Vitanuova for 2002 June
<M <Y
Y> M>

Jack Valenti's 1982 VCR testimony has been published by Cryptome. It's important and timely reading.

In 1981, Mr. Chairman, this United States had a $5.3 billion trade deficit with Japan on electronic equipment alone. We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the VCR. One of the Japanese lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the VCR -- well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don't know. He certainly is not MGM's lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

(I'm going to do a quiz where you have to decide whether Valenti said something in 1982 or 2002. I expect it be very difficult.)

Fortunately, EFF has issued comments on the BPDG report. And several interesting people have expressed their support.

There seems to be some risk of a new COINTELPRO, because the Attorney General has decided to roll back rules which were created as a response to COINTELPRO. There is a suggestion that history or political sentiment comes in cycles, so thirty years ago was the era of the Church Commission and the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act and the proximate causes of the modern freedom of information and privacy movements. (And also the skepticism of power which came from the anti-war movement, and so on.) Today, a substantial number of people haven't lived through that time (I haven't, for one), and others may not remember it vividly. So now there is a remarkable opportunity for old walls between intelligence and domestic law enforcement to be broken down, for new FOIA exemptions to be created, for new surveillance powers to be created, and so on. Maybe I'm wrong to try to get people to read the Valenti and VCR wars stuff; maybe they should be reading the Church Commission hearings instead.

And also, if we use open source software, the terrorists have already won!

Here is a formal language for defining contracts. The same author, Nick Szabo, came up with smart contracts, which seem very important to me.

On Thursday, I went to a lecture by Professor Lessig at the Mechanics Institute; earlier in the day, I got to visit the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. (I used to live just a few blocks from the Magnes Museum, but never knew about it until I met its former curator Ruth Eis. She told me I should hurry and see the current exhibit, and I did, although I didn't make it until the last day of the exhibit.)

On Friday, I went to a book-binding competition ("bind-off") between members of two Bay Area bookbinding societies. The unusual thing was that the bookbinders were given extremely unusual materials for this task -- for example, sheets of nori, handcuffs, paper bags, and disco balls.

Despite this, they managed to produce some beautiful books (some said: "beautiful 'books'"). The event was hosted by the San Francisco Center for the Book, a few blocks from Linuxcare. So I got a repeated sense this past week that there were lots of great things nearby everywhere and I didn't know about them. If I could save up some money at some point, I'd consider taking one of their weekend introductory letterpress courses.

The bind-off had a comic interlude with a former page from the San Francisco Public Library (she was proud of her title) who purported to tell us how to take care of books. In fact, she showed us how not to take care of books, and she was very funny. (She also showed off her talent for shelving people: she would interview them briefly and then assign them Dewey call numbers.)

So here's the round-up on confusingly-named "Children's ..." legislation.

The CIPA decision was the newest of these, and EFF's own Lee Tien worked on that case. I'm planning to have a "CIPA Party", corresponding roughly to my earlier "Bunner Party".

Cory mentions a book about the Turk chess-playing automaton, by the author of The Victorian Internet. That sounds good to me.

meta tauta dê, eipon, apeikason toioutôi pathei tên hêmeteran phusin paideias te peri kai apaideusias. ide gar anthrôpous hoion en katageiôi oikêsei spêlaiôdei, anapeptamenên pros to phôs tên eisodon echousêi makran para pan to spêlaion, en tautêi ek paidôn ontas en desmois kai ta skelê kai tous auchenas, hôste menein te autous eis te to prosthen monon horan, kuklôi de tas kephalas hupo tou desmou adunatous periagein, phôs de autois puros anôthen kai porrôthen kaomenon opisthen autôn, metaxu de tou puros kai tôn desmôtôn epanô hodon, par' hên ide teichion parôikodomêmenon, hôsper tois thaumatopoiois pro tôn anthrôpôn prokeitai ta paraphragmata, huper hôn ta thaumata deiknuasin.

horô, ephê.

hora toinun para touto to teichion pherontas anthrôpous skeuê te pantodapa huperechonta tou teichiou kai andriantas kai alla zôia lithina te kai xulina kai pantoia eirgasmena, hoion eikos tous men phthengomenous, tous de sigôntas tôn parapherontôn.

atopon, ephê, legeis eikona kai desmôtas atopous.

homoious hêmin, ên d' egô: tous gar toioutous prôton men heautôn te kai allêlôn oiei an ti heôrakenai allo plên tas skias tas hupo tou puros eis to katantikru autôn tou spêlaiou prospiptousas?

(Plato, Republic VII)

Interea magno misceri murmure caelum
incipit, insequitur commixta grandine nimbus,
et Tyrii comites passim et Troiana iuventus
Dardaniusque nepos Veneris diversa per agros
tecta metu petiere; ruunt de montibus amnes.
Speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem
deveniunt. Prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno
dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius aether
conubiis summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae.
Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum
causa fuit; neque enim specie famave movetur
nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem:
coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam.

(Vergil, Aeneid IV)

Sometimes, when things feel crazy and chaotic, it's good to remember that Kathleen Connell is in charge. She's the Controller of California!

If I were a package in Debian GNU/Linux, my package name would be:

opensetsc

What's yours?

I went out to Moss Beach and saw Shari's place, on the beautiful California coast by the ocean. I hadn't been along Highway 1 since I was about six years old.

We played a good game of Frisbee, and I got a nice bruise on my hand. And it turns out that Shari (in order to bolster her reputation as a vicious copyright pirate?) owns a player piano. I played through "Hotel California" twice on the player piano, with enthusiasm, and I've got a picture of that which I ought to scan in. Playing a player piano is real exercise.

I also saw an example of this and felt suitably impressed.

