Vitanuova for 2002 February
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I learned how to use nested scopes. It's too bad that Python didn't have them before! As explained at http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html,

Python Pre-2.1 did not have lexical scopes. In Python before version 2.1 there were only two variable scopes per module: global scope and function scope. In Python 2.1, released in April 2001, if you do "from __future__ import nested_scopes", you add a third scope, block nested scope. In Python 2.2, this is the default behavior. Without nested scopes you are allowed to nest a function definition (or a lambda) within another, but the inner function can only reference global variables, not the variables of the outer function.

I taught another Python class at EFF. It's a lot of fun to teach people to program in Python.

Using my logic gates code, and assuming you start with BITS=3, you can do things like 

> >>> xor_gate = gate(150)
> >>> print xor_gate[(0, 1, 1)]
> 0
> >>> xor = lambda x: xor_gate[x]
> >>> print map(xor, map(binary_tuple, range(8)))
> [0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1]

A huge amount is known about Boolean functions, and I don't know most of it.

I found Cox's conjecture very interesting: the hardest-to-realize Boolean function of n variables using AND and OR (and starting with the values and their complements) is the n-input XOR. This seems very plausible, but I don't know how to prove it.

I'm sure PLD people are still studying efficient ways of realizing Boolean truth tables.

The AT&T telemarketers are really persistent, and don't seem to keep any record of whom they spoke to, or when, or what they heard. So I've personally gotten over a dozen calls from them. And I've now explained for the third time that we don't have a default long-distance carrier at all, and we select one each time we want to make a long-distance call. So therefore we aren't willing to adopt AT&T or anyone else as our default carrier.

However often I explain that, and also talk about VarTec's lower-than-AT&T long distance rates, AT&T keeps calling me back as though they've never spoken with me before.

"The most important thing we want to do is be true to our own values in football, which we believe are the values reflected and brought to bear more broadly in our society," he said.

(NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue)

It's been a long time since I experienced the wonders of seismology puns, but this appeared in Sumana's diary:

Matt told us that one could drive to Half Moon Bay to cross from one tectonic plate to another. I asked whether he enjoys doing that. "Yes," he said. "To a fault."

Happy Groundhog Day.

The real and imaginary parts of impedance are called resistance and reactance while the real and imaginary parts of admittance (the reciprocal of impedance) are called conductance and susceptance.

(Jon B. Hagen, Radio Frequency Electronics: Circuits and Applications)

Maybe I should go back to college.

Later on, Hagen says:

Digital processing of the IF signal makes it possible to realize any desired filter amplitude and phase response. Good performance requires sufficient processing power (available in general-purpose digital signal processor (DSP) chips) and high-speed high-resolution analog-to-digital converters. The prospoed standard for advanced television (ATV) requires substantial digital processing at the receiver, not only for obviously digital tasks (decoding, etc.) but also for signal processing, such as adaptive multipath signal cancellation.

Some people seem still not to believe this today!

... you write to Rachel and she responds, so to speak, by turning up in your supermarket forty minutes later.

... or when you have a dream about Wolfgang and she wakes you up by calling you.

Seen in an old edu-sig post:

"We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors." - Bruce Joyce

(quoted by Jeffrey Elkner, who attributes it to the book Discovering Geometry)

He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not.

Richard Stallman, in Open Sources

slashdot had a link to an interesting piece about space elevators (which I'm used to calling orbital towers). It seems that they might be feasible.

If you had to climb to LEO under your own power -- as by walking up stairs -- but you could rest at any point -- it would take under four years, assuming that you could climb the height of the Empire State Building each day. Food, oxygen, and restrooms are serious problems, as is temperature -- considering how difficult it is to climb Mt. Everest, which is just about 2% of the way to LEO. But it would be very rewarding! You could climb up the tower, coming out there other end, so to speak, four years older, much stronger, very hungry, and receiving an "I climbed most of the way out of the Earth's potential well and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" or "I gave myself 400 megajoules of gravitational potential energy and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" or "I accelerated myself into low Earth orbit and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" shirt.

(OK, so that 400 megajoules calculation is bogus -- it's based on multiplying the minimum energy used to climb the Empire State Building by the ratio between an estimate of LEO height and the Empire State Building's height. Since the Earth's gravity falls off as you get higher, though, it's actually much easier as you go -- so you could climb faster and with less energy expenditure and acquire less potential energy. I should do the integral and found out how much energy you actually store.)

On a more serious technical note, there was an interesting claim that you can use measurements of gzip's compression efficiency on various files in order to detect, in a statistically significant way, what language and document type they are, and even who wrote them. I got several e-mail messages about this result, but I haven't found a good link to a good explanation of it yet. If I see a link, I'll link to it. But that's an interesting claim, and it goes on to say something like "you can identify individual authors based on how well gzip compresses their works" (so we could just look at the sizes of federalist.1.txt.gz, federalist.2.txt.gz, etc., to sort out the authorship controversy?).

I tried running something like 

#!/usr/bin/python

compression_level = 9
import zlib, sys

results = {}

def entropy(s):
	# return zlib's estimate of the compression efficiency of s
	# (measured in bits per character)
	return len(zlib.compress(s, compression_level))*8.0/len(s)

for i in sys.argv[1:]:
	try:
		e = entropy(open(i,"r").read())
		results[e] = i
	except:
		pass

k = results.keys()
k.sort()
for i in k:
	print ("%.6f"%i), results[i]

and nothing jumped out at me.

In completely separate Python news, Python threads seem very easy to use. Maybe I'll write some multithreaded programs soon.

I thought this discussion in my draft recursion appendix for my Python class 4 handout came out well:

There's a common saying in programming that recursion has to have a "base case" (to prevent an infinite loop). Some people interpret this to mean that there must be a number which gets smaller all the time and a different rule to handle the situation when that number reaches the "bottom". This view of recursion is somewhat too narrow; if you think of recursion as a loop, or as a trip through an enchanted forest, the point is simply that, if you don't want to stay there forever, there must be some way out, and you must be able to reach the way out. We don't necessarily have to say what the way out _is_. It doesn't necessarily have to be a "number always getting smaller"; maybe a fairy shows up and waves a magic wand, or maybe you find a door in the side of a stone, or climb a tree and are carried away by an eagle, or fall through a trap door and end up somewhere else entirely. The point is just that there should be a way out. And, if you want to get out, you should come to it eventually.

It's true that the most common recursion examples do use a variable which gets constantly smaller (or constantly larger), or a sequence type whose _size_ gets constantly smaller. But this form is not an absolute requirement. There are good reasons to write recursive code where the objects you're dealing with may well grow _and_ shrink, perhaps many times, before you've reached the end. (One common example is a queue technique, where you have a sort of to-do list. You won't be done until the to-do list is empty, but you may well add and remove things many times before you're done. Furthermore, the act of doing one thing on the to-do list may well involve adding other sub-tasks to the end of the list, so that the list actually appears to get longer, much as your room may temporarily become messier while you're re-organizing it.) There are even, in principle, sometimes good reasons in computer science to write recursive functions which don't necessarily terminate at all. You just wouldn't want to call them in an actual program with input which makes them loop forever, or you'll be waiting a long time for the results.

