.
Let's be optimistic tonight and invite everybody to share in the good
news.
I got a haircut today. My beard is too short.
I'm going to have
a
party on Saturday (not tomorrow) to celebrate the
recent
decision in the Bunner case.
I went to a neat meeting today in the South Bay.
I bought the Mike Oldfield CD called The Songs of Distant
Earth, apparently named after a book by Arthur C. Clarke.
It's great! I heard it in high school and never again since
then.
My friend Micah came out from New York to celebrate his mother's birthday.
We went to a place called Citizen Cake around the Civic Center/Hayes Valley
area; it was very fancy.
It seems that Zack is ordering some neat stuff from Edmund
Scientific, one of my all-time favorite catalogs.
I'm trying to find a bathing suit so I can go swimming over at the
Garfield Pool. The clothing stores I looked at didn't seem to have
any; maybe I need to go to a sporting goods store.
I got a forwarded patriotic message criticizing schools and governments
which removed patriotic and religious slogans and symbols from public
places for "sensitivity" or "diversity" reasons. I wrote back with a long
reply, mainly addressing two issues: first, a seemingly random comment about
Americans speaking English, and English being "the language" of the U.S.;
second, the provenance and implications of the phrase "In God We Trust".
Here's the bit about "In God We Trust".
> "In God We Trust" is our national motto.
I'm given to understand that this isn't quite correct -- I'm told that
there is no legislative enactment providing this (although the current
political climate might allow something like that to happen).
Apparently the source of this impression is the line in The
Star-Spangled Banner:
"Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just: /
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'"
However, that just means that Francis Scott Key thought of "In God is
our trust" as a national motto, or the equivalent of one. It doesn't
mean that it was.
(I haven't verified this, and I might be mistaken.)
> ?This is not some
> off-the-wall, Christian, Right Wing, political slogan - it is our national
> motto. It is engraved in stone in the House of Representatives in our Capitol
> and it is printed on our
> currency. ?We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on
> Christian principles, founded this nation; and this
> is clearly documented throughout our history. If it is
> appropriate for our motto to be inscribed in the halls of our highest level
> of Government, then it is certainly appropriate
> to display it on the walls of our schools.
>
> God is in our pledge, our National Anthem, nearly every
> patriotic song, and in our founding documents. We honor His
> birth, death, and resurrection as holidays, and we turn to Him
> in prayer in times of crisis. ?If God offends you, then I suggest you
> consider another part of the world as your new home,
> because God is part of our culture and we are proud to have
> Him.
A prohibition on government "establishment of religion" is also a part
of the U.S. "founding documents"; in fact, that prohibition appears
even before the guarantee of freedom of speech (by six words).
There are certainly different views on what "establishment" means;
some people continue to think of it as merely a disestablishmentarian
rule reacting to the Established Church in England, so that no
particular church could be prescribed by law as the official church of
the U.S.
The court record on interpreting this is mixed -- I am disappointed
that the American Atheists and Freedom From Religion Foundation lawsuits
to get "In God We Trust" off of U.S. currency were unsuccessful. There
is a strange paradox around this phrase. On the one hand, courts which
have considered "In God We Trust" have argued that it was
non-religious and not an example of government endorsement of
religion. On the other hand, proponents of having the government
display this slogan routinely maintain that it would express religious
values, and point to the presence of the phrase in other places as
evidence that it's legal and legitimate to do so.
This seems to be a general trend. When someone challenges a
particular state action under the Establishment Clause, a court will
often say "No, that might once have been religious, but now it's
purely secular and cultural!". Subsequently, an activist will point
to the same exact practice and say "You see, it's perfectly legitimate
for the government to promote religion -- look at how it happens all
the time!".
On the other hand, the general trend in interpretation of the
Establishment Clause is encouraging. Lots of states used to have
religious test oaths for public officers and employees. In some
cases, these were Christian religious tests, accompanied with state
laws providing that only believing Christians could hold office.