Sumana found that Berkeley's journalism department is going to have a for-credit class on weblogs (and their research subject is intellectual property).

I thought of submitting "The DRM Dark Age" to DRM2002, but I worry that the rule about "papers that have been published" might get me in trouble. I should ask some people who've had papers in academic conferences before about how this all works.

According to Google, I am the seventh Seth. (I'm the first Schoen.)

What a lot of shrinkwrap license debates!

When I go into a store and buy a CD and take the CD home with me then that transaction is either a sale or a bailment, and it most certainly is not a bailment. (And I've taught lots of people how to know a bailment when they see one.)

(That actually isn't the funniest thing Professor Junger said in those debates, but it was memorable.)

I went to a CPTWG meeting in person (getting up at 5:00a, back at EFF in San Francisco by 4:00p). The BPDG report was presented there, amidst much press coverage (though not from any reporters in the room).

That evening, I went to an SVLUG meeting with Biella. (It's an interesting contrast to CPTWG, though not quite so dramatic as the CPTWG/EFF Pioneer Awards contrast back in April.)

The speaker at SVLUG talked about his work at NASA on atmospheric physics data acquisition systems, and now on data acquisition using EEGs and EMGs (electroencephalograms and electromyograms). Although he seemed to lack confidence in himself, he was very clear, and kept my interest the whole time. In fact, I was so curious about electromyography that I spent a long time the following evening sticking voltmeter probes into my hand in the hope of measuring a repeatable millivolt change.

The EEGs are taken with electrodes placed on the scalp, and have now been used successfully to place a simulated robot entirely under a human subject's mental control. (It's like the old biofeedback machines, but with renewed NASA study on practice interface techniques.) It's totally non-invasive. EMGs are also non-invasive and are taken with electrodes placed on the skin at either end of a muscle. Apparently electromyography is very well-understood and can accurately measure even a tiny muscle movement. (Zack suggested to me that electromyography can measure a muscle movement so small that you can't feel you're making it. I didn't ask the NASA researcher to confirm that, though I should have.)

All this work uses Linux and free software, by the way.

At SVLUG, I mentioned that EFF was about to file an exciting court case. The case I was referring to is Newmark v. Turner, also known as Craig v. Hollywood.

Nick says that it turns out that glass is a solid.

The most dense of the two forms of concrete is 65 pounds per cubic foot while the less dense is a mere 30 pounds per cubic foot. These physical attributes give the concrete boat its ability to float, considering that water is 62.5 pounds per cubic foot.

(Daily Cal)

Concrete boats don't float because the concrete used is less dense than water; they float because the boats weigh less than the water they displace. The hulls of boats are regularly made with materials denser than water. If you cut off a piece of the hull of a large boat and dropped it into the water, it would likely sink.

Another gripe: Spirit, Southwest Airlines' in-flight magazine, had a piece this month complaining about how most Americans can't identify the Constitution's guarantee of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Maybe that's because it was the Declaration of Independence.

I'm reading about TCPA. (If you don't want criticism, don't give your effort or legislation a four-letter acronym! Four-letter words are so easy to fit into songs, chants, and poems. Now, a six-letter word, on the other hand...)

I finally met fellow loyalty oath opponent Jimmer Endres, who turned up at Berkeley as a biology grad student.

I read a novel by Ross King called Ex-Libris. It's a mystery set in the 1600s (the narrator is supposed to be writing in the year 1700, a detail you find out on very the last page of the book). It was engaging and thrilling and difficult to put down (ah, what chase scenes they had in those days, even without automobiles or electricity or automatic weapons!). But it was also frustrating.

One reviewer felt that Ex-Libris wears its considerable learning lightly. By contrast, I felt that the book wears its considerable learning rather heavily. There are many points at which the author seems to feel compelled to include a great deal of detail (and some of it is even slight anachronism). There are regular wink wink nudge nudge allusions to things the narrator doesn't understand or doesn't expect but are about to happen some time in the next three hundred years.

For example, right in the first chapter, there's an "alas, we had no vaccine nor name for tetanus, unlike you fortunate readers of the future" scene:

I had married as a young man, but my wife, Arabella, had died some years ago, five days after scratching her finger on a door-latch. Our world was a dangerous place.

A number of the historical discussions seemed rather heavy-handed to me, as though the author were saying, come on, notice my allusion, won't you, fine, I'll give you another hint so that you get it...

There are long didactic passages on the discovery of Australia, the problem of longitude (the subject of an exciting non-fiction book published not long before Ex-Libris), what a palimpsest is, how a Vignere cipher works, how to do secret writing, and so on. So there's something awkward about a historical novel in which the author has to decide that the protagonist is going to encounter a Vignere cipher and so must make a long excursus on what a Vignere cipher is (for the benefit of the prospective non-Vignere-knowledgeable reader). It doesn't quite fit; we don't quite feel that the protagonist is really thinking like a 17th-century Englishman.

So I perceived a contrast with The Name of the Rose. Several reviewers compared Ex-Libris to The Name of the Rose. The reasons why are clear. Both are historical fiction murder mysteries, involving libraries (and those who tend them and those who try to destroy them), a mysterious book which gets caught up in political and religious conflicts, lots of Latin, and smart bibliophile humanists whom everyone is trying to deceive and assassinate. Also espionage and heresy and dark arts and secret societies and allusions to the future. (Eco even prefigured Ludwig Wittgenstein in a mystic vision of a German quotation about a ladder meant to be discarded after its use.)

But I felt, as I said, that the comparison with The Name of the Rose is inapt -- that the books have important differences, and The Name of the Rose is a significantly better book. Sure, both are exciting mysteries by terribly erudite men. But The Name of the Rose really does wear its learning lightly -- every historical detail fits seamlessly into the story, and into the consciousness of the narrator. Details in Ex-Libris frequently feel forced or arbitrary, and, more significantly, don't seem faithful to the narrator's character.