I had some success with udon noodles, shichimi togarashi, curry powder, green curry paste, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, basil, bamboo shoots, baby corn, and sesame seeds. Problems: too much shichimi togarashi or curry paste, too little time cooking the bamboo shoots and corn. Also, I didn't have any tofu. But the teriyaki-shichimi togarishi-curry combination is pretty nice. It seems like some of the best-tasting sauce/spice combinations involve something sweet (hoisin sauce, teriyaki sauce, the House of Tsang stir-fry sauce) together with something spicy (curry or chilis).

I had no idea that the people killed in that plane crash were so young. According to 20 Past Midnight: 

  1959: Buddy Holly dies at age 22
  1959: Richie Valens dies at age 17
  1959: The Big Bopper died (all three in the same plane crash)

I wrote this helpful Googlewhacking code, which should assist you in automating your Googlewhacking searches.

(However, Gary Stock "consider[s] it unsportsmanlike; Google may consider it illegal". I didn't think of that before writing this.)

You can also use this module as a start to a Python equivalent of the Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. But my module is a quick hack; it's not elegant robust portable. 

#!/usr/bin/python

"""google module by Seth Schoen.
Defines method matches(L), which, given a list L of strings,
returns the number of hits for the search terms represented by
the elements of L which Google suspects would exist.

For example, google.matches[("superstitiores", "suadere"]) equals 1."""

import sys, urllib, string

def extract(line):
	n = string.find(line, "Results")
	o = string.find(line, "seconds.") + len("seconds.")
	return line[n:o]

def n(line):
	# A regular expression would be much nicer here!
	# Maybe it would be more reliable, too.
	e = extract(line)
	for repetition in range(2):
		n = string.find(e, "</b>") + len("</b>")
		e = e[n:]
	n = string.find(e, "<b>") + len("<b>")
	o = string.find(e, "</b>")
	return int(filter(lambda x:x in "0123456789", e[n:o]))

def contains(line, phrase):
	return string.find(line, phrase)>-1

def matches(terms):
	search = "http://www.google.com/search?q="
	search = search + string.join(terms, "+")
	for line in urllib.urlopen(search).readlines()
		if contains(line, "Results "):
			if contains(line, "Search took"):
				return n(line)
				break
	else:
		return 0

if __name__ == "__main__":
	x = sys.argv[1:]
	print x, matches(x)

The entire Linux kernel source will be read by a machine over an Internet radio station. There is something very interesting about this; it reminds me of the sort of clever and original thing that we imagine happened in the past "before the assimilation of x to private enterprise". (This kind of phrase is a sort of meta-Leonardonics.)

I took the 12 Folsom out and had a huge lunch at the India Garden on Folsom, then walked in a loop to Trader Joe's and Rainbow, and caught the 12 Folsom back home. This led to my finding out experimentally where the DNA Lounge is, which is good to know because I'm hoping to go to CodeCon later this month.

Now I have a large case of soymilk and some other food items, and I'm extremely full. And I got a big box of Next to Godliness laundry detergent, which should last over a year. (I've never managed to use up one of those boxes; I always moved before it was gone, or lost it, or gave it away!)

There's an antiquarian book fair coming up in San Francisco next weekend.

There's an interesting article mentioned in (East Bay) Zack's diary about Richard Register. Maybe I will pick up those Jane Jacobs books and start trying to get a perspective on city planning. Some of the most interesting people I know are architects.

"People found the city because they love other people."

(Dar Williams, "Mortal City")

Register thinks that cities should be dense and small, so that people can use public transit and so that they won't sprawl and consume lots of land area.

It's interesting to think about different factors which have environmental impacts (and also affect the cost of living in a city, and the subjective feeling, and the appearance and culture of the city). So one thing is how much land is used; another is how the land is used; another is whether people have to drive; another is how fast the transportation is; another (stressed by Jane Jacobs, I remember) is how well commingled different kinds of things are.

One nice thing about the Mission District is that there are restaurants, supermarkets, laundromats, and similar things near my home. That means that I don't need to drive or even take transit to get to those things. But that doesn't mean that the Mission is particularly dense or that it's laid out the way Richard Register might prefer.

Jeff Waugh's signature points out that, because GDK stands for GTK Drawing Kit and GTK stands for GIMP Tool Kit and GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix, GDK is an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool-Kit Drawing-Kit".

I continued my tradition of sending long letters to women. Since 1997, I have sent at least 400 pages in just seven letters to women (and I suspect that the true number is closer to 500 pages). That's far from all of my letters to women in that period, and only includes paper, not e-mail.

Someone might suspect from the lengths and genders involved that many of these were love letters, but as far as I can tell, only one of those I mentioned was meant that way.

And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time.

(1 Kings 18:34 (KJV))

I remember, two years ago, making a digression from one very important conversation into another. The second conversation pertained to a trend toward technology products which were hard to understand or modify, and a culture which had begun to stigmatize understanding and improving technology (instead of praising it as creative or innovative). I'm working on a concept now which I think summarizes this trend and others, and I'm thinking about the idea of "guild freedoms". More on this later, I think.

Zack took me to Ti Couz.

In a conversation about Darren Lo, I mentioned The World's Most Complicated Card Trick.

I went to a CalLUG meeting where there was a presentation by these people (Springbox) which was actually among the best presentations I've ever seen at a CalLUG meeting. (I hadn't heard of Springbox before, and I thought it might be "yet another product pitch" -- but it was actually extremely technical.) Maybe I was just biased because there was actual Python code in the presentation.

My impression is that the people behind Springbox are brilliant people with an excellent technology, very much work experimenting with and holding great promise. On the other hand, they seem to think like 1964-era MIT AI enthusiasts: they have the sense that if only we can collect and formalize enough facts about language in a gigantic database, we will produce software which actually has common sense and understands the real world. They do have a very powerful infrastructure for collecting many people's insights about many languages used in many different domains, within a single distributed database which collects syntax, semantics, and empirical facts under one roof. This doesn't mean that it can solve the problems of AI and understand the world!

The technology behind this project has been updated a bit from 1964, so there's Python, regular expressions, recursive descent parsing, object orientation, inheritance, polymorphism, modern computational linguistics techniques, symbol versioning, cryptographic signing, and even a peer-to-peer file sharing network. No kidding. And they've found legitimate uses for all these things, so they aren't just buzzwords. That might be the most impressive part of all.

I do want to take a look at this and maybe try writing some functions, er, symbols within their scheme, to see if I can attack some real problem. The syntactic stuff also reminds me a little bit of the declarative logic programming languages from SICP; I remember using pattern matching in Scheme to do a little phrase structure grammar thing back when I took CS61A (this is why everyone at Berkeley ought to take Ling 5 and CS61A at the same time -- two great tastes that go great together), but regular expressions from PCRE are SO MUCH MORE EFFICIENT than the pattern language in the toy database system they create in Scheme as an example in SICP.