(Yes, these practiced survived well into the 20th century.) In other
cases, there were anti-atheist laws, designed to prevent atheists (and
Buddhists and most everyone outside the Judeo-Christian orbit) from
holding office or giving testimony in courts. These tests are going,
going, gone -- it helps that the Constitution requires that "No
religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for any
office or public trust under the United States".
Mentioning God in the Pledge of Allegiance is a new thing. The
original version, by Francis Bellamy, the author of Looking
Backward, went
"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it
stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all."
God wasn't mentioned for 62 years, from 1892 to 1954, when the Knights
of Columbus (!) got "under God" added to the text during the Cold War.
Bellamy is lucky he never lived to see that; as a socialist (Looking
Backward is a utopian vision of the establishment of a socialist
society in the U.S.), he probably wouldn't have fared well during the
McCarthy era.
Nowhere in the first amendment -- Establishment Clause, Free Exercise
Clause, and right on out -- is there a right not to be offended. If
it were only about being offended, I'd be right there saying "Don't
make a Constitutional case out of it" (although it's strange to me
that the author of the essay seems so eager to write off offended
parties in various ways). But the separation of church and state is
all about political power.
It's easy to forget that when you don't see the intrigues and
political decisions that injected religion into government in the
first place. It's easy to forget that when some of those battles are
in the past, so that someone can claim that religion was "always" a
part of government, or that we "always" had "In God We Trust" on
currency. (It's not so; the original inscription was only "E pluribus
unum" -- "From many, one". "In God We Trust" was added to U.S.
currency late in the Civil War by an act of Congress as a result of a
protracted political campaign by the National Reform Association, a
Christian group, and it wasn't added to all U.S. currency until 1955.
The National Reform Association was keen on creating evidence that
the U.S. was a "Christian nation" -- perhaps especially so because it
wasn't! The evidence thus manufactured comes in handy today for
"Christian nation" enthusiasts in political debates, who merely have
to say "Look at our currency!" in order to make what is certainly a
very powerful argument about the influence of organized Christianity
in the U.S.)
"We adopted this motto" not because of U.S. history in the abstract,
but because the National Reform Association wanted to show off its
political power in a way which would marginalize non-Christians.
Most of its uses date to the Cold War or other wars, and it certainly
has no connection with the founders of the U.S. (who were keen on "E
pluribus unum").
It's not about sensitivity or political correctness, it's about the
power to define -- in the government's "potent, omnipresent" voice --
who is going to be considered a good American, and what beliefs are
going to be depicted as good American beliefs.
(I was wrong about "In God We Trust" not being the U.S. national
motto -- it is, ever since 1956.)
I'm serious about that power to define who is going to be considered
a good American. When George Bush Sr. was campaigning for
president -- before he was actually president -- Robert Sherman
asked Bush about the atheist community and received a lukewarm
response. So Sherman inquired about the "citizenship and patriotism"
of atheists, and Bush famously answered: "No, I don't know that
atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be
considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
Clearly, Bush wasn't suggesting that atheists don't have civil
rights, because he was answering a question about "citizenship
and patriotism", in which context "citizenship" means something
closer to the Boy Scout or Civics version. He was merely saying
that atheism is unpatriotic.
Well, July 4, 1776, as everybody learned in school, was a Thursday.
And, as all of us born on a Thursday must have heard, "Thursday's
child has far to go".
Some of us went to visit Biella and she cooked
her
sancocho for us. Wow, that was some yummy soup!
I forgot to mention some things I read in the past few days: The
Secret Sharer and The Dispossessed. The latter is,
as the subtitle suggests, "an ambiguous utopia". It's also chock-full
of allegory.
There are
some things that annoy Phil Agre. A few of them have annoyed me, too.
I knew somebody was born on Guy Fawkes Day. Happy
birthday, Stephane.
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics,
the best math site on the Internet, is back on-line.
Shame on CRC Press, publisher of
excellent technical materials, for suing them and for imposing the terms
of their settlement.