One perceptive review of The Name of the Rose said that the book's greatest accomplishment was Eco's feat of getting into the mind of a 13th-century monk, who really does think about things in ways deeply different from our own. That monk really didn't grow up with electricity or Darwin or Copernicus and really doesn't know about what we do and really does have an outlook on everything which contrasts in unexpected and alarming ways with our outlook. Eco's characters are absolutely not 20th-century characters transplanted back in time; they're authentically of their age and faithfully reproduced. And this is very hard to do in historical fiction, because it's possible to learn about history (even to understand its dynamics very well) without actually learning to think persistently within the boundaries of another culture, without actually becoming a part of that experience from the inside. I think Eco manages to do that through the length of The Name of the Rose where King sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails in Ex-Libris.

I'm reminded of the high praise of Coleridge which forms the epigraph to Gardner's Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

But I do not think "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an
escape from reality: I think it was reality,
I think he was on the ship and made the
voyage and felt and knew it all.

-- THOMAS WOLFE,
in a letter of 1932, included in
The Letters of Thomas Wolfe,
edited by Elizabeth Nowell,
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p. 322.

So this is the sense I have about Eco, that he really gets inside his 13th-century characters and that they are not simply present-day characters transported back in time. And I don't get the sense that King sustains such a feat. I don't get the sense that his uses of history and learning always fit smoothly with the whole.

I found a New York Times review of Ex-Libris which contains criticism very similar to mine.

DRM Helmets! It's better than putting up Faraday cages around dorms! (Such proposals are very Swift ideas.)

The monks in The Name of the Rose are 14th-century monks, not, as previously reported, 13th-century monks.

Jim Tyre found a good piece by Lisa Bowman on programmers getting involved with legal issues.

Similarly, GrepLaw reports that Reason interviews Larry Lessig on his work. Interesting:

If they were to become more politically active, however distasteful that may be to them, that could begin to put a check on what is achievable by others who have no hesitation about being politically active.

("Casuistical politics is a branch of ethics." Wolff?)

I went to three parties this week. The first was my own CIPA party, on Saturday, celebrating the partial victory won last week by CIPA opponents. About a dozen people came by my house, including David Fifield, who came all the way from San Diego.

The second was a costume party in Golden Gate Park, on Sunday, which coincided with a street fair on Haight. There I played Frisbee with Biella and other people, and stayed a few hours outdoors, impressed with the park's size.

The third and last was the Mozilla release party at the DNA Lounge on Wednesday. I saw about a dozen people I knew there, and had a nice time, despite lingering guilt about age discrimination, about which more later. The Mozilla party was perhaps the most impressive of the three, with an intense bass track and dancing fire-eaters (not to mention thousands of lines of code scrolling by on a huge overhead monitor).

I look kind of bewildered here; maybe it was the late hour. The picture is due to Kevin Burton.

Veeck v. SBCCI: the 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed itself and ruled in favor of Veeck. Yay!

I don't feel enough connection to this case to have a "Veeck Party", but it's still good news. The 5th Circuit holds that legislation is not copyrightable, even if it was originally written (and properly copyrighted) by a private party such as a "model code" vendor.

People who don't mind living in Washington (and travel all over the world) have a fantastic opportunity to get a free software job with the Science and Human Rights project at the AAAS -- working with Patrick Ball.

Google Answers seems to be pretty effective.

My mom and Pam are in town, and I had dinner with them twice, and hope to see them again soon.

There was a partial solar eclipse, and I managed to watch it without injuring my eyes.

Some labels are actually going to sell popular songs without DRM, something I've advocated for a long time. If you want to create a "legal alternative" to infringing copies, your alternative should not be less functional than the illegal version. (Customers don't necessarily want MP3s because they can be had for free -- they also want MP3s because MP3 is a better format than proprietary DRM schemes! But in the past, people who wanted legal MP3 purchases of major labels' songs were unable to obtain them at all. The labels, assuming their customers were all out to break the law, kept insisting on DRM even when their customers constantly insisted that they hated it.)

Note that what's being sold here isn't actually MP3 yet -- but I think we're getting close.

I had a memorable dinner at Zante's Indian Pizza with Linda, Praveen, and Bernie (whom I'd never met before).

Declan dropped by the office on Wednesday; I've never met him in person before.

My arms are very sore again.

Did I mention that incredibly great job opportunity over at AAAS? You should be breaking AAAS's doors down to apply for such a job (except don't, because they need their doors, in order to do things like protect human rights effectively).

  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 E8-G8
  7. F1-D3 D7-D6
  8. A2-A3 B4-C3
  9. D2-C3 F6-E4

 ABCDEFGH
 --------
|RN Q RK |8
|PBP  PPP|7
| P PP   |6
|        |5
|  ppN   |4
|p bbpn  |3
| p   ppp|2
|r  qk  r|1
 --------

socat, mentioned on NTK, seems useful. There's much else out there; we'll have to go out and find some things for the new LNX-BBC, which I hope can be published by LinuxWorld in August.

The EFF went to see Windtalkers, which was quite violent. (People get shot, impaled, blown up, partly blown up, have throats cut, catch fire, lose parts of limbs, are crushed by objects and vehicles, and repeatedly stabbed with bayonets and knives.) The violence made me feel ill -- even though war movies are supposedly not as extreme as horror movies. One of the things a modern war movie demonstrates graphically, thanks to the state of the art in special effects, is that, whatever kinds of horrors you might have imagined, there are always other horrors out there, things which actually happen.

("This is real, this is something that happens!" Magnolia.)