I then pestered the speaker with lots of questions about how you would teach the Springbox system to understand Latin (word inflections, flexible word order, irregular verb conjugations and noun declensions), and he answered those very capably, showing that he'd really thought extensively about how to parse natural languages through formal methods. Then I spent a long time trying to Wake (him) Up From The Boolean Dream.

After that lecture, I went to Blake's with some people to see Sumana perform stand-up comedy (along with a few professionals who opened for her). She's really very funny, and I had a nice time, even waiting through the professionals' acts (many more jokes about drugs and sex, but wow, that bagel joke made my week).

French and Indian War, groan, snicker, these young upstarts who actually know something about history and politics... there need to be fewer drunk people in the audience.

Happy birthday to BookFinder.com.

My mom says that the "Forgotten New York" web site shows what I looked at when I was a baby (note, not what I looked like): Hunts Lane in Brooklyn.

Darn, after I said that the comedian made my week with his comment about liking bagels, Peter Junger goes and makes my week again:

It's not so much a matter of believing them as estopping them.

Mary Gardiner has a new policy for her diary. (I've never tried writing a diary policy; maybe I should create a List of the Terms of Service Under Which this Content is Provided to You.) The problem she mentions is an interesting one. I remember that Phil Agre was very unhappy about the Wayback Machine when I mentioned it to him. People who have been Internet users for a long time will be surprised, perhaps unpleasantly, when other people start to learn "ancient history" about their beliefs, activities, or lives.

I decided to draft a Terms of Service for the use of this diary. What do you think?

If I keep reading boing boing, I will have no free time left at all. But Google is having a programming contest where you can get a chance to win the use of your program on the actual Google archive.

Wednesday, on my way to work, I proved that n-input NAND is universal and also that n-input NOR is universal.

Given an n-input NAND, use NAND(x,x,x,...) to get NOT(x). Now use NOT(NAND(a,b,c,...)) to get n-input AND, and NAND(NOT(a,b,c,...)) to get n-input OR. You can get 1 and 0 in various ways, including NAND(x,x,x,...,NOT(x)) or AND(x,x,x,...,NOT(x)). You can get 2-input AND via AND(a,b,1,1,1...), and 2-input OR via OR(a,b,0,0,0,...). With two-input AND, two-input OR, NOT, and n-input AND, it's straightforward to implement any truth table by brute force.

You just write a sum of products, which is to say you start with an enclosing OR (you can get a 2^n input OR by cascading n-input ORs and applying 1 to any unused inputs), and apply it to a series of terms, each of which is an n-input AND which produces a 1 if and only if a condition corresponding to a particular truth table row is met.

For example, with two-input NAND, the brute force implementation of XOR, which has the truth table 

A B  result
-----------
0 0  0  ("AND(NOT(A), NOT(B))")
0 1  1  ("AND(NOT(A), B)")
1 0  1  ("AND(A, NOT(B)")
0 0  0  ("AND(A, B)")

will be OR(AND(NOT(A), B), AND(A, NOT(B))). This kind of synthesis should be familiar to anyone who has ever done synthesis from a truth table using AND and OR gates.

The brute force implementation of three-input XOR with three-input gates looks like 

A B C  result
-------------
0 0 0  0  ("AND(NOT(A), NOT(B), NOT(C))")
0 0 1  1  ("AND(NOT(A), NOT(B), C)")
0 1 0  1  ("AND(NOT(A), B, NOT(C))")
0 1 1  0  ("AND(NOT(A), B, C)")
1 0 0  1  ("AND(A, NOT(B), NOT(C))")
1 0 1  0  ("AND(A, NOT(B), C)")
1 1 0  0  ("AND(A, B, NOT(C))")
1 1 1  1  ("AND(A, B, C)")

or OR(AND(NOT(A), NOT(B), C), AND(NOT(A), B, NOT(C)), AND(A, NOT(B), NOT(C)), AND(A, B, C)).

Interestingly, three-input XOR is not universal, because it can be implemented with two-input XOR, and two-input XOR is not universal for two inputs, let alone for three. So we have two examples of gates which are always universal, when scaled up to any size, and two examples of gates which are never universal. (Actually, n-input AND and n-input OR are also not universal. Neither can produce even a single-input NOT.)

Oh, I left out the proof that n-input NOR is universal. OK, if you do NOR(x,x,x,..), you get NOT, and then you use that to get OR, and then you use that to get AND, and you're back in exactly the situation you had with NAND. That's not surprising.

Biella took me to SVLUG. Thanks!

Jim Tyre pointed out what happens if you sue yourself (in case you've ever wondered).

We have considered whether respondent/defendant/beneficiary should be awarded his costs of suit on appeal, which he could thereafter recover from himself. However, we believe the equities are better served by requiring each party to bear his own costs on appeal.

The judgment (order) is affirmed. Each party shall bear his own costs.

Oreste Lodi v. Oreste Lodi, 173 Cal.App.3d 628 (1985).

The Moffitt brothers came to visit, and we had a nice time.

Yesterday, I went to an EFF party and then to Kate's Harikuyo party in Berkeley. That was fun. I sat next to a woman who was playing an artistic game in which someone draws a letter and then you (the player) have to draw things which turn the letter into something interesting. It's essentially a test of artistic creativity.

So her friend kept giving her Roman letters -- which she did a nice job with -- and I decided to throw her a challenge by drawing some non-Roman letters (from the Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic alphabets). Sure enough, she did an excellent job with them. Michelle theorized that it's not actually harder to turn letters from a foreign alphabet into art than it is to do the same with own's own alphabet; that seemed surprising to me, somehow.

Capital sigma: a bowtie. Shin: an erupting volcano. Capital omega: a neuron (releasing neurotransmitters into a synapse). And so on. I forgot what she did with the aleph, but all of her work was very impressive.

I stayed over in Berkeley and then went to Berkeley Bowl in the afternoon on my way back to San Francisco. There, I ran into Sumana and Leonard! The former had just taken the CBEST, and showed me a notice which prohibited her from disclosing any part of the test to anyone else (presumably including that notice, which reminds me of one of the things I disliked about the Linuxcare severance agreement which I have yet to sign).

Americans have such a compulsion to follow directions printed on stickers and signs and warning labels! It's so bad that we can actually believe that shrinkwrap licenses create valid contracts, which is complete nonsense.

On the other hand, CBEST claims that test takers have already agreed to a variety of rules, including a non-disclosure agreement, before they even arrive at the testing center. Can this be true? Wouldn't Sumana have heard about it if it were?