See also: "Welcome
Back to MathWorld",
"Eric's Commentary on the Shutdown of MathWorld",
and
Eric's
affidavit in that case (an extremely long discussion of the potential
perils of book deals).
I'm busy at ALS all this week, but I'll try to post a long conference
report here at the end of the week. My diary may be a little quiet until
the weekend.
[...] Groups like the ACLU and People for the American Way
have used a mythical 'separation of church and state' argument to
drive the knowledge of God out of our classrooms.
As far as I'm concerned, their misdirected efforts -- and the failure of
God-fearing persons to challenge them -- are a major reason our
schools, and our society, are in the fix they are.
[...] Our own Congress voted in 1956 to make "In God We Trust" our national
motto. It's a patriotic issue, not a religious issue.
(Don Wildmon, AFA)
The worst part: Wildmon says "libertine" groups have been "mysteriously
silent" on church/state issues since September 11. Hmmm, could it be that
the civil liberties community was too preoccupied with tracking surveillance
legislation?
Here's what happened at ALS:
I showed up early and did a conference call for one of EFF's legal cases.
After that, I found our booth on the show floor. My first impression was
that the show was very tiny compared to LWCE; there seemed to be only
about two dozen exhibitors.
I ran into Bill Pollock and his colleague from
No Starch Press as they were
setting up their booth; I gave them some BBCs and they gave me some
Red Hat manuals.
Wednesday was a set-up day, so I saw the familiar scene of forklifts,
masking tape, packing crates, carpet rolls, and cabling. I'm getting
entirely too accustomed to the trade show set-up experience. It's
always funny to see the contrast between a show floor's appearance
one day and its final form the next morning.
Marc turned up with all of our booth stuff in his car -- panels,
bumper stickets, t-shirts, hats, press releases, and so on.
We unpacked it and got the booth into shape; I'd also brought some
BBCs, which I set out on the table.
I dropped by the LANL booth and
got a demonstration of LinuxBIOS
and netbooting a cluster (which used BProc -- very, very impressive).
Those folks are real cluster wizards, and very friendly.
Ronald Minnich gave
me the story on everything that was going on; I was also interested
to learn that Erik Hendriks (the author of Two-Kernel Monte, whom I'd
lost track of for two years) is working at Los Alamos in their
cluster group.
I finally got to tell Erik about my idea of making a procmail recipe
which allows you to boot kernels by e-mail -- sending them as attachments
with a certain subject line. He was amused.
(Later on, I wrote to Michelle about the fact that LANL is a weapons
lab, and their funding comes from a nuclear weapons engineering agenda.)
Nearby the LANL booth (well, everything was nearby everything
else) I found the FSF booth, containing
Steve Bibayoff and Bradley
Kuhn. (It turns out that FSF is now making their classic GNU shirts
in two new colors; I used to have one shirt in each color in which
they were issued -- beige, black, maroon, green -- but now I've fallen behind.
I bought the new blue version but held off on the gray until a future
show.) I also ran into Scott McNeil -- who arrived to set up the
Free Standards Group booth,
right next to EFF. And I saw Chris DiBona and Don Marti and was reminded
of the good times in 1999 over at the CoffeeNet.
Steve and Bradley and I got a quick dinner together and wandered up to the
BOF rooms where Lee and I did the evening EFF BOF session on the effects
of antiterrorism legislation on civil liberties. Lee gave a thorough
explanation of the legal rules surrounding communications surveillance
in the U.S. and how they had been altered by the USA PATRIOT Act. I
wrote things on transparencies and tried to fill in details.
I also did the "CIPA, COPA, COPPA, CPPA" contest -- "Each of these
pieces of legislation pertains to children and the Internet. What is
each act's full name, and what does each one do?"
After this, I had dinner again with a group at a Chinese restaurant.
