Today is May Day and International Worker's Day (was it originally called
International Workingmen's Day?).
The 2600 appeal was heard in New York. I don't know how it went.
Reports on yesterday's 2600 appeal are mixed. Unfortunately, it seems that
the judges weren't sympathetic to the first amendment arguments.
This is upsetting. I thought the great arguments from the amici
would make them pay close attention.
Andy Hertzfeld:
"Code, whether it is source or object,
is speech and should be
protected.
That's the truth, and there is no ambiguity. I abhor what the
MPAA is doing
to bend the facts to fit their commercial ends."
I wrote a little README and improved things a bit.
Here it is, if you
have a Unix system.
Linuxcare and Turbolinux aren't going to merge after all!
I was in Berkeley on Tuesday. I picked up a copy of
MIM
Notes,
the newsletter of the
Maoist
Internationalist Movement, which is a
revolutionary Communist party.
There are all sorts of interesting things in MIM Notes. The
biggest headline is about AIDS drugs and patents -- one of several examples
in the newsletter of issues where I agree with MIM. These just go to show
that political issues don't "belong" to a particular political ideology.
(I have to accept that someone might think that the DMCA is terrible but not
actually care about free software.)
The newsletter also includes (in the section about how "MIM differs from
other communist parties")
a claim that most workers in first world countries aren't the real proletariat
because they're "bought off" with an artificially high standard of living
based on exploitation of more genuinely oppressed workers in other countries.
I hadn't actually heard that one before; most Marxist writers I've run across
in the past did think that there was a real proletariat in the U.S. But MIM
says not really -- that the interests of U.S. workers aren't really
aligned with those of workers in other countries.
(Here I'm using "workers" in the left sense which doesn't just mean someone
who works. For example, I would probably not be considered a worker in this
sense, notwithstanding that I have a job. This is also the sense in which
most people mean the word in International Workers' Day -- the people in my
office aren't being celebrated by that day, nor are the financial industry
folks downtown who were the targets of protests.)
One of the most interesting:
The border also prevents the development of a real "free market"
in labor power. The internationalist section of the Amerikan bourgeoisie
complains about barriers to the free movement of capital, but you rarely
hear them complain about barriers to the free movement of labor (i.e.
people). This is because they -- and the privilege enjoyed by
oppressor nations generally -- depend on the depressed wages in Third
World countries. [...] In this context, the border is a tool to keep
the vast majority of workers in a situation of most brutal exploitation.
I thought this was an interesting point. It seems clear to me that all
supporters of free trade would be critical of borders in general
and also expect free immigration (in some sense "as the other side of the
coin"). But I'm afraid MIM Notes is right here in that probably
most people who say they support free trade do think that countries have a
right to prevent the free movement of people. And many of them
think that that right should be exercised.
I'm interested in how these correlation work. A lot of libertarians have
attacked "isolationism" and suggested that there is a connection between
opposing trade and opposing immigration. But there must be four
possible combinations.
Interestingly, I associate those combinations to some extent with the four
corners of the Nolan Chart -- much as I think the Nolan Chart is not very
reliable. The correlation in my mind with the Nolan Chart runs something
like this:
- No free trade, no free immigration (no economic freedom, no social
freedom): populist (Nolan "authoritarian")
- No free trade, free immigration (no economic freedom, social freedom):
left-liberal
- Free trade, no free immigration (economic freedom, no social freedom):
right-conservative
- Free trade, free immigration (economic freedom, social freedom):
libertarian
I'd be glad to hear opinions on subtleties of these issues.
The U.S. government has the Customs Service, which tries to prevent or tax
movement of goods across borders, and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, which tries to prevent or regulate movement of people across borders.
It seems strange to me that somebody would be offended by only one of these
functions, but possibly most people are.
MIM Notes also featured a review of an anthology on violence and
non-violence edited by a philosophy professor who's a friend of my father's.
So that was an interesting co-incidence. MIM's conclusion was that most
of the essays in the book are deficient because they fail to recognize that
capitalist property is violence. (In libertarian notation: they fail to
realize that defending property is coercive, so they don't realize that
infringing property rights is not an initation of force.)
Here, again, MIM Notes makes me think. MIM is making an
argument that, in carrying out the revolution by force, they wouldn't be
violent aggressors; they'd just be using the force necessary to prevent
people from upholding property by force. ("Now we see the violence
inherent in the system." This extends -- from MIM's perspective -- to
apologetics for the actions of the former Soviet Union and of the
Chinese Communist Party, because many of the opponents they were fighting
were quite willing to try to fight back. "No free speech for fascists",
anybody?)
An important theoretical question: what if libertarian ethical ideas are
correct (e.g. everyone has the right to act as he or she pleases as long
as he or she doesn't infringe on anyone else's equal rights), but there
is no such thing as a right to property? One idea is to
become a geolibertarian, but it's
not quite clear to me that solution can be justified (even though it
sounds very appealing).
David
Friedman's response to Mike
Huben's Non-Libertarian FAQ contains the following statement:
Early in [Huben's] FAQ he points out, correctly, that there
are problems with private claims to unproduced resources. But the
implication of that, insofar as there is an implication, is not
government ownership but commons--if I can't get ownership of the
land, and you can't, then we can't, so the land remains unowned.
Insofar as there are justifications for ownership, they start with
private actions and private ownership.
So, what ethical principles describe how people should behave towards one
another in connection with unowned land? That might not be a hypothetical
question, because maybe nobody owns land, so it would be a very real problem
that faces everyone.
My arms are fairly sore, not the worst they've been this week.
Don't let anybody tell you that experiences in early childhood don't really
have a huge effect on how people see the world. Or, when they tell you,
don't believe them.
One encounter or one conversation can have a vast effect.
I made some more updates to my companion site at
bbc.loyalty.org, including a bit
about how to find business card CD-R media, and what kind of CD-ROM drives
not to use these media with.
Maria Cantwell is back in Congress -- this time
in the Senate.
She was very popular with civil liberties folks earlier this decade when
she was in the House of Representatives; she sponsored an
unsuccessful
bill to allow exports of cryptographic software. After that, she went to
work for RealNetworks; now she's
been elected to the Senate.
I wonder if Senator Cantwell is still interested in cryptography. I'm
afraid her time at Real might not make her particulary sympathetic to DMCA
opponents: Real
used the
DMCA to suppress a program called StreamBox VCR, which allowed people
to save RealMedia streams to disk and to convert them to other formats.
(StreamBox subsequently settled with Real and agreed to modify its
software to comply with Real's demands.) This case was the earliest use
of the DMCA to prevent publication of a computer program; unfortunately,
StreamBox didn't attempt a first amendment defense and didn't get in touch
with people who were interested in first amendment protection for software.
Also unfortunately, a number of people on the dvd-discuss list weren't
sympathetic to StreamBox's position and some didn't even think that StreamBox
VCR should have first amendment protection!
I can't quite understand that; I think StreamBox VCR should be every bit as
legal as DeCSS. (You can find some of my arguments in the dvd-discuss
archive.)
Anyway, I don't think Cantwell was still at the company when that lawsuit
was going on, but I wonder whether she got the idea from people at Real that
the DMCA is good.
Even outside of the DMCA, regulation of cryptography is still definitely a big
deal; maybe she can take up the issue once again.
Her biography on her web
site says:
Maria's district contained many of the world's most influential
software and technology firms, and she applied herself to learning the
issues and standing up for this vital new sector of our economy. She
is well-regarded in Internet circles for fighting against archaic
export restrictions on software encryption products and for helping to
defeat the infamous Clipper chip proposal.
Having immersed herself in high tech issues while in Congress, Maria
joined a software start-up [that would be Real, which was
called
Progressive Networks at the time]
in 1995 and helped the
business grow to create 1,000 jobs in Washington state.
In November 2000, Maria was elected to the U.S. Senate, promising to
fight for reform and help expand opportunity for all of Washington
state. She knows that Washingtonians have come to expect a lot from
their Senators, and she is committed to giving them her very best
every day.
No, the "singularity" file in the BBC has no connection with the Singularity.
Chlorophyll, literally, is captured energy from the sun.
Green plant cells are the only ones capable of absorbing energy
directly from the sun and storing it as the chemical
chlorophyll.
[...]
In his book, Wheatgrass: Nature's Finest Medicine, author
Steve Meyerowitz explains wheatgrass' life and energy-giving
properties this way: "Inside the juice are photons, protons,
and electrons. Our living cells reach out for these charged nutrients."
(The Jamba Juice newsletter
Jamba Whirl, Spring 2001)
Wow, I heard cyanoacrylates have protons and electrons too! (I'm not
so sure about the photons.) Maybe our living cells can benefit from
eating CD-R media. I've also heard that there are protons and
electrons in plutonium -- in fact, even more protons and
electrons than in wheatgrass!
Thursday was World Press Freedom Day.
There was more interesting news I can't talk about. It isn't job-related.
Mr. Alter compared DeCSS to code that crashes airplanes, etc. Dave Farber
forwarded my
response:
> > > U.S.: DVD Decoder is Terrorware
> > > By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
> > > 6:16 a.m. May 2, 2001 PDT
> > >
> > > NEW YORK -- To the U.S. government, a DVD descrambling utility is akin
> > > to terrorware that could crash airplanes, disrupt hospital equipment
> > > and imperil human lives.
>
>Since the U.S. still has no Official Secrets Act, telling people how
>to commit serious crimes is still legal, unless you are conspiring or
>aiding someone in committing an actual crime (or breaching a special
>duty, etc.). Investigative journalists are constantly describing and
>exposing vulnerabilities and risks, even, sometimes, in military
>security.