Sumana complained that, on a test of beliefs about personal identity and survival,

only at the last question did I find out that, hypothetically, I have a "soul" that only lives whilst my body lives, and that upon my death is reborn in some new body, and that dies with no hope of rebirth if I'm cryogenically frozen. (Whew!) This would have changed my answer to the previous questions (e.g., "shall we destroy your body and recreate it elsewhere or shall we transport your body physically?"), since I had been operating on the there-is-no-soul assumption. It's completely consistent for me to change my beliefs when I receive new information! I've been assessed unfairly!

and that was exactly my problem and exactly the reason I failed to survive.

I had a nice time on Sunday. I went with Zack to India Garden (hmmm, I continue to like spicy food much better than he does) and to Central Computer, where we didn't buy any computers, but I bought a PS/2 to AT keyboard adapter and also an AT to PS/2 keyboard adapter (although probably what I wanted was two AT to PS/2 adapters). The adapter is working well -- right now, I'm finally using my wonderful Model M keyboard. Click! Click! Click!

I really like these firm keyboards, and I've found (and some people have said) that they're more comfortable to type on. I know that I can type faster on a Model M than on any other keyboard I've ever used; maybe that's not a good thing. But it feels better and more natural. I've been starting to think about wrist angles, and the angles I seem to form with a Model M are not right but somehow not necessarily as extremely wrong as with other keyboards.

I also met up with Anirvan at the book fair at 7th and Brannan (it would have been at 8th and Brannan, but that half of the convention hall was taken up with the bridal expo). He'd just come from the Alternative Press Expo -- or APE -- where he'd picked up a huge number of comic books.

The ABAA's major California book fair alternates between San Francisco and Los Angeles, so that it's like 

def abaa_book_fair_location():
	if year%2:
		return "San Francisco"
	else:
		return "Los Angeles"

Currently, not year%2, so the big fair is in Los Angeles and a much smaller fair (with about half as many dealers) is held in San Francisco one week later. The big fair supposedly gets about 250 exhibitors and the smaller fair about 150.

I saw some dealers I knew (or who knew my father) and got to look through the copy of De non necandis ad epulandum animantibus, which I mentioned in my Advogato diary when I saw it at the fair last year. (The dealer, Hosea Baskin, who showed it to me then was back again for this fair. He's from Northampton.)

One thing I saw in that text was a selection of typographic contractions in Greek. So there are lots of abbreviations and combinations of letters which are printed in certain ways in old Latin (or other Roman alphabet) printing. For example, "et" is often abbreviated "&" -- even when it's not a word by itself -- so you could see things like "all the l&ters of an alphab&". (But some printers seemed to feel that "&" should stand for the word for "and" in the language which was being printed -- so you might see "I wanna hold your h&". Some people still do this in their own personal shorthand notations.)

There are lots of other examples; I have a handbook which gives a table of common abbreviations in Latin. Many people have seen an "n" after a vowel written as a line or tilde over the vowel, for instance. But I'd never seen abbreviations like that in Greek texts. A strange and interesting example was a (non-final) sigma inside a circle, for an "-os" suffix.

Michael Thompson, from L.A., was back with his history and philosophy of science and history of computation collections. These are very impressive; he had works by Boole, de Morgan, Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon, and so on. (The Shannon book, The Mathematical Theory of Computation, 1st ed., which he sold me last year, was back again, at nearly twice the price. I do imagine that it's getting harder to find, and not just because I bought a copy.) He also had (again) the copy of Mind with Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": "I propose to consider the question 'Can machines think?' [...]"

Another dealer had some first edition Norbert Weiner titles and some late-1800s magic stuff which probably all cost an arm and a leg.

You can compare all this with what I wrote about last year's San Francisco book fair.

Anirvan talked to several people about BookFinder. All of them had heard of it, and most of them used it!

Anirvan and I talked about how expensive rare books are. Sometimes you can buy dozens of new books, or more, for the price of a single rare book. Examples are easy to proliferate; I have a Simon Finch catalogue and a Dover catalogue... (No, Simon Finch wasn't at this fair, though he was probably at the L.A. fair.)

I talked to my father's friend David Bayer (an avid book collector) a few years ago about why people wanted to have original copies of things when they could easily be photocopied and digitized. He suggested that I read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which I still haven't done.

Nick says that Graybar Electric Company is worthwhile. I might try going there.

Michelle was talking to me about the mounting numbers of books I have which I haven't read. I want to remedy that. And I want to read particular things.

I made a list -- or better a pile -- of books which I want to read urgently, or at least as soon as possible. There are eighteen of them. Adsit omen.

It's difficult to sort these books into categories, but one way of breaking them down is as follows: Philosophy, 6. Social sciences, 4. Law, 1. Medicine, 1. Economics, 1. Performing arts, 1. Literature, biography, and memoir, 4.

I might read another book for work: Electrical engineering, 1. But I won't include that in my list of 18 for now.

Leonard's link to his song Three Years Ahead of the Japanese made me want to go back and check on what was happening to me around this time other years. So where better to look than my "poems" directory, where the filesystem preserves the date and time each piece was finished?

Unfortunately, there are some things there which I'm not allowed to talk about (however much I might like to!). But We Can Reveal that on Sunday's date four years ago, I was writing my California Mandated Reporting Song.

If you want to hurt yourself or if you want to harm your kid
(if you'll harm him in the future, or if you have said you did) [...]

zork went down on Sunday with some mysterious hardware problem, and Nick and I ended up making contact in strange ways -- I paged him, I hailed his character in TW2002, and ultimately he managed to e-mail me his phone number.

Anyway, it was almost midnight, but Nick didn't have an ATX power supply. It turned out that I didn't either. But a motherboard he had around (which turned out to have come from a slot machine!) had both AT and ATX power connectors. After a long effort, I managed to disconnect an AT power supply from a computer I had sitting around here. It almost seemed that the person who built the case had tried to make it as difficult as possible to extricate the power supply; problems just kept arising, one after another.

To take just one example, the AC power lines which lead from the power supply to the switch (screwed into the front of the case) turned out to be commingled and even topologically linked with all of the LED connectors which ran from the case to the motherboard. But those connectors turned out to be bundled together with zip ties, so that just unplugging them from the motherboard still left them connected -- topologically -- to the AC power lines. (I think this is pretty bad wiring practice, to twist live AC wires with low-voltage DC LED indicator leads.) So I had to cut the zip ties, which were in a particularly inaccessible place, in order to be able to unplug the LEDs and get their wires free and then get those free of the switch and then unscrew the switch and remove it and get the power supply out. Perhaps you get the idea, although I'm not particularly good at describing mechanical problems in words. Everyone who's even built and then un-built a PC will probably imagine the kind of thing that was happening to me.

I ended up taking a taxi ride up to Cortland with a bag containing a power supply, a pair of VGA cards, a screwdriver, a multimeter, and a CD-ROM drive. I got to see Nick and Elise's new place for the first time; it's above a video store, and very nice. (I haven't seen Elise in quite a while, either.)