At one point, some of the folks at our table got into an extended
discussion of PC hardware. A man at the next table asked whether he
could ask us a computer question. We said he could, but then he asked
something about the Windows "Add/Remove Programs" feature, and we had
to interrupt him and let him know that we were all Linux users (except
for Bradley, who was a GNU/Linux user).
The show floor opened, and people came by all day; Marc and I were
working in the booth, and some volunteers, too. Biella did a number
of interviews with developers who were in town; lots of people stopped
by our booth and asked questions about our cases.
I met some people from LinuxTag
who knew Klaus Knopper and who gave
me two CDs -- an "OpenMusic" audio CD and a LinuxTag conference CD
based on the Knoppix distribution (which is astonishingly good, among
the best software products I have ever seen).
I caught part of the conference presentation on lobbying, and then went
to the Debian BOF session, in which people had a protracted argument.
(I ducked out briefly to see the "Linux 10th Birthday Party" -- not to
be confused with Linux10 -- which
featured Linus Torvalds and was hosted by Maddog. I didn't actually
stay around for the party, which was going on at the same time as the
Debian BOF, but I did try both kinds of birthday cake.)
After that, we walked out to 19th street and had a big group dinner at
a very nice Indian restaurant there. I sat opposite Bradley Kuhn, a
fellow left-handed vegetarian, and we ordered together (to get a $20
two-person dinner special). Don tried to figure out under what conditions
a certain set of people, some of whom are vegetarian and some of whom
are left-handed, can arrange themselves at a table so that no right-handed
person sits to the left of a left-handed person, and no vegetarian sits
opposite a non-vegetarian.
David Thompson from UW
Madison made a kind offer to host the LNX-BBC download site on
mirror.cs.wisc.edu, which I think we will take.
I watched Drew playing NetHack during a slow moment in the FSG booth,
and he and I traded NetHack tips. He might be the most knowledgeable
NetHack player I know; unlike me, he regularly consults spoilers and
source code.
Duncan and Drew and I went out for lunch to a street fair/farmers'
market which was in progress right outside the convention center. There
was some nice stuff on sale; I got a black and white cookie and some
Indian food (samosas, naan, and an interesting chutney).
Drew had organized a PGP BOF session which was billed as a keysigning.
Manoj of Manoj's
Key-Signing Protocol fame was to be there -- and so, the rumor
went, was Phil Zimmermann.
I helped Drew print out the key fingerprint sheet in the conference
office, and as we were working on stapling them together, a man walked
up, looking for all the world like the pictures of Phil Zimmermann you
see in the magazines.
Man: Hi, can you tell me where the BOF sessions will be?
Seth: Up that escalator, turn right, past the elevators, up the stairs,
around the corner, through the door, and then find the room you're
looking for. [Yes, that is actually how you get to the hotel's
meeting rooms from the convention center lobby.]
Man: Do you know which room the PGP BOF is in?
Seth: I think the Oakland room -- that's his BOF [points at Drew].
Drew: That's me. It starts at seven.
Man: What's going on until then? Are there other BOF sessions?
Drew: There's the historian --
Seth: Yeah, Peter Salus, who wrote A Quarter Century of UNIX,
is speaking over in that ballroom [points down hallway] about the ten years,
the ten year history of Linux, since 1991. That should be interesting.
We just have to get ready for the keysigning.
[Man walks toward ballroom; we continue stapling. After a minute or two,
he comes back up to the table.]
Man: What's the PGP BOF about? Is it just a keysigning?
Drew: Actually, we're going to have a keysigning, but I thought I'd start
out at the beginning with a brief introduction, about fifteen minutes,
explaining the concepts of keysigning, the keysigning protocol, what public key
cryptography is all about, for the benefit of people who haven't been to
one of these before.
Man: Is there time for any general discussion of PGP?
Drew: Well, I thought we could take about 30 to 40 minutes before the
keysigning for social stuff, for issues about the uses of PGP. So we
might have the social and general part first, and then move into a
keysigning. We're hoping that Phil Zimmermann will come.
Man: [Raises hand.] That's me.
