Via RRE, I found a link to
a list of
some U.N. Security Council resolutions which are being violated
today; there are
more than you might think and by more countries than you might think.
(It's also not as though all bad things result in U.N. Security
Council resolutions. For one thing, they focus mainly on cases where
there is or has been a territorial dispute in which at least one party
is an internationally recognized nation-state; for another, they're
subject to a tremendous amount of politics.)
More politics:
claims
about oil pipelines and Realpolitik (which is German for
"nihilism"). (Thanks to Aaron for the link.)
I got a couple of nice replies to my question. Everyone agreed
that filesystems preserving case made sense, but people
seemed to be skeptical that case sensitivity was a good
thing. The strongest statement in support of case sensitivity
so far is that it provides the flexibility to implement both
case-sensitive and case-insensitive systems and software on top,
in another layer, whereas case-insensitive filesystems don't
provide the flexibility to implement case-sensitivity (in
that software will never be able to create a file
called "polish" and another file called "Polish").
The deeper controversy, briefly addressed by one correspondent,
is probably whether it makes sense for software to expose
filesystem case-sensitivity to a user. I may have been making
an unstated and possibly unwarranted assumption that the view
of a filesystem in an API (for example, in the Unix open(2)
system call) is the same view which will appear in a UI.
This has traditionally been true in almost all Unix software,
but not, for example, on a system like MacOS. It is possible
to have a filesystem which is case-sensitive but a UI which
conceals that case-sensitivity -- or even does more, e.g.
translating UTF-8 in a filename into Unicode glyphs, and vice
versa.
I have an
attempt
at a Martin Gardner bibliography on my web page, and I got a
helpful note from Dana Richards, who is compiling a much more
authoritative bibliography (and published part of it in
Martin Gardner Presents, and correctly concluded
that I'd had access to that book in the course of compiling my
own bibliography).
I went to Berkeley over the weekend, attended a birthday party,
visited the RSF (the student
gym) for the first time in many years, and actually worked out
there (which was the first time I had gotten a workout in months).
I also got a haircut and got to have brunch at Intermezzo (the
first time in a year) with Michelle, and to see Sumana.
Speaking of birthdays, happy birthday to Dave Barry's son
(October 8).
On Friday I wrote:
I think consumer expectations are subject to a great
deal of manipulation and are not clearly related to either fair use or
innovation. (Libraries are particularly sensitive to this; what
consumers expect to be able to do at home has very little connection to
what other groups, like librarians and scholars, want to be able to do
in the course of their own work.) However, "consumer expectations"
seems to be a very politically powerful concept [...]
There ought to be more on this subject. Consumer expectations is
just a tiny piece of the puzzle, but it's starting to get top
billing.
Weather
permitting, I'll spend much of tomorrow night in line to hear the
Eldred argument, and I'll be out
in Washington, D.C., for the rest of the week. I've only been to
Washington once before, when I was very young. Now I'm going back as
an adult man to do real work.
Every now and then I hear about a Hindu religious concept which is
used translated "Thou art that". Now, I now extraordinarily little
about Hindu theology (and really just a little bit about Jewish
theology and Christian theology -- enough, someone might say, to
be dangerous). Strangely, the former resident of the attic room
in my mother's house in Northampton, whom I don't believe to have
been a Hindu, had put a big THOU ART THAT sticker up on the wall of
the attic staircase. That room was my room, so almost every day when
I lived with my mother I would walk up to my room at night and see
THOU ART THAT, which I knew was a Hindu religious concept and of
which I didn't (and don't) have much understanding otherwise.
When I was in Berkeley toward the end of September, I happened to
walk by a protest and, as I often like to do, I asked for some protest
literature. The protestors handed me a single-page flyer.
As I was walking away, I started to read it, and I was absolutely
horrified by the contents -- verging momentarily on "outraged",
but mainly just horrified.
I folded up the flyer and put it in my pocket, and walked another
block or two before I thought any more deeply about it. And what
I suddenly realized was that, actually, I was that: it
would have been very easy for me to have been one those protestors,
to believe what they believed and to act as they were acting.
Even more, it seemed to me that I had acted exactly as they were
acting, and advocated (mutatis mutandis) what they were
advocating. I saw a parallel between myself and those horrifying
protestors which was so close that there was no reason not to call
it an identity.
That's the clearest experience I've ever had of "Thou art that".
