Vitanuova for 2002 May 3

Brown-Tien

1. D2-D4 G8-F6
2. C2-C4 E7-E6
3. G1-F3 B7-B6
4. B1-C3 F8-B4
5. C1-D2 C8-B7
6. E2-E3 ...

 ABCDEFGH
 --------
|RN QK  R|8
|PBPP PPP|7
| P  PN  |6
|        |5
| Bpp    |4
|  n pn  |3
|pp b ppp|2
|r  qkb r|1
 --------

Old mail

This pattern repeats itself again. My e-mail from three years ago, which I happened upon, contains innocuous, ordinary things which now seem tragic in retrospect. And on the pedestal these words appear:

>-- 
>                    Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
>      They said look at the light we're giving you,  /  And the darkness
>      that we're saving you from.   -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
>  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/  (personal)  http://www.loyalty.org/  (CAF)

Switch

My elegant made-in-Switzerland switch, which we all thought was an SPST toggle switch, is actually a momentary SPST normally-closed switch. It does make a lovely, satisfying click, though.

It seems that they make a DPST version -- there's some empty space in the switch where another pole would go. I'm happy that some kind person taught me the difference between SPDT and DPST when I was a child. So why not go and teach a child the same?

Skepticism

This dates back a few weeks, at least. I made some notes at the time toward a diary entry, and here it is.

As I was walking home along Shotwell one evening, a thought began to run through my head: "Skepticism Is No Fun" or possibly "Skepticism Is Not Fun". The phrase reminded me of Ian Goldberg's remark at DEF CON last summer: "Suddenly, your TCP three-way handshake is no fun anymore!" But Ian was talking about high network latencies, and I was thinking a little more generally.

What I thought that evening I wished children could know is that skepticism is in some way the equivalent of the "nuclear option", as people used to refer to it during the Cold War of my youth. "Nuclear option" is a phrase which originally referred to the literal possibility of using nuclear weapons. Somehow it came into use as a metaphor for something very extreme, very final, very irreversible, a last resort from which there is no return.

I had the thought that skepticism is lots of fun when you can wield it a weapon against someone else, to undermine your adversary's beliefs until they collapse. But subsequently, when once it has been introduced, it can be used against you in return.

Along Shotwell that evening I saw a bumper sticker with a cross, or a fish, and the legend Dios Te Ama.

So I thought of the excursions or vacations people used to try to take into skepticism.

Supponam igitur non optimum Deum, fontem veritatis, sed genium aliquem malignum, eundemque summum potentem & callidum, omnem suam industriam in eo posuisse, ut me falleret: putabo coelum, aerem, terram, colores, figuras, sonos, cunctaque externa nihil aliud esse quam ludificationes somniorum, quibus insidias credulitati meae tetendit: considerabo meipsum tanquam manus non habentum, non oculos, non carnem, non sanguinem, non aliquem sensum, sed haec omnia me habere falso opinantem.

I shall therefore suppose that (rather than the most noble God, source of truth) some evil genius, and he ideally powerful and clever, has placed all of his ability in the goal of deceiving me: I shall imagine that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and everything outside of me are nothing but the figments of dreams, by which he has prepared deceptions for my belief. I shall even consider that I do not have hands, do not have eyes, do not have flesh, do not have blood, do not have any sense, but instead that I falsely believe that I have all these things.

(Descartes, Meditationes I, 12)

Then they would come back from them somehow into ordinary life where they could again have their beliefs.

But I thought that skepticism really means not knowing whether Dios Te Ama -- not only an ability to attack someone else's belief, but a matter of being finally uncertain.