Phil and Drew proceeded to have a very interesting conversation about PGP,
which drew a small crowd -- everyone nearby who'd heard Phil identify himself
as Phil Zimmermann -- and when it was about time for the BOF, we wandered
upstairs and Phil walked off briefly to get some dinner.
The BOF session was packed, partly because people have such a fierce
competition to improve their
keyanalyze rankings, and
partly because they heard Phil would be there. He gave a long
disquisition on the recent history of PGP (and his experiences at NAI),
with his speculations on the future of the software now that NAI is
getting rid of it. It was very colorful and very interesting and
probably all new to the people there -- technical experts and hard-core
cryptography enthusiasts though they were -- because they were all in
the free software orbit, GNU users,
and hadn't been following the adventures of the original commercial
code base.
Phil took a number of questions and asked the audience not to publish
some of his answers -- so I won't. As I was about to ask Phil opinion
of Brad
Templeton's e-mail encryption idea, Phil mentioned the very
problem Brad identifies in his essay: e-mail encryption is too hard
for most people to use, or at least more trouble than they think
it's worth. (It might be better to say that most computer users could
learn, and could do it, but they don't make a priority of it, because
it doesn't seem beneficial enough to them.)
The biggest problem, Brad and Phil observe, is that key infrastructure
is such a pain; most prospective users don't understand it at all, and
in any case aren't willing to go through the steps involving fingerprints
and fingerprint verification and looking at trust paths and so forth.
They probably would be willing to do a one-time step to generate a key,
but then they would expect other people to be able to get and use that
key automatically, transparently, without any additional steps. And
we all know that this is impossible, but Brad insists that it's
got to happen if the general public is going to use cryptography.
(He doesn't even endorse the idea that a user would be willing to
explicitly generate a keypair in the first place.) Now, Phil and
Brad suggest that perhaps this problem could be addressed by
streamlining and automating key exchanges...
Manoj and Phil got into a notable argument at this point in Phil's
talk. Manoj is well known for thinking that most users of cryptography
don't do enough thinking about security precautions. (He
suggestions physical isolation for machines which store private keys --
not connecting them to a network -- as well as the use of more
stringent key-signing protocols, and more attention to the details
of key validity and trust paths.)
So here Phil started to talk about threat models and how uncommon
were MITM attacks and how useful PGP might be to the general public
even without the whole web of trust. And Manoj was just
shocked; you could see it. He asked, in a very polite and
reasonable way, why it was necessary to undermine the security
that PGP was capable of attaining. He didn't see the benefit.
Phil and Manoj went back and forth on this for a bit and clarified
that they were talking about distinct ways of using the technology;
there was a certain trade-off between security and convenience
and Manoj did not want to give up any security. Phil maintained
that some users would want to give up some security so that they
could use cryptography at all -- otherwise they wouldn't get any of
its benefits. He's always been very keen on spreading "encryption's
bounty" (as the Ninth Circuit described it in the Bernstein
case) as far and wide as possible.
Phil's specific proposed solution is different from Brad's -- Phil is
talking about a "robot CA" which performs an automated protocol to
verify that a certain private key is owned by someone who also has
control over (can send and receive mail using) a certain e-mail
address. It doesn't verify identities, just the mapping between
e-mail addresses and keys. (So, for example, the robot CA could
verify that this key 0167CA38 with a certain fingerprint does
belong to the person who reads mail at schoen@loyalty.org --
but not that the person who reads mail at that address actually
is Seth Schoen. The former assurance is good enough for
many purposes, e.g. when you only know somebody through
e-mail, or when you have an out-of-band way to verify somebody's
e-mail address.)
After this discussion, Phil went home, and we did a keysigning.
Manoj didn't sign my key (because I don't have government
issued photo ID) and everyone else did (because I showed them
my bank cards and stuff, and many of them knew me from other
contexts). After the keysigning, many of us went to dinner at
the Thai restaurant across the street from the convention center.