During World War II, a relatively "lawful" war (although much of modern war-crimes law was still uncodified), people were burned to death every day, and died in hundreds of other ways.

The Marines had a recruiting ad at the beginning of the movie! (The combatants in the movie are marines.) Did that make sense to other people who've seen the movie?

There was a lot of war and not very much code; I don't think this is a great movie for crypto fans unless they're also war movie fans.

  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 E8-G8
  7. F1-D3 D7-D6
  8. A2-A3 B4-C3
  9. D2-C3 F6-E4
  10. A1-C1 ...

 ABCDEFGH
 --------
|rn q rk |8
|pbp  ppp|7
| p pp   |6
|        |5
|  PPn   |4
|P BBPN  |3
| P   PPP|2
|  RQK  R|1
 --------

(I have represented white pieces with capital letters, following the ordinary convention instead of the convention I used in the past.)

Sumana: it's originally Doppelgänger. My old New Cassell's claims it comes from parts meaning "double-goer".

You get similar transliteration problems in names like Schroeder, Schaefer, and Schoen. (Did you know that Pat Schroeder and Bruce Lehman were both there in the room when Jack Valenti gave his "Boston strangler" testimony?)

Leonard, were you thinking

You always play the madman poets
(He stood upon the bridge alone)

vinyl vision grungy bands
(and Fire and Shadow both defied;)

you never know who's still awake
(his staff was broken on the stone,)

you never know who un...der...stands.
(in Khazad-dûm his wis...dom...died!)

or maybe

So tonight I turned your station on
(He stood upon the bridge alone)

just so I'd be understood
(and Fire and Shadow both defied;)

instead another voice said I was
(his staff was broken on the stone,)

just too late and just no good.
(in Khazad-dûm his wis...dom...died!)

I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to get a new beard trimmer, because I managed to burn out my old trimmer by leaving it on while it was plugged in. I use a cheap Conair trimmer, which seems to work well. (I took a full-calendar-year vacation from cutting my facial hair at all, and there is no co-incidence in the fact that my first Vitanuova diary entry reported on my getting my beard cut.) On my way there, I stopped for the lunch buffet at India Garden. It still seems to me that lunch buffets are a better deal for me than for other people, because I eat so much.

With the beard trimmer having been obtained, and ablative absolutes aplenty having been employed, I took a bus or two to Borderlands Books on Valencia, where Rudy Rucker was reading. Rucker is best-known to me as the author of Infinity and the Mind, and is a well-beloved and well-respected fiction and non-fiction writer in the geek world. I often get his oeuvre (I should say his opera) mixed up with that of Clifford Pickover; I forgot, for instance, which of them wrote Time: A Traveler's Guide (it was Pickover).

I didn't actually hear Rucker reading, but I did hear him answer questions from his fans. He seemed very respectful of them and of their questions.

At the reading, I ran into Lisa Rein and Cory, and also Kragen. Kragen and I talked for a while, and then we went by to see the new pirate store at 826 Valencia. (Eye patches, pirate hats, whittled canes, ornate spyglasses, a sextant which turns out to be a quadrant rather than a sextant, Jolly Roger flags, maps, lemons and limes, etc.)

In the evening, I walked over to the Castro to hear a series of readings which included Cory (with his new book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which I read the night before) and surly media nerd (and Aeneid fan) Annalee Newitz, who was actually curious why I called her the Cumaean Sybil just under a year ago. (I owe her a good answer.)

Annalee got up on stage to read from her Techsploitation columns and suggested that she could use a "geek cheer".

There was a famous software patent protest chant from around 1991 which included counting in hex, but I can't find it at the moment. (Or maybe it was a "Free Dmitry" chant -- all I remember is that it came from Boston and involved counting on beyond 9. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?)

So I suggest -- for future reference --

Oh,
2, 4, 6, 8, A, C, E,
Eight hex cheers for Annalee!

Several of us had dinner at the Bagdad Cafe, and then Ren had a housewarming party at his place in the Lower Haight.

When I was walking downtown on Sunday, I saw a preacher at Powell Station (who's been there for as long as I can remember) with a sign denouncing fornication and other sexual sins. I remarked to Zack that this preacher's speech was no doubt bad for business and that local shops surely would have preferred if he'd left them alone.

About half an hour later, we walked by Neiman-Marcus in Union Square and happened upon a picket in progress by members of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade. How much more dramatic an illustration of the rivalry between free speech and retail could someone have wished for?

A policeman was guarding Neiman-Marcus from the activists and the activists from Neiman-Marcus (and its customers). At one point, we saw a woman walk out of the store -- probably a customer -- and say something to the officer. I didn't hear what she said, but I heard his reply: "Well, they've got their first amendment right." So presumably her question was whether the officer couldn't just make the protestors go away. It's always a pleasure to hear police officers say "first amendment right"; I had a similarly pleasant experience with SFPD during our rally for Dmitry at the Federal Building, but a different experience at the DeCSS protest at the Metreon back in 2000 (where the police dispersed us and detained one activist).

On Sunday, we talked to one CAFT activist for about twenty minutes. (Thanks to the impressive reach of Google, I was later able to determine her full name. You can get a lot of information from Google.) She was very friendly -- at least to those of us who are no friends of the fur trade.

One mystery: she suggested that CAFT would try to obtain local legislation in San Francisco prohibiting the sale of fur. So I told her that such legislation wouldn't even make it past a declaratory judgment hearing, what with the dormant commerce clause. She replied that nobody expected that legislation to survive a court challenge, or even to be enacted, but that it was essentially a means of promoting public debate about the fur trade.

In other words, that legislation was meant to garner publicity, not meant to function as legislation. So it might not be meant as a moral statement.