>
>A recent "Boondocks" cartoon showed a student asking why it is legal to
>publish plans for pipe bombs on the Internet, but (supposedly) not
>information on decrypting DVDs. Although some politicians don't like
>it, it's legal to know how to make pipe bombs, it's legal to teach the
>public how to make pipe bombs, it's just not legal to make the pipe
>bombs (without proper pyrotechnics licenses) or to use them in a
>terrorist attack.
>
>Mr. Alter's comparison is extreme hyperbole. Still, I think U.S.
>legal precedent would support publishing details of serious risks and
>threats (which the breaking of CSS isn't), including computer
>software which could be used to exploit them. On the other hand, giving
>information out _in order to facilitate a crime_ is never protected. If
>I know that someone is trying to build a bomb, even providing a standard
>chemistry or engineering textbook might be actionable.
>
>Once again: if I know that somebody is planning to commit a burglary,
>simply looking up an address in a phone book could make me an
>accomplice. Intent is critical, and the burden of proof should be on
>the organization trying to suppress speech.
>
>With their "course of conduct" arguments, the government and the MPAA
>cleverly ask us to overlook that magazines and web sites _aren't_
>generally trying to facilitate crime by offering information to the
>public. And, by outlawing the information itself, they would relieve
>plaintiffs of the burden to prove otherwise.
>
>Jack Valenti said so in a speech on February 7:
>
> The minute you give one professor the keys to the kingdom,
> you're going to be ransacked.
>
>--
>Seth David Schoen | And do not say, I will study when I
>Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will
>down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/
Some clarification of the Official Secrets Act point: in some countries, like
the U.K., there are
government secrets which you're not allowed to tell anybody, regardless of how
you found them out. Even if you, for example, read them in a newspaper, or on
a web site, you might still get in trouble if you passed them along to other
people. In the U.S., there's no such thing -- if you learn a
government secret "legitimately" (in the sense that you weren't to blame for
its unauthorized disclosure), its secrecy is simply lost. This is true for
almost all categories of factual information under U.S. law; there are very
few things you could be punished for revealing if you learned them by
legitimate means. (It appears that the DMCA has created a new category
along these lines, though.)
My script is back on-line at
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/~schoen/cite.html, but I still need to make it so you can cite to
more things.
I'm planning to make posters out of the
DVD region code
map and the
Federal judicial
circuits.
It's amazingly easy to tell whether a particular long string of random
numbers is really random or was generated by a person asked to give random
numbers. You can use some of the same insights to predict random digits
sequentially generated by a person with better than 10% accuracy (if you
can hear the digits as the person generates them). Part of this is related
to the Gambler's Fallacy.
I had a dream that Wolfgang was visiting. Then I had a dream that I told
her I had dreamt she was visiting. Then I woke up, and she was, so I did.
Lots of parades and festivals today.
I went to the BayFF meeting at the San Francisco Public Library. There was
a panel including David Burt, who founded
Filtering Facts, and who now
works at N2H2.
The meeting was interesting. I'm not going to summarize it here, because
I've already written a long summary for peacefire-technical.
I made an attempt to represent Peacefire
there, by mentioning our work, by asking a Peacefire-interest question, and by
writing a report for Peacefire afterward.
This was a really good weekend. Wolfgang was here, we went to Kate's party,
and other nice things happened.
I went to eat with Zack in the evening.
"[...] We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and
not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present
one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house;
in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still
another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."
"In every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, "I am
grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden
of Ts'ui Pên."
"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time forks perpetually toward
innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths", trans. Donald A. Yates)
I got a sunburn on my neck over the weekend, between Tilden Park and Bernal
Park.
Zack and I got Speak Freely
working, even with encryption. But we only have half duplex, because
there is no free full duplex Linux driver for our sound card.
And she said, "I got this suitcase and I don't know what to pack."
And I said, "You can take anything you want: just wait and see.
It's not a release, it's not a reward, it's the blessings:
It's the gift of what you notice more."
(Dar Williams, "The Blessings")
Until further notice, I'm interested in hearing about job opportunities.
My resume is here.
"It seems that you would rather have chocolate donuts than moral realism."
I went to the chiropractor, and my shoulder felt a bit better afterward,
but of course I have lots of other arm injuries which are still giving
me trouble. I plan to go back regularly.
I went to Berkeley. It's pretty hot outside all around the Bay Area, and
I'm told there were some rolling blackouts, althugh nowhere I was during
the day had any while I was around.
But it sounds like the colocation facility where this machine is located
was affected -- there were messages from the UPS that Trey installed,
complaining that its batteries were running out.
As often, I understand more things after a trip to Berkeley.
I have no news about my job search yet. The only people who would
actually know that I'm looking for work are a few friends and family
members, and people who read this diary or my home page regularly.
I got invited to the Berkeley commencement ceremony tomorrow (Wednesday
Night is Commencement Night at Zellerbach Hall with Janet Reno?), but I
can't go because of a chiropractic appointment.
Reading a discussion on CTY-L inspired me to play my Alphaville CD. So it
so happened that "Forever Young" came on just as I was reading a later
message which quoted its lyrics.
Do you really want to live forever?
Hi everyone,
Effective immediately, I am forking the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card
project to create a new free software project. [...]
From Leonard:
Sic
transit gloria Mundie.
The Knapsack Problem.
"You could try to compel my testimony about that, and in your case I wouldn't
mind."
"That's what friendship's all about."
and later
Most golden tablets are designed to take away your freedom to share
and change religions. By contrast, the GNU General Golden Tablets
are intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
religions -- to make sure the religion is free for all its users.
There was a pretty good response to my announcement. A few dozen people
have joined up on the new
lnx-bbc mailing list in the first day. Of course,
if we make some successful releases, we should be able to attract a lot more
attention.
Today is Daniel Berrigan's 80th birthday. I had a birthday party at my
home; Anirvan and Zack came. We listened to the
Dar
Williams song and had a birthday cake with eight candles and the
inscription "Happy b-day Father Dan".
We also listened to an MP3 of Martin Luther King's speech on why he opposed
the Vietnam War. In the factual background section, there were a bunch of
pieces of history about the Vietnam War I hadn't known about. And this is
the source of a few famous King quotations:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of
values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights are considered more important than
people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are
incapable of being conquered.
(Alas, I'm pretty sure King would see me as part of the problem.)
Anirvan let me borrow Phillip Berrigan's autobiography, Fighting the
Lamb's War.
![[Book burning image]](/images/1933-05-10.jpeg)
(Books burning in Berlin, May 10, 1933, sixty-eight years ago today)
Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt
man auch am Ende Menschen. [That was just a prelude; where they burn
books, they will burn men in the end.]
(Heinrich Heine, 1820)
This morning I remembered my famous letter to my parents:
At Northfield Mount Hermon School,
I learned
how to order from a catalog,
how to read sheet music,
how to use Krazy Glue,
how to snap my fingers,
how to set up an Ethernet hub,
how to read the Aeneid and the Iliad,
how to make a proposal,
how to do line integrals,
how to understand optical illusions,
how to assemble audio cables,
how to put on a tuxedo,
how to remember IP addresses,
how to debate in the Oregon, Lincoln-Douglas, and Parliamentary styles,
how to expand acronyms,
how to participate in a protest,
how to send a sick person flowers,
how to found an association,
how to crimp an Ethernet cable,
how to read stock charts,
how to find the altitude of a model rocket,
how to arrange a meeting,
how to swim,
how to explain Gödel's Theorem,
how to give a public speech,
how to appreciate classical music,
how to set up a stereo,
how to graph costs and revenues as a function of output,
how to tie a tie,
how to read Greek and Esperanto,
how to throw a Frisbee,
how to take a derivative,
how to use an uninterruptible power supply,
how to host a radio show,
how to scan dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter,
how to order take-out food,
how to write a genuine note of thanks,
how to appreciate a sunset,
how to explain the philosophy of Plato,
how to understand the nomenclature of electrical cable terminators,
how to play badminton,
how to evacuate during a blackout,
how to circulate a petition,
how to use Unix well,
how to recite passages from classical texts,
how to do some card tricks,
how to participate in distributed collaborative computing projects,
how to pass on a tradition,
how to use a video editor,
how to write a bibliography,
how to loan people music,
how to create a to-do list,
how to arrange dial-up Internet e-mail,
how to translate the text of the requiem,
how to use a digital multimeter,
how to usher in a play,
how to write a newspaper article,
how to be a friend to a lonely person,
how to make an enormous poster,
how to analyze the efficiency of an algorithm,
how to make a collage,
how to decipher bar codes,
how to play the Prisoner's Dilemma,
how to sing along to music in other languages,
how to use the antiseptic betadine,
how to make advertising posters for various occasions,
how to use an audio or video mixer,
how to perform a titration,
how to install memory in a computer,
how to identify constellations,
how to reminisce about the past,
how to use a Macintosh,
how to design a solar car,
how to use a scanner,
how to write HTML,
how to read Catullus and Horace,
how to know more about the Los Alamos Project,
how to use the conservation of energy,
how to administer computer systems,
how to serve on a committee,
how to compete in a science competition,
how to win a rope pull,
how to give cross-examination,
how to build a binary search tree,
how to play music on a computer,
how to write a computer game,
how to manage a political campaign,
how to say "dishwasher" in German,
how to write letters to the editor,
how to use DSM-IV,
how to ask someone to be my girlfriend,
how to find a senior quotation,
how to count in binary on my fingers,
how to run a store,
how to read a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram,
how to install site wiring,
how to compete in triplespeak,
how to apply to college,
how to find the price at which a market will clear,
how to write an autobiography,
how to be Head of House for a play,
how to annotate Dante's Inferno,
how to describe the origin of seasons,
how to appear on a game show,
how to apply the mass-energy theorem,
how to host a party,
how to describe the outcome of chemical reactions,
how to find yearbook inscriptions,
how to build a regulated power supply,
how to use a CB radio,
how to audition for a play,
how to argue for free markets,
how to catch someone breaking into a computer system,
how to read the gospel of John,
how to compose a short piece of music,
how to tie a laundry bag,
how to memorize friends' initials,
how to calculate equilibrium concentrations of ions in aqueous solutions,
how to play an audio CD on a computer,
how to call an ambulance,
how to write vote-tallying software,
how to use a bullhorn,
how to calculate electrostatic potentials,
how to write a sonnet,
how to install Macintosh video input and television tuner cards,
how to like Moxie,
how to play a role-playing game,
how to throw pottery on a wheel,
how to create a routing table,
how to use a credit card,
how to make a decorated graduation cap,
how to be interrogated,
how to perform Sortes Vergilianae,
how to compare works of literature,
how to use the method of loci to remember lists of items,
how to submit to a literary magazine,
how to give announcements at a Campus Meeting,
how to use a video camera,
how to write a program to make pictures of fractals,
how to wear a martenitsa,
how to sing "Jerusalem",
how to use a blacklight,
how to use personality assessment instruments,
how to classify and identify logical fallacies,
how to make an iron-on t-shirt design,
how to thank the Speaker for recognition,
how to set up a recording studio,
and many other things as well.