It's really delicious.
One great thing was that two high school students were there. I
already knew both of them from before, so it's not that the pool of
high school students who are into free software is necessarily
expanding rapidly. But I just thought that going to something like
ALS was exactly the kind of thing I would have loved to do in
high school.
As it turned out, though, I also loved the things I did do in high
school.
I gave away our copy of the Bunner appellate decision to a law student
who stopped by. She promised to let her classmates know about summer
internships with EFF.
It started to rain on Saturday, and the exhibition hours were shortened
slightly because it was the last day of the conference. Duncan gave
me a ride over and back, and ended up transporting EFF's booth, too.
A much larger number of local Linux hackers and LUG members turned up
at the show on Saturday, and I saw at least a dozen people I knew from
the Bay Area. It was probably a matter of people having to work and
then being free for the weekend.
I had a party on Saturday to celebrate the Bunner decision. It went
well; attendees included some of the people behind
NTK,
FSF,
and nmap.
I had a lot of help from Dmitriy "I'm Not Sklyarov" Ivanov (who actually
wore a "Not Sklyarov" name tag to the party). Zack and some of the earlier
guests did an amazing job of cleaning up my room a dozen times faster
than I could have, by throwing lose items into boxes to clear floor and
table space. It looks great! My room hasn't been this
orderly since I first moved in here.
Biella came by and we worked on her laptop (network and mutt
configuration) and my bike. I also played a lot of
NetHack on Drew's server, and had some fantastic games, including
the first time I've ever made it all the way through the Sokoban
levels. (A pet water troll is cool -- my water troll actually
got killed by a shopkeeper and then rose from the dead still
tame!)
With some help from Katy (more than a year ago), Zack, and Biella, I
managed today to change the tube in my bike tire and get the bike
working again. (The brakes still need some calibration.) I rode my
bike down to Cesar Chavez, and I was amazed at how much faster it is
than walking. It felt like practically no time at all.
I'd like to ride it to work, but that will have to wait until Tuesday
because of the rain.
Monday was the day many people get off in observance of Armistice Day
(now called Veterans' Day in the U.S.). I remembered that the "Great
War" ending on the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month" connoted a sense of urgency and relief -- the war had ended,
in some sense, at the last possible moment (before the world was
destroyed).
Nowadays the sense of a war seems very different.
The new EFF t-shirts are in. "On-line freedom doesn't just
happen."
Last week, Zack got a giant Fresnel lens in the mail. If it stops
being overcast out, we may use the lens to burn things. It's the largest
lens I can remember seeing anywhere.
Jim Tyre, Southern California lawyer extraordinaire, came by and we
had dinner. It's only the second time I've seen him in person, but
I've known him on-line since 1997, which is to say over four years.
I played a long and successful game of NetHack and used some of Drew's
advice re altars to get a large number of hit points and other nice
stuff like intrinsic protection. However, as I was trying to pick
up a cockatrice corpse in order to sacrifice it, I saw the dreaded
"Touching the cockatrice corpse is a fatal mistake" message. Oops.
Hadn't I been wearing gloves?
Oh, yeah. That incubus I ran into removed the gloves, and I completely
forgot to put them back on.
Back in real life, I discovered a bathing suit in my closet. ("Suddenly,
you notice a bathing suit.")
Jim was in the EFF office today, hanging out and working on some of our
cases.
In the morning, I went with Fred to a meeting of the
Liberty Alliance (which
is not a civil liberties group but rather an identification service).
The meeting was at Sun Microsystems, and various representatives of
privacy and consumer groups talked about concerns they had around
consumer privacy and on-line identification. The folks from
Consumers Union were pretty cool.
I rode my bike to work, and Ren helped me tune up the brakes a little.
It's easier to ride now, but the gear changing mechanism is still messed
up and needs some kind of adjustment I can't quite figure out.
I moved my stereo back into my own room. It's fun to be able to listen
to music through speakers; I'll try to do more of that now.