Nick worked for many hours on zork, although I left after a little while, after I started to fall asleep over a copy of A Little Java, a Few Patterns, a book by the authors of The Little Schemer. (It teaches an amazing amount about object-oriented programming, and very little about Java itself. These computer scientists are really big on abstraction and generality; they say that The Little Schemer isn't mostly about Scheme, either.)

Using some of those parts, Nick got zork back up on Monday morning. Sorry if anybody wanted to read this diary or this entry earlier; I would have posted most of this entry if zork had been up.

Two more results to tack on:

  1. Any universal n-input gate can produce a 2-input NAND. Proof: Since it is universal, it can produce 1; it can also produce n-input NAND. Then NAND(a,b,1,1,1,...)=NAND(a,b), so it can produce 2-input NAND.
  2. A 2-input NAND can produce any universal n-input gate. Proof: The 2-input NAND can produce unary NOT (NOT(x)=NAND(x,x)). The 2-input NAND can also produce 2-input AND (which we know because it's universal, but we can also write it explicitly as AND(a,b)=NOT(NAND(a,b))=NAND(NAND(a,b), NAND(a,b))). Now, a 2-input AND and an n-input AND can produce an (n+1)-input NAND, because AND(x,AND(a,b,c,...))=AND(x,a,b,c,...). Therefore, 2-input AND can produce n-input AND for any x. Therefore, 2-input NAND can produce n-input AND for any x. But unary NOT and n-input AND produce n-input NAND, so 2-input NAND can produce n-input NAND. We already know from earlier that n-input NAND is universal.

This shows that "being a universal n-input gate" is exactly equivalent to "being able to produce 2-input NAND"! If you can produce 2-input NAND, you will be universal; if you can't, you won't.

I'm hoping to find some inductive rules along the lines of "if you take a universal n-input gate and [...], you will get a (non-)universal (n+1)-input gate" or "if you take a non-universal n-input gate and [...], you will get a (non-)universal (n+1)-input gate".

If I could find enough such rules, they might be broad enough to give a recursive decision procedure to determine whether any given gate is universal.

So one example is "if you take a universal gate and add a new input which is ignored, you will get a universal gate".

It seems that adding a new input can always be seen as composing gates in some way (although I haven't thought out how to write that), so there might be some inductive rules about composing gates with one another.

I spent a while talking to a new EFF volunteer, who's going to start next week.

In the evening, I went over to Berkeley to hear the lecture by James Bamford. He's the author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets. I stopped off at Soda Hall first, and there I saw several people I knew from undergraduate life or from CalLUG. Some of them are going to graduate!

The Bamford lecture was fascinating; Bamford told all sorts of stories about the NSA (even in the unclassified world, that place accumulates anecdotes like a huge anecdote magnet) and about his FOIA experiences. The NSA twice attempted to have him prosecuted criminally for his work in writing The Puzzle Palace, but eased off a bit in the preparation of Body of Secrets.

Bamford astonished the audience by telling them about the Northwoods plan ("Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba"), in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated making terrorist attacks in order to frame Cuba and provide a pretext for an invasion to topple Fidel Castro. I knew about Northwoods because it was reported on Cryptome; most people in the audience hadn't heard the story, and gasped as Bamford quoted some of the possibilities the government had been contemplating. (This was an example he gave for the importance of FOIA and of independent investigative journalists. He encouraged public policy students to consider becoming journalists themselves.)

I spotted John Gilmore at the lecture, and tried to catch up with him; I ended up falling in with a whole cypherpunk krewe which had turned out to catch the event, and we ate dinner together at a Thai restaurant on Northside. I met Prof. David Wagner in person for the first time.

I had heard of or seen most of the people who were present at dinner, but I still had a hard time putting names to faces. The company was extraordinarily geeky, smart, and accomplished.

I talked about GNU Radio with some of the people involved, and discussed the influence that the project might or might not have on the BPDG.

Dave Del Torto, on the dietary habits of people at the dinner table: "We have an echelon of carnivores over here."

James Bamford, on the difficulties of researching the NSA: "I couldn't get a lot of senior officials to talk to me. In many cases, the problem was that they were dead. ... So, I found a way around that."

"Nobody's suing people who actually infringe copyrights anymore. Everyone is suing people who make devices," Lemley said. "The [studios] are going after the creation of new technology."

(Mark Lemley, in the L.A. Times)

Andrea saw me on TV -- the Bamford lecture was covered by local TV news, and they had shots of the audience.

I had a nice time at BayFF and saw many old friends and unindicted co-conspirators. (I haven't been indicted either, so that's nice.)

There were lots of Linux people there, and people from other connections. The audience asked nice questions and the EFF lawyers gave good answers.

I didn't get to give my "In 1995, I read a virus" commentary on the expressive content of code. I'm hoping that, if I tell enough lawyers about it, the phrase "In 1995, I read a virus" may make it into some law review article.

I met Eric Blossom of GNU Radio fame, and went to dinner for the second night in a row with a bunch of freedom-loving geeks in Berkeley, although it was a completely different crowd with no overlap at all. The people who went to Bamford's talk were just not the same people who went to EFF's talk, which doesn't quite make sense to me.

"Will you read me a story?"

"Read you a story? What fun would that be? I've got a better idea: let's tell a story together."

(Photopia)

I saw Nathaniel at BayFF, and he told me about the paper "Language Trees and Zipping", by Dario Benedetto, Emanuele Caglioti, Vittorio Loreto. I wrote about this a few days ago, and it turns out that I got it wrong. I thought it was just about compression ratios; it's actually about something much more subtle. So I'll have to try to experiment with that a little more.

Given a universal n-input gate, adding an ignored input yields a universal (n+1)-input gate. That is, if U(a,b,c,...) is universal, then U_new(a,b,c,...,N)=U(a,b,c,...) is also universal.

So, I've been studying what happens if you compose a new 2-input gate with a universal gate (not vice versa, yet). I found some straightforward results. Let U(a,b,c,...) be a universal n-input gate from which we will produce a new (n+1)-input gate which takes the inputs a,b,c,... and the new input N by using some 2-input gate with inputs U(a,b,c,...) and N. Then

There are probably only sixteen ways to combine U and N this way, although some of those I've given are actually trivially equivalent, like (NOT U) XOR N and U XOR NOT N, which I examined as separate cases but which always yield exactly the same value.

The problem is that there are sixteen ways to combine U and N by composing 2-input gates with U. (Perhaps there are more and I've miscounted.) But there are many other possibilities for what a new input could "do" to a universal gate, aside from just being an input to a gate composed with it. I don't have a convenient notation for many of these. 

