Vitanuova for 2001 August 17

Monday

I discovered that my pager had been set to the Las Vegas roaming area, from when I went to DEF CON, which is why I haven't gotten any pages in almost a month. Oops.

A juxtaposition

You can't eat bits.

(various critics of cryptoanarchy)

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

(Matthew 4:4 (KJV))

(The Straight Dope addresses whether man can really live on bread alone.)

BBC

Twenty-four hours of work at Duncan's house! (Well, sleeping again, sometimes.)

This is a good BBC.

Tuesday and Wednesday

Was there a Tuesday? We kept working on the BBC, and I visited Michelle and Lia in the evening. The BBC was shipped to Hong Kong. These days are a bit of a blur for me; my sleep schedule was severely disrupted by that BBC work. It always seems to be perfected at the last minute.

Thursday

I had a chiropractic appointment and received "permanent and stationary" status.

I had a very nice job interview at EFF. In the evening, Duncan and I gave an enjoyable talk at BayLISA -- it was kind of rambling, but we had a nice time and got to mention a lot of cool features of the Bootable Business Card. It seems that sysadmins are impressed and enthusiastic.

One guy wanted to buy me a beer to thank me for working on the BBC. He settled for buying me a root beer. A number of people congratulated me on the project and said it was indispensable for their work. I also received a nice t-shirt with the pink "Bay LISA" logo. Now all sysadmins everywhere will be jealous. (As I know somebody named Lisa who lives in the Bay Area, I think it would be amusing to send her a shirt like that. I don't know whether she'd want it.)

I also got to announce that I was hired as EFF's Staff Technologist.

While demonstrating the new BBC, I had the sense that it was something that people in the audience really wanted and really needed. How pleasant!

I had dinner with a crowd including Karsten Self and Roger Gregory (that Roger Gregory). As you might expect, we talked a lot about DRM.

Science and the Useful Arts

Karsten is up late, too, after that meeting, and he wrote:

Note that "Science" ~1784 pertained to "general knowledge", including what we'd consider literature and other artistic works. "Useful arts" refers to "artifices" -- science or technology in today's vernacular. "Science and the useful arts" in the Constitution has almost the reverse of the apparent contemporary meaning. We'd probably phrase it today as "knowledge, culture, and applied technology".

From the 1913 Webster's definition:

The ancients reckoned seven sciences, namely, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy; -- the first three being included in the Trivium, the remaining four in the Quadrivium.

And, for art:

The employment of means to accomplish some desired end; the adaptation of things in the natural world to the uses of life; the application of knowledge or power to practical purposes.

Cheers.