Ignoring the legislative proposal for the time being, though, it was interesting to think about how bad the pickets are for the business of Neiman-Marcus, and how much Neiman-Marcus might like them to dissipate.

I think they have the largest commercial effect on people who considered buying something other than fur from Neiman-Marcus, because most people who want to buy fur know that it comes from slaughtered animals. But a shopper who was looking for a non-fur item might be influenced by the picket and decide to shop elsewhere.

If that guess is correct, I could imagine many department stores shedding their furs, so to speak, in favor of fur-specialty shops which sell nothing but furs. (The CAFT activists, if I remember correctly, said Macy's had already stopped selling furs.) Then people who specifically wanted to buy fur would probably go there, and non-fur businesses wouldn't be burdened by the pickets and bad publicity attending on their fur-dealing. This comes to mind partly on account of Fred's comment about CD duplication plants: either they print only legally-duplicated CDs, he claimed, or only illegal CDs. The legal plants apparently consider adding illegal business to be an unacceptable risk, while the illegal plants consider taking on legal business to be too unprofitable. Their profits are higher if they specialize, especially in an environment where doing any illegal business could risk the shutdown of an entire duplicating plant.

(This might not be correct, but it's plausible.)

The other day I came up with a hex cheer for Annalee. I was trying to remember what the original inspiration might have been.

Seth Finkelstein and Richard Stallman obliged me by finding the original hexadecimal protest chant, from a 1989 protest against Lotus:

1, 2, 3, 4 / Kick the lawsuit out the door.
5, 6, 7, 8 / Innovate, don't litigate.
9, A, B, C / Freedom, not monopoly.
D, E, F, 0 / Look-and-feel has got to go.

Leonard, on the other hand, devised approximately the following "retroactive" Free Dmitry chant:

0,1,2,3 -- We all want Dmitry free!
4,5,6,7 -- Less morally ambiguous than Kevin!
8,9,A,B -- Set Dmitry free today!
C,D,E,F -- We will chant until you're deaf!

It also occurs to me to try to combine all these and produce an Annalee-plus-free-Dmitry hex cheer:

Count 0-1-2, publishers sure love to sue.
3-4-5-6, get your Techsploitation fix!
7-8-9-a, we all hate DMCA;
b-c-d-e, this cheer mentions Annalee.

I spent a while writing to Annalee about tragedy, her column of last year, my reaction to it, and how she landed in Existence and Uniqueness. (I'd totally forgotten, but she shows up within the last 200 lines of that poem.)

Congratulations!

Apparently the recent Enigma movie is really bad.

I went to speak at EBLUG, at Hurricane Electric in Fremont. Fremont is much further away from San Francisco than I'd realized; the train ride is about an hour. I talked about what EFF was up to and had confirmation that Hollywood's legislative agenda sounds as horrifying to other people as it does to us.

I've been to a whole lot of LUGs now.

  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 E8-G8
  7. F1-D3 D7-D6
  8. A2-A3 B4-C3
  9. D2-C3 F6-E4
  10. A1-C1 F7-F5

 ABCDEFGH
 --------
|rn q rk |8
|pbp   pp|7
| p pp   |6
|     p  |5
|  PPn   |4
|P BBPN  |3
| P   PPP|2
|  RQK  R|1
 --------

Disney is really getting into Linux!

I don't remember whether I've been quoted by name in the New York Times before, but now I have been, in any case.

I think a somewhat more detailed version of haiku licensing for the GPL would be

derivative works
must come with source code or let
third parties get it

  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 E8-G8
  7. F1-D3 D7-D6
  8. A2-A3 B4-C3
  9. D2-C3 F6-E4
  10. A1-C1 F7-F5
  11. E1-G1 ...

 ABCDEFGH
 --------
|rn q rk |8
|pbp   pp|7
| p pp   |6
|     p  |5
|  PPn   |4
|P BBPN  |3
| P   PPP|2
|  RQ RK |1
 --------

We had a BBC meeting, and we were productive. In fact, we've made steady progress. I got the lnx.img package building a boot floppy image; I even figured out how to use mtools and dd to put SYSLINUX on a floppy (instead of using the "official" supported way from Peter Anvin). The advantage here is that you don't have to be root to make a bootable floppy.

Subsequently, I figured out how to use user-mode Linux to test various parts of the bootable business card. User-mode Linux is coool (like xml-rpc)!

Biella's reading group met at our apartment; we discussed the first three issues of Wired (1.01, 1.02, and 1.03). Reading early Wireds now is really very educational. I thought the ads were at least as interesting as some of the articles. You can find out a lot from reading old advertising, which is one of the reasons Nicholson Baker suggests it's important to preserve paper copies of print publications. (Sure enough, the Wired web site does not have any of the print ads; it has its own banner ads which are completely distinct from the original print ads. The banner ads are selling products and services of today, and Wired is getting paid for them today; the print ads are selling products and services from 1993, and that's when Wired got paid for those ads.)

There are also exercises around observing which predictions were successful and which unsuccessful, how the magazine's politics developed, and so on.

Biella decided to create her own blog. This, in turn, reminds me that Nick took pictures of the BBC meeting.

The 802.11b network in our apartment (called catenary) is working well, and it was helpful for the BBC meeting. Does anybody know anything about health effects of 802.11b? (Watch me get lots of Google hits for that term, now, even though I was just asking the question.)

We ate Indian pizza from Zante's twice this weekend -- once for the BBC meeting and once for the reading group meeting. It's wonderful. If you're doing a Google search for Zante's, know, reader, that as of June 2002 they were at Mission and Cortland and their phone number was (415)821-3949.

I think it's going to be a busy week.

