Vitanuova for 2002 February 11

Sunday

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.

Graybar

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

Books

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.

This day in history

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

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.

Universal gates

Two more results to tack on:

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.
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.

Monday

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."