PRO-ANOREXIA SITES RAISE CONCERNS
A growing number of sites devoted to promoting anorexia is
raising concern among health officials.  Groups have begun
to take their concerns to ISPs and content providers with
sites such as Yahoo! removing such content citing them as
harmful or threatening.
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000010755feb12.story>

One of the amazing things about free speech and maybe about the large world of the Internet is that it sometimes seems to be only a matter of time before a seemingly universal consensus is broken by somebody who advocates what had seemed like a problem to everyone else. (Compare Artists for Earthquakes, the Bay Area's leading seismicity advocacy group. SF Weekly coverage, Pigdog Journal coverage. Fortunately, Artists for Earthquakes is a joke. The pro-ana sites aren't, as far as I can tell. Somehow I am reminded of the disclaimer I saw in one edition of Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft where Scot talks about how to kill birds and bring them to life again. One editor felt compelled to tell people that Scot's method wasn't reliable and, in any case, was cruel to animals. This is true; the editor seemed to feel that such was the power of Scot's narrative that it might actually seduce some would-be present-day charlatans into attempting to kill and revive birds using King James-era magicians' methods. Or again when people describe pyrotechnics recipes and some of them are reprinted -- we are always tempted to say "Do not try this at home; anorexia may be hazardous to your health (and is cruel to animals)".)

(Sumana wants to create abiding works. Don't you?)

There is a high school ritual of writing essays about the unintended truth of the poem "Exegi monumentum aere perennius". Everyone gets to make the observation that Horace spoke truer than he knew, because even the things he held up as metaphors for permanence ("cum tacita virgine pontifex") did not last as long as his own poetry. It's not a very original observation, since it seems to appear in every discussion of "Exegi monumentum aere perennius". So a different lesson from this poem -- outside the "Horace did achieve what he claimed to have achieved" -- might be the difficulty in getting a sense of eternity.

Stewart Brand talks a lot about this in The Clock of the Long Now (I've just ordered Time and Bits, which will be very interesting). We tend to think of long time spans in terms of the accumulated small changes in things we know, but it seems that those things may not even exist in a few hundred years. (We expect to be able to watch the progress of state changes on an object to which we hold a reference, only to find that the object has passed out of scope and been garbage collected. Insert "scrap heap of history" joke here.) I was told yesterday by a Russian I encountered in Soda Hall that it was funny that we spend so much time studying U.S. history, because "U.S. history is so short! My city is older than your country".

Rome was already getting up toward Moscow's present age when Horace wrote, yet Rome fell, too, and the current "city of Rome" has very little cultural, civilizational, political continuity with the ancient Rome.

NOUVEAU venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n'aperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.
Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine: et comme
Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois,
Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois,
Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme.
Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit,
Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance!
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.

THOU STRANGER, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,
And nought of Rome in Rome perceiu'st at all,
These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest,
Olde Palaces, is that which Rome men call.
Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast,
And how that she, which with her mightie powre
Tam'd all the world, hath tam'd herselfe at last,
The pray of time, which all things doth deuowre.
Rome now of Rome is th' onely funerall,
And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie;
Ne ought saue Tyber hastning to his fall
Remaines of all: O worlds inconstancie.
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.

(Bellay/Spenser; the translation is remarkably literal!)

Don Marti gave me some "Open / DRM-free technology" stickers. They are great! EFF will be passing some out at the RSA conference. I'll try to bring a few to CodeCon.

I'm trying to confirm a certain claim about the North Korean government. That government hasn't been much help, but I found its official news agency (with a web site located in Japan, because there's apparently no Internet service to North Korea). Take a look at a few days' headlines; they are fascinating reading.

In 1998, the poem "Mardi Gras (Shoulders of Giants; A Summoning)", when for Carnaval I went up onto a mountain to talk to my dead.

Did you ever invoke your dead and pour them a libation? When you were a rationalist and a materialist?

In 2000 -- give or take a few days -- the Chinese New Year celebration and the parade and the endless dragon, and the people who are all going somewhere and who all have purpose in life, and all have context in their lives. I ask her to climb up on my shoulders to see better, and she refuses. Did she not believe that all of her horizons in every direction would have given way? I am about to invite her for Valentine's Day, am making plans.

In 2001, I hear Professor Lessig, and I correspond with Jim Tyre. I have already decided to move to Shotwell Street and have been trying to pack.

The January CPTWG antitrust benediction by Bob Schwartz ("Fifty Ways to Set a Standard", to the tune of "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover") is now on-line.

But to actually build technology that enforces a degree of control over content without creating some horrid security framework turns out to be despicably difficult.

(Martin Lambert, SealedMedia)

I went to CodeCon with Biella! Brad Templeton made jokes!

My mom and my sister are visiting!

Zack (of the East) wrote a document discussing my discussion of a problem earlier posed by Sumana.

A lot of people came to my "Meet my mom and my sister" party on Saturday night. We had a very substantial turnout.

Biella came and cooked sancocho. I cooked a stir-fry and (what was new) a miso udon soup. It was very successful -- my sister agrees. There was a huge amount of food at the party, including several cakes, several soups, dolmas, samosas, and so on.

Thanks to everyone who attended. I'm glad so many people were able to meet my family, and vice versa. I'm told that you were a big hit with them.

Nathaniel helped with the following conclusions:

We have conjectured that m-input NAND and m-input NOR (for each m such that 2<=m<=n) are the only universal gates with n inputs (assuming that the other n-m inputs are simply ignored where m<n).

Nathaniel and I also talked about the Hofstadter problem of how to write "x is a power of 10" using Hofstadter's "TNT" system. We didn't solve it, although we did stay up late. I know that solutions are available on the net, but I want to try to work it out by myself.

A huge touring expedition with my mom and my sister, first stopping by our cousins' house for brunch, and then going out to Russian Hill and seeing my mom's old apartments, from when she lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. We walked to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she used to work, and took in some of the views there; then we walked down to the Cannery and took a cable car (an amazing amount of fun at night!) back to Market Street. We had dinner at Taqueria Cancun.

My arms have become pretty sore again.

Si Pergama dextra defendi potuit, etiam hac defensa fuisset.

(Aeneid II, 291-2)

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Eldred v. Reno! Free Mickey!

(we should organize "prior art parties" to brainstorm ideas to prevent patents)

(Phil Agre, on RRE) 

(@Sigma) so if you deploy fighters in MSL,
(@Sigma) they eventually get garbage collected

On Cryptome today:

While substantial domestic and international laws exist, proposals abound to improve the working of our intellectual property system both at home and abroad. At home, we can dedicate more funding to the fight against intellectual property theft, and better coordinate among federal agencies involved in the effort, as well as between federal and state authorities. Moreover, we can do a better job of making it clear to all Americans that the theft of intellectual property is a crime, and that it hurts us all. Abroad, we can bring pressure to bear on countries that are recalcitrant in efforts to rein in piracy and counterfeiting; we can encourage the development of intellectual property laws and enforcement through targeted foreign aid for training and equipment; and we can prevail on all countries (including our own) to eliminate the use of illicit intellectual property within their own governments. Billions of dollars are being stolen, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. It is worth the effort to do all we can to stem the tide.

(Senator Joseph Biden, Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Aborad and at Home)

I can't read the PDF from here to know what other things Biden says in order to shift our language and culture in this direction.

Nathaniel completely solved the problem. I'm still trying to understand his solution, and, when I do, I'll explain it here.