Nick took me out to eat at the famous New World Veggie House in Oakland (although the restaurant itself doesn't call itself that).

Lee: The first [fourth amendment] sensory-enhancement case [leading up to Kyllo v. U.S.] was actually a flashlight case, where the police used a flashlight, and it was challenged as a search because ordinarily you wouldn't be able to see in the dark...

Seth: Oh, because the flashlight enhanced their senses by allowing them to see, because in the old days people used to rely on the darkness for privacy.

Lee: Some of them still do that today.

Also:

libc confronted about dependency on kernel source tree; insists "I only read it for the headers, the headers!"

Also:

a very small printer named Aldus Minutius

Also: Look at the bottom of http://www.notfrisco.com/ -- doesn't it look like we're being invited to pay fines to Emperor Norton via PayPal?

I went to Stanford. I didn't notice it when I was a prospective student, but the Stanford campus is beautiful, and the Stanford Bookstore is fantastic.

Thanks to Quinn for transportation and conversation.

I met Profs. Ed Felten and Ross Anderson there. (Amusingly, neither is actually a Stanford professor; both just happened to be visiting. Felten is visiting for a year, and Anderson for a week.) I also caught sight of Larry Lessig, but didn't speak with him.

I want to read Anderson's and Felten's books; Felten hasn't finished his yet, so there will be a wait for it to be published. Anderson also strongly recommended a book called Information Rules, by Varian and Shapiro.

Supposedly Bennett Haselton is about 60% hero, per public opinion.

I had the pleasure of seeing both Katy and Ben, the latter somewhat unexpectedly.

I'm thinking and reading a lot about TCPA, after Ross Anderson's criticisms of that initiative and the related Palladium. This is a big deal; we're probably going to meet some people from Microsoft to get their side soon.

The Ninth Circuit held the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional (in particular, the 1954 "under God" amendment) as a violation of the Establishment Clause. (Newdow v. Congress; I haven't read the opinion yet.)

I am thrilled about this, because, as I wrote earlier today, I have long supported the theory that government uses of "In God We Trust", "under God", etc., ordinarily violate the Establishment Clause. In November, I wrote more about this issue.

I'd like to be able to write about the separation of church and state from the perspective of a respectable left-liberal, because there is so much which is comforting about respectable liberalism, which calls on people to support institutions rather than symbols, for example. So respectable liberal opinion will tell us that we are not supposed to honor the flag, but rather what the flag represents, and that various illiberal patriots have their hearts in the right place but are simply making a category error or mistaking symbols for institutions. After that, respectable liberals get to tell us about how they are actually very good patriots themselves because they actually protect the institutions in question, and you get statements like "the flag stands for your right to burn it", which are proper respectable liberal statements.

But I'm uncomfortable with this respectable liberalism, because even though it is altogether fitting and proper that respectable liberals should do this (proclaim their patriotism and contrast it with a less reflective and more unthinking patriotism), it never moves on to a deeper skepticism and a deeper criticism which would say not only that it is a category error to protect or honor or venerate symbols instead of the institutions they represent, but further that it is also a category error to protect or honor or venerate institutions instead of the values or principles or moral ends they represent.

Now in one sense, protecting institutions is not necessarily this kind of error, because maybe the institutions are effective institutions and are doing good things. So some people have said that it is a silly superstition to be inherently mistrustful of institutions, because you should always look at what they are actually doing. And maybe in fact the practice of an institution is to advance a worthwhile purpose. But on the other hand there is always a risk in forming an emotional bond of any kind with any institution, or in identifying one's self with any institution, because even if the institution was very virtuous at one time, it may change.

To make things a little more personal without bringing in political philosophy, let me talk about my high school. I love my high school's symbols; I love my high school's traditions; also I love my high school. As a result of an emotional process which I experienced, I even like things like my high school's colors, which are blue and red. (It was a funny thing for me to come to Berkeley, where one is expected to hate red on account of red being rival Stanford's color.) I like my high school's seal, which shows the lamp of knowledge, and I have it imprinted on my wallet, and I even refuse to discard that old wallet which is falling apart and which has holes in it and which looks ugly, because it has my high school's seal, and that is magical.

I love my high school's tradition. I was just thinking about the Rope Pull. I hope they are having Rope Pulls in eighty years, and in a hundred years, and in two hundred years. I even love my high school's songs, like Jerusalem, even though they are religious songs whose message I don't believe, founded in a powerful evangelical Protestant tradition which originally created my high school late last century. (I wouldn't want my high school to get rid of those songs, although I wish they would face up to the fact that they have a particular origin from which the school has subsequently moved away; they don't necessarily care to think all the time about where they really came from or how they came to be where they are now.)

I love the various other symbols, like the Spade (I was once the Spade Orator).

I also love the school itself, which taught me many things, and many other things.

It's a mistake to think that these feelings, which are reasonable and appropriate, actually get at what is really worthwhile about my high school, or provide deeply sound guides to action. It's also a mistake to think that other people have to feel the way I do or that there isn't anything important wrong with my school or that I somehow know its entire story.

Let me take these points one at a time. What is really worthwhile about my school is not its symbols or traditions, or even the institution of the school itself. What is really worthwhile about it are things like community, learning, and knowledge, which happened to be embodied in my school, or at least in my experience of it, when I was there. (It isn't purely co-incidence that those things came to be so embodied; it was the result of the long work of wonderful people, "sainted men with faith triumphant have upbuilt her walls in love", si monumentum quaeris circumspice, etc.) But the really valuable things are much deeper and much less tangible than either the corporate institution of this particular school or any of its outwardly visible symbols. So devotion shown to any of those things is in some way misplaced, because it isn't devotion to the really valuable things -- in some way it is superficial. (That's not to say that it's necessarily possible to show devotion directly to the ideals and values which were embodied there, but still in some sense they are the important thing, as of course are people.)