Thank you for sending me to NMH.
What I thought about the list on this occasion was that I recant on "how to
ask someone to be my girlfriend". Just because I did it does not mean that I
knew how.
So, please explain how a bunch of people sitting around drinking coke,
listening to music, and playing Settlers of Cataan -- which is what went on at
the MIT fraternity party that I most recently attended -- heightens the
incidence of rape, domestic violence, and assault. And if you find no such
explanation forthcoming, then please stop over-generalising.
(Matthew K. Belmonte, on CTY-L)
I went back to the chiropractor; it feels like she's still making progress.
Today I talked to a Loya and to a lawyer. I also
had lunch with Alex, and Duncan visited in the afternoon. It's good to catch
up with him.
The 2nd Circuit has issued a number of
questions for the
attorneys for the appellants and appellees in the 2600 case:
1. Are the anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act content-neutral? See 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 328-29 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
2. Does DeCSS have both speech and non-speech elements?
3. Does the dissemination of DeCSS have both speech and non-speech elements?
4. Does the use of DeCSS to decrypt an encrypted DVD have both speech and
non-speech elements?
5. Does the existence of non-speech elements, along with speech elements,
in an activity sought to be regulated alone justify intermediate level scrutiny?
6. If DeCSS or its dissemination or its use to decrypt has both speech and
non-speech elements and is not subject to intermediate level scrutiny simply
because of the non-speech elements, is intermediate l.evel scrutiny appropriate
because of the close causal link between dissemination of DeCSS and its improper
use? See 111 F. Supp. 2d at 331-32.
7. If the District Court is correct that the dissemination of DeCSS "carries
very substantial risk of imminent harm," 111 F. Supp. 2d at 332, does that
risk alone justify the injunction? In other words, does that risk satisfy
the requirements for regulating speech under Brandenburg v. Ohio,
395 U.S. 444 (1969), thereby rendering unnecessary an inquiry as to whether
non-speech elements of DeCSS or its dissemination or its use (if such exists)
may be regulated under United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968)?
8. Are the three criteria identified at 111 F. Supp. 2d 333 the correct criteria
for determining the validity, under intermediate level scrutiny, of the use
of DeCSS that has been enjoined?
9. If not, what modification or supplementation would be required to conform
to First Amendment requirements?
10. Are the three criteria identified at 111 F. Supp. 2d 341 and the "clear
and convincing evidence" standard the correct criteria and the correct standard
of proof for testing the validity of the injunction's prohibition of posting
on the defendant's website and of linking?
11. If not, what modification or supplementation would be required to conform
to First Amendment requirements?
It's a relief (no pun intended) that the Court is considering the first
amendment issues seriously, because at oral argument they seemed to ignore
them, for the most part. Now the question is, among other things, how to
convince them.
It does seem that the speech and conduct distinctions are often artificial.
Professor Junger wrote a bit where he pointed out that speakers always
engage in conduct in connection with their speech -- for example, breathing
and wearing clothing (Junger's examples). And speech always has an effect,
and knowledge (and social relationships) may be more consequential than
"conduct".
It is said
that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement.
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if
believed, is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it, or some
failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference
between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower
sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire
to reason.
(Justice Holmes, dissenting, in Abrams v. U.S.,
268 U.S. 652 (1925), at 668.)
And if we didn't believe that what we said would do something,
would we bother to say it at all?
bvi is great! That's the very
first thing I'll add in the LNX-BBC 1.618 tree.
A very busy day.
I had several dreams, including one very upsetting one, but I don't remember
any of them now.
I went to the chiropractor and continued to feel better.
In Berkeley, I went by
Berkeley TRiP
and got a BART Plus
pass. This is really cool; I wish I'd known about it before. I can
ride Muni and AC Transit "for free" (at a significant discount) with this
pass.
I went to Michelle's Spanish and Portuguese graduation in Zellerbach. The
speaker was Prof. Robert Alter, who talked about the importance of reading
literature, and got in a plug for independent bookstores, even mentioning
Cody's and Black Oak by name.
My nose started to bleed just before the Italian Department graduated. Oops.
Maybe it's a good thing that I never finished that hypothetical double major
with Classics and Computer Science. If I had, I'd have been in that very
graduation ceremony, and then, if my nose had started to bleed, it would
have been extremely inconvenient.
I did think a lot about the fact that, if I hadn't dropped out of Berkeley,
I would have been graduating around now, and quite possibly would even
have graduated already. Things would have been very different for me.
In the evening, I went to a party at Sumana's house, which was lots of fun.
I met Leonard in person there.
Overheard: "Geeks need advocates."
Sumana has a comic book version of the Mahabarata, in which
the Bhagavad Gita gets an entire issue all to itself. She
also has a different comic book version of the Mahabarata
in which the entire epic is a single issue, and the Gita is
a single page. I should have written down the text of that page
so I could quote it.
I wish I were a cartoonist. Cartoons can be an amazingly effective medium,
and you can certainly draw cartoons on very serious themes (I've seen
physics and African-American history as examples). No wonder the
Comics Code Authority wanted to make sure that cartoonists drew nothing
offensive to faith or morals...
(The CCA is an amazing episode in the history of "industry self-regulation"
in America, and how much more powerful it can be than the government
censorship it seeks to stave off. What do you mean, you've never heard of
it? Well, I hadn't either until I came across some of
Seth's web pages.)
We played Trivial Pursuit, and our team lost. I went to sleep.
Douglas Adams has left this Earth,
Upon which he provoked much mirth.
Just forty-two plus seven he:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Leonard woke me up really early in the morning because he and Sumana were
leaving for a trip. Amusingly enough, I decided to go back to San Francisco
so Duncan could pick me up and take me to Foothill.
And that's exactly what I did, so I ended up at Mongomery and Market around
7:00 in the morning (the last time I was there that early on a weekend,
Rick Moen still lived in the CoffeeNet!). I waited around for a while and
bought a bagel, and then Duncan picked me up, with Simon, Duncan Jr., and
Daniel in the car.
"Foothill" means the Foothill
College Electronics Flea Market, a monthly tradition which I've heard
about for years but which I'd never experienced in person. It's run in
a parking lot at
Foothill College in Los Altos.
This thing is amazing! It starts before dawn and continues until sometime
in the middle of the day. All kinds of vendors -- most of whom are
just individuals -- show up and set up tables or carpets or junk piles
in the parking lot. Then you walk around and talk to them and buy things.
There's a big ham radio focus to the event, but that's not all that you
can find there. I bought a slide rule, a bunch of LEDs, a big 12-volt
rechargeable battery (like an electric scooter battery or a an electric
wheelchair battery), two 1-watt solar panels, and, last but not least,
a traditional IBM PC keyboard! The keyboard is the big heavy type with
the very loud keys which make a satisfying clickety-clack. I learned
to touch-type on one of those keyboards, and I can still type faster
on them than on any other kind of keyboard. Some people have also suggested
that the strong springs will reduce wrist injuries. I know I really
enjoy typing on a keyboard like that.
Of course, there were other neat things I didn't buy -- whole systems,
component kits, oscilloscopes, lots of other test equipment. There was a
PAL programmer -- if only I had some use for a PAL programmer!
Michelle does want to have an electric graduation cap, so we're going to
work on that. I dug out my Engineer's Mini-Notebook set
and looked up the 555 timer chip. I think I have a few of those sitting
around, so maybe I can figure out how to produce a good clock pulse with
a 555 and then drive a relay from that and make some LEDs flash.
Duncan gave me a ride back from Foothill to Berkeley, and we met up with
Michelle and had lunch. It was still early in the day; I'd thought that
Cristina's graduation was at noon, but I was wrong. Eventually we went
to the ceremony, the Berkeley English Department graduation in the
Greek Theater.
One of the speakers gave the following reason for studying English:
I became an English major because I love to read, yes: but I also
wanted to get credit for it.
Now that's really sensible, unlike the claim of another speaker that
recently scientists
have cloned the human genome.
I have a history of complaining about claims people make about the genome
in speeches. One hint: the Human Genome Project is not the same as
cloning or genetic engineering. My guess is that the speaker here meant
that scientists have mapped the human genome.