My mom and my sister continued their visit, and my mom's friend Alex took us all over the city on a great tour -- Bernal Hill, South of Market, the Embarcadero, the Marina, and over the Golden Gate Bridge and out to Muir Woods. It was fabulous.

After an hour's walk or more in Muir Woods, under a cloudy sky, we went to The Stinking Rose for dinner. I love garlic.

At City Lights, during our little tour of North Beach, I got three books, on war crimes, the philosophy of mathematics, and the control of nature. (Conveniently enough, the books are titled Crimes of War, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and The Control of Nature. This should leave fairly little doubt as to what each is about.)

I never really get out into the City or into the Bay Area unless people come to visit. My mom and Rebecca are only going to be here through Friday, but we should get to do a bit more last-minute touring.

On the second day of CodeCon, the guard at the door of the DNA Lounge asked me for ID, and of course (I say of course) I didn't have any. As I've told a few people now, to their surprise and apparent incredulity, I don't smoke, drink, or drive. So I don't carry any government ID with me, at all, ever, unless I am going to an airport (when I use a passport). When I work places which issue employee ID, I'll carry that to be able to identify myself at work. I think not carrying ID is usually a feature, not a bug, from a privacy point of view.

I have large-scale and small-scale comments about the ID request. The large-scale comments are about liquor laws, liability, drinking, cultural norms, identification, and government monitoring and surveillance. I'll skip over those for now.

The small-scale comments are that CodeCon was a conference, not a party; furthermore, it was a conference about privacy and anonymity, and there's some profound irony in having to show government ID in order to attend an anonymity conference. Inside, programmers were talking about virtual circuits, encrypted links, and store-and-forward protocols; some of the programmers were using pseudonyms. Outside, people were being carded.

It's unfortunate to think that people without ID, or people under 21, might have been turned away from CodeCon. Considering the theme and focus of the event, I can't imagine any reason why either of these groups should have been unwelcome. (I remember an earlier incident at LinuxWorld when a 13-year-old programmer was turned away and I was unhappy about that. But CodeCon prided itself on being more inclusive and community-oriented than large corporate-sponsored shows like RSA -- so much so that CodeCon actually used HTML to display the content on its home page, where the RSA Conference used Flash.

I've attended dozens of trade shows, academic conferences, and industry conventions, and never until CodeCon was I asked to show government ID at any of them.

A song.

On the second day of CodeCon,
the guard asked for ID,
to prove my age as
twenty-one or older,
how could CodeCon insist on ID?

Praveen told me the following three jokes last week. (I'd heard the first one before, but not the other two, I think.)

Of course, jokes are always funnier when read out loud with proper timing and other showmanship, but you can take these and read them to somebody else to make up for that.

OK, so

Finally,

My mom and my sister and I visited Michelle and Sumana, and I ended up staying late at Sumana's place and talking about a number of things, not least Sumana's logic homework. I copied down the famous "problem 8" and then solved it on BART. Since Sumana didn't want any spoilers, my solution is in ROT-13.

Qrsvavgvbaf. Vs n Obbyrna shapgvba cuv(c,d,e) unf gur cebcregl gung cuv(c,d,e)=cuv(d,e,c)=cuv(e,c,d), gur shapgvba vf pnyyrq plpyvp. Vs gur beqre bs gur guerr vachgf vf ragveryl veeryrinag (n fgebatre pbaqvgvba), gur shapgvba vf pnyyrq pbzzhgngvir.

(n) Ubj pna jr gryy jurgure n shapgvba vf plpyvp ol ybbxvat ng yvarf gjb guebhtu frira bs vgf gehgu gnoyr?

Gur gehgu gnoyr ybbxf yvxr 

   c d e
1. 0 0 0
2. 0 0 1
3. 0 1 0
4. 0 1 1
5. 1 0 0
6. 1 0 1
7. 1 1 0
8. 1 1 1

naq jr abgr sebz gur qrsvavgvba bs n plpyvp shapgvba gung yvarf gjb, guerr, naq svir nyy arprffnevyl unir rdhvinyrag inyhrf, naq yvarf sbhe, fvk, naq frira nyy arprffnevyl unir rdhvinyrag inyhrf. Guhf, gur grfg vf fvzcyl gb frr jurgure yvarf gjb, guerr, naq svir unir gur fnzr inyhr sbe cuv, naq jurgure yvarf sbhe, fvk, naq frira nyfb unir gur fnzr inyhr sbe cuv.

(o) Ubj znal qvssrerag plpyvp shapgvbaf cuv rkvfg?

Yvar bar bs gur gehgu gnoyr znl unir nal inyhr (rvgure mreb be bar). Yvarf gjb, guerr, naq svir zhfg or rdhny, ohg pbhyq unir rvgure gur inyhr mreb be gur inyhr bar. Yvarf sbhe, fvk, naq frira zhfg or rdhny, ohg pbhyq unir rvgure gur inyhr mreb be gur inyhr bar. Yvar rvtug znl unir nal inyhr (rvgure mreb be bar). Rnpu bs gurfr sbhe cbffvovyvgvrf vf vaqrcraqrag bs nyy gur bguref. Gurersber, gurer ner gjb gb gur sbhegu cbjre gbgny cbffvovyvgvrf, be fvkgrra qvssrerag fhpu shapgvbaf.

(p) Vf vg cbffvoyr gung n shapgvba vf plpyvp, lrg abg pbzzhgngvir?

Gurer ner fvk cbffvoyr crezhgngvbaf bs gur vachgf gb cuv (fvapr gurer ner guerr vachgf, naq guerr snpgbevny vf guerr gvzrf gjb gvzrf bar, be fvk), naq jr pna nffvta n qvssrerag inevnoyr gb gur inyhr pbzchgrq ol cuv va rnpu pnfr. Guhf, yrg 

n=cuv(c,d,e)
o=cuv(d,e,c)
p=cuv(e,c,d)

naq ntnva 

q=cuv(d,c,e)
r=cuv(c,e,d)
s=cuv(e,d,c)

Hfvat gur qrsvavgvba bs n plpyvp shapgvba, jr xabj gung n=o=p, naq nyfb gung q=r=s. Bayl bar nqqvgvbany vafvtug vf arprffnel: gung, fvapr c, d, naq e rnpu unir inyhrf pubfra sebz gur frg (0, 1), vg vf abg cbffvoyr gung abg(c=d be d=e be c=e) -- ng yrnfg bar cnve bs inyhrf zhfg or rdhny gb bar nabgure. (Vs guvf jrer abg fb, gurer jbhyq or guerr qvfgvapg inyhrf, pubfra sebz n cbby bs gjb cbffvovyvgvrf!) Gung zrnaf gung (c=d be d=e be c=e).

Abj, vs c=d, gura n=q, fvapr gura cuv(c,d,e)=cuv(d,c,e). Fvzvyneyl, vs d=e, gura o=s, fvapr gura cuv(d,e,c)=cuv(e,d,c). Naq vs c=e, gura p=r, fvapr cuv(e,c,d)=cuv(c,e,d).