If you feel love for or devotion to an institution, you might be tempted to pay allegiance to the particular officers of that institution at a particular moment. And that might be a bad idea, because they might not deserve it. (I've been reading a few of Cory's comments about his own high school, to which he's very attached, and he and other alums are positively furious about what the people in charge up there at the moment are doing to the place. There is no reason to think that respect for the institution has to mean going along with what the people who are running it say they think is best, and of course respectable liberalism is perfectly comfortable with that conclusion.)

If you feel these things toward an institution, you might also be tempted to think that there is something inherently right about the institution. I don't think that belief can be justified. Something wonderful like a high school can become corrupt, or it can fail, or it can die, or it can suffer a profound discontinuity, or it can go obsolete. It's not necessarily straightforward to notice any of these things, and it might be particularly painful and undesirable if you really care about the institution. But it's no fair concluding that the institution did well in the past and so much necessarily do well in the future. I would not wish for any institution to be mortal, if I really cared for it, but neither would I wish mortality on people I really cared for.

It might be that my high school will fail or become wicked in the future. For all I know -- being out of touch here in California -- it might be that this has already happened. I don't want to believe that, and I want to resist that thought, but it is possible. With time and chance happening just as much as ever, it's hazardous to say that because my school was doing so well when I left it some years ago, it must still persist in that same state and condition today. There are institutional safeguards, but no ultimate safeguards, to assure that the school will represent and achieve good things in the future the way it did in the past.

(In fact, in the opinion of its founder, the school surely already failed a long time ago; surely, in his opinion, the safeguards he devised have long since been overcome, and the entire point and value of the entity is already demolished, and its current activities are a mockery of what it was meant to be. Moody founded my school to be a beacon of Christian doctrine, and it is not so today. There is a real change, a discontinuity, which means that different people have loved very different things in my school over time, even very contradictory things.)

My school also has flaws, and I don't know all of them. I know that it failed some people even at the same time it was nourishing and sustaining me. I know there were people for whom the school did not work, and who left it in anger, or in tears, or in shock with a letter of expulsion. I know there are people who must hate the red and blue, or laugh at the Spade, and people who have independent reasons to dislike the school from outside. Maybe some of them have been in a labor dispute or a professional dispute with it. (One employee had such a dispute, very publicly, soon after I graduated; it ended only with his untimely death.) Maybe some of them could not afford to attend and were not offered a scholarship, as I was. Maybe some of them hate what the school stands for, and maybe some of them think Moody's vision of religious education was correct and has been perverted terribly now, so that the school is a travesty. Maybe there are other objections I haven't heard about.

(We could also talk about drug use, or drug use and discipline; we could talk at length about discipline, how my friend was reprimanded wrongfully, how another friend was expelled...)

But the real point is that it is not enough to say that we have to go beyond our attachment to symbols and rituals. We also have to say that we have to go beyond our attachment to institutions and traditions and customs, which respectable liberalism can be reluctant to do. To be critical and independent thinkers and doers, we have to be prepared to keep on looking past layers of indirection, and saying that we value institutions for what they do and for what they can be, and not for a superficial reason.

I think that means making part of experience contingent, because you say that you love something, or honor something, when and if and because and insofar as the thing does well. Maybe that is troubling because it isn't the same as unconditional love.

I heard a cynical friend of mine ask a civil liberties lawyer whether the latter loved the United States. The cynical friend pointed out that the U.S. government had done many wicked things, repeatedly, and many of them were not popularly known, but were none the less wicked. And he added that the government continues to do terrible things. So my friend said "Do you love this country?"

The lawyer's answer was very interesting: "I love some things about this country. I've seen a lot of what this country is capable of, and some of it I love, and some of it I don't love."

I think that answer is well-taken (although it might have been, in context, a bit respectable-liberal for my taste). There is a subtlety to it, and there is a depth and a sophistication to it. The equivocal answer the lawyer did not give was "I love this country and I respectfully and passionately disagree with some govenment decisions and actions", which might be a purer respectable-liberal reply. It was actually much stronger and much more direct than that: "I love some things about this country". So in that I see a lot of promise and a lot of potential, because it says that to the extent that an institution can and will protect freedom, it can be honored for what it's done to protect freedom, and to the extent that it will not or does not protect freedom, it can be dishonored and ridiculed and despised. And there is no special pleading there, or evocation or vacillation, which tries to reserve or exclude something from criticism; there's no unconditional "but". There is no assertion that a school or a government or a constitution has an inherent virtue which prevents us from questioning it or from questioning the nature of our allegiance to it. Nothing is held outside.

It's very direct: "I love some things about this country". And because of the uncertainty to which it subjects everything, it is also very deeply subversive, from a certain perspective. If you say that people have to have certainty -- "without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion"! -- then loving some things about a country is clearly worse even than simply hating the country. If you hate the country, after all, you're an obvious enemy, or an obvious outsider, but if you love some things about the country, you're a weak and uncertain individual, perhaps untrustworthy, perhaps trying to claim an undeserved bit of patriotism or loyalty to which you aren't actually entitled. After all, you've tried to express love and admiration, tried to claim these things for yourself, while trying to retain the right to subject everything to your own judgment. (You won't accept the need for a sort of reference monitor which will scrutinize you but remain immune from your scrutiny.)

I think that line is remarkable in what it says about human freedom. Try saying it: "I love some things about this country." It's an interesting contrast with the Pledge of Allegiance, and it creates so many more opportunities for dialogue than the Pledge, which somehow seems a sort of conversation-stopper. But the shorter, allegedly weaker statement is genuinely interesting; it points to a whole world of experience, possibility, judgment, and nuance. I love some things about this country.