Cristina and Christine were both graduaing, and they
arranged it so they graduated one after another. Since their names are
pronounced the same way, it was amusing to hear the cheers from our
section: "Go Cristina! Go Christine!"
Some parties followed, and I went back to the City. I ran into two people
from Cal Libertarians on my way home.
As usual, Berkeley was a very educational place.
Overheard on BART:
- "I listen to Pacifica Radio and I
read the Bay
Guardian, so I know what's really going on."
- "Nobody ever falls in love, it's all a media-based lie to sell movies,
and to sell songs."
(If the second claim were true, it would give new meaning to the Dar Williams
lyric "whoever thought of love is no friend of mine".)
Saturday was the one-year anniversary of my first experience of arm pain.
It's amazing to think that I've had these injuries for a whole year.
The wisdom of Tim O'Reilly, as expressed on the Free Software Business
mailing list:
License terms like the right to fork, and the right to redistribute
under the same terms, are *protections* of open source effectiveness,
not causes of them.
Lao Tzu says:
Losing the way of life,
men rely on goodness.
Losing goodness, they rely on laws.
The laws or licenses we create are needed because people have lost sight
of or never understood why open source works (the way of life, the
science and market dynamics of why this is an effective software
development paradigm), or they have lost goodness, and look to subvert
the system for short term local benefit. They don't drive the system.
I didn't reach my mother until Monday, but I hope mothers in general had a
good day.
I had a nice time in Berkeley. Michelle wants an electric graduation cap,
and I'm trying to help out. I finally learned to use a 555 timer chip to
generate clock pulses (thanks to the Radio Shack Engineer's
Mini-Notebook on the subject), so now if I can find solid-state
relays, I can put together some really bright flashing lights.
It's amazing that someone can support free trade and oppose free immigration!
How can that be? Isn't your right to go somewhere even more obvious than your
right to sell things there? For that matter, isn't your right to sell your
labor in any market more obvious than your right to sell personal property in
any market?
It's strange that free immigration is an idea associated with the left and
free trade with the right. I can understand how you can believe in free
immigration without free trade -- if you think that the economic is not
the personal (I just wrote something on CTY-L about this issue) or that
property rights are
socially constructed. How can you believe in free trade without free
immigration? How can that be?
Is it just that free trade is good for business?
I'm getting pretty upset with trade treaty organizations, more so all the
time, for their failure to defend free trade in general, not just in narrow
areas (and for how they export bizarre U.S. intellectual property law through
"harmonization"). I wish -- this will be nothing new to readers of this
diary -- that opponents of treaties like the FTAA would take the approach
that free trade is good but that the treaty organizations don't achieve it
and mix in other things.
For me, free trade is particularly desirable, not because it's good for
business (which I do think is a benefit!), but because it erodes and
diminishes the relevance of the international system and of national borders.
National borders are so contemptible to me; free trade diminishes their
impact. So does free immigration. Today, we finally have half-decent
communication across national borders -- radio, the global telephone network,
the Internet, and the global postal system. Not so bad. That diminishes the
impact of national borders too.
I want to write something about the role of business, supporting the ideal
that politics should neither help nor hinder it, and the idea that it's (just)
one of many important parts of human life. This reminds me very much of
the injunction
You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be
partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness
shall you judge your neighbor.
(Leviticus 19:14 (RSV))
Donella Meadows too is
dead,
Who wrote about what lay ahead
For humankind in times to be:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The 555 timer circuit is cool; I'm just following a "cookbook" application,
but I have adjustible clock pulses which I can probably get to drive TTL
circuits.
I can't drive a relay coil directly, unless perhaps I use a very high
input voltage, or a transistor, and I still don't see how the transistor
would work, although there seem to be "cookbook" examples of that too.
It's more fun to understand the theory behind something than to follow
somebody's instructions.
I looked into how to get unemployment
benefits, but I haven't applied yet.
I need to do more to look for work. I'm likely to apply to
VA Linux and
Red Hat, two prominent free software
companies which have done a lot for the community. I have some concerns
about some of Red Hat's marketing campaigns, but I think the company has
done great things for the community and for the public's awareness of
Linux, not to mention
the public domain.
Perhaps they have work in the field of training.
I had a dream that I was on a trip and went to see a chiropractor locally
for my arm injury. I met the chiropractor in a cafe which looked a lot like
the old CoffeeNet and where various
doctors consulted with the patients who came in to drink coffee. There were
massage tables; it was set up a lot like the hair styling parlors where there
are lots of independent hairstylists who each rent space from the
proprietor.
This chiropractor was a woman, about 28, who was very interesting and had
a fair amount of health advice for me. Unfortunately, I've forgotten it
all.
"I haven't lost count."
"Have you started count?"
"Actually ... no."
If I may quote myself:
Linuxcare is a trademark of Linuxcare, Inc. Linux is a
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. United States copyright law is
a regulatory capture of the publishing industries.
My BART Plus pass started working. I saw my cousin.
I filed for unemployment benefits over the phone. I heard that people would
traditionally file in person in an unemployment office and that it would be
very depressing and take a long time. The telephone version was very
convenient.
Interesting question: "Do you have a disability?" Do I have a disability?
I've been listening to Handel's Messiah, which I had out because
I played a selection from it which was parallel to something Martin Luther
King said in his speech on Vietnam which we listened to at the birthday party
for Daniel Berrigan.
In the afternoon, I practiced my LaTeX, and my arm pain came back along
with other sorts of pain. I met Zack and his friend Noah for dinner.
For those not on seth-trips, you should go to Stanford on Thursday to hear
Professor Felten give his
censored lecture on SDMI
("Reading Between the Lines"), or at least an update on when the world can
expect to hear about his results.
Also, you should come with me to see Sacco and Vanzetti: A
Vaudeville at the
Marin Theatre Company sometime
soon.
The U.S. isn't going to support the International Criminal Court. Why not?
Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas,
contended it could be used against U.S. military personnel overseas
and, by endorsing the court, ``we would be abandoning the sacred
covenant between the Congress and our men and women in uniform.''
("Bush Says U.N. Dues Should Be Paid", Associated Press)
Think about this for a minute. The "sacred covenant" between the Congress
and the Armed Forces means that U.S. military personnel can't be tried
before an international war crimes tribunal?
When I first read this, I exclaimed "Tom DeLay says the U.S. military
by definition can't commit war crimes!". But one friend responded
"See how he didn't actually have to say that?", and it's true:
he didn't actually say that the U.S. Armed Forces can't commit war crimes,
just that the U.S. shouldn't implement a plan that would allow them to be
punished for war crimes without its consent.
For that matter, how come party leaders actually like to be called "Whips"?
Doesn't it have a bad connotation for them? What if they were called
"Majority Scourge" or "Minority Cattle Prod"?
I shold get more sleep, because I fell asleep on my bed in my clothes
surrounded by electronic components. Thankfully, I didn't squash them,
nor did they poke me. I was reading about op amps when I thought I'd
just close my eyes for a few moments; I didn't open them until
morning.
This was an aftereffect from lost sleep on Saturday, I think.
The electronics project is not done, but I'm planning to go work on it
and finish it in Berkeley tonight. I couldn't find solid state relays
anywhere. This, after buying all of them from every Radio Shack in
a large radius in New Hampshire just five months ago. Where have they
gone?
The ones I bought back then are in an attic in New Hampshire -- that's where
they've gone. But why would Radio Shack stores in Massachusetts and
New Hampshire carry solid state relays, and stores in San Francisco not
carry them?
I might use my exciting BART Plus pass to go to Berkeley in the afternoon
in search of relays, then come back for my chiropractic appointment, then
go back to Berkeley again.
I'm continuing to practice LaTeX.
Martin Gardner's Puzzling Questions About the Solar System
is a good book.
If you think I should have an accent,
well how do you feel about Ancient Greek?
I'm not quite sure how it's supposed to sound,
but my Swahili's far too weak.
And if you want me to talk backwards,
well oot taht od nac I llew.
And if you want me to speak gibberish,
well meeko weeko Taco Bell.
'Cuz I can do the linguistically ridiculous for you. (For you.)
And I can do the harmonically impossible for you! (For you.)
(Ben Beckstrom and Peter A. Peterson II,
"Biologically
Impossible", from Last Transmission
from Starbase XY003)
I was up all night, only the third or fourth time in my life that I've done
that. With the kind help of several people, I was working on an electronic
graduation cap for Michelle. I think it turned out extremely well! We
mounted a beautiful specimen of Michelle's papel picado artwork,
a papercut of a dragon, on her cap. Then we placed two LEDs over the eyes,
a blue and a gold (UC Berkeley colors), and made them blink alternately, so
that the dragon seems to have a glowing blue eye and a
glowing gold eye and to open and shut them alternately.
The graduation was pretty nice, although rowdier and less organized than
other Berkeley graduations I've seen. I knew five graduates (three
Cognitive Science, two Public Health) and managed to catch up with most
of them, though not all.
I got a sunburn and also got a bit dehydrated at the ceremony. In the
afternoon, I fell asleep while at the lunch table; I walked back to
Michelle's place in a daze (in one case almost falling asleep standing up),
and took a nap for several hours. I felt a lot better physically after
that nap, but still worn out for much of the day.
I hate surface mount soldering! I wasted over five hours trying to transfer
a circuit -- which worked perfectly on a breadboard -- onto a copper
perfboard. After hours of making poor connections and inadvertantly
shorting things together and struggling to separate them, I finally tested
every joint and every pair of adjacent traces; at last, I had connectivity
where it was supposed to be and not where it wasn't supposed to be.