Fvapr (c=d be d=e be c=e), vg'f arprffnel gung (n=q be o=r be p=s). Ohg guvf zrnaf, fvapr n=o=p naq q=r=s, gung vg'f arprffnel gung n=o=p=q=r=s. Gurersber, gur shapgvba juvpu jr vavgvnyyl nffhzrq jnf plpyvp zhfg nyfb or pbzzhgngvir.

Gur sbyybj-ba dhrfgvba: qbrf guvf erfhyg punatr vs gurer ner guerr gehgu inyhrf vafgrnq bs gjb?

Vg pna. Pbafvqre gur shapgvba beqre(c,d,e); pnyy gur guerr cbffvoyr vachg inyhrf 1, 2, naq 3, naq gur guerr cbffvoyr bhgchg inyhrf "nfpraqvat", "qrfpraqvat", naq "ercrgvgvir". (Jr pna fnl gung nfpraqvat=1, qrfpraqvat=2, naq ercrgvgvir=3, vs lbh yvxr. "nfpraqvat", "qrfpraqvat", naq "ercrgvgvir" ner whfg zrnag gb vzcebir uhzna ernqnovyvgl.)

Abj, 

beqre(1,2,3)=nfpraqvat,
beqre(2,3,1)=nfpraqvat,
beqre(3,1,2)=nfpraqvat,
beqre(3,2,1)=qrfpraqvat,
beqre(1,3,2)=qrfpraqvat,
beqre(2,1,3)=qrfpraqvat,
beqre(nalguvat ryfr)=ercrgvgvir
r.t. beqre(1,1,1)=ercrgvgvir (orpnhfr fbzrguvat vf ercrngrq)
r.t. beqre(3,2,2)=ercrgvgvir (orpnhfr fbzrguvat vf ercrngrq)
r.t. beqre(1,2,1)=ercrgvgvir (orpnhfr fbzrguvat vf ercrngrq)

Fb "nfpraqvat" zrnaf "gur vachgf, ernq yrsg gb evtug va n plpyr, pbagnva gur frdhrapr 1,2,3". "qrfpraqvat" zrnaf "gur vachgf, ernq yrsg gb evtug va n plpyr, pbagnva gur frdhrapr 3,2,1". Naq "ercrgvgvir" zrnaf "gur vachgf qb abg pbagnva rvgure gur frdhrapr 1,2,3 be gur frdhrapr 3,2,1, orpnhfr ng yrnfg bar bs gur vachg inyhrf vf ercrngrq".

Vg fubhyq or pyrne gung guvf shapgvba vf plpyvp, orpnhfr n plpyvp crezhgngvba bs gur vachgf bs na nfpraqvat beqre vf fgvyy nfpraqvat. N plpyvp crezhgngvba bs gur vachgf bs n qrfpraqvat beqre vf fgvyy qrfpraqvat. Naq, pyrneyl, ab znggre ubj lbh punatr gur beqre bs n ercrgvgvir vachg, vg jvyy fgvyy or ercrgvgvir.

Ubjrire, guvf shapgvba vf abg pbzzhgngvir, orpnhfr beqre(1,2,3)=nfpraqvat naq lrg beqre(3,2,1)=qrfpraqvat. Fb jura guerr qvfgvapg gehgu inyhrf ner cbffvoyr, fbzr plpyvp shapgvbaf ner ab ybatre pbzzhgngvir. (Ba gur bgure unaq, fbzr plpyvp shapgvbaf ner fgvyy pbzzhgngvir. N fvzcyr rknzcyr jbhyq or gur shapgvba cuv(c,d,e)=1, juvpu vf pyrneyl plpyvp naq pbzzhgngvir.)

Ol jnl bs sbeznyvmvat jung gur beqre shapgvba qbrf, nygubhtu EBG-13 qbrfa'g ernyyl bofpher gur npgvba bs guvf Clguba pbqr fb jryy, 

qrs beqre(c,d,e):
	vs c<d naq d<e:
		erghea "nfpraqvat"
	vs d<e naq e<c:
		erghea "nfpraqvat"
	vs e<c naq c<d:
		erghea "nfpraqvat"
	vs c>d naq d>e:
		erghea "qrfpraqvat"
	vs d>e naq e>c:
		erghea "qrfpraqvat"
	vs e>c naq c>d:
		erghea "qrfpraqvat"
	erghea "ercrgvgvir"

Gung shapgvba vf n guerr-inyhrq shapgvba juvpu vf plpyvp ohg abg pbzzhgngvir.

Watch this space!

The Supreme Court docket number for the Eldred appeal is the golden ratio, phi. Adsit omen.

I read Biden's "Theft of American Intellectual Property" report. It reads like a BSA and RIAA report. Perhaps that's because it quotes so many statistics and claims from BSA and RIAA reports. (The EFF is mentioned by name; the report claims that we might appeal the Felten case, which isn't true any more. There's also some bragging about the courts' rejections of free-expression arguments against the DMCA. How often do we get to see publishers gleeful that a court was unpersuaded by a first amendment argument? See generally the EFF amicus brief in American Amusement v. Kendrick, which has no page numbers in the HTML version; start at "The district court's reticent application of First Amendment principles to this new medium echoes the incremental and inconsistent way in which courts historically treated new communications technologies" and keep going from there.)

Are statistics inherently convincing? Do we need reports on "people who died because they couldn't afford patented AIDS medicines", "people who couldn't afford college because copyrighted revised-edition textbooks were too expensive", "years of jail time faced by programmers for writing useful software banned under DMCA", "millions of dollars spent fending off copyright industries in order to bring you the VCR, photocopier, and portable digital music players"?

Biden's report is upsetting to me, because it's practically pure ideology and propaganda, in sharp contrast with my own ideology and propaganda. Its choice of words goes out of its way to include language which I go out of my way not to use. (Nathaniel, take note!) "Theft, stolen, steal, wrong, hurt, thief, pirate, own, take, owner, property, thieves, protect, property." No. "Control, monopoly, power, restrict, deny, prevent, censor, government, monopoly, limit, artificial, balance, legislation, technology."

If "language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about", Biden's report may be particularly disturbing to me because the Senator doesn't speak my English very well.

It is worth reading that report, and refuting it, if you can find a PDF viewer somewhere. But how could we begin to explain to Biden himself what's wrong with it? "Senator, linguam Latinam discere debes, ut me intellegas!"

The foghorns are blowing this evening. I like them a lot. Or is it possible that we can't hear them in the Mission and I'm hearing something else instead?

Nathaniel proposes a different version of the joke:

Yesterday I wrote that

I've attended dozens of trade shows, academic conferences, and industry conventions, and never until CodeCon was I asked to show government ID at any of them.

The RSA Conference made two in a row; they are now going with show-issued photo ID, and you are supposed to show government ID in order to get it. Yuck. Here are some other observations from the conference:

Cool things: EFF decoder