I had a lot of dreams Saturday night, and I remember that they were very
interesting, but I don't remember exactly what happened.
Several of the dreams involved playing various kinds of games with large
groups of people at what were apparently parties. I think that, in each
case, I didn't know most of the people at the parties, but I always knew
at least one or two, and there were extensive sub-plots concerning my
interactions with those people. One game was played outdoors at night by
candlelight or firelight, and I wandered around or wandered off with a small
group of people to have some sort of conversation I don't remember.
I want to give more of the story on one of the things that happened on
Saturday, but I'm still trying to figure out how to phrase it.
I went to a protest march which started at the 24th and Mission BART
station and proceeded along Mission to Dolores Park. It was certainly
the biggest protest I've ever been in; I guess there were at least
several hundred people. I was uncomfortable with some portions of the
event, and that's the part I'd like to write more about.
I was very sedentary all day. I talked to a few people on the phone and ate
some food and cleaned up a bit.
Zack showed me Raymond Smullyan's book of retrograde analysis chess problems.
It's an interesting area, partly because you don't need to know anything
about chess strategy to solve these problems. As Smullyan says, you assume
not that a player has played well, but that the player has played legally.
In some retrograde analysis problems, the players would actually have to
co-operate to achieve the position you see! (That's also the case with the
Fool's Mate.)
I wrote to Ilya Vasilyev to point out that most people in the world are older
than their local copyright legislation. It seems that he's over a decade
older than software copyright in his home country. :-)
lnx-bbc.org (unlike vitanuova and other sites) is being attacked by the
Nimda worm several times per minute. Yikes! It's a good
thing we're running Apache and not IIS.
You can learn a lot about the relationships between companies -- and to
some extent about their business plans -- with a quick
TESS search and a little judicious
use of whois. If you don't know how to use whois, you're missing out.
With partial thanks to Leonard: "Deictics to Watch Out For"
