Definition of "prime"
To yesterday's "prime(x)" we would need to prepend "x!=1 and".
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I took up Martin Pool's long-time recommendation and bought a copy of the CD Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor!, whose name, like Yahoo!'s, contains an exclamation point (according to some people's typographical conventions). It is actually a two-CD set. Parts of it seem very good to me. I still haven't paid enough attention to the second CD, but I really enjoyed the first.
It appears that you can find Godspeed You Black Emperor on the net.
Thanks for going CD-shopping with me, Brita!
I had a bit of a "this day in history" experience while writing a letter in the Logan airport. (I got home OK and am refraining from writing Yet Another Airport Security Commentary in my diary for the time being. If I don't stop myself, I will write something about airport security every single time I get on an airplane, which will be often). Leonard's diary does this for him automatically, and I think that's what prompted Sumana to mention that she met him a year ago.
Thanks to my own web diary, I can look up some of what I was up to a year ago. I was still working for Linuxcare, and I thought that too obvious to mention. I had just written a poem called "Tenebra Appropinquante: A Year 2000 Problem", which I still have and have still not published. (That poem, in turn, looked back at what I was doing in early January 2000, now two years ago.) I was working on a great hardware project (a 480-watt 7-segment incandescent digital display, which was used in counting down to the new year). I received some powerful electrical shocks because I worked on telephone and lighting systems with live current without wearing gloves. My arm injuries were very troubling and very different from what they are today (numbness rather than shoulder pain, for example).
You could try browsing my web diary from a year ago to see what I thought was worth sharing at that point. I hadn't begun this diary (vitanuova), so everything there is originally taken from Advogato.
Mailing a couple of postcards, I flew to San Francisco from Logan via Midway on ATA (famous for being cheap and also for being the only U.S. airline whose name is a Hayes modem command). Midway seems extremely lame and boring compared to O'Hare. For one thing, all the concessions are run by the same company! So for example you might see five shops which sell sandwiches and drinks, but each of the shops is selling exactly the same sandwiches and drinks. At O'Hare, there are artworks on display, there are several different restaurants (although I didn't actually find any I was extremely enthusiastic about), and there's more of a variety of things other than terminals. When you have to spend some hours inside a building waiting, that's helpful.
I promised to forego the security discussion, so I will.
On the planes, I took a nap, and watched most of Along Came a Spider without sound (amazing how you can still understand it -- I once watched The Hot Zone without sound on an airplane and similarly managed to understand it). The only tricky part was the occasional plot twist, because sometimes the details are explained only through dialogue. I also read most of The Fellowship of the Ring, after buying a paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings in an airport bookstore at Midway.
It was amazing that the airport bookstore had almost no books I wanted to buy. Practically everything was either recent novels (trade paperback, mainly mass-market mysteries and thrillers and romances) or self-help or tips for business executives. Is that really all that bookstores sell to "regular people"? I noticed that there were no technical books and no non-fiction about anything (nothing narrative, nothing polemical, nothing historical or critical). What's up with that?
Right before my trip, I bought Bamford's Body of Secrets, which is his updated book about the NSA. So now I have both The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets and am strangely unenthusiastic about reading either one. Maybe I have soaked up too much NSA history and passed into a cypherpunk mode in which I only want to hear about contemporary legal and technical issues in privacy and surveillance. On the other hand, one thing that's irritating about many cypherpunks is their lack of knowledge of history -- so I should be sure to avoid the trap of paying attention to the present day to the exclusion of the past.
Contact: Seth David Schoen