But it still didn't work. Either some connections still had unreasonably
high resistance, or I damaged some of the components with the heat from
the soldering iron (which is very possible), or I made a mistake in the
wiring or in following traces (even though I triple-checked all the
connections).
I had to re-do the circuit from scratch on a breadboard in the morning, and
only finished at the last minute. But the dragon atop Michelle's
graduation cap, in my opinion, is lovely.
Parts: 7805 voltage regulator; 555 timer (556 in new version); 7404 TTL
hex inverter (7402 quad NOR gate in new version); capacitor and two resistors
(for timing); two more resistors (for LEDs); two LEDs; 9-volt battery.
The blinking LED scheme in this graduation cap was more or less equivalent
to, and probably inspired by, Jonas Klein's version for his 1993 NMH
graduation cap (although Jonas used many more LEDs, and tried to drive
them using transistors to increase the available current). Jonas also
used a 555; this impressed me, because I didn't know how to use that chip
until this past week.
I wrote about 1100 lines, about 10,000 words, of my epic poem, tentatively
called "Existence and Uniqueness". (Three books plus a section of a fourth,
out of what I expect will be either ten or twelve books.) Although some parts
are not so bad, in places it may be some of the worst poetry I've
ever written. (Not so much bad writing as merely much closer to prose
than poetry: some parts could well be long prose narratives pretending to be
poetry. There is no meter; I've almost never been able to write in meter.
I'm trying to keep it iambic where possible, but I haven't done anything
metri causa.)
Most of it seems like good storytelling to me. It helps to have a
meaningful story that you care about. The lapses there have to do with
trying to talk about inner states and thoughts rather than showing what
happened or recounting conversations -- the old "show, don't tell"
advice.
"Show, don't tell" is not good advice. It's just good advice for people
who aren't skilled fiction or narrative writers, while they're writing
fiction or narratives. If you're really good at using a particular
form, you can tell and it will still work fine.
Remember the Maine!
I went to two parties in Berkeley, and didn't go to one party in Berkeley.
"Thera-Band(R) and associated colors are trademarks of the Hygenic
Corporation. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. (C) The
Hygenic Corporation, 1998. All rights reserved. Made in USA.
Patent Pending."
They've really got all their bases covered, haven't they? This is on
a package containing an exercise ball
which you squeeze to develop hand and arm strength. It's the latest
instance of the idea that
colors
can be trademarks, which
courts seem to believe. (That thread on
the Crackmonkey list was the first time I'd heard of the concept, but then
I went down to my local office supply store and looked at the back of a
pack of Post-It(R) notes. Sure enough.)
One of the most exciting things about the first party in Berkeley was
getting to argue about the Monty Hall problem for half an hour with
Daniel Ellsberg, "a great hero of the American people".
I also met a doctor who's working on scientific studies of alternative
medicine, and is planning a randomized, controlled, double-blind study
of moxibustion for breech babies. There was
a
previous study which found positive results but didn't use any kind
of placebo for the control group. So this new study will include a
sham moxibustion treatment to see whether the effect could be due to a
placebo effect.
At the second party, I met a woman who managed to complete the inductive
proof of the formula for the sum of the first n integers in her head.
I've never seen anybody do that before; I kept offering her paper and
pen, and she kept on refusing, saying that she could figure it out. So
she did.
I also went swimming at that party for the first time in a couple of years.
It felt great, but I think I overdid it a little.
"You're a happening geek!"
(My sister Rebecca)
"Only people who
have something to hide should be worried," [about a legislative
proposal to keep complete archives for seven years of all voice and e-mail
traffic in the U.K. to allow retroactive searches] said a spokesperson at the
Department of Trade and Industry.
I thought that was just a parody, and actual government officials didn't
really say things like that.
Everybody has something to hide.
"Clearly, what you should do is help them [...] and then write a feature article
for slashdot."
(a slashdot reporter with an innovative response to an ethical dilemma)
"he
thought he knew better than the U.S. Government what was best for the United
States."
Meeting Daniel Ellsberg and thinking about his experiences made me ponder
the quotation above. It's
upsetting to me that this should be phrased so contemptuously, so so
condescendingly.
(The piece is not about Ellsberg but about a more recent case involving a
man named Frederick Hamilton, who leaked classified information for
altruistic reasons -- once again, to try to stop a war -- and went to jail
for it.)
Ellsberg also "thought he knew better than the U.S. government what was
best for the United States"; according to interviews, he still thinks
he knew better than the U.S. government what was best for the United
States:
[Q.] Do you have any regrets about releasing the Pentagon Papers or would
you have done anything differently?
[A.]
Yes. I regret that in 1964 or early 1965 I did not release the
documents in my possession at that time to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. These documents were in my safe in the Pentagon.
Later they were among the documents in the Pentagon Papers that I
copied and gave to the Senate in 1969 and later to the newspapers in
1971. But if I had released them during the 1964 presidential campaign
or before the open-ended escalation on the ground in mid-1965, I
believe that all the war that came afterwards could well have been
averted. That is a heavy burden to bear.
(Daniel Ellsberg, in a 1999 interview with Bay Area high school
students)
It seems to me that history will vindicate Ellsberg, so that people will
agree that he, in fact, knew better than the government. Perhaps
history will also vindicate Frederick Hamilton. It seems that the
Department of Energy doesn't consider that a possibility.
You know you've been reading the news media too long when ... you see the
news headline "Bush Energy Plan Not Universally Popular" and think "Oh,
that must be a new piece from The
Onion".
I wrote a few hundred more lines of "Existence and Uniqueness".
I went to the chiropractor and then I went down to the
EFF to meet with Shari Steele.
I'm planning to volunteer for EFF and work on technical projects there.
I wrote some more lines of "Existence and Uniqueness".
My friend Erik came to visit in the morning, and in the afternoon I went
to Berkeley to get a Feldenkrais lesson.
In the evening, I had dinner with Biella. That was very nice.
Erik discovered that the reason my old Ricochet didn't work was that
the power supply was failing. He also discovered that the Sony
4.5 V DC supplies (for a Walkman, Discman, etc.) work with it just fine.
That's cool.
What is the difference between freedom and justice?
I read the beginning of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
(most famous as the author of The Shockwave Rider). This
novel is interesting so far for its picture of overpopulation. There's
also some treatment of race relations. This novel is also known as
the source for quotations from Chad Mulligan's The Hipcrime
Vocab, which
perhaps plays the same role in Stand on Zanzibar that
Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism plays in 1984.
Some of these lines are fairly famous among Unix geeks (who may have
encountered them in fortune files). For example:
HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we
learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from
what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
I went to the chiropractor and I helped Zack put in a new hard drive
and then went to dinner with him. I still have a lot of things I have
to get done that I've put off.
As you might expect, I wrote some more of "Existence and Uniqueness":
currently almost 3000 lines, 25,000 words. I need to make a "records"
list: longest letter, longest written work, longest conversation,
longest walk, longest poem, etc.
My arms are a bit sore -- I think the chiropractor helped. Certainly,
writing that poem is a possible explanation for my arm pain.
I also read a little more about Ellsberg's Paradox and its interesting
implications. Maybe some time I'll read a bit more technical game
theory than I have; game theorists are certainly interesting,
colorful characters.
Intellectual property law
is government regulation
not free trade
(Not a haiku, but rather a memo to the BSA)
A powerful dream on the distinction between "dating" and "being boyfriend and
girlfriend".
Did I mention these lovely little stickers? I got a bunch at the EFF when
I went by there with Erik on Tuesday. They say "Free Jon Johansen", and
I have been wanting one for a while.
My dream Wednesday night was really very interesting,
and so was
Raph
Levien's.
"If you talk that way and don't make that distinction, they won't
believe you. They aren't going to believe you, they'll think you're
lying."
I ate a ridiculous amount of sugar on Thursday.
It's good that I returned to this subject after quite some time away
from it. Back in 1995, I got interested in why the well-known
digital root divisibility test works, and also in generalizations to
other bases. I managed to prove a pretty good generalization which
shows clearly why it works, and later I also showed when it won't
work.
Yesterday I also examined the last digit divisibility test, and once again
showed why it works and when. Interestingly, these results can be
used to establish the relatively obvious conclusion that the two tests
never both work for divisibility by a particular digit.
Another simple corollary: the last digit test works to tell
whether a number is even or odd in an even base.
The digital root test works for this purpose in an odd base.
Outstanding question: the digital root test "doesn't work" for
certain digits (in general, most digits), in the sense that it can
and sometimes will give wrong answers for those digits. (It's not
guaranteed to give a wrong answer every time -- if it were,
it would still be a perfectly accurate test, you'd just have to reverse
the interpretation of the results, much in the sense that someone
who can actually get a 0% on a multiple choice exam or a Rhine ESP test,
while still answering the questions, has something strange going on.)
The point is that it gives answers which are not directly connected
to what the test is supposed to be testing for: we would like to say
that the test result and the actual divisibility property are
"uncorrelated". But is this true?
I'd like to know whether the test gives you any information at all
in this case. (One example: adding the digits in a base 10 number
to test for divisibility by 6. We know that this "doesn't work",
but is it right more often than 1/6 of the time, wrong more often
than 5/6, or is it right exactly 1/6 of the time? Can you get
any information at all by applying this faulty test, or is it
completely useless?)
I wrote a program to experiment with this. It's not clear quite
yet what the result is.
I'm trying to write these proofs and explanations of them up nicely
in LaTeX. The slight problem is that I don't know a whole lot of
LaTeX. I guess this is a great way to learn more.