Here's
a
message I wrote today about the robot CA idea.
Kevin Barrett sent me a very nice birthday care package containing some
vegan chocolate bars of a brand called
Tropical
Source. They're amazingly good -- not the best chocolate I've
ever had, but very respectable, and you certainly wouldn't know they
were vegan.
He also included a Howard Zinn CD, an impressive multi-color pen which
even includes a PDA stylus and a mechanical pencil, and a copy of
A Quarter Century of Unix. (Too bad I didn't have that
last week -- I could have gotten it autographed at ALS.) Thanks, Kevin!
I read a poem called "Fuit Ilium" which I wrote early in 1998; that poem
was amazingly prescient, and I wrote a new poem tonight called "Of
Non-Existing Country" which continues its thought.
In 1998 (and every couple of months thereafter until the beginning of
2000) I wrote a bunch of poems which explained myself to myself pretty
well. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to forget all about them (partly
because most of them were on a hard drive that I couldn't read all that
time).
I moved my diary from homer to zork because homer went down. I
have a long entry in the works, but I've been awfully busy and
haven't quite finished it yet. I'll try to post it before I
head off to Southern California.
"Holy Will Consulting: Kantian Services for the Enterprise".
When I first thought of this, holywill.com wasn't registered;
recently, it's been taken by a (religious?) group in Korea.
I had a nice time walking around with Zack after work one day.
My arms started hurting again, and I had some two
chiropractic appointments which seemed to help.
I finally made it to
Moonbase University
for the genetic engineering talk, which featured Eduardo Blumwald,
who created a
tomato
which can grow in extremely salty water (and pulls salt out of
the soil and stores it harmlessly in the plant's leaves!).
Professor Blumwald showed the results of his impressive research,
and there was some discussion over control of biotechnology
(e.g. through patents), its safety, whether it's necessary
because of population growth, and whether rich people get to
eat natural foods where poor people have to eat artificial
foods.
Zack and I took his huge Fresnel len out in the sunlight and
burned a big hole in the side of an aluminum soda can, in
just a few seconds. The Sun is awfully powerful!
As I mentioned yesterday, homer went down, so I've moved this diary
to zork. Readers should not
notice much different (except that the search doesn't work). Thanks
to Trey for hosting things for a long time, and to Nick for setting
me up over on zork.
I went with Gwen, Ernie, and Ren on Friday to see the movie
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone on its opening night.
It made me feel motion-sick -- all that flying around!
I heard it was called the Philosopher's Stone in the U.K. -- perhaps there
people still remember just how fearsome philosophers could be. :-)
Just before the movie started,
Ernie was reading Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard
Rorty; I borrowed it for a few minutes, and that convinced me that
I'd have to read it. I bought a copy at Cody's on Sunday afternoon, and
I'd finished it by Monday night.
I usually think of myself of someone who's familiar with the contrasting
positions of various philosophers, and who wouldn't hesitate to allude to
them in speaking or writing. But sometimes Rorty almost seems to be
engaging in name-dropping. On the other hand, if you've actually read
all those people, I suppose mentioning them every now and then is only
natural. But it's funny to look through a paragraph and see all the
capital letters.
Rorty is probably the philosopher with whom I would most have disagreed
in the past. One of his many clever observations is that "Platonism"
isn't about agreeing with Plato's specific conclusions so much as having
an obsession or preoccupation with the questions Plato asked and the
distinctions he drew. (So, for example, you can easily be a Platonic
Realist without specifically endorsing the Theory of Forms or the
Divided Line or the theory that our perception of Forms arises from
the immortality and persistence of our souls. Platonism is mostly a
way of looking at the world which gives a pre-eminence and an
independence to mind and to mental conceptions -- Rorty alludes to
"logocentrism" and that seems like a fair description too. "In the
Beginning was the Word" is said to be Christian outreach to Platonists,
or, if you prefer, Platonist outreach to Christians.)