At the risk of veering uncomfortably close to respectable liberal territory, the Newdow decision today is one of those things. And the reaction to it, from what I've seen, is not one of those things.

Culture Time reveals that the CDA decision (ACLU v. Reno) was rendered on the same day in 1997.

Lisa told me about the Berkeley physics auction, which has since become a big deal (appearing in several blogs, in the SF Gate, and now even on slashdot). I don't know if the auction house will be able to deal with the crowds easily.

The backlash from the Newdow decision is really troubling me. Sometimes it's easy to think that the U.S. is mainly made up of people who don't mind being secular and pluralist and are comfortable with an aggressive and conscious separation of church and state. But, in fact, this is probably not true.

Q. How do you think about the religious references in the Declaration of Independence?

A. The people who were writing that Declaration all did believe in some sense in a Creator, etc., although not all of them had mainstream Christian beliefs. When you come round to the Constitution, the representatives were not very representative (no women, no black people, no poor people, no Jews, etc.), but they no longer mentioned their personal religious beliefs in the document. (I don't know whether or not there was greater religious diversity in the Constitutional Convention than in the original Continental Congress; I understand that the Convention contained Quakers and Deists, both of whom were likely to be disestablishmentarians.) Even if the Congress and the Convention had been identical in their membership, I see very little conflict between the statements of a group of people engaged in a revolutionary struggle and the subsequent efforts of some of those people to create a neutral, pluralist government. The Declaration is (among other things) a much more personal statement.

A parable. Let's say there is a mainly-Muslim nation which has been oppressed by some hegemony (perhaps Soviet, perhaps Chinese, although I don't want to place this parable in actually-existing history). A significant part of the oppression, maybe, was an attempt to prevent the free practice of Islam. A group of revolutionaries gather and issue a statement: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, we will fight to liberate our nation and defend our rights." They proceed to actually fight, or maybe they don't need to fight and simply engage in successful diplomacy, and subsequently they actually do liberate the nation, and they get together and declare: "We will create a modern state which will be secular and pluralist and protect to every one the freedom of religion." Should they not do this, and instead create a theocracy? Even if they don't create a theocracy, should they decide to create a "Muslim state" simply because the revolutionaries themselves are Muslims?

Teaching attorneys to do two's-complement arithmetic is immensely satisfying.

Google searches for "Seth" are still yielding better results for Seth as in channeling than for Seth as in Schoen. (Seth was the name given to a personality Jane Roberts claimed she was channelling; there are many books of his metaphysical teachings.)

My name means "appointed" in Hebrew (see Genesis 4). My last name means "beautiful" in German. (Don't write to haesslich@loyalty.org.) In elementary school, they taught us LOGO, and we all tried typing our names in as LOGO commands. Most students got things like

> katherine
I don't know what to do with katherine.

or

> rachel
I don't know what to do with rachel.

But I was the only one in the whole class whose name was a valid LOGO primitive:

> seth
Not enough arguments to seth.

Sumana and Leonard visited me, and other people visited Zack at the same time, and the house was full and hopping.

There were a couple of good jokes in my conversation with Sumana, but I don't remember them now, so I can't report on them.

Smith College will host the 13th conference on Virginia Woolf in 2003. (My mother is the webmaster!)

An O'Reilly piece (by Tim O'Reilly) linked from slashdot today is excellent. There are many subtle and important observations in it.

"That's very Christian of you."

(I.e., Christians are supposed to act virtuously, and you acted virtuously. Now archaic in many places.)

I went to a computer show in Oakland with Duncan; after that, I visited Andy and Michelle and played Dance Dance Revolution.

I went to the auction which various people told me about. It was fun! I did bid on a couple of items, but I was quickly and dramatically outbid.

The 4-foot demonstration slide rule sold for about $450; that was the item I most wanted, but I couldn't afford anywhere near that. I also bid unsuccessfully on some antique voltmeters (fine voltmeters with hardwood panelling, etc.), and they generally ended up going for about $200 apiece.

The big news today was probably that my foot was run over by a car. It doesn't seem that I broke any bones; I can still move all of my toes and still feel all of them, and the pain is relatively mild. In fact, I can still walk without too much trouble. But my toes are certainly sore. I'm icing my foot, and I'll see how it feels over the next few days.

I've never been run over by a car before. When I was really little, I tended to think that accidents were inherently divided into "fatal" and "nonfatal", in the sense that a particular kind of accident had a particular quality of either inflicting or not inflicting death. For example, I thought that everyone who had ever been shot with a gun had died of the gunshot wound. (I had heard of several instances of people killed by shooting, and never heard of anybody surviving it.) Similarly, I thought that "being run over by a car" and probably even "being in a car crash" were necessarily fatal. It took a while for me to realize that practical every injury, accident, and disease exists along a continuum, so that it can have fatal, acute, or chronic characteristics, and different people will be affected by it in different ways. (Maybe I still haven't fully realized this.)

After we'd satisfied ourselves that I hadn't broken any bones, we went down to Campbell for an LNX-BBC meeting. We stayed there for a few hours and then came up to Emeryville, where we had dinner at the Emeryville Food Court. (This is a cool place -- officially known as the Emeryville Public Market -- with a huge variety of inexpensive fast food restaurants.)

We continued the BBC meeting in Berkeley, and I got the whole thing building an iso9660 image! The problem is that the resulting image won't quite boot -- you get a shell but you can't use most of the software we've compiled. It shouldn't take long to get the whole thing working properly.

Vitanuova for 2002 June
<M <Y
Y> M>
[Main]
Support Bloggers' Rights!
Support Bloggers' Rights!


Contact: Seth David Schoen