0 is divisible by everything, and everything is divisible by 1.
Sounds like blood types, doesn't it?
What cryptographic systems lack in subtlety, they
make up for in malice...
(Whitfield Diffie and Mary Fischer, explaining the difference between
cryptographic systems and God, "Deciphment Versus Cryptanalysis",
in Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and
Decipherment)
Sumana mentions
a piece by
Annalee Newitz (whose writing I've sometimes
read in the past; she likes to write about free software reasonably often).
This one, on the other hand, is about love and sex, and what they have
to do with one another. Newitz mentions the "scarcity economy of love"
and suggests that it's a problem that people either think that sex
must be connected with love, or that it must not.
This reminds me a lot of the divisibility problem: there, if the divisor
is a divisor of the highest possible digit, the divisibility of the sum of
the digits in a number must be the same as the divisibility of the
number itself. Either they are both divisible, or they are both
not divisibile. On the other hand, if the divisor is not a divisor of
the highest possible digit, then the divisibility of the sum of the digits
in a number will certainly sometimes be the same as and certainly
sometimes be different from the sum of the digits of that number,
depending on what number you choose.
So I guess Newitz is telling us that sex and love are like the
divisibility of a number and the divisibility of the sum of digits in
the number, where the highest digit in the base is not itself divisible
by the divisor of interest: they're sometimes the same and sometimes
different, sometimes both present, sometimes neither, and sometimes
either one by itself in the absence of the other, and if we assume that
they're one way or the other all the time, we're sure to be mistaken
eventually.
Of course, I am one of these people who are part of the problem, per
Newitz's view, on account of having a traditional (in two senses)
theory about the situation.
Yeah, I'm really far from being able to relate to her attitude. I go
far beyond what she criticizes as unreasonable.
And, separately, alas for us if her conclusion is right:
[O]ne often hears the
truism "communication is the key." The idea is that we can bridge that
gulf of relationship misunderstandings if we're just "honest," and
tell our sex partners up front what we expect from them. But
communication and honesty can't possibly be solutions to a problem
whose roots are self-delusion and plain old uncertainty. If few of us
truly know what sex means to us, or what we want out of our dates, how
can we be honest about our feelings unless we say something like,
"Duh, I don't know"? That's the sort of honesty we could all do
without.
We long to use words like "honesty" when it comes to love and sex not
because we are confident about our intentions but because we want to
ward off the disorienting ambiguity of desire.
I remember quoting, and I'll quote again, the lines from Aeneid
VI:
O tandem magnis pelagi defuncte periclis!
Sed terrae graviora manent. In regna Lavini
Dardanidae venient; mitte hanc de pectore curam;
sed non et venisse volent. Bella, horrida bella,
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
Non Simois tibi, nec Xanthus, nec Dorica castra
defuerint; alius Latio iam partus Achilles,
natus et ipse dea; nec Teucris addita Iuno
usquam aberit; cum tu supplex in rebus egenis
quas gentes Italum aut quas non oraveris urbes!
I'll try a quick informal translation:
Oh you who passed such dangers on the sea!
But graver ones remain on land: into the kingdom
of Lavinius you Trojans will come, so send that fear away.
But you won't wish that you had come! I forsee wars,
horrible wars, the Tiber flowing red with blood.
The rivers of Troy and the enemy camps will
come back again for you; another already in Latium
Achilles waits for you, his mother, too, a goddess. And Juno
who hates you won't leave you alone: when you in dire straits
go as a beggar, what cities won't you ask for help
in Italy?
I told Zack that the best figurative translation of "Non Simois tibi ...
defuerint" for Americans might be "It will be another Vietnam for you".
One reason this passage is so disturbing is its context. Aeneas has
survived a long war -- in which his country was destroyed -- and then
wandered for years at sea and nearly been killed there, too. He's
learned that his destiny is to go to Italy and to found a new
civilization there. So he dutifully heads for Italy, never having
been there before, and not entirely sure he'll make it. But in Italy,
he believes, "the fates offer us peaceful seats" ("Latium, sedes ubi
fata quietas / ostendunt").
So now, through much effort (the theme of the first half of the poem),
Aeneas has almost made it to
Italy at last, and he stops by to ask this prophetess to give him
more advice about his destiny. In some sense, he believes that the poem
is about to end, for he's on the verge of reaching Italy, and reaching
Italy was what he was supposed to do, wasn't it?
And then she says this!
She tells him that, not only will Italy not be peaceful, but that
he'll practically have to fight the Trojan war all over again from scratch
when he gets there. (Indeed, the entire second half of the
Aeneid is devoted to the war Aeneas does, in fact, have to
fight when he finally makes it to Italy; the Sybil wasn't joking around,
and the river Tiber does run run with blood.)
The great
Dryden translation has
Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign,
Yet more and greater ills by land remain.
The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event),
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent.
Wars, horrid wars, I view -- a field of blood,
And Tiber rolling with a purple flood.
Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there:
A new Achilles shall in arms appear,
And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate,
Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate.
To what strange nations shalt not thou resort,
Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court!
I believe that the line "Sed non et venisse volent" ("But they will
not also wish to have come", or Dryden's "but having reach'd, repent")
must have been the most shocking to Aeneas of everything he hears in
the whole poem. It's true that Aeneas gives a speech in reply in
which he denies being afraid of anything, but immediately beforehand
he's just expressed his state of mind and clearly shown that he was relying
on reaching Italy to be the end of the story. And, directly in reply,
the Sybil says
no, there is a second half of the Aeneid, books seven through twelve,
and in them you're going to fight your war again, another Vietnam...
Annalee Newitz is the Cumaean Sybil.
Speaking of having a theory, I wrote more of "Existence and
Uniqueness". This is starting to remind me of my collage
(which I started about a year ago), a private creative project
which I always mention in my diary that I'm continuing to work on.
Slightly edited from a post by Daniel Wang to peacefire-technical:
Did we also mention PanGo and GlobalTrack's customer tracking system?
In fact, over 2000 malls in the US have installed their marketing and sales
lead system that will allow them to detect and track transponder signals
from cell phones, PDAs, and anything that is enabled with WAP, 802.11b,
Bluetooth, CDMA, or GDMA.
Guess what? They're already working on getting the station to read phone and
PDA serial numbers too, so they can track where YOU specifically go every
single time you visit the mall.
Oh look, by the year 2010, it's estimated that almost everyone will have
some sort of wireless device, whether it's a Proximity card or a cell phone
or a satellite dish. Welcome to real-world persistent solid-state client
identifiers, or in other words, real-world cookies. Bum bum bum!
... there are some downsides to devices which easily and automatically
interoperate with other devices, aren't there?
My arms have gotten quite sore again.
I sent a letter to Linuxcare about my severance agreement.
I went to the chiropractor.
Tomorrow, I was
going
to go to HSC, but now
I'm
not.
I finished Stand on Zanzibar. The book's title is an allusion
to the overpopulation theme -- the idea is that at the start of the book,
the huge human species is still small enough to "stand on Zanzibar"
together, if, for some reason, it wanted to. But by the end, there are
too many people to hope for this.
Brunner predicted a lot of things that would happen, and many of
them correctly (one which comes to mind is subcutaneous contraceptives).
I'm ashamed that I forgot that Annalee Newitz was the author of the somewhat
infamous piece
"If
code is free, why not me?".
(I shouldn't have forgotten because many of the people she interviewed for
that piece are friends of mine.)
She wrote
When programmers see that software production is dramatically improved
in a shared, non-competitive, free environment, wouldn't it be natural
for them to apply what they've learned from coding to what they
practice in their everyday lives -- including their sex lives? And the
logical extension of free and open-source software in the realm of sex
would certainly include publicly shared sex at a sex party, for
instance, alternative ways of building relationships (such as queer
sexuality) and non-monogamy (or, to put it another way,
non-proprietary sexual affection).
To me, this was an incredible non sequitur, truly a bizarre conclusion.
"Wouldn't it be natural"? Perhaps if people thought that sex (or romance;
see yesterday's entry) was like writing code, it would. I have many
concerns with "If code is free...".
One is that perhaps the free software world as we know it here in San
Francisco is too self-consciously "alternative". (I'd defend my beard,
though.) I would hardly begrudge San Francisco its culture and its
supposed radical tolerance: to the extent that they're real (which I don't
think seems true to everybody), they're not only virtuous but also really
aid the quality of life out here. On the other hand, does free software
necessarily find its strongest roots in "liberal" places? Does it have to?
The people I know, and most of those who might be reading this, are
generally free software geeks -- and sometimes I have to remember what
a small minority that is, when I go somewhere else and find that not
only is it not difficult to find Windows users, it's hard to find a
Linux user most places.
But when I read that proprietary software is "traditional", I wince.
So many articles speak about "the traditional proprietary software model"
and "traditional proprietary software development" and "traditionally,
users didn't have access to source code". This is all nonsense, as
you can learn by reading Levy's Hackers or by talking to
some. Free software is traditional.
For years at the beginning of computing, virtually all users had
complete source code for all the programs they used, and almost nobody
bought code from "vendors" under NDAs or EULAs. Many programs
were developed by some virtuosi and often with the help of user
community contributions.
There was a serious controversy -- when computers and software had already
been around and actively used for years by business users and hobbyists
alike -- about whether or not software would be copyrightable
at all! It was up in the air, and the public policy came down in
favor of the advocates of software copyright. Software copyright is
a new invention, much newer than software itself.
I've heard the argument in some detail from Nick Moffitt
(e.g. $7 Tours)
and from Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning Was the Command Line)
that the proprietary software industry had to be invented, to the dismay
of some traditionalists, who found it strange.