His view of moral evolution (that it's based on expanding human
consciousness rather than in conforming to a non-human rule or
standard of knowledge) reminded me in a certain way of the story
about Eris from the Principia Discordia:
[...] an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord!
Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a
heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain.
Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with
injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people,
mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
(Principia Discordia, "A Sermon on Ethics and Love")
Rorty is really smart and interesting, but I doubt I would have been
interested in reading him before last year. So now I can read
Searle where he argues with Rorty over realism. How strange to
encounter an actual antirealist philosopher!
It's not necessarily that Rorty is confident that there is no such
thing as the "real world"; it's more a matter of his applying
Laplace's skepticism about God to the world itself -- "Sire, I had
no need of that hypothesis".
I think Rorty gave me enough in that book to talk about for a few
years, if I happened to find people who were interested in
discussing it.
It's interesting to see someone far outside an entire conceptual
world, so that the bitter debaters within that world will
consider the outsider totally ridiculous, if they happen to
notice him at all. For example, Rorty, like Hume, considers
scientific, naturalistic realism on par with theistic religious
faith (for many of the same reasons Hume does). So where
proponents and opponents of spiritualism, mechanism, Christianity,
and so on will go around and around in a debate allowing only a
few alternatives (e.g. knowledge is revealed by a divinely-given
scripture, or knowledge is obtained from the physical world by
empirical observation), Rorty comes along and makes fun of all
sides, by insisting that there's no such thing as knowledge, or
a place knowledge is obtained from!
In fact, both religious fundamentalists and working scientists
are extremely keen to criticize "postmodernists" like Rorty,
perhaps because they've both been subjects of his criticism.
It's interesting that the reality of the world and knowledge
of it is agreed upon between such bitter adversaries: tertium
non datur, they say, shaking hands.
But for Rorty,
[s]cientific realism and religious fundamentalism are products
of the same urge. [...] Both scientific realism and religious
fundamentalism are private projects which have got out of hand.
They are attempts to make one's own private way of giving meaning
to one's own life -- a way which romanticizes one's relation
to something starkly and magnificently nonhuman, something
Ultimately True and Real -- obligatory for the general public.
("Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance")
Huh. How interesting, but unsurprising, to end up on the same
side with the traditionalist religious folks, defending the
existence of the real world, human knowledge, right and wrong...
it's really not such an unusual situation for me to find myself
in. Just ask my ex-girlfriend.
You get a hint of Rorty's orientation here at the very beginning
of his book, in the introduction:
If the Platonist is going to insist on that distinction,
he has got to have an epistemology which does not link up
in any interesting way with other disciplines. He will end
up with an account of knowledge which turns its back on the rest
of science. This amounts to making knowledge into something
supernatural, a kind of miracle.
(p. xxvii)
Gee, do you anyone who's ever conceived of people as having a
facility like that?
On Saturday, I went to a karaoke party to celebrate Biella's housemate's
birthday. Then I went to Berkeley to watch the meteors with Ben, who
took
a group of us up to Grizzly Peak, where the skies were wide open and
clear.
It was extremely cold. I brought a CD player and a copy of Handel's
Fireworks Music, which I listened to as the Leonids streaked
by overhead. They were impressive.
On Sunday night, I went to a party at
BookFinder, which has to move
to a new office space. That was a lot of fun. They ordered a little
too much food, though.
One partygoer tells me that there is a Latin conversation group in the
Bay Area. This sounds like a good thing to me.
The OpenMusic project of
LinuxTag put out an
OpenMusic
CD, and I was given a copy at ALS. I finally listened to it; it's
quite a mixed bag, with some interesting material.
The song titles of Void Main
are hilarious! I think I want to buy their CD Deadlock.
I'm going off to L.A. for a week for Thanksgiving and
CPTWG. I probably won't
post any diary entries until I get back.
I'm back (more on that later, as time and my arms permit).
I've almost finished writing "Believe (Richard Rorty Remix)".
Lots of court stuff these past few days; more on that later, too.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