Stephenson suggests that the greatest thing Bill Gates ever
invented was the idea of selling programs in boxes to end users;
software had never been distributed that way before, and it took
an effort to convince consumers they were getting something for their
money this way. (I've also argued in several places that
this step led to the error of thinking of programs as appliances
rather than as literary works, which has made it easier for
so many people to believe that software shouldn't
have first amendment protection.)
As someone sympathetic to the argument that free software has
roots in academic and scientific traditions of open publication and
collaborative research -- traditions which have been eroded
in the scientific world itself, but which many people are trying
to rehabilitate --
I think that free software is not some recent innovation, but that proprietary
software may be the anomaly.
To the extent that free software isn't a strange new innovation,
there's no reason it should only be favored by the
young and "alternative". I don't see why free software
shouldn't be relevant to everybody, whether or not you go to
monthly sex parties.
I just don't like this suggestion that, if you like free software,
you must be very unconventional and open-minded and...
Are there really correlations like this, that the
"early adopters" of something are going to be "early adopters" of
other things, too?
On the other hand, why is it that free software has caught on
so wildly out here and not as much in other places? Is there
such a thing as a generic conservatism or its opposite?
All this makes me think that it's quite clear that libertarian thought
can be conceived as an attack on political authority per se and
not
on traditional values. This is a strong distinction between libertarianism
and some other radical movements which also advocated lifestyle
freedom: some movements actually suggested either that they knew of
better ways to live than traditional ones, or that the traditional ways
were corrupt or stifling or limiting.
Although some libertarians do certainly diverge in significant cultural
or lifestyle ways from traditional norms or mainstream ideals, many
don't. (I should also point out here that drug use is no longer
"alternative" in many circles, if it ever was.)
So on the one hand you have the movements that say "The old traditions
and values are bankrupt" or "We don't want to live within the old traditions
and values" or "We see a way that we prefer to live", and actually do something
to put these beliefs in practice,
making real lifestyle changes or conducting concrete experiments in
"alternative" social organizations or family structures or romantic or
sexual behavior -- or at least advocating specific, concrete choices
along these lines. (People forming communes and utopias or even
barter networks count; the most direct heirs of the 19th-century
Georgists and individualist anarchists, who create private currencies
like the Itacha Hour or land trusts do, too.)
On the other hand are people who don't necessarily have any specific
grievance that relates to their own lives, or don't have any theories
that they consider generally beneficial -- but who are interested in
arguments about social pressures or about political authority in
general. I am obviously much more in that category most of the time,
although I have my flirtations with the other. I think the issue is
not that there is some other way I would actually prefer to live
(using drugs, having a plural marriage, living or working in a commune
or collective) but just that the obstacles which have been created
for people who choose these things are inappropriate.
This is slightly different from the contrast discussed in Murray
Bookchin's interesting book Social Anarchism or Lifestyle
Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. One of Bookchin's several
points is that there is a difference between political activists
(notably in anarchist movements) who have a positive program for
how society can be better and for what they want to change, and between
activists or enthusiasts who simply want lifestyle freedom for its
own sake. Bookchin strongly prefers those who have a social program
and want to change things in what he sees as deep rather than superficial
ways.
The connection between the opposition I'm talking about -- the practical
versus the theoretical, or the concrete versus the political
-- and the one Bookchin describes -- the substantive versus the
cosmetic -- is that it's possible to see politics as cosmetic and
not what's really important or what people really care about.
When I've talked about politics, I often
say that what's really fundamentally wrong with the state is the
bogus theoretical claims about sovereignty or legitimate authority,
the idea that legislation has a connection to right and wrong beyond
being perhaps the considered opinion of legislators. One interesting
thing is that nowadays a lot of people who aren't libertarians or
anarchists or anything don't actually even believe in the metaphysical
notion of legitimate state sovereignty: they see a Realpolitik
in which governments are immensely powerful actors who espouse
some worthwhile ideals and have some measure of accountability. Therefore
the idea is to try to influence the states toward good. The whole
question of finding an essential nature of the state or of assessing
the legitimacy of states or state actions seems irrelevant to many
people. These people are certainly among those who believe that
politics as such is cosmetic, and that it's important to pay attention
to the substantive things that people care about: politics is then one
method of influencing the application of power on substantive questions
to promote certain causes or interests. (Was it in Stand on
Zanzibar that the line appeared about a hungry man thinking
freedom was a full rice bowl, and not caring about whether he could
vote for a political delegate?)
I've already said somewhere that Bookchin would place me and most
people who think more or less as I do in the "lifestyle" camp
and would even suspect me of limiting my complaints to "things
that do not matter much":
Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much.
That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is
the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing
order.
(West Virginia State
Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943))
(If you've never read Barnette, please do. Aside from being
fascinating reading, and raising points which come up again in much more
recent legal controversies, it directly protected one of my great heroines
of a few years ago,
MaryKait
Durkee.)
An interesting thing is that I personally don't want to use most of the
freedoms that I think everyone should have. (Is there any way of
quantifying that? Is that just an idle guess?) I have mentioned drugs
before; I'm fortunate that in the offline world I rarely notice the
infringements on my freedom which I have to practice to complain about.
(Many people are not so lucky, inside and outside of the United States.)
Back to my main topic: some more direct criticism along these lines can
be found in
"The
Libertarian as Conservative" by Bob Black, where, for example, we
read:
They [libertarians] don't
denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This
is why the people most victimized by the state display the least
interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion
don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or
don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called
larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control
your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in
degree and duration.
Black would insist that (unlike libertarians' concerns and issues),
his concerns -- a left-anarchist program for the abolition
of employment and bosses -- actually "touch the heart of the existing
order".
Readers of my diary must have figured out long ago that the theoretical
debates between libertarians and left-anarchists are an endless
fascination of mine. If not, perhaps this entry will reinforce that
idea. One reason for this interest, aside from the occasional
intellectual interest and surprise and excitement that writers
in these two professedly anti-authoritarian traditions can provide, is
that I suspect that one of the two is right. Another is that I'm
not entirely positive which it is.
Many of the debates between the radicals of these two traditions
concern which of the two is really anti-authoritarian, and
which one is actually (perhaps) an authoritarian tradition in
disguise. I have no doubt that either side really thinks of itself
as anti-authoritarian and the other side as mistaken.
The left traditions can mostly lay claim to being the more pragmatic,
although they have no shortage of social and political theory.
Certainly they don't believe that nomina sunt consequentia rerum.
Isn't it amazing that most of the world thinks of this debate as of
almost no consequence? That most people have never heard of it or
think that all sides in it are speaking utopian nonsense?
Sumana, who is interested in politics, mentioned that
Sen. Jeffords switched political parties -- well, at least left the
Republican party and became an "Independent" (nobody has in years
served in the U.S. Senate with an actual party affiliation other than
"Republican" or "Democrat"; how can that be?). And a lot of people of
course thought that this meant that Jeffords had had some insight in his
political philosophy that changed his outlook and made him now disagree
with Republican thought where previously he thought it was correct.
But Jeffords himself denied this:
I have changed my party label, but I have not changed my beliefs.
Indeed, my decision is about affirming the principles that have shaped
my career.
So he says that he was simply mislabeled before as a Republican instead
of an Independent, and now he's correcting this. His beliefs are still
the same!
I wonder what it is that makes people have particular political beliefs,
and not others.
My professor, bless his heart, needs
to get out more often. . . and not out to collect field specimens, either.
Here is a direct quote from him: "It is popular to say that the pollen
grain of the angiosperm evolved to have a three aperture system in the
sporopollinen to ensure that, once the grain has passed through the
integument to the nucellus, at least one aperture will be facing down
towards the egg." Pause to contemplate the blackboard and meaningless
diagrams thereon. "It's a cute story, but I'm afraid that it's only that. .
. . a cute story, the sort of thing you would tell a child at night. People
seem to like it, though." O.K., I don't know what sort of stories you would
tell kids at bedtime, but for me, the evolution of sporopollinen apertures
is not it. Nonetheless, I did record the story, word for word, in my notes
in case I'm hard up for bedtime reading later in life.
(The further wit and wisdom of Helen)
In checking on an epigraph, I once again happened on these lines:
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn't.
(Leonard Cohen, "There is a War")
... and I wrote more of "Existence and Uniqueness". (This is getting to be
just like the old days with my collage.)
I went to Duncan's house on Saturday night, and we worked on getting
the new BBC web server up.
My arms felt quite a bit better through most of Saturday.
On May 27, 1937, the newly completed Golden Gate Bridge connecting San
Francisco and Marin County, Calif., was opened to the public.
Maybe I'll take a trip out to the bridge today, if I feel up to it. This
could be a great day to walk across it for the first time.
So, I'm once again in the situation where a diary entry here documents
the day before. (This one documents Saturday night and Sunday.) That
happens because my software and policy say "only one entry per day",
so if it gets after midnight, an entry shows up the next day and I can't
write a new one for twenty-four hours. There are other possible
inconveniences, too. So this whole entry, one might things, should
be dated "May 27", and
the entry for May 27 should be dated
"May 26", etc.
But this entry is still being posted on May 28, just after midnight.
So that's where the naming thing comes in.
I had a remarkable dream Saturday night in which I was back living in Freeborn
and I had to leave a party somewhere else because I was supposed to go to a
concert back in Freeborn.
Supposedly I was going to sing in a chorus and they were going to perform a
classical piece I knew very well. I wasn't afraid and I didn't feel that
I had to rehearse because I knew it so well -- I thought the situation was
kind of like when I'd gone to that performance of the Messiah
where the audience was invited to join in. For some reason, I'd believed
that it was very informal.
As I went on my way, I saw posters put up on walls with my picture
and advertising that I was going to be a star of this upcoming concert,
and also that the piece of music was a different one by the same composer.
I felt worried.
Reaching the (somehow extremely large) lounge upstairs in Freeborn, I saw
all kinds of people gathered around, and no chorus, and a few instrumentalists.
I looked at a program and saw that I was supposed to be a soloist in a
piece that I had never even heard before. At this point, I got very upset,
because I remembered that I'd agreed to sing in this informal chorus
and all of a sudden these people were saying that I was this great baritone
giving this highly professional, highly formal performance which they
would even advertise on posters!
So I asked somebody in the audience "Hey, what's going on?" and she said
"Look, the members of that religious cult are putting on this performance,
and they insist that everyone should feel happy with everything. So
when you came to that first meeting -- don't you remember?". But I
didn't remember. So she reminded me (and ask she spoke I started to
remember it) how I had arrived and then I'd heard that the piece was a
different one and that they wanted soloists, and I'd said "No thanks"
and gotten up to leave. And at that point all of the members of the cult
who had been at the first meeting were very upset that I was unhappy with
their plans, and they said "Unhappiness is evil" or "Unhappiness is a sin"
or something, and I said "Look, I just don't want to be in your performance
because I don't know that piece and I'm not really an expert singer" and
they said "But bad things happen to people who are unhappy, they are
judged and punished" and I said that I disagreed.
And before I could leave, the people started to say things like "God,
show this person what happens when people are unhappy", and then I
couldn't remember anything after that but apparently a lightning bolt
had smashed through the window and hit me right in my intestines,
and I ended up in a hospital and there had been a newspaper article
about "Student hit by freak lightning strike" and I had become
mildly famous for this. Despite which, I hadn't remembered any of it
until the audience member told me, and I had thought that I was
still going to be a casual performer, while the cult had assumed that
I was going to be a star in a different piece, and had begun putting
up posters and sending out announcements about "Seth Schoen,
baritone" or something.
So as I remembered this, I became quite unhappy, and I started to say,
somewhat loudly, that I had to talk to an organizer of the concert
(in order to say that I couldn't do that solo). No organizer wanted
to talk to me, so I walked over to the pianist, who was trying to
concentrate on playing her music, and said "Hi, I need to talk to
somebody", and she said "About what?" and I started to tell the
story.
She said "You need to talk to that women over there!" and shrugged in
the direction of somebody.
So I found that woman and, as I started to talk to her, I looked out
into the audience and saw that about half of them were wearing huge
crosses which identified them as members of this cult (even though
the cult wasn't actually Christian, I think they liked the cultural
power or acceptance they could get by claiming to be an offshoot of
Christianity). I told her that I had remembered what happened and
that I didn't know this piece and couldn't perform it.
She said "You sound unhappy, and God send bad things to punish those
who are unhappy. Don't you know that? Do you want the people here
to see what God will do to unhappy people?".
At this, I stood up in the center of the stage and gave a speech to
the whole audience. This was a wonderful speech, and which I wish
I could quote. It ran something like
Members of the audience! Perhaps you have heard about the accident
which I suffered at the rehearsal for this concert, when lightning
struck me. And now some of you say that this is punishment for
having been unhappy with the concert program, and that if I persist
in my unhappiness, God will send another punishment like that
against me. I'm here to say that I am unhappy with what has happened
and with the efforts of these concert promoters to force me to
sing this piece for you, a piece I don't know and which I've never
practiced. I am unhappy. But I'm not afraid. I don't think that
God disapproves of my unhappiness, or that he's getting ready with
a lightning bolt to strike me for disapproving.
I don't think God wants me to be in pain. I don't think God wants
me to suspend my judgment. I love my body -- which God gave
me! I love my reason -- which God gave me! And I
can't understand why God gave me those things if not to use them
as my judgment sees best. For that reason, I am not afraid to
say that I have chosen not to perform this piece. I will perform
something else instead and God will see how he approves it.
Whereupon the cult members seemed to begin to pray for more
lightning bolts to strike me (and I was a little bit
afraid), but none did. I rode up and down
the escalators (yeah, that's right, somehow there were even
escalators inside a little upstairs lounge in Freeborn!)
and I improvised my own piece, and the musicians accompanied
me, and the audience loved it.
The author's second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on
the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley 1996) bought this observation
into focus by pointing out that historical frontiers were typically
tamed by displacing property-averse, communitarian, indigenous tribes
(such as the American Indians and the Open Source movement) by
property-conscious, capitalistic newcomers. Although the displacement
of primitive economic systems is devastating to those displaced, the
advanced economic order that follows is ultimately far more productive
and capable than the primitive economic system that preceded it.
(Brad Cox, mybank.dom)
Gee, I know I always like to promote my business plans by comparing
them to genocide...
Today I remembered a cartoon that my Greek class in high school drew for
our Greek teacher when she and my Latin teacher were in a car accident
in 1997. It showed three men, who were represented as stick figures. They
were identified with captions: ho Achilleus, ho Ioannes, and ho Dikaiopolis.
The things they carried were a sword, a bottle of water, and a plow;
these were captioned "to ksiphos", "to hudor", and "to aratron", and
all three were smiling, except for Achilles, whose frown was captioned
"he menis". John also had a halo over his head, which I think was not
captioned. This cartoon is probably the funniest thing I have ever
helped draw, except it's not very funny if you haven't studied ancient
Greek.
There was a big "Carnaval" parade on 24th Street all morning, which
was strange because it wasn't actually Carnaval.
Sunday was the birthday of the Golden Gate Bridge. In honor of that
fact, Zack and I went out to the bridge and walked across to Marin
County and back. Some observations:
- It's very long. (30 minutes to walk across!)
- It's a very impressive accomplishment. (If you look straight up,
you can see how big it really is, which is difficult to appreciate from far
away.)
- It's very beautiful.
- It's very cold and windy. (We wore warm clothes.)
- It's very scary (thinking about earthquakes, looking down through
the cracks at the ocean below).
- It's very orange, even the wastebaskets and fire extinguishers
and telephones and toilets and plaques and everything.
- It's pretty foggy, even up close, but not as much as Pacific
Heights at night.
- A lot of people visit, some from very far away, but few seem
to know that the birthday of the bridge is May 27. (There is a
plaque which mentions this, but you have to walk all the way out to the
middle of the bridge to read it.)
- They allow pedestrians and bikes, unlike the Bay Bridge.
(There are some people
who would like other bridges to follow this example.)
(It was the bridge's 64th birthday. It's looking well, still a healthy
international orange glow...)
After we walked across, I felt kind of sick. I was exposed to something
recently, but it's not really clear to me whether I caught it or
whether I was just feeling funny for some other reason. I'll keep
paying attention and try to figure out whether I'm really sick.
Notwithstanding the possibility that I might not really be
sick, I walked most of the way home instead of taking a bus or
a cab. (Yeah, other people take a cab if they feel sick, and
walk if they feel OK. I take a cab if I feel OK, and walk if I
feel sick. This is to avoid any possible motion sickness effects
or general anxiety from being in a vehicle when I don't feel
well. It worked well; I walked from somewhere out on
Lombard -- west of Van Ness -- to the Civic Center BART
station, and actually felt much better from the fresh air and
exercise. At least, that's how it seems at the moment.)
Zack made a lot of progress on the new LNX-BBC project web site.
I got a Mouser Electronics
catalogue in the mail.
My arms felt messed up again.
Zack and I went to Berkeley. We ate lunch there and were heading back
to the City when we ran into
Brian and his friend
on Shattuck; this was unexpected, as it's been a while.
Later on, Zack continued to do a lot of work on the LNX-BBC web site.
My arms really hurt today; maybe going to the chiropractor tomorrow will
help again.
(I'm also planning to go the EFF tomorrow, if possible. I don't know
what I'll be working on; there's also a chance that I won't be able to
make it, but I hope I'll be able to start there tomorrow.)
I really need to keep a health diary
like
Biella's software will
eventually facilitate. Then I could tell whether things are
actually getting better or worse, or, maybe, what helps or hurts to
a particularly significant degree.
I probably have been typing more in the past week than I had a while,
partly on account of writing such a long narrative poem.
I always forget when Memorial Day is.
But Memorial Day was Monday, and I tried to remember things and people
and places.
Ten of twelve books, 4,000 lines, 35,000 words.
But how and where is this story going to end?
There's something missing on a Risk board. Oh, yeah! The Pacific
Ocean.
I translated my word
ladder program from awk into Python. It's dramatically
slower in Python!
I went to see the chiropractor, and then I went to have some dinner
downtown, by the Embarcadero. Then I caught a bus to get home, but
it was the 14X instead of 14, and I read a newspaper along the way,
and missed my stop and ended up along the side of the freeway
somewhere between downtown and Daly City. Oops.
So I thought I'd walk north until I recognized something; the first
thing I recognized was Folsom Street (thanks to the street sign
informing me that this was the end of Folsom Street, something I'd never
seen before). After I walked a few blocks up Folsom, I realized
that I was in Bernal Heights, and I knew where I was.
Accordingly, I walked up Bernal Hill, sat down on top and wrote a
letter to Wolfgang for a couple of hours, and then walked down the
other side and home.
The view from Bernal Hill is certainly the best I've seen
from anywhere in San Francisco yet.
Later, Zack and I tried to clean up.
My arms felt a bit better.
I didn't work on "Existence and Uniqueness" at all today! Except that
I did look up another epigraph for it.
I made some changes to my diary script so that I now mention people who
have linked to this